Tim Parks - Europa

How should I behave towards my daughter, I ask myself? Shall I lie on my right side or my left? And more in general, I ask myself, how should I behave towards anybody when almost anybody would be offended if I honestly discussed with them almost anything I care about? Or on my stomach? Which is the opposite of the illusion she brought, of course. The illusion she brought was that everything could be said. Every tic and quirk. Every masturbatory impulse. Every passing opinion, however, extreme and unacceptable. The inebriation of total intimacy, that was what she brought, on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, where everything was clear, everything was said, everything was acceptable, in a rapture of total communion, until the first piety, the first lie, not more than a fortnight later, when she said that she did not wish to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage , and then the entirely gratuitous revelation, not three months after that, of the simultaneous mosaic of friendship she had been laying down with another man, unmistakably, though never admittedly, my colleague Georg, right down to the cod-piece, the cock-piece, at the centre of that tasteless mosaic, out of v raie sympathie , she said, because he insisted so much , with flowers and phone-calls, and then worse still somehow, worse than all this, the unwillingness to retreat from what she had done in any way, the unwillingness to see it as shallow in any way, to regret having done it in any way, to regret having so gratuitously told me that she had done it, to regret having so gratuitously blown away the foundations of our illusion, my illusion, that intimacy, and worst of all, worse than everything else, my sudden awareness of her almost constant use of such expressions as Í haue made my choices in life , or Je suis allée jusqu’au fond, or Je n’y suis pas allee pour faire l'amour , or There's no point in crying over spilt milk , my sudden awareness, I mean, that she wasn’t wise at all , that I had been a complete, and utter fool ever to imagine her so, that I, a stupid man, had left my wife for another stupid woman , until the moment I shouted whore and hit her. Irremediably.

How can I discuss things with people if discussion inflames me, if discussion makes me violent? Or is violence the only proper response when you are right, for years and years you are right and others are so obstinately wrong? But then why do you imagine, I ask myself, pushing my hands under the pillow now — and if my wife, my daughter, my lover have anything in common it is that they have all asked this same question — why do you imagine that you are right and that everybody else is wrong? I can’t answer. Yet that is exactly what I do imagine. Wouldn’t it be madness to suppose one was wrong merely because others did not agree with you? Where would that lead? You believe what you believe, I told myself. There’s no way round that. Even if you have frequently acted blindly and foolishly. And lying on my back now with my arms on my chest in this narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel that I am beginning rather to like, if for no other reason than its appropriate awfulness, it occurs to me that the only way for someone like me to behave is to wait for dumbshow situations like the hand on the knee from Plaster-cast-tottie, and to go for them.

The hand on my knee! I can still hear talking, laughter, glasses, distantly from the lobby, despite the protests of the proprietor, who was nevertheless ready, after our vain, drizzly search for a suburban night-spot, to sell us what Eurobooze he had (cognac, brandy, pernod, grappa — bottles of it — which people acquired quite wildly in infantile gestures of group bonhomie) before he drew his bar grille down and complained about the noise, as nations selling bombs like to complain about the noise when other nations explode them, as she complained when the love and dreams she nursed me on for so long came back to her in blows and ugly phone-calls. Yes, I can still hear talking from down the passageway through the thin prefabricated walls and the squeal of young girls' giggles and occasionally Vikram’s Welsh voice in Welsh song, or Colin shouting his favourite words, or a sort of fruity nervous guffawing that comes I suspect from the ambiguous Avvocato Malerba. So that most probably, if I wanted to, I tell myself, that hand, Plottie’s hand, could still be made to engage in something more than a caress of the knee — it’s only one o’clock, or thereabouts — I could still capitalize on that promised intimacy, or at least contact, with this strange girl. And the fact that I did nothing to capitalize on that caress under the table, indeed quite the opposite, discouraged, even spurned it, is, I suppose, reflecting on it now, here in this hotel room where I have just realized that I shall never really be able to talk to anybody about anything , both heartening and unnerving — heartening because it suggests that you are not on for absolutely anything, you are not totally a slave to that, to sex, in the way on occasion, very many occasions, you have been; and unnerving because it may well be that you acted as you did out of an incorrigible romanticism. You are an incorrigible romantic, I tell myself. How fascinating that those two words should have wed together in standard collocation. An incorrigible romantic. For sitting on the other side of me at the massive grosse tisch around which, to pre-empt any formally convened meeting of the lectors, Vikram Griffiths raised, over a sort of dumpling stew, since it turns out that Strasbourg is as much German as French, the pressing question of our representation to the official institutions of the European Parliament, thus muting the carefully prepared attack on him by conducting the affair in the presence of the students, who love Vikram and tend to equate him, and particularly his bushy sideburns and his drinking habits and his well advertised and injudicious private life, not to mention his embodiment of two ethnic minorities, with an idea of revolution dear to their innocent hearts — yes, sitting on my right side at that moment when the hand to my left reached across and firmly took my knee under the table was the ever more engaging Nicoletta, she of the flat breasts and equilibrio interiore , and of course it was she, Nicoletta, who later, in the fruitless search for a bar back in les banlieues when the coach driver had gone to bed and the group had lapsed into that sort of wilfully daredevil sentimentality that dictates that an evening cannot be allowed to end but must be made mythical in some bar or other under a tidal wave of alcohol, it was she who took my arm and invited me, for the air was a mist of dark drizzle, to share her umbrella, a gesture I immediately and excitedly compared, even equated, with that previous gesture — the hand on the knee — from young Plottie in the restaurant, to the extent that the thought, There must be something about me today , crossed my mind, Spoilt for choice I am , I told myself, Sneaky Niki indeed! — the kind of presumptions you have to laugh at later, you have to mock and poke fun at, for it wasn’t long after I had been drawn under the umbrella and then into a conversation which seemed to have to do with difficulties the dear girl was experiencing at home with her widowed mother, it wasn’t long before I began to realize that far from being a gesture of sexual complicity, this, of Nicoletta’s, this drawing me under her umbrella, was no more, no less, than a gesture of friendship! And decidedly not the kind of friendship whose mosaic would require the placing of my cock-piece in its centre. I had turned down Plottie’s brazen advance for friendship!