Things I Don't Want to Know

One. Political Purpose

That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing. It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself. Escalators, which in the early days of their invention were known as ‘travelling staircases’ or ‘magic stairways’, had mysteriously become danger zones.

I made sure I had lots to read on train journeys. This was the first time in my life I had ever been pleased to read newspaper columns about the things that happened to the journalist’s lawnmower. When I wasn’t absorbed in this kind of thing (which I experienced as being shot with a tranquilliser dart) the book I read most was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short novel, Of Love and Other Demons. Out of all the loved and loveless characters dreaming and scheming in hammocks under the blue Caribbean sky, the only one that really interested me was Bernarda Cabrera, the dissolute wife of a Marquis who has given up on life and his marriage. To escape from her own life Bernarda Cabrera is introduced to ‘magic chocolate’ from Oaxaca by her slave lover and starts to live in a state of delirium. Addicted to sacks of cacao and fermented honey, she spends most of the day lying naked on her bedroom floor, ‘enveloped in the glow of her lethal gases’. By the time I got off the train and started to weep on the escalator that apparently was inviting me to read my mind (at a time in my life I preferred to read other things) I began to regard Bernarda as a role model.

I knew things had to change when one week I found myself staring intently at a poster in my bathroom titled ‘The Skeletal System’. This featured a human skeleton with its inner organs and bones labelled in Latin and which I constantly misread as ‘The Societal System’. I made a decision. If escalators had become machines with torrid emotionality, a system that transported me to places I did not want to go, why not book a flight to somewhere I actually did want to go?

Three days later, I zipped up my brand new laptop and found myself sitting in aisle seat 22C heading for Palma, Majorca. As the plane took off I realised that being stranded between the earth and the sky was a bit like being on an escalator. The man unlucky enough to be sitting next to a weeping woman looked like he had once been in the army and now spent his life lying on a beach. I was pleased my cheap airline buddy was a tough guy with hard square shoulders and jagged welts of sunburn striping his thick neck but I did not want anyone to attempt to comfort me. If anything my tears seemed to send him into a tantric shopping coma because he called for the air hostess and ordered two cans of beer, a vodka and coke, an extra coke, a tube of Pringles, a scratchcard, a teddy bear stuffed with mini chocolate bars, a Swiss watch on special offer, and asked the crew if the airline had one of those questionnaires to fill in where you get a free holiday if it’s drawn out of the hat. The tanned military man pushed the teddy bear into my face and said, ‘That’ll cheer you up if nothing will,’ as if the bear was a handkerchief with glass eyes sewn on it.

When the plane landed in Palma at 11p.m., the only taxi driver prepared to drive me up the steep mountain roads might have been blind because he had white clouds floating across both his eyes. No one in the queue wanted to admit they were anxious he would crash the car and avoided him when he pulled up at the taxi rank. After we negotiated the price, he managed to drive without looking at the road and instead had his fingers on the dial of the radio while staring at his feet. An hour later he began to manoeuvre his Mercedes up a narrow road lined with pine trees that I knew went on for a deceptively long time. He managed to get half way up and then suddenly shouted NO NO NO and abruptly stopped the car. For the first time all spring I wanted to laugh. We both sat in the dark, a rabbit running through the grass, neither of us knowing what to do next. In the end I gave him a generous tip for driving so dangerously and started the long walk up the dark path that I vaguely remembered led to the hotel.

The smell of wood fires in the stone houses below and the bells on sheep grazing in the mountains and the strange silence that happens in between the bells chiming suddenly made me want to smoke. I had long given up smoking but at the airport I had bought a packet of Spanish cigarettes, fully intending to start again. I sat down on a damp rock under a tree that was a little way off the path, pushed my laptop between my shins and lit up under the stars.

Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way and just as I was thinking I might have to sleep on the mountain that night, I heard someone shout my name. A number of things happened at once. I heard the sound of someone on the path and then I saw the feet of a woman in red leather shoes making her way towards me. She shouted my name again but for some reason I was unable to attach the name she was shouting to myself. Suddenly a torch was being shone in my face and when she saw me sitting on a rock under a tree smoking a cigarette, the woman said, ‘Ah there you are.’

The woman’s face was shockingly pale and I wondered if she was mad. But then I remembered I was the mad one because she was trying to get me off my rock on the edge of a mountain dressed for the beach on a night when the temperature had fallen to below freezing.

‘I saw you walking in to the forest. I think you are lost eh?’

I nodded, but must have looked confused because she said, ‘I am Maria.’

Maria was the owner of the hotel and she looked much older and sadder than the last time we met. She probably thought the same about me.

‘Hello Maria.’

I stood up. ‘Thank you for coming to find me.’

We walked in silence back to the hotel and she pointed with her torch to the turning where I had missed the path, as if she was a detective gathering evidence for something neither of us could fathom.

People who book into this pensión want particular things: a quiet place near the citrus orchards and waterfalls, cheap large rooms, a calm place to rest and think. There is no mini bar or TV, no hot water, no room service. Never advertised in tourist guides, word of mouth alone made sure it was always full in season. The first time I stayed here was in my early twenties when I was writing my first novel on a Smith Corona typewriter which I carried in a pillow case; then in my late thirties when I was in love and carrying what was then called a ‘luggable’ computer. I had to buy a special bag for it, a long rectangle with extra padding and little compartments for the mouse and keyboard. I was very proud of it and even prouder of being able to set it up in any hotel room with the extension lead I had bought at the airport. The parched August afternoon I lugged my luggable (very heavy) computer up this mountain, plus all my other bags, I was wearing a short blue cotton dress and suede walking shoes and was as happy as it is possible to be. When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense. I liked being on my own with the knowledge that I was returning to my sweetheart, the great love of my life. I phoned him every evening from the old fashioned call box next to the pizzeria, holding on tight to the fistful of sweaty 100 peseta coins that connected us to each other’s voice, rolling the coins in to the slot, believing that love, Great Love, was the only season I would ever live in.

If love had changed to something else, something I did not recognise, the terrace at the front of the pensión with its tables and chairs placed under the olive trees looked exactly the same as it did when I last stayed here. Everything was the same. The ornate tiled floor. The heavy wooden doors that opened out onto the ancient palm tree in the courtyard. The polished grand piano that stood majestically in the hallway. The thick cold stone of the whitewashed walls. My room was exactly the same too, except this time when I opened the doors of the worm eaten wardrobe and saw the same four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders.

I started to perform the familiar rituals of travelling alone, as I had done so often in my life; untangling wires and precariously plugging in the European adapter with two pins, switching on my computer, charging up my mobile, arranging on the small writing desk the two books and one notebook I had brought with me. First of all the well thumbed Of Love and Other Demons, and secondly, George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca, an account of the year she spent in Majorca with her lover, Frederick Chopin, and her two children from her first marriage. The notebook I had brought with me was labelled ‘POLAND, 1988’. It would probably be more romantic to describe it as ‘my journal’, or ‘my diary’, but I thought of it as a note book, perhaps even a sheriff’s notebook because I was always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.

In 1988 I was taking notes in Poland, but what for? I found myself flicking through its pages to remind myself.

In October 1988 I had been invited to write about a performance directed by the renowned Polish actress, Zofia Kalinska, who had collaborated on many productions with the theatre director, painter and auteur, Tandeusz Kantor. My notebook starts at Heathrow, London. I am on a plane (LOT airlines) heading for Warsaw. Nearly all the passengers are chain smoking and the entire female cabin crew have dyed their hair platinum blonde. When they wheel the trolley down the aisle to deliver an unidentifiable ‘soft drink’ (cherry juice?) in a grey plastic cup to the enthusiastic smokers, they resemble belligerent nurses delivering medication to their troublesome patients. This scene turned up in a novel I wrote two decades later — the cabin crew on LOT airlines become nurses who have been imported from Lithuania, Odessa and Kiev to deliver electroshock therapy to patients in a hospital in Kent, England.

This novel, it seems, is what I had been gathering evidence for, twenty years before actually writing it.

And then my notebook tells me I am on a train in Warsaw, wagon 5, seat 71, heading for Krakow where Zofia Kalinska is based. Here I witness a scene that would not be out of place in one of Kantor’s performances. A soldier is saying goodbye to three women — his sister, his mother and his girlfriend. First he kisses his mother’s hand. Then he kisses his sister’s cheek. Finally he kisses his girlfriend’s lips. I also note that Poland’s economy is collapsing, that the government has increased food prices by 40 per cent, that there have been strikes and demonstrations at the iron and steel works in Nowa Huta and the Gdansk ship yard.

It seems that what interests me (in my sheriff’s notebook) is the act of kissing in the middle of a political catastrophe.

I am in Krakow. Zofia Kalinska wears two (shamanistic) necklaces to the rehearsal of her play: one made from cloudy turquoise and one from wormwood. I note that absinthe is made from wormwood. Didn’t the ancient Egyptians soak wormwood in wine and use it as a remedy for various afflictions? I had read somewhere that absinthe, with its heady mix of fennel and green anise was given to the French troops in the early nineteenth century to prevent malaria. The soldiers returned to France with a taste for the ‘green fairy’. If they were not bitten by mosquitoes, they had nevertheless been nipped by a winged creature, a metaphor, as they lay wounded and hallucinating on their camp beds. I remind myself to ask Zofia about her necklaces. She is in her early sixties and has performed in some of the most famous avant-garde theatre productions in Europe — including Kantor’s Dead Class, in which a number of apparently dead characters are confronted by mannequins who remind them of their youthful dreams. Today, Zofia has a few notes to give to her Western European actors.

‘The form must never be bigger than the content, especially in Poland. This is to do with our history: suppression, the Germans, the Russians, we feel ashamed because we have so much emotion. We must use emotion carefully in the theatre, we must not imitate emotion. In my productions, which have been described as “surreal”, there is no such thing as a surreal emotion. At the same time, we are not making psychological theatre, we are not imitating reality.’

She tells a young actress to speak up.

‘To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish. We always hesitate when we wish for something. In my theatre, I like to show the hesitation and not to conceal it. A hesitation is not the same as a pause. It is an attempt to defeat the wish. But when you are ready to catch this wish and put it in to language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.’

And then she has an idea. She says the costume for the actress playing Medea is all wrong. Medea murdered her children so she should wear a dress with a hole cut out of its stomach. Zofia explains that this is a poetic image, but the actress must not speak her lines like poetry.

It occurred to me that I had jogged along with Zofia’s notes to her actors in my own writing for much of my life. Content should be bigger than form — yes, that was a subversive note to a writer like myself who had always experimented with form, but it is the wrong note for a writer who has never experimented with form. And it is the wrong note for a writer who has never wondered what would happen if the Warsaw soldier kissed his mother on her lips and his girlfriend on her hand. And yes, there was no such thing as a surreal emotion. Her other message was that emotion, which always terrifies the avant-garde’s stiff upper lip, is better conveyed in a voice that is like ice. As for the strategies a writer of fiction might employ to unfold the ways in which her characters attempt to defeat a long held wish — for myself it is the story of this hesitation that is the point of writing.

I did not know why I had bought the Polish notebook with me to Majorca. Actually I did know. Scribbled on the back of the cover were two Polish menus that I had asked Zofia to translate into English for me:

White borscht with boiled egg and sausage.

Traditional hunter’s stew with mash potatoes.

Soft drink.

OR

Traditional Polish cucumber soup.

Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and mash potatoes. Soft drink.

I had used these same menus in the as-yet unpublished novel Swimming Home I had written two decades later, the novel in which the cabin crew on LOT airlines had morphed into nurses from Odessa, but I did not want to think about this. I closed the notebook. After a while I placed it on the small writing desk and then I rearranged the chair.

The next morning, when I woke up at 8am I could hear Maria shouting at her brother who was shouting at the cleaner. I had forgotten how everyone shouts in Southern Europe and how doors bang and dogs bark all the time and from the valley there is always the sound of more banging from the building of stone walls, the mending of sheds and chicken coops and fences.

And another sound. Something so eerily familiar, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears. As I made my way down to the terrace for breakfast, I heard a woman sobbing. HUH HUH HUH. I did not want to hear that some of the HUHs were longer than others and that these carried the most sorrow for the length of the breath. The sobbing came from the utility room just above the terrace where the brooms and mops were kept. Maria was weeping into her arms that were resting on top of the washing machine. She saw me make my way to a table and turned her back on me.

Ten minutes later she brought out breakfast on a silver tray: small bowls of home-made yogurt and dark honey, warm bread rolls, a large cup of aromatic coffee with a jug of milk on the side, a glass of spring water with a slice of lemon in it, and two fresh apricots. As she unloaded the tray, Maria never once asked me about my life in London or I about hers in Majorca. I made sure I barely looked at her but I reckoned I was a detective gathering evidence for something neither of us could fathom.

Maria was one of the few women in this Catholic village who had neither married or had children. Perhaps she was wary of these rituals because she knew they would ultimately exploit her. Whatever, it was clear that she had other kinds of projects in mind. She had designed the irrigation system that watered the citrus orchard, and of course, the ambience of this inexpensive, tranquil hotel was designed by her too. If it mostly attracted solo travellers, it was possible that Maria had quietly and slyly constructed a place that was a refuge from The Family. A place that was also her home (her brother lived elsewhere with his wife) but a home she did not entirely own — all financial arrangements were handled by her brother. All the same, Maria had made a bid for a life that did not include the rituals of marriage and motherhood.

As I bit into the sweet orange flesh of the apricot, I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children — we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally-programmed to run to our babies when they cried) in to someone we did not entirely understand.

Feminine fertility and pregnancy not only continue to fascinate our collective imagination, but also serve as a sanctuary for the sacred. . Today motherhood is imbued with what has survived of religious feeling.

— Julia Kristeva, Motherhood Today (2005)

Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life. The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should ‘be’ and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the societal system, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. All the same, we felt guilty about unveiling this delusion in case the niche we had made for ourselves and our much-loved children collapsed in ruins around our muddy trainers — which were probably sewn together by child slaves in sweatshops all over the globe. It was mysterious because it seemed to me that the male world and its political arrangements (never in favour of children and women) was actually jealous of the passion we felt for our babies. Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure — and unhappy too — but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled — we were to be Strong Modern Women whilst being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.

Something strange had happened to the way a particular group of the women I met in the school playground used language. They said words that were childlike but not as interesting as the words children made up. Words like groany moany smiley fabby cheery veggie sniffy. And they made an uneasy distance between themselves and the working class mothers they called chavs. The chavs in the playground had less money and less education and ate more chocolate and crisps and other nice things. They said words like, Oh my God, I didn’t know where to look. In the balance I thought these were the more exciting words.

Oh My God

I did not know where to look

If the Oh My Gods were channelling William Blake, the language that came out of the mouths of the smiley sniffy groany cheery women was not so much grown up as grown down. I listened to all those mothers in a daze because I knew we were all exhausted and making the best of our new niche in the Societal System. This fact made us all a bit odd in my view.

Adrienne Rich, who I was reading at the time, said it exactly like it is: ‘No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.’ That was the weird thing. It was becoming clear to me that Motherhood was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness. This male consciousness was male unconsciousness. It needed its female partners who were also mothers to stamp on her own desires and attend to his desires, and then to everyone else’s desires. We had a go at cancelling our own desires and found we had a talent for it. And we put a lot of our life’s energy into creating a home for our children and for our men.

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began. The most difficult thing in tackling this subject is to get down to the basic and utterly manageable terms in which women see the fantastic challenge a house represents: how to provide a centre for children and men at the same time. . The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it — can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.

— Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1987)

There is no one who said it more ruthlessly, or kindly, than Marguerite Duras. There is no feminist critical theory or philosophy I have read that cuts deeper. Marguerite wore massive spectacles and she had a massive ego. Her massive ego helped her crush delusions about femininity under each of her shoes — which were smaller than her spectacles. When she wasn’t too drunk she found the intellectual energy to move on and crush another one. Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December. I hear Duras’s hard-earned ego speaking to me, to me, to me, in all the seasons.

Men and women are different, after all. Being a mother isn’t the same as being a father. Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they’re on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden; they devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured, and sometimes she sleeps because they are on her body. Nothing like that happens with fathers.

But perhaps women secrete their own despair in the process of being mothers and wives. Perhaps, their whole lives long, they lose their rightful kingdom in the despair of every day. Perhaps their youthful aspirations, their strength, their love, all leak away through wounds given and received completely legally. Perhaps that’s what it is — that women and martyrdom go together. And that women who are completely fulfilled by showing off their competence, their skill at games, their cooking and their virtue are two-a-penny.

— Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1987)

Was Marguerite Duras suggesting that women are not so much a dark continent as a well-lit suburb? If maternity is the only female signifier, we know that the baby on our lap, if it is healthy and well cared for, will eventually turn away from our breast and see someone else. He will see an other. He will see the world and he will fall in love with it. Some mothers go mad because the world that made them feel worthless is the same world with which their children fall in love. The suburb of femininity is not a good place to live. Nor is it wise to seek refuge inside our children because children are always keen to make their way in to the world to meet someone else. Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free.

It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts.

— Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstances, Vol. III (1963)

I began to see the groanies and moanies in the playground as human skeletons wearing pastel cardigans with sequins sewn on to the buttons. The Oh my Gods were skeletons wearing tracksuits. We were all uneasy in the Societal System that divided the playground so forensically and stupidly into rich and poor skeletons.

A particular mother of my acquaintance had eyes so small the moanies and groanies would have called them piggy eyes. It was not that her eyes were literally small, it was as if they wanted to disappear in to her head. Every time we met in the playground, I found myself trying not to stare but I couldn’t help myself. When her tiny peepholes tried to wriggle away from my gaze, it was usually when she was insisting (unusually, it has to be said) that her charismatic but bullying husband was the love of her life. In fact he had loved her right out of her life. I remember thinking at the time, yes, never mistake hate for love.

It was as if she had told herself in the voice of the masculine consciousness she imitated, but had no rights to inhabit, that she did not suffer fools gladly (me) and that she stood for certain kinds of values. Most confusing of all, she was required to raise the children more or less without her husband’s participation, yet feel entitled on his behalf to mock and judge the single mothers on the other side of the playground. The way she ventriloquised her husband’s values and standards sounded not so much crazy, as crazed. She was really not very likeable but I began to regard her as a political prisoner. It seemed to me that her eyes wanted to disappear into her head because she did not want to see that the reality she had bought into might just slaughter her.

And what about my own eyes? My eyes which so quickly filled with tears on escalators were trying not to stare at all that was wrong in my own situation, but, Oh my God, they didn’t know where to look.

I was certainly not looking at Maria who was now sweeping the courtyard with her back turned to me.

I decided to visit the village shop to look for the pure chocolate that had so intoxicated Marquez’s errant fictional wife, Bernarda Cabrera. The strange thing was I found it. There in front of me, lying with the other bars of more familiar confectionery, was a bar of Chocolate Negro Extrafino: Cacao 99 %. Ingredientes: cacao, azucar. It even had a warning on the wrapper telling me this chocolate was ‘intensidad’. The owner of the grocery store was a distinguished Chinese man originally from Shanghai. For as long as I had known him he was always reading books behind the counter, tortoiseshell spectacles perched half-way down his nose. His black hair was now streaked with silver as we exchanged superficial greetings: how are you, yes not many tourists at this time of year, yes it is very cold, the forecast said it might even snow, how was I going to spend my day?

I told him I was about to walk to the next village to see the monastery where George Sand and Frederick Chopin stayed during the winter of 1838.

He smiled but it was a more of a grimace. Ah yes. Jorge Sand. The Majorcans did not like her. She dressed in men’s clothing and she said Majorcans preferred their pigs to people. No. Jorge Sand was not a woman he would like to share a bottle of wine with. When I laughed I was not really sure what I was laughing about or who I was laughing at. I paid him for the chocolate, and then as a second thought bought an extra bar of the 99 % cacao for Maria.

George Sand (who was really Baroness Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin) smoked large cigars to get through her day. She would have needed them living in the gloomy Carthusian monastery of Jesus the Nazare. With its withered flowers and suffering wooden saints lurking in the alcoves, it seemed a sinister place to live with children and to have a love affair. The guidebook told me that she had no choice but to rent rooms here, because no one dared offer accommodation to Chopin who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. I admired her for trying to keep cheerful for her children and writing at her desk wearing Chopin’s trousers instead of wasting her life weeping about her circumstances. With this in mind, I briskly walked out of the monastery and made my way through the almond trees towards the silver sea, fierce and roaring beyond the cliffs.

As the waves crashed on the rocks and the wind numbed my fingers, I waited for something to happen. I think I was waiting for a revelation, something big and profound that would shake me to the core. Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all. And then what came to mind was the poster in my bathroom called ‘The Skeletal System’ which I had misread as ‘The Societal System’. The second thing that came to mind was the mute piano in Maria’s hallway, a piano that was polished every day but never played. I don’t know why it preoccupied me, but it had caught my attention. In fact I had tried not to look at it on my way down the stairs that morning. I thought about all the things I had hoped for and I laughed. The sound of my own cruel laughter made me want to die.

Later that evening, when I asked Maria’s belligerent brother for an extra blanket to get me through another night in freezing Majorca, he pretended not to understand me. I could smell wood smoke all over the valley and it was obvious to me that every house had a fire going. Sure enough the one restaurant open out of season had a log fire burning at the back of the room and I made my way towards it. When the waitress came to tell me that noooo waaaay could I sit alone at a table laid for three, I took a tip from Maria’s brother and pretended not to understand her. This prompted the German couple sitting nearby wearing identical hats, coats and walking boots to translate what she was saying into German, then Portuguese, and finally a language that sounded like Russian. I concentrated on the menu with incredible focus, nodding annoyingly at the furious waitress and earnest linguists, until I noticed the Chinese shopkeeper was sitting in the bar. He waved and walked over to my table for three.

So, he asked me, did I still think the Majorcans were lucky to meet a lewd and discourteous woman like Jorge Sand?

I told him, yes, they were very lucky to meet her and I was lucky to meet him too because I was just about to be dragged away from my table by the fire. He sat down and explained that even though she came from the sophisticated cuisine of France where everyone cooked with butter, it is not right to mock peasants for cooking in cheap oil, as she did. His accent became more Chinese than Spanish when he said that. It was as if his voice had suddenly dropped from one altitude to another, like turbulence on an aeroplane. I invited him to share a bottle of wine at my table for three.

At first we talked about soup. He told me he had more or less forgotten how to make Chinese soup. Many years ago he had left Shanghai aged nineteen on a ship heading for Paris where he worked in a fish shop. His bedsit in the 13th arrondissement always smelt of the crab and shrimp he cooked most days. This perplexed his landlord who said the room usually smelt of urine — as if that was what was required in Paris. Europe was mysterious and crazed. He had to learn a new language and earn his rent, but it was the start of another way of living and he was excited every day. Now he sold calzone and bratwurst to tourists and he was richer, but he wondered what else there was to look forward to? I think he was asking me a question but I did not want to answer it. He took a small sip of wine and placed his glass neatly, almost surgically on the table. And then he lifted up his hand, and with his two fingers outstretched, briskly tapped my arm.

‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’

It was not exactly a straightforward question because a few years back I’d glimpsed him reading one of my books behind the sweating cheeses laid out for tourists on the counter of his shop. He knew I was a writer, so I wondered what it was he actually wanted to know. I sensed he was asking me something else. I think I had been asking myself something else too because I was still no closer to figuring out why I had been crying on escalators. So when he said, ‘You’re a writer aren’t you,’ what came to mind again was the poster of the Skeletal System in my bathroom. I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System — for a start it had proved quite tricky to be alone at night in an empty restaurant and be allowed to sit at a table. If I had been George Sand, I would have thrown my cigar butt on the floor, sat myself down at a table laid for six and loudly ordered a suckling pig and a flagon of finest red wine. But that was not the sort of drama I wanted. The night before, when I had walked in to the forest at midnight, that was what I really wanted to do. I was lost because I had missed the turning to the hotel, but I think I wanted to get lost to see what happened next.

I still hadn’t answered the Chinese shopkeeper’s question, ‘You’re a writer aren’t you?’ That spring, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it was impossible to say yes, or hmmm, or even to nod. I suppose I was embarrassed at what I was thinking. Anyway, it would have been such a long answer; something like this: ‘When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.’

I didn’t know how to join these thoughts up and there was still a part of me that did not want to spend another second of my life thinking (again) about all of this stuff. So I left these thoughts hanging like a wave waiting to crash and I still had not answered the Chinese shopkeeper’s question.

He tapped my arm again. And then he poured more wine in to my glass. His eyes were clear and kind. He was inviting me to speak and I could sense that he was angling for the long story, rather than a yes or no or even a hmm or a shrug. I thought I had nothing to lose by telling him about crying on escalators.

He said, look you know I can speak Spanish and I can speak French too. But my English is not so good. Can you speak Chinese?

No.

Can you speak French or Spanish?

No.

So why do you English people speak no languages?

That’s true, I said, but do you know I am not completely English either? He was surprised to hear that and the waitress with her fierce and roaring eyes who was eavesdropping nearby looked surprised too. Of course his next question was to ask me where I was born? I started to speak to the Chinese shopkeeper in English about where I was born, but I’m not sure I went on to say everything you’re going to read now.