But then the words gravy train remind me that I had vowed I would leave this job, which is a pointless and soul-destroying job. You have been doing the same job year in year out for fifteen years now, I tell myself, staring at titles on a video screen as Doris Rohr pops another chocolate in her elegantly made-up mouth. You have gone on and on doing exactly the same thing, teaching huge groups of students who are never the same from one week to the next and with whom one has no contact at all and who are only interested in passing their exams, punching their meal-tickets. Indeed many of the students on this bus, I tell myself, to whom you were no doubt hasty in your attribution of altruistic impulses, are perhaps hoping that their faces will be remembered by the foreign lectors, ourselves, and that they will thus get better grades in their oral exams. For having come on this trip. For having lent their support. For years and years, I tell myself, suddenly extremely anxious, you have gone on and on teaching students interested in nothing more than the acquisition of a convenient piece of paper, a convenient passe-partout, students with no interest at all in English, all the while nourishing, cherishing, defending, the initial illusion that you were somehow transmitting culture to these people. This has to stop, I tell myself, refusing Doris Rohr’s offer of a Walnut Whirl. I should never have taken this job at all. Or never have stayed there for more than a year or two. Then reaching this conclusion, and terribly aware that only a moment ago I had reached the exact opposite conclusion, I am appalled at my own vacillation, at my loss of direction and purpose, as this whole trip, I’m obliged to observe, has been a terrible loss of direction for me, a deep lesion in the identity and resolve I had so carefully been constructing, reconstructing, in my little flat with all the new personal items and objects I had slowly been accumulating, to wit my wallet with its purpose-cut spaces for an Italian identity card, an Italian driving licence, my keyring, purchased in heavy snow from a Moroccan on Via Manzoni, which has a little leather pouch the perfect size for a Johnnie (it is presently loaded), my new leather jacket to replace the one she helped me buy, my new music collection, after I threw out the old with all the French singers she taught me to listen to and all the sixties music I rediscovered — yes, I’m appalled, appalled by the idea of being in my job for the rest of my life, and equally appalled by the idea of losing my job and being alone with nothing whatsoever to do or be for the rest of my life — I hate the expression ‘the rest of my life' — and without of course, it occurs to me now, a ready supply of young women, which has been, as I said before, together with screen-based computer games and biliards and arguments about politics, an important solace for me over the last two years. But above all I’m appalled by my lack of resolve, by my not knowing what, even if I knew how, I should do. I’m appalled by my constantly being appalled.
Suzanne was out, my wife said. I could get in touch with her this afternoon.
Okay
But then although these credit-card calls are expensive and I really had nothing to say, I made a conscious decision to stay on the phone to my wife for a moment or two longer, partly because Sneaky Nicoletta was not out of the loo yet and partly because she had barely reached the top of the stairs and I did not want to give her the impression that I was still at the stage of hurrying off phones to follow her about and thus still dangerous, although of course I’m perfectly aware that I came on this trip for no other reason than to follow her about, and it may even be that I am still dangerous, something I can hardly deny having been. Indeed, if there is one legitimate, or at least convincing thought in my mind on those occasions when I stand by the phone thinking, Now I am going to call her, now I can’t stop myself calling her (so that my finger will begin to punch, or until very recently, the buttons 045), it is the desire to show, in the course of a light and relaxed conversation, that Í am no longer dangerous and that I deeply regret having been so, the desire to end the affair well (when in fact it ended long ago and badly). And if I have learnt not to pick up the receiver on those occasions, or at least to stop dialling after the five, it is because bitter experience has taught me that the longer I go on talking the more violent and outraged I will become, the more dangerous I will show myself to be. How could she say that nothing had really happened, she who had previously insisted to me how important it was to have things happen in life? Make something happen, she said. She put the knife to my throat. It takes more than a kiss to cut yourself free, she said.
But mainly I decided to stay on the phone in the service station to my wife because taken by the idea of coming away from this conversation with something resembling cordiality, or even a deep mutual acceptance. I constantly hope that we can somehow still be friends, my wife and I, despite this terrible thing that has happened to us. It’s a desire, I sense, which always seems to be the aspiration of he or she who has abandoned, but never never never of he or she who has been abandoned, as I would never want to be her friend (what could that mean?), but only to be her lover again, her beloved again, which is why I suppose my frequently repeated attempts to engineer a happy ending, after all was already over, were so disastrous, because the truth was I was still hoping in some part of myself deep down that it hadn’t ended at all, that the discovery of a happy ending might become a new beginning. And I wonder now, could this be my wife’s problem, could this be why she is so difficult sometimes? She wants a new beginning. She wants me. to start using those words again. Those words that would be like spitting sharp stones. And’ how tedious, I think, how unbearably tedious life is to be forever engineering these same problems that everybody has written about and suffered over for centuries, for millennia: Ariadne gazing out to sea from an empty beach and Samuel Pepys going crazy for his serving maid. To mention but two.
So I told my wife, apparently by way of easing the tension, that I was reading this book Suzanne had given me for my birthday my forty-fifth birthday, a book called Black Spells Magic, and my wife said, yes, Suzanne had been raving about it for weeks and had bought copies for everyone she knew, but no, she, my wife, hadn’t read it. I thought how typical this was of the sublime lack of interest my wife has always shown for the lives of those around her, for the influences, adventures, friendships and agonies that are changing and reshaping those lives, and even for the simple details: why somebody is late, why somebody is calling from a phone-box; and I thought how this lack of interest had enabled me to conduct an intense love affair and to start reading and thinking and laughing and living again, without my wife’s showing the slightest curiosity about what was happening to me, and later, again, had allowed me to stop living, to descend into utter mental darkness, to withdraw into the silence of complete and total alienation, so unlike my normal, talkative, and on occasion people have gone so far as to say charming self, without my wife’s appearing to notice anything at all.