AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
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1959 which resulted in their wedding. Perhaps that was another reason why I was so amenable to Simone’s unwitting reinterpretation of it. My parents’ elopement having entered the family folklore, it must have formed a template in my psyche for how romantic events were meant to unfold. The template ran as follows:
Out of love, one follows the other across the sea.
We often play out our lives according to these semi-mythical frameworks implanted in childhood. They work like a foreshadowing, or the unwitting tracking of ley lines. In both cases, however, accepting the invitation was as foolish as it was romantic. By eloping, my parents had been playing fast and loose with their family ties. I was damaging my career prospects still further, for in those days, before the opening up of the European labour market, I had no right to work on the continent. Perhaps it was romantic because it was foolish.
A staircase without stairs
Fortunately, Simone had a steady income from her job as lectrice at Perpignan’s university, which eased the immediate pressure on me to earn money. Perpignan sits in south-west France near the Spanish border. One had only to make the short drive through the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees to see in silhouette against the hills the effigies of bulls that were so talismanic of Spain. The border country also maps onto Catalonia. On Perpignan’s labyrinthine streets one would hear Catalan spoken both by old ladies wearing black and old men in flat caps.
A true melting pot of cultures, Perpignan was north African too. Simone had rented digs on the Rue Dugommier in the city’s shabby Arab quarter. Our downstairs neighbours were Moroccans. On the one day that it snowed, they congregated in woollen beanies, looking out from the hallway in bemusement. The apartment was on the first floor, above a horse butcher’s straightforwardly called A Cheval, with sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood. A few doors down was a bistro, Chez Nicole et Marcel, where they served mussels in piles as high as a wedding cake.
Having a place of our own at that age was wonderful. We had terracotta tiles and red shutters. Not that it was perfect. One day we came back to find that several of the stairs between the first and second floors had crumbled away, leaving a ravine spanned only by the iron of the banister. Whenever the people on the two storeys above us wanted to get into their flat, they had to approach the ascent like mountaineers.
I was to give English lessons. Without a work visa or leave to remain in the country for more than ninety days, however, I’d have to do so on the sly and for cash only. That meant I was nervous of getting caught. It wasn’t just paranoia. One night, towards dawn, we were woken by a commotion in the hallway. Doors were banging, people were shouting. ‘Ouvrez! Ouvrez! Police des étrangers! Ouvrez!’ The immigration police were conducting a raid. Our Moroccan neighbours in the ground-floor flat were wrenched from their beds. More of them than we ever imagined could live in it were bundled out of the door in their nightwear.
Being on the first floor, Simone and I were next. She was legit, but my number was up. I saw myself thrust into a police cell, questioned and roundly deported. ‘Vos papiers!’ barked the gendarme at our door. I fetched my passport from the drawer and proffered it to him as if I were a lamb to the slaughter. No sooner did the officer see the British insignia than he bowed, apologised and moved on. I was as illegal as any of the Moroccans, but the good old racism of the French South had come to my rescue.
In addition to the grande dame who hired me to occupy her daughter with English verbs while she had adulterous sex with her lover, one student stood out. For our first lesson, he insisted that we meet at a public venue. I arrived at the Café de la Paix at the appointed hour to be greeted by a Sicilian man called Andrea. He was in his late thirties, stocky, with a broken nose, yellow-tinted sunglasses, a gold chain and greased-back black hair. He said that he was looking for an English-speaking partner in his shoe business. Why he thought a student dropout would fit the bill wasn’t clear, but the Oxford connection seemed endorsement enough. I explained that he’d got the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t looking for a business venture, just to earn some francs teaching English.
Andrea and I compromised on a meal at his house, to which he also invited Simone. In a marble dining room, we feasted on lobster and other fruits de mer, accompanied by champagne. The meal was served by his wife, who was coiffed to perfection, dressed to the nines and sparkling with jewellery. Andrea pointed at her as if she were a poodle at Crufts, giving an inventory of each jewel she wore and how much he had laid out for it. Simone and I felt obliged to return the favour, so we had them round to our bijou flatlet. They walked up in their finery, through the hallway that smelled of cat pee. We served trout followed by apple tart. They looked down their noses.
Too much freedom
The disparity in our lifestyles didn’t stop Andrea from continuing to court me for my friendship. He would invite me out for couscous royale or fillet steak at his expense. He even proposed that I join him on a business trip to Italy. My dual role would be to share the driving and keep him company.
I was far from sure about accepting. That friendship never was quite mutual. I had had my doubts about him from the start. Why did he want to meet in public? What was this notion, exactly, about me being his partner? All I had done was to advertise English lessons in the local classifieds. Out of nowhere loomed this swarthy Sicilian who seemed less interested in learning English than in coercing me into a business scheme. His approach was at best misjudged. At worst, it was sinister. What was his agenda? I wasn’t just doubtful; I was also scared. He exuded a dark Mediterranean roughness like that of a Minotaur. With my half-a-degree in English literature, I had only the flimsiest defence. He was unambiguously a man, while at twenty-one I was essentially a boy. It was like the meeting of Innocence and Experience.
In the end, I agreed to go to Italy with Andrea for the feeble reason that I had nothing better to do. When Simone went off to work, I was left to potter around the apartment or mooch about the farmers’ market. Apart from a smattering of translation work, there were just my ‘little English lessons’, as Andrea would disparagingly call them – and not so many of those, frankly. So I was free.
Too free, perhaps, like I had been at Oxford, when I had only to show my face once a week. Because freedom implies the absence of responsibility, it’s a close cousin of rootlessness. Pure freedom is bad freedom, in other words. Good freedom comes about when we securely belong. Think of children playing in the garden while their parents make Sunday lunch. The children are all the more free because they are invisibly tethered to the kitchen. It’s the feeling of being safely held which, paradoxically, releases them to play.
In my case, there was barely a tether at all. My parents never tried to talk me out of leaving Oxford. After my departure for France, I heard not a peep from them until I dropped the bombshell of Simone’s pregnancy. Up to that point, they were content to keep paying out the rope that might have kept me connected, and I was content to keep pulling away. It was all slack. That gave me a strong sense of the arbitrariness of life, of how easy it is to turn onto new paths when there’s no firm set of expectations. It lay behind my later decision to make what was, to many people, the bizarre switch from academia to management consultancy. There was never enough glue sticking me to my own track, whatever that was, never any chance of getting stuck in a rut.fn3 The surface over which I moved was as smooth as marble. Freedom and arbitrariness went together. I could slide in any direction.
Red voice, green voice
That trip to Italy in the spring of 1987 began innocuously enough. Andrea and I would take turns at the wheel of his white Audi as we cruised along the Côte d’Azur, while he talked with gusto about sex. He described the positions he favoured for fucking his wife, pausing every now and then to enquire unsuccessfully as to my own proclivities. ‘Tu es bien,’ he remarked with sorrow.
Andrea’s concupiscence extended to food. He recommended consuming not just the flesh but also the eyes of grilled fish, and sucked the whitened discs from a sea bream. At another restaurant, he returned to his seat having already settled the bill for our five courses – antipasti, pasta,