Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

He wakes early next morning, and goes out at once, anxious to get to grips with the city. The air is still cool when he comes out onto the street, and the sunlight has that soft, early-morning freshness which makes even the cars and buses seem alert and hopeful. People wearing light suits and crisp dresses are walking to work, glancing at newspapers as they go. Howard walks with them, his eyes moving from person to person, from object to object, trying to take everything in. What kind of place is this? What sort of feel does it have? Where does it remind him of? He forms a new general conclusion at every third step. Focusing on a plump man with dark hair at a bus stop he decides the people are Latin. But — as he takes in two girls with long fair hair — there is a North European element as well. A black street-sweeper; they have a racial situation. An elegant fire-hydrant, an acceptable litter-bin, a well-thought-out pedestrian-barrier; the standards of design are high. He stops to look in a shop window. It’s an electric shop, with a shining chrome display of toasters, coffee-pots, and electric carving-knives. The prices range from 47.25 to 5,040.80. Some of the apparatus is made by Philips and Westinghouse, some by manufacturers he has never heard of. It all looks slightly unfamiliar. But good. He likes the general impression it makes.

He stops at a kiosk and buys all the better-class local papers he can find, together with an airmail edition of the Times, a street map, and a green Michelin guide to the city. He takes them to a cafe terrace in the sun, orders coffee and croissants, and starts on the papers. He finds them very difficult to follow. The CS have walked out of the annual conference of the CDF, he reads. The CCU-CLC is split down the centre over the CGTC dispute. Thierry has declared his support for Dallapiccola; but there are signs that Pugachev may be about to break off his “Long Courtship” of Guizot. Thierry … Guizot … CDF … the names are all faintly familiar, and have a serious look about them. There is quite a lot about God, though, of whom even Howard has heard. 100,000 VOIENT DIEU A L’OUVERTURE DE L’EXPO “TECHNOLOGIE PUBLICITAIRE.” “Gott: Ohne Vertrauensvotum much’ ich nicht welter!” “Dieu serait contrarie par la hausse des produits laitiers.” The domestic politics in the Times look embarrassingly homely by comparison. “An incomes policy” — “the Foreign Secretary” — “Labour backbenchers cheered” … how shabbily comprehensible it all seems!

He licks butter and flakes of croissant off his finger, and turns to the Michelin, impatient to get started on actually looking at things. His eyes run quickly down the page. “Centre administratif de l’univers. . Capitale des Capitales … une cite fourmillante d’idées … ses splendeurs inepuisables… sa beauté ‘morale’… ses mille et un plaisirs. .

“UN PEU D’HISTOIRE: C’est id qu ’est arrive, vers l’an 67, selon la legende, St. Jean le Theologien…. legerement entrâiné par son enthousiasme, sans doute, il a decrit une ville ’d’un or pur, semblable à du verre clair,’ qui était longue, large, et haute de ’douze mille stades’ (240 km.)…. Quoi qu’il en soit, les archeologues ont découvert, sous le parking du Café Apocalypse actuel, les restes d ’une porte magniflque en or et en pierres precieuses…. (Pour la visite, s’addresser au gardien. Fermé le dimanche) …”

The list of things to be seen goes on for several pages, and most of them have three stars. It’s suggested that you should linger on the great avenues and squares in the morning and afternoon, to see the swarms of officials and experts who administer the universe hurrying to and from their offices; or sit for a while in the shady walks of the various public gardens, and watch these same officials’ wives proudly taking the baby out for an airing. There are certain bars where artists and writers are always to be seen, talking animatedly as they set the world to rights. The pageantry surrounding the court is a feast of spectacle and venerable tradition.

The museums are going to take quite a lot of time. They contain all the world’s originals. Howard never realized — up to now he has seen only copies of the Night Watch and the Birth of Venus; indeed of everything, from electron microscopes and tin openers to the muddle of plasticine, string, and electric cord in the toy-drawer at home. It’s a real metropolis.

He pays the bill and sets out briskly, Michelin under his arm, passing newsbills for the popular papers which say:

DIEU ET MARGARET: SE SERAIENT-ILS

BROUILLES?

He walks along a broad, straight avenue lined with luxury shops. Chauffeurs wait at the kerb beside long, illegally parked cars. Women with large dark glasses and small hats go by, leading dogs. Howard looks into the shop windows as he passes and sees himself walking eagerly along. He disappears briefly into revolving doors and uniformed doormen, then reappears among discreet silk ties, or cashmere sweaters and handmade brogues. He notices an odd thing about himself: he looks right. He is still himself — still rather short and tubby, with a high forehead, and dry hair that turns upwards and back in the wind of his passage. He still leans forward slightly as he walks, as if he is just about to shake hands with an old friend, and he still has a slight benevolent smile about his lips. But in these surroundings the whole effect seems somehow natural. This is partly because — as he realizes with a shock — he is remarkably well dressed. His light summer suit and pale striped silk tie are for once exactly like the light summer suits and pale striped silk ties that everybody else is wearing. And yet, at the same time, they are entirely different. He has at last achieved his ambition to look both indistinguishable and distinctive.

Also, as he discovers after a little experiment, the windows of the shops here are constructed so that you don’t have to keep looking sideways to see yourself in them. You can catch sight of yourself looking at other things than your own reflection, wearing unself-conscious expressions of interest and curiosity. He sees himself crossing the road — deftly, like a native, knowing exactly which way to look for the traffic. His shoulders are broader than he had supposed, he notices as he walks away from himself; his bottom sticks out less. He watches his expression carefully as he goes up to a beggar and puts a coin in his tin. He has always feared that he looks embarrassed or patronizing on these occasions. But not at all. He finds that he looks at the beggar intensely, as if he would like to know his life story, and smiles quite naturally.

The beggar is plainly moved, and goes on looking curiously at Howard for some moments after he has walked on.

He threads his way through narrow alleys where the sun never penetrates. Fat women and bald-headed men standing in the doorways of tiny shops make jokes to him which he can’t quite understand, and shout ribaldries to each other about him — clapping him on the shoulder to indicate they’re not serious, and cutting slices of cheese and sausage for him to try.

In a quiet street beside a canal small children are playing. One of them comes tottering up to him, falls, and pitches a red plastic fire-engine at his feet. Gravely he stands the child up, and restores the fire-engine. Old ladies sitting on benches under the trees beam at him.

Near the railway station he finds shops with dusty windows full of strange rubber objects; bulging, pink, obscure. Long legs and pointed breasts wait in doorways. Lips and eyelashes smile at him.

He walks along the top of ancient city walls, passing secretly among the rooftops, through a world of slates and television aerials and caged birds at dormer windows; emerges upon high places where the whole city — roofs, towers, domes, and lives — is gathered at his feet, and the immense acreage of its noise comes up to him like the murmur of the sea.

And he stops at cafes, for a sit-down with a beer or an aperitif or a coffee, without so much as noticing the price, or whether it’s too near lunchtime.

After lunch (in a little restaurant with a vine shading the tables, where the proprietor comes out for a chat, and orders him a brandy on the house; 37.20, wine and service included; astonishing value) he lies down on his bed, and with delicious gradualness, watching the bars of sunlight stirring gently on the half-drawn curtains, falls asleep.

Even his dreams in this place are extraordinary.

He dreams he is sitting at the wheel of his car at the traffic lights, unable to drive off because he can’t decide whether to kiss Rose when he arrives, or whether to ask her for a cheese and chutney sandwich instead, or where to go for his holidays. His wife is standing at the window, looking out at the rain.

“But what do you feel yourself?” she keeps asking. “Do you want to go back to that place in Brittany again? Or shall we borrow the Waylands’ cottage? Or what?”

He can do nothing, though, because the stuffing is coming out of the armchair he is sitting in, and before anything else can happen he has to decide whether to get it recovered or buy a new one.

“But you must have some kind of idea what sort of chair you want to spend your holidays in!” says his wife.

By this time the light is red again. So nothing can be done for another year.

In the late afternoon, as he is walking past the Little Palace (*** Bramante 1512, chapel by Michelangelo, later additions by Bernini, Wren, Pugin, and van der Rohe), whistles begins to shrill, and policemen appear from nowhere to stop the traffic and hold back pedestrians from crossing the road. Howard peers over the shoulders of the people in front of him, trying to see what’s going on. Beyond the palace railings in the distance a handful of white-haired old men in some kind of grotesque medieval robes emerge from an archway. Two of them are wearing spectacles, and one a hearing aid. They form a group in the courtyard, some of them talking to each other, some walking up and down, one chatting to the policemen at the gate. Howard thinks to himself that he must write to his children tonight and tell them that he has seen his first angels. It’s just the kind of thing they like to put in their newsbooks at school. He wonders if he could get postcards of them.

Suddenly a police-car emerges from the archway in the palace, its blue light flashing, followed by a closed Cadillac with tinted windows and a pennant on the wing. The two cars swing out of the palace gates, and disappear down the avenue. The angels go back inside. The policemen controlling the pedestrians beckon them across the road.

Now that Howard has thought about his children, he misses them painfully. This is the worst time of day for the solitary traveller, when the light begins to mellow, and life slows down, and the evening looms ahead. This is the moment when it comes into his mind to ask himself what he’s doing in this place; to see the meaninglessness of his business there, and the hollowness of his enjoyments; to lose sight suddenly of what it is in the texture of life that has ever occupied his attention and led him forward.

But just before this happens, while the taste of melancholy on his tongue is strong enough to set off the sweetness of the place, and of his freedom to enjoy it, but not yet strong enough to overpower it, he sees the woman who is gazing at him from the balustrade of a terrace looking down on the street. For a moment they look straight into each other’s eyes. Hers are dark and serious, and accept his existence. She looks away. But he doesn’t hesitate. He runs straight up the stone steps leading to the terrace — it’s part of a small public garden — rounds the urn at the top, and comes face to face with her, with no idea at all inside his head as to what words will emerge from his mouth.

“I beg your pardon,” he says, “but when is lighting-up time here?”