Tim Parks - Europa

The German stube restaurant was perhaps the fourth restaurant our group of forty and more had tried after the coach driver abandoned us at the edge of a pedestrian area in heavy rain of the same weather pattern, no doubt, that was leaking through the skylight of what was once my home in the suburbs of northern Milan. Overwhelming a dozen quiet, Monday-evening clients, silently mulling over their chunks of boiled pork beneath the glazed stares of nobly stuffed stags and owls on wood-panelled walls, we were allowed to pull two great stube tischen together to accommodate us all, Dafydd the dog curling up on a seat to nibble at his hind parts, while Georg and Doris and Heike the Dike negotiated the cheapest group menu with a solid proprietress, many of the students being short of cash, and particularly so after it now transpired that in the brief space of our coach journey from Milan to Strasbourg the Lira had fallen not by fifty but by seventy points against the Deutschmark, and similarly against the French franc, and was still falling, indeed plummeting , on the so-called international markets , to wit New York and Tokyo, where it seemed, or so the Spanish lector Luis claimed to have heard on the hotel television, that people simply did not want to have anything to do with the Lira any more. And while Georg was negotiating with the proprietress in German, a language I once knew but have now forgotten, wilfully I sometimes think, Vikram Griffiths, infinitely more astute than I imagined, stood up as soon as everybody else had sat down and suggested that in the face of the present economic crisis the lectors could perhaps pay more for their meal in order to allow the students, who had so generously decided to lend their support to our cause , to pay less; we could fork out to ease the burden on them. That is, Vikram Griffiths suggested a redistribution of wealth , something which, lying as it does at the heart of the socialist ethos, and more in general at the core of what the Italians with technical piety and pious technicality like to refer to as consociativismo , the others in the group could hardly disagree with, though some wanted to, and in particular Colin, I felt, who is the tightest person with money I have ever known. And perhaps Doris Rohr. The lectors would pay half of the total between them, Vikram Griffiths suggested, and the students, of whom there were more than twice as many, would also pay half between them, meaning we would pay more than twice as much pro capita as them, Vikram Griffiths said, and he ordered ten jugs of the house wine and further suggested that before the food arrived we might as well resolve at once the pressing question of our representation at tomorrow’s important encounters, since he personally had no intention of wasting the latter part of the evening at a meeting. He was going out on the razzle. Devaluation or no devaluation. If they wanted to unfrock him, he laughed, let them do it now.

The silence that followed this supremely political manoeuvre confirmed the Indian Welshman’s cleverness, with the students clearly wondering what the trouble was, and what on earth ‘unfrock’ could mean, and those lectors who were against Griffiths finding themselves embarrassed to have to say so in front of students to whom he had just generously awarded the cheapest of meals. Then how could they speak against his drinking at precisely the moment they were so eagerly filling their glasses themselves? So it is, I thought, that one thinks all kinds of unpleasant things about a person, one denigrates that person in the urgent chatter of one’s mind, or in complicity with a third person or persons, one denigrates and wholly condemns a person and draws a certain satisfaction from having done so so comprehensively, but then hesitates to say what one thinks in public, and particularly in front of that person themselves, finding quite suddenly that one is, in some obscure way, ashamed of opinions one nevertheless still feels it perfectly legitimate to hold . One hesitates, for example, to say to one’s daughter, I think the problem here is one of your ignorance, or to one’s wife, I think the problem here is your terror in the face of change, in the face of life . Instead one stays silent and polite. Such is the nature of consociativismo , the sad glue that keeps couples and countries and coach parties together. Until the day you walk out or hit someone, or drop a bomb.

But for Dimitra, perhaps, that moment had come. Or was close. Insisting on her Greek Italian, she started to say that, no offence meant, but there were those who felt that his,Vikram Griffiths’, how could she put it, wildness — she tried to smile at the students she knew — might not be entirely appropriate for the kind of interlocutori we were likely to find at a major international organization and in particular at that legislative body that ultimately held the key to our long^running case against the Italian state. There was a noisy silence until the Avvocato Malerba now saw fit, as an outsider, he said, with a particular perspective to offer, to intervene, and having begun by saying that he himself thought it might be unwise of us to discuss these matters over dinner, rather than in more formal circumstances, he proceeded to analyse the legal weapons that the Community, as he insisted on calling it, as if there were but one community in the whole world, laid at our disposal. Like children admitted to the adults’ table for the first time, the students sat paying serious attention to the Avvocato Malerba of lean neck, dusty features and ponderous manners, as he took us through the niceties of that clause in the Treaty of Rome which forbids discrimination against citizens of other member states and posed the question how best such discrimination could be made to emerge for the kind of people we would find ourselves presenting our case to. The students sat listening, Plottie on my left and Nicoletta to my right, and then dozens of sensible and silly and pretty and plain girls under the dim stube light, faces concentrated, even devoted, as if any of what the Avvocato Malerba was saying could remotely matter to them, while Colin on the other hand, half-way down on the left-hand side, Colin to whom this matter matters enormously, since Colin has neither the inclination nor perhaps the capacity to engage in any serious work and counts greatly on his,gravy train and his adequate supply of fresh tottie, is rolling up small balls of baguette and flicking them insolently at the various girls he is interested in, who smile and look pained. And she of course has pulled out a pen and is taking notes. Upon which it occurs to me that she and the Avvocato Malerba are the only two people who have dressed up for this dinner. The only two people who have made that kind of effort. For beside his sober suit and tie, which I now realize has on its blue background that circle of yellow stars which symbolizes our European solidarity, twelve identical yellow nebulae encircling a void, she is wearing the tight black chiffon dress with black beading down into a pronounced cleavage which she liked to wear the two or three times we went to the theatre together, or the opera once, and beneath which I know she invariably has her black suspender gear with red trimmings that so excites her when she sees herself, ice-cold Martini in hand, in the full-length mirror of a hotel wardrobe, just as it excites her, she always said, to have her thick dark hair pulled up tight, as it is now pulled up very tight, with a great wooden pin through it that keeps the tension on her scalp all day, and as her slightly undersized bra, she said, kept her slightly oversized breasts forever in a state of slight tension, at once uncomfortable and exciting . And precisely as the Avvocato Malerba, pressed by Dimitra, explains that his point is that any presentation must approach the problem from two angles: on the one hand a genuine feeling of injustice , this for those Euro MPs who are not experts in the field but will respond emotively, and on the other a meticulously technical presentation of the legal nitty-gritty, for those on the Petitions Committee who would be only too ready to find the kind of flaw in our case that would save them from having to consider it seriously — precisely at this moment, when the Avvocato Malerba is trying to establish the strategy our representative must adopt and hence, by inference, the qualities he, or she, must have, I am seized, seeing that low-cut dress I know so well, by such a vision of love-making, such an immediate and overwhelming impression of skin and hair and perfume, such a meticulously technical sense of the adherence of underclothes to slightly heated flesh, the give of a bra undipped, flattened nipples plumping, and then the glassy pornographic reflection of all this in the mirror of the fake, or no, perhaps genuine, antique wardrobe on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, so inflamed by the smell of skin and sex, that I have to grab my glass and down, in one gulp, a very considerable quantity of very poor quality house wine, a gesture that has Nicoletta turning to me in concern, while Dimitra predictably interrupts the Avvocato Malerba to say that all things considered she is not convinced that Vikram Griffiths is really the best person for either of these modes of presentation. Plottie bangs me on the back when the dregs go down the wrong way, then bangs again, harder, upon which it comes to me, coughing fiercely over remembered rapture, a comic, ludicrous figure with cheap wine in his windpipe, a girl thumping on his back, it comes to me that the presumptuous, judgemental Nietzsche went mad at forty-five. Didn’t he? Wasn’t it forty-five? Or at least in his forty-fifth year, I can’t remember. I must check. Assuming there is still time.