Lise fights her way to a dark corner at the back of the garage where a small red Mini-Morris, greatly dented, is parked behind a larger car. She wrenches at the door, forcefully, as if she expects it to be locked. It opens so easily as to throw her backwards, and as soon as she regains her balance she gets inside, locks herself in and puts her head down between her knees, breathing heavily, drawing in the smell of petrol blended faintly with a whiff of tear-gas. The demonstrators form up in the garage and are presently discovered and routed out by the police. Their exit is fairly orderly bar the shouting.
Lise emerges from the car with her zipper-bag and her hand-bag, looking to see what damage has been done to her clothes. The garage men are vociferously commenting on the affair. One is clutching his stomach proclaiming himself poisoned and vowing to sue the police for the permanent damage caused him by tear-gas. Another, with his hand to his throat, gasps that he is suffocating. The others are cursing the students whose gestures of solidarity, they declare in the colourful derisive obscenities of their mother-tongue, they can live without. They stop when Lise limps into view. There are six of them in all, including a young apprentice and a large burly man of middle age, without overalls, wearing only a white shirt and trousers and the definite air of the proprietor. Apparently seeing in Lise a tangible remnant of the troubles lately visited upon his garage, this big fellow turns on her to vent his fury with unmastered hysteria. He advises her to go home to the brothel where she came from, he reminds her that her grandfather was ten times cuckolded, that she was conceived in some ditch and born in another; after adorning the main idea with further illustrations he finally tells her she is a student.
Lise stands somewhat entranced; by her expression she seems almost consoled by this outbreak, whether because it relieves her own tensions after the panic or whether for some other reason. However, she puts a hand up to her eyes, covering them, and in the language of the country she says, ‘Oh please, please. I’m only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey. I’ve hurt my foot.’ She drops her hand and looks at her coat which is stained with a long black oily mark. ‘Look at my clothes,’ Lise says. ‘My new clothes. It’s best never to be born. I wish my mother and father had practised birth-control. I wish that pill had been invented at the time. I feel sick, I feel terrible.’
The men are impressed by this, one and all. Some are visibly cheered up. The proprietor turns one way and another with arms outstretched to call the whole assembly to witness his dilemma. ‘Sorry, lady, sorry. How was I to know? Pardon me, but I thought you were one of the students. We have a lot of trouble from the students. Many apologies, lady. Was there something we can do for you? I’ll call the First Aid. Come and sit down, lady, over here, inside my office, take a seat. You see the traffic outside, how can I call the ambulance through the traffic? Sit down, lady.’ And, having ushered her into a tiny windowed cubicle, he sits Lise in its only chair beside a small sloping ledger-desk and thunders at the men to get to work.
Lise says, ‘Oh please don’t call anyone. I’ll be all right if I can get a taxi to take me back to my hotel.’
‘A taxi! Look at the traffic!’
Outside the archway that forms the entrance to the garage, there is a dense block of standing traffic.
The proprietor keeps going to look up and down the street and returning to Lise. He calls for benzine and a rag to clean Lise’s coat. No rag clean enough for the purpose can be found and so he uses a big white handkerchief taken from the breast pocket of his coat which hangs behind the door of the little office. Lise takes off her black-stained coat and while he applies his benzine-drenched handkerchief to the stain, making it into a messy blur, Lise takes off her shoes and rubs her feet. She puts one foot up on the slanting desk and rubs. ‘It’s only a bruise,’ she says, ‘not a sprain. I was lucky. Are you married?’
The big man says, ‘Yes, lady, I’m married,’ and pauses in his energetic task to look at her with new, appraising and cautious eyes. ‘Three children — two boys, one girl,’ he says. He looks through the office at his men who are occupied with various jobs and who, although one or two of them cast a swift glance at Lise with her foot up on the desk, do not give any sign of noticing any telepathic distress signals their employer might be giving out.
The big man says to Lise, ‘And yourself? Married?’
‘I’m a widow,’ Lise says, ‘and an intellectual. I come from a family of intellectuals. My late husband was an intellectual. We had no children. He was killed in a motor accident. He was a bad driver, anyway. He was a hypochondriac, which means that he imagined that he had every illness under the sun.’
‘This stain,’ said the man, ‘won’t come out until you send the coat to the dry-cleaner.’ He holds out the coat with great care, ready for her to put on; and at the same time as he holds it as if he means her, temptress in the old-fashioned style that she is, to get out of his shop, his eyes are shifting around in an undecided way.
Lise takes her foot off the desk, stands, slips into her shoes, shakes the skirt of her dress and asks him, ‘Do you like the colours?’
‘Marvellous,’ he says, his confidence plainly diminishing in confrontation with this foreign distressed gentlewoman of intellectual family and conflicting appearance.
‘The traffic’s moving. I must get a taxi or a bus. It’s late,’ Lise says, getting into her coat in a business-like manner.
‘Where are you staying, lady?’
‘The Hilton,’ she says.
He looks round his garage with an air of helpless, anticipatory guilt. ‘I’d better take her in the car,’ he mutters to the mechanic nearest him. The man does not reply but makes a slight movement of the hand to signify that it isn’t for him to give permission.
Still the owner hesitates, while Lise, as if she had not overheard his remarks, gathers up her belongings, holds out her hand and says ‘Good-bye. Thank you very much for helping me.’ And to the rest of the men she calls ‘Good-bye, good-bye, many thanks!’
The big man takes her hand and holds on to it tightly as if his grasp itself was a mental resolution not to let go this unforeseen, exotic, intellectual, yet clearly available treasure. He holds on to her hand as if he was no fool, after all. ‘Lady, I’m taking you to your hotel in the car. I couldn’t let you go out into all this confusion. You’ll never get a bus, not for hours. A taxi, never. The students, we have the students only to thank.’ And he calls sharply to the apprentice to bring out his car. The boy goes over to a brown Volkswagen. ‘The Fiat!’ bellows his employer, whereupon the apprentice moves to a dusty cream-coloured Fiat 125, passes a duster over the outside of the windscreen, gets into it and starts to manoeuvre it forward to the main ramp.
Lise pulls away her hand and protests. ‘Look, I’ve got a date. I’m late for it already. I’m sorry, but I can’t accept your kind offer.’ She looks out at the mass of slowly-moving traffic, the queues waiting at the bus-stops, and says, ‘I’ll have to walk. I know my way.
‘Lady,’ he says, ‘no argument. It’s my pleasure.’ And he draws her to the car where the apprentice is now waiting with the door open for her.
‘I really don’t know you,’ Lise says.
‘I’m Carlo,’ says the man, urging her inside and shutting the door. He gives the grinning apprentice a push that might mean anything, goes round to the other door, and drives slowly towards the street, slowly and carefully finding a gap in the line of traffic, working his way in to the gap, blocking the oncoming vehicles for a while until finally he joins the stream.