Jour de repos - mercredi le 22 décembre
[journal]
Simone de Beauvoir - "une journee blanche" - "meme sa
curiosite manquait aujourd'hui."
Kammerzell with Mitchell for his twenty first birthday. He seems to want
so small a relationship. Does he really? Is it laziness or indifference?
Wednesday, 22 décembre
[letter]
It's Mitchell's 21st birthday and somebody has sent him 20 dollars so
he's asked me to dinner at the Maison Kammerzell, a restaurant built in
1485, a beautiful, beautiful building with carved wood and half-timbering
on the outside, and carved wood all over the interior, with thick round
panes of glass set into lead frames in the windows, with carnations on the
tables, with garcons or waiters in red vests, with a separate wine-waiter
and a supervisor who comes to ask whether everything is good. I did wear
the opera dress Mother, and Mitchell who never notices clothes thought it
very nice. There's your first compliment. And I enjoy wearing it! Afterwards
we go for a walk, to the cathedral which is just across from the Maison
Kammerzell, and window-shopping, looking at the lights and the shop window
decorations, daydreaming. Next morning Richard and Mitchell leave for Spain:
I'm still muttering under my breath at having to stay in the rain while
they warm their skinny bottoms on the beaches of the Spanish Mediterranean
coast.
Peter was leaving for Italy so I stopped in to see him late one rainy
evening after work - there he was, a bit pink-faced after having drunk the
whole bottle of champagne some friend gave him for Christmas by himself,
writing a letter, a bit lonesome but his usual loveable self - he greeted
me with a hug and a glass of quetch and we had a good long visit in which
he said that since he was not going to be home for some weeks, and since
he had paid the rent anyway, he might as well let me have his room until
he got back - it's close to the hotel where I work and would save me many
rainy half hours riding in the morning. Consequently I've been living in
his very pleasant room next to the most beautiful church in Strasbourg since
the next morning! With his radio! (One evening I was listening to the Messiah
and The Magic Flute at the same time - both because I couldn't bear to miss
either and because the radio kept drifting from one station to the other.)
December 25th
Christmas Eve. During the day Jean-Jacques confided that he was not going
to go home for Christmas at all because his parents are indifferent to him
and he prefers the streets to them on Christmas Eve. (Madame Matter later
confirmed what he had said. Evidently J-J's mother helps herself to his
wages but hasn't the motherliness to buy him even one little Christmas present):
he was so wistful that I immediately invited him to spend Christmas Eve
with me. After he'd finished work, he arrived chez moi with a wooden checker
board and two bottles of mousseux (a bubbly sweet ginger-ale-like wine)
under his arm. We poured the mousseux into my toothbrush glasses and he
beat me in checkers because the rules are different in France - a king can
move great leaps in all directions. When it was time to go back into the
rain for the Midnight Mass at the cathedral, we discovered that the courtyard
gate was closed and locked - so with great relief we went back into the
warmth. We had lit all the candles Madame Matter had given me for my Christmas
'tree.' I had picked up a branch of evergreen in the Place Broglie one night
and put it into a chianti bottle: it is still trailing tinsel on the table,
with its one silver ball and its sprig of mistletoe at the crown. The candles
lit my Georges de la Tour Nativity with Mary so beautiful in her red robe
and the Child so radiant .... We opened the windows and looked at Strasbourg's
early a.m. with its light reflected in irregular squares by the wet cobbles
of the courtyard, the fresh sky moving rapidly, the shining roofs, the cool
air blowing into the room. We went to sleep (I chastely in bluejeans and
J-J chastely in a chair [actually we lay side by side in our clothes] with
a blanket and pillow I'd given him) listening to the rain, feeling very
close and sentimental and both very happy with our funny Christmas. The
first thing Jean-Jacques said when the alarm woke us to go to work at 6
a.m. was "C'est la premiere Noël que j'ai dormi. Je suis merveilleusement
heureux." Me too. When we walked to work the streets were empty except
for a little man waiting for a bus, Saint Paul's was dim, the river Ile
was flowing rapidly and unevenly between the quais, the old old church of
Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune hulked in shadows behind the garish orange lights
of the Sofitel marquee, the air was fresh and we walked quickly.
Christmas morning: there is little work. Darinka and I sit listening
to the radio or lean our elbows out the window as the wind blows the sound
of the city's bells across the rooftops to us in gusts. Dinner is a marvel
today. The cook served up his turkeys with élan: seizing them by
both feet like a baby about to be powdered, he hacked them in half with
his cleaver. Hack: both legs are off. Hack: the drumsticks are brutally
chopped in two. Six hacks and the breast is in slices. With the turkey we
have roasted potatoes and stewed chestnuts, and frozen oranges stuffed with
sherbet. (In the evening there is the bûche or 'log,' a rolled cake
full of whipped cream.) Then there is red wine and the men get cigars -
Jean-Jacques has 30 in all because the chambermaids give him theirs. At
the other tables the chambermaids are in an uproar: Georgette is roaring
out Christmas carols, old Marie is smirking, and Sorka is dancing with her
stockings rolled down below her knees. Afterwards Sorka explains. Her face
is still flushed and she looks at it anxiously in the mirror of the room
I'm vacuuming. Her stockings are still rolled below her thick knees, her
strawy hair is standing up in back-combed wisps. She's ugly even when she's
tidy, but this wild face is grotesque. She jiggles as she tells me in pigeon
German-Yugoslavian-French, "Nichts essen heute Morgen, spät, nichts
essen. Zehn Uhr, Flasche Vermouth. Gros' Glass, alle femmes de chambre,
Badezimmer, trinken gros' Glass. Moi nichts essen." She hops on one
foot and slaps the other, then slaps her head to demonstrate, "Oh viel'
schwer' Füsse, schwer' Knopf."
After work I walk, whistle, windowshop, bump into other people window
shopping in crowds. I get to the cathedral just in time for a mass, walk
to the front. At the altar four officials in golden robes wheel and advance
with grace and precision in this ceremony they know so well, tall priests
in white robes carrying tall candles whose flames burn steadily far above
their heads, the cathedral is blazing with candles, the mass is a pageant
stiff with ages, the arches of the cathedral vault open out in their rhythm
of light and dark, the concentrated movement and sound of the 'actors' is
a constant which seems to move backward in a perspective of time as the
arches do in their perspective of space. I'm moved by its beauty and its
age.
28 December, Tuesday
On Monday night I scraped together 3 francs and the 2 francs a client
had given me as a tip, and ran to the Opéra house to buy a ticket
for the opera, The Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach: the man at the ticket
window sat back and looked at my pile of coins. Then he picked up the 2-franc
piece: "That's not French, that's Swiss." And from among my French
10-centime pieces he fished out another coin, "And what is this? It's
a German 5-pfennig piece, that's not French either. On dirait une collection."
When he had weeded out all the foreign elements I had 3 francs left - just
exactly enough for the cheapest seat in the house, in the fourth balcony!
On Wednesday night, there I was at the Opéra for the first time
in my life, half an hour early, fiercely elegant in my opera dress and an
upswept hairdo and my lace stockings, in the fourth balcony up, under the
elaborate painted ceiling and level with the bathroom-sized chandelier.
For the half hour before the performance I leaned on the balcony railing
and stared at the people and the opera house, and savoured my elegance.
The Opéra with its four tiers of gold-trimmed white balconies and
its sweeps of red velvet seats is very elegant too, arranged in a horseshoe
before the stage, with the boxes for celebrities at the ends of the horseshoe.
[boring description of the opera]
29 decembre, mercredi jour de repos
[journal]
Snowfall in Strasbourg.
On Friday night I met Michèle outside of the hotel, we went across
the street to the Restaurant de la Bourse and ordered a martini, and then
I ran out to find Mitchell and Rick. By the end of the evening I was furious
and desolate because Mitchell was so unfriendly ("tired") and
Michèle so charming.
(I was tired too - after I came in from the ballet with Bill Volk, I
was lying in bed 'thinking' and half asleep when a knock on the door jarred
me and I fumbled the door open to find - Peter. [He'd lent me his hotel
room centre ville while he went to Spain for the holidays.] We opened
his packages, read his mail, cut an end off the Christmas cake from his
mother, drank beer from a glass and then lay together on his bed, under
the eiderdown, and talked in the dark until I fell asleep. It was sweet
to have him there, looking so shaggy with his hair long, so tired and so
warm with his arm around me all night. In the morning I dressed in the washroom
and found my things without turning on the light, said "Dors bien,
je te laisse," to a hand rather than a face.)
I waited forty minutes for the bus. I hated Mitchell sourly, I tramped
and limped all over the bus stop island, and there on the service station
next door was the large blue trade name in neon lights, with the top letter
shot out: HELL. I was cheered up by it.
But I got up as miserable as I'd gone to bed. In the bus I looked around
dully and thought how everyone was sealed in plastic capsules that they
couldn't see through. Sneaked to Place Kléber instead of the earlier
stop which was all I could afford by squashing myself between a group of
tall Alsacians going to work. In the bathroom of 524, burst into tears because
I felt deformed and ugly, cried all morning, wallowing in admitted weakness
("Mais tu as toujours du courage" says Madame Matter, but I'm
weak - no I'm not. I show weakness in order to prove that I do not live
by even my own laws, to prove strength. It's an argument.)
It was a good move because it brought Madame Matter to tell me the sad
stories of Jacqueline (who is so lovely and no longer trusts men) and Mademoiselle
Ziechelmeyer ("Elle n'a plus rien la-dedans" with a gesture of
sweeping all of the contents of her abdomen into a basket on the floor)
and then to cry herself when she told me about her romance with her husband
and about her 'boyhood' as a little devil. We were sitting across a table
from each other as I ate the dinner she'd brought for me. She said suddenly,
"Quand j'avais ton age à toi, j'étais un jour assis juste
comme toi, en face d'une dame qui s'appellait Matilde, et elle a pleuré
en me racontant son histoire et je m'ai demandé si une fois ça
m'arriverait et voilà. Un jour, si tu te souviens et si ça
arrive aussi à toi, te peux penser à moi ... elle doit être
morte, ce Matilde."
Sometimes when I'm cleaning a bathroom and she comes in to speak to me,
Madame Matter stands and watches herself talking in the mirror; I wonder
what she sees, what she thinks of her fleshy red face with its vital blue
eyes, flesh dragged unwillingly through a difficult life, and spirit, hard
as a pebble, intact - but formed in the fleshy midst of life, secreted in
layers, a gallstone!
By the time I showered, I felt euphoric and sang both loud and high for
the double benefit of myself and Mr Volk.
-
Saint Paul's on a hazy day in which the sun seems to be misted onto objects
rather than to have come through the haze: contrast of blue shadow and pink
brown stone, seen through the fine, trailing branches of a leafless tree.
The strong design of its two towers and the three entrances between.
Is what I've called dépaysment what Sartre calls la nausée?
"Les mots étaient évanouis, et, avec eux, la signification
des choses, leurs modes d'emploi, les faibles repères que les hommes
ont tracés a leur surfaces. J'étais assis seule en face de
cette masse noire et noueuse, extièrement brute et qui me faisait
peur." My reaction is different: fear sometimes (this summer, fear
of a word in my Spanish text) but usually more a lightheadedness, a wonder,
a euphoria. "Jamais, avant ces derniers jours, je n'avais pressenti
ce que voulait dire 'exister'." "Ces objects incommodaient; j'aurais
souhaité qu'il existassent moins fort, d'une facon plus sèche,
plus abstraite, avec plus de retenue." (reserve)
"Faces stop showing what they crave / In my attempt to see"
-
Mr Volk, sugar daddy; Bill Volk, engineer, twenty and fifty two, sophisticated
and pure in heart (his jokes with waiters, his happiness and his desire
for goodness) - his young, young blue eyes, grey-brown stiff beard, body
becoming flabby at the centre - his smacking goodnight kiss, his longing
to dance up stairways after seeing a ballet! He laughs at my jokes, he puns,
he is metaphysically uncertain but 'physically' confident. He doesn't become
embarrassed by himself, he doesn't request posturings from me, he's a representative
middle-aged professional American, cultured, democratic, informal, full
of the love of good and beautiful things but without snobbery and without
oneupsmanship. He is something I am becoming - he interests me because he,
who is older than my father, is so much past the agonies of Father that
he is more like me. I'm comfortable with him, I expect nothing from him.
(But I'm seeing Mitchell tomorrow and I'm afraid that I'll be speechless,
"in my attempt to see," and we are friends. I tell him the truth.
I'm not enchanted, but I cherish him. Good.)
At the ballet, beautiful bodies dancing with the snap and lash of elastic
neon lights and a housing project of newsprint which rolled up like a screen.
A young girl dancer with a sharp nose and unpretty face, a marvelous tight
body, and wild strawy hair. A small clown with red woolly hair tied up in
a bow under his hat, a flopping way of walking, ecstatic mime, old wise
man in the clown's suit.
"Love triumphs," the girls being carried off by their men as
the clowns stare after them.
"Good is the conscious enjoyment of beauty" - George Moore
quoted by Mr Volk. "Death doesn't exist. Being dead isn't being."
"I would like to do something to make this world a better place."
A satirist would claw out a caricature of Bill Volk and I wouldn't because
I have too much affection for him: I am too like him. Is he Carmichael after
thirty years or Norman?
(I want to write - poetry and the story of my trip with Rasheed, and
a sketch of Madame Matter.)
December 31, Friday
[letter]
Michèle invited me several weeks ago to come spend New Year's
with her if I could get the day off. Everything arranged itself - even the
last minute scare of "will we get paid in time?" was taken care
of when the payroll came out just an hour before my train was bound to leave
after work on Friday ... I could go after all, I had trainfare! So I bought
a pot of flowers for Michèle's mother, and with suitcase and opera
dress over one arm and a handbag and pot of flowers and sack of peanuts
from the peanut sellers wagon in the other, I pushed into a train that was
full already - and got to Merlebach, the mining town where Michèle's
father works, near the Luxembourg border and eight minutes from the German
border - in the rain at 9:30 pm. And there's Michèle waving and shouting,
and there's her father with the car, and there's all of this hilly small
town lit up for Christmas, and then there's the Guillot's chalet-house on
the hillside, and Madame Guillot with supper ("Is she getting enough
to eat, Michèle? You see to it") and there's Mr Guillot getting
out his coin collection to show me, while Michèle is pawing the ground
waiting to get off to a New Year's Eve party and Madame Guillot is brewing
a pot of tea for their quiet New Year's at home with the neighbour lady.
Michèle and I went to the party of a photographer cousin of hers,
and arrived just after midnight - imagine my surprise to be not only introduced
to but kissed by, on both cheeks, every person at the party including
the wives and fiancées and girlfriends. It was an extremely pleasant
and boisterous party with lots to eat, champagne and Seven-up, Alsacian
folk music and German bar songs, universal friendliness, an assortment of
beautiful faces and interesting men, a thoroughly French or perhaps thoroughly
Alsacian atmosphere. At four-thirty we went home to bed. At one o'clock
next afternoon we woke up and lay in bed langorously and talked, and I discovered
I was sick, and threw up all of the night before's party food, and since
I felt better joined the family for dinner - and there was Michèle's
handsome and witty eighteen year old brother Charlie - but the sight of
food made me sick again so I excused myself dejectedly (the dinner looked
so good) and went upstairs and slept all afternoon until eight o'clock when
I felt great and decided to go to a movie with Michèle - we saw Hemingway's
The Snows of Kilimanjaro with Rock Hudson and Ava Gardner chattering French
(all American movies here are dubbed) and then had coffee with what seemed
the entire teenage and university age crowd of the village, and then sneaked
into a bal populaire because Michèle wanted to show me the typical
form of entertainment in the whole chain of German-border French provinces,
Moselle, Lorraine and Alsace ... (the bal populaire is a sort of unsophisticated
dance which has an orchestra that is neither folksy-polka nor pop-jazz,
but a mixture. All social classes go, everybody dances, and when the girls
find the boys' dancing too bumbling, they dance with each other.) We got
a table right next to the orchestra and I had a wonderful time watching
the faces and limbs swarming by. Eventually we went home and to bed, but
at four-thirty, a.m., we were up again because I had to catch the 5:12 a.m.
train to get back to work for 8 Sunday morning. The whole household (except
Charlie of course) got up to supervise my tea and cookies and to pack some
more fruit and cookies for me. Madame Guillot put a German record that I
thought I recognized onto the record player - it turned out to be Herbert
and Carol Janzen singing German evangelical hymns: have you heard of them
before? I think they're Canadian. And Mr Guillot hurriedly told me a few
more stories before I should escape into the rain, and finally I kissed
everybody goodbye and left, only to get very sick on the train and arrive
in Strasbourg at 8 only to go straight to bed where I slept until 4 p.m.,
when I woke up feeling great, just in time to go to dinner with Mr Volk.
I've described the weekend so peculiarly because that is exactly the way
it happened: in funny fragments of consciousness between recurring blackouts
and blurred spots. In actuality the Guillots are kind and hospitable people,
and I'd like to spend some time with them when I'm totally conscious!
January 2
I've come upon an unexpected sugar-daddy. Mr Volk of Princeton
New Jersey. The Volks were clients on fifth floor for two months before
Christmas: Madame Matter adopted them long ago, gave them other people's
flowers, washed their socks, brought them cookies, changed their linen oftener
than the other clients', and kissed them goodbye when they went home for
Christmas. Now Mr Volk - a research engineer working for a French plant
here, at home a lecturer and the author of a university textbook in maths
- is back alone for several months more, and since I'm nearly the only person
he knows in Strasbourg who speaks English (and his French is dreadful) he
invited me out to dinner. So we went to the Coq d'Alsace, a beautiful little
restaurant full of polished wood and dried flowers, with gleaming white
tablecloths and wine goblets, and handsome waiters in white jackets and
bow ties ... a 'martini' to begin with, sweet orange-colored wine with a
floating strip of lemon peel. Then consommé, clear tea-coloured soup
with a sharp onion flavour, served in a thick bowl which was served on a
plate which was served on a slightly bigger plate which was served on a
slightly bigger plate ... then the entrée, a sort of appetizer: Mr
Volk had a blue trout (really blue and very pretty) served whole with head
and tail intact and half a lemon for color contrast; and I had a dozen escargots:
snails. They were served to me in their well-scrubbed shells, each one rocking
in a slight indentation in their silver platter. The waiter gave me a tiny
two-pronged fork and a walnut-cracker (or maybe it was a surgical forceps
of some kind?): eh bien, now what? Eating snails is a complete ceremony:
you take your large silver soupspoon and lean it across your plate. Then
you pick up a snail shell with the forceps and put it gently into the bowl
of the spoon (no, you don't crack it). With the little fork you poke around
in the entrance of the shell and pull out the snail, very small and grey
and chicken-liver-like. Then you pick up the shell with the forceps and
tip the juice over the snail: the juice is green and salty and looks like
swamp water. Then you eat the snail: he's good: and you drink the juice:
it's even better. ... Then the poussin which we had ordered without knowing
what it was. The waiter brought a covered platter to the table, and before
our eyes pulled out two very small chickens roasted golden brown with their
feet still attached and squeezed into claws: the waiter chopped the legs
off deftly at the knee, then cut the chicks in half along the middle of
the breast bone, and gave us a chick each. Good! Halfway through the meal
a funny little woman came along and swept our pile of bones onto a little
saucer, then disappeared again without a word. Two minutes later a waiter
appeared with two shallow silver bowls, each of which had a slice of lemon
floating in lukewarm water. "What's that for?" I asked Mr Volk
in all naivete. "Fingerbowl." And then he went on, "There
were these two middle-aged Jewish New Yorkers who decided to go out to dinner
one night. At the end of the dinner, the waiter brings these bowls of water
with the slice of lemon. 'What's that for,' says one of them. 'I dunno.'
'Do you drink it?' 'I dunno.' 'Ask the waiter.' So he asks the waiter, and
the waiter says 'It's to wash your hands in.' 'See,' says the first guy,
'you ask a stoopid question, you get a stoopid answer.'"
... After the poussin, cheese with bread. Then dessert, glace: Mr Volk
had an orange frozen and stuffed with orange sherbet, and I had a lemon.
Extremely nice! During all this, the waiter had been solicitously refilling
our goblets with riesling, the most famous white wine of Alsace, a very
light and delicious wine without the bitterness of most red wines.
For the classic ending of a classic French gourmet meal, tiny cups of
bitter black coffee.
It is amusing to think that the cost of this one meal was nearly half
my weekly wage: I live very oddly on these two financial levels, working
for a low labouring class wage and going out from time to time on a high
high-class splurge. And since I've had Peter's room for the holidays, I've
spent my days playing femme de chambre and then come home to a room that's
been polished and a bed that's been made by my femme de chambre!
The irony is beautiful. As Mitchell says, it could only happen to a student.
January 3 1966
[letter]
Jean-Jacques is in love: ever since he bought his new suit he has been
strutting in front of mirrors, absolutely delighted with himself and full
of arrogance. (I'm delighted too - he is so straightforward and eager that
it is funny and beautiful to watch him!) And in the full flush of his new
confidence he decided to take out a little girl he's known two years, a
very pretty blackeyed brunette, and in his decisive way, he's immediately
fallen dizzily in love with her. Madame Matter beams like a mother, and
when she teases him, Jean-Jacques grins like an idiot. "Nellie,"
she says, "it's too bad about you - you've lost your coffee dates.
French girls are jealous - like my husband - and if you don't watch yourself
you'll have your eyes gouged out ...." Whereupon Jean-Jacques grins
beatifically and I rescue him by assuring her that I won't give up my little
brother quite that fast, and Jean-Jacques mutters, "Et moi,
je ne perde pas si vite une petite soeur." I like him very much.
January 4, Tuesday
Tonight Darinka invited me for supper (the writing is queer because my
hands are cold): Darinka is the Yugoslavian girl who works with me and Madame
Matter, twenty-eight, small-boned, pretty with her black eyes and the bushy
knob of a bun on the top of her head. She speaks very little French and
only three or four words of German and so when I began a month ago she spoke
to me hardly at all but just stared out of her round eyes and went on with
her bed making. But during the Christmas holidays when M.M. was away for
ten days, Darinka and I spent our abundant free time sitting in some bathroom
we were cleaning, telling stories. She told me about her family at home
in Yugoslavia: she quit school to help on the farm at the age of eleven,
and worked as a baby-sitter in someone else's home from that time on - she
has been earning her bread for an awfully long time. Two years ago she escaped
illegally into Switzerland, I think, and after staying there with Yugoslavian
friends for about a year. Hamide (an Albanian Muslim) asked her to marry
him and go to France. When she arrived in Strasbourg she was put into jail
for several months, but in the meantime, Hamide, also a political refugee,
and other Yugoslavian friends were arranging for her papers to be taken
care of, and now she's been working at the Sofitel for nine months. All
of her adventures in prison and crossing borders illegally were recounted
in animated pigeon French .... If you could only hear the magnificent conversations
we have! Darinka knows a number of French words but has no intention of
putting them into sentences. Words she doesn't know she mimes or says in
Yugoslavian, and she ties the conglomeration together with vast gestures
and exaggerated facial expressions. If I speak normal French she doesn't
understand me - it's bad enough when people who speak French speak normal
French to her - so I've learned her pigeon and we rattle along at great
speed and enthusiasm. I enjoy these conversations enormously, no matter
how trivial the subject, because they are a game requiring enormous
inventiveness both in expression and understanding, but no correctness.
Anyway, Darinka led me into her room on the second floor of an old house,
where she and "moi Monsieur" live with one bed, one dresser, a
table, one wooden chair and one striped canvas deck chair, a radio and a
record player - Darinka set about making meatballs and macaroni and soup
in the kitchen, and while I watched her, along came her neighbour, a grandfatherly
Albanian, and asked her whether he could 'buy' "the mademoiselle"
(me!) for the evening, all in Yugoslavian-Albanian that I understood only
by gestures. Darinka told him firmly, "No, at least not tonight, because
tonight she is my guest." Since it was cold before the heater
had properly started to burn, Darinka poured us both a little glass of schnapps
to warm us up and cure her toothache (she and her monsieur have a glass
of schnapps first thing in the morning to cure any ailments that might arrive
during the day) (preventive medicine). Then she poured us another. Then
her monsieur arrived from his job at the Kronenbourg Beer factory, still
dressed in his bright blue overalls and red shirt. Hamide is
forty-four, small and thin, with a large head and enormous black eyes.
His face is full of wrinkles and the top of his head is bald, he looks like
a friendly dwarf from Snow White because his face is so warm and so good.
I trusted and liked him immediately. He and Darinka have a warm and affectionate
relationship in which he is definitely boss, but a kindly considerate boss.
We had a hilarious meal, all three talking pigeon, discussing Albania and
gypsies and Yugoslavia, teasing one another, telling stories, grinning over
our Kronenbourg beers through the haze of Hamide's American cigarettes.
When I left they stuffed my purse with Kronenbourg beer bottles, bonbons,
oranges and dates until it wouldn't close any more. Hamide shook my hand
and said very seriously that I should come back anytime, that he'd lived
alone for eighteen years and that he knew the situation, that I should consider
them my family, and would I come tomorrow night? It was one of the pleasantest
evenings I've ever spent in France.
- The French have a habit of wishing Happy New Year by kissing everyone
once on each cheek. Though it's past New Years I still meet people I haven't
wished New Year's happiness to, and the kissing begins again. I like it.
- Got a letter yesterday from Spain, where Mitchell and Richard are spending
Christmas. The Spanish stamp is for Rudy.
Wednesday 5th January, 1966
I got your letter today, the one you wrote on the 23rd.
- Where am I? I haven't left Strasbourg - but I'll be leaving at the
end of January. Yes, I've received the money: when I got it I cursed a little
and cried a little and bit off all my fingernails: it's so much and you
need it more than I do! I thank you very much and I'm going to use part
of it to pay my debts. - I haven't got it yet, because the bank needed to
write Sexsmith to verify the amount. This is standard for anything other
than a bank-to-bank cheque so it'll be another 15 days before I see the
money, but I have my paycheck now and all is very well; I have warm boots,
Madame Degen is all paid up. And as for the 'love gift' from the Grandparents
Epp, that, too, touched me very much, especially since I am far far from
a model grandchild - it came at exactly the right time, just when every
one of my pairs of shoes gave out at the same time. So I bought shoes with
the money. I'm writing them about it. I thought of Grandma Konrad, too,
when Madam Matter gave me a Christmas box full of cookies and candies and
chocolates, exactly the way Grandma Konrad always has. People have been
so amazingly good to me -
I thought of you all in BC often and tried to imagine the last Christmas
in the beautiful old house.
13 January
[first page of yellow journal, which must have fallen out of the main
book and so got mailed home before the journal was stolen]
My first new journal resolution is to become thin and grow my fingernails:
I'm embarrassed by the pettiness of my most urgent desire! But my most painful
problem is that I am not beautiful, and I dislike the poverty that makes
me stare too long at beautiful women and watch too doggedly for the admiration
of men. Example: the beautiful blond girl from the cours d'étrangers
met two rumpled young men as she left the café where I am writing
this, and the one stopped with the door half open to goggle after her. I
despised my desire to seek the boy out with my eyes, to see whether he would
stare at me as well, to compare his reaction to me with that of the blond
idol - did I check the urge because I rejected its pettiness or because
I was afraid? Earlier, I stared at one of the French boys who was with her
and we looked directly, expressionlessly at each other until I dropped my
eyes - I felt I should have smiled, but I resented him because he was with
a girl who is beautiful: his choice of her is illogically a rejection of
me, and I must reject in my turn, to save myself from the omnipresence of
autrui - I understood de Beauvoir's L'invitée very well.
Other women threaten me if they are beautiful (Indra) or vivacious (Alison)
and my reaction is rejection, avoidance. (What a coward I am!) What saved
me finally from écrasement by Olivia? I knew her well enough to know
her weaknesses, I could feel superior to her to balance the times when I
was enchanted by her. I realized that it was safe to love her because she
[illegible], as well. Twice the balance nearly tumbled, once when I changed
my plans to stay with her for the summer of the Sunnyside job, and the second
when Tugwell fell in love with her. The first time, it was because my feeling
of power to hurt and reject made me ashamed of my mauvaise foi; the second
time, it was because a man had chosen her rather than me and because she
had not chosen me rather than him (the double jealousy of L'invitée).
Men threaten me if they are indifferent (Mitchell), if they are possessive
(Ferdinand), if they are more conscient (Rick - but not really Rick, because
he is so open: his consciousness unrolls in his conversation like the cast
of characters on a movie screen: there's nothing to threaten me. And besides,
his thinking is nearly always reflected back to himself. His indifference
is more agreeable than the critical indifference of Mitchell), if they are
'important' (Arthur Pape, Tom Hathaway) and I am enchanted - illogically.
My reaction - avoidance. Have I spent my life avoiding people I admire because
I admire them and people I don't admire because I do not admire them? Quelle
bêtise! I am not threatened by Judy (or wasn't until she became an
intellectual sexpot) because I can lead her and not by Norman because I
can enchant him (and I do not respect him because I can 'fool' him). It
seldom occurs to me that anyone can legitimately like me: only in instances
where the balance is impossibly precise, Olivia and Frank, am I confident
and capable of nearly complete bonne foi - I can begin to add Peter here
too.
The shaggy young man who looked after the blond turned his head when
I looked at him now, and when I turned my eyes he turned his as well, with
what seemed complete indifference - alors, la réponse! I have to
grin at such silliness in myself, but I am ashamed as well and I wonder
if I can learn enough confidence to lose this need to enchant men (what
Mademoiselle Zieckelmeyer said to me was sweet: "On a un proverbe en
alsacien qui dit que c'est la femme qui a quelque chose qui tourne la tête
des hommes," and I wonder if it couldn't be made true. The directions
I must work in are:
- learning self expression, direct real conversation
- learning to understand needs ("faces stop showing what they crave
in my attempt to see")
- learning to accept weaknesses in them and weaknesses in me
- learning bonne foi, learning how to express it, learning balance
- learning to create confidence for myself - and for this reason, to
become thin and to grow my fingernails and to dress well!
- and from all this, learning to select my relationships and to create
what I want
which is not to dominate - I am not power hungry, Olivia taught me that
good relationships are possible - but to equal, to be 'good' and energetic
in a relationship we've constructed in full awareness of what we were doing.
All that I want from my life seems difficult, impossible, but anything less
is unthinkable, unacceptable; I cannot imagine going without any of it.
My second resolution is to experiment with Richard's theory that the
mind is a tool - "The more you use it the sharper it gets." Maybe.
I need lucidity - professionally I will need it, personally I'll need it
to save myself (this morning vacuuming a hallway I thought to myself that,
since I do not believe in voluntarism I would try to write a journal that
excludes all reference to "I decided" or "I chose" and
substituted "I did," "I thought" - to see if it is possible
to act and think without it or if the word and concept of choice is so entangled
in our way of thinking and in our language that it is impossible to live
without it in spite of the belief that it does not exist - like god maybe,
but I think not) - "save myself" is not in keeping with my vow
to determinism! - from all the waverings of my hungry ego.
Hence the reasonable tone of this first entry.
The book is a gift from Peter. I admired its beautiful yellow, and he
said, like the good Japanese host, "It's a present."
[another undated page of journal that must have fallen out]
His
face is so beautiful and when it is relaxed it has a slightly sad look,
with his soft, long, well-defined mouth, his Hamlet beard, his blue eyes
lost and grey. When he smiles his face shines. (Blessed are the pure in
heart.) His hair is grey, and it musses over his forehead in a shock, a
very crisp cowlick. "You restore my faith in being able to stay uncorrupted."
24 January
A martini and two pieces of pastry with a large, fat, British MP called
Mr Richard who gobbles and hums, and spreads his legs wide when he sits,
and loves the Welsh (he's Welsh) because "they're Dylan Thomases, all
of them, great eaters and drinkers and letchers, and all with such a sense
of sin."
-
Bill Volk, our relationship makes me think of Hemingway's Across the
River and into the Trees, about a young girl and an old man who loved each
other with the same sort of tenderness and cherishing as I have begun to
and will never have a chance to love Bill, whose first name I hate to use!
(It was his wife who pointed this out.)
-
Tuesday again, and I am sad and raw again, and happy
because of Bill Volk. I am sad because of a deception of Madame Matter,
raw because of my confused love of Darinka and her, because of the way Jean-Jacques
stood shivering outside the hotel waiting to tell me that he knew I'm in
trouble, "C'est grave, regard comme je tremble pour toi." "Tu
rigoles, Jean-Jacques?" "Je ne rigole pas, c'est grave."
(And this afternoon, "Qu'est-ce que tu as, toi? Je ne peux pas te regarder
comme ca." "Je suis triste, je ne suis pas fauchée. C'est
la nature humaine, c'est tout. C'est pas grave." "Mais qu'est-ce
que c'est?" "C'est une petite déception." I am so
confused, perhaps it is from the wine we drank with dinner, perhaps because
I realize that so many things are ending here in Strasbourg, I think of
Jean-Jacques with his hair so long, in his white tunic looking so young
and beautiful, like a Da Vinci angel with soft eyes and a delicate, delicate
face, shivering, his hands in his pockets as far as they could go, his face
turned sideways toward me. Raw because I feel again the overwhelming largeness
of the world, where I am gathering perhaps too much strangeness at one time,
where I am pushing back perhaps too fast, where I am finding nearly no one
to trust in spite of my longing to trust and cherish ("Love many, trust
few, always paddle your own canoe"), where I find books, pictures,
faces that overwhelm me by their beauty and vitality, where I can run up
the hotel corridors with the laundry cart because I am bursting with fierce
energy and then drag through the hallways sad because I should not have
trusted someone.
Bill Volk, so anxious not to hurt me, trying to be so direct, trying
to love, to cherish, holding me and telling me how sweet physical contact
is to him, both of us bursting with almost-love and the sweetness of it.
"But don't fall in love, you frighten me, don't get hurt."
He came in and we sat awkwardly for a moment not knowing what to say,
and if the relationship was still there, if it had vanished and nothing
were left. Then we talked about whether we should go away for the weekend,
and about where we should go if we went (Domremy?), and about the 'relationship'
and about whether we should make love or not - can we go to bed together
and not make love? ("It isn't so much that I want to make love to you
as that I want to be in bed with you," that is I; and "I want
to love you with my eyes and my mouth, and my hands, but that's all.")
"This relationship is so unexpected. Maybe I didn't expect anything.
Nothing so sweet." Nor I, nothing so sweet as this beautiful middle-aged
man who speaks so easily and has learned so much, who knows so much of what
I don't know and am knocking about looking for, and who yet is so much like
me.
Wednesday
When I leave for Italy with Mitchell on Tuesday I'll take along the bottle
of B&B from Bill Volk and we'll drink it as a toast to the giver. I
come home every evening happy because he's so beautiful, because he talks
to me and I talk to him, because we can both be so warm and impulsive in
this relationship - because he is excited to find me and I am equally excited
to find him. ("Do you know the story of Van Gogh cutting his ear off
and giving it to a prostitute? They said he was mad of course, but for the
first time I thought I understood it today. He was poor, his pictures weren't
worth anything she wanted, but he wanted to give her something of himself
so he cut off his ear" in his quizzical, humorous New York accent,
"I'm incoherent, but it's like our situation. You won't let me buy
you a sweater but I want to give you something." We were sitting side
by side, very close, at the draughty corner table in an old Elsasser restaurant
where first three old men ("original clientele") and then a blond
young woman who looked like Catherine Hepburn sat across from us and smiled
and nodded. All of the tables were occupied by groups of family and friends
who sat talking and joking over their wine, or playing cards - and there
was a kind of curiosity and warmth shared by people in neighbouring tables.
Our evenings are mosaics of hesitation, doubt, certainty, affection,
sweet long kisses, embraces, slow words, jokes, face studying face, seeing
youth or middle age personified, and then seeing Bill and Ellie, wondering
[page ends there]
28 janvier
[letter]
8 rue des hirondelles, for the last time from this address
I've just come in from saying goodbye to Michèle; we had a going-away
celebration in the Judy-Susy tradition - ie we went to a restaurant, installed
ourselves well with our books and bags (frightening away an old man who
was peacefully drinking his coffee but swallowed the rest in one gulp and
left with a timid smile when we moved in), looked around at the young men,
and ordered two "banane merveille"s - a sort of banana split in
a tall glass. After which we promenaded looking in shop windows and, of
course, met some young men we knew (I knew Georges, the charmingest of the
French students I've met, vachement sympathique), whereupon we continued
to promenade all four. Then Michèle spotted two sailors, grabbed
the red pompoms on their hats, and kissed them both - I was astonished at
her behaviour and gaped like a mouton until everyone explained at once that
it is a French superstition - touching a sailor's pompom and kissing him
afterwards brings happiness. This time it was to the sailors that happiness
arrived: both of them were strange to Strasbourg and celebrated their birthdays
on the same day, alone, with long faces. So we took them to a café
and spent the rest of the evening cheering them up. Then goodbye at the
bus stop. Suddenly I realize that the first stopping-off time of this European
year is over. I'll miss my Friday evenings with Michèle and her pell-mell
ways.
The person in Strasbourg that I'll miss most isn't even French - he's
my American sugar daddy, Bill Volk of Princeton New Jersey. We have dinner
together about four times a week, and although he's fifty four years old,
we've developed one of the closest, realest, friendships I've ever had;
it amazes me and touches me to find so much communication with a man who's
lived thirty four years longer than I. He is as surprised as I, and we're
both delighted. It all began when Mrs Volk went home to stay just before
Christmas and he wanted someone to eat dinner with. He thought, "Here's
a poor student who speaks English and could use a meal once in a while,"
and I thought, "Here's a lonesome American who speaks English and can
well afford to buy me dinner." And from this pragmatic basis, a very
sweet, very honest relationship developed, slowly and unexpectedly, until
suddenly it was there.
He's a remarkable middle-aged man, with young ideals, young dreams, a
young honesty that doesn't want to accept any easy answers. Even his face
is lovely with its grey beard and radiant blue eyes (Paul, you'll be able
to tell something about him from the letter he wrote you when I showed him
your letter and my answer. The letter was his idea; I didn't even suggest;
I just found it in his room the day after when I was cleaning his desk at
the hotel!), his French beret set at an angle over his cowlick, a beautiful,
shining, open face. The phrase that comes to me when I think of him is "pure
in spirit." He restores my faith in the ability to reach middle age
uncorrupted by bitterness or indifference, with his warmth, his democracy,
his good will and good faith. Is it possible to escape the clutches that
nearly all adults have been strangled by? (But you mustn't think that because
he's good he's simple. Au contraire! He has a very alert, subtle mind, always
pouncing on puns. He's written a mathematics text for engineering students
and he's an excellent research chemical engineer.) He effuses affection
and it's not difficult to love him back. I'll miss him!
February 7
[journal Strasbourg-Rome]
My first strange encounter, a boy in a turtleneck who came to where I'm
sitting under a bus shelter, Pont du Rhin, and asked if I were a 'beatnick'
making a tour of the world. Maybe I look it - bluejeans with a hole in the
knee where I fell off my bicycle yesterday, thick sweater, packsack and
air flight bag, desert boots, Bill Volk's cast off chestnut-colored corduroy
shirt with its fraying cuffs, hoop earrings, expression of anxiety. (Will
Mitchell arrive or will he be only half an hour late as usual?) The hotel
didn't give me my money yet - I have 200 francs under the bottom lining
of my flight bag. - He's here!
-
Stood for several minutes on the Autobahn corner, waving futilely at
passers who didn't stop, then realized it wasn't the Autobahn corner at
all. Crossed the road, a ride immediately with a Dachdeckermeister in a
station wagon, going to Freiburg.
At the Freiburg turnoff, picked up by a man in a warm car going
to Basel - I was about to write "bags precariously placed on the top
of a wagon full of swine hair, bumping on top of the sacks" when I
looked around to see that the bags were gone and shouted "Unsere Sachen
sind nicht mehr da!" and the driver swerved with surprise. Mitchell
got out and ran back, the driver and I drove until we came to an exit, quite
a long ways further on, and could circle back for Mitchell and the bags,
which a truck driver had given him by then. His suitcase with one of the
metal corners staved in, my packsack punctured in several places, and the
B&B bottle which had fallen out of my bag badly chipped but unbroken
with the brandy foaming inside!
He left us at the Zoll in Basel where we both got our passports stamped
and found a supply of Swiss money at the Geldwechsel - walked across, walked,
walked, sweating in the sun because our bags were heavy, seeing only underpasses
and railroad tracks, trying to find a bus to the autobahn across the city.
("This doesn't look like Basel, Basel is wide open, bright, clean,
flat with hills in the background.") We found the real Basel when we
stepped off the tramway on the other side and stood waiting for a lift on
a sidewalk beside a canal, waving our thumbs at cars who didn't stop, tearing
bread off our loaf in chunks and stuffing the chunks into our mouths between
cars - the hills in the background, the grassy orchards with fruit trees
climbing every slope in sight, the clean bare houses, the horses in the
fields (all sleek chestnuts pulling wagons), the transparent air which becomes
blue as you look toward the sun so that all the small villages are silhouetted
on their hilltops, with the thin pointed steeples of the churches like pointed
evergreens. We were nonchalant; no one stopped immediately although there
was a great deal of traffic, but the day was glorious and we wouldn't mind
standing all day. But a car stopped - a petroleum salesman whose native
language was the ancient Römische Sprache, from Southern Germany. We
were squashed into the back seat of his Peugot with all our bags for a short
ride to Olpen, where he intended to find a customer - he said very little.
So far we haven't had any of the animated conversations that I liked,
hitchhiking in Canada. Much of the thrill was the speech of the people who
picked us up, their ways of forming phrases, their choice of mots justes,
their stories and inflections. Here we lack fluency and must be contented
with faces and scenery. The swine hair man told us rather patronizingly
that our German was "ganz gut" - I suspect he's rather stupid.
I miss the personality play! Partly my fault: I've not been very animated
either. Mitchell is a distant, distant friend; I long for Bill Volk and
sniff his shirt sentimentally; and I long for Rasheed too because this trip
makes me remember so much of our last summer's trip.
Our driver turned around in front of a service station and we stood waving
our arms again, munching bread and chocolate, being examined by a family
across the street when a truck pulling a trailer shocked us by stopping.
This time we made sure our bags were well down and couldn't fly away. Mitchell
and I sat rather squashed on the left side of the Lastwagon because
in Swiss trucks the driver is on the right. The truck roared up and down
the hills so that we could barely talk, and so we rode in power and majesty
through crooked villages, past a magnificent Schloss on the hill overlooking
our road, the engine moving noisily from gear to gear with a rhythm that
elated us. When we stopped for Kaffee at a small truck stop ("Jetst
gibst Pause") a womanly waitress called Maria came and sat down beside
our driver (I liked his green sweater and warm brown eyes). She had a very
pretty, warm, coquettish way about her, is a friend of the driver who stops
to see her three or four times a week. When we got back into the truck I
put on the trucker's hat instead of holding it - it had a good, heavy feel
that I liked and I was sorry to have to give it up. The sun, the speed and
control of the driving, the space and hillsides, freedom from the routine
of working, the road and new countries ahead.
We came roaring down a hill, the engine shifting, shifting, shifting,
across a bridge, and there was Bremengarten, perhaps the loveliest town
I've ever seen with its towers, its fine steeples. One of the towers was
textured all over with small and larger stones and a crenellated band before
the peaked roof; another old-looking building was inscribed, on the fourth
storey under the roof, with Carpe Deum. Everywhere are the red heraldic
lions of Züricher Bier.
A long climb uphill from Bremengarten - and on the other side, Zurich.
The driver of the cable trolley we took to the city centre immediately began
to address us in passable English, explained the route to the Jugendherberg,
beamed, refused to talk German to us. "Oh, I must go now," he
said, and installed himself in the triangular space at the front of the
trolley, but smiled back at us and spoke from time to time.
Zurich
Thousands of birds settling on the end of the lake beside the Bahnhof
between bridges; the youth hostel just completed, a grey concrete monstrosity-palace
where we sat eating Kasebrot and drinking Rieslinger from the long slim
bottle I had left from Sunday's picnic at St Margen im Swarzwald, watching
two gosses hiding from imaginary enemies in the shallow basement
steps; the two English students who arrived with packsacks and ski boots,
the girl plain and quiet, the man talkative and attractive; the American
who pathetically repeated his questions of "How do you hitchhike?"
I've never hitchhiked before. I have one bag and a sleeping bag, is that
too much?" in a feeble American voice, and refused a chugalug of my
Riesling.
Hot, high pressure shower.
Walking back into city centre along the lakeshore, the lights on the
opposite side were reflected in long thin streaks of brilliant color which
the ripples made by ducks broke into restless mosaics; trees, lights, bird
calls, stars and moon in the black sky; the graceful sideways leap of people
stepping from moving trolleys; streets full of bank windows with stock quotations;
a window of candied fruits piled in brilliant fantastic pyramids; an Oriental
carpet which made us both shout and run across the street; books, ceramics,
glass. A Wurstli at a street stand.
Milano
Walked to the Autobahn from the hostel this morning and were picked up
out of the fog by a Swiss whose station wagon took us only to near Zug,
but already in view of the mountains. The man who picked us up next vexed
us both by talking about religion. Mitchell confounded him by telling him
he was Jewish, and I by saying I was "abgebrochen." When he left
us in the valley of Schwyz he pointed out a church steeple and suggested
that we both pray. (Forgot: as we waited for our second ride a stream of
autos in the small village where we stood in front of the pompous theatre
(the Beatles and Ballet Afrika) passed - then came a truck: "Oh you
big pink platinum plated baby, stop!" I shouted and he did - we sat
high and roared in silence along the dream-lake Zugersee, where ducks and
reeds float reflecting in black and the fog seemed to be the beginning of
sheer nothing. I saw an old man in a flatboat shoveling seaweed, and the
archetypal picture made me think of the ancient lake people of Geneva. He
took us only to Zug and we were left there to the mercy of the religiomanic.)
The valley of Schwyz is flat and large, with round hills rising to rocky
snow covered peaks, and houses built high on the grassy slopes - even churches.
A woman who we thought must have been the reliomaniac's wife walked along
with us and suggested stopping places.
We hadn't stopped more than ten minutes when a devil driver in a Corvair
pulled in and stashed our bags under the front hood - he was going to Lugano,
a goodlooking Italian Swiss with a round head and long hair. Mitchell went
to sleep and I got sick as we bombarded the road, lurch after lurch through
the hairpins of the road along the Vierwaldstettersee: the mountains rose
sheer from the soft, luminous surface of the lake: here was the Schillerstein,
here the first three cantons of Switzerland united, here Wilhelm Tell sprang
from the rock to make his escape. In the small town of Altdorf a hideously
painted tower and a statue commemorate the Swiss national hero.
The gorges became deeper and full of huge boulders, the hillslopes harder,
held back by welt-like [?] stone-rubble fences, with stone houses built
onto the hillside and frantic paths running back and forth between them.
The people have no visible means of support. At Göschenen the car drove
onto a flatcar and we moved into a tunnel through the mountains and for
12 kilometers we moved through the tunnel in complete darkness, in
silence, each isolated with the physical impressions of touch (the cool
draft on my knees, the seat under me, a pain in my heels, the pencil in
my hand, that was all. The sound of the train was so rhythmical and pebbly
that it seemed not to exist, like the feeling of air on a hand). I longed
to reach out and touch Mitchell and say "Are you still there?"
but I can't touch Mitchell in any sense or out of any desperation.
We emerged, and although we were still in Switzerland it was like Italy:
the signs were ristorante and statione servizio, there were palms in Lugano,
and the houses had become square villas with tiled roofs. Lugano was hot:
we bought pane and a postcard for Rudy in a j.d. hangout where everyone
looked at us with great interest.
When a black Fiat stopped we asked for Como but he was going to Milano,
okay, we'll go there too. Matteo was handsome, well dressed, the only son
of a banker with banks in France, Italy, Switzerland and America, beautifully
mannered, charming, witty and pleasant - his fingernails were bitten to
the roots. (I sit in the Milano hostel biting my own fingernails beside
three Argentinian boys, a young man from Sicily and one from Holland, while
Mitchell talks to two Australians who are going to settle in Israel when
they've toured Europe. Their wives are my roommates.) He stopped in Como
- we were in Italy now - for half an hour we walked along Lake Como looking
at the weedy beds of wriggling polliwogs and a villa emerging from the mist.
Then we sat in the sunshine in a piazza's sidewalk café talking to
Matteo.
Thick fog to Milano, a caffé crema with Matteo (delicious), a
walk to Mussolini's mausoleum - elephant bastard train station where we
checked our bags, then went to meet Matteo again: he drove us along the
Via M--- to the Piazza della Scala. "La Scala" said Matteo and
I gasped "La Scala, is it in Milano, already?" It was a very plain
and ugly building. Across from it was the old glorious shopping district,
a magnificently decorated walk under a glass dome that made me think of
St Peter's turned inside out - to the Piazza of the Duomo where the unlovely
front of the cathedral holds the extremely lovely Da Vinci door with the
leg of a workman (?) worn shiny from the touch of the thousands who touch
it for happiness. We touched it too and hurried back, much too soon, and
had caffé crema in the drafty railroad station, and made a date to
have dinner in Rome on the 10th.
(Oh the crazy driving fools of the autostrada just before Milano! Mitchell
at the railroad station lit up in one of his rare beautiful enthusiasms
for these skillful idiots and for Italy because of them.)
Then found the albergo per la gioventú on a bus in the fog that
eddied like water in the streets - nubia. A hostel with the friendliest
atmosphere I've ever found in a hostel - Canadians! Australians! A restless
night and dum-dum, dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum to wake us in the morning.
Bologna
Bus. Far walk in mud to what might be the Autostrada della Sole, silence
not exactly hostile but not friendly, a book seller stops and takes us through
the fog to Parma. The plains are flat, all trees are planted in straight
rows, I love the simple Lombardy farmhouses built as basically rectangular,
three-storied, shallow-peaked, tile-roofed, orange-or-yellow-plastered Roman
town-house looking blocks with lean-tos, brick air vents, gracious arches
in the hay storage areas as variations.
At Parma, a pink tower and a lovely Duomo on a square surrounded by Architecture.
Food - lasagna al forno, green pasta in tomato sauce with Parmegiesiano
- anyway, Parmesian cheese. Two middle-aged people going halfway to Bologna,
fog, fog, waiting beside the road reading haphazardly from Henry Miller's
book About Miracles, and Mitchell says "That's true, you know"
- one minute of some sort of communication.
Another man who took us all over Bologna looking for the albergo, which
we found on the hillside of Via Corsica, a rickety orange building with
shutters. I drank half a beer and some cognac, which immediately isolated
me, because I was thirsty, and Mitchell found an Austrian baron who keeps
asking "Soll ich gehen, soll ich bleiben?" and the two of them
are talking animated Oestreicher German interrupted by bursts of vigorous
halting Italian which Mitchell speaks con gusto italiano. An Italian boy
here, an art student, has warm brown eyes and I'm lonely.
Rome
Went to bed miserable under piles of blankets but fell asleep immediately
and woke up with some balance restored.
Around me, voices talking about Greece, roads; nearly everyone here is
Australian; Mitchell has gone to bed I think; I walked up a balmy street
under palm trees until the fact of having eaten - diarrhea - sent me hurrying
back to the hostel.
At Bologna this morning the fog was thick, it was cold, we tramped to
the autostrada behind a Japanese boy from Hiroshima whose sign (sewn beside
the red sun at the back of his haversack) read "From Hiroshima around
the Eurasia Ban the Bomb."
The first ride was a Volkswagon bus to Valdarno where we stood on a bridge
watching a woman wash her clothes on a black stone in the river; it was
raining lightly; there were decrepit villas on the hilltops, and little
traffic. Everyone was going north anyway. A dirty little man in a stinking
car stopped at last - rattled off his squeaky incomprehensible Italian at
us. My stomach ached and his driving gave me mal de mer tho' lord knows
he drove slowly ("I nearly laughed aloud when he passed that first
car: he honked about half an hour before he finally passed it" said
Mitchell). I read aloud a long Henry Miller dirge on the planet Saturn to
see if it would pull M out of his dark mood. It didn't. He's an incurable
crosspatch when he's with me; but he has such beautiful moments of joyousness
when he is with someone like the Baron von Kraft-Ebbing who pulls him along
like the tail of a comet: I'm no comet. But I worry about being foggy, and
not only foggy but absent, when I'm with this spectre who seems to
sleep through his days only to be recalled to earth by the magnetic field
of some very strong anti-spectre. Which I'm not. It enrages me to have such
an indifferent relation with anybody and it frankly wounds my vanity to
have him turned off so completely since the disastrous night of Pierrot
le Fou. Merde! Firenze!) (I tried to sketch his bony fine side-face in a
car yesterday but I could get neither the proportions nor the delicacy.
His face 'enchants' me a little although I'm past the danger of the other
'enchantment.' To be absent, spectral in an absent spectral un-friendship
drives me wild with my own spectrality, and the absence of comet quality
which could pull him along too.)
The stinky little man went to Arezzo, where we stood laughing and shivering
and swearing because the traffic was heavy and nearly half the cars stopped
but always "Signore, al sud, a Roma"" and a shake of their
head, "Firenze." "I've never had so much good and bad luck
at the same time " said Mitchell.
An hour later, perhaps, a truck stopped when we made hungry eyes at it
(I had a Schluchs of B&B to take away the pain in my stomach, and it
was real firewater, all the way down, a peculiar effect.) The two drivers
changed places; a young man with a tight dark face was in the driver's seat,
Mitchell had the other seat, I was in the narrow leather sleeping bench
with my back pressed against the body of the truck, and the older man sat
on the engine. We started off in the hill twisted countryside, Toscana I
think, where trees seem not to lose their leaves but only to turn a rusty
color among the evergreens. The farmhouses are older, they're made of rock
and seem built into the rocky hillsides as a kind of eruption: they have
none of the solid geometrical separateness of the Lombardy farmhouses from
their plains and the rows of trees that surround them. I prefer Tuscany
and I love the massive hills.
I had little time to reflect on this because the older truck driver was
playing footsies with his elbow along my abdomen - I thought at first it
was the jolting of the truck but it became more and more definite and more
and more definite. After he took out his handkerchief and blew his nose
industriously he put it back into his side pocket, but his hand wandered
between my knees and I clamped them together hard, squashing him I hope.
My back was freezing because the window was grande ouverte in order to allow
the driver to spit out. The other man now began to stroke the side of my
face: I tried ignoring him, I'd frown slightly to indicate my unwillingness,
finally I said "Mitchell would you turn around and say something to
me once in a while?" "Why, are you falling asleep?" "I'm
having trouble fighting him off. And I'm having a hell of a time keeping
from laughing, I'm biting the inside of my mouth." After that, no trouble
from the older man, who sulked at me whenever I dared to look at him. I
was half asleep when they turned off and stopped. Mitchell turned around
and barked at me, "Do you want to get off here or go to the entrance,
hurry and decide." Stunned. His conversation in Italian became confused.
The driver began to speak in French. Mitchell was confused too. "Are
you going to Rome? Marvelous! You're not? You want to be paid? We have nothing
to give you." "No, no, don't want to be paid." The two Italians
had an argument in which the driver repeated several times "protegere"
or something similar. I said "Tell them we'll get off here." Mitchell
said, "No, no, I don't understand," and to them, "What do
you want?" The driver, apologetically, "La donna." "Well,
no the donna. You won't reconsider?" The two men had an impassioned
discussion of which I understood only that the young driver, who seemed
on our side, said "Shut up, you fool, he understands Italian"
to the older man. But by then we'd gathered our junk and bolted up the highway,
where we were picked up just as a policeman had turned his motorcycle to
chase us off.
A sportscar with padded leather seats stopped for us just as we were
becoming anxious about the police and took us on to Rome. In the midst of
the mad 5:30 p.m. traffic entering the terminus square our driver, who had
a strange dark face on the body of a fashionable Roman, leaned out the window
and shouted "Contessa" to an equally ugly blond woman driving
the neighbouring car. She was écaltante too, sleek! Fashionable!
Gay! But ugly. We got off just after coming upon the Tivoli fountains, lit
up, yellow with the combination of age and lighting that I've always seen
in photographs of Roman monuments. The station was a contrast to "la
staziona bruta" of Milano - all smooth modern stone and glass well
lit and without staircases.
In the Piazza in front of it are two long lines of book stalls among
the green trees and carts selling Somalian bananas for 250 lire. In the
station everyone stares at my bluejeans with their frayed bottoms and the
rip getting longer across my knee, the rust-colored shirt, the desert boots,
the limp, the packsack slung over my shoulder by one strap. I can't tell
what they think but the men stare and the women are indifferent.
We got the bus, we found the hostel on the Monto Sacro, we put our stuff
into our cold rooms and ate supper with two Australian boys. All the rest
are australesi too as far as I can gather, except for two bums from Napoli
and a Canadian girl from U of T. Mitchell is mal luné today.
(Remember the walk up the hill in Bologna - pink sky, green leaves like
laurel, which I've attached to my packsack, modern villas. Mitchell's baron
called Kraft-Ebbing has enchanted him. "Die sind aus dem selben Holz
geschnitten.")
part 4
- raw forming volume 5: september 1965 - september 1966
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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