Tim Parks - Europa

The unshaven boy smiles, embarrassed, pouts, shrugs.

Have you got a girl-friend? Monica asks. Squeezed next to her, Colin makes a face.

Graziano says he goes out with two or three girls now and then, on and off, but he hasn’t got a girl-friend.

Blessed state, I tell him, but Plottie says why, she is unhappy because she hasn’t got a boy-friend, or rather because the boyfriend she had was an idiota .

Exactly.

And Colin says, What’s this with the indefinite article in front of boy-friend/girl-friend? The singular crap. When the girls smile, he says in his most Brummie Italian, False presumption of binary opposition.

Georg says: We can’t all be as emancipated as you, Colin. Which is such a beautiful piece of hypocrisy, coming from Georg. He turns to the girls and is smiling especially warmly, I’ve noticed, at the small red-head Veronica with the swollen lips, though in a very quiet and correct way. Colin is avant-garde , he says, forerunner of the new man.

When Georg smiles his face takes on such an expression of wry wisdom, of one who’s been there and come back, one who knows what he knows; it’s as if in his case the whole of self had been transmuted into the Brahminic bird, not a small part of one’s identity observing the whole, but the whole observing a mere shadow, an efficient routine put on for his own amusement, and it occurs to me now that when he sent those flowers, when he made those phone-calls and insisted so much , and later when he explained to her how the mother of his child suffered from an incurable disease , which she then explained to me as if this somehow made what she had done not only perfectly reasonable but generous, towards a man in a difficult predicament, her v raie sympathie pour les autres , yes, it occurs to me that when he did all these things, which he has done, I happen to know, with scores of women: the seduction, the sad story that excuses him from any involvement, and then the gift, in this case The Age of the Courtesan with the neat calligraphy inside to write down an expression he imperfectly remembered from her, or more likely she imperfectly remembered from me, The taste of triumph , it was all a game to Georg, or rather it was pure form in which he had no investment at all. Or there was investment, there is, but only in the form, the motions, the image of himself he projects, and not in whoever happens to be the object of those formal motions on any particular occasion. Which may be why he is so convincing. Certainly little Veronica is warming to him, doubtless thinking how mature he is. And he is. And the galling thing for me, one of the many galling things for me, the many many galling things, is that even now, even after marriage and separation and eighteen months’ shiftless shagging around, or amour amok as Colin always says, even now I can’t behave like this, like Georg, with the tottie I meet, I can’t observe the traditional formulae, I can’t tell my sad story to advantage. And somehow this makes me less, rather than more convincing. You are less convincing than everybody else, I tell myself. For example, everybody thinks now, as I ask Graziano these questions, that I am playing, I am teasing, I am being cruel. But I am not playing. I am not teasing. And I am not being cruel. I really do want to know how someone can achieve an equilibrio interiore . Then everybody imagines, when I can’t become heated about my rights, about my salary, when I can’t undertake a battle for the job that puts bread in my mouth, that I am merely flippant. Or cynical. But I am not flippant. Or cynical. I’m lost.

Your breath smells of whisky, Plaster-cast-tottie says. She looks me in the eyes, pushing her page-boy fringe from her forehead. She stares glassily at me from too close, but with youth and sex written all over her.

It must be because I drank some whisky

Got any for us? she asks. She’s speaking Italian and she has that endearing boldness of people determined to be adults for the first time, more adults than an adult, which is to say adolescent. So I say, Non c’é piú — All gone — in the voice parents use with their tiny children.

Antipatico , she objects.

Oh, if the naughty girl likes whisky we can buy her some this evening, Colin says. Whisky is another favourite word.

And you? I ask Nicoletta, the other possessor of an equilibrio interiore . Tell us. Is Rifondazione Comunista the key?

Or have you got a dog? Colin asks.

Nicoletta isn’t flustered. She’s kneeling on her seat, but turning this way and that, a slim young body, though sadly flat-chested, so that if, it occurs to me with fatal inappropriateness, if I should score tonight with Nicoletta, I shall have to say that I like tiny breasts, love them, as I did once with a girl who became known as Psycho-tottie who was the first I had, or had me, after the disaster, by which I suppose I mean the Napoleonic episode. Yes, I swore to Psycho-tottie that I adored breasts that were no more than a sort of sad fried-egg with nipples, but she knew it wasn’t true, and I called her Psycho-tottie, telling Colin about her, because of a way she had of bursting into tears in the middle of love-making, something that I presumed had to do with a previous lover, but I felt it wiser not to enquire. The last thing you want, I told myself as she cried, is a story like your own.

I’m not interested in politics, Nicoletta says, though I do think it’s important to have ideals.

You betcha, Colin says.

Georg asks, Like?

Nicoletta puts the tip of a thumb between her teeth, smiles. She is such a little girl , but apparently so sensible, so genuine, with an imminent, immanent, motherliness about her.

Well, things like this trip, she says. Helping people in need, people who are being treated badly.

Dead right! Colin applauds but at the same time I feel warm breath against my ear, and Plaster-cast-tottie is whispering: Niki fancies you, did you know that? She fancies you. Though later it would be her, Plottie, who put her hand on my knee under the wooden table of the stube-style restaurant after I quoted Benjamin Constant in response to the sickening false modesty of Barnaby Hilson’s self-candidature to the position of lectors’ representative to the European Parliament: The mania of almost all men , I quoted, later on in the evening, leaning across the scrubbed top of the stube tisch — and it was my first contribution to a long discussion — The mania of almost all men is to appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers is to appear to be men of State . There was a short silence of incomprehension, before I added, since she clearly hadn’t recognized it, Benjamin Constant, De I’esprit de conquéte et de l'usurpation. Vikram Griffiths said in a loud Welsh voice, What if I propose our Jeremy as a candidate? and at the very same moment Plottie slipped her hand on to my knee and squeezed, definitely squeezed, but I was merely mortified to see that there was still no sign of recognition, or even gratitude, on her face.

It occurs to me now that memories act on me the way alcohol does, they excite and depress me, they inflame me, so that after all the talk in the coach about how only a sense of acting for a good cause could lead you to an equilibrio interiore , and after having to hear Georg agree with this and then add, along the same lines, that even when you weren’t acting for a good cause you should never act in contradiction of your beliefs , in a negative cause as it were, since moral contradiction led to mental turmoil, he said (speaking all the while in his measured pacato tones for the benefit of the young Veronica), and after remembering-, as inevitably I would then remember, how she insisted that on being invited to spend that first weekend in Várese she had not gone there in contradiction of all she had promised to me, no, since she had not gone there thinking to make love at all, but only, she said, to be close to someone the mother of whose child was in hospital, and hence the fact that they had made love in the end, she said, was just something natural , something that had arisen out of her vraie sympathie , the last piece, she said (and these were her very words), in that complex mosaic that friendship is , and thus not something she would, or could, ever feel guilty about — after all this, as I was saying, on the coach through the afternoon, this inflammatory cocktail of piety and platitudes spoken and remembered on top of a considerable amount of whisky, how could I be expected to conduct the phone-call I fell into shortly after checking into my room with anything like a clear head?