Charles and I count among the small minority of people who found out about the events of September 11 after a delay of about twenty-four hours. Owing to a combination of factors, including language barrier, love and general distraction. We were in Lisbon, at the shabbiest hotel you can imagine. The corridors, furnished with damp-stained runners that were apparently only there to conceal missing floorboards, were filled with junk that had never made it any further; worn-out suites were piled up, beds that had been slept to death, chairs that had been sat to death, tables covered with thumbprints left by melancholics who probably thought in circles, round and round the table. Outside our room there was an old typewriter. When you struck a key, the slender metal typewriter leg got stuck halfway between the ribbon and the other letters (a flowery meadow of ancient letters) as though trying to say: No, I won’t do it alone.
Who can deny having a weak spot for typewriters? Every time I returned, every time I left the room, I struck a key. I simply could not resist. Like seeing a piano that just has to be played. Recollection arrives, everyone knows the platform: I must have been nineteen, I had not written a single word, much less a poem, when I hauled my 7.5-kilo typewriter along on a train journey with stops in Rome, Florence, Venice, without ever managing to write a single word, but it was completely worth it when a young American girl told me that she understood why I was dragging that heavy beast around because ‘what is an author without her typewriter,’ she said. And I was sold. Recollection cancelled. It leaves a pleasant tingling, but also an insipid taste in the mouth because nothing much ever came of it. I feel like the typewriter key, dangling between heaven and earth. No, I won’t do it alone. But I still like typewriters. And I like to read Charles’s food reviews and suggest a change here and there. The reviewer’s reviewer, that’s me.
It was not only the recollection of the American girl’s assertion that made me tingle inside. Florence, New Year’s Eve, a quarter of a century ago, she had long black hair and was wearing a red duffle coat, just like Paddington, and perhaps that was why I thought of her as a small bear, I’ve never been able to resist that kind of button, wooden and oblong, buttoned crosswise.
Back to Lisbon. Our hotel room was stained with damp, just like the rest of the hotel. When I plugged my blow-dryer in to the outlet, I could use it to switch the lights in my room on and off, but I could not make it blow. And there was a mirror in which you could faintly discern yourself, and each other – naked and locked in an embrace we appeared, Charles and Camilla, duly flattered, only contours, somewhere deep inside the rusty night of the mirror while (we were doing it all the time, we were probably doing it all the while) the aeroplanes flew into the towers. Afterwards, hungry from all of that love, we left the room and I struck a key as always, perhaps ‘d’ for disaster that day, and we walked with our arms around each other, hungry and happy along the dangerous corridor and down the dangerous staircase, the lift was simply too dangerous, even for soldiers of fortune like ourselves. Downstairs in reception, one of the Indian owners emerged from his room under the staircase, said something to Charles and tugged at his sleeve. He was tugged into the room. And I followed. He was visibly agitated about something on TV. I saw a mass of smoke and assumed it was a forest fire.
‘No, we are not interested in seeing a film right now,’ Charles said in a friendly tone, because he is always friendly, and tugged his sleeve back.
‘It’s not a film,’ I said, ‘I think the forests in his native country are on fire.’
‘Argh,’ Charles said, leaning forward and stroking the Indian on the cheek, ‘I’m sure everything will turn out all right.’
The Indian was at a complete loss. In the end he let us go with a shrug. And without realizing it, we stepped out into a world transformed. But of course people do that all the time. I would hate to overestimate the significance of the event: so much evil has happened prior to and since then, and perhaps society would have isolated itself anyway. And perhaps we would have isolated ourselves out of anxiety anyway. Perhaps the collapse of the Twin Towers was just an opportunity. That’s what Charles thinks, for example. Unfortunately I am unable to produce an independent, an original political analysis; I’m not trained for that so I rely on and repeat what I have heard and read. Good thing I have my newspaper. Good thing I have Žižek. And not least, good thing I have Charles. And good thing I have Alwilda, too. She is tough.
I was riding my bike one day when I got stopped by a journalist, asking if I could explain why I wore a helmet. How many answers could there be? But in an attempt to surprise him, I told him I was afraid of something falling on my head. ‘From above?’ he asked. ‘From above,’ I repeated. ‘I belong to a nation of nervous Nellies, we’re scared of everything these days.’
‘Would you mind confining your reasons to you,’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I would prefer that. Long before 9/11, I began to fear the worst. Always. The only thing I’m not afraid of is salmonella. I eat raw eggs with complete disregard for death.’
‘I’m hearing and writing disregard for death,’ he said, ‘but we’re not talking about eggs. Although, an egg landing on the kitchen floor and a head landing on the asphalt, of course they can be compared.’
And then he rushed off, with the idea of opening his short feature on cycle helmets with a slow motion shot of an egg being smashed against a hard surface. How he ran. So nobody would steal his idea.
Let’s talk about flowers then, I say (the journalist is gone). I am sitting directly in front of a bunch of almost black-red gladioli at home in our living room and I wonder what it would be like to walk inside such a velvet funnel. Now don’t go thinking this is about female genitalia, caution, this is about death again. Walk inside such a funnel of velvet, turn around and watch it close behind you. Be surrounded, enclosed, suffocated in a delightful scent, with soft walls, and be allowed to die a flowery death.
But where does it come from, I ask myself, and sometimes Alwilda asks me that too, and Charles, this circling around death. For a long time I could not come up with an answer. I shrugged, turned away and decided to keep death to myself in the future. As though it was my problem alone, mine and only mine. For that reason I was happy when I found a possible answer in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival one day.
I learnt the piece by heart, and the next time Alwilda asked me, I replied: ‘To see the possibility, the certainty of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad, partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty…’
‘Trinidad,’ Alwilda said in disbelief, ‘but we lived in Jægersborg the entire time, and your home was so nice, it was certainly no ruin.’
‘The uncertainty,’ I said sombrely,’ the uncertainty, the furniture was shifted round a lot, for long periods at a time I was put out to graze with relatives, there was much illness, my life was abruptly turned upside down, people arrived and departed.’
‘Yes, childhood is a quagmire,’ Alwilda said, ‘you get stuck. Every single day I blindly repeat what others have told me. Who is speaking through me now? I ask myself, is it my dear mum or my dear sweet granddad, who was it now that got ill from having cobwebs on the broom, who was it now that shouted at me when I swept the webs off the ceilings and forgot to clean the broom, with something resembling mouldy porridge stuck to the bristles. And now it is my turn. I don’t care what the broom looks like. But when Daniel forgets to clean the broom after sweeping up, a shout escapes me (nonetheless)…’
‘Isn’t it a little simplistic to fall back on the idea that someone is speaking through you? Shouldn’t we take responsibility for what we say?’
‘But now that someone is being spoken through. First I have left – yes, what have I left – the figure of my granddad shouting at me. And then, when I am shouted through, am I also meant to take responsibility for that?’
‘At least you have the pleasure of shouting at Daniel.’