Tim Parks - Europa

You don’t approve because it’s lesbian sex, my daughter said, switching to her adult Italian. And I had offended her. Your daughter, I thought, your delightful daughter, Suzanne, has given you a book for your forty-fifth birthday and you are telling her it is terrible. Your daughter is trying to establish a new relationship with you after the period of hostility that inevitably followed your walking out on her mother and herself and then again the shocking stories she quite probably heard about you from her . She has given you a birthday present, something she did not do the previous year. She has called you in your flat, something she has done no more than two or three times in this whole period of separation, the norm being that it is you who call her, you who visit her, engaging in conversations of an almost palpable limpness and hostility. Your daughter, I thought, has given you a present and called you. She has left a message on your answering machine. In English. And what do you do? Rather than sharing, or at least tolerating, her enthusiasm for what is in the end no worse than another kitsch expression of present-day orthodoxies, you simply confirm what an offensive and irretrievably acrimonious person you are by judging the book according to standards perhaps exclusively your own and anyway entirely dependent on your own peculiar vision of the nature of contemporary decadence.

Why don’t we talk about it when I get back? I said. Hotel calls are expensive, I said, and I wondered, Did she have lesbian tendencies, or didn’t she? The Avvocato Malerba was selecting a shirt and tie.

All men are afraid of lesbians, my daughter laughed. Come on, Dad, loosen up, go with the flow. And she laughed again, rather mockingly. At which, instead of repeating that we should talk about this when we were together and could relax, I foolishly, on the line from Strasbourg, began to object that, quite the contrary, men were not afraid of lesbians at all, they were fascinated by lesbians. Lesbianism was the only aspect of the book that even remotely interested me , I told her. And this was the truth. But all the same, I insisted, as far as the doubtless imaginative scene in the lift was concerned, I just felt that such a prurient enlisting of fashionably transgressive multiracial pop eroticism to blow away the paper tiger of white male domination symbolized by the computer circuits of an evil stock-market could hardly represent the apex either of literary achievement or of intelligent political comment. Could it?

Was I right in imagining my daughter had begun some kind of relationship with her? How often had she been babysitting? — And how was it my wife could look on with such indifference while her daughter baby-sat for her husband’s ex-mistress? Was she deliberately encouraging the kind of relationship she thought would make me jealous?

I don’t understand you, Suzi said, and she asked, why did I have to talk in this pompous way? She didn’t understand at all. So that now, rigid on the bedspread while the Avvocato Malerba drew the curtains before removing his jacket and shirt, I recognized this as another of those increasingly frequent conversations where one feels that one must reconstruct the entire history of Western thought just to knock the undesirable parts down again, say absolutely everything in order to say anything at all. Which at the price I was no doubt paying to call suburban Milan from suburban Strasbourg, at hotel rates, would be imprudent to say the least. Such is the power of money over human relationships. And once again it occurred to me that one of the sources of immense uneasiness in my marriage had always been the growing preoccupation that both my wife and in a different way my daughter were, if not stupid, then hardly very intelligent No, they are not particularly intelligent, I told myself. They don’t discriminate. They don’t think . And the agony here is that one feels presumptuous and. judgemental in reaching such conclusions, in deciding that one’s wife and daughter are not particularly intelligent, yet on the other hand one cannot help but be aware of the evidence that comes constantly before one’s eyes. So that perhaps one of the reasons I fell so completely for her when I did was the illusion she managed to generate of being deeply wise and extremely intelligent . The illusion. Let’s talk when I get back, I said to my daughter.

She laughed. Switching back to English, she said, You always back down from an argument, don’t you, Daddy?

Happy birthday as of tomorrow, I managed, and finding, on getting the phone down, the Avvocato Malerba buttoning a white shirt over a grey hollow of chest hair, I asked him — I would pay the phone-bill of course, I said — if he knew what Nietzsche had once written down in his notebook as the most cogent argument against his own cherished notion of The Eternal Return, the eternal repetition of all things?

Determined to show off his English, which it occurs to me now might be a plausible reason for his having agreed to come on this trip — seventy-two hours of free English lessons — the Avvocato Malerba said he found Nietzsche unbearably presumptuous and judgemental . He actually used those two words, presumptuous and judgemental. The world would have been a better place, said the Avvocato Malerba, without people like Nietzsche, who had been criminally responsible , he said, for the rise of Nazism and Fascism. He preferred Spinoza himself. So there seemed no point in telling the Avvocato Malerba, or indeed any person who could prefer Spinoza to Nietzsche, that the most cogent argument against the notion of the eternal return, for Nietzsche, was the existence of his mother and sister.

But going over all this now on my narrow bed after the extraordinary farce of the stube supper and the brief conversation with her vis-a-vis the exact composition and competence of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee, and then the absurd group walk in the wet night, arm-in-arm with the long-legged, sadly flat-chested Nicoletta in search of a late-night bar — going over this and struggling to get a grip on the day’s events, as I appear to be under some kind of obligation, vain as it is compelling, to get a grip on everything, which is to say on myself, I am struck by the question, How can I preserve my relationship with my daughter? How can I behave towards someone who would be deeply offended and hostile if I told her what I thought about almost any issue worthy of discussion, to whom, if I wish to keep the peace, I will always have to say things like, I enjoyed the book overall, but …, or, I really tried to get out of this trip, but … For years, I tell myself, tossing and turning in my bed — because I have never quite known what to do with my arms when I am trying to go to sleep, and particularly when I am trying and failing to go to sleep — for years you have sought the affections of your daughter, sought the heart of your daughter, as before for years you sought the heart and affections of your wife, only to be thwarted by your daughter’s taking offence at observations so reasonable as to be self-evident, as before it had been your wife who took offence at such observations, all perfectly reasonable and even, so far as you could see, self-evident. Where do people put their arms when they sleep? For years, I reflect, one curries the favour of a person, one feels the need for a relationship with that person, one feels that one will be a lesser person oneself if one doesn’t have that relationship, only to discover, in a trice as it were, that the chief obstacle to that relationship is the other person’s lack of intelligence and discrimination , only to see, from one day to the next it seems, and perhaps after years of frustration, the blindingly obvious fact that you have been so desperately contriving to ignore: this person is not particularly intelligent .