A World of My Own (13 page)

In May 1965 I stole something of great value, although it looked like no more than a scrap of black lace. If it was discovered I would suffer a long term of imprisonment. A plainclothes policewoman came to search my apartment. She was quite sympathetic but very thorough. I kept the scrap in my hand for a long time, but I feared that eventually I would be searched myself. When she was occupied with
something else I hid it in a carton of lump sugar, pushing it under the lumps. Unfortunately she finally reached the point of opening the carton and peering inside. I hoped it would be too dark in the carton for her to see a scrap of black. She looked for a long time and then closed the box. The search was at an end.

I asked her if the police would now be satisfied that there was nothing in my apartment and she agreed, but I didn’t quite trust them not to make a sudden return visit and I tried to think of a better hiding-place. Perhaps I had learnt my lesson, for in the twenty or more years that followed I find no reference to another theft.

I had a very unpleasant experience. I found
crevettes
were coming out of my penis with my urine. There were about twelve in the lavatory bowl, and one
langoustine
.

There I was sitting in my favourite small restaurant with this old tart in her sixties. What had ever induced me to pick her up—pity? I talked to her politely. She didn’t look like a tart, I thought, and hoped again. I heard my name mentioned at a neighbouring table and tried in vain to hear what they were saying about me. She expected me to go home with her after this, and what was I to do? I was stupid enough to tell her that this was my favourite
restaurant. I thought: I won’t be able to come here for months in case she looks for me here.

For some reason we left the restaurant separately, and I thought for a moment of creeping round the corner, but I decided that would be unfair and unkind, and then I heard her ‘coo-ee’. I explained to her as well as I could that there simply wasn’t time to go home with her that afternoon, and that anyway I was too tired. In that case, she said, I’d have time to look in at an exhibition of religious art in the church at the end of the street. I agreed though I had no intention of going, and I pressed a hundred-franc note into her hand.

It is one of the charms in this World of My Own that animals talk as intelligibly as human beings. For example, on the evening of October 18, 1964, I was caressing a tabby kitten who boasted to me in a small clear voice that she had killed four birds that day. I rebuked her with pretended anger since I am not very fond of birds. She replied with a certain pathos, ‘But you know, I got forty-two francs for them.’

I was worried and a little frightened by a beastly little yapping dog who resented me coming into the house. When I turned my back on him I could hear him making dashes at my heels. I shook my finger at him and scolded him and he collapsed on his side and whimpered out, ‘Are you going to punish me?’
I replied, ‘I damned well am.’ He made a little pool of spittle in his fear.

In a hut by the sea where I was living I received a visit from a remarkably intelligent dog. I had met him once before, with his owner. He had close, curly black hair. He opened the door himself and came and laid his head upon my knee. He asked wistfully, ‘Am I faster than Diamond?’ Diamond was a cat. I said, ‘Yes.’

‘Am I faster than.…’ He mentioned an old spaniel.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but remember he’s very old.’

Later I had to reprove him for putting his paw on the table laid for two and stretching it towards the sugar basin. I tapped his paw gently and he left the room, opening the door himself and closing it behind him.

In Milan with my friend Yvonne and her setter dog, Sandy. Yvonne went into the cathedral and, when I looked around for Sandy, a bystander told me he
had followed her in. But this was not true—it was a different dog. Sandy was lost, and we were about to leave Milan. I went round all the side streets, calling his name with increasing anxiety. At last someone said, ‘Here he is,’ and a setter bounded towards me with enthusiasm. Only when I had brought him back to the hotel did I realize he was of the wrong colour. So back I went calling ‘Sandy!’ and to my relief he came. He said to me, ‘If only I had carried a handbag with a little money for a taxi. I was lost, and I didn’t even know the name of the hotel.’

I had to have a massage for the back. The masseur—who seemed to be American—found two black spots on my buttocks at the base of the spine. He said he had to get them out, and pinched one very hard while giving me a running commentary. It hurt quite a lot before he was successful with the first. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see nothing longer than a match head, but he was holding a large scampi wrapped in a transparent caul.

‘Is it alive?’ I asked.

‘Sure it’s alive,’ he said.

‘I would have thought that I would feel it eating away at me.’

The masseur was hot from his exertion and mopped his brow. ‘It doesn’t eat you. It’s like a vegetable. It sort of lies in you, as though it were in the earth.’

He began to work on the second one. This was
even more difficult. He said, ‘They can give you hepatitis. Maybe I’ve saved you from that in time.’

He gave an angry exclamation. I think he had broken off the head of the second one, leaving the body in the flesh.

My mother had died and her dead body had to be lifted from a bed and carried into another house. I didn’t want to help, but I had to, and I didn’t want to look, but it was necessary. The body was very thin and dry and shrunken. It was easier to move it in a standing position, and at moments it resembled my elder sister, who had died many years before.

Then I heard the body speak as I moved it. It said, ‘Cold. Cold.’ I tried to convince the others that the body could not really be dead, but they paid no attention. I told the body that I would light a fire and soon it would be warm. There was no reply, but I felt a horrifying pity. One could suffer after death, it seemed.

I had a discussion about the fear of extinction by death. I began by telling of a dream of mine which suggested to me that there was an afterlife for those
who believed in it. In the dream I had been aware of people I had loved who called to me to join them. But I had chosen, by my lack of belief, extinction. A great black cone like a candle extinguisher was to be dropped over my head.

In the discussion that followed, I argued that we all, whatever our beliefs, feared extinction.