How can I discuss things with people if discussion inflames me, if discussion makes me violent? Or is violence the only proper response when you are right, for years and years you are right and others are so obstinately wrong? But then why do you imagine, I ask myself, pushing my hands under the pillow now — and if my wife, my daughter, my lover have anything in common it is that they have all asked this same question — why do you imagine that you are right and that everybody else is wrong? I can’t answer. Yet that is exactly what I do imagine. Wouldn’t it be madness to suppose one was wrong merely because others did not agree with you? Where would that lead? You believe what you believe, I told myself. There’s no way round that. Even if you have frequently acted blindly and foolishly. And lying on my back now with my arms on my chest in this narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel that I am beginning rather to like, if for no other reason than its appropriate awfulness, it occurs to me that the only way for someone like me to behave is to wait for dumbshow situations like the hand on the knee from Plaster-cast-tottie, and to go for them.
The hand on my knee! I can still hear talking, laughter, glasses, distantly from the lobby, despite the protests of the proprietor, who was nevertheless ready, after our vain, drizzly search for a suburban night-spot, to sell us what Eurobooze he had (cognac, brandy, pernod, grappa — bottles of it — which people acquired quite wildly in infantile gestures of group bonhomie) before he drew his bar grille down and complained about the noise, as nations selling bombs like to complain about the noise when other nations explode them, as she complained when the love and dreams she nursed me on for so long came back to her in blows and ugly phone-calls. Yes, I can still hear talking from down the passageway through the thin prefabricated walls and the squeal of young girls' giggles and occasionally Vikram’s Welsh voice in Welsh song, or Colin shouting his favourite words, or a sort of fruity nervous guffawing that comes I suspect from the ambiguous Avvocato Malerba. So that most probably, if I wanted to, I tell myself, that hand, Plottie’s hand, could still be made to engage in something more than a caress of the knee — it’s only one o’clock, or thereabouts — I could still capitalize on that promised intimacy, or at least contact, with this strange girl. And the fact that I did nothing to capitalize on that caress under the table, indeed quite the opposite, discouraged, even spurned it, is, I suppose, reflecting on it now, here in this hotel room where I have just realized that I shall never really be able to talk to anybody about anything, both heartening and unnerving — heartening because it suggests that you are not on for absolutely anything, you are not totally a slave to that, to sex, in the way on occasion, very many occasions, you have been; and unnerving because it may well be that you acted as you did out of an incorrigible romanticism. You are an incorrigible romantic, I tell myself. How fascinating that those two words should have wed together in standard collocation. An incorrigible romantic. For sitting on the other side of me at the massive grosse tisch around which, to pre-empt any formally convened meeting of the lectors, Vikram Griffiths raised, over a sort of dumpling stew, since it turns out that Strasbourg is as much German as French, the pressing question of our representation to the official institutions of the European Parliament, thus muting the carefully prepared attack on him by conducting the affair in the presence of the students, who love Vikram and tend to equate him, and particularly his bushy sideburns and his drinking habits and his well advertised and injudicious private life, not to mention his embodiment of two ethnic minorities, with an idea of revolution dear to their innocent hearts — yes, sitting on my right side at that moment when the hand to my left reached across and firmly took my knee under the table was the ever more engaging Nicoletta, she of the flat breasts and equilibrio interiore, and of course it was she, Nicoletta, who later, in the fruitless search for a bar back in les banlieues when the coach driver had gone to bed and the group had lapsed into that sort of wilfully daredevil sentimentality that dictates that an evening cannot be allowed to end but must be made mythical in some bar or other under a tidal wave of alcohol, it was she who took my arm and invited me, for the air was a mist of dark drizzle, to share her umbrella, a gesture I immediately and excitedly compared, even equated, with that previous gesture — the hand on the knee — from young Plottie in the restaurant, to the extent that the thought, There must be something about me today, crossed my mind, Spoilt for choice I am, I told myself, Sneaky Niki indeed! — the kind of presumptions you have to laugh at later, you have to mock and poke fun at, for it wasn’t long after I had been drawn under the umbrella and then into a conversation which seemed to have to do with difficulties the dear girl was experiencing at home with her widowed mother, it wasn’t long before I began to realize that far from being a gesture of sexual complicity, this, of Nicoletta’s, this drawing me under her umbrella, was no more, no less, than a gesture of friendship! And decidedly not the kind of friendship whose mosaic would require the placing of my cock-piece in its centre. I had turned down Plottie’s brazen advance for friendship!
The German stube restaurant was perhaps the fourth restaurant our group of forty and more had tried after the coach driver abandoned us at the edge of a pedestrian area in heavy rain of the same weather pattern, no doubt, that was leaking through the skylight of what was once my home in the suburbs of northern Milan. Overwhelming a dozen quiet, Monday-evening clients, silently mulling over their chunks of boiled pork beneath the glazed stares of nobly stuffed stags and owls on wood-panelled walls, we were allowed to pull two great stube tischen together to accommodate us all, Dafydd the dog curling up on a seat to nibble at his hind parts, while Georg and Doris and Heike the Dike negotiated the cheapest group menu with a solid proprietress, many of the students being short of cash, and particularly so after it now transpired that in the brief space of our coach journey from Milan to Strasbourg the Lira had fallen not by fifty but by seventy points against the Deutschmark, and similarly against the French franc, and was still falling, indeed plummeting, on the so-called international markets, to wit New York and Tokyo, where it seemed, or so the Spanish lector Luis claimed to have heard on the hotel television, that people simply did not want to have anything to do with the Lira any more. And while Georg was negotiating with the proprietress in German, a language I once knew but have now forgotten, wilfully I sometimes think, Vikram Griffiths, infinitely more astute than I imagined, stood up as soon as everybody else had sat down and suggested that in the face of the present economic crisis the lectors could perhaps pay more for their meal in order to allow the students, who had so generously decided to lend their support to our cause, to pay less; we could fork out to ease the burden on them. That is, Vikram Griffiths suggested a redistribution of wealth, something which, lying as it does at the heart of the socialist ethos, and more in general at the core of what the Italians with technical piety and pious technicality like to refer to as consociativismo, the others in the group could hardly disagree with, though some wanted to, and in particular Colin, I felt, who is the tightest person with money I have ever known. And perhaps Doris Rohr. The lectors would pay half of the total between them, Vikram Griffiths suggested, and the students, of whom there were more than twice as many, would also pay half between them, meaning we would pay more than twice as much pro capita as them, Vikram Griffiths said, and he ordered ten jugs of the house wine and further suggested that before the food arrived we might as well resolve at once the pressing question of our representation at tomorrow’s important encounters, since he personally had no intention of wasting the latter part of the evening at a meeting. He was going out on the razzle. Devaluation or no devaluation. If they wanted to unfrock him, he laughed, let them do it now.