I invented the speech to please her. Encouraged by the touch of her hand on my leg. Perhaps if allowed to go on I would have introduced the concept of permanent pan-factional compromise. If allowed to go on speaking to the influential Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, and I was certainly planning to go on, I might have discovered some rhetoric to suggest that the whole process of European integration hung on the resolution of the lectors’ crisis at the University of Milan, or on my relationship with her. A test case, I could have said. A test case in the application of the collective will to establish a new and more ‘acceptable reality. Then Dimitra came. O trelos aftoktonisse! It never occurred to her she was speaking the wrong language. Aftoktonisse! Someone had to go and recognize the body. I volunteered. I was still in the buzz of my new authoritative role, my new success. She had always wanted me to realize my potential, to become the man she felt I had been born to be. Were we together again? We walked back around the left hemisphere, hurried along by an official in traditional dark suit, the Welsh MEPs Yorkshire blonde secretary quietly padding beside. On the first floor a small crowd had formed by one of the toilets. A doctor held her back. Only one, he said. It’s upsetting. So she and Nicoletta and Luis and Barnaby Hilson stood outside talking to journalists while I went in. And it occurs to me now how bizarre Vikram Griffiths’ decision was. I would have imagined a man who enjoyed his suffering so much was proof against suicide, a man who had moulded his identity around an accident of birth that made him a minority of one, around his eloquent articulation of the world’s endless conspiracy against him, who told his sad life-story with such relish, who discovered himself in his struggles, against the University, against his women, against the English, against God, luring everybody else into embattled complicity, for and against; a man who said, We’ve got to get the bastards, Jerry boyo, we’ve got to take our case to Europe. Full of energy, full of determination. In the Shag Wagon! A man safe in the knowledge of the just cause, and likewise of his insatiable appetite for trouble and for women. He should have been proof against suicide, I thought. Unless suicide was the ultimate mise-en-scene for his kind of theatre. Suicide was the one way he could become our representative again, and emblematically forever, centre^stage in the European Parliament.
They had taken him out of the cubicle and laid him out on the tiled floor. The face was almost black. The tongue stuck out of the thick lips covered in spittle. The ties he had used were one plain blue, the other striped. The petition was not pinned to his jacket. He wasn’t wearing his jacket. But some sheets of paper were stuffed in the front pocket of his trousers, damp with urine. It was Vikram Griffiths, I said. The doctor pulled out the papers — they were damp — perhaps expecting a note. Instead I saw my signature. And hers and Georg’s. Afraid I would vomit, I asked if that was enough and hurried out, to find her briefing the journalists. And what she was doing was repeating the exact words from my speech: that here was a man who hadn’t slept for weeks because threatened with firing, his salary reduced, a problematic child-custody case to fight. In a foreign country. This was the person who had had the courage and vision to bring our case to Europe, she said. Our only hope must be that the death would not be in vain, that this suicide, in the heart of Europe, would finally draw attention to the urgency of our position. A fat man with long hair and indeterminate accent asked me for a statement, but I had gone to the phone. And it occurs to me here now, gripping my packed bag in the Meditation Room, that there is nothing worse than hearing someone else repeat one’s words, exactly the same. One’s waterwords. One’s frasi di letto. Did I want to be together with her again? I was infatuated. It took me five minutes to get the number from directory enquiries. I remembered her surname was Cenci. I hope this isn’t what you English call a practical joke, she said. I only had five francs to explain. There will have to be an autopsy. She wasn’t sure if she would come. She hated him, she said. As the final pips went I heard a man’s voice shouting in the background.
I explained I’d called his wife. She had come over to the booth. You’re a fine man, Jerry, she said. Perhaps we are back together, I thought. Certainly she was deeply moved. She spoke emotionally. Her eyes had tears. But suddenly I was thinking how odd it was that we all had just the one child. You know, I told her. We all have one, just the one child, then something goes wrong. Vikram, Georg, you, me. Just one. Martino, Tilman, Stephanie, Suzanne. Then something goes wrong, I said. It seems impossible to have more than one child these days, I told her. I had never thought of this before. She attempted to embrace me, but we had to talk bureaucracy to the doctors and round up the students to get back to the hotel. I must phone my daughter, I thought.