Colin sits on Monica’s legs even before she has a chance to move and starts to explain his Euraufait joke for the benefit of the young Italians who haven’t understood, while I’m thinking, Why can’t you be like Colin? Would you like to be like Colin? What on earth do the girls think of him? Beating someone across the face is irremediable, I tell myself. Much worse than anything Colin does. Until with a sudden determination to participate at all costs, to escape at all costs the Furies pressing, their faces against the wet coach windows where hills are massing again now under a heavy shower surreal with doodlings of afternoon neon, I ask, Hands up those who have achieved an equilibrio interiore, come on, hands up! And of all those sitting in the back two rows, to wit Margherita in the extreme left corner, Georg, Plaster-cast-tottie, silent, pouty Veronica on my right, Graziano, Monica, Nicoletta and Maura, and Colin on Monica’s knees, of all these only Graziano and Nicoletta half put up their hands.
Explain, I say, determined now not to be left alone with myself for one more minute of this trip, determined to talk, to be the centre of attention — so that now lying here on my narrow bed in this Strasbourg suburb, whether to north or south or east or west I neither know nor care, it occurs to me that this must have been the moment when I consciously changed plan, or rather became conscious of having unconsciously changed plan, having opted in a complete and bizarre swing of temperament, not for silent reserve, but for a virtuoso performance. From now on you will perform nonstop, I told myself. For the next forty-eight hours and with the help of a little whisky perhaps and enormous reserves of nervous energy you will be deeply ironic and sparklingly witty, and she will see you being brilliant and crackling like a firework and she will imagine that you have got over her entirely and she will be intensely jealous of the young women you’re talking to and will deeply regret…
Explain, I demand.
Graziano, in the second seat from the back on the left-hand side, has an open, boyish face whose patchy unshavenness suggests how young he is. He shrugs his shoulders and smiles shyly Cost, he says.
But you feel you have achieved an equilibrio interiore?
He smiles.
Georg says smoothly, Leave off, Jerry.
I just want him to explain how he does it, I said. With the best will in the world, I asked the boy, What do you do? I mean, how do you fill the time? Let’s see if that gives us the clue.
Wanking, Colin suggests.
Only Plaster-cast-tottie laughs. That gave a naughty little girl away, didn’t it? Colin says. Don’t we know a lot of naughty words?
Colin! Georg says. For Christ’s sake!
So then Graziano tells us that he plays the guitar, classical guitar and folk songs, that he attends meetings of Rifondazione Comunista and delivers leaflets for them because he believes they’re the only political party who seriously want to help poor people. He reads a lot for his exams and helps his father on their grandfather’s smallholding near Lodi which they work Saturdays and Sundays and sometimes in the evenings in summer. They grow salad greens and aubergines and peppers.
Rifondazione Comunista! Maura, beside Nicoletta, protests, and it’s the first thing she’s said that I’ve registered. How can you support Rifondazione Comunista when it’s them prevented the Left coming to power?
But I suggest we leave aside the politics. The last thing we need is an argument about politics. No, what we want to establish, I say, is whether there is anything profoundly similar to each other and different from ourselves in the lives of those claiming to have achieved an equilibrio interiore. Something that might indicate how the rest of us can get there. No trouble with women? I ask Graziano.
The unshaven boy smiles, embarrassed, pouts, shrugs.
Have you got a girl-friend? Monica asks. Squeezed next to her, Colin makes a face.
Graziano says he goes out with two or three girls now and then, on and off, but he hasn’t got a girl-friend.
Blessed state, I tell him, but Plottie says why, she is unhappy because she hasn’t got a boy-friend, or rather because the boyfriend she had was an idiota.
Exactly.
And Colin says, What’s this with the indefinite article in front of boy-friend/girl-friend? The singular crap. When the girls smile, he says in his most Brummie Italian, False presumption of binary opposition.
Georg says: We can’t all be as emancipated as you, Colin. Which is such a beautiful piece of hypocrisy, coming from Georg. He turns to the girls and is smiling especially warmly, I’ve noticed, at the small red-head Veronica with the swollen lips, though in a very quiet and correct way. Colin is avant-garde, he says, forerunner of the new man.
When Georg smiles his face takes on such an expression of wry wisdom, of one who’s been there and come back, one who knows what he knows; it’s as if in his case the whole of self had been transmuted into the Brahminic bird, not a small part of one’s identity observing the whole, but the whole observing a mere shadow, an efficient routine put on for his own amusement, and it occurs to me now that when he sent those flowers, when he made those phone-calls and insisted so much, and later when he explained to her how the mother of his child suffered from an incurable disease, which she then explained to me as if this somehow made what she had done not only perfectly reasonable but generous, towards a man in a difficult predicament, her vraie sympathie pour les autres, yes, it occurs to me that when he did all these things, which he has done, I happen to know, with scores of women: the seduction, the sad story that excuses him from any involvement, and then the gift, in this case The Age of the Courtesan with the neat calligraphy inside to write down an expression he imperfectly remembered from her, or more likely she imperfectly remembered from me, The taste of triumph, it was all a game to Georg, or rather it was pure form in which he had no investment at all. Or there was investment, there is, but only in the form, the motions, the image of himself he projects, and not in whoever happens to be the object of those formal motions on any particular occasion. Which may be why he is so convincing. Certainly little Veronica is warming to him, doubtless thinking how mature he is. And he is. And the galling thing for me, one of the many galling things for me, the many many galling things, is that even now, even after marriage and separation and eighteen months’ shiftless shagging around, or amour amok as Colin always says, even now I can’t behave like this, like Georg, with the tottie I meet, I can’t observe the traditional formulae, I can’t tell my sad story to advantage. And somehow this makes me less, rather than more convincing. You are less convincing than everybody else, I tell myself. For example, everybody thinks now, as I ask Graziano these questions, that I am playing, I am teasing, I am being cruel. But I am not playing. I am not teasing. And I am not being cruel. I really do want to know how someone can achieve an equilibrio interiore. Then everybody imagines, when I can’t become heated about my rights, about my salary, when I can’t undertake a battle for the job that puts bread in my mouth, that I am merely flippant. Or cynical. But I am not flippant. Or cynical. I’m lost.