Thus the woman for whom I left my wife.
I see her more often than you do, she said.
It’s her birthday today, I said. I was totally in love with her again. Jealous beyond all comparison.
I know, she said, I gave her a present. Then I asked her what she had given and discovered she had given my daughter underwear. All girls of that age love nice underwear, she said. They love to fantasize themselves. You know? But all I knew was that she was wearing stockings and suspender belt. Her tottie-gear. I’d felt them. She said: Suzanne’s got such a stunning body. She asked, What did you give her?
I leafed through the three typed pages of the notes she and Georg and Dimitra had put together for the speech I was about to deliver. Then my hand clasped her thigh again. The finger-nails cut right through the silk. They sank into the skin. This time she didn’t cry out. The door swung and the Petitions Committee filed in. She gasped, Jerry! And thinking about this now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, when really I should be thinking of other things, and most particularly when I should be asking myself whether there wasn’t something I might have done to prevent what was perhaps already happening, it occurs to me how completely she had freed herself from me. To the extent that she could allow herself to play with my violence, my ineptitude. Though at least I hadn’t asked her whether there was anything between her and Suzanne. To the extent that later that day she would even be able to suggest we spend one more night together, for old time’s sake. When I withdrew my hand, she held on to a finger for a moment.
The Committee filed in. People in their fifties and sixties, men in suits and spectacles, one with a limp, then a token woman of sober elegance. Talking amongst themselves in fragments of various Indo-European languages, they ambled to their seats on the front row, where one took a light-hearted swipe at a fly. Perhaps with a sheaf of papers from Bosnia. The tall man limping was intent on a plastic cup which steamed. Thus the Petitions Committee. Thus my perception of the Petitions Committee, brimming with unpleasant emotions, deprived of all bromazepam, still casting about for Vikram Griffiths, hoping for a saviour.
The Vice-president, who hadn’t seen fit, or hadn’t been able (because of us?) to attend the emergency meeting on Bosnia, now stood up and introduced us. We were foreign-language lectors from the University of Milan. We were representing both the European lectors at our own university and those at universities all over Italy. It was our contention, the Honourable Owen Rhys said blandly, head nodding with ritual conviction, that, contrary to articles 7 and 48 of the Treaty of Rome, we were being treated differently from Italian citizens. Unfairly, that is. Our case would be presented briefly by Dr Jeremy Marlowe, a British lector who had taught English at the University for over twelve years. After which we would be submitting an official and thoroughly documented petition signed by more than four hundred lectors presently working in various regions of Italy.
It was at this point that it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the petition itself. Not since I signed it. Who has the petition? I whispered to her as I stood up to speak. The look on her face, her French face, her razzled face Vikram Griffiths had said, but handsome, was one of alarm. And she actually said, Oo la la! As when once she imagined she heard her husband’s car arriving while we were making love in his second or third or fourth house up in the mountains. Above Selva di Val Gardena. But it was only the technician come to prepare the swimming-pool for summer. Now things were far more serious. She closed her eyes theatrically, as one receiving appalling news. From Sarajevo perhaps. From Bihac. Vikram has it, she said. Vikram had the petition itself, the papers and signatures. Then, as I pulled and pushed at my microphone, she was walking round behind me to whisper to Dimitra, who swiftly vacated her seat, so that as I began to speak the Greek woman was already striding swiftly, unpleasantly somehow, up the aisle between two banks of seats with chattering students.
Ladies and gentlemen, I said. Members of the Committee. I spoke softly, shakily, wondering what I would say, but the microphone carried my voice right around the auditorium, magnifying its tremors and nerves, while three or four of those in the front row adjusted their headsets the better to pick up their translations. From the back, on her feet, Heike the Dike smiled with great warmth, great encouragement. Likewise Sneaky-tottie. The door banged and Dimitra had gone. In search of our petition.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have just left a meeting where you have discussed the grave and worsening situation in Bosnia. I coughed. I looked down and looked up. We can hardly claim that our poor problems today can in any way compare with those.
Beneath the desk, I felt a hand lightly caress my thigh as she returned to her seat. I breathed deeply, waiting for the words.
No, it would be ridiculous to draw comparisons, I said, between ourselves and that war-torn population. On the other hand, one can hardly ignore the fact that the situation that I shall now briefly describe to you is nothing other than an infinitely milder form of the same thing: the desire by one group, one majority ethnic group, language group, to deny full rights and privileges of citizenships European citizenship, to another group.
Thus the drivel the microphone drew from me, the interpreters above were interpreting for me. There were knitted brows on the bowed head of the token woman member of the European Petitions Committee as one hand pressed an earpiece of her headset and the other scribbled on a slip of headed paper. Barnaby Hilson nodded approval. And sitting here in the Meditation Room it is perfectly clear to me now that one need only open one’s mouth in a public situation and the words will come. You will do what is asked of you. Bromazepam or no bromazepam. Orthodoxy is in the air. That is the truth. In the patterns of speech. The inertia of what you hear around you every day will take you through. Will write your speeches and your books. Will even explain to your wife why you’re leaving her. Why hadn’t I understood this before? Why had I worried so much about everything I said? Why had I fought so hard, stupidly criticizing the book my daughter gave me (swim with the tide, she had told me), stubbornly refusing to accept that her gesture of friendship to Georg was indeed a gesture of human friendship? After all, she did come back to me. Why hadn’t I simply said what was required of me? The words that are in the air. The water-words. Some comment on us all belonging to the human race. Under the table she touched my leg again.
Then one says, I went on, more confidently now, seeing sombre faces nodding in agreement, one says, ‘an infinitely milder form’, but the truth is that discrimination, however apparently mild in comparison, is always discrimination, and always ugly, especially when perpetrated along ethnic lines. One population keeping another out. One population denying another the equal right to a job. The loss of one’s livelihood, I said to the sombre faces of the Petitions Committee, the loss of one’s vocation — for this is what I am here to talk about — can cause immense suffering, mental and physical, even in situations of apparent well-being, even when the victims do not risk hunger and violence. The woman in particular, I noticed, was taking notes. One of our members, for example, I said, had to return urgently to Milan in the early hours of this morning because the mother of his child had suffered another disabling crisis in her ongoing muscular dystrophy. You can see, I said, how the loss of financial security in such a case could prove disastrous. Not to mention the humiliation, I said, for a man in his forties who loses his ability to care for those close to him. The Committee listened. Another member confessed to me this morning, I invented, that he had not slept for weeks because he was anxious about losing his job, a job he has held and faithfully performed for more than ten years. The only job he really wished to do, he told me. Perversely, I was beginning to enjoy this. The only job he honestly felt he was suitable for, I insisted. I was beginning to feel powerful. His concern being, that since he was living in a foreign country, supporting a family in that country, a family made up of Italians it must be said, it would be far more difficult for him than for a local national to find another form of employment. If not impossible. I paused. I’m referring to one of our group who should have been presenting our case here now, in my place, to the person indeed who organized our petition to the European Parliament, but who in the end felt too nervous even to be present, so much is at stake.