Europa (23 page)

Then just as she arrives at
uno
, I announce:
Fear is the first time you can't come the second time. Horror is the second time you can't come the first time
. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the joke. So called.

Peppy stops. For Christ's sake! Colin says. Spoil-sport! You miserable bastard, Jerry! Thus Vikram. Peppy waits. What did you say? she asks. Because the girls don't understand. Haven't understood. WHAT! There's a chorus. They're too young to understand.
WHAT!!!
And the same goes, it occurs to me, for my encounter with Sneaky-tottie earlier on. Didn't understand. I drain my whisky as Peppy-tottie hesitates, holding on to the one last button of her blouse. And what I am thinking, as everybody shouts and groans and hisses at me, is that this joke says nothing other than that horror is gasping after lost intensity, that horror is a terrible awareness that the best is past. Too soon, Picasso's lovers are gasping after lost intensity. That much is obvious. The whole Western world, I tell myself, as the room is in uproar, is obsessed with remaining young — thus my immediate thoughts, as Peppy-tottie sits down, groaning, the joke having now been laboriously explained, by Heike the Dike! The whole Western world has attached its identity to falling in love over and over again, marrying over and over again, coming over and over again. Men! Heike shakes her head. As if we were immortal! We are driving ourselves mad - thus my reflections as Colin hurls an empty pack of fags at me, as Vikram Griffiths roars, Let's see the tits anyway! - with our love-making and ogling and orgasms, first, second and third. We are driving ourselves
insane
. Any girl who wants a good result in her exams, roars Vikram Griffiths, shows her tits now! The Avvocato Malerba is going crazy, I reflect, pouring more whisky. Vikram Griffiths is going crazy. I am going 
completely
crazy. This coach trip, how could one conclude otherwise, this Shag Wagon, is entirely emblematic of a phenomenon general all over the Western world, I tell myself. We are behaving 
entirely inappropriately
. Peppy-tottie hesitates. At least dogs are spared this, I reflect. I'll do it if someone else does, she says. Perhaps this is the difference between animals and ourselves. And while everybody is yelling, Yes!, and Plottie gets up on her plaster-cast pulling off her sweater, gyrating, awkwardly, on her plaster-cast - and her breasts are big - it occurs to me, draining for the second time what is a whole glass of whisky, that the bother of coming a second time is unimaginable now. Who would I ever make that effort with now? To come a second time! Who could I care that much about now, once I had vented or failed to vent my rage? Once I had defined my trap again. Dogs just fuck once, I reflect, then retire replete to the hearthrug. Plottie has got the old hands up her back. She's smiling at me: She's swaying her hips over the plaster-cast. I would never be able to come a second time with her, I tell myself. But I will cadge a second fag, though. At forty-five surely, thus the thoughts crossing my mind as the noise level rises, as Plottie's breasts spring loose in a tight T-shirt, one should have reached the point where one is free from anxieties about coming once or twice. Or three times. Or four. At least at forty-five one might achieve a dog's serenity over such matters. She extracts her bra from a sleeve. The dark hair of unshaved armpits. That's always a wonderful gesture. Unless it's precisely at forty-five, even at forty-three … Then I remember that
Georg is forty-three
… I'm on my feet. Of course. Georg. Georg is coming a second time. Now. At forty-three. He said he was forty-three. Not the end of the world.
She
was thinking of Georg. Just as Peppy releases the last button, I'm on my feet. In the roaring, the whoops, the shouts of More! of Nice! of
Belle!
of 
Brava!
I'm heading for the corridor. I'm already listening at the first door. Georg is forty-three. Why wasn't that obvious? Can't hear anything for the shouts of, Everybody, come on, everybody take your tops off. But how could she mix me up with Georg? Colin goading Tittie-tottie to join in. He wasn't at my level, she said, as if that was supposed to be reassuring. Can't hear anything at the second door. Nothing. Nor at the third. Do I want to hear anything? Then the French proprietor rounding the bottom of the stairs. Furious. Slippers slapping. I turn to him. In his dressing-gown.
Que faites-vous? Silence! On veut dormir!
His shout is a whisper, pushing past me along the corridor to crush the rowdiness. Then a door closing. Turn back. To find, suddenly, here's Georg striding along the corridor with his black executive's weekend bag. Georg, from nowhere, in the corridor. Hurrying, hurriedly dressed, unkempt. Georg! Crisis at home. Thus his explanation. Urgent phone-call. None of his normal
pacato
. Got to rush. Thus his muttered words. Drowned in a dog's bark. Serious. Crisis. The proprietor and Vikram shouting. Georg shouting. The dog. None of his normal cool. Got to call a taxi. Got to get to the station, to the airport. To Milan. The mother of his child! Which leaves me at two-thirty a.m. the fourth of the fifth stranded along the corridor of a cheap hotel in the heart of Europe, inappropriately dressed, inappropriately occupied. Drunk. Sick. This is faithfulness, I tell myself. Rushing off at two-thirty in the morning, interrupting second orgasm because the mother of your child has phoned, or her mother,
this is faithfulness
. Thus my immediate thoughts. Nothing to do with sex, I tell myself. Could I have stayed with my wife? Shagged around and stayed with my wife? Georg is more faithful than I am! How I envy his caring enough to rush off. But which room did he come out of? Wait to see if
she
emerges? Thus my reaction. My unforgivable reaction. Which room did he come out of? If only I hadn't been distracted by the French proprietor, now hissing and raving at Griffiths. The dog baring his teeth. Wait? The dog growling. The others dispersing to bed. Defending his master. The others escaping the French proprietor, and Vikram Griffiths starting
Men of Harlech
, mockingly.
How you bravely live for glory
. Then fiddling for my key, the sound of a door opening further back. Almost manage not to turn. But, out slips a figure.
As they brave the arrow's shower
. Woman's figure. Girl's pretty figure. Pretty white night-dress, pretty brown hair.
Though your men are sick and
tying, Vikram sings. Pouty lips. Veronica. The one he was angling for in the coach.
And your loved ones sad and crying
. But did he really come out of that door? Thus my uncertainty, my envy.
Freedom in the flag is flying
. Giggling at her door. Gazing back along the corridor to the lobby. Final show-down with the proprietor, the dispersal. Calling to Plottie. The girl is. Giggles. Vikram Griffiths still humming,
All the nation with you weeping
. Pulling her in. Plottie allowing the others to shag? Freedom will not die! The Indian Welshman slams his door. And in my own room the lights flit less often across the great modern masterpiece, across the lovers stranded in their nostalgia for intensity. That's why it's on the beach, of course, with the sea now behind them. I see that now. Such a calm, flat sea. A dead sea. What good fun, says the Avvocato Malerba coming in, closing the door behind him. What a great evening. Terrible news about Georg, says the Avvocato Malerba, shaking his head. Is he the spy? He collects information to discredit us, to tell them Vikram Griffiths offered good exam results for any girl who'd show her tits. Aren't young women such fun, announces the Avvocato Malerba, finally loosening his pompous tie. Blue background, little rings of yellow stars. Europe. Tomorrow. The Petitions Committee. In the bathroom I shake out six tablets of bromazepam and fill the plastic toothglass with tap water.

And I sometimes wonder if 1 ever came
back, from that voyage. For if I see myself putting
to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the
reakers, and I do not
hear the frail keel grating on the shore.

Samuel Beckett,
Molloy

Plato did not believe in the realm of pure forms. That much is clear from any reading of
The
 
Republic
. Nobody saw more plainly than he that the world was a place of change and betrayal, and if he chose to deny that place any ultimate reality and spoke insistently of an ideal, more real realm beyond, it was perhaps his way of expressing his outrage, expressing a mental space, a place of yearning that is in all of us. For things to be still. Like my wife, like the foreign lectors at the University of Milan, like the visionary architects of our United Europe, he longed for the world to declare its final form and be still, or at least for all motion to be neutralized in repetition, in ritual, as the rigidly ordered world of his philosopher-kings must reflect the eternal harmony of the cosmos. He longed for each man to assume his definitive station, forever, each role to be exactly defined and assigned, forever, authority imposed, balance achieved, justice done. Thus Europe. Thus our final home. Our permanent job. The end of conflict. The end of poverty. The end of history The shape of an apple, defined. The ingredients of an ice-cream, defined. Pure form. Ultimate solidarity in a world where perfected technique will remove all suffering. All wrongs righted. By the effective agency of the Petitions Committee …

The entrance to the European Parliament in Strasbourg presents a row of flags commanding a large area of green below and offering a tangent to the curve of a concrete structure behind, which, despite its imposing scale and the monumentality conferred by wide expanses of paving and long flights of shallow steps, might well have drawn its inspiration from a study of the Chambersee Service Station. There is a flaunting of technical know-how in such a building, of mechanical
savoir faire
. A fan of radiating external buttresses supports the whole. Tall panels of glass reveal curves and floors within, ramps and stairs, and, more in general, that combination of polished wood, stone and stuccoed mural which expresses at once power and luxury and ideals. For the themes are those of fraternity, of peace among all men, and the building is circular, of course, so that no nation should feel they have been pushed into a corner, so that the parliamentary hall itself should not display the harsh geometry of the rectangle with its symbolic freight of opposites, its hints, as the Italians like to say, of
muro contro muro
.

The students milled on the grey esplanade taking photographs of each other and of the flags twitched by a damp breeze. It had stopped raining but clouds were constantly forming and breaking in a liquid sky and the light was shattered everywhere by steaming puddles and gleams and sudden sunshine stabbing in the shadows of concrete and glass. The Parliament is isolated from the rest of the town, as well it might be, set apart on an artificial mound in its own abstract space, and the flags, I noticed, through a haze of bromazepam, as the students photographed each other, joking and laughing and standing on one leg, embracing and pulling faces, were studiously arranged in the random abstraction of alphabetical order, this to avoid, one presumes, any offence of hierarchy. And staring at their bright colours -the Belgian flag, the Danish flag, the German flag (Deutschland), the Irish flag (Eire), the Greek flag (Ellas), the Spanish flag (España), the French flag, the Dutch flag (Holland), the Italian flag, the Luxembourg (ish?) flag, the Portuguese flag, the Union Jack (UK) - it occurred to me how notoriously difficult it is to arrange objects in space without generating meaning. Without causing offence. Since all meaning, so-called, causes offence to somebody, I reflected. As my wife always objected to my objecting to her keeping all the wedding photos so prominently displayed along the piano-top. As I threw a tantrum when I saw
she
had inserted
The Age of the Courtesan
alongside all the books we had read together: Chateaubriand and Sophocles and the
Satyricon
of Petronius. The arrangement of the flags outside this Parliament building must be
entirely meaningless
, I told myself. Otherwise it would give offence. Or rather, any meaning here expressed must lie in the absence of meaning, in the absence of any hierarchy in the relation of these flags the one to the other. Here arrangement must point away from arrangement, I thought through a fog of bromazepam, must point to that ideal of perfect indistinction and equality which can only come, perhaps, in the absence of any real relationship, only exist for people, countries, thousands of miles apart. Or with death, I told myself. The indistinction of death. The cemetery is the only level playing-field, I told myself. Where Chateaubriand and Robespierre and Eulogius Schneider are equal at last. And I recall now, sitting as I am at present in this not unattractive space which forms the
Meditation Room
, so-called, of the European Parliament, that it was looking at the flags, or rather the arrangement of the flags, with the Avvocato Malerba getting himself photographed, by Plottie, in double-breasted suit and European tie, then returning the compliment (close enough to get all the signatures on her plaster-cast braced against a flagpole), and with a general atmosphere amongst students and lectors alike of self-congratulation, and also of awe, as of pilgrims newly arrived at a shrine, it was milling about the esplanade in the damp breeze as we waited for entry passes to be made up so that we could penetrate this shrine, this sanctum, as supplicants, and present our petition to those appointed to set right whatever wrongs had been done to us, that I observed that there was no Welsh flag, for of course Wiles does not constitute a nation-state, and I set off to find Vikram Griffiths and to mention this fact to him, in jest. That there was no Welsh flag. That he wasn't properly represented, didn't even turn up, as the Scottish and Irish did, as decorative elements, trophies really, within the British flag, the Union Jack, which anyway Europeans notoriously refer to as English. How could he sing, Freedom in the flag is flying, when there wasn't one? Not to mention the absence of Empire. I looked for Vikram, thinking this was the kind of provocative if banal reflection that might elicit some wit and sparks from a man who claimed to have been the first, perhaps the only, non-white to have been a card-carrying member of Plaid Cymru. Might cheer him up. In the way that old enmities can be heartening, galvanizing, as I myself in my bromazepam haze had felt galvanized earlier this morning seeing the numbers 4/5 on the cheap flap-down calendar in the hotel reception, galvanized (so far as the bromazepam would allow) and somewhat ridiculous for having ever given any importance to something that could hardly be more significant than the arrangement of the flags outside the European Parliament, or indeed any mere arrangement of numbers and letters. But I couldn't find Vikram Griffiths.