All the same, it would not surprise me if one of these people came and spoke to me of our shared past, however distant and tangential. In Contatti!, Roberto tells the waiter that he has known the Robinsons for many years. Ci conosciamo da molti anni. Peter Robinson adds that they are hoping to purchase a casa di campagna. There is a small circular table fixed to the floor in front of my chair and I put my head on it and sleep for a while. It is a cluttered, gray-lighted sleep suffused with the hum of the ferry and with the same feeling of familiarity, which, now that my eyes are closed and it has nothing to fix on, washes over me in unstructured waves until my knowledge of where I am and what I am doing has been broken up and mingled with things I have thought or dreamed or imagined, mingled and mingled into a gray expanse like the sea, with just a few Italian verbs floating on the surface. When I sit up again the northern coast of France is lying in a rocky beige-colored crust along the horizon. A piercing female voice begins to issue from the loudspeaker warning us of the imminent closure of the canteen. These tidings do not concern us: we are finished with this boat. We strain for release from its numb enchantment. The children are hurling their felt-tip pens back into their rucksacks and urging us into our coats. We go out on deck as the cliffs of Dieppe bear down on us and the wind whirls in a crazed cyclone on the ferry’s snub front, lifting our hair into maniac shapes, tugging at our clothes. The melancholy Dieppe sky is deep gray, its sand-colored rocks friable-seeming and transitory. It looks like a place that would forget itself if it could. After a while we go back inside and file along toward the back of the boat, where people are forming long migratory queues and a girl in a white uniform is clearing piles of smeared plates from the tables and the voice on the loudspeaker is bidding us farewell and a safe onward journey.
The road out of Dieppe winds round and round, round and round and round its empty green hinterland, as aimless and methodical as a geriatric waltz around a deserted dance floor. Beneath a sky the color of smelted iron, raw patches of development stand out on the hills above the port: new supermarkets and warehouses, half-built roads, modern buildings standing in empty car parks, a double row of giant streetlights heading inexplicably off into a field. From a distance, the inharmonious spectacle of these creations, in which no one object relates to any other, gives it an appearance of almost human inwardness and alienation, like a crowd of total strangers caught in a random moment on a police security camera. We pass a building like a child’s drawing of a Swiss chalet and a building like a cardboard box and a building like a playground climbing frame painted in primary colors. We pass Gemo and Mr. Bricolage and Decathlon. We pass a low, ranchlike building in a tundra of tarmac called Buffalo Grill, with a giant pair of white plastic cow’s horns attached to its tiled roof. The air-temperature gauge on the dashboard reads twelve degrees Celsius. The sky looks swollen and bruised. We revolve three times around a roundabout trying to identify the road to Rouen. The roundabout is planted with clumps of marigolds in forensic rows, like a cemetery. I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth. An hour out of Dieppe, a shout goes up from the back seat. We are running through somber green countryside now, past meadows grazed by white Charolais cows, past flat affectless fields under low skies, past narrow little lanes that meander out of sight like unfinished sentences. The children have observed that the temperature gauge has risen by two full degrees. An hour later, on the other side of Rouen, they shout again.
In the front seat we are discussing names. My husband has tired of his name: at forty-one, he wishes to change it. This is an unusual wish, but it does not surprise me. As a small child he was sent to boarding school, where his name was a graven fact on every sock and book and toothbrush in his possession, on the toy rabbit he hugged so hard over the years that it became crushed flat, on the metal trunk he dragged behind him along the platform, beside the waiting train; inscribed on the polished plate trophies won by long-disbanded teams, on watches and pens and handkerchiefs, on yellowed monogrammed towels. He has an antique silver christening mug engraved with his initials — ACC — and there are portraits of his ancestors, frowning clerics, on his parents’ walls. It is almost as though his name, so concrete and indelible, preceded him in everything he did so that he was forever dogged by a sense of obligation. I do not know what this is like, only that it is the opposite of what the artist feels when he puts his name to a canvas. It is the opposite of self-expression. As a child my own name seemed strange to me, abstract, like a mathematical symbol whose representative function remained mysterious even once I’d grown accustomed to what it looked like. It was only when I began to write books and put my name to them that I understood its associative purpose. All the same, an artist might prefer a name less constricted by his mortal soul. The artists of the Renaissance often had such names: Veronese (“the man from Verona”), il Tintoretto (“the dyer’s son”), il Perugino (“the bloke from Perugia”). A few years ago ACC discarded his profession, removed his name from the company letterhead and the ledger of good works. He began to take photographs, portraits of people whose names he writes out in full. They are unknown people, though at a certain level — police files, prison records, social security databases — their citations are as numerous and indelible as ACC’s own. This explains part of his attraction to them. But now he wants a new name to call himself when he looks through the camera lens. I suggest Ace, or even the Ace. It seems to me to be just what is required. Go on, I say; why don’t you?
We are barreling toward Paris now, which sits on the map like a great glamorous spider in its web. The road has become crowded. There are old, slouching cars with winking indicators and big glittering ogre-like cars with black windows, tiny battered cars with frantic plumes of smoke fluttering from their exhausts and cars towing enormous caravans. There are trucks and lorries and untidy vans of every description, all blaring their horns. The children play Sweet and Sour out of the window. They wave and smile at everyone who passes. The Sweets wave and smile back. The Sours don’t. The children keep a tally on a piece of paper. As we near the Paris périphérique the road becomes a torrent, an onward rush of roaring, barging traffic all hurtling with carefree ferocity toward the center. In a way I would like to join it: I don’t know, perhaps it would be easier. Always the effort of resistance, of countermotion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility. Overhead the sky has come apart in great fraying scarves of pale gray and blue. Bursts of soft sunlight fall and fade and bloom again on the windscreen of the car. The temperature rises another notch. On the back seat, the census of the human disposition finds that people are in general more sweet than sour. Weaving and hesitating and being abused on all sides, we swing gloriously south, onto the Autoroute du Soleil.