Tim Parks - Europa

The outrage of obstructed energy. Impulse without fulfilment. Can any Petitions Committee ever right this wrong? Very deliberately on my narrow bed in this nondescript hotel room where at one-thirty or — forty the apparently staid Avvocato Malerba still hasn’t returned to his bed, I start to masturbate over Plaster-cast-tottie. I start to masturbate, after my normal fashion. But to do this I have to remember what she looks like. What does she look like? And all I can remember is the unconcealed disappointment in her bright glassy eyes when, rather than remaining behind in the hotel lounge on our return from the stube supper, I elected to follow Vikram Griffiths and others out into the night in search of a bar, leaving her and her hobbling plaster-cast behind. I elected to go on this alcohol hunt, I reflect now, because she — had elected not to go on it, just as I elected to come on this coach trip because she had elected to come on it. Whether I choose to be where she is, or where she isn’t, it is always she who governs the choice.

Vikram Griffiths exchanged some words with the sour proprietor, who apparently gave directions as to where we might find a bar open. But Vikram spoke no French and the proprietor did not seem eager that we find this bar. Perhaps he imagined that a fruitless walk in the suburban rain would bring us back respectably sobered. My mind buzzing with the thought that she did not even remember my age , which is somehow forgivable between a father and his children, or even between man and wife, but not between the lovers we were, I pushed through the glass door with other students to be pulled aside then by Colin, who confided that he could hardly shag in his room with Saint Barnaby there, could he? The experimental Irish novelist had already twice phoned his wife about a baby with a sore throat. Because our affair was about being a certain age, I told myself. So he would have to go to Tittie-tottie’s room, Colin said, where gentlemanly courtesy might just oblige him to shag Tittie-tottie’s tottie-mate as well, he laughed. Our affair had to do with age, I was suddenly thinking, as Colin marvelled at the alliteration of Tittie-tottie's tottie-mate. Though she was more the kind of party who was likely to go down well at a charity ball for the blind, Colin laughed. Go down, damn you, he laughed. He gestured with an imaginary cue. How could she miscalculate, I thought, knowing so well, as she must, the exact difference in ages? Charity ball! Colin laughed. Colin brays rather than laughs. Get it? He sneers rather than brays. Tottie-mate would be an excellent title for a centre spread, he said. But there is no evil in Colin, I thought now, reflecting that he too was exactly ten years younger than me. You never feel Colin could harm anybody. Never broach the breach unsheathed, he laughs. And I thought, looked at in a certain way, age was the only truly important factor in our relationship. We would never have had an affair like that at a different age, at different ages . How could she have thought I was forty-three?

People milled under an awning outside the hotel where wind was sweeping the thin drizzle against carelessly parked cars. Beyond a low hedge lay the road that now sends intermittent light flitting about my room. Vikram Griffiths came out singing Whisky in the Jar again, then explaining that he never put his dog on a leash. Never. He laughed, scratching a sideburn, and apparently he had quite forgotten about the question of our representation at the European Parliament, the precariousness of our jobs, his acrimonious court cases back in Italy. With a studentessa under each arm of his loose open mac he shouted, Follow me! and made a dash through a gaggle of girls into the phosphor-lit rain. And, still obsessed by the notion that we had loved each other only and exclusively because we were a certain age, I found myself admiring Vikram Griffiths for this, this drunken cavalier carefreeness, and I- envied him. I envied Vikram Griffiths for the way he turns his energy outward to whatever is available , whatever woman, whatever amusement, and appears to be satisfied with it, willy-nilly. While I implode. You eat your heart out, I told myself, watching Vikram with a girl under each arm heading towards the glare of oncoming traffic, singing about Captain Farrel and his treacherous Jenny. You eat your heart out and vomit it up, and eat it out all over again. Why have you suddenly become obsessed with this question of age? And I experienced then, so soon after sitting in the coach and hearing her talking about the principles of the French Revolution, as if she had never said these things to me before, indeed as if nothing had ever passed between us, as if the earthquake that completely altered my mental landscape had not even been registered on any of the scales properly established for measuring these things, I experienced such a sense of desperation and self-loathing and absurdity that I turned back, on impulse, towards the hotel with the intention, hardly creditable, of venting my rage on Plottie, of simply grabbing the Plottie girl and dragging her, plaster-cast and all, to some secluded corner of the hotel to be thoroughly shagged, as in the past, I suppose, I have vented my rage on Psycho-.tottie and Photo-tottie and Dimple-tottie and others more memorable for their soubriquets than their sentiments. One says one’s rage was vented, but the truth is it never was, it was always intact after orgasm, if not magnified, with the added curiosity that these women never felt that any rage had been vented upon them, never imagined anything but affection on my part, even passion, they mistook rage for passion, and so were happy as a rule and spoke eagerly of a next time, as witness Opera-tottie and her generous phone message. One hadn’t even been cruel! And this makes matters worse: I mean when every woman is the wrong woman but reminds you of the right woman, when venting is not venting, but reminds one of venting, or of how things were before the notion of venting had even occurred, the time when it was impossible to imagine not having an outlet for the person one had become through being with her . And lying in my narrow bed, recalling that moment in the wind-swept carpark when I envied Vikram Griffiths for the ease with which he turns his energy outward to whatever’s available, and, as a gut reaction, turned back to vent my forty-five-year-old rage on Plottie, it occurs to me now, here in my hotel room, casting about for an image to masturbate over, that what Picasso’s lovers are really seeking in this flat reproduction of their intermittently lit clasping, this miserable simulacrum of a great modern masterpiece that I have been staring at now for upwards of an hour, is themselves again. They are seeking themselves as they were when they made each other themselves . Yes, this is something I understand now, as one understands so many things no sooner than it’s too late. And I had just turned round to go back to the lighted porch, to go back to the Plottie girl — and through wet sheet glass I could see the Avvocato Malerba deep in conversation with Georg, no doubt discussing the finer points of the legal case I shall tomorrow, incredibly, be presenting to’ the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament — when an umbrella burst open in front of me and Nicoletta said, Don’t go back. Share my umbrella. And immediately I was elated.

Here then is another bizarre thing: the fact that you were elated when Nicoletta, entirely absent from your thoughts for at least the previous half-hour, now opened her yellow umbrella and invited you under it, immediately slipping her arm into yours, as she had done earlier on in the day climbing the concrete stairs of the Chambersee Service Station. You were elated, over the moon no less, the mental volatility of the perfect lunatic.