by Gully Wells
All of a sudden, upheavals in the Israeli cabinet, Yitzhak Rabin’s Interim Agreement with Egypt, and the withdrawal from the Sinai all became fascinating topics I couldn’t get enough of. And yet how could I possibly begin to understand present-day politics if I didn’t have a clearer picture of the past? Luckily right there in the office were the extensive Weidenfeld library and backlist, just waiting to help me out. The stack of books beside my bed started to lean toward subjects like Chaim Weizmann’s pivotal role in the Balfour Declaration, Theodor Herzl and the creation of the Zionist movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s fractious relationship with the British Mandate in Palestine, while still leaving a bit of space for Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz, and Primo Levi. Enthralled as I was with my studies, all too frequently my mind would simply refuse to concentrate on a story in the paper about the collapse of some ill-advised jerry-built coalition (why did those Israelis have to have quite so many political parties?) and instead would obsess over that impossible and eternal question: When will I see you again? Amazingly the answer turned out to be in a few weeks, when he flew back to London for no good reason except that he said he missed me.
Around about this time I called Tom in Madrid. It must have been at least a week since I’d heard from him. Or maybe even longer. How odd. (Oh dear, had I learned nothing? If your boyfriend doesn’t call, it’s quite simple. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Or see you. And he hasn’t the slightest idea how to tell you, which is why he hasn’t called.)
“¡Hola! Por favor y muchas gracias, ¿donde es Tom?”
Yes, where was Tom? I had telephoned his grandmother’s apartment where he lived, and her voluble maid was obviously eager to discuss this puzzling situation with me because she erupted into a high-speed avalanche of words, not a single one of which could I understand. (Oh dear, why in five years had I failed to learn any Spanish at all?) Still, a message of some sort must have been relayed—“La señorita tonta Inglés teléfono”—or something along those lines, because the next day he did indeed call back. It was not a happy conversation. Apparently he had met a sane Spanish señorita (my imagination immediately equipped her with a dusky mustache, unusually short legs, and a Frida monobrow) whom he had decided to marry. Yes, marry. Surprisingly no amount of tears or shouting—and there was plenty—could change his mind. Ah, but what if I caught the next flight to Madrid?
“Are you mad? Have you forgotten what happened when you took that train ride and surprised Martin at his dad’s house?”
I was sitting in Anna’s kitchen drinking a tumbler of whiskey, weeping, but not loudly enough to wake the baby, who, drunk on milk, greasy eyelids flickering, had just dozed off in his basket next to the potatoes on the floor.
“Anyway, Tom was always asking you to marry him, but you didn’t want to, so you really can’t blame the poor man.”
Oh yes I could.
“Well, you shouldn’t. And I do seem to recall you were swooning over some gentleman from Israel only last week.”
“Yes, but he’s married and lives in Tel Aviv.”
“And Tom is about to be married and lives in Madrid. What you need is a nice unencumbered Englishman who lives in London, and I know just the one. He’s an incredibly good-looking defrocked priest, who quite sensibly decided he couldn’t take another moment of that Vatican II lunacy, and now he’s writing a book for Colin about Bernard of Clairvaux and twelfth-century Cistercian monasticism. And best of all, he’s coming to dinner this evening, so you must stay and meet him.”
At least I managed to laugh.
L’Israélien
IN MY MIDTWENTIES, on account of a combination of poverty and laziness, I was still living at home. Except that I wasn’t really. What estate agents like to call a “well-appointed, self-contained garden flat” had been created on the ground floor of our house in Regent’s Park Terrace, and there I lived quite happily, without ever having to confront anything so disagreeable and adult as a mortgage or an electricity bill. I had my own front door, a pretty bedroom with French windows that opened onto the dogs’ bucolic toilet, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and a large drawing room, but the one thing the flat didn’t have was a well-appointed, self-contained telephone. How could I possibly have let go of a number (485-4855/Gul-Gull) that so conveniently spelled out my name? The only drawback to this arrangement was that the switchboard operator upstairs (Freddie and Nick never bothered to answer the telephone) was a bit more au courant with my life than a daughter might have wished her mother to be. Still, since the operator also ran a free intermittently reliable answering service on the side—“Some fag called from your office. Didn’t catch his name.” “Half-witted sounding debutante called. Fiona Fartface or something. Jesus, I didn’t know they still made them like that.” “That goddamn Israeli called. Again.”—I really couldn’t complain.
Sometimes the goddamn Israeli and I would see each other in London, where he liked to stay at the Playboy Club. Once we spent a weekend in a “Fawlty Towers” establishment near Brighton, so he could interview Ben-Gurion’s mistress—an old lady with fluffy white dandelion hair, whose memories of her David turned out to be rather more discreet than my David had hoped—but usually we met in Paris. The city I had fallen in love with as a triste teenager, staying in Monsieur Bretiane’s triste apartment on the rue de Rennes. David was a modern man who favored modern hotels of the “Towering Inferno” variety. The infernos tended to be skyscrapers with grotesque chandeliers in the lobby, terrifying elevators that raced up and down the sides of an interior atrium, and rooms where the beds were too big and the plate-glass windows didn’t open, but so what? I was much too happy to say anything.
“Chérie! I knew you must be here because I saw your friend on television this morning. Comme il est beau, but I must tell you that I do not agree with what he says au sujet des Palestiniens.”
Well no, I didn’t suppose that Francette, who lurched ever farther to the left as she got older, and had been a militant supporter of the students against de Gaulle in ’68, would have agreed with David on the subject of the Palestinians, but that certainly didn’t prevent her from insisting that we come for a drink later that evening.
Francette opened a bottle of Domaine Tempier cuvée La Migoua, to remind us both of home, and, tactfully leaving the Palestinians to their own murderous/courageous devices, depending on your point of view, asked how my mother and Freddie were. “Tout va bien avec Vanessa et Hylan?” Having established that all was well in my parents’ curious marriage, she turned her attention to David, and quite soon they became entangled in the minutiae of some French political scandal involving the iniquity/brilliance of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, again depending on your point of view. Since I neither knew nor cared what they were talking about, I sank into the soft velvet folds of the sofa, lit a cigarette, and gazed out the window at Notre-Dame’s billowing backside, lost in an inane miasma of contentment. It felt like being in my bed in La Migoua, listening to the grown-ups chattering away below on the terrace after dinner, knowing that nothing could go wrong so long as they kept on laughing and talking.
At one point their voices became more animated, and I heard Francette say, “Mais non, c’est pas la vérité.” Oh Christ, they couldn’t have moved from Giscard to Arafat, could they? I quickly glanced at David’s face—he was smiling, and our hostess was busy filling his glass, but clearly he wasn’t about to back down. Backing down was not something he did. Not his style. Would not have crossed his mind. Ever. David’s character fascinated me. Never before had I met a man with quite such devastating confidence in himself. (Nor have I met one since.) What could it possibly feel like to be so wonderfully unencumbered by self-doubt, to be so unfamiliar with the concept of self-deprecation, to march across life so sure of receiving the world’s admiration and respect? How on earth did one become like that? Was it nature or nurture? (Many years later, when I had children, I used to wonder how I could feed them just a fraction of this magic potion.) Maybe there’d been a bit of a muddle with hi
s testosterone dosage in utero? Perhaps it came from a mother who had always had total blinding faith in him? Who the hell knew? But it was certainly most peculiar. And utterly seductive.
WHEN I WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN I fell in love with the Romans. My parents were thrilled—so much more suitable than some greasy lout on a motorbike—and, egged on by them, we used to make regular pilgrimages to the Pont du Gard, the amphitheater in Arles, the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, and the ruins of Glanum, just outside Saint-Rémy. Freddie’s classical education illuminated the larger picture—he could, and did, quote great chunks of Gibbon, and would, without any encouragement, recite the dates of every single emperor—but my mother and I were much more interested in poking around the ruined villas, trying to imagine what life must have been like for their inhabitants. A shallow stone basin with a drain in the middle stood in what must have been the kitchen, vestiges of a black-and-white Escher-like mosaic still covered part of an atrium floor, and a gently rounded alcove was the perfect size for a vase full of spring flowers. After a morning spent scrabbling around in the sun-scorched rubble we would all, quite naturally, be in need of a little refreshment.
“I seem to recall there’s rather a nice restaurant in the place du Forum in Arles, where I dined during the war on my way north after we had liberated Saint-Tropez.”
My mother rolled her cynical American eyes. “And you honestly think it’s still there?” But Europe holds on tight to its past, and Freddie was right; the Hôtel Nord-Pinus was still there, and they were still serving lunch outside, under the plane trees in the place that had been constructed on the site of the old Roman forum.
“Jesus. Will you get a load of this!” My mother had leaped up from her chair and was pointing up at the corner of the hotel, where two gigantic Corinthian pillars supported the broken edge of an equally colossal pediment and were embedded, like some ancient parasite, in the stucco of this unremarkable nineteenth-century building. Grotesquely out of scale, they reached way up to the roof and were all that remained of the Roman temple that had dominated the forum two thousand years ago. Clearly a hotel I was going to have to come back to someday.
ROOM NUMBER 10 was where the famous bullfighters stayed—its wrought-iron balcony, overlooking the place du Forum, came in handy for greeting your adoring fans—but if it wasn’t reserved for one of these superstars, ordinary people were allowed to have it. Decorated with all the flashy flair of a bullfighter’s suit of lights—plenty of gilt and brocade and fringed silk lampshades—it was also the room where Helmut Newton photographed Charlotte Rampling sitting naked on the same table where I had just put down my handbag.
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
I led David out onto the balcony and pointed at the place.
“That’s where I sat and hatched my plan to bring you here before I knew you existed, and this”—I made him close his eyes and ran his fingers across the rough, pitted stone of the Corinthian column—“is our own private piece of Rome.”
His hand slowly slid from Rome to my left cheek, and by the time I opened my eyes it was already dark.
David frowned at the menu, studying it with such conviction that it might as well have been a military map of the Sinai—turn right for the Suez Canal—which allowed me to watch his face—the black eyelashes, the hawkish nose—for a long time without his noticing. Why looking at the object of one’s desire, unobserved, should be quite so pleasurable is something I have never been able to figure out. It just is. The waiter was hovering, David looked up, and I quickly opened the menu. Oh boy, somebody was having fun in this kitchen, because there, among all the predictable touristy things like tomates Provençales, daurade grillée, and moules marinières were regional surprises that must have been slipped in to delight the more demanding locals. Tellines, tiny clams no bigger than a toddler’s thumbnail, from the nearby Camargue; anguilles de Martigues, baby eels sautéed in olive oil and parsley; suppions à l’encre, squid stewed in its own ink; and bourride, a smoother, creamier version of bouillabaisse—I was swimming in fish heaven.
“Alors. Moi je prend la bourride, et pour ma femme, les tellines.”
The waiter scribbled away. He must have heard these words a million times, but I hadn’t.
“Ta femme?’
“Oui, ma femme.” And he smiled at me.
WHENEVER PICASSO’S HUNGER for Spain became more than he could bear, he would gather up his current mistress and a gang of friends and check into the Nord-Pinus. As the supreme superstar, he took precedence over the bullfighters and would always be given room number 10. After lunch, surrounded by his entourage, he would lead a raucous procession through the streets of Arles to the Roman amphitheater, where for a few hours he could forget his self-imposed exile and lose himself in the atavistic drama of the corrida. In the evening, refreshed by their siestas, Picasso and his friends would set off to the only restaurant in Arles that served a real Gardiane, the Camargue version of a boeuf en daube, made from bulls who had met their deaths not in a common abattoir but rather fighting gloriously in the blood-soaked ring. After which it would be time for a late-night copita back in the bar of the Nord-Pinus.
As soon as we walked into the dimly lit room it was as though I had returned to Spain. Above the bar a bull’s head stared back at me with eyes as dark and implacable as Picasso’s, and in the corner I could just make out one of those candlelit altars, dedicated to the Virgin, that bullfighters carry with them, to invoke her tender mercy before they stride out into the arena. And there, behind David, mounted in a glass cabinet on the wall, was the suit of lights—pale green silk, encrusted with rubies, sequins, and pearls, so tightly fitted that it must have been as hot and constricting as a corset—that the great Spanish bullfighter Dominguín had worn when he had fought in the Arles arena in the 1950s. Didn’t Ava Gardner fall madly, badly, dangerously in love with him? Hadn’t Hemingway written some book about the summer of 1959, and his rivalry with Ordóñez? Yes, it was all coming back to me. Not just Dominguín, but everything I had left behind in Spain. How strange that I should be sitting quietly, happily, with David in a bar in France, while part of my mind had escaped across the Pyrenees and was wandering obsessively, like some lost soul, all over a country I had loved, and thought I would never see again.
The dawn air in Provence, even at the height of the summer, is surprisingly cool, and standing on the front steps of the hotel the next morning in a thin cotton dress, I started shivering. David draped his jacket over my shoulders, and I remember thinking that if I refused to give it up, he wouldn’t be able to get to the airport and fly away from me. Just a crazy passing thought. He needed to go home to Tel Aviv, to his wife and his life—I understood that—but still I hung on to him for as long as I could, until he said, very gently, that he was about to miss his plane.
BEATRICE WAS THERE to meet me at the train station and on the drive back to the house filled me in on the scene at La Migoua. Freddie was scribbling away at the marble table under the lime tree, Monsieur Maurice’s hunchback and snobbery were more pronounced than ever, the Tricons had constructed a triple-tiered fountain, like a wedding cake, on their terrace, Nick had one of the Haystack boys staying, and Francette’s disagreeable new dog Éloi seemed to have moved into our kitchen. Reassuringly, nothing seemed to have changed.
“Ah, there you are.”
Freddie looked up from his writing, and greeted me as if I’d just arrived back from a quick shopping trip to the village, where I had presumably gone in search of delicacies to serve him for dinner that night. I leaned over and kissed him on the head, and followed Beatrice through the clackety wooden beads into the kitchen. The sexy kitten-heeled sandals were abandoned at the door (along with my mistress-in-room-10 persona), and barefoot, I slipped into an old apron and back into the familiar fussy homosexual/bustling French housewife role of my teenage years. Oh là là it was already six o’clock, and there was so much to do! Not that Beatrice was any slouch. Something delicious was simmering away in a
pot on the stove, roasted yellow and red peppers sat on a platter, waiting to be peeled, and a huge triangle of Brie was drooling over the edge of the marble slab we used as a cheese board. And there in the middle of the table, instead of flowers, she had arranged a bouquet of fresh basil, yellow fennel blossoms, and wild mint in that jug my mother and I had bought from the one-armed bandit in Toulon.
“Christ, what the hell is this?”
I had lifted up the lid of the pot and lurking beneath a seething sea of scum was something that resembled a giant’s dismembered cock.
“That, my dear, is une langue de boeuf aux champignons. Except that I have not yet added the mushrooms to the tongue. It’s my father’s favorite dish, and I thought Freddie would enjoy it too,” and she giggled. “Well, they are about the same age, you know.”
Privately I doubted the wisdom of serving old geezers anything that might remind them of just how enormous a cock could be, especially in comparison to a mushroom. I told Beatrice that it sounded delicious and I couldn’t wait to put it in my mouth.
“You, Mademoiselle, are completely dégueulasse, your mind is like a sewer, and en plus you don’t understand the recipe at all.”
No, I certainly did not. But Beatrice was going to teach me. First you simmer the cock in a nice broth composed of an onion, a bay leaf, one celery stalk, salt, peppercorns, and water for about five hours. Then you heave it out, rip off the skin, slice it, and after that you whip up a brown roux with butter, flour, and a little cock juice from the pot, stir in some mustard, the sautéed mushrooms, chopped gherkins, pour the sauce over the sliced member, and return it to the oven in a casserole for ten to fifteen minutes. You can also add white wine or cider and a touch of cream, which will make it even more irresistible.