So, he asked me, did I still think the Majorcans were lucky to meet a lewd and discourteous woman like Jorge Sand?
I told him, yes, they were very lucky to meet her and I was lucky to meet him too because I was just about to be dragged away from my table by the fire. He sat down and explained that even though she came from the sophisticated cuisine of France where everyone cooked with butter, it is not right to mock peasants for cooking in cheap oil, as she did. His accent became more Chinese than Spanish when he said that. It was as if his voice had suddenly dropped from one altitude to another, like turbulence on an aeroplane. I invited him to share a bottle of wine at my table for three.
At first we talked about soup. He told me he had more or less forgotten how to make Chinese soup. Many years ago he had left Shanghai aged nineteen on a ship heading for Paris where he worked in a fish shop. His bedsit in the 13th arrondissement always smelt of the crab and shrimp he cooked most days. This perplexed his landlord who said the room usually smelt of urine — as if that was what was required in Paris. Europe was mysterious and crazed. He had to learn a new language and earn his rent, but it was the start of another way of living and he was excited every day. Now he sold calzone and bratwurst to tourists and he was richer, but he wondered what else there was to look forward to? I think he was asking me a question but I did not want to answer it. He took a small sip of wine and placed his glass neatly, almost surgically on the table. And then he lifted up his hand, and with his two fingers outstretched, briskly tapped my arm.
‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’
It was not exactly a straightforward question because a few years back I’d glimpsed him reading one of my books behind the sweating cheeses laid out for tourists on the counter of his shop. He knew I was a writer, so I wondered what it was he actually wanted to know. I sensed he was asking me something else. I think I had been asking myself something else too because I was still no closer to figuring out why I had been crying on escalators. So when he said, ‘You’re a writer aren’t you,’ what came to mind again was the poster of the Skeletal System in my bathroom. I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System — for a start it had proved quite tricky to be alone at night in an empty restaurant and be allowed to sit at a table. If I had been George Sand, I would have thrown my cigar butt on the floor, sat myself down at a table laid for six and loudly ordered a suckling pig and a flagon of finest red wine. But that was not the sort of drama I wanted. The night before, when I had walked in to the forest at midnight, that was what I really wanted to do. I was lost because I had missed the turning to the hotel, but I think I wanted to get lost to see what happened next.
I still hadn’t answered the Chinese shopkeeper’s question, ‘You’re a writer aren’t you?’ That spring, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it was impossible to say yes, or hmmm, or even to nod. I suppose I was embarrassed at what I was thinking. Anyway, it would have been such a long answer; something like this: ‘When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.’
I didn’t know how to join these thoughts up and there was still a part of me that did not want to spend another second of my life thinking (again) about all of this stuff. So I left these thoughts hanging like a wave waiting to crash and I still had not answered the Chinese shopkeeper’s question.
He tapped my arm again. And then he poured more wine in to my glass. His eyes were clear and kind. He was inviting me to speak and I could sense that he was angling for the long story, rather than a yes or no or even a hmm or a shrug. I thought I had nothing to lose by telling him about crying on escalators.
He said, look you know I can speak Spanish and I can speak French too. But my English is not so good. Can you speak Chinese?
No.
Can you speak French or Spanish?
No.
So why do you English people speak no languages?
That’s true, I said, but do you know I am not completely English either? He was surprised to hear that and the waitress with her fierce and roaring eyes who was eavesdropping nearby looked surprised too. Of course his next question was to ask me where I was born? I started to speak to the Chinese shopkeeper in English about where I was born, but I’m not sure I went on to say everything you’re going to read now.
Two. Historical Impulse
I have gradually come to understand what every great philosophy until now has been; the confession of its author and a kind of involuntary unconscious memoir.
1 JOHANNESBURG, 1964
It’s snowing in apartheid South Africa. It’s snowing on a zebra and it’s snowing on a snake. It’s snowing on my father’s spectacles and for a moment I can’t see his eyes. I am five years old and have only seen snow in picture books. My father takes my hand and we walk down the steps of the red verandah and into the garden to take a closer look at our peach tree. It is covered in ice crystals. We are going to build a snowman even though we don’t own gloves or warm scarves, but never mind, says Dad, let’s get going, it doesn’t snow every day in Africa.
First we make the body, scooping handfuls of miraculous Johannesburg snow and patting it into a fat dome. Last of all we make the snowman’s head, tracing a wide smile with a stick that had fallen from the peach tree. What shall we do for eyes? I run into the house and come back with two ginger biscuits. We poke out the holes and press the round gingers into the snow head. When it gets dark we make our way back inside our rented bungalow in the suburb of Norwood, up the wax-polished steps that leads to the red doep that leads to a door that opens into the kitchen where a cotton sack of oranges leans against the peeling paint of the pantry wall.
Outside, the snowman stood under the African stars. Tomorrow we would make him even taller and fatter and find him a scarf.
That night while I lay in bed, the special branch of the security police knock on the door of our bungalow. They want my father and tell him to pack a suitcase. Two of the policemen are smoking cigarettes in the garden, watched by the snowman whose eyes are round and hollow. The suitcase my father is packing is very small. Does that mean he will be back soon? The men have their big hands on his shoulders. Dad is trying to smile at me. A smile like the snowman’s that turns up at the corners. And now he is being marched off at a pace by men who I know from conversations overheard between Mom and Dad torture other men and sometimes have swastikas tattooed on their wrists. A car is parked outside the house. The men are saying COM COM COM. The white car pulls away with my father inside it. I wave but he doesn’t wave back.