Tim Parks - Europa

Unable to masturbate over Plottie’s glassy disappointment, I find myself sitting up in bed again. I’m sitting up shivering in my bed. First you set off, I tell myself, on the trip to the bar because of her , then you turn back from the trip to the bar because of Plottie, and finally you set off on the trip to the bar once again because of Nicoletta. You are no more than a ball in a bagatelle, shot for one brief second over the moon. Nicoletta opened her umbrella and invited you under and slipped her arm in yours and immediately you were over the moon. Immediately a voice sang out: You’re on here, Jerry! And it sang, There must be something about you today! First Plaster-cast-tottie and now this. Sneaky Niki. Spoilt for choice I am! Thus your own mental rhetoric. In the space of one split second, I tell myself, you went from the most total misery (over her extraordinary miscalculation of your age) to the most gushing exhilaration and optimism. You thought, Love is a movable feast, Jerry, go for it. Thus your criminal naivety. You thought, why should I cry over split milk , and you thought, there is no reason at all why I shouldn’t fall in love all over again with this young and beautiful if somewhat flat-chested girl. Thus your asinine presumption. At which juncture, sitting here rigid and shivering on my narrow hotel bed, it has to be said that there can be no hope for a person as absurd as I am, no hope for someone capable of such extraordinary vanity. Though quite what one might mean by hope, I’m not sure; I suppose what she meant when she spoke of an analyst being able to save me; or perhaps what Plottie meant when she spoke of some improbable equilibrio interiore .

I was under Nicoletta’s umbrella. We were striking off on a walkway beside a dual carriageway. Vikram Griffiths was trying to teach his two girls The Green Green Grass , explaining in between whiles that before coming to Italy he had never been south of Eastbourne. Nor north of Clwyd if it came to that. Then came a long gaggle of students and lectors under umbrellas and rain-hoods beside a muddy verge with no sign anywhere of any sort of building that might house a bar, though a huge billboard above chasing cars announced La ville veste les femmes núes , and at the rear there was myself and Nicoletta, with me wondering, as she spoke of difficulties at home since her father’s cancer, whether this was one of those occasions where one would ask for a kiss or simply try to snatch one. Her mother, Nicoletta said, speaking to someone she had only met that morning, a man any woman should have seen had designs on her, had become terribly morose and withdrawn after her father’s death and hardly talked, but at the same time she, the mother, tended to get upset if she, Nicoletta, or her twin brother or older sister, went out of an evening, as if they were somehow deserting her. Yes, they’ll all come to greet me , came Vikram’s voice. Then a peal of laughter. The green green grass . And while I began to appreciate, not without a prick of resentment, that the kind of complicity Nicoletta had imagined, on inviting me under her yellow umbrella, was one oí friendship , and far from the variety that might require for completion the cordial placement of my cock-piece in its mosaic centre, I nevertheless, resentful prick though I am, became extremely helpful and began to talk persuasively to this tall-necked young girl with her over-sweet perfume and delightful red hair-tie on the blackest, raven, almost blue hair (which I would be so willing to bury my face in and adore) — began to talk about modern theories of grieving and about her mothers inevitable jealousy that her children had their lives entirely before them (a feeling I have all too often experienced with my own daughter) whereas her life (the mother’s), at least as she was probably seeing it at present, was behind her, had ended, and badly at that, or at least unluckily, with her husband’s death. Vikram Griffiths started into Men of Harlech . And the only thing to do, I suggested with the sort of wisdom that comes from knowing absolutely nothing about a situation, was to be patient: her mother would no doubt come out of this with time, life would force her to.

We were talking under the girl’s yellow umbrella while I resentfuly tried to come to terms with the idea that her invitation to walk along under its dripping rim had had nothing to do with any plans to seduce me, let alone shag me rotten before the evening was out. Perhaps your mother will even take another husband, I announced thoughtfully. I had as much chance of sleeping with Nicoletta, I thought, as of taking the Madonna from behind. It was as easy and as difficult as that. But Nicoletta said that that was impossible, her mother could never love anybody else. She could never love anybody after her father. With whom she had been very much in love. To the exclusion of all others, she added, unprompted. I asked her her mother’s age, and she said forty-five. Then, responding rather well I think to the-nth recurrence of this number, almost as if it were an old ailment I had finally learnt to put up with, I laughed out loud, even good-heartedly. I laughed and said, Perhaps I would marry Nicoletta’s mother myself, we were the same age, after all , and instinctively the two of us, man and girl, squeezed each other’s arms a little harder and exchanged entirely friendly smiles in the street-lit gloom of the umbreEa as Vikram Griffiths now stopped the group at a crossroads surveying blocks of flats to the right and, across a soaking urban highway, low industrial buildings to the left, and admitted he had no idea where he was. My mother would like you very much, Nicoletta laughed, I think, and I laughed — call me Niki, she said, everybody else does — and Vikram Griffiths said we would have to turn back. That miserable bastard at the hotel with his miserable directions! Dafydd! he shouted, then slowly sang for the girls who were learning, With the foe towards you leaping, You your valiant stance are keeping. Dafydd! And lying here now on this narrowest of divan beds, not even waiting for sleep, not even trying to masturbate, not even wondering about the Avvocato Malerba’s delayed return, I am struck by the amusing fact, this very early morning of the fourth of the fifth in my forty-fifth year, that not only did a young woman offer me her friendship this evening, rather than her body, her affection , rather than her sex, but what’s more that I amazingly walked along beside this young woman for almost an hour in the sifting rain, and condescended to her, discussing fashionable grief-theories and other psychoanalytical simplifications of everyday calamities, some of which I vaguely remember allusions to in the atrocious Black Spells Magic , not to mention the execrable Dead Poets Society , and even began to pretend to myself, like the infantile and incorrigible romantic I am, that perhaps this gesture of friendship, of affection (complete with jesting vis-a-vis a possible relationship with her mother!), was somehow better or more appropriate than the gesture of straightforward sexual complicity offered by the Plottie girl (young enough to be my daughter), as if, apart from the easy good conscience that comes from talking sympathetically to another human being about their insoluble troubles, there could possibly be any use to me in the mere affection of a no more than moderately intelligent twenty-one-year-old.

Why haven’t I given the girl her tottie-tag as yet? What is wrong with me? Or am I simply hoping that chaste friendship first will eventually lead to more serious sex later? Will lead to Rheims?

Quite suddenly I’m furious with myself. Furious. How could I possibly have imagined that the caress under the table, the blunt message of the hand on the knee, the leaning against me in the drizzle by the floodlit anodyne cathedral, was not infinitely preferable to earnest talk under umbrellas about the nature of grief? Grief. I was offered sex with no frills, for Christ’s sake, and turned it down for a discussion of everyday misery, playing kind Uncle Jerry, wise Uncle Jerry, disinterested Uncle Jerry, who might at most amount to a sensible last resort for Mummy. It would have been less absurd, I tell myself, to have joined in with the choral expression of Welsh nationalism led by a man whose features and skin-colour suggested the subcontinent. An Englishman, I tell myself, in France singing a Welsh nationalist song, led by a man whose mother came not from Bangor but Bangalore, would have been less absurd! And if I cannot masturbate over Plottie, I decide, and I can’t, because I can’t imagine her, then I shall masturbate over someone else. My mind wrenches viciously to Opera-tottie. I rehearse our first meeting at an evening course I gave for high-school teachers: Echoes of the Greek Classics in Modern English Literature . A tall, solid woman, handsome legs boldly crossed in the front row. I recall the first smiles of obvious complicity. I remember the difficulty of approaching her at after-course drinkypoos in a busy bar in Via Fatebenesorelle with one particular pain-in-the-butt who just would not go away. Somehow I appreciate that despite a kind of sadness that hangs about her — no, it’s because of that sadness — she goes. She’s porca , I tell myself, drinking too much after my mediocre lesson. She wears stockings, not tights, I tell myself. And all the while, as I become outrageously unpleasant with this pain-in-the-butt who just will not leave us alone, who will not understand that I want to make a pass at this woman, here in the bar, now, I’m thinking that the amused awareness of her smile across the table definitely promises porcheria , promises filth. As likewise the blonde-brown hair that keeps falling across her face. A lined face, carefully made up, with exactly that bold poignancy of recently lost youth, exactly that shrewdness that recognizes a red carpet when it’s rolled out before her. Then her postcard, then my phone-call, then the dinner, the ritual swapping of our sad stories, somewhat tedious, but at least safe in the knowledge that it was definitely on — one can listen for a long time to someone’s failure to become anything more than an amateur opera singer when the brushing of knees under the table reassures you that some pretty high notes will be struck later on. Then at last the undressing, the slightly thick, softening body squeezed tight in tight underwear, the particularly high waistline of fancy pants, and then my tongue under the flop of the breasts. But no sooner have I started to fist myself seriously over this stuff than I get a very strong image of myself masturbating over her breasts, myself coming over her breasts, and she taking the sperm on her finger and rubbing it on her lips and drawing me down to kiss me. And the reason I get this image is perhaps because this is exactly what we did, only last night to be precise, only about twenty-eight hours ago. Incredibly. Though I haven’t thought of it so much as once since then. And the reason I masturbated over her breasts, which is also perhaps the reason why it hasn’t so much as crossed my mind since, is that I set up the whole evening, clinically you might say, with the specific intention of doing just that, the specific intention, that is, of repeating what had been done before on one quite mythical occasion with her , in her husband’s second house in the mountains, if I remember rightly, when for the first time in my life I masturbated in front of a woman. So that immediately her image is now superimposed over Opera-tottie’s, though Opera-tottie’s expression sticks, a haunting mixture, on a rather pudgy face, of lust and compassion, as if aware that she is acting out a part for me, doing me a service, perhaps, who knows, in order to save me, such missions being something that so often seems to get mixed up with female gratification. This superimposition upsets me. I become conscious of the words I am muttering to myself as I masturbate, the same words that so excited Opera-tottie: I want to smother you in sperm, I want to come on your breasts, in your face, in your mouth, in your hair, I want to drown you in sperm and then fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, etc. And I become conscious, but I was always conscious, it was never out of my mind, that these are words I first spoke with her , since before her I had never experienced the liberation of saying such words to any woman. The first time I came on her breasts, in her face, the first time she flicked her tongue in my anus, the first time I flicked my tongue in hers, the first time she finger-fucked my arse while blowing me, and all the words we spoke as we did it all, the wild wild words we spoke, in Italian, in French, in English, and the book we found that claimed that the whole elaborate structure of Greek rhetoric and philosophical dialogue had been built around the art of seduction. How excited that made us. The Athenian obsession, this rather unorthodox book said, that the beloved should concede her or his graces willingly , rather than being forced, had been the driving force behind all dialectic . What important discoveries we imagined we were making! Behind all persuasion lay the libido. Lay our sex talk. Our shag chat. How superior we were, what initiates, and how we despised a crass world that had forgotten how to love, as the Athenians despised the mental sloth of the Spartans, whose women were merely obliged to submit. And for the first time, here in this Strasbourg hotel room, in the heart of Europe, it comes to me, perhaps prompted by that ridiculous conversation about Nicoletta’s grieving mother, that masturbation will always be an expression of bereavement for me. Every sexual fantasy I ever had was fulfilled with her. And so, in a sense, stolen from me. The day seized and lost. There is as much chance, I tell myself, of my concentrating on Opera-tottie or Plaster-cast-tottie as of seeing the moon beside the sun. Over the moon indeed! I cannot masturbate, that is the truth. I cannot masturbate, in the same way I cannot read, in the same way I cannot think, in the same way I cannot talk. Because all of these things are intimately connected with her . Yet, I have to masturbate, I have to read, I have to think and above all I have to talk, inside my head and out. I have to be with her .