by David Plante
I said, “If thinking is seeing a person in order to block off every part of him and name it, I’m against thinking, because I have to believe there are parts of a person which can’t be blocked off and named—”
She exploded. “Against thinking! How can you say that? What do you think thinking is? Naming? Do you think it’s what Freddy Ayer thinks? My God, my God. Freddy Ayer. He doesn’t think. You don’t understand about thinking. You are frivolous. Your writing is frivolous. It isn’t thought through. I do think. I do think things through. I’m not frivolous. You were a Catholic. You studied syllogisms. You know about the displaced middle. So was I a Catholic. I learned what good hard thinking is. Why are you frivolous, and I’m not? Is it because you’re American? You Americans. You Americans. We Europeans know how to think. When you told me the other day that you wanted to write a beautiful book, I thought, No real writer would say that, because that’s a frivolous reason for writing a book. How could you have said that? Freddy Ayer. Freddy Ayer. My God. I know Freddy Ayer. I know he doesn’t think. How can you imagine that thinking is what Freddy Ayer thinks? How could you say you want to write a beautiful book and consider yourself a serious writer? I find it hard to believe you are a serious writer. And I’ll tell you there are a number of people who think the same. Jean Rhys tells me you’re a writer. I have to believe her. But a lot of others tell me you’re not. They, like me, know that you lack thinking. My God, my God. Freddy Ayer.”
I was angry, and I sat, silent, thinking: What am I doing here listening to this obsessed woman?
“And another thing I’ve got to tell you,” she shouted. “You’re frivolous because you’re worldly. Yes, you must be a part of the world if you’re going to write about it, but you’re too much a part of it, too much taken in by it. You lead a very chic life. The people you invite to your house are very worldly people. You’d be surprised that in Paris I have very very ordinary friends. You imagine I see only grand friends. It’s not true. I’m not so worldly. I see perfectly ordinary people in Paris and we think things through in our talk. No, you’re too worldly. All you talk about is Germaine Greer.”
My anger began to give way to depression.
She went on. “I didn’t want to tell you these things, but you wanted me to. You’ll ruin yourself by being worldly.”
“Yes,” I said dully.
Her obsession lasted till four o’clock in the morning. I simply said, from time to time, “Yes,” and became, with each yes, more depressed. I imagined us as from a great distance, in a dimly lit stone house in a dark valley.
“You don’t know about life and death,” she said; “you don’t, you haven’t thought your way through living and dying, and the awfulness of both.”
In bed, I lay thinking: Why do I imagine Sonia is a close friend? Though I might have tried to think it through, whatever made her a friend, and a close friend, would have to have been, literally, unthinkable.
•
The next day we were both very quiet. The woman writer came over in the late afternoon to ask us if we would like to join her for dinner. Sonia said she couldn’t, she was too exhausted. I thought for a moment I might go, but I said I’d stay. After the writer left, I lit the fire in the scaldabagno so Sonia could have her bath. We were quiet again.
With our first glasses of wine, I said to Sonia, “I have an idea. Let’s make a little excursion for a few days to the hill towns.”
Her narrowed eyes opened, and the small wrinkles of her face were pulled back as her face, too, appeared to open. She smiled. “What a good idea,” she said.
My idea was to get her away from the house.
We set off over the Umbrian mountains towards Urbino. She was concentrating tensely on the roads. I, too, was tense with concentration, and, even when I passed her a cigarette and her lighter, stared with Sonia at the road which sometimes doubled back on itself, at steeper and steeper angles.
In Urbino, I found a good, clean hotel, and I saw on Sonia’s face, as she entered the bright marble-floored foyer, a look of relief.
In the Ducal Palace, which she said she thought the most beautiful building in the world, I imagined her looking at the spaces, those clean, bright spaces, as with longing. In room after room, we were silent; she kept walking away from me to a window, a far doorway, her back turned to me. I let her go on ahead, and followed at a distance.
In the evening, we sat out in the café in the main square. We didn’t talk for long, still periods.
When, about nine o’clock, she said she was tired and rose to go to the hotel, she leaned towards me and said, “Don’t pick anyone up.” She wasn’t joking. I said, “Do you think I would?” “Thanks for that,” she said, and left.
I remained in the café in the piazza. The air was warm and smelled of the perspiration of the people crowded about me at other tables. I felt very much alone, and I wondered why, if I felt so alone with Sonia, I wanted to be with her. Why was I drawn to a woman—and, when I considered it, to women—who made me feel so isolated, and made me question myself body and soul? Of course I was drawn to her for her literary world, in which I’d wanted a place. Here, however, we were both outside that world. I was drawn to her, more, for what I imagined to be her reason for having to have a world of friends about her to whom she could devote herself: for that deep darkness in her which she seemed to accept as a fact nothing could be done about, and which made her turn away from herself and it to her friends. Sonia made me aware that I, as she, was entirely isolated; in her case, she denied the importance—the selfish, or, she might have said, the self-indulgent importance—of such isolation, but I was nevertheless attracted to that isolation more than to her deliberate, disinterested devotion to friends.
I realized my whole attitude towards Sonia had been sentimental and selfish: I had been drawn to her darkness because she, who commanded a place in the world, was justified in her darkness, and justified mine. I had perhaps even imagined that, alone with her in Italy, I would try to get her, in some subtle way, to commiserate with me for my isolating darkness, though I could not imagine Sonia taking me in her arms. This, of course, was ridiculous; all those dark, isolating feelings had to be kept inside, because there was nothing that could be done about them; they had to be kept secret. It occurred to me that, for years and years, I had assumed that the deepest feelings one could have were the darkest, and that the deepest relationship one could have with another person was in communicating those darkest feelings to him or her, to understand them and to have them understood. I had presumed the world to be, somehow, inside—a world of privileged friends who communicated to one another their inner feelings and thoughts, mostly rather sad feelings and thoughts. But the only world that mattered, I saw now, was the world outside one’s thoughts and feelings, and friends communicated with one another in terms of that world—not talking to one another about feelings and thoughts, but helping one another to put their houses in order. Never would I be able to talk to Sonia about feelings and thoughts—her own even less than mine—and that, I knew, was right; Sonia was right not to talk about what didn’t matter, but to do what one had to do to get on.
Perhaps, I told myself, I had learned something from her, though it would have been very difficult to articulate exactly what. As with the sense of accomplishing something for the first time, thinking out something thoroughly, I left the café and walked across the traffic-less piazza to the hotel.
Sonia was difficult, but she was difficult for a reason. She wanted, demanded so much from herself and from others, and it made her rage that she and others couldn’t ever match what was done to what was aspired to. I admired her for being difficult. I could admire her like this when I wasn’t with her.
•
In the hill towns, we stayed in clean, bright hotels. Sonia relaxed and slept well.
Back in Cortona, I rang the writer, who invited us to dinner and to spend the night with her. The two women talked animatedly while I said nothing. I left them talking and drink
ing and went to bed.
At my house in the morning, Sonia immediately got on her hands and knees to pull up the weeds that had grown among the paving stones under the pergola and began to talk about the outside of the house: a row of oleanders there, the lilacs cut back there—
Before going to bed, I said, “Sonia, if you’d like to get away from the house tomorrow, the Saturday market is on in Cortona.”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Only if you’d like.”
In the early morning, I heard her get up. I got up.
“We’ll go to the market,” she said.
While Sonia wandered about the stalls in the small stone squares of the town, I did chores. In the post office I stood in a queue behind a woman I thought I recognized; I leaned forward and did recognize her, an American professor of literature who lived in England. Surprised, I asked her what she was doing in Cortona, and she, as if there were no reason at all to be surprised, said, “I’m staying at Germaine Greer’s.” She said that as she was buying and preparing lunch at Germaine’s she thought she could ask me along. I said, “I’m with Sonia Orwell. I’ll have to ask her. She may say no, she doesn’t want to go to Germaine’s.” I went out into the market and found Sonia buying many tiny handkerchiefs from a woman standing before a big cardboard box full of them; I brought her back to the American professor, who invited Sonia, and Sonia said, “That would be lovely.” I thought: Oh God, Sonia and Germaine, and I recalled their first brief encounter. I said to Sonia, “Only if you want to go.” She answered, “Of course I want to go.” I did not want to go.
I did a few more chores, then Sonia and I drove off. On the dusty white roads, I got lost. I saw her frowning. When I found my way, up a narrow rocky road, I saw her frown more. I said, “Remember, this whole escapade is not my responsibility.” She said nothing. The car bounced over ruts, and she winced. I said, “We can go back. I’m very willing to go back.” “No,” she said, “if it doesn’t get any worse.” “It does get worse,” I said. Sonia drove on a little further over ruts. “We’ll park the car by the side of the road,” she said, “and walk.” “It’s a long walk,” I said. “We’ll do it,” she said.
I thought: She wants to see Germaine.
We walked up a steep road in white heat for about a kilometre. Sonia didn’t talk. Her hair began to drip with sweat.
I repeated, “We could go back.”
“We’ll go on.”
Through the chestnut trees, I saw the red tile roof of the house.
We approached by way of the garden of all-white flowers. Germaine, under the fig tree before the house, stood with one hand on her throat, another on her thrust-out hip. She was wearing a red dress and blue high-heeled shoes. As I went to her, she said in a loud voice, “My guests invited guests to lunch without asking me first.” I didn’t take in what she said, but, laughing, kissed her on both cheeks. She drew back and gave me a glinting look. She said, “My guests do what they like in my house.” I took it in suddenly, and just as suddenly became angry. I thought: I’m going. But when I looked round at Sonia, sweating and leaning forward with exhaustion, I thought: I’ll have to be polite. The professor came out and Germaine went in. Sonia talked with the American in a loud voice, saying, over and over, “What a beautiful place this is. And the all-white garden was obviously planted by a genius. What a spot.” Germaine leaned out of a window and said to Sonia, “Would you like a glass of white wine, dear?” Sonia went into the house with the professor, and I heard the women speaking.
From another room, I heard the professor’s husband trying to quieten their crying children so they would sleep.
Still depressed, I lay in the hammock and closed my eyes.
After lunch, just before Sonia and I left, Germaine took me up behind her house to, she said, show me what wild thyme looked like, as I’d said I’d never seen any. Both of us leaning over a low plant of wild thyme, she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to have guests now.” I said, “If you invite guests, you must bear them. I thought you above all would insist on that.” “Why above all me?” she asked. I said, “Because I thought you knew about responsibility.” She pursed her lips, lowered her eyes, put the knuckles of her index fingers to her cheeks, and pretended to cry.
Sonia was drunk. All the way down to the car she talked about what had happened. Sometimes she stumbled on the stones and ruts.
I kept thinking how she, in an instant, had taken complete control of the situation as if as a responsibility, as if she had realized she, as a duty, must save the luncheon. She had had to drink a lot to do it, and she had talked in the silences with a kind of passion to do it, but she had succeeded.
On the way to the car, she said, “It was my fault, Germaine’s reaction, I know it was.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was,” she said.
I said, “Oh, Sonia.”
“I like Germaine,” she said. “Her house revealed a lot about her I liked. It’s an entirely feminine house.”
“Yes.”
In the car, before starting off, she said, “I want to be a good person, but I’m not.”
I did not know what to say.
“Most people don’t like me,” she said.
From Germaine’s we went, for tea, to the house of an Oxford graduate student, who had a number of other students staying with him. On the terrace, Sonia was given a chair under a big umbrella, and the students sat around her. Instead of tea, Sonia was given cold white wine. I had to go off to collect chairs which had been re-caned, and when I returned I found Sonia, with waves of an arm and backward thrusts of her head, pronouncing on various writers she knew whom the students asked her about.
“Oh, I can tell you about—”
The students stared at her with wonder.
Back in the car, she said, “I did it again. I put on my act, my widow of George Orwell act. Was I awful? I’m so drunk. Did they think I was a fool?”
I said, “They were fascinated.”
She drove carefully. She insisted on preparing supper, which she did drunkenly, but carefully.
As she went upstairs to bed, she said, “I hated today, but in a way I’m glad for all of it. I hate everything, but, finally, I have to be glad for it all.”
Her last day with me was bright and clear and fresh. I did not know what mood Sonia was in. She went on her own for a walk, and returned with a huge bunch of wild flowers which she arranged in a pitcher. Then she wandered off again. She seemed to wander, out of and into the house, throughout the day.
3
Sonia came back to London more and more often from Paris on what she called business trips, trips to see her lawyer about a lawsuit (or lawsuits) she would only talk about when drunk, and then so incoherently one couldn’t understand except for the great importance of it (or them) to her. She said, “Once I win—and I’ve put everything I’ve got into winning—I’ll kill myself.” There was a sense one got from her during these business trips that she was unable to explain her legal problems because they, complex as they were, had to do with something more complex in Sonia, which she did not want to go into—which she could not go into. Her drunken attempts to describe her litigation always ended with her saying, “It’s all much much more complicated than can be imagined, and much much more awful. It’s desperate.”
I went to Paris to visit her. She asked me, please, to come to lunch, to supper, to lunch the next day.
Nothing was going right for her.
She lived in a narrow, L-shaped room in a low building, like a cottage, at the back of an alley. There was a small kitchen and a bathroom off the kitchen where the air smelled slightly of escaping gas. She met friends in expensive restaurants, where she insisted, always, on paying the large bills.
In a dim restaurant—decorated with chamber pots on shelves—I said, “It must be wonderful living in Paris.”
“You don’t understand Paris,” she said.
“No, I don�
�t.”
“Even I don’t understand Paris. I’m a foreigner, and I realize I don’t, after all, speak French very well.”
“Will you stay?”
“I’ve got to stay.”
When the waiter came to the table to ask if there was anything we wanted, she shouted at him, “Laissez nous en paix,” and he, startled, stepped back and said, “Tres bien, madame.” She said to me, “Why did I do that? Why? Yesterday a young woman stopped me in the street to ask me the time, and I shouted at her, ‘Do you think I can give the time to everyone who stops me in the street?’ Afterwards, I wondered why I’d been so rude to her. Why? Why am I so filled with anger?”
I said nothing.
She said, “I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life.”
When I kissed her goodbye before getting into a taxi, I saw there were tears in her eyes.
In London, I visited her painter friend to talk about her. I felt a need to talk about Sonia with her friends. I sat with him at one end of a long room; bare bulbs hung on wires from the low ceiling. I asked him if Sonia had ever attacked him, as she attacked so many of her friends.
“No,” he said, “she never has.”
“Why, I wonder.”
He thought. “I don’t know why.”
“I suspect she’s never attacked you because she’s frightened of you.”
“Why should Sonia be frightened of me?”
“Because she’s frightened of people whom she thinks have succeeded totally in what they paint, write, compose. She’s suspicious of anyone who tries to, I think, and, even more, hates the presumption in anyone who tries. She believes, I’m sure, that very, very few people succeed, and that because of the great, the superhuman demands they put on themselves. She thinks most people are pretending. She thinks I’m pretending. And to that I can only say, Well, maybe I am.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know why she should think I’m not.”
I said, “Do you imagine that Sonia has ever wanted to write?”