I take my carrier bags and I say thank you to the sad old fruit and he just shrugs and looks tired. Then I walk out of the shop and head directly towards the Hotel Bristol. I am forming a plan. Please remember I still look like a seriously not-wealthy hobo with a bloody ear. It’s true I’m carrying three bulging carrier bags that display the name of a luxury store, but on the whole the enormous doorman of the Hotel Bristol is not excited by my entrance. He doesn’t know about my angels.
“You speak English?” I say to the lady at the desk. She’s one of those sleek young women they breed in Milan to do this job: hair strained back, high cheekbones, dark-grey tailored suit, crisp make-up, smiling but never intimate.
“Of course,” she says, the smile slowly leaking out of her face for lack of input.
“I’d like a room,” I say. “A good room. A very good room.”
She doesn’t look down at her screen to check room availability. She just holds her default expression that’s designed to offend no one and to put no creases in her make-up.
“How will you be paying, sir?”
“Oh, I won’t.”
I’m enjoying this.
“I just want to use the room,” I amplify. “I don’t want to pay.”
“I see.”
I’ve not broken her cool. She transmits a micro-glance towards the doorman. He’s been waiting for this. He comes over and takes hold of me by one arm and propels me with irresistible power towards the door.
“Police!” I yell. “POLICE!”
This is not the way the doorman has been expecting events to unfold. He’s got the door open and I’m about to be hurled onto the snowy pavement only I’m yelling “Police!” like I’m the injured party. The police, ever ready to help a stranger in distress, are right here. Also my friendly ski instructors.
Once again low words are exchanged, and I am a free man. I take up my carrier bags and re-enter the hotel. The lady at the desk is disconcerted. Not much. Just a tremor of one pencilled eyebrow, but it’s a start.
“As I was saying.” I savour the moment. “I’d like a room.”
She looks past me. I don’t even bother turning round. I know there’ll be a man in dark glasses there making hand signals that say, Do it. She does it.
The key she gives me has a lump of metal attached to it the size of Hong Kong. I love that. It’s supposed to stop you leaving town with the key in your pocket but to me it’s the material signifier of the hotel’s status. If you can hardly lift the key you’re in the right economic bracket. So I follow a young bellboy to the lift and I live for the moment.
It’s not the presidential suite exactly but it’s not bad. The bellboy moves around switching on lights and opening doors in that dance they go on doing till you tip them, but I have no money so he’s wasting his sweetness upon the desert air. He shows me the mini-bar and the bulky closet which succeeds in hiding the TV but very obviously has no other function, and the balcony with the view of the cathedral.
“Sorry,” I say. “No money. But next time you’re in trouble with the police, call me.”
He gives me a long interested look, featuring my mashed ear.
“You want girl?”
“No. I want bath.”
“Okay.”
He cracks a grin that says, Good for you if you can swing it, and he goes. I check out the bathroom. Totally not renovated since I guess 1939, when hotels understood about bathrooms and majored on space. It’s the size of a small concert hall, with loud shiny pipes six inches in diameter. I run myself a bath. The water comes out of the giant taps at a thousand gallons a minute, kettle-hot, and in seconds all the chrome and all the mirror-glass has a soft sheen of condensation. This is heaven.
I take off all my clothes and throw them on the bed. Then I walk naked into my steamy dreamland and just stroll about for a bit, from the bath to the double basins, from the double basins to the lavatory, from the lavatory to the bath, and so back again. I check the water temperature as the bath fills, and wallow in the knowledge that shortly I’ll be pink and clean as a peeled tomato. Then the enormous bath is full. I turn off the taps. Silence falls, broken only by a distant whooshing. Slowly I enter the embrace of the steaming water.
This running of baths is one of the few matters on which I claim some expertise. The temperature of bath water is critical. Run it too hot and you can’t get in without suffering. Run it not hot enough and you lose the entire point of taking a bath in the first place, which is to melt your unforgiving body. A lukewarm bath is worse than no bath at all. A lukewarm bath says your hopes and dreams will never come true. It’s entropy in action, the dribbling away of energy in the inexorable downward slide to the death of the universe. So the water has to be hot, hot, hot: so hot that it takes half an hour to get in. Except for me. Here’s the trick of it. Keep checking the mix as you run it. That means what it says: keep checking. Stay on the case. Don’t wander off and re-stack your socks. Lose control for more than a minute and you’ll start over-compensating, running all cold, then all hot, then all cold, and take it from me, it’s over. Go run yourself a shower. The key to a fine bath is to keep it hot to your hand but bearable, remembering that it will feel much hotter to your body, and leave room for a major top-up of undiluted hot water once you’re immersed. Maybe all this sounds obvious but don’t tell me it’s what you do because I don’t believe you.
So then I just lie there for a week or two. My hurt ear buzzes and tingles. My entire body slowly turns to marshmallow. Then, one critical micro-second before the pleasure turns to disgust and self-hatred, I spring to my feet and soap myself all over and sluice myself down and lose myself in towels.
Never get dressed too quickly after a hot bath. Mooch about in a towel until you start to cool, then a bathrobe. I check out the mini-bar. There are rows of little tiny bottles of various alcohols and rows of little tiny bags of nuts and crisps and chocolates. I eat everything that can be eaten. Then I drink all but five of the little tiny bottles without getting overly concerned about what’s in them. After that I’m king of the world.
I get dressed in all my new purchases, which is how I like to think of them because I paid for them with bravado. I discover myself in a full-length mirror behind the door and I look the way I feel. The honey suede over the navy cotton knit is so damn sharp I don’t recognise myself, and when I do there’s this ping in my brain of a new image being slotted into place. I’m actually not a bad-looking guy. Even the black blood clotted in my ear looks cool in a mean sort of way. Up until this moment I’ve always thought my ears stuck out too much and my chin not enough, both of which are true. But here I am looking like someone you could mistake for a minor movie star after a night out with his mob buddies. So I drink the remaining five little bottles and I’m ready to assume power and run the country.
My bodily needs have been met. According to the psychologist Abraham Maslow I must now move on to the higher levels of need, which if I remember correctly are emotional, intellectual and spiritual. These needs can all be met by the one act of getting out of this country alive. Nothing stands in my way but the apparatus of the secret police. In my newly heightened state I see this as no insuperable problem. I will go out into the great maze that is a modern city and I will lose them. After that, I will seek help from teachers or librarians or whoever else I can find with a positive attitude to Leon Vicino, and ask for their guidance. But I’m not about to lead the boys with the pliers to do their business on friendly folk who are armed only with the Oxford Book of English Verse.
My filthy old clothes are scattered over the big bed. I ponder what to do with them. My roving eyes fall on the closed windows to the balcony. In one smooth movement that expresses my current twin sensations of omnipotence and contempt, I gather up my soiled garments, throw open the windows, and hurl them at the distant view of the cathedral.
Next stop those mean streets. This time as I leave the lobby the doorman holds the door for me, and I realise he doesn’t recognise me. This
is because I’m clean and wearing new clothes. It’s also because the most striking part of my appearance is the golden-brown suede jacket, which I was not wearing on my way in. Once I’m out in the avenue and mingling with the populace this becomes even more apparent. Some people go for dark blue coats and some for dark grey. A breakaway minority make their statement in dark brown. But I alone look like egg yolk on legs. I am a beacon for all eyes. My minders will not be challenged in their appointed task. In this city you could pick me out at a distance of half a mile with your head in a paper bag.
This of course gives me my brilliant idea, or at least my brilliant idea Part One. I look round for my minders as I go and I can’t see them. They’re rather good at this. I infer their nearness from recent experience. But if you can’t see people following you, how do you know when you’ve succeeded in losing them? For this, I have a plan.
I turn off the broad avenue and very quickly I’m in the real city, by which I mean narrow streets lived in by poor people. Some street doors stand open, revealing even narrower passages leading to tenement courtyards. On every corner there’s a bar or a pawn shop. Small children sit on doorsteps practising being victims. Not so many people out on the pavements here. Once when I turn I catch a glimpse of two men in dark glasses, looking ridiculously overdressed for the milieu. But then so do I. If I’m not careful I’ll get mugged for my jacket. So I’m being not careful.
I turn a corner walking fast and then I turn another corner and I run into a fight brewing outside a bar. These two guys with thick moustaches and dark work coats are yelling at a third guy with a thick moustache and a dark work coat and in between yells they’re pushing at his shoulders. I back away, retracing my steps, and take a different turn, and there are the sun-seekers hovering at the far end of the street, so I head round the block thinking fast. I need a couple of minutes out of their sight and on present form I’ve got maybe thirty seconds. If I can lose them for two minutes I could be anywhere and that translates as everywhere and even well-trained secret police operating on home territory can’t look everywhere.
This is where I have my brilliant idea Part Two. Lesser men would have dodged into a doorway or even tried to outrun the men in shades but I propose to go for the gold by disappearing altogether. So I turn the next corner and I’ve come all the way round the block and there at the far end is the bar brawl again, which has now ripened into a punch-up. I peel off my gold suede jacket and toss it through an open doorway. Then I break into a run, pound down the street to the yelling drunks outside the bar, and hit the one being hit by the other two. Not sporting but I have my reasons. He yells and hits me back. I go in with both fists. Being five miles high on a vodka-gin-Glenfiddich cocktail I feel no pain. As the angry octopus of the brawl takes me in its flailing arms and I become dimly aware that my ear is bleeding again the men in suits come loping by and never even give me a glance. They’re not interested in a bunch of drunks beating the shit out of each other. I would guess that ninety per cent of the male population of the city gets blasted ninety per cent of the time. It’s what you do when you have no money, no power, and a state-controlled television system. Nor am I surprised that they’ve let me join their mutual-injury society without any kind of introduction. The losers of this world have big hearts and open arms. Anybody can share in their leisure activities.
After the thumping has been going on for a while the lone brawler decides to call it a day, and backs off down the street, issuing a torrent of incomprehensible curses. His two assailants curse back with undimmed vigour until he passes out of sight. Then they shake hands with each other and shake hands with me and we all go back into the bar. They clap me affectionately on the back and we all compare wounds and I receive my share of dabbing with a wet dishcloth. A glass is pressed into my hands filled to the brim with some brand of firewater which my companions drink without pausing to take breath, so I do likewise, and the result seems to be a general anaesthetic because all the stinging and throbbing of my outer body ceases. My new friends ply me with questions but I’ve decided to be a deaf-mute and only answer them with nods and smiles. So I don’t have a honey-coloured jacket and I’m not English and with luck I’ve disappeared.
By the time the party breaks up it’s dark outside and my mood has changed again. I’m thinking of looking out a quiet cemetery somewhere and lying down to die. We all shake hands again and shake heads and give each other rueful smiles that I translate as, Life is hard and then you die. Then off we roll in our various directions. No goons loom out of the lamplight. The plan has worked. Whether I survive it is another matter.
The evening streets are quiet. Oddly quiet. Maybe there’s a curfew or something and people out after dark get shot dead. I want very much to sit down and hold my head. I want very much to do this sitting down somewhere indoors, out of the vicious wind that has sprung up. My knitted cotton pullover and linen shirt are not proof against the night cold.
Ahead I can see a church with a small door standing half open and a dim light trickling out onto the pavement. I can also hear music. I head for this sanctuary. The music is a string quartet. For a moment I think I’m home again and coming down the path to the back door and the music is Radio 3 which my mother always has blasting away in the kitchen. But the door ahead is not our front door, it’s a small arched entrance in the high side wall of a church. I stand in the doorway to get out of the wind and I close my eyes and I listen to the music and it occurs to me after a while that I’m crying, and that this is probably the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard in my life.
FOURTEEN
A deep thrill of sound streams through the shadowed church. I walk down ancient aisles, over honoured dead. Light in an end chapel, darkness elsewhere: the charged and mighty darkness of high stone vaults. Da-da-da! Da-da-da! Stabbed by sudden strings, the grave flow breaks, and resumes: and now I travel with it, tugged by longing for other worlds, for the journey that never ends, and I’m crying because I’m so smashed and fucked and pissed that I have no resistance left in me. The sweet-strange music carries me beyond hurting, beyond memory, into pure space. I sail like a soap bubble, weightless, transparent, rainbow-eyed. The music sings me and pierces me, bursts me and makes me nothing, as the enchantment of the violin steals through the church and lifts me on its thermal of hope and floats me up, away—Da-da-da! Da-da-da! Buffeted to earth, I come to a stop in the aisle, alone, and the music swirls about me, searching, turning, until the journey begins again, and now I know we’re feeling for the way out, we seek rest, the music and I, we’re caught in the twisted loop of eternity, we seek silence. The violins and I, we loop and twist, round and round, we dip low and rise, and—gone!—all sound gone!—we touch the cool cheek of the longed-for silence—and the questing murmur returns—and again! we slip out of time—and return—and sail on, only now we go nowhere, no goal, no strife, no journey, a surrender of the will, as the great cloud-massed chords return, so stately, so far above all human cares and joys, magisterial as mountains in the mist. So, slowly, the mist closes in, and the prospect fades, and without any moment that can be called an ending, the music has ended.
The musicians sit in a little circle before the lady chapel, candles glowing by their music stands, the last tremors of departing sound hovering about them. For a moment they are still, the music-making finished, the life not yet begun. I am standing in the aisle stupid with loss. How can such beauty have been made by such clowns? They look like refugees from a seaside bingo hall. Dress them in white and you’d have a crown bowls team. What I’m saying is they are all seriously old.
Two old men and two old women: two violins, a viola and a cello. The old women come in big and small, and so do the old men. The big man looks like General de Gaulle, the little man looks like a garden gnome. In a moment they will discover me. I brush my stained cheeks and marvel that these shrivelled oldies can make music that makes me cry. Some composition never knowingly heard by me before, without obvious shape or melody, has awed me into
attention. I feel as if I have never truly listened to music until now. This much is clear to me. I have eaten music like comfort food, demanding foreknowledge of the experience in the shape of tunes, the way small children will only eat what they have eaten many times before. Never have I set out on music as on an adventure, trusting to an unknown guide. But never before have I been in the state I’m now in. So let me recommend disorientation, physical discomfort, and dread of the morrow, for your listening pleasure.
I am being awakened. Parts of me I had not known to exist are stretching and stirring and unfurling within me. Even as I long for home and warmth and sleep, I am waking.
The garden gnome is putting away his cello and speaking to me. It sounds like a greeting.
“Good evening,” I say.
My English of course surprises them. Their puzzled faces turn towards me in grave inspection. Candlelight is supposed tobe flattering, but it is not kind to aged skin. It deepens wrinkles.
“You are English?”
Cello speaks my language.
“Yes.”
He raises the palm of his right hand as if in benediction.
“Oh to be in England, now that April’s here.”
Another poetry lover. What is it about this country? Anyone would think they have a law that obliges them to learn English poetry by heart.
“Right,” I say.
“You are a visitor to our country?”
I don’t deny it. I see his kind eyes probing the bruise on my face, and dried blood in my ear. He asks me where I’m staying and I tell a small lie so as not to distress them.
“The Hotel Bristol.” Then, to move the dialogue on past questions about my presence here that I do not altogether know how to answer, I add, “What were you playing?”
“Shostakovich,” says Cello. “The eighth string quartet. Dedicated to the victims of war.”