Europa

by Tim Parks

  In the crush of the coach, she called, Sit here a moment, Jerry, so we can go over tomorrow.

  There were Dimitra and Luis in the seat in front, Vikram Griffiths with Heike the Dike behind and the wet dog wagging his wet tail in the passageway At which it flashed across my brain, quite inappropriately, undecided whether I should sit with her or not, that I dislike dogs intensely. And particularly wet dogs. I dislike the easy affection people have for dogs, which costs nothing and can never be betrayed. The animal was frantic for some reason, leaping up to paw Vikram and slapping its wet tail in the passageway. I hesitated. People thrust their dogs upon you, I thought in the crush of the coach, undecided whether to sit next to her or not, expecting you to show affection for the creatures, merely because they are dogs, when the truth is you feel no affection for them at all, only a profound sense of irritation, expecting you to respect themselves, the owners, for the relationship they have with their pets, the sacrifices they make on behalf of these representatives of a now vanquished Nature, when you feel nothing of the kind, only dismay that people should find such relationships necessary. All the girls were laughing as the dog pranced. Hey up, Vikram called. He rubbed the creature’s nose against his own, so stuffed with catarrh. And suddenly I was aware of a great loathing for dogs, as if they and all they stood for were entirely responsible for my inability to decide whether to sit myself down beside my ex-mistress or not. 1 was furious. We should go over what you have to say tomorrow, she said. The creature slapped its wet tail repeatedly against my leg. There are some important political decisions. Plottie came back along the corridor and tugged at my sleeve. Her smile was warm. Clearly the girl believes she has established some kind of intimacy or complicity with me, I thought, whereas Nicoletta, towards whom 1 thought 1 might have felt something, has disappeared. Where was Nicoletta? 1 should sit next to Nicoletta. And somehow that decided me and 1 sat down next to her, without so much as exchanging a glance with Plottie, entirely spurning the girl and her generously open advance.

  Ah, the polis! I said facetiously as I sat down, and immediately I was trying to jog her memory again, as 1 had tried and failed to jog her memory with Benjamin Constant, tried and failed to jog her memory earlier in the day with Thucydides. A protagonist in the polis at last, I repeated. Thinking óf Aristotle. Thinking of her. The dog barked. Of the Pensione Porta Genova. But from in front, her face poking between two head-rests, Dimitra said, The police? Where? She seemed anxious. I would have laughed, but nobody else had seen the joke. For everybody had begun to advise me. I was sitting on the fourth or fifth seat from the front on the left-hand side of a powerful modern coach negotiating the ancient centre of floodlit Strasbourg and I was being advised by five or. six people at once: the Petitions Committee at eleven o’clock, the lunch with the London Times, the meeting of Euro MPs, the different approaches required for each, the importance of getting and keeping all the students there to show we had support, the importance of seeming seriously professional. The wet Dafydd now on his lap, Vikram said, With the Italian Euro-MPs you have to stress there’s no way out for the bastards in the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. The legal point we should stress, the Avvocato Malerba said, a little breathless from his exertions, is that the only employees in the Italian state education system who do not have permanent contracts are yourselves, foreigners. This is clearly a case of discrimination. She said: The purpose of the Petitions Committee is to set in motion the necessary machinery to right all wrongs presented to it within the Community. That was fair enough. But when she went on to say that as such -and since the president of the commission was French I might usefully remark on this - as such the organization was inevitably founded on the same principles that had guided the French Revolution, and indeed the whole formation of Europe over the last two centuries, to wit, liberté, égalité, fraternité - when she said this, my mind froze. You are sitting, I told myself, next to the woman who took you to the furthest extremes of erotic pleasure, the woman with whom you imagined you were sharing serious philosophical conversations in a pensione in the Navigli where trams screeched on soft spring afternoons, the woman whom you described, criminally, to your wife, as the only woman to have made you truly happy. You are seated next to her and she is wearing her black chiffon dress, short above black-stockinged knees, which she often wore in those days, to please you, and she is repeating, in your presence, perhaps hoping to impress the Avvocato Malerba, who does not seem immune to female charms, the same banal reflections she has forgotten she once expressed to you on the second floor of the Pensione Porta Genova, and again quite probably on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine in Rheims, where we did everything and promised everything in an intensity never to be recovered or repeated. Fraternité, she was repeating now from three years before, is just an older formulation of the modern ideal of solidarite. This is the woman you are sitting next to, I told myself. And I thought how fortunate it was that I was surrounded now by six or seven other colleagues and that Dimitra was once again discussing the question of the spy (convinced now that it must be someone from the ever-diffident German department), and in short how lucky I was that there was no danger at all of my suddenly trying to beat some sense into life, to recover some meaning by pounding her chiffon dress with my fists. This is the part she acts, 1 thought, as she went on to say that a proper presentation of our case within a historical perspective could only help. She acts a part. With everybody. How she laughed when I told her Plato wanted people who acted parts to be banned from his Republic. Georg wasn’t at her level in bed, she said. She only did it two or three times, out of vraie sympathie. I should never have told my wife, never never have said such terrible, destructive words to a woman I had lived with eighteen years. The last piece in a mosaic of friendship, she said. Because he phoned so much and sent flowers. Above all I should never have said I found the smell of her body repulsive. However true it is. And then the business with the mother of his child. The mother of his child was so ill, poor thing, and he so heroic to stay with her. How could I care so much about a fuck or two, she said. How infantile of me! There was a way in which the English were still barbarians, she said. Why do I care what books my daughter has been reading? No wonder they had trouble with Europe. They lacked the subtlety Catholic cultures had. They lacked the flexibility. Unless Suzanne really is her lover? The spirit of compromise, she said. Of negotiable identity. It was an expression she had found in a book on psychoanalysis in the period when she was convinced an analyst could save me. People still talk about salvation. Though not my wife. My wife knew from the moment I opened my mouth that there was nothing to salvage. She who had spent all her life pretending old things were new. Your eyes are glazing, I told myself in the coach, speeding out to the suburbs. You are losing your grip. You are no longer following the excellent arguments being deployed by your excellent colleagues with a view to protecting the excellent job you cannot bear. Analysis could save you, she said. It could save us! My wife never talked about saving anything. Give her that credit. This was in the days she implored me to go back to her, the days she seemed happy to be slapped about, if it helped me to get over it, she said. Ishould see an analyst. But my wife knew when something had been blown to smithereens. And once she said very earnestly: They weren’t just mots sur l’oreiller, Jerry, the things I said to you, not just frasi di letto, pillow talk. I really meant them. But I was appalled, and I was appalled again now in the coach, eighteen months on, to think that there was, there existed, a set and accepted expression in French - mots sur l’oreiller -and again a similar expression in Italian -frasi di letto - and that she knew these expressions and used them, and that she distinguished, so readily, between the times she meant the things she said in bed and the times she did not mean them. This was Catholic subtlety. They weren’t just frasi di letto Jerry, she said, and doing so she managed to transform everything she had ever said to me into a frase di letto, and I hit her. Perhaps that was the night I finally hit her too hard. The night of t
he second trip to a second hospital. You are losing your grip, I told myself, sitting in the fourth seat from the front on the left-hand side of this powerful coach now shuddering over at a suburban traffic-light, all the panels trembling. The night of the story about the bicycle accident. The last night. How could you have lain in your bed and told your wife everything? Everything we did. Has she used her frasi di letto with your daughter? Has your daughter replied with expressions from Black Spells Magic? Your eyes are filling with tears, I told myself. You are on the edge of making a major spectacle of yourself. Lick me inside out, baby, the lead singer says to the record producer’s wife. You have not a single sound cell in your brain. Just one more moment of this, I thought. One imagines a dog’s tongue. Just one more moment. Then Colin leaned over to me from across the aisle, Don’t know about yours, he whispered, but my evening’s soubriquet is Tittie-tottie. Keeps letting me take a dekko down the Grand Canyon, He meant Monica, And four seats further back Barnaby struck up on his tin whistle. Whisky in the Jar. Daffy-dog licking his chin,Vikram began to sing: the Kilkenny Mountains; Captain Farrel; mushereen m’doran da' And he shouted: Who’s for the nearest bar as soon as we’re back? The girls roared, Barnaby played his tin whistle, But the devil’s in the women, sure they never can be easy, mushereen m’doran da’. To everybody’s delight the dog yowled. Get a grip, I told myself. People were shaking with laughter. No facts, I told myself, only interpretations. The dog yowled again. As if he understood, Vikram clapped. And in the hubbub she leaned over and said, with vraie sympathie, whispering in my ear, Are you okay, Jerry? I said yes. I laughed. Just feeling my age, I said. Forty-three isn’t the end of the world, she told me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The outrage of obstructed energy. Impulse without fulfilment. Can any Petitions Committee ever right this wrong? Very deliberately on my narrow bed in this nondescript hotel room where at one-thirty or -forty the apparently staid Avvocato Malerba still hasn’t returned to his bed, I start to masturbate over Plaster-cast-tottie. I start to masturbate, after my normal fashion. But to do this I have to remember what she looks like. What does she look like? And all I can remember is the unconcealed disappointment in her bright glassy eyes when, rather than remaining behind in the hotel lounge on our return from the stube supper, I elected to follow Vikram Griffiths and others out into the night in search of a bar, leaving her and her hobbling plaster-cast behind. I elected to go on this alcohol hunt, I reflect now, because she -had elected not to go on it, just as I elected to come on this coach trip because she had elected to come on it. Whether I choose to be where she is, or where she isn’t, it is always she who governs the choice.

  Vikram Griffiths exchanged some words with the sour proprietor, who apparently gave directions as to where we might find a bar open. But Vikram spoke no French and the proprietor did not seem eager that we find this bar. Perhaps he imagined that a fruitless walk in the suburban rain would bring us back respectably sobered. My mind buzzing with the thought that she did not even remember my age, which is somehow forgivable between a father and his children, or even between man and wife, but not between the lovers we were, I pushed through the glass door with other students to be pulled aside then by Colin, who confided that he could hardly shag in his room with Saint Barnaby there, could he? The experimental Irish novelist had already twice phoned his wife about a baby with a sore throat. Because our affair was about being a certain age, I told myself. So he would have to go to Tittie-tottie’s room, Colin said, where gentlemanly courtesy might just oblige him to shag Tittie-tottie’s tottie-mate as well, he laughed. Our affair had to do with age, I was suddenly thinking, as Colin marvelled at the alliteration of Tittie-tottie's tottie-mate. Though she was more the kind of party who was likely to go down well at a charity ball for the blind, Colin laughed. Go down, damn you, he laughed. He gestured with an imaginary cue. How could she miscalculate, I thought, knowing so well, as she must, the exact difference in ages? Charity ball! Colin laughed. Colin brays rather than laughs. Get it? He sneers rather than brays. Tottie-mate would be an excellent title for a centre spread, he said. But there is no evil in Colin, I thought now, reflecting that he too was exactly ten years younger than me. You never feel Colin could harm anybody. Never broach the breach unsheathed, he laughs. And I thought, looked at in a certain way, age was the only truly important factor in our relationship. We would never have had an affair like that at a different age, at different ages. How could she have thought I was forty-three?

  People milled under an awning outside the hotel where wind was sweeping the thin drizzle against carelessly parked cars. Beyond a low hedge lay the road that now sends intermittent light flitting about my room. Vikram Griffiths came out singing Whisky in the Jar again, then explaining that he never put his dog on a leash. Never. He laughed, scratching a sideburn, and apparently he had quite forgotten about the question of our representation at the European Parliament, the precariousness of our jobs, his acrimonious court cases back in Italy. With a studentessa under each arm of his loose open mac he shouted, Follow me! and made a dash through a gaggle of girls into the phosphor-lit rain. And, still obsessed by the notion that we had loved each other only and exclusively because we were a certain age, I found myself admiring Vikram Griffiths for this, this drunken cavalier carefreeness, and I- envied him. I envied Vikram Griffiths for the way he turns his energy outward to whatever is available, whatever woman, whatever amusement, and appears to be satisfied with it, willy-nilly. While I implode. You eat your heart out, I told myself, watching Vikram with a girl under each arm heading towards the glare of oncoming traffic, singing about Captain Farrel and his treacherous Jenny. You eat your heart out and vomit it up, and eat it out all over again. Why have you suddenly become obsessed with this question of age? And I experienced then, so soon after sitting in the coach and hearing her talking about the principles of the French Revolution, as if she had never said these things to me before, indeed as if nothing had ever passed between us, as if the earthquake that completely altered my mental landscape had not even been registered on any of the scales properly established for measuring these things, I experienced such a sense of desperation and self-loathing and absurdity that I turned back, on impulse, towards the hotel with the intention, hardly creditable, of venting my rage on Plottie, of simply grabbing the Plottie girl and dragging her, plaster-cast and all, to some secluded corner of the hotel to be thoroughly shagged, as in the past, I suppose, I have vented my rage on Psycho-.tottie and Photo-tottie and Dimple-tottie and others more memorable for their soubriquets than their sentiments. One says one’s rage was vented, but the truth is it never was, it was always intact after orgasm, if not magnified, with the added curiosity that these women never felt that any rage had been vented upon them, never imagined anything but affection on my part, even passion, they mistook rage for passion, and so were happy as a rule and spoke eagerly of a next time, as witness Opera-tottie and her generous phone message. One hadn’t even been cruel! And this makes matters worse: I mean when every woman is the wrong woman but reminds you of the right woman, when venting is not venting, but reminds one of venting, or of how things were before the notion of venting had even occurred, the time when it was impossible to imagine not having an outlet for the person one had become through being with her. And lying in my narrow bed, recalling that moment in the wind-swept carpark when I envied Vikram Griffiths for the ease with which he turns his energy outward to whatever’s available, and, as a gut reaction, turned back to vent my forty-five-year-old rage on Plottie, it occurs to me now, here in my hotel room, casting about for an image to masturbate over, that what Picasso’s lovers are really seeking in this flat reproduction of their intermittently lit clasping, this miserable simulacrum of a great modern masterpiece that I have been staring at now for upwards of an hour, is themselves again. They are seeking themselves as they were when they made each other themselves. Yes, this is something I understand now, as one understands so many things no sooner than it’s too late. A
nd I had just turned round to go back to the lighted porch, to go back to the Plottie girl - and through wet sheet glass I could see the Avvocato Malerba deep in conversation with Georg, no doubt discussing the finer points of the legal case I shall tomorrow, incredibly, be presenting to’ the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament - when an umbrella burst open in front of me and Nicoletta said, Don’t go back. Share my umbrella. And immediately I was elated.

  Here then is another bizarre thing: the fact that you were elated when Nicoletta, entirely absent from your thoughts for at least the previous half-hour, now opened her yellow umbrella and invited you under it, immediately slipping her arm into yours, as she had done earlier on in the day climbing the concrete stairs of the Chambersee Service Station. You were elated, over the moon no less, the mental volatility of the perfect lunatic.