Europa (16 page)

From along the corridor I could hear the girls refusing to let Colin bring the bags into their room and he protesting that he had never been anything but a gentleman. I phoned my daughter at once and got my wife's voice from the kitchen phone over the throb of the dishwasher. The skylight was leaking again, she said. I asked to speak to Suzanne. It was pouring, my wife said. It had been pouring all day and the skylight was leaking. Then Suzanne came on the extension, where I could now pick up the gibberish of the television. Suzi, I said. My wife rang off, taking the dishwasher with her, and I said I was sorry I'd have to miss the birthday party. I had tried to get out of this business, but in the end I felt a certain obligation when everybody's job was at stake, not just my own.

My daughter asked me had I read
Black Spells Magic
, and I said about half, and she asked what did I think, and still inflamed from all that had been said and remembered on the coach, and what's more irritated with myself now for having lied about my motives for coming on- this trip, and not only for having lied about them, but for having heard in my own mouth precisely the kind of pieties I have no time for in others (a certain obligation!), I began to say, injudiciously, just as the Avvocato Malerba walked into the room with a far larger suitcase than anyone could possibly need for two nights, that although I was enjoying the book
overall
I found bits of it hard to take.

Don't you think all her magic stuff is great though! my daughter said.

I said I had only got to the bit where their love-making in the lift emanates a power that puts all the stockbrokers' computers on the blink.

Isn't that brilliant! my daughter said. It's a fantastic metaphor.

Of what exactly? I asked obtusely, and what I remember now, lying in this lurid, insomniac dark, is that although I was perfectly aware, at this point of the conversation, of the impending danger, aware I mean that I was perhaps about to argue with my daughter, or at least to disappoint her, almost the only person in the world I would rather not argue with or disappoint, I nevertheless, inflamed as I was, already knew that I would not be able to resist saying what I feel has to be said about books like this, perhaps because it sometimes seems that all that has happened to me, all that I have allowed to happen to me, has intimately to do with such books, or at least the mentality they are steeped in, which is of course exactly the mentality of the person who can pretend, on accepting an invitation to spend a weekend with a man who has bombarded her with flowers and phone-calls, that she is not going to his house to make love but only in order to add one final piece to
the complex mosaic that friendship is
. To wit Georg's no doubt considerable cock. And twisting the receiver cord round my finger, I told myself,
All her love for you was mere whorishness
.

My daughter was saying, Obviously it's a metaphor of how human emotions and sensations - I mean when two people make love like that - are stronger than electronics and money.

The Avvocato Malerba had now laid out three sober and, to my untrained eye, identical suits on the bed and was going through a pantomime of gestures to ask which wardrobe he could use when I objected to my daughter, who is eighteen tomorrow and hence at just that age where you begin not to know whether you should still be making allowances, that this was precisely the kind of comforting cliché it was so easy to sell to people, was it not? Didn't she think, I went on to ask, trying to indicate to the Avvocato Malerba that he could have either of the wardrobes, or both, since I had no clothes worthy of hanging, unless with myself in them, didn't she think that in the end this book was not unlike a narrative version of a Benetton advertising campaign,
Hands Linked Around the World
and such-like stultiloquence,
United Colours of Good Conscience
, etc., etc., while all the while the company, as here the author, sorry authoress, was sensibly pocketing the cash that came with a higher moral profile. Entirely inappropriately, I was furious. The Lira's fallen fifty points against the Deutschmark today, I said. I want to see what love-making could reverse that.

You don't approve because it's lesbian sex, my daughter said, switching to her adult Italian. And I had offended her. Your daughter, I thought, your delightful daughter, Suzanne, has given you a book for your forty-fifth birthday and you are telling her it is terrible. Your daughter is trying to establish a new relationship with you after the period of hostility that inevitably followed your walking out on her mother and herself and then again the shocking stories she quite probably heard about you from
her
. She has given you a birthday present, something she did not do the previous year. She has called you in your flat, something she has done no more than two or three times in this whole period of separation, the norm being that it is you who call her, you who visit her, engaging in conversations of an almost palpable limpness and hostility. Your daughter, I thought, has given you a present and called you. She has left a message on your answering machine. In English. And what do you do? Rather than sharing, or at least tolerating, her enthusiasm for what is in the end no worse than another kitsch expression of present-day orthodoxies, you simply confirm what an offensive and irretrievably acrimonious person you are by judging the book according to standards perhaps exclusively your own and anyway entirely dependent on your own peculiar vision of the nature of contemporary decadence.

Why don't we talk about it when I get back? I said. Hotel calls are expensive, I said, and I wondered, Did she have lesbian tendencies, or didn't she? The Avvocato Malerba was selecting a shirt and tie.

All men are afraid of lesbians, my daughter laughed. Come on, Dad, loosen up, go with the flow. And she laughed again, rather mockingly. At which, instead of repeating that we should talk about this when we were together and could relax, I foolishly, on the line from Strasbourg, began to object that, quite the contrary, men were
not
afraid of lesbians at all, they were
fascinated
by lesbians. 
Lesbianism was the only aspect of the book that even remotely interested me
, I told her. And this was the truth. But all the same, I insisted, as far as the doubtless imaginative scene in the lift was concerned, I just felt that such a prurient enlisting of fashionably transgressive multiracial pop eroticism to blow away the paper tiger of white male domination symbolized by the computer circuits of an evil stock-market could hardly represent the apex either of literary achievement or of intelligent political comment. Could it?

Was I right in imagining my daughter had begun some kind of relationship with
her?
 How often had she been babysitting? -And how was it my wife could look on with such indifference while her daughter baby-sat for her husband's ex-mistress? Was she deliberately encouraging the kind of relationship she thought would make me jealous?

I don't understand you, Suzi said, and she asked, why did I have to talk in this pompous way? She didn't understand at all. So that now, rigid on the bedspread while the Avvocato Malerba drew the curtains before removing his jacket and shirt, I recognized this as another of those increasingly frequent conversations where one feels that one must reconstruct the entire history of Western thought just to knock the undesirable parts down again, say absolutely everything in order to say anything at all. Which at the price I was no doubt paying to call suburban Milan from suburban Strasbourg, at hotel rates, would be imprudent to say the least. Such is the power of money over human relationships. And once again it occurred to me that one of the sources of immense uneasiness in my marriage had always been the growing preoccupation that both my wife and in a different way my daughter were, if not stupid, then
hardly very intelligent
No, they are not particularly intelligent, I told myself. They don't discriminate. They don't
think
. And the agony here is that one feels presumptuous and. judgemental in reaching such conclusions, in deciding that one's wife and daughter are not particularly intelligent, yet on the other hand one cannot help but be aware of the evidence that comes constantly before one's eyes. So that perhaps one of the reasons I fell so completely for
her
when I did was the illusion she managed to generate of being
deeply wise and extremely intelligent
. The illusion. Let's talk when I get back, I said to my daughter.

She laughed. Switching back to English, she said, You always back down from an argument, don't you, Daddy?

Happy birthday as of tomorrow, I managed, and finding, on getting the phone down, the Avvocato Malerba buttoning a white shirt over a grey hollow of chest hair, I asked him - I would pay the phone-bill of course, I said - if he knew what Nietzsche had once written down in his notebook as the most cogent argument against his own cherished notion of The Eternal Return, the eternal repetition of all things?

Determined to show off his English, which it occurs to me now might be a plausible reason for his having agreed to come on this trip — seventy-two hours of free English lessons - the Avvocato Malerba said he found Nietzsche
unbearably presumptuous and judgemental
. He actually used those two words,
presumptuous and judgemental. 
The world would have been a better place, said the Avvocato Malerba, without people like Nietzsche, who had been
criminally responsible
, he said, for the rise of Nazism and Fascism. He preferred Spinoza himself. So there seemed no point in telling the Avvocato Malerba, or indeed any person who could prefer Spinoza to Nietzsche, that the most cogent argument against the notion of the eternal return, for Nietzsche, was the existence of his mother and sister.

But going over all this now on my narrow bed after the extraordinary farce of the
stube
supper and the brief conversation with
her vis-a-vis
the exact composition and competence of the European Parliament's Petitions Committee, and then the absurd group walk in the wet night, arm-in-arm with the long-legged, sadly flat-chested Nicoletta in search of a late-night bar - going over this and struggling to get a grip on the day's events, as I appear to be under some kind of obligation, vain as it is compelling, to get a grip on everything, which is to say on myself, I am struck by the question, How can I preserve my relationship with my daughter? How can I behave towards someone who would be deeply offended and hostile if I told her what I thought about almost any issue worthy of discussion, to whom, if I wish to keep the peace, I will always have to say things like, I enjoyed the book overall, but …, or, I really tried to get out of this trip, but … For years, I tell myself, tossing and turning in my bed - because I have never quite known what to do with my arms when I am trying to go to sleep, and particularly when I am trying and
failing
to go to sleep - for years you have sought the affections of your daughter, sought the heart of your daughter, as before for years you sought the heart and affections of your wife, only to be thwarted by your daughter's taking offence at observations so reasonable as to be self-evident, as before it had been your wife who took offence at such observations, all perfectly reasonable and even, so far as you could see, self-evident. Where
do 
people put their arms when they sleep? For years, I reflect, one curries the favour of a person, one feels the need for a relationship with that person, one feels that one will be a lesser person oneself if one doesn't have that relationship, only to discover, in a trice as it were, that the chief obstacle to that relationship is the other person's
lack of intelligence and discrimination
, only to see, from one day to the next it seems, and perhaps after years of frustration, the blindingly obvious fact that you have been so desperately contriving to ignore:
this person is not particularly intelligent
.

How should I behave towards my daughter, I ask myself? Shall I lie on my right side or my left? And more in general, I ask myself, how should I behave towards anybody when almost anybody would be offended if I honestly discussed with them almost anything I care about? Or on my stomach? Which is the opposite of the illusion
she
brought, of course. The illusion she brought was that everything could be said. Every tic and quirk. Every masturbatory impulse. Every passing opinion, however, extreme and unacceptable. The inebriation of total intimacy, that was what she brought, on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, where everything was clear, everything was said, everything was acceptable, in a rapture of total communion, until the first piety, the first lie, not more than a fortnight later, when she said that
she did not wish to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage
, and then the entirely gratuitous revelation, not three months after that, of the simultaneous
mosaic of friendship
she had been laying down with another man, unmistakably, though never admittedly, my colleague Georg, right down to the cod-piece, the cock-piece, at the centre of that tasteless mosaic, out of v
raie sympathie
, she said, because
he insisted so much
, with flowers and phone-calls, and then worse still somehow, worse than all this, the unwillingness to retreat from what she had done in any way, the unwillingness to see it as shallow in any way, to regret having done it in any way, to regret having so gratuitously told me that she had done it, to regret having so gratuitously blown away the foundations of our illusion, my illusion, that intimacy, and worst of all, worse than everything else, my sudden awareness of her almost constant use of such expressions as Í
haue made my choices in life
, or
Je suis allée jusqu'au fond, or Je n'y suis pas allee pour faire l'amour
, or
There's no point in crying over spilt milk
, my sudden awareness, I mean, that
she wasn't wise at all
, that I had been a complete, and utter fool ever to imagine her so, that I, a stupid man, had left my wife for 
another stupid woman
, until the moment I shouted whore and hit her. Irremediably.