William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

It had not gone well. No. He had to face up to that, acknowledge it, squarely. As lovemaking went it was indubitably B minus. B double-minus, possibly. And it was his fault. But could he put it down to the fact that he had been in bed with an Italian girl and not a Portuguese one? Or perhaps it had something to do with the half dozen vodkas and water he had consumed as he kept pace with Margarita?…

But the mood had changed, subtly, when he had learned the truth, a kind of keening sadness, a thin draft of melancholy seemed to enter the boisterous pub, depressing him. An unmistakable sense of being let down by Margarita’s nationality. She was meant to be Portuguese, that was the whole point, anything else was wrong.

He turned over in his bed and stared at the faint silhouette of Margarita’s profile as she slept beside him. Did it matter? he urged himself. This was the first non-British girl he had kissed, let alone made love to, so why had he been unable to shake off that sense of distraction? It was a sullenness of spirit that had possessed him, as if he were a spoiled child who had been promised and then denied a present. It was hardly Margarita’s fault, after all, but an irrational side of him still blamed her for not being Portuguese, for unconsciously raising his hopes by not warning him from their first encounter that she didn’t fit his national bill. Somehow she had to share the responsibility.

He turned away and dozed, and half dreamed of Liceu Lobo in a white suit. On a mountaintop with Leonor or Branca or Caterina or Joana. A balcony with two cane chairs. Mangos big as rugby balls. Liceu, blond hair flying, putting down his guitar, offering his hand, saying, “My deal is my smile.” Joana’s slim mulatto body. The sound of distant water falling.

He half sat, blinking stupidly.

“Joana?”

The naked figure in his doorway froze.

“Joana?”

The figure moved.

“Vaffanculo,” Margarita said, weariness making her voice harsh. She switched on the light and began to get dressed, still talking, but more to herself than to him. Wesley’s meager Portuguese was no help here, but he could tell her words were unkind. He hadn’t fully awakened from his dream. How could he explain that to her? She was dressed in a moment and did not shut the door as she left.

After she had gone, Wesley pulled on his dressing gown and walked slowly down the stairs. He sat for a while in his unlit sitting room, swigging directly from the rum bottle, resting it on his knee between mouthfuls, coughing and breathing deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Eventually he rose to his feet and slid Elis Regina into his CD player. The strange and almost insupportable plangency of the woman’s voice filled the shadowy space around him. Nem uma lágrima . “Not one tear,” Wesley said to himself. Out loud. His voice sounded peculiar to him, a stranger’s. Poor tragic Elis, Elis Regina, who died in 1982, aged thirty-seven, tragically, of an unwise cocktail of drugs and alcohol. “Drink ’n’ drugs,” the CD’s sleeve notes had said. Tragic. A tragic loss to Brazilian music. Fucking tragic. He would call Pauline in the morning, that’s what he would do. In the meantime he had his chorinho to console him. He would make it up with Pauline, she deserved a treat, some sort of treat, definitely, a weekend somewhere. Definitely. Not one tear, Elis Regina sang for him. He would be all right. There was always Brazil. Not one tear.

NONE OF THESE girls is French, right?”

“No. But they’re European.”

“Not the same thing, man. French is crucial.”

“Of course …” I don’t know what he is talking about but it seems politic to agree.

“You know any French girls?”

“Of course,” I say again. This is almost a lie, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.

“But well? I mean well enough to ask out?”

“I don’t see why not.” Now this time we are well into mendacity, but I am unconcerned. I feel good, adult, quite confident today. This lie can germinate and grow for a while.

I am standing in a pale parallelogram of March sunshine, leaning against a wall, talking to my American friend, Preston. The wall belongs to the Centre Universitaire Mediterranéen, a large stuccoed villa on the front at Nice. In front of us is a small cobbled courtyard bounded by a balustrade. Beyond is the Promenade des Anglais, its four lanes busy with Nice’s traffic. Over the burnished roofs of the cars I can see the Mediterranean. The Baie des Anges looks gray and grim in this season: old, tired water — ashy, cindery.

“We got to do something …” Preston says, a hint of petulant desperation in his voice. I like the “we.” Preston scratches his short hard hair noisily. “What with the new apartment and all.”

“You moved out of the hotel?”

“Yeah. Want to come by tonight?” He shifts his big frame as if troubled by a fugitive itch, and pats his pockets — breast, hip, thigh — looking for his cigarettes. “We got a bar on the roof.”

I am intrigued, but I explain that the invitation has to be turned down as it is a Monday, and every Monday night I have a dinner appointment with a French family — friends of friends of my mother’s.

Preston shrugs, then finds and sets fire to a cigarette. He smokes an American brand called “Merit.” When he came to France he brought a hundred packs with him. He has never smoked anything else since he was fourteen, he insists.

We watch our fellow students saunter into the building. They are nearly all strangers to me, these bright boys and girls, as I have been in Nice only a few weeks, and so far, Preston is the only friend I have made. Slightly envious of their easy conviviality, I watch the others chatter and mingle — Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Tunisians, Nigerians … We are all foreigners, trying hard to learn French and win our diplomas … Except for Preston, who makes no effort at all and seems quite content to remain monoglot.

A young guy with long hair rides his motorbike into the courtyard. He is wearing no shirt. He is English and, apart from me, the only other English person in the place. He revs his motorbike unnecessarily a few times before parking it and switching it off. He takes a T-shirt out of a saddlebag and nonchalantly pulls it on. I think how I too would like to own a motorbike and do exactly what he has done … His name is Tim. One day, I imagine, we might be friends. We’ll see.

Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality. He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.

“Ne bouge pas. C’est l’habitué!”

That’s what he calls me— l’habitué. L’habitué de lundi , to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail. He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find this perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful. “Salut, l’habitué,” “Bien mangé, l’habitué?” “Encore du vin, l’habitué?” and so on. But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.

Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with neat spry figures. Both of them are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice. A significant portion of my affection for them is owing to the fact that they have three daughters — Delphine, Stéphane and Annique — all older than me and all possessed of — to my fogged and blurry eyes — an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty. Stéphane and Annique still live with their parents; Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home. These are the French girls that I claimed to know, though “know” is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them. I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them. I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.