Chapter 7. Foreign Skins
AMSTERDAM
On the train to Amsterdam from Milan, I sit in a compartment with other foreigners, one a Pakistani man, one an English girl of seventeen, one a Belgian man, all of us headed in the same direction for different reasons. The Pakistani and I engage in one of those fitful conversations in which neither is able to make clear what one wants to say. Finally we stand in the compartment passageway and talk about the neon lights on buildings, that blaze of created energy that gives color to our nights. Beauty, he says to me, artificial beauty. Yes, I agree. Why, he asks, are you not married? I don’t want to be. Ahh, he says, scrutinizing me, then may God be with you. I thank him. The rest of the journey he and I are noticeably silent, as if something portentous had occurred. When we arrive at Centraal Station at dusk, the Pakistani gravely shakes my hand and I bow slightly, an atavistic gesture that brings Charles to mind, but one just as grave as his handshake. With a doleful expression he takes his leave, and I’m sure he watched me throw my bag into the taxi and shook his head, certain I was meant for tragedy.
Amsterdam doesn’t seem a suitable place for tragedy, but place — the city, for instance — is as much a mental space as a physical one, and its physical boundaries, its history, are much less concise than any term such as “city” might lead one to think. Am I headed for tragedy, I wonder as the cabdriver brings me to the three-generations hotel. And are conversations with strangers necessarily uncanny?
They give me the same room. It still doesn’t have a television and I’m embarrassed to ask for one. The breakfasts are also the same, which pleases me enormously. Eat the same thing every day and you won’t go mad, also said to me by the friend who insisted upon keeping a diary for the same reason.
I think I understand why so many English plays take place in the restaurants or sitting rooms of hotels. Apart from the cheapness of their production, any aggregate of people, drawn or thrown together and involuntarily in each other’s company, poses dramatic possibilities. It’s not that you expect anything very fantastic to happen — the American woman named Helen is not going to do a strip in the breakfast room, the Irish guy called Pete is not going to sing an aria just because he feels like it, the German Ulrich will not fall to his knees and confess some terrible crime — there will be no orgy. We are all remarkable for our constraint. If something like that did happen — if Olivier, the Frenchman, exposed himself to me in front of my fellow diners — the course of playwriting would have to be altered, as would the site of the hotel. And I would not now be playing at eating this raisin bun, or krentebollen, in the breakfast room. I’d be in a state beyond words, blood racing, or I might be laughing nervously. Olivier merely smiles at me, a sly guarded slash of a grin, throws his book, Truffaut’s Hitchcock, into his leather satchel, pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and strides past me, brushing against my arm ever so slightly. Why do I feel I’ve seen this scene before? And will I end up in bed with him? Is my life as predictable as it sometimes appears?
* * *
It’s cold in Amsterdam and I’m lying in bed, covered by an eiderdown. The window has no view since the hotel is almost attached to another building, joined like a Siamese twin. Why are they called Siamese? A cold gray light filters in, unwelcoming but atmospheric, right for staying in bed. Called Siamese because the first pair were born there? Or, more pejoratively, another insult to the East, deeply embedded. I meditate on this, although I believe meditation is meant to free one’s mind and thoughts like these don’t. But these are the only thoughts I seem to have.
Jessica meditates every day, at the same time. Arlette works out. New Zealander John smokes dope mixed with tobacco. I lie in bed for long periods of time, inert. I suppose a Dutch summer is what we’re having, since it might as well be the fall, spring or winter. That’s what Pete, the Irishman from London, says. He can also tell you about the weather in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Istanbul and further east. He’s one of those devilishly handsome guys, a bit androgynous, tall and nervous — he played rhythm guitar in a band in Dublin. Pete holds things together in a loose sort of way. I take him for a dealer, cars or dope. He seems familiar. Olivier’s gay and so is Pete. Life isn’t as predictable as it often seems.
The third-generation hotel guy, Huub, is interested in Helen, an actress from New York, and she’s attentive to him, with his light yellow hair, large teeth and height of about 6′7″ when not wearing his cowboy boots which make him even taller. He seems too big for the small breakfast room where I see him every morning. Amiable and always wearing a clean white baker’s apron, Huub is drawn to or in awe of Helen’s dark beauty and studied gestures. Helen and I must have been together in the same room many times, because we know each other and keep our distance, as if we also know that further acquaintance would lead to futility. Pete and Olivier like each other and go out dancing late at night. In the morning the charged glances that fly around the breakfast room make the Dutch breakfast an extraordinary affair, even though it’s the same every day and would please Wittgenstein. Jessica once accused me of being voyeuristically engaged in other people’s lives. Which is not the same as liking gossip, but I couldn’t convince her of that. I told her my interest is more naked than hers.
Cities aren’t naked. But Amsterdam is more literally a naked city than New York. Window curtains are left open, and apartment inhabitants are casually on view not unlike the prostitutes who sit in other Amsterdam windows, half-naked, their rooms and bodies open to view, to the public, to commerce. Amsterdam isn’t a naked city. Not knowing the language or the customs, to me everyone and everything is thoroughly clothed, wrapped in the thick mysterious outerwear of the other. They have foreign tongues and foreign skins that protect them from outsiders. Or aliens.
A brown café with hanging plants is the harmless background against which I review Jessica’s latter-day revelation of pregnancy, as well as Alfred’s bite on my cheek. Such thoughts are easy to be occupied by. Not like living as a citizen in an occupied country the way Arlette’s mother and father did. A real-photo postcard that Arlette gave me documents my inexperience of that kind of occupation, showing the first tanks, Leclerc’s tanks, as they entered Paris to liberate it. People are thrusting their arms into the air, waving scarves ecstatically, welcoming the men on the tanks that signify the end of war. That kind of release, liberation, can never be merely personal, and exists on a scale different from the minute, regular events that make up any, my, life. Even if I could forget the letter my best friend of twelve years sent me after one bad fight, which revealed that for half of those years she’d been estranged from me and I hadn’t known it, even if I could get over it, be liberated from it, no one would celebrate with me this tiny release from an awful occupation. The social is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
Aborigines decide to forget an event if after great discussion and analysis its meaning cannot be determined. For instance if a child disappears because a dingo took it or killed it and after many searches they can’t find the child, having done all they can, the loss will not again be spoken of, falling under the heading “mystery,” that which is beyond explanation. I’d love to be able to reverence mystery and give it its due, let something go, but perhaps for the same reason a Bob Dylan song in Italian sounds strange to an American in Italy, I wouldn’t be able to think for long in a really different language, assuming that that language mirrors its ideas. In one African language the word for money and rain is the same. If there isn’t a word for guilt, movies or sex in some culture, could I really exist there?