Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

And I started to tell him about my wonderful life. My extraordinary travels all over the world. I drank deep of the champagne, and showed off for him. I wanted him to know what a prize he was getting, if I should decide to give myself. I reeled off names and recommendations.

At first he went through the motions of listening, handsome head angled attentively, inserting the required amounts of curiosity to keep my gazeteer unfolding. Indeed I thought he was very impressed. I thought he was virtually stunned into silence; I reined myself in, a little; I wanted to dazzle, but not frighten, the boy. I paused, and sucked in another three snails drenched in heavenly garlic butter. A little of it ran down my chin; I wiped it, flirtatiously, on the napkin.

‘And you,’ I said. ‘Do you travel at all?’

‘I’m not a tourist,’ he said. That was it. He stared down at his plate, refusing me. His charcoal-thick lashes hid his eyes. I asked him if I’d said something wrong.

‘I think you’ve lived your whole life wrong, but that’s only my opinion, Madame, and I really don’t want to upset you… Let’s change the subject. Have some dessert. Have you seen any theatre in Paris?’

Naturally I couldn’t leave it at that. I was completely rattled. What could he mean? I begged him to explain, I pleaded with him. I saw him enjoying his power, then.

We went back to my hotel to talk further. I was tipsy enough not to want to talk, by the time we got to the high-ceilinged room with the vast pale bed and the view over Paris; I wanted to shut out the rest of the world, I wanted to crawl into bed with him, I wanted to be given the treat I craved and then to wake up and find him gone.

But he wasn’t so easily disposed of. Jean-Claude was an anthropologist; Jean-Claude was a philosopher. He was a Marxist too, and in the twenty-first century how often does one meet one of those? He was a pedagogue, once he got started; he had the absolutism of youth; and — as I found out at the end of the day, when I started to get a swingeing headache and to long for sleep, solitary sleep, without his voice boring on in my ear — his attitude to women was an awkward mixture of shyness, lust and cruelty.

Yet for all that, what he told me was true. I knew as he spoke that it was all true. I must have known it before, in some part of me, and that arrogant boy just put it into words as he tossed his black cow-lick away from his black eyes. How handsome he was, this prince of darkness, how sure he was of his own virtue. How he enjoyed despising me! How he wanted to fuck me, though.

He said I had never travelled at all. He said Christopher and I had been nowhere, done nothing. We had fed an industry, that was all. We had failed to see the simplest facts. Did I know that tourism was the biggest industry in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century? He said Christopher and I were archetypal tourists. We had tried to buy the world, and missed it.

He asked me if I’d met the local people; eaten their food; stayed in their houses; been in their houses, even. (I had, when we were trying to buy the child, but I didn’t tell him about that.) He asked me if I realised that all the hotels we’d stayed in were the same. I denied that, furiously, and started to describe them in detail, the most spectacularly eccentric ones, built in old castles or old monasteries, built on piles over picturesque lakes… I could feel myself getting red in the face, but Jean-Claude, or Jean-Pierre, just laughed at me. ‘Window-dressing. It’s not the real world. You floated about in a fantasy space invented to please you foreigners… You spent most of your time with other English people, or rich Americans, or Japanese…’ He was getting actively angry now, warming to his theme as he drank the brandy a blank-faced waiter had brought to the room. ‘… You probably spent most of your time with your husband. Your nice fat bourgeois English husband. Drinking and fucking and stuffing yourselves, and then going out to buy souvenirs which were fabricated with you in mind. Tourism is a gigantic con-trick —’

‘— We weren’t tourists, we travelled on our own, we never went on package tours, we never asked for fish and chips — we looked at things. That’s not a crime.’

‘But everything’s getting worn away by all you people looking at things. Not understanding, just looking, touching, because you want to feel you possess them, you’ve been there, done that, stolen their soul… Except you know nothing about their soul. You only know what you read in your guide-book, some glib bit of nonsense written for tourists. Then you stroll back to your luxury hotel and start to feel hungry for another destination, another airport, another hotel… And the people who it all belongs to — the real people, the ordinary people — the people who live and work in these places — probably poor people living simple lives — you only meet them as servants. People you never notice or look at, like the waiter who brought up these drinks. Don’t deny it, I saw how you hardly said thank you —’

‘— But he ignored me, for goodness’ sake, you Parisians are always so snooty —’

‘We don’t like English people much. Stupid, materialistic, soulless —’ (this was getting out of hand, I should have to get rid of him, but I saw he was getting excited, now, staring at my breasts as he insulted me) ‘ — in any case, that’s not the point. The point is, your travel was just a hobby. The world was reduced to an accessory. You looked at whatever flattered you. You were blind to everything that mattered. Poverty, disease would have upset you. You would have been bored by people’s real lives —’

‘That’s not true! That really isn’t true! It was one of the things I missed. Something real — whatever that might be. Not all the time, but occasionally. I did sometimes feel our lives were unreal, there’s a lot of truth in what you say — I just didn’t know where to begin. My husband was always watching films, or swimming. At least I walked. I seemed to walk endlessly. I never knew quite where to go. I did want to see things, I was interested, I wanted the names of birds and trees — but there weren’t any books about them in English, there weren’t any books about them in Spanish, there weren’t any books, period — I suppose I could have tried to get the locals to explain, but I didn’t know how to get through to them — they were often hostile, or suspicious —’ I was flapping about like a nervous hen, justifying things that required no justifying, telling him things he didn’t need to know. Why was I letting him do this to me? He was the merest stripling, spoiled and aggressive — and he, unlike me, had been rich from birth. Why should I let him rattle me?

Now he was taking out his penis. It was engorged, a shiny, rosy toadstool; he held it towards me with his fingers, indicating that I should masturbate him. His dark eyes were hard, excited. Make the bitch feel small, then fuck her. But I wasn’t going to play that game. I have never been a masochist. I realised that I no longer felt drunk, whereas he was lit up with Armagnac. I had a headache, but I was sober.

‘OK, you’ve made your point. Which must be why I’m bothering to justify myself. There’s no point in quarrelling, is there? If a life has been wasted, it’s mine, not yours… look, I’m older than you. I know things you don’t. Recently I’ve suffered a great deal. And I shan’t make love while you’re being aggressive. I’m too old for that. It’s a mug’s game, little one.’

Then because he looked so crestfallen — because he had shrivelled to the size of a wren, a fledgeling abandoned on his blue cotton trousers, because his red mouth was on the verge of tears — I took pity on him, and ordered coffee and omelettes to be sent to the room. I took his hand, and sat him down in the window where we could look over the rooftops, the eccentric and magical rooftops of Paris, their silver-grey slowly darkening, the sky becoming an indigo blue, the first stars coming, so old and so young — and I said ‘Have you travelled? Do you know about travelling? Tell me how I should have travelled.’