Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  It’s lunchtime again, at least I think it is. I find a café still serving only drinks. I take out my laptop. The waitress does not know if there is WiFi. A man at the next table watches me type up some notes. He is fascinated: ‘It’s like playing a piano.’

  A Roman woman walks by: a navy trouser suit, a flash of red briefcase and red shoes, the flashes dictated by time and movement. There are bright clothes in the shops, but only the tourists are wearing them. Her briefcase swings: stride – flash – red – stride – flash – red: pattern recognition.

  A pattern is… both a description of a thing which is alive and a description of the process which will generate that thing. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

  A Roman passes, talking in gestures into his mobile phone. At the next table, a cute guy in designer black sits alone, sipping a glass of wine. Then I see the dog collar. There are some patterns I still don’t recognise.

  I chase a few WiFi signals, but can’t connect so instead I read your message again, then look back through our emails, and I am shocked to find them silly. Such flat words do no justice to feelings, but how would I flirt again else? Flirting’s meaning deferred – that surface-y glancing urr sound, skidding on ice. I can recognise the pattern – the flash of cards dealt, trumped – a vocabulary of gestures impersonal as those I found in marriage. Flirting has its own architecture, unstoppable, built of polished aphorisms put in the gaps between the stones. How high you can build depends on received wisdom, local planning regulations. In London you can build what you like, in the shape of whatever. In Paris, you can’t go beyond certain limits. I have no idea of the restrictions for building in the centre of Rome. Maybe we built just because we could, because the blocks were already there, lying around, and we knew how to use them. But how do I stop the endless elaboration of my thoughts about you, the Baroque curlicues in my head?

  Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

  I leave the café, find a small stationer’s, and buy a notebook. Oh, in Rome they make things more beautiful than anywhere else! This notebook: hand-bound, sewn, its edges tinted red as pork in a Chinese takeaway, its paper thick as fabric. For three Euros! I should have bought two, three, but in the shop it seemed one of the more ordinary, cheaper items.

  •••

  Back at my hostel, there’s WiFi and I’m finally connected. But there have been no more of your words that arrived like flowers, so I sit down and book a flight out of Rome – where, because of the state holiday and the religious holiday, there is no room for me at this, or any other hostel – to Athens and, in Athens, another cheap hotel. I do this with no fuss, because no one knows where I am, and nothing I do now means anything to anyone.

  And, because you called me a game-player, I decide to play a game with you. I reply to your email and tell you the tale of the missed ferry and the full hostel: Will you rescue me? I want to hook you with a story, then slip from your grasp, if only to make you want me again. I want to amaze you with an illusion as clever as the statue in the Palazzo Spada. How could you know that, having been abandoned, I have already rescued myself?

  Lay waste to everything. Transform yourself into a contemptible person whose only pleasure is in tricking and deceiving. If you can do this, then you will have established equality.

  Kierkegaard, ibid

  I check out. As I wait for my bill in the performance art living room, I flick through postcards on the desk: the Rome I didn’t see. The top card shows Cupid and Psyche, a statue inside the Capitoline Museum, which I have not visited this time or on any trip to Rome. It is said to be a copy of a Greek original (always in Rome, there’s something older, better to refer to). Psyche kept her name, Cupid was translated from the Greek, Eros. Cupidity means greed, and Cupid (rhymes with stupid), the Roman god of love, is a jelly baby with a little round belly. Eros is more difficult to say, and sounds like rose, and like something to do with sex.

  The marble lovers on the postcard are two plump teens of about equal height, lit through a late-afternoon window that turns them yellow as instant custard. They are kissing, but they are walking as they kiss, heads turned to each other so they must stumble. She leans into him, and it is difficult to see how he supports himself without falling – or perhaps the sculpture has been wrongly displayed and really shows two people lying down, or perhaps it’s in some way a bad sculpture. He is looking into her eyes, no, at her face, his finger prying her lips apart with the intrusive sensuality of a dentist or a baby. Something like a bed sheet is draped around her hips. He is naked and has no dick, or a tiny one, or else it has been knocked off.

  Psyche was Cupid’s human girlfriend but he would only visit her at night when she couldn’t see him. Being in touch wasn’t enough: Psyche wanted to look too, but as soon as she demanded more than words, he disappeared. Cast out from the temples of Juno and Ceres, the gods of home and food, she was taken in by Venus who, she thought, would help her, but who set her impossible tasks: lessons in love.

  You have taught me a lesson in love. No one thinks they need to be taught how to love: it is love that teaches the lesson, and the lesson love teaches does not seem to be one that tells you how to love better, but the sort you hear in, I’ll teach you a lesson! Not a lesson, then, a punishment. Or a warning: do not look too closely at what you love, don’t ask to much of it, not if you want to keep it. On the postcard of Cupid and Psyche from the Capitoline Museum, Psyche’s pupil-less eyes are only for Eros, or maybe they are still closed. Has she looked yet?

  There could never be anything between us. I would ruin you, you said on that afternoon in the old city. You said it as though you were working out a problem, as though you were pretending to talk only to yourself but you meant me to hear. And that seemed such a silly idea it almost made me laugh, but also struck me with terror (as soon as words are out, there’s always a chance they might correspond to something real). We were on the corner of a street and it was as if you were deciding aloud which way to go, like someone on stage, planning a quick exit, and making sure I knew it. What a performance!

  I take a bus back to the rail station, which is another oculus, a gap through to somewhere else. An oculus, in art, is also known as a ‘station point’, the point from which the artist intends the observer to view the work.

  And, once I’m on the train, the view is like the view outside all the other stations in Europe, the backs of apartment buildings so subject to the railway’s rattle they’re few people’s first choice of home. When I arrived in Rome, I’d thought Termini in the station’s name meant an ending but, I just found out, it’s named for the ancient thermal baths.

  As the train leaves the station I catch a glimpse of the Terminal Hotel.

  6 Rome to Athens/Vol de Nuit

  28/29th April

  Please pay attention to the safety instructions, even if you are a frequent flier.

  I can’t remember what the stewardess looked like, what kind of uniform she wore, whether she was young or old, beautiful or not. I thought I would pay more attention because I am not a frequent flier. For years I tried not to fly, didn’t visit places that required it. It was not Green. It was a kind of indulgence I didn’t want to take. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who thought some specific benefit came only with the very quickest change of scene, that I should go to other places to have particular kinds of experience, and – feeling displaced myself – I had no desire to treat other people as native. For years I stuck to it, though I found it hard not to take flights when so many of the other people I knew who worried about taking flights took them anyway. But here I am at an airport hoping, just like them, that in leaving, the most hopelessly non-specific
meaning will take place.

  I am about to cross a time zone, to lose another hour. Night flight, I am thinking, Vol de Nuit, which is a perfume by Guerlain that does not smell like this airport, which smells of the human props – coffee, cigarettes (for all that they’re banned), cleaning fluids – that we use to keep ourselves, and our places, under control. Nor does the perfume smell of the mechanics of flight, of petrol and metal and the future of the twentieth century like Caron’s En Avion, which is a perfume I like. It smells of being asleep, and flying at night is like being asleep: it is easier to let go of stolen hours (vol, in French, also means theft), or to pretend there were more of them. Night flight is nothing happening. It is a kind of denial.

  It’s a small world, and easy to cross if you have the time, and the money – from airport to airport at least, if those are the places at which you want to arrive. Otherwise it can be a large world, and difficult to cross, difficult to find your way up a small track off the map once you leave the main road. But airport to airport is hardly travel. This airport looks like all the other airports I have been in. There is very little information here to tell me which country I am leaving and, when I arrive, it will be at a building very much like the one I left. The airport is a buffer zone against loss of time and place. Designed to cushion the shocks of change, every corner is rounded, each surface easy to clean: plastic, marble, polished concrete. Against a background of undemanding grey, which suggests I might be in an office, functional fittings stand out in primary colours, hinting that I might be in a nursery, or on a building site. Shops that are open day and night breathe out a scent identical to fresh passion fruit, which, I know, comes from cosmetics and not from fruit at all. Signs threaten politely in every language: Please do not leave your baggage unattended: it will be removed and destroyed. The airport is made to run smoothly, so smoothly that passengers slide off each other without a second glance. I go to the bar where sounds are submerged as in a swimming pool, where plastic chairs that imitate wood are decorated with cushions in fabric that imitates flowering plants. I order a drink to celebrate being nowhere, after-hours. On the floor plan of the bar at the computerised till, island tables swim in a bright blue sea.

  I am waiting for your reply to my email and I have settled into a waiting state, which is an airport state of mind. Waiting is familiar and its anxiety, once recognised, is comfortable. Loving is waiting for something to happen even when I’m not: I’m always in the headlong state of being about to hear from you. The internet, which is also so much waiting, doubles it. I could spend hours flicking from Twitter to Facebook to Email, hypnotised, waiting for someone to make contact, to tell me I’m still here. I wait and I don’t do, until I find I have used up all my time, agreeably, waiting, until I almost feel I have done something. I could live in this suspended state (almost) indefinitely.

  As I pay for my drink, the postcard spills out of my bag: Cupid and Psyche, their bodies rolled in puppy fat, I can hardly tell boy from girl. I bin it. Now I have started clearing myself out, I can’t stop. I take everything from my bag that might weigh me down: receipts, screwed-up notes, the crumpled empty cigarette box. Fumer nuit gravement à votre santé, it tells me: Smoking damages your health. Nuit. Night flight. Se nuire (vb): to damage – yourself or another. A transitive, and a reflexive verb, you can’t do damage without damaging something, or someone, or yourself.

  I take a corridor down the side of a duty-free concession, thinking it leads to my gate but it ends in an air-conditioning duct. A woman at the end of the corridor is leaning on a trolley. On it there are many things in bags, so many, and so full that I can’t think how she got them through security, but they are not bags for travelling. They are ragged and made of plastic. She leans over her trolley, resting against it, as though she has been pushing it for a long time. This airport that is so bare and shiny is where she lives.

  •••

  All electronic devices must be switched off during take off and landing… We fly over places I have only seen named in IKEA catalogues. I never thought to have them pried off the page.

  In a row of three seats, I’m paired with a couple in their twenties who are playing top trumps with cards showing the puppets from a kids’ TV show. They must have learnt so much about these fictional characters in order to play. They are so into each other. Like Cupid and Psyche, they look only inward, are always half turned in each other’s direction, her hand always on his arm, his fingers on her thigh. When he takes off his cardigan it is her arm, not his, that reaches around his shoulder to unhook the cuff, and it looks like it is his, but unexpectedly white, short, and pointed, like a novelty dance number where one partner stands behind the other doubling his number of limbs. When he eats crisps she holds the bag and he feeds first himself, and then her. They have no independent action. Her face is pale and unformed. He pushes up the thick black scaffold of glasses to kiss her, and is helpless as a slug.

  The stewardesses offer headsets, and the passengers pay to quiet themselves. Because they have spent money, they agree that silence is necessary. The headphones link to a playlist, but there’s nothing else to entertain us on this flight, which is too short for love or for action, at least the way films tell it. Instead I fall asleep and dream that I am dead. I am still on earth with other dead people waiting to be passed on to somewhere else. By a kind of customs desk, I wait with my former brother-in-law. We discuss comic books we have read. Now we are waiting, we will have time to catch up on our reading. I ask the customs officer whether it is possible for the dead to fall in love. He looks regretful. He says, definitely, ‘No’. I open my eyes to find large tears burning down opposite sides of my face into the airline pillow.

  A hostess nudges me awake: drink? biscuits? Although I do not want the drink, and do not like the biscuits, I eat them because they are given, and drink warm wine from a tiny plastic bottle. I cross the little boundary on the map into the shaded part of the world. Alcohol leaks in to loosen up my mind, to let stories out. Words hang in front of me as on the runway, illuminated: I cannot say them, have no one to say them to. In the seats in front of me, an old man and an old woman don’t know each other. They find the stories that come out are about their grown-up children. Deal, play, trump: it’s difficult for me to listen. I have planned for nothing beyond the hostel at the end of my flight, but I’m buoyed up by faith in other people’s plans, as the plane is buoyed up because the passengers believe it is flying and, if we stop believing, it will fall. These particular old people talk in operatic vistas: friends, relatives marry, divorce, die, all in a sentence. Everything happens to everyone; it’s no surprise. So much is concluded. Their stories have ends, and people come to them, even before the fasten seat belts sign goes off. I listen like I might learn something: they have been stocking their memories for so long, long enough, perhaps, for them to begin to see a pattern. Storytelling is a consequence of survival and each tale – told as though it could have happened only that way – irons out regret. But they don’t foresee their own ends, not these people who are really not that old, in their sixties maybe. Like children they still haven’t learned that things will go on beyond them.

  Turbulence: people fasten their seat belts with the sound of bubble-wrap popping. Things shake and fall from the overhead lockers, as though there were a right way up, as though the plane were a house set on solid ground that could be pushed off balance. The chicken leg wheels descend from the plane’s undercarriage. Take nothing with you. If we go down, metal stripping from the aircraft roof, if we gallop through the houses at double speed… but I’ve always had a problem with the might-have-been. As it is, after an interval of unsure minutes the uncrushed plane leaves a shadow of its crash across the rooftops, across desire.

  7 Athens/Speaking

  29th April

  I’m at a café table. It doesn’t matter which country. I’ve been travelling for a long time now. Or, not long but – how many cities in how many days? A couple of nights in each, maybe three at
most. I am establishing a pattern. The first night is for flopping, exhausted, into whatever hostel, hotel, or friend-of-a-friend’s apartment I have booked, borrowed or blagged. And then for getting up again, for walking the streets of the neighbourhood until the moon shows above the bay/bridge/ruin/whatever, compulsively needing to find out exactly where I am on the map.

  My hostel overlooks the dual carriageway in front of the station. It has no double glazing, no air conditioning, and the windows rattle with traffic, but it is clean enough, and very cheap. The hostel is hot and smells of drains and I am tired and this is where I am. No one else is staying in my room, and the woman behind the desk smiles although neither of us understands the other. I haven’t spoken since arriving in Greece, don’t even know what to eat for breakfast. The coffee in the hostel tastes of hairspray. There is flabby white bread, small jewels of plastic-cased preserves, thick slices of industrial cake, oranges. I eat the oranges. I look up the phrase for coffee but forget it before I get to the corner café.

  Without language I am not a traveller but a sightseer. Unable to put anything into words, I am freer: you can no longer condemn thoughts that I can’t articulate. I am travelling away from meaning, can’t even read the alphabet. Street signs start off OK, then the letters crunch into triangles, polygons. I can’t keep their shapes in my head long enough to fasten them to what I see when I glance down at my map. In the meantime, simpering gets me a long way with waiters, with ticket clerks. Asking for directions in the street I smile and apologise, leave gaps, echo phrases, get by with words common in every language: taxi, hotel, WiFi. I could buy a little book with photos instead of sentences, and if I don’t speak the language, there are machines for that: ticket dispensers, ATMs, money itself. If I prepare well enough, I won’t have to talk to another human being. Brandish a banknote and point. I am freer with money because in an unknown language it does not feel like spending and because, as a tourist, it is my duty to dispense it.