But the moment he says the word ‘witch’ I’m thinking of her again. Yes, here on the big back seat of this big ugly modern coach crossing Europe, in this controlled environment, so called, of ducts and vents and conditioned air, this triumph of modern mechanics, I’m thinking of her again, as if a great divide had slid down between myself and the others, some invisible screen with enormous and surely marketable capacities for insulation, or as in a dream where one is shouting screaming clawing unheard unseen only inches from people behaving politely at mundane cocktail parties.
But what do I think of when I think of her like this, suddenly isolated, shut away against my will, or in some curious perversion of the will, in this claustrophobic space, this living tomb I am inexplicably digging for myself? What do I think of? What does it really mean, I ask myself in sudden angry rebellion, to say that you me thinking of her? What is this relation between the enigma that is yourself, this voice of yours, and the enigma that is her, her body, her laugh, the area she occupies in space? Why don’t you turn your mind inward now, I suddenly decide, to resolve this once and for all, to confront, once and for all, these moments of sudden and tremendous alienation, so that you can then clear your thoughts and turn them freely to the pressing questions of your colleagues and your job and your future and your ability to maintain in the manner to which they are accustomed the family you have left, not to mention the wider issues of Italy and of Europe and of how you should behave on this trip in this coach where you are going to support a cause that not only do you not believe in but which you do not even remotely care about, since the only thing you care about, I tell myself, quite ruthlessly now, however much you might like to care about other things, as for example the new furniture you must choose for your flat, and the small car you would like to buy, and your daughter, yes, your daughter, the only thing you care about, I tell myself, is her, or rather what happened to you with her.
And what did happen? Do I even know? Perhaps not. Definitely not. Perhaps I shall never know what happened to me with her. Only I know that of all people I have known she was the one I was happiest with, the person I most idealized, the person I was prepared at the last to leave my wife and daughter for, and simultaneously; yes, exactly simultaneously, and both lines of thought are at once attached to and separate from a thousand corroborative details (words images songs smells moments situations), I am thinking that she is the person who most betrayed me, who most completely and so carelessly destroyed me, the person who most built me up and then casually blew me away, blew me to smithereens, made a nothing of me. Because if a man, I reflect, is already next to nothing when he can’t take his work seriously and when people tell him, albeit kindly (and one is thinking here of old friends and family), that he has failed in his vocation, which was to have been, my vocation, but here one has to laugh, to make some sort of contribution to classical studies, so called, and above all, or so I once wrote on a piece of paper for others more important than myself who might have found a research position for me, to reconstruct, so far as such things can be reconstructed, the psychology of the ancients, to savour their minds and the way they lived inside the natural world, at home in it in a way we never can be, the patterned constellations over their heads throbbing with deities, the deep wells they drew their water from encircled by serpents, and not a single holy text (I’m thinking of pre-Orphic times) or social manifesto, or sniff of political correctness to slip a credit card between themselves and the sacred — if, as I was saying (and how relieved I am when I can digress a moment, when my mind, however briefly, finds some other channel to flood) — if a man is nothing when he can no longer follow even this most tenuous of vocations, classical scholarship, or some similar respectable spin-off, as for example teaching, or translating, or even writing a decent text-book, any sort of respectable and remunerative occupation that might have grown out of that presumptuous vocation, then he is doubly nothing when all at once at forty-three he finds himself leaving his wife and children, he finds himself without his family, so deeply betraying and betrayed that he himself cannot help, cannot help, I tell myself, committing the ultimate betrayal of all, which is not falling into somebody else’s bed (how remarkable that one should ever have imagined such a thing), but abandonment, abandonment. And certainly even if one never could and indeed one never would say that this is her fault any more than mine, or even see much point frankly now in attributing blame to anyone, still it is inescapably true that she had to do with it, with what has happened to me, she still has to do with it, she still holds me under her spell, she is or was and I don’t really know what I’m saying now or what I might mean by this, but it seems to me she is or was or might still be my access to the sacred, the irreducible element in my long negotiation with the other, by which perhaps I mean death, or nature, some part of life’s interminable equation that cannot come out until this harping voice, which is my mind, or part of it, is stilled forever. So that when I think of her, as I was trying to say, it is a witch I think of, a witch I cannot stop thinking of. A witch I am endlessly hunting. And at that very moment Colin leans forward and says her name.
It could be her, he says in his execrable Brummie Italian that makes the students smile. His moustache is the kind airmen used to wear. It could be her, the spy. She’s after that scholarship business they’re giving away, in’t she? He switches to English. And old man Ermani’s something to do with that. She’s in with Ermani.
There. He said her name. Because this is the kind of person Colin is, I reflect, the kind of person who immediately names names of colleagues, speculating without a moment’s hesitation on their betrayal, and also of course he is the person I sometimes spend whole evenings with, talking tottie over glasses of beer and billiards, talking nipple-hue and pubic-definition over cigarettes burning in ashtrays, because one of the things that has come out of all this, this debacle, this retreat from Moscow, is that! have no self-respect. You have no self-respect, I tell myself, the way you talk about sex and women now, with Colin, And when I think of who I was, what I was, at thirty, at thirty-five, and of the airs I put on, discussing matters social, political and moral in appropriate tones of earnestness and concern, and then of what under those airs was really in my mind, that groping after something darker, that strange waiting as if for life to begin, or end, or begin to end, in an explosion of denial of all one imagined one had been, if I think of that then I have to laugh, a long and mirthless laugh, and in the billiard hall with Colin we discuss our most recent conquests and what we have done with them, and we refer to them by some easily distinguishable characteristic, as for example where they live or what they do or what they’re like, so that they might be called Bologna-tottie, for example, or Opera-tottie, or in one case Psycho-tottie or even Armpit-tottie, because it is forbidden to mention their names, since this would suggest involvement and respect, which are taboo for those of us who have decided that boorishness is our only hope, that sex is purely physiological, with the result that the only thing I cannot, I must not, I do not, and I will not tell Colin, is how everything I do with them, with these women I find, or who find me, from time to time — and particularly most recently with one I call Opera-tottie — how everything I do with them is an attempt to make them repeat what I did with her and she with me those halcyon days of three years ago, and I’m talking of course about the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine in Rheims where we did everything and said we would love each other forever. Yes, yes, we went that far, and the curious thing was how we both really meant it and knew it meant nothing. All this must be taboo between Colin and myself, indeed is the difference between Colin and myself, is what is left of my self-respect.