by Tim Parks
Then Georg had indeed just begun to raise his even, pacato voice above the chatter, no doubt to propose her as our representative, this being part of a pre-arranged plan, when Barnaby Hilson, he of the experimental novels and traditional tin whistle, cut in. And this is what Barnaby said in his rather Irish Italian: that the important thing was for us to remain united. He fiddled with his cutlery as he spoke. That there must be no hostility between the representative and other key members of our union. He looked down at his fingers, disarmingly embarrassed. That we must work together to win our rights, with no suspicion that the person doing the representing was in any way acting in his personal interests. He looked up and smiled with impeccable mildness and cleanshaven good nature. He himself could be such a person, he admitted. He had never shown any ambition for power in the union, he said, and indeed was thinking of leaving the University in another year or two, as this was not, as most of us knew, his principal career, he remarked. His tone was apologetic, since the embarrassment, the endearing embarrassment, of superior beings upon their declaring their difference from the rest of us is only another way of foregrounding that superiority, of course. Also, he said - and now his shy wryness was illuminated with a youthful smile — also, an Irish person would never put the backs up the powers-that-be in the Community the way a German, a French, or above all a British representative might. Because Ireland, he said, still speaking in this amiable tone, was a weak member of the Community and a willing member and clearly represented the oppressed rather than the oppressor on the international world stage, which was an important advantage, he said, again lowering his eyes to fiddling hands. Thus in the present circumstances, Barnaby Hilson said - and I noticed what exceedingly long and blond eyelashes he had - he was wiling, though only too aware of his limitations, to put himself forward as a compromise candidate in what was rapidly becoming a delicate situation.
Barnaby Hilson’s modest self-candidature was immediately seconded by Doris Rohr, who had clearly enjoyed their animated Dead Poets conversation, and again by Heike the Dike, who perhaps finds those long eyelashes attractively effeminate, and again by Luis, who, coming as he does from the Basque country, perhaps has a sentimental affinity for the evocative if limited music of dead if not decently buried minority cultures. A vote was thus proposed over what remained of the dumplings in broth and the ten jugs of very poor quality house wine, and there was a definite look of concern on her face now at seeing herself about to be pipped at the public post by this charming, experimental and above all Irish novelist, about to lose this role that she had no doubt hoped would lead her to important contacts with figures, preeminently male, in important institutional positions, men with whom she could perhaps profitably have discussed her essay on A Future Constitution for a United Europe. The vote was thus about to be taken, doubtless in favour of our charming philosopher-king Irishman, who I do honestly believe would have made a presentable and conscientious representative, when, out of the complete silence I had maintained throughout, indeed had imposed on myself ever since putting the phone down on my daughter and hearing that the Avvocato Malerba preferred Spinoza to Nietzsche, I suddenly and for no reason I could imagine found myself quoting, in Italian, the same Benjamin Constant I had once read with such pleasure, between fucking and fellatio perhaps, in Pensione Porta Genova: The mania of almost all men, I said, leaning across the scrubbed stube tisch where two or three of Colin’s tottie-directed baguette pellets had fallen into a pool of spilt wine and broth, while another stuck to the fur of Dafydd ap Gwilym, now furiously attacking his hind parts on the seat beside Heike the Dike, is to appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers, Barnaby, is to appear as men of state. Benjamin Constant, I added, feeling dazed as one who has blundered into stage lights, or a fly compelled to halogen, De l'esprit de conquéte et de I’usurpation.
Immediately I had finished speaking, Vikram roared with laughter. For Vikram Griffiths of course, despite his show of general bonhomie, despite his apparent couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude to losing his representative role on a trip which is entirely his own inspiration, loathes Barnaby Hilson. Vikram Griffiths loathes Barnaby Hilson in part because Hilson usurps his, Vikram’s, role of charismatic figure from much-loved ethnic-minority culture and in part because Hilson has a serious project in life and gets on with it, working hard in the mornings and pursuing an entirely stable and sensible private life with his rather older English wife, who is commendably jovial and practical, and their two small, doubtless delightful children, boy and girl. Vikram Griffiths, understandably, loathes Hilson, and now, quite probably in a fragile emotional state after having been voted out by his colleagues on this trip which was absolutely his own invention, and with a child-custody battle going on back in Italy with his first wife, a woman frequently obliged to seek psychiatric help, not to mention financial claims the second wife is making in their protracted and apparently extremely acrimonious separation proceedings, involving, amongst other things, the ownership of their ugly mongrel dog, he roared loudly with laughter, perhaps drunken laughter, and said, Compagni! I propose our English Jeremiah as a candidate! At least he can always quote the bastards someone they’ve never heard of! Upon which, immediately, without any mental mediation whatsoever, but rather as even a suicide might instinctively grasp at a rope thrown to him in swirling waters, I said okay, I would do it, if people wanted to vote for me. But I would need, I said -and how quickly one thinks when one doesn’t try, when one is possessed by one’s thoughts, rather than possessing - I would need somebody to advise me on what exactly I would have to say. I would need advice and help. From somebody who knew something about Europe. Surprisingly, Dimitra at once and enthusiastically seconded Vikram Griffiths’ proposal, remarking that my Italian had a more official flavour to it than Barnaby's, plus I was quite a lot older, which might be useful, she said, in allaying the unfortunately widespread impression that foreign language lectors were, as in some other countries, or should be, mere graduate student teachers on a brief stage away from home. Then, after a moment’s hesitation (the Avvocato Malerba being unexpectedly deep in conversation with’ the tiny southern girl beside him), she spoke out to accept what had so obviously, I felt, been my invitation to her. She would advise me, she said. She had done a lot of research on the European issue, she said, speaking not to me, oddly enough, but across the table, to Georg perhaps, perhaps to Dimitra, as if to say, This is an okay solution, we can go with this. Then she was writing an essay, she said, on A Possible Constitution for a United Europe, and as far as our own case was concerned, she said, she knew all the pertinent decisions of the European Court of Justice and its exact area of competence. She would assist me in talking directly to people, if I liked. And I was voted in. Eight votes for and only one abstention. My own.
On the square outside the cathedral, the students danced. I can see them again now if I shut my eyes. This is the square where Michelet tells how Saint-Just chained Eulogius Schneider, ex-monk turned revolutionary, to the guillotine for having forced a girl to marry him, pain of death to her whole family. The coach was late. The rain had stopped. Laughing together, the girls began to sing on the wet flagstones in a flapping breeze with the great facade of the cathedral rigorously floodlit behind, and then to dance. They sang the same song the radio had played three or four times during the journey, Sei un mito - You're a myth - and they danced in damp anoraks. The dog was sniffing against wet walls. And gazing at the facade as these girls swayed and danced, full of enviable high spirits and with that lightness young women have when they move to music, gazing at the cathedral, as Colin joined in, beside Monica, and Doris Rohr in maroon trousers studied the cosmetics advertisements in luxury shop windows, I reflected, leaning against a post forbidding parking, that every major monument in Europe is now- cleaned and floodlit. Everything ancient and medieval, I thought, as the girls danced, some beautifully - and she was deep in conversation with Georg, by a window full of pipe tobaccos - has been appropriately sandblasted, cl
eaned and illuminated. It is impossible, I thought, hugging myself in the cheap coat with which I recently replaced the leather jacket she bought three years ago, even to imagine these stony martyrs being in the gloom now, impossible to imagine these angels and gargoyles in a dark wind or under moonlight. I should never have told my wife, I thought, as the dog. cocked a leg. Impossible to see them as part of our lives, our nightmares, potent in the gloom, sacred in darkness or starlight. I should never have opened my mouth like that and destroyed her life. Why did this thought come to me now? These monuments have been neutralized by the light, I thought, by the light and by carefully researched detergents. They have been made part of the modern city. They have been subtracted from us and made possible for us. I should never never have told my wife that the only person I had ever been truly happy with was her. Why on earth did I do that? Squares where people hanged and lynched and guillotined each other and, in general, committed all sorts of irremediable crimes, are now attractive areas of floodlit public art, I thought, emptied of their potency precisely by the zeal with which we have focused on them, cared for them, illuminated them, absorbed them into the on-off neon of our intermittent modern night, our world of time-switches and default settings and above all discrete units of measure - I should never have told ray wife that even the smell of her body repulsed me - where nothing is absolute, I thought, nothing is safe from division and subtraction and quantification, where no one sacred facade, or person, or vision looms supreme in the consciousness, singular or collective, but cars pass endlessly, lights stretch out endlessly, and above all at regular intervals, where you count your lovers, all egales, all libres, at regular intervals, each a discrete and equal unit, clasping and unclasping in endless reproduction under intermittent light, this world where Colin says, Orgasm achieved, all tottie is old tottie. How could I tell my wife that the only sex that mattered to me had been with her? I should never have done that. I should never have beaten her across the face. Napoleonic debacle or no. It was the end when you hit her, I told myself outside the floodlit cathedral, when you saw the blood at the corner of her mouth. New pastures, Colin says over the billiards table, new treasures in tottie-town. Onward. The girls are singing, Sei un mito. The dog shivers at the end of his pee. They are even holding hands in a circle, wonderful twenty-year-old Italian girls under yellow French street-light, the willowy Nicoletta, the pouty Veronica, the breathy, breathtaking Monica, all swaying together, all apparently unaware of one of the great cathedrals of Europe hugely floodlit behind them on a square where the guillotine once stood. Why on earth did I take that line on the phone with my daughter, as if her choice of reading material could possibly matter? Except that occasionally a girl stops and exclaims, Che hello! Che bella piazza! And now they want to draw their teachers in. Now they want to dance together as a group, with their professori, whose jobs they’ve come to save, as young women are always eager to save something or someone far beyond their power to save, singing a song together, something they have heard on the radio, to do with solidarity, as a group, and already Vikram Griffiths is clowning with them, a cigarette between his lips, and now she has joined them, with Luis, so pleased about the collapse of the Lira because he means to change all his savings in Barcelona into lire to buy a flat in out-of-town Milan. And watching these people dance, together, as a group, in this Cathedral square in the centre of Europe, in many ways a beautiful scene, in many ways a touching scene, I ask myself if I will ever be able to sandblast and floodlight her image in such a way as to turn it, like this cathedral, into an attractive decorative landmark in my mental landscape. Will my wife ever be able to do the same with me, with the man who so completely and carelessly destroyed her? The rain falls again. The Avvocato Malerba skips under an umbrella plucked by the wind. The girls are giggling. The dog barks at their heels. Will I ever be able to dance careless of the rain in front of her neutralized floodlit image, having accepted it as a central but perfectly manageable interior monument from a past one may as well remember for the good as the bad, the kind of once sacred place one might choose to visit occasionally, on high holidays perhaps, just to get a feel for how it was, how I was, but without any sense of obligation or compulsion? Will I ever be able to do that? Will I ever be able to read a book again? Will I ever be able to talk like old friends with my wife? Until it occurred to me, leaning against a post in suddenly heavy drizzle in the central square in Strasbourg staring at the white light over white sandblasted Gothic figures, as young Plaster-cast-tottie, unable to dance, hobbled up and stood beside me and - after the bold hand on the knee under the stube tisch just a few minutes ago - now took my arm and actually leaned against me, as if in need of support - it occurred to me, smelling a perfume so sweet as to be sickly, that perhaps the time has come to start using her name. Perhaps I came on this trip to start using her name. Perhaps I got myself elected union representative to the European Petitions Committee to put myself in a position of inevitable attrition, to be obliged to speak with her, to work with her, to start the sandblasting.
The great Mister Jeremiah Marlowe, said Georg approaching. Georg wears a trilby out of doors, though he is not balding as I am. The coming political man, he said, drawing us under the awning of a bar. I said Vikram had taken it well, being voted out, and Plaster-cast-tottie, detaching herself a little, but not entirely, said how sorry she was for Vikram because he was such a comic and 'simpatic' person, and you could see he cared, she said, but hadn’t wanted to show it, Georg shrugged his shoulders. Griffiths is a maverick, he said. Then he began to ask if I genuinely felt I was up to making the presentation of our case, because if not, there was a written speech which he and she and Dimitra had prepared for whoever had to make the presentation, detailing the exact nature of our grievance and in particular the legal justification for our claim both to permanent contracts of employment and to salaries equivalent to that of an associate professor, albeit at the most junior level, i.e. two-and-a-half million lire a month after tax. The whole thing was a question, Georg said - and this was absolutely crucial — of comparison within the relevant framework. And while he began to explain then, very seriously, that the point was that all comparisons had to be made within the reality that was Italy, rather than allowing myself to be drawn, should there be any open discussion, perhaps with the press, into comparison with legal systems outside Italy, which tended to be less favourable to employees in general and University employees in particular (since European law stated that we should have equal rights within the system of the country we lived in, rather than generally across the Community) — while he explained all this carefully and usefully, I found myself recalling, as Plottie gave my hand a squeeze, for the coach had arrived now and people were trooping towards it, I found myself remembering how she had once made a comparison which was supposed to be favourable to myself. In response to my continued anguish at her betrayal, she remarked that he, and she meant Georg (though she has never to this day admitted it was Georg), had not been alla sua altezza a letto, not at her level in bed, as I on the contrary was. She laughed, she was naked, we had made love. She said - no, she sighed - He wasn’t really at my level in bed, you know. The way you are. This was perhaps a week or two after the phone-call when she talked about the ammonia spray She sighed again: In the end, we only made love two or three times, she said. And the fascinating thing here was how she imagined this comparison would cheer me up, offering as it did, as she doubtless saw it, a convincing reason for her decision to come back to me, particularly after I had done the honest thing now and left my wife, she said. Whereas what struck me was the subtext that, had Georg proved to be at her level in bed, then perhaps she would have stayed with him. Love does not, or should not fall within the realm of comparison, I thought, walking through blown rain across the central square in Strasbourg towards our big modern coach with the pally Plottie to one side and sensible Georg to the other, the latter properly concerned about the source of income that allows him to support the chronically sick mother
of his child. Love should lie outside the world of analogical procedure, of comparisons within the relevant framework and discrete units of measure, I thought, climbing on to the coach in a press of girls giggling and singing and with the distinct feeling that Plottie was seeking to appropriate me and was being remarkably straightforward about it. Though of course, I thought, climbing the steps, looked at from another point of view, one is always seeking comfort in comparison. One is always saying to oneself, At least you’re not so badly off as so and so, at least you haven’t had such an empty life as so and so, or suffered so much as so and so, this person you read about and that person you knew. Or one even catches oneself comparing the bodies of casual lovers with her body and saying, This arse is better and younger and fresher than hers, this skin is smoother and softer and sweeter than hers. One believes, I tell myself here in the hotel room gazing at those clasping Picasso lovers, who would perhaps have looked well against the anodyne facade of a floodlit cathedral, one believes one desires uniqueness, yet one seeks comfort in comparison. One constantly, obsessively, compares one’s own story with everybody else’s, until, not finding quite the like, one realizes that one’s banality lies precisely in uniqueness.