A Fool's Alphabet (23 page)

‘Yes, she was modest. I once asked her if she knew how beautiful she was. She said that sometimes she could look in the mirror and think she looked all right that day, but that was all. She had to admit something, I suppose.'

‘And all the women you've most admired or loved, do they have this thing in common?'

‘There is something. I don't know what you'd call it. A femininity which is made of strength. Not just gentleness. Which is comforting as well as inflaming. Excuse me.' He reached for the maligned box of tissues.

‘And yet you didn't trust it.'

‘In Laura?'

‘You've used words like “doomed”.'

‘You're trying to say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy?'

‘Those are your words,' said Dr Simon and sat back in her chair.

Damn it, thought Pietro. He felt that he had, in some way he did not understand, walked into a trap.

‘You're well travelled for someone of your age, aren't you?' said Dr Simon one day.

‘Yes,' said Pietro, happy to expound on something apparently neutral. ‘I've always liked it. Well, I mean I did until that episode I told you about – the thing that started all this off really.'

‘In Guatemala?'

‘Yes. Before then I'd always hoped that I would find somewhere I could feel was truly mine – somewhere I was supposed to be. I didn't feel myself to be wholly English and I didn't think of England as the right place.'

‘Yet you speak very warmly of the village you lived in as a child.'

‘But that was an episode. It ended when my mother died.'

‘And her death ended your affection for the place?' Dr Simon's voice was compassionate but sceptical.

‘Not completely. But it was over. The story was complete.'

There was a silence. The clock ticked. After a minute, Dr Simon crossed her legs. Pietro looked down. The silence filled the room again. Pietro tried to feel what he was supposed to feel, but he couldn't make the connections. Time, people, a place.

‘I suppose,' he said, ‘I felt I would be nearer if I kept moving. If I was static I would be lost. But you don't know what it's like. I didn't like that school I told you about. I didn't feel comfortable in my father's flat. Why should I?'

‘He's your father.'

‘Yes, but, you know, it wasn't right somehow. Anyway, I envied people, people like Harry, who's Jewish so he might
feel his allegiances were elsewhere, but he was perfect there in London. He was made for it. I'm half Italian anyway.'

‘Is that what makes you restless?'

‘I don't know.' Pietro laughed. ‘I suppose it's quite improbable, isn't it?'

Dr Simon gave one of her thin smiles and nodded very slightly.

At Dr Simon's suggestion, Pietro kept a note of the better interchanges in a book in his lodgings and looked back at them carefully. There were important things there, he was sure, if only he could puzzle them out.

On other days he felt he had simply wasted his time. He drove slowly back down the Woodstock Road into Oxford and looked at the young students hurrying along the streets on their bicycles or walking along wrapped up in their scarves. Why did students and old people always wear scarves, he wondered. Some of the different colours proclaimed a college allegiance, others were just for show. Even the young people with glasses and piles of books, however, seemed to look quite part of the town. Perhaps because it belonged to no one, then it was impossible for anyone to feel excluded. Presumably the dons looked with distaste at the migrant undergraduates. They were not worth befriending since they would only be there for three years. Yet it must have been difficult for the students, he thought, to decide when they arrived whether they would colonise Oxford and make it theirs for a short time, or whether they would skim over it and acknowledge that history had dispossessed them. The choice was especially hard when ownership of the place presumably entailed knowing all the antique nicknames of the colleges and streets as well as knowing which society, bar or party was to be recommended or gone to at any time. The thought of trying to keep abreast of it all was exhausting. Pietro had been to the required functions in London, but it had hardly been the same. Outside the lecture halls and assembly rooms the identity of the place was dissipated in the commercial town; academic purity
lasted only a few footsteps down the pavement of a London street.

To cure his agoraphobia, Dr Simon suggested a simple solution. Pietro was to walk as far as he could from his lodgings before panic set in, then return. The first day he managed one hundred and fifty yards. In succeeding days, safe in the knowledge that he could get at least that far, he was to go a step or two further. By the end of the first week he had made it to Magdalen College where he touched the stonework before heading hurriedly back to his lodgings.

As the weeks went by he found himself inching up the High Street. One evening after work he reached the crossroads at Carfax. He turned and pressed his fearful legs a little further. It was like leaving the earth's atmosphere: he was out, beyond gravity, in a floating world.

He regarded the colleges not by reputation, of which he was in any case ignorant, or by architecture, but by their distance from his house. He believed they helped him on and he was grateful to the early landmark of All Souls, the approach of what a painted notice told him was St John's and the welcome of a neo-Gothic brick institution on the way out of town.

THERE SEEMED TO
be a conspiracy among the French to prevent Pietro from understanding them. Shown a French newspaper, he could immediately tell what had happened. Given a French novel, he could not only follow the story but see if the writer was any good. But when they talked, he heard a continuous vowel burble in which it was not possible to say where one word ended and the next began. Some well-known expressions stuck out from the noise, so there would be a long ribbon of sound, then
cinéma
, more uncut ribbon, then
très bien
. There were enough spiky or unmissable words for him to have an idea of what was being said, but never enough for him to understand with a completeness that would have made the conversation worthwhile.

This was the first major failure Pietro had suffered for some time. He had been hopeless at school to begin with, it was true, but by the end he had belatedly come into his own. Hearing Laura talk about books had inspired him to read. He didn't read his first novel by Dickens until the age of twenty-three, but in a way it was more rewarding. He wasn't compelled to understand or enjoy books; if he didn't like them he didn't finish them, and at the age of twenty-six he could see better what Flaubert was driving at than he could have done at the age of fifteen when he first declined to read the set text at school. He liked books of ideas rather than narratives of people's lives. His knowledge was patchy, but passionate in unexpected areas.

He stayed in a small hotel near the Gare du Nord where
he was well placed to see the Americanisation of Paris. His nearest café was a burger bar where the waiter wore basketball boots which he called ‘les baskets'. People fulminated in the press against the corruption of language and the loss of culture, but Pietro was quite glad because each English word that took root in the vocabulary would reappear as a beacon in the otherwise incomprehensible Parisian burble. They had a way of trying to throw him even with their anglicisms: they liked to chuck in an extra ‘t', so the food was processed in a mixter, and someone at dinner asked him if he played squatsh.

His eye was caught by the giant advertisements in the Métro. Young women caught in a moment of lively hesitation on a windswept street, their skirts billowing to reveal their legs – three metres long on the hoarding, against a cream tiled wall with a tunnel in the background. Children, brightly dressed, leaping hugely above the platform, their health assured by some vital milk derivative. Films from which the dramatic stills were as large as a cinema screen and on which the lettering, across an empty track, was made bold and powerful. His camera fired.

The first time he had plunged into a hole in the pavement he had found a different world: not Paris, but an independent state with its own geography, climate and character. It was as rich and strange as any place he had visited. On the map were names like Barbès-Rochechouart, Solférino, Filles du Calvaire, Réaumur-Sébastopol. Some were imposing, like Châtelet, Nation or Défense, some sinister like Denfert-Rochereau, with its suggestion of hell, some obviously foreign like Wagram or George V, some baroque like Reuilly-Diderot, some weird like Iéna, and some lovely, like Mairie d'Issy, Mairie d'Ivry and the most beautiful of all, Mairie des Lilas.

On Vincennes-Neuilly, the straight east-west line, the modern wagons rolled on their rubber wheels, chasing each other across the city with an eyeblink between them, their wire conductor brushes circling briskly against the charged
rail. On other lines, such as Porte d'Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt, they still had rattling wagons on which the doors had to be opened by hand. Some of the stock that clanked away to remote areas like Eglise de Pantin looked as though it might have transported the wounded back from Verdun.

In the lettering of the names, the look of them on the maps in the carriages and the sound of them as Pietro repeated them wonderingly in his head, was a universe as complex as a microelectronic circuit, yet in its subterranean way as grand as a painting by Géricault. It bore no relation to Paris itself, to the streets he walked when he left the Métro. These were just variations on the theme laid down by Baron Haussmann: carved boulevards and squares, with narrow streets interlinking, the architecture of Napoleon III dominant. The Métro was its own world, more interesting because of the character of other places to which the names of its stations gave it access.

Rather than merely wonder at it uninformed, Pietro sought out articles and books. He became an expert in the subterranean country. From the aerial platform of Barbès-Rochechouart he peered down at the hectic street scene below, a big junction of the Boulevard de la Chapelle, where Zola had set his novel
L'Assommoir
. One founder was Armand Barbès, a revolutionary politician born in Guadeloupe, whose death sentence was commuted to imprisonment by the intercession of Victor Hugo. He was exiled on Belle Ile, a Breton island not unlike Cornwall, and later in Holland. The other was the Abbess Marguerite de Rochechouart, a redoubtable leader of the Abbey of Montmartre in the early eighteenth century. The station had seen the start of the worst ever Métro disaster. A carriage which had caught fire was sent back to the terminus in the belief that the flames had been extinguished. But the fire began again, asphyxiating eighty people in the station at Couronnes. Barbès-Rochechouart was also the site of one of the first acts of open armed resistance against the German occupation, when a Colonel Fabien (also
known as Frédo) shot Alfonse Moser, a German officer, on 21 August 1941. Fabien, who blew himself and several other people up when wiring a mine near Mulhouse in 1944, was rewarded with his own Métro station: Colonel Fabien, which replaced the former name of Combat, which had been given because it was the scene of open-air fights in the eighteenth century between dogs, wild boar and sometimes tigers.

Combat fell victim to superior claims. Others became unstations as history dictated: on the outbreak of war in 1914 Berlin became Liège, and Allemagne became Jaurès in honour of the great socialist leader assassinated by the incredibly named Raoul Villain. Jaurès had, in Pietro's view, the particular honour of being a
correspondance
with three other lines. To have a station named after you was one thing, but a triple
correspondance
. . .

He was not much interested in the trains themselves, only in the human dramas they joined. The haphazard, cruel nature of history was exactly reproduced in the station names. Here was no order of merit, but pure chance. Eleven French writers were honoured, but they did not include Molière, Racine, Balzac, Verlaine, Rimbaud or Baudelaire. They did include Edgar Quinet, author of the 1833 prose poem ‘Alias verus', and the itinerant nineteenth-century Gascon poet Jasmin. No Flaubert. No Proust, though he had even lived on the boulevard named after the architect of Paris.

There was an impressive martial air in the Métro too. Partly this came from the names like Stalingrad, Austerlitz, Wagram, but also from the printed instructions regarding reserved seats. ‘1. Aux mutilés de guerre. 2. Aux aveugles civils.' Pietro could not help wondering how many war-wounded were left from 1914–18, and how in any event they could prove in an argument with an injured civilian fighting for the same seat that their wound had been sustained under fire. He was not aware that France had participated in later wars, apart from the Resistance movement. He was therefore surprised to read in a battered book he found in a second-hand barrow an entry on Bir Hakeim,
a station whose name had caught his eye: ‘This was a fortress in Libya where the French troops resisted heroically under General Koenig for almost three weeks against the tanks of Rommel's Afrika Corps in 1942. Their action permitted the British to retreat to El Alamein.' Pietro knew what had happened in Italy, but hadn't otherwise interested himself in the events of the war. What he knew came from his father. He had had the vague impression that the French had been on the other side. He also remembered that El Alamein had been the scene of a British victory. Perhaps that had been later. It was perplexing.

The Métro's attitude to foreign people and places showed the same element of chance as in its honouring of French writers. As well as the fort at Bir Hakeim, the country of Argentina and the little town of Campo Formio near Venice were selected. From all of human history the seven people chosen from ‘abroad' were three revolutionary leaders, Bolivar, Garibaldi and the Greek Botzaris; one artist, Michelangelo; one American, Franklin D. Roosevelt, author of the New Deal (
Nouvelle Donne
); one king, George V; and an outdoor-concert sponsor, Lord Ranelagh. In his Chelsea garden the lord had installed a bandstand for daily public recitals. In 1772 the governor of the Château de la Muette gave permission for a similar building to be erected on the lawn of the castle, then just outside Paris to the west. It found favour with the court and was increased in size in 1779. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it disappeared. The area was absorbed into Paris, next to the noisy streets of Passy, whose thermal baths and rustic beauty once attracted Balzac, Lamartine and Victor Hugo. The Métro station still bears the name of Lord Ranelagh, unpronounceable even to the English.