Tim Parks - Europa

There was a mill of students around the reception desk when we climbed off the coach with Vikram Griffiths reading out names and handing out keys from an envelope while the sour proprietor, furious about the dog, tried to get people to be quiet enough for him to speak on the phone. Never seen a more tottie-rich environment, Colin laughed, and he had Monica’s bag over his shoulder and another girl’s too, because a gentleman would never allow a young lady to carry her luggage, he said, and he insisted on delivering the bags right to their rooms: I shall not let a lady carry a bag in my presence, he announced, while both girls were fighting, pretending to fight, to grab their things off him and he was shoving his way through the others with one pink and one neon-green backpack held high above his head, when Vikram called out my name, then called it again when apparently I hadn’t answered the first time, and he told me I was to share room 119 with the Avvocato Malerba. We were the only two who hadn’t settled on a partner.

I took the key and walked down the linoleum corridor to this shamelessly anonymous room where I now lie disorientated, unable to sleep, on a narrow bed, as yellow headlights turn Picasso’s blue period to green and perhaps in the next room Mondrian’s Composition in Red , etc. to orange, etc., or a Van Gogh sunflower to cellophane, and the first thing I did, on getting in here, and this must have been perhaps seven o’clock in the evening, was to go to the phone and call my answering machine in Milan, which told me, in Italian, that I was out and that if I left a message I would phone myself back as soon as possible. Pressing the code on the beeper to retrieve any messages, I thought of the tiny tape whirring backwards and forwards on the small shelf in the narrow passageway of my minuscule apartment, stale and dark with the shutters down and all my nice books and pens and intimate odds and ends, recently replaced, in safe and shadowy order; and I thought how only twenty-four hours before I had been safe in that room, which was my room, and only mine, perhaps the first room that has been truly and exclusively mine in all my life. I had been safe and functional and had imagined myself cured, or almost, or at least convalescent, whereas now I knew that the contrary was true and that away from that neat and narrow retreat into order and limitation I was quite lost, completely without definition or identity, and that what lay ahead of me, until such time as I could return to my small apartment, was nothing but ever more bizarre strategies for avoiding the worst. A female voice announced, Hello, it’s me, and asked whether perhaps I was really at home but just not answering the phone, since it seemed too early in the morning, the voice said, for me to be up and out. No? Hadn’t I said I was never up before nine? With all I did in the evenings, ha ha? The voice left a message saying it would call back later, which, after a couple of beeps, it did, now leaving another message saying it only wanted to say how much it had enjoyed the evening before, thus confirming that this was Opera-tottie, whose peculiar urinating habit I have still to tell Colin about. There was a pause, followed by a nervous, calculated, adult woman’s laugh, generated in Monza, stored in my sitting room in Milan, heard, without interest, in Strasbourg, and she rang off. Then another voice announced name and time of day and said she had finished her thesis summary and would like to fix an appointment to bring it over to my flat for me to see, as I had suggested. Would Friday at five do? and this was a mature student who I was planning to lure into my tottie trap (Colinism).Then after another silence of beeps and scratches my daughter said: Daddy? Daddy, have you already gone? She was speaking English to please me, and since she never speaks English to anyone but myself, and then only rarely, her voice, in English, has a babyish, uncertain tone to it, an endearing childishness, so different from her adult, rather brash Italian, and she over-accents the ends of all the words: I was just calling to see iff you likedd yourr presentt, she said.

From along the corridor I could hear the girls refusing to let Colin bring the bags into their room and he protesting that he had never been anything but a gentleman. I phoned my daughter at once and got my wife’s voice from the kitchen phone over the throb of the dishwasher. The skylight was leaking again, she said. I asked to speak to Suzanne. It was pouring, my wife said. It had been pouring all day and the skylight was leaking. Then Suzanne came on the extension, where I could now pick up the gibberish of the television. Suzi, I said. My wife rang off, taking the dishwasher with her, and I said I was sorry I’d have to miss the birthday party. I had tried to get out of this business, but in the end I felt a certain obligation when everybody’s job was at stake, not just my own.

My daughter asked me had I read Black Spells Magic , and I said about half, and she asked what did I think, and still inflamed from all that had been said and remembered on the coach, and what’s more irritated with myself now for having lied about my motives for coming on- this trip, and not only for having lied about them, but for having heard in my own mouth precisely the kind of pieties I have no time for in others (a certain obligation!), I began to say, injudiciously, just as the Avvocato Malerba walked into the room with a far larger suitcase than anyone could possibly need for two nights, that although I was enjoying the book overall I found bits of it hard to take.

Don’t you think all her magic stuff is great though! my daughter said.

I said I had only got to the bit where their love-making in the lift emanates a power that puts all the stockbrokers’ computers on the blink.

Isn’t that brilliant! my daughter said. It’s a fantastic metaphor.

Of what exactly? I asked obtusely, and what I remember now, lying in this lurid, insomniac dark, is that although I was perfectly aware, at this point of the conversation, of the impending danger, aware I mean that I was perhaps about to argue with my daughter, or at least to disappoint her, almost the only person in the world I would rather not argue with or disappoint, I nevertheless, inflamed as I was, already knew that I would not be able to resist saying what I feel has to be said about books like this, perhaps because it sometimes seems that all that has happened to me, all that I have allowed to happen to me, has intimately to do with such books, or at least the mentality they are steeped in, which is of course exactly the mentality of the person who can pretend, on accepting an invitation to spend a weekend with a man who has bombarded her with flowers and phone-calls, that she is not going to his house to make love but only in order to add one final piece to the complex mosaic that friendship is . To wit Georg’s no doubt considerable cock. And twisting the receiver cord round my finger, I told myself, All her love for you was mere whorishness .

My daughter was saying, Obviously it’s a metaphor of how human emotions and sensations — I mean when two people make love like that — are stronger than electronics and money.

The Avvocato Malerba had now laid out three sober and, to my untrained eye, identical suits on the bed and was going through a pantomime of gestures to ask which wardrobe he could use when I objected to my daughter, who is eighteen tomorrow and hence at just that age where you begin not to know whether you should still be making allowances, that this was precisely the kind of comforting cliché it was so easy to sell to people, was it not? Didn’t she think, I went on to ask, trying to indicate to the Avvocato Malerba that he could have either of the wardrobes, or both, since I had no clothes worthy of hanging, unless with myself in them, didn’t she think that in the end this book was not unlike a narrative version of a Benetton advertising campaign, Hands Linked Around the World and such-like stultiloquence, United Colours of Good Conscience , etc., etc., while all the while the company, as here the author, sorry authoress, was sensibly pocketing the cash that came with a higher moral profile. Entirely inappropriately, I was furious. The Lira’s fallen fifty points against the Deutschmark today, I said. I want to see what love-making could reverse that.