A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  Meanwhile, Voltaire is staring at Madame Metzler in her black anorak with the embroidered Chinese Dragon, skin-tight black jeans, red cowboy boots and a cigarette holder at the ready.

  ‘Madame,’ he says, bowing as she struts right past him.

  The classroom audience quickly divides into two: educated professionals assume places behind tiny desks along the front of the classroom, village blue-collar stiffs line up defensively along the back. The commuting women are still in their Geneva suits and expensive boots. The women at the back wear Madame Metzler’s border chic—a fringed-leather cowboy look popular among the chalet dwellers.

  I find my seat, indicated by a silhouette of Theo’s head pasted on construction paper. He’s left me a drawing of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor. The cartoon’s expression is grim.

  Voltaire sniffs a character next to him who is about thirty years old, badly shaven, with two earrings in one ear lobe and a long quiff of blue-dyed hair at the nape of his neck. He ruffles through a crumpled packet of cigarettes for an unbroken candidate. V. settles on a tiny stool next to my chair.

  ‘No doubt that is one of my friend Rousseau’s Natural Men, a friendly and flowing savage who would return us to nature.’

  The school director has arrived from ‘en bas,’ that is to say, the gentrified dormitory communities that lie closer to the lakeshore. Clearing his throat portentously, Monsieur Villar adjusts his bifocals, sets up his PowerMac on a table, and connects it to a projector. He will display his talk in outline form on the wall.

  ‘Kind of like projected opera lyrics,’ I mutter to Peter. ‘—for those of us who are literate!’ V. whispers. ‘How thoughtful! I always found the Vaudois accent simply impenetrable.’

  In perfectly acceptable French, Villar announces that he is bringing the Canton of Vaud’s educational system into line with more advanced parts of Switzerland. Every change appears on the wall, in outline form, with ponderous predictability. Each point is announced with a balletic flourish as Villar’s index finger descends towards the PowerMac keyboard to announce Another New Idea.

  His big message of the night is that no longer will the future of each child be engraved in stone by sixth grade. One can enter the university track a bit later than seventh grade with a sizable effort to jump from the ‘general track’ to the ‘baccalauréat track,’ provided the student repeats years wasted on the general track. This is good news?

  Villar now projects something resembling the map of the London Underground. Track lines move up and across, over and down, up, over and up again. These innovations were all tested and proven in—Quebec.

  ‘The Land of the Huron Tribes, a model of educational reform?’ V. grins. ‘That’s why the school is named Rousseau!’

  Despite Quebec’s high unemployment, Villar seems to think the French-Canadian example will lead us out of the darkness of Vaud. I am distracted from Villar’s remarks by V.’s eyes which are circling hypnotically in time to the director’s finger pointing to the white board, then diving towards the PowerMac, the tool of the Educated Man visiting the Peasants. Indeed, there is something of the courtier in Villar’s minuet as he explains the ‘formation’ of the masses.

  ‘Excuse me, but is this man from Versailles, by any chance?’ V. asks into my ear. ‘Those hand gestures remind me of my old friend, the Duc de Choiseul, demonstrating the latest dance at Versailles.’

  ‘Shush,’ I whisper, trying hard to translate Villar’s windy replies.

  ‘Oh, don’t bother trying to understand everything he says. I’ve already concluded that this man must be very ignorant, for he answers every question that is asked of him, ‘ V. quips.

  Next Madame Vacher shuffles forward to announce her big innovation: the kids will no longer just copy out vocabulary lists. They will try using new words in sentences on themes they choose themselves!

  I’m starting to wonder what century this school got stuck in.

  Voltaire whispers dolefully, ‘Vocabulary lists? No great verses to inspire their hungry young minds? No Corneille? No Molière? No Voltaire? Les pauvres enfants . . .What a bleak century for education . . . ’

  One of the younger teachers—a tall, sporty blonde—follows the mumblings of Madame Vacher. V.’s expression brightens considerably. After all, this was a man who enjoyed very close relationships with many of the actresses in his plays. It’s her unhappy task to explain the new grading system, discarding numerical grades for none other than American smiley faces.

  The audience shifts in their under-sized seats as Villar draws the goofy circles on the blackboard. Parents of budding scholars manage to discuss Les smileys, without feeling too silly; the dignity of the evening erodes as less fortunate parents question the impact of les demi-smileys, les straighties, and les frownies, on the self-esteem of their dunces.

  Madame Metzler suddenly launches at Villar in a ferocious attack, ‘Les smileys are infantile. Worse, they’re American! They’ve got nothing to do with Swiss culture.’

  V. is delighted. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him smirking ludicrously at the parents in an imitation of le smiley drawn on the board—he has become a Smiley clowning in an eighteenth-century wig. You can bury the man, but not the ham.

  Other parents goad Madame Metzler on. Villar intervenes and says that instead of les smileys, some schools in the same district indicate the four levels of performance with the initials, L.A., A., M.A., and P.A., standing for largely acquired, acquired, less, or moins, acquired and poorly acquired.

  But V. has wandered on to more mischief, poking blue-quiffed Natural Man into complaint that his older son in sixth grade is receiving marks in yet a third code, A.A., A—plus, A, N.A., standing for Achieved with Ease, Achieved with some Ease, Achieved and Not Achieved.

  ‘Is the school system drowning in alphabet soup, or what?’ Natural Man shouts to general applause. He takes a bow. Villar is retreating, his back against the chalkboard. Traces of a Smiley grin at us from the back of his dark suit. At the back of the room a separate argument breaks out over les frownies versus not acquired versus poorly acquired.

  The meeting’s gone haywire. Everyone is firing away at each other like machine guns in local dialect, waving cigarettes at Villar, who’s packing up his PowerMac in retreat.

  I drift off from the linguistic mayhem into memories of New York. St. Boniface parents never argued during a parents’ evening. No one smoked. Everyone smiled politely in their beige pantsuits while surreptitiously running their eyes down class lists to see who lived on East End, Fifth or Park. Their Manolos tucked awkwardly under the little desks, the New York parents nodded at the classical allusions dropping from the headmaster’s mouth. For $14,000 a year, this man would guarantee the boys Renaissance art and Etonian values, the keys to the Kingdom of Harvard, and the vice-president’s corner office, plus a field trip to Florence in the spring to soak up European culture.

  But this is the reality of Europe; a roomful of over-taxed and angry parents drowning in an onslaught of mind-numbing vocabulary lists, educational software sales campaigns, distant bureaucracies, Disney movie posters, and textbooks from Quebec.

  Peter and I leave the school meeting and walk home through the sleeping village. V. trails behind us, softly reciting some Homerian verses learnt by heart at Louis-le-Grand. We pass the abandoned youth hostel with shredded flyers stuck to the lobby floor and the tattooed locals sitting in the darkened rear of the café.

  I smile to myself, realizing how different St-Cergue probably looks to a tourist here for a few hours of cross-country skiing. Each Saturday morning, the craft boutiques spring to life, the laiterie lays out its runny cheeses, the social worker moonlights at his second-hand junk shop and M. Metzler drives tourists in a horse-drawn sleigh.

  The town’s latest stab at a renaissance is the restoration of the former home for unwed mothers into a chic art gallery. At the official opening I sipped my white wine and overheard another guest, none other than our Dr Claude, disparage some
of his patients as, ‘drop-outs, marginals, socially unfrequentable.’

  I start picking up threads of what Dr Claude means. I’m told in a murmured aside, by a teacher no less, that one father ‘mistreats’ his sullen older daughter of fifteen, but the details are only hinted at. What I see is that the girl rollerblades aimlessly outside the tabac until the new snowfall forces her indoors.

  I can hear the Rochats fight with each other over his long hours in a backroom operation set up in the village by a British bank to take advantage of the lower wages here in the mountains.

  Alexander gets off the train one day, his face swollen, his cheek bruised deep purple, beaten up for refusing to relinquish his seat. Having failed to budge Alexander with judo pinches to the nape of neck, the local bully Christophe finished up with full-fledged punches to his face.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone stop him? Where were the adults?’

  ‘Two old ladies were watching,’

  Peter calls the perp’s mother who invites my husband over for ‘a glass of white.’ Peter says the wine can wait; he’d prefer a written apology from the child. The next morning, I tackle the doyen of teachers to complain but she only chuckles when I name the culprit.

  ‘Christophe? He’s already set fire to a car. That kid’s a real case,’ she says, sauntering away.

  Of course no written apology is forthcoming. Peter persists and drafts a letter giving Alexander’s account of the incident. No answer. He follows up with a second call to the little thug’s home. His father answers this time, and says his lawyer is preparing a case against us for ‘menacement.’

  That night, Peter and J sit on the bedroom balcony, wrapped in blankets to wallow in the moonlight reflecting off the snow-covered lawn. We are no longer arrivals, spectators, or outsiders. We’re being sued for harassment. Noelle Gruyère got it wrong. Events have fast made us locals ourselves.

  Chapter Eight THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

  Normal people aren’t regularly caught talking to themselves in empty rooms.

  Peter suggests I take a break.

  I have finally waved off the last worker. Theo’s back at school, his throat scarved against brisk winds. His gym class entails an inordinate number of chilly afternoons sledding or skiing on the village piste, but despite these exercises in group congelation, there’s no more wheezing. The stoic, invalid’s disposition that was settling over him in Manhattan has lifted to reveal an elfin optimism.

  As serious as ever, Alexander devotes long hours on the attic floor memorizing French verbs, measuring triangles, and diagraming the laws of electricity to prove that a member of our family can make the cut for the university track despite an American accent.

  These days even Eva-Marie seems almost whole again, winning snowball fights with the agility of someone born to plaster.

  I’ve stuck to V.’s demonic pre-dawn timetable, although not his daily ingestion of twenty-five cups of coffee. The revision of the Tibet novel starts to trundle along despite my grumpiness. The only distraction is V.’s conversation, full of scandalous tidbits. Despite efforts to concentrate on work, I find myself muttering incredulously, ‘The Regent slept with his own daughter?’

  I agree to Peter’s get-away offer. Facing down fears of airborne antibiotic-resistant T.B. germs, terrorist attacks, and lost luggage, I buy a cheap ticket to England to visit my goddaughter, Rebecca.

  With a look of deepening consternation, V. watches me disconnect my computer and clear my desk. ‘It’s all yours for three days. That’ll give you time to write a new play. Well, knowing you, maybe two new plays.’

  He raises himself up to his full, if not imposing, height. He is too proud to ask me my plans, which in the end, I can’t conceal.

  ‘I’m going to England for a long weekend.’

  ‘A marvelous idea!’ he leaps up with relief ‘To return at last! It’s been so long. My old haunts, my old friends—’

  Which is how I find myself standing in a ‘ticketless’ airline queue with a man who has tossed aside his green bathrobe for discount travel in his best polished boots, long brown velvet travelling coat with deep cuffs over a red brocade waistcoat, a high collar of wrapped linen frothing out in hand-worked lace, and on top of his elegant brow, an impossible wig of tumbling brown curls.

  For what it’s worth, I’m wearing a five-year-old black Anne Klein pantsuit that’s gone shiny in the rear.

  V. beams at me with unfettered delight as his enormous leather-bound trunk swings away with my red Samsonite between the rubber flaps and into the dubious mysteries of charter flight baggage control.

  He is flushed with excitement as we wander the duty free counters. I have to stop him repeatedly from spritzing his lace cravat with Eau Sauvage—‘Rousseau would have loved this one’—but my disapproval does nothing to dampen his anticipation.

  ‘How I love the English! How I love people who say what they think! How I admire the English respect for facts, reality, utility, simplicity of manners, habits and dress!’

  ‘I’m glad you’re looking forward to it,’ I grunt, lugging an overloaded handbag. I would rather have left him at home, and he is no fool.

  ‘What a relief from that Bastille of an office of yours! Now, do you have your letters of introduction? With whom are we staying first?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You haven’t done too badly by my accommodations so far.’

  There are no reserved seats. V. insists I dump all my stuff on the seat next to me, so that he is sure of a place once everyone is settled.

  ‘Oui, Madame, I have kept silent about your low ceilings, your inadequate heating, and the complete lack of intelligent Society because I am the soul of courtesy,’ he says, finally squeezing his velvet’ed bottom into a seat that looks narrow even for his eighteenth-century pelvis.

  ‘Even in the Bastille, I had the company of Madame de Tencin, the queen of the salons, but then, you must have heard all that in history class. Do you think they’ll give us a coffee?’

  ‘At these prices, I doubt it. What was Madame de Tencin in for?’

  ‘Another Royal intrigue. In the Bastille, she and I were like Pyramis and Thisbe, a whispering wall between us and . . .’

  ‘All right, all right. Anyway, you’re sprung now from the doldrums of my office, so I hope you have a good time. We’re staying with my friends, the Worthys, in Suffolk. Who did you stay with last time?’

  ‘Henry John, Lord Bolingbroke.’

  He doesn’t need to tell me that Bolingbroke was the Kissinger of his day, but before I can scour my memory for a few scraps about this familiar name, Monsieur Blabbermouth starts the usual boasting . . .

  ‘ . . . the Tory foreign minister who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, a political figure who strode both sides of the Channel like a diplomatic Colossus, author of Idea of a Patriot King . . . ’

  ‘Oh, yeah, that Bolingbroke.’ I feel pathetic.

  The Worthys and their two daughters are a delightful upper-middle-class English family, comfortably off thanks to Allen’s endless toil in far-flung postings as an oil trader, but this will hardly be a weekend hobnobbing with regulars from Buckingham Palace. I try to warn V. that his hosts won’t be titled aristocrats.

  ‘No problem at all,’ he chides me. ‘In the three years I spent in England, I realized that the English classes divide up much like their beer—with the froth at the top and the dregs at the bottom, but the middle is excellent!’

  Will Katherine, a former women’s page editor, chatelaine of a yellow Georgian rectory in Stowmarket, Suffolk—-with her twice-weekly tennis doubles, needlepoint projects, and bread machine—appreciate comparison to a common brewski?

  In ninety minutes, we’ve landed at Stansted, so sane and spacious it makes my memories of Heathrow in the late seventies compare with a Breughel painting of Hell. Gone are the clumsy diesel buses trundling across the tarmac. We whoosh our way from the landing gate via a sleek underground shuttle to the main terminal, pressed up against people with roughened fac
es, pale eyes, and the tired smiles of the freshly vacationed.

  ‘I landed on May 10th, 1726 at Greenwich, the week of the Fair,’ V. chatters on. ‘The Thames was covered with boats, the King was coming down in a barge, preceded by a band,’ he sighs, then adds, ‘this fat person is standing on my foot. Not that it pains me, but it is so very rude.’

  I gently edge aside the fat man wearing a T-shirt that advertises, ‘Bigger is better.’

  ‘No doubt you thought the revelers were coming to greet you,’ I comment dryly.

  He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘I admit at thirty-two, I was stirred by the pretty girls, dressed in their finest, set off by their demure modesty, their rosy cheeks, but I quickly realized my elation was a little premature. When I reached London I found my banker had just declared bankruptcy. I was unexpectedly penniless . . . ’

  ***

  What day was it I finally landed in England sometime in early spring, 1977? I’d already warmed up to the British experience by spending three years in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, writing for the South China Morning Post. I’d done my time in the field, covering Vietnamese refugee camps, working eleven and twelve-hour days for $200 a month, clothed myself in cut-price Chinese sandals and rejects from the factory outlets, eating local, living local.

  The colony was also the ‘Fragrant Harbor’—like any successful port, an open culture; it drew all nationalities, particularly Commonwealth citizens. The raging war in Vietnam and a Communist walled giant to the north fueled Hong Kong’s teeming economy.

  The Post’s newsroom wasn’t England, but a microcosm of the British Empire, a crossfire of personalities: the boisterous self-parody of the Australian reporters, the dry irony of the New Delhi subs, the suave aloofness of the Sunday features editor from Sri Lanka, the slinky innuendo of the Cantonese Harold who covered the drugs beat by night, and the wild-man sentimentality of the New Zealand news editor who hired me virtually unseen.