William Boyd - The New Confessions

Speakers changed but the tone of voice and diminished vocabulary remained the same. There was vehement applause at the end of every speech. And then Doon got up on the rostrum. I listened to what she had to say. She attacked the institution of Christmas and, thinking of the travesty my own home had become, found myself loudly applauding all the predictable ideological grievances. She wound up with a plea for donations to party funds. She would be passing among us, she said, taking a collection.

I waited for Doon to reach me. Four people were going through the audience with wooden boxes as the meeting’s business was ponderously concluded by the thin man who had begun it all. I kept changing my position and thus made two donations before Doon and I finally met.

I felt a poignant helplessness suffuse my body as I stuffed notes into her box. To my credit, and my joy, she colored. Admiring noises came from others at my party-spirited largess.

“Thank you, comrade,” she said. Then in a lower voice, “What’re you doing here?”

“I followed you. After you called. I had to see you.”

“Are you a member?”

“Yes.”

“How long? I thought you were a cynic.”

“Oh, not so long.… People are allowed to change their minds, you know.”

“Wait for me at the end.”

I was wrong about it finishing. That meeting ran on for three hours. By its conclusion I was overpoweringly hungry. My stomach was audible at three yards, my mouth awash with saliva as I thought helplessly of Frau Mittenklott’s Christmas rum grog, her rabbit paprika and her Schokoladenstrudel .

It was night when Doon and I finally left. We walked back towards her flat, she talking overanimatedly of the cell, the cause, the struggle, the comrades. I let her natter on — she had slipped her hand through mine and I was close enough to smell her lavender perfume. Eventually I could stand it no longer and steered her into a small cellar café.

I ordered two coffees with kirsch and whipped cream and ate two large but rather solid slices of yesterday’s date torte. Then I put my hand on hers.

“Doon,” I asked, “why did you phone?”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“But you did.”

“God.… I don’t know. I was feeling blue. Fucking Christmas. I hate it.… I left Alex. Two weeks ago. I was sitting waiting for the meeting and I thought I’d — Shit. It was silly of me.”

My mouth was dry. “I still mean it.”

She lit a cigarette. She seemed uneasy now.

“It’s sweet of you to say that, Jamie.” She was trying to be composed. “But you don’t have to. Not on my account. Can I have another coffee?”

“But I do . I’ve known it since I saw you that first day in the Metropol.”

She looked down, blew a strong jet of smoke away to her left.

“But you’re a married man. You’ve got two kids—”

“Four. Now.”

“ Jesus! Four?”

“Sonia had twins three weeks ago.”

“My God. Well, there you are.… It’s useless. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. I should never have called.”

She continued listing objections. I felt short of oxygen, like Duric Lodokian. I was breathing through mouth and nose but my lungs still felt starved of air. I had to divert her from the wife-and-children topic. She paused to take off her hat.

“See, I kept it blond. Memories of Julie. ”

The idea seemed to fly up in my face, like a game bird started from heather.

“I was going to get in touch anyway,” I said slowly. “I want you to be in my new film. With Karl-Heinz again.”

“Oh yes. I read about it. But what part is there for me?”

“Someone called Madame de Warens.”

“I don’t know.…”

“You’d be wonderful.”

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea. What’s the film called again?”

“ The Confessions. ”

VILLA LUXE, June 22, 1972

Emilia has been acting strangely, lately. It’s all to do with that hole in the shutter, I’m sure. One day she was taciturn. Then yesterday she came wearing lipstick and some unattractive wooden earrings. I sense too that she doesn’t like Ulrike. It’s curious how women can become so proprietorial. I told her Ulrike had permission to use the beach. She was clearly irritated by this. I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on. Could it be — however absurd it sounds — that she’s jealous? My God.…

It’s time I told you something of Jean Jacques Rousseau, for those of you unfamiliar with him. First I will give you the public image, the official version, one we can swiftly forget. Unfortunately my library here is impoverished. I can only quote from A Students’ Guide to European Philosophy by one Dr. Ida Milby-Low (M.A., D. Phil., Oxford), published in 1934. I apologize, but this is the mere husk of the man we are interested in. Bear with me.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His father was a watchmender [a watchmaker, in fact] and his mother died immediately after his birth. He received no regular education, but such as he had in the formative years of his life was augmented by a reading of French novels kept in his father’s library. In Rousseau’s infancy his father was obliged to quit Geneva as a consequence of a quarrel and the young Jean Jacques was placed first in the care of a country parson and subsequently an uncle. After a turbulent adolescence he was apprenticed to an engraver, who attempted vainly to discipline him. Deeply unhappy, Rousseau made his escape from this employer and fled from Switzerland to Annecy in Savoy, where he shortly made the acquaintance of one Mme. de Warens, a woman of facile morals [this is the voice of Miss Milby-Low — spinster don, I predict, with a moustache, and whose sole vices are a rare cigarette and a secret tipple from that sherry bottle in her desk drawer].

Mme. de Warens directed Rousseau to Turin, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism and was employed as a domestic servant by two prosperous aristocratic families. He might have risen to become the steward of one of these households had not his perennial instability caused him to run away again. He fled his responsibilities once more, back to Annecy and Mme. de Warens, who became, in Rousseau’s own parlance, his “ Maman. ”

There now followed a succession of temporary employments and wanderings. Rousseau took up music as his main career and worked intermittently as a chorister. He even composed an opera during this uncertain period of fleeting attachments to adventurers, which took him to Lausanne and Paris. Each time he returned inevitably to Mme. de Warens whom he had lived with first at Chambéry and then at Les Charmettes, a charming country house nearby. Rousseau continued his education here, in a period of some tranquillity, through a self-imposed course of various indiscriminate reading. Emotionally, however, his life was less calm. Mme. de Warens had introduced into her household a man named Witzenreid. Rousseau found himself unable to share his “ Maman ” with another and left Les Charmettes to take up work as an itinerant tutor. He had written little by this stage of his life and was quite unconscious of his genius.

In 1742 he decided to try and make his fortune in Paris on the strength of a new system of musical notation that he had devised. This was never popular and Rousseau remained ignored. In 1744 he took up with one Thérèse le Vasseur, an ignorant girl of low class [the voice of the senior common room again] who became the mother of his children.

Rousseau earned his living by copying music, secretarial work and the very limited success of his operatic comedies. In 1749, Diderot (q.v.) invited him to contribute to the French Encyclopedia (q.v.), wherein Rousseau wrote the articles on music and political economy. Thus he was drawn into the society of French intellectuals such as d’Alembert and F. M. Grimm, a German of gross impiety.