Questions of Travel (7 page)
On his way home, he met a face he hadn’t seen for some years. It belonged to a man who had once kept a little shop where cheap household goods were sold. Ravi expected to pass him with a nod, but the man stopped. They talked for a while, and Ravi learned that the shopkeeper was home from Dubai, where he worked as a cleaner. The money he made had sent his sons to a private school, paid for his father’s heart surgery, bought his sister a respectable groom. He offered Ravi a duty-free Dunhill and said, “Don’t go.”
WHEN IT BECAME PLAIN
that January intended to go on forever, a ticket from a bucket shop carried Laura over clotted skies. Two hours from London, a sunlit planet waited. Then there was trudging and happiness. There were little glasses of dark
digestivi,
bitter with herbs. There were angels in the architecture, and cypresses and tombs, and strangers with known faces: they had floated free of seventeenth-century paintings. It was true that to try crossing the street was to be plunged into terror. And there was that day she saw a girl lean from a pillion to detach a bag from a negligent arm. But for the space of a whole morning, street led to street and brought nothing that didn’t please. She had to look at everything. She had to eat gnocchi on Thursday because when in Rome. In every direction, buildings were ocher, burnt orange, the rosy-red of crushed berries. Even vertical new suburbs risked lemon and olive and a rather poisonous blue-pink.
Cats stalked over tawny rooftops to inquire at the window of Laura’s
pensione.
From the far side of the world, a pragmatic continent declared that it would be only kindness to destroy these ragged regiments—humanely, of course. But scraps of bread and Parma ham made their way to Laura’s sill in defiance of antipodean common sense.
In a piazza named for a superseded god, a toddler pointed:
Gatto!
Then, as a pink coat passed,
Rosa!
So it went, each fresh sighting calling forth an elated affirmation. Car! Spoon! When the child’s eye fell on the tourist eking out a latte at the adjoining table, he glared. But they were not so different, really, each marveling at the wonders of the world.
A sunless afternoon brought the pitiless arches of the Colosseum. Out-of-place figures, shivering in synthetics, came slipping out. They offered carvings, and beads hefty as sorrows. One elongated, knife-thin form, a Giacometti sculpted from ebony, knelt to release a white bird at Laura’s feet. Together they watched it whir heavenwards, a soaring no less full of hope for being mechanical. They could only try to replicate it later in a room at the end of a bus line, far from the relics of emperors and saints.
Afterwards, Laura stood at a terminus in a road where rubbish blew. Posters advertised a band in an enigmatic, attractive script. The people passing had cheap coats, and eyes full of calculations. But unlike Laura they were hurrying home. The stout African waiting for the bus, her hair bound in a gaudy cloth, was privy to knowledge enjoyed equally by the apricot-complexioned rich admiring each other on the via Condotti. It was the reason tourists read travel guides like missals. If they chose the correct street, dined on a particular terrace, went through a crucial door, everything would be different. Laura felt in her bag for her guidebook; she needed to check that it hadn’t been left behind, along with the starburst of joy, in the room with the exposed wiring and the single, cold-water tap. Recently she had dreamed of owning a chart, white lines on blue paper, with a telephone number at the bottom: 85148. All she had to do was to follow the diagram or, in the worst-case scenario, call the number. Then she would possess the city at last, its monuments and litter. Rome, like paradise, would gather her in.
She was armed with a railway pass. The windows of meandering
diretti
framed towns and towers on rounded hills. They were teasingly familiar, touched with déjà vu. After a while, Laura realized that she was looking at the bland, pretty vistas with which the minor masters of the Quattrocento filled in their backgrounds. At any moment there would be a Crucifixion on a bald, middle-distant hill.
La Spezia came, and the mincing sea that drowned Shelley.
France brought Mediterranean ports and hotel rooms with a view of dank light wells where night arrived at half-past three. On the wall, turquoise roses as large as Frisbees bloomed on baleful trellises. Sometimes there was carpet there instead—the same brown
moquette
that exerted a squelching suction underfoot.
The richly pink walls that in Rome had summoned berries now looked to Laura like boiled beetroot. It was just as well that along with a change of jeans and the sturdy merino jumpers of home, her backpack held a small library, even if the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere was opposed to books. A shuttered villa flanked by cypress candles might have been only hostile if it hadn’t called up the brittle modern heroines, bravely rouged, of doomed Katherine Mansfield. Laura could only envy their predicaments, the nerves that caused them to suffer and bound them to webs of human intrigue, as she grasped a paperback with woolly paws in a marble park. In every direction, leafless perspectives delivered lectures on fearful symmetry. The trees had been hacked about by someone who preferred statues. Trees and statues alike stood frozen in the wind that had set off in Russia and rushed straight down the Rhone Valley. Why did people in novels come to the south of France for winter? Laura lifted her eyes to the hills and found them blue with cold.
Well muffled, she walked about the steep streets behind the seafront as the long evening descended, waiting for the hour when she might decently dine. Windows opening on to the street allowed her to catch the crash of cutlery or game-show laughter. She came to a square and looked up at the balconies, each with its crocheted iron. Here and there, where a lamp had been lit in the room behind, a tense chair showed or a mirror in a golden frame. But no one opened the glass doors and stepped out among the empty window boxes to say, “But who are you,
mademoiselle?
You simply must come up and join us!”
In a sinister boulevard lined with bars and ugly shops, lonely North Africans hissed. Stranded in jackets, dreadfully checked, over shiny-kneed trousers, they lacked consequence. They might have been characters plucked from a story of family and politics and consigned to a footnote—even the jut of their cheekbones was mournful. At the going down of the sun they were to be observed gazing south from sea-view parks, restrained by balustrades from darkening water.
When the youth hostels weren’t closed against winter, they were situated as far as possible from stations, shops, markets, bars, anything that might conceivably interest the young; a
pension
was in any case more Mansfield. But a fit of economy, backed by deep boredom with her own thoughts, drove Laura at last to a bunk in a dorm. During and long after dinner, she drank
vin ordinaire
with Daniel, Alissa, Masuko, Piotr, Kelly and a Belgian. Grievances and baguettes were sliced up and shared. Everyone had a story about trains that ran late or simply stopped between stations, and all were agreed in their opinion of the French. The hostel had only two long rooms for sleeping. Daniel and Alissa had spread the contents of their packs in the first room to show how things stood. At midnight, Alissa, one of those girls with emphatic eyes, was ready to go to bed, but Daniel and Kelly were on to politics. Every time Kelly used her Swiss Army knife or a tube of mayonnaise to designate injustice—“Say this is Gaza here, right?”—Piotr’s gaze rested on whatever she had touched. So Alissa was driven back on the Belgian. His face was a wedge of cheese, but Alissa was determined now to stay and fascinate. She undid the knot of her hair, releasing a torrent of light, and saw herself at thirty: rare, mysterious, wrapped in a cloak, the latest door softly closing behind her on the sound of masculine tears. She spoke a confident French sprinkled with literally translated idioms and didn’t hesitate now to confess to itchy feet:
“J’ai les pieds qui grattent.”
She meant it kindly, as a warning: Do not imagine your devotion can conquer my need for freedom.
“Un eczéma?”
suggested the Belgian. He moved smoothly into the first of his long, bitter tales about a race called the Ongleesh.
In fine, cold rain, Laura and Masuko walked the two kilometers to the nearest bus stop. The new day was still black; they hadn’t bothered with bed. Their flashlights went ahead, pausing on coiled dog turds colored a bold orange. Masuko, considerably widened by her backpack, sported a beret and a perm. In Japan, curly hair designated a free spirit, Laura learned. She, too, wore an angled beret. There was nothing more useful to the French, marking the tourist below. An architecture student, Masuko was on her way to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Why not go there together? she proposed. She held strong opinions on subjects that rarely crossed Laura’s mind, declaring, “I hate the revolution of 1848” and “Upholstery was put on earth by enemy aliens.” Now, “The only tolerable utopia is a shabby one,” she flung into the first stirrings of dawn. The idea of
a shabby utopia
almost persuaded Laura, but she didn’t want to double back to Marseille. Also, she was on a pilgrimage of her own. In the bakery opposite the bus stop, the young women bought warm, greasy
pains au chocolat,
and Laura Fraser, stuffing her face, showed the paperback she carried in her coat. She wanted to visit Saint-Jean-de-Luz because Patrick White had written one novel in the town and drawn on it for another. Masuko had never heard of White or
The Aunt’s Story,
but remarked, as they boarded the bus, that she had no time at all for Mishima: “A very arrogant man.” At the station, they waved from opposite platforms. Encouragement, regret and undying friendship can only be expressed for so long in mime; it was a relief when Laura’s train pulled in. Travel was only really tolerable when solitary. Two was a group barricaded behind
we.
It offered conversation and someone to blame for disappointments, but the dream of transcending tourism wasn’t available—there was always another foreigner in a foolish hat.
A magical morning in Madrid brought the white annihilation of snow. The olives were wonderful, purple and full-flavored. But in a bar all the profiles were Picassos, the line of the forehead continuous with the bridge of the nose. Fairy-light-entwined among the bottles, the Virgin’s plaster robe shone Aryan blue. Laura left without ordering, and from every radio along the street, Madonna II declared that it was
just like a prayer;
a song that had pursued Laura across the globe, fanning out from the bus station in Tamil Nadu where it had first emerged in tinsel tinkles from someone else’s Walkman.
She escaped to Cintra, where her passport was pinched on a Romantic stair. The upset this caused was undeniable. Laura remembered France, her solitary
plats du jour
in out-of-season cafes where there were always postcards fading to yellow above the bar. She felt too exhausted to continue. It was senseless, this shuttling between stations and the provincial masterpieces that disgraced the walls of overheated museums. Such pleasures as she took were transient and casual: touristic, in a word. And on top of everything, she had a cold.
But in Lisbon she racketed over the hills in tin trams. Glass caskets done up with iron were fixed to every wall: the opera boxes of the street. Laura could just see herself up there on this or that balcony, conducting a scandal on a worn velvet seat. There were grilled sardines, a mosaic promenade, tiles painted with ships and insouciant whales. And everywhere, Rome’s grandstanding Baroque transformed for lack of funds into something altogether more humanly decayed. Even the young had an old-fangled air. Boys were neat in navy blue, their girls restrained in crisp white. They held hands as they walked but didn’t caress, although now and then embracing with fervent self-control at the descent of all-forgiving dusk.
It was a backward city, a European capital folded in a pleat of time unknown to Golden Arches. It returned Laura to childhood and to India, which is to say unmodern places. This was the effect of food cooked in the street, the care with which even modest purchases were wrapped, the dim shops with their diffident displays, the heavy spectacles on fine-boned faces. Yet ships sailing from this harbor had once shrunk and expanded the world, mapping its modern configuration. Somewhere in that rage for profit and cartography, the outline of Australia had been waiting to take shape.
Laura’s bed and breakfast occupied the fourth floor of an apartment block. Names she had seen in Goa—da Costa, Oliveira, Gomes—converted the list of residents posted in the lobby into a genealogy of empire. Here, the Age of Europe had begun—when she realized that, her view of Australia shifted. Her birthplace had always seemed singular: solitary and distinctive. Now Laura saw it hooked into histories that ran back and forth across the globe, so that it hung in its watery corner with the stretched, starfish look of a map produced by a radical projection.
She emerged from a cinema one evening to find herself in a road transformed by rain into gleaming black glass. Her fellow spectators ignored her as they dispersed, already starting to process the American scenes they had all received into alien words. Every light in the city was shining.
What are you doing here?
This was travel, marvelous and sad.
She stayed three weeks. She would never come back. For the rest of her life,
Lisbon
would summon a season: sealed, sufficient unto itself as a fruit. Even details would return: an armoire, carved and overlarge, where linen was stored; the spectacular dandruff of the foreign-exchange teller at the bank. Smells came back, and the taste of warm codfish patties, and the metal props buttressing a tree whose branches roofed a square. Who can explain the sympathy that runs swift as a hound and as stubbornly between people and places? It involves memory, prejudice, accidents of weather. (Although in fact, Laura would later confuse certain things; the armoire, for instance, didn’t belong to Lisbon at all but to a dark, waxed corridor, inset with rectangles of light, in a convent on the Ligurian coast.)