I begin to spend more and more nights at Ulricke’s. Madame d’Amico, my landlady, makes no comment on my prolonged absences. I visit my small room in her flat regularly to change my clothes but I find myself increasingly loath to spend nights alone there. Its fusty smell, its dismal view of the interior courtyard, the dull conversations with my fellow lodger, depress me. I am happy to have exchanged lonely independence for the huggermugger intimacy of the villa. Indeed, for a week or so life there becomes even more cramped. The twins are joined by a girlfriend from Bremen, called Clara – twenty-two, sharp-faced, candid – in disgrace from her parents and spending a month or two visiting friends while waiting for tempers back home to cool. I ask her what she has done. She says she had an affair with her father’s business partner and oldest friend. This was discovered, and the ramifications of the scandal spread to the boardroom: suits are being filed, resignations demanded, takeover bids plotted. Clara seems quite calm about it all, her only regret being that her lover’s daughter – who hitherto had been her constant companion since childhood – now refuses to see or speak to her. Whole lives are irreparably askew.
Clara occupies the divan. She sleeps naked and is less concerned with privacy than the other girls. I find I relish the dormitory-like aspect of our living arrangements even more. At night I lie docilely beside Ulricke listening to the three girls talking in German. I can’t understand a word – they could be talking about me, for all I know. Clara smokes French cigarettes and their pleasant sour smell lingers in the air after the lights are switched out. Ulricke and I wait for a diplomatic five minutes or so before making love. That fragrance of Gauloise or Gitanes is forever associated with those tense palpitating moments of darkness: Ulricke’s warm strong body, the carnal anticipation, the sounds of Clara and Anneliese settling themselves in their beds, their fake yawns.
On the Promenade des Anglais the shiny cars sweep by. Ulricke and I stick out our thumbs, goosing the air. We always get lifts immediately and have freely hitched, usually with Anneliese, the length of the Côte d’Azur, from San Raphael to Menton, at all hours of the day or night. One warmish evening, near Aix-en-Provence, the three of us decided spontaneously to sleep out in a wood. We huddled up in blankets and woke at dawn to find ourselves quite soaked with dew.
A car stops. The driver – a man – is going to Monte Carlo. We ask him to take the haute corniche. Cherry’s villa is perched so high above the town that the walk up from the coast road is exhausting. Ulricke sits in the front – the sex of the driver determines our position. To our surprise we have found that very often single women will stop for the three of us. They are much more generous than the men as a rule: in our travels the women frequently buy us drinks and meals, and once we were given 100 francs. Something about the three of us prompts this largess. There is, I feel, something charmed about us as a trio, Ulricke, Anneliese and me. This is why – quite apart from his rebarbative personal habits – I so resent Steve. He is an interloper, an intruder: his presence, his interest in Anneliese, threatens me, us. The trio becomes a banal foursome, or – even worse – two couples.
* * *
From the small terrace at Cherry’s villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbour lights and the headlamps of cars on the coast road. The dim noise of traffic, the sonic rip of some lout’s motorbike, drift upward to the villa, competing with the thump and chords of music from inside. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – Live, The Yes Album, Hunky Dory. . . curious how these LPs pin and fix humdrum moments of our lives – precise as almanacs. An ars brevis for the quotidian.
The exquisite Cherry patrols her guests, enveloped in a fug of genial envy from her girlfriends. It’s not her impending marriage that prompts this emotion so much as the prospect of the ‘real’ Coca Cola, ‘real’ milk and ‘real’ meat she will be able to consume a few days hence. The girls from Ann Arbor reminisce indefatigably about American meals they have known. To them, France, Nice, is a period of abstention, a penance for which they will be rewarded in calories and carbohydrates when they return home.
I stroll back inside to check on Steve and Anneliese. My mistake was to have allowed them to travel together in Bent’s car. It conferred an implicit acknowledgement of their ‘coupledom’ on them without Steve having to do anything about it. Indeed he seems oddly passive with regard to Anneliese, as if content to bide his time. Perhaps he is a little frightened of her? Perhaps it’s his immense vanity: time itself will impress upon her the logic and inevitability of their union . . .? Now I see him sitting as close to Anneliese as possible, as if adjacency alone is sufficient to possess her.
Ulricke talks to Bent’s girlfriend, Gudrun, another Scandinavian. We are a polyglot crew at the Centre – almost every European country represented. Tonight you can hear six distinct languages . . . I pour myself a glass of wine from an unlabelled bottle. There is plenty to drink. I had brought a bottle of Martini Rosso as my farewell present to Cherry but left it in my coat pocket when I saw the quantity of wine on offer.
The wine is cold and rough. Decanted no doubt from some huge barrel in the local cave. It is cheap and not very potent. We were drinking this wine the night of my audacity.
César had a party for some of his students on the Spanish Lit. course. After strenuous consumption most people had managed to get very drunk. César sang Uruguayan folk songs – perhaps they were his poems, for all I know – to his own inept accompaniment on the guitar. I saw Anneliese collect some empty bottles and leave the room. Moments later I followed. The kitchen was empty. Then from the hall I saw the bathroom door ajar. I pushed it open. Anneliese was reapplying her lipstick.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said.
I went up behind her and put my arms round her. The gesture was friendly, fraternal. She leant back, pursing, pouting and repursing her lips to spread the orange lipstick. We talked at our reflections.
‘Good party,’ I said.
‘César may be a poet but he cannot sing.’
We laughed, I squeezed. It was all good fun. Then I covered her breasts with my hands. I looked at our reflection: our faces side by side, my hands claws on her chest.
‘Anneliese . . .’ I began, revealing everything in one word, watching her expression register, interpret, change.
‘Hey, tipsy boy,’ she laughed, clever girl, reaching round to slap my side, ‘I’m not Ulricke.’
We broke apart, I heeled a little, drunkenly. We grinned, friends again. But the moment lay between us, like a secret. Now she knew.
* * *
The party is breaking up. People drift away. I look at Steve; he seems to have his arm round Anneliese. Ulricke joins me.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask Steve.
‘Cliffs taking us down to the town. He says they may be at the café tonight.’
I confirm this with Cliff who, improbably, is French. He’s a dull, inoffensive person who – we have discovered to our surprise – runs drug errands for the many tax-exiled rock musicians who while away their time on the Côte d’Azur. Every now and then these stars and their retinue emerge from the reclusive licence of their wired-off villas and patronize a café on the harbour front at Villefranche. People sit around and gawp at the personalities and speculate about the hangers-on – the eerie thugs, the haggard, pale women, the brawling kids.
A dozen of us set off. We stroll down the sloping road as it meanders in a sequence of hairpins down the steep face of the hills to the bright town spangling below. Steve, I notice, is holding hands with Anneliese. I hate the look on his face: king leer. I feel a sudden unbearable anger. What right has he got to do this, to sidle into our lives, to take possession of Anneliese’s hand in that way?
The four of us and Cliff have dropped back from the others. Cliff, in fractured English, is telling us of his last visit to the rock star’s villa. I’m barely listening – something to do with a man and a chicken . . . I look back. Anneliese and Steve have stopped. He removes his Afghan coat and
places it cape-like round Anneliese’s shoulders. He gives a mock-chivalric bow and Anneliese curtsies. These gestures, I recognize with alarm, are the early foundations of a couple’s private language – actions, words and shared memories whose meaning and significance only they can interpret and which exclude the world at large. But at the same time they tell me that nothing intimate – no kiss, no caress – has yet passed between them. I have only moments left to me.
The other members of our party have left the road and entered a narrow gap between houses that is the entrance to a thin defile of steps – some hundred yards long – that cuts down the hill directly to the town below. The steps are steep and dark with many an illogical angle and turn. From below I hear the clatter of descending feet and excited cries. Cliff goes first, Ulricke follows. I crouch to tie a shoelace. Anneliese passes. I jump up and with the slightest of tussles insinuate myself between her and Steve.
In the dark cleft of the steps there is just room for two people to pass. I put my hands on the rough iron handrails and slow my pace. Anneliese skips down behind Ulricke. Steve bumps at my back. Soon I can barely make out Anneliese’s blonde hair.
‘Can I get by, please?’
I ignore Steve, although he’s treading on my heels. Below me Anneliese turns a bend out of sight.
‘Come on, for God’s sake.’
‘Bit tricky in the dark.’
Roughly, Steve attempts to wrest my arm from the handrail. He swears. I stop dead, lock my elbows and brace myself against his shoving.
‘You English fuck!’ He punches me quite hard in the back. I run down the steps to a narrow landing where they make a turn. I face Steve. He is lean and slightly taller than me, but I’m not interested in physical prowess, only delay. Further down the flights of steps the sound of footfalls grows ever fainter. I hold the bridge. Steve is panting.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he says. ‘Who do you think you are? Her father? You don’t own these girls, you know.’
He takes a swing at me. I duck my head and his knuckles jar painfully on my skull. Steve lets out a yip of pain. Through photomatic violet light I lunge at him as he massages blood into his numbed fist. With surprising ease I manage to throw him heavily to the ground. At once I turn and spring down the steps. I take them five at a time, my fingertips brushing the handrails like outriggers.
Ulricke and Anneliese are waiting at the bottom. The others have gone on to the harbour front. I seize their hands.
‘Quickly,’ I say. ‘This way!’
Astonished, the girls run with me, laughing and questioning. We run down back streets. Eventually we stop.
‘What happened?’ Anneliese asks.
‘Steve attacked me,’ I say. ‘Suddenly – tried to hit me. I don’t know why.’
Our feet crunch on the pebbles as we walk along Villefranche’s plage publique. I pass the Martini bottle to Ulricke, who stops to take a swig. We have discussed Steve and his neuroses for a pleasant hour. At the end of the bay’s curve a small green hut is set on the edge of the coast road. It juts out over the beach where it is supported by thick wooden piles. We settle down here, sheltered by the overhang, spreading Steve’s Afghan coat on the pebbles. We huddle up for warmth, pass the bottle to and fro and decide to watch the dawn rise over Ventimiglia.
The three of us stretch out, me in the middle, on Steve’s convenient coat. Soon Ulricke falls asleep. Anneliese and I talk on quietly. I pass her the Martini. Carefully she brings it to her mouth. I notice how, like many women, she drinks awkwardly from the bottle. She fits her lips round the opening and tilts head and bottle simultaneously. When you drink from the bottle like this some of the fluid in your mouth, as you lower your head after your gulp, runs back into the bottle.
‘Ow. I think I’m drunk,’ she says, handing it back.
I press my lips to the bottle’s warm snout, try to taste her lipstick, raise the bottle, try to hold that first mouthful in my throat, swilling it round my teeth and tongue . . .
Ulricke gives a little snore, hunches herself into my left side, pressing my right side against Anneliese. Despite what you may think I want nothing more from Anneliese than what I possess now. I look out over the Mediterranean, hear the plash and rattle of the tiny sluggish waves on the pebbles, sense an ephemeral lunar greyness – a lightening – in the air.
N is for N
Nguyen N, Laotian belle-lettrist and amateur philosopher. Born in Vientiane, Laos, 1883; died Paris, France, 22 February 1942. N’s family was of bourgeois stock, comparatively wealthy, francophone and francophile. Nguyen, a precocious but somewhat unhealthy youth, yearned for Paris, but World War I delayed his arrival there until he was twenty-four.
But after humid Vientiane Paris proved noisome and frustrating. The severe winter of 1920 caused his health to fail (something cardiovascular) and he went south to recuperate, to the Côte d’Azur. Strengthened, he decided to settle there. He earned his living as a maths tutor and semi-professional table-tennis player, participating in the short-lived ping-pong leagues that briefly flourished on that sunny littoral in the 1920s.
And it was there that he wrote his little masterpiece, Les Analectes de Nguyen N (Monnier, Toulon, 1928), a copy of which I found last year in Hyères, its cerise wrapper dusty and sun-bleached, its pages uncut. A sequence of epiphanic images and apophthegms, its tone fragile and nervy, balancing perilously between the profound and the banal. ‘Somewhere snow is gently falling,’ Nguyen writes amidst the mimosa and the umbrella pines, ‘and I still feel pain.’ English cannot do their tender sincerity full justice.
After the book’s success Nguyen was taken up by the cultural salons of Paris, where he returned permanently in 1931. He is a tenant of the footnotes of literary history; the unidentified face at the café table; a shadowy figure on the perimeter of many a memoir and biography.
He wrote once to André Gide, who had taxed him on his unusual surname, which is not uncommon in Laos ‘. . . It is properly pronounced unnnnhhhh, effectively three syllables, the final “h”s being as plosive as possible, if you can imagine that. Ideally, after introducing me, you should be very slightly out of breath.’
The war brought penury. Nguyen went to work in the kitchens of Paris’s largest Vietnamese restaurant, where he discovered a talent for the decorative garnish. His lacy carrot carnations, scallion lilies and translucent turnip roses were miniature works of art. In between shifts he wrote his short autobiography, Comment ciseler les legumes (Plon et Noël, Paris, 1943 – very rare), which was published posthumously.
Nguyen N was run over in the blackout one gloomy February night by a gendarme on a bicycle. He died instantly.
The Persistence of Vision
Persistence of vision is a trick of the
eye, an ability the eye possesses to fill
in the gaps between discrete images
and make them appear perfectly
contiguous. This is what makes
animation work.
Murray and Ginsberg’s Dictionary of Cinema (1949)
4.05 a.m. The island. Seated on the terrace in front of my house. This is what I tried to retain. This is what I wanted to come to me unbidden from those three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. A bare-breasted gypsy girl dancing for some native soldiers. Orange snakes uncoiling in the glossy panels of an antique automobile. Big papery blue blossoms of hydrangea. A red printed smile on a square of tissue. A honeyed triangle of toast on a faience plate. Tennis in Sausalito. The huge pewtery light of the salt pans. The bleached teak decks of a motor yacht. A rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting pool.
It was in the gusty autumnal pathways of the park that I first saw her. Her small dog had nosed its way into a crackling and shifting drift of plane leaves and she was tugging crossly at the lead, shouting ‘Mimi, no, come on, really, you impossible beast!’ in her surprisingly deep voice. But it was her wrists that held my attention first and provoked that curious breathlessness which I always associate with mo
ments of intense irritation or intense desire. They were very thin, with the bony nodule of the wrist bone, the ulna, particularly prominent as she tugged and heaved on recalcitrant Mimi’s crocodile-skin leash. She was bundled up against the astringent frostiness of the day in an old ankle-length apple-green tweed coat, a black cashmere shawl and a soft felt hat that concealed her figure, but the length and slimness of her pale wrists and swift computations and assessments thereafter – a slightly hooked nose, sunglasses of an opaque ultramarine hue, a corkscrew of auburn hair – were enough for me to lose concentration totally and allow Gilbert, my adored but ineffably stupid labrador pup, to gallop by me, unchecked, from whatever shubbery or tree bole he was dousing, and hurl himself into Mimi’s leaf-drift.
The soft explosion of dry leaves, the terrified yips and idiot barkings, the cuffs administered to Gilbert’s golden rump, the apologies, the pacifying of Mimi, the crouchings down, the straightenings up, the removal of sunglasses, the removal of a calfskin glove from my right hand, the briefest gripping of those thin cold ringless (ringless!) fingers were achieved in a kind of roaring silence as if one half of my brain were registering the full tapestry of sounds available (the dogs, our voices, and above the traffic the querulous ‘where-the-hell-are-you?’ toot of an impatient motorist, blocked in by a delivery van or waiting for someone) while the other half, as if in some dust-free, shadowless laboratory, were pedantically analysing and observing. Noting: the ability to raise one eyebrow (the left) without any change in expression; the depth of the blue hollows in the undulations of bone and skin where the clavicle joined the manubrium below her throat; the wide mouth and the perfect unevenness of her teeth. Assessing: the exact moment when to affect the introduction; the exchange of doggy arcana (’A Norfolk terrier? Quite rare, I think.’ ‘Norwich, actually.’ ‘Really?’); the casual invitation absent-mindedly offered just as one was saying goodbye, about to set off: ‘Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy . . .?’ The observable pause, the flick of the eye towards the east gate of the park, the decisive, independent jut of the chin and the tautening of the lips to suppress a smile as she accepted.