The year Sonia stayed with me in Italy, I did not see Germaine again, after we visited her, until the end of the summer. When I did, she suggested to me that I drive back to London with her. She said, “I’m going to go non-stop, not even to eat. We stop only for petrol and to pee.” I had a plane ticket, which I sold for £20.
She said I should close down my stone house and join her in hers on the other side of the mountain for the few days before we left. I waited for her under the pergola of my house, my duffle bag packed; she drove up a road like a rutted dry river bed to collect me, then she drove on similar roads over the mountain.
Her house, long and narrow, with window boxes of white petunias, was high up, in the midst of its beautifully tended garden of all-white flowers. From the garden you looked out over the lower chestnut-covered mountains.
When we arrived we found a baby, about a year and a half old, at a table under the fig tree, playing with finger paints. The baby was slopping green paint on to a shiny piece of wet paper, her hands covered to the wrists; some of the paint was on her face. She was preoccupied and didn’t see us until Germaine, standing over her, shouted, “That’s not the way to use fucking finger paints,” and the baby stared up at her with a look of shocked awe that there was a wrong and a right way to use finger paints.
I went into the house while Germaine taught the baby the use of finger paints. The inside of the house was as beautifully kept as the outside.
The young American mother of the baby was reading a women’s magazine.
Germaine shouted to her from outside, “Where the fuck are you while your baby is making a fucking mess out of the fucking finger paints I paid fucking good money for?”
Half smiling at me, the mother dropped her magazine and ran out.
As I didn’t know what room I was to have, I waited in the small living room, by the fireplace. I didn’t sit. When Germaine came in she looked at me as if I had suddenly appeared in her house, and she seemed about to ask me what I was doing there; she frowned. I smiled. I smiled to remind her who I was, and that I hadn’t forced myself into her house, but that she had invited me. I had not even presumed to sit down.
“I’ll show you to your room,” she said.
The lintels of the doorways were low, and, being tall, she had to bend to go through. I looked at her long legs, long torso, long arms, and her long, curved neck. I followed her through, into her room. It had a large bed, the iron bedstead painted what she called penis pink, and it seemed to me to be the only piece of furniture in the room. She took me through to the next room, my room. Off it was a tiled bathroom.
She laughed. She said, “To get into your room you have to come through mine, and for me to use the bathroom I’ve got to come through yours.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I’ve put you here intentionally.”
Again, I smiled, but more broadly. I didn’t ask her what her intention was.
Now, a year or so before, I had been told, severely, by another woman writer, that I was a cunt teaser, and I’d better stop it. I’d not been aware that I was a cunt teaser, and this made me wonder. She said, “You hug women, kiss them, are always pressing against them, and then, of course, you don’t follow up in any way on what you make women feel you’ve promised them.” “I don’t do that,” I said. “You do,” she insisted; “study yourself the next time.” I hugged her and kissed her, as if on impulse. This writer set her jaw and looked at me closely, then she said she would be able to accept my hugs and kisses, my bodily contact, if I were straightforward; but she thought I was truly duplicitous because I wanted women to imagine me to be a way I wasn’t, and this was not only duplicitous, it was perverse. I mustn’t do it. I mustn’t play with women.
Conscientiously, I stopped.
For all her stature, Germaine was very huggable and kissable.
In my bedroom in her house, it was she who put her arms around me, kissed me at the side of my mouth, and squealed.
I thought: I mustn’t cunt tease.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed and said, with a deep sigh, “I don’t know what to do with that girl and her baby. I’ve done everything I can. I invited them out here, paid for everything while they’re here, bought special food for the baby, even clothes. You’d think that the least the mother might do is get off her fat ass and watch the child while I’m not here. I’m tired, I’m tired and I’m fed up with taking care of them. I’m always taking care of helpless and hopeless people.”
I wanted to do something immediately to show her I was not helpless and hopeless.
I wanted her to think I was quite as efficient as she was.
Before I could think of anything, she got up from the bed and said, “I’ve been so done in by them, I’ve become crude. Here, you’ve just arrived in my house and I haven’t even offered you a glass of wine.” She sighed again.
We went into the living room, where, on the hearth rug, two sleek white cats had appeared. With a long scooping gesture of both arms, Germaine leaned and took them up, and she buried her face in the fur of one, then the other, saying, “Oh, momma’s darlings, momma’s beautiful, beautiful darlings.” The cats closed their eyes.
I said, “I’ll open a bottle of wine for us.”
While I opened the bottle, she played with the cats.
“Did you feed them?” she shouted out of the window.
A timid voice responded. “They didn’t seem hungry.”
“I knew it,” Germaine said. “She won’t do the fucking simplest thing I ask. She won’t even feed the cats. No one ever does the simplest things I ask for, but everyone asks me for the world, the moon, the stars, the whole universe, and my money.”
I hoped I conveyed to her by my look that I myself was not asking for anything. Though, perhaps, in some way I was. I felt that I was.
The living room was partly kitchen. Germaine opened the fridge door and looking in said, “What do I have for my darlings? What do I have for my darlings to eat?” She reached inside. The cats had their noses into the bottom of the fridge. “Oh darlings,” she said, “you’re so lucky. Here’s testicle.” And she took out, in her hand, a large, yellowish lump with fleshy tissue hanging from it and threw it, with a soft wet thud, on the big wooden chopping block on the table at which I was standing with the open bottle of wine.
“Where’re glasses?” I asked.
“In there.” She nodded to a cupboard.
As I poured out three glasses of wine she chopped up the testicle with a knife. The cats were mewing at her feet.
I brought a glass of wine out to the American girl, who was sitting quietly by the baby, holding her hand and rubbing one stuck-out finger, green, across the clean sheet of paper. The baby was learning how to use finger paints. Her mother was whispering to her.
Inside again, the cats were eating the chopped-up testicle and Germaine was preparing dinner at the long marble-topped table.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“You can integrate all the ingredients for a pesto sauce in the mortar.”
She was frowning, and I wondered what she was thinking. It occurred to me that she might have been thinking: Here I am, again, preparing a meal for guests.
I pounded the wooden pestle into the marble mortar.
At least, I thought, I can be of some help.
The pesto reduced to a fine bright green, I said, “I think this is done.”
“Let me see,” Germaine said, and plunged the pestle up and down. “It’s not at all done. It’s nowhere near being done. If you’re not going to do it properly, why offer to do it? Now I’ll do it. I always end up finishing, or putting right, or completely restarting what others do badly. I’ll do it.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“No. I don’t think you could. Sit and drink your wine.”
From a wicker chair, I watched her pound the pestle. She wore a red dress, and through the knit I could see her bare flesh; her bum, her hips, her tummy, her breasts shook. As I didn’t want to disturb her concentration, I was silent. She pounded and pounded, then pushed the mortar aside as if she could no longer bear the look of it. Her hands on her hips, she looked at the table, then about the room, again as if she could hardly bear what she saw; then she looked at me.
“What the fuck are you doing sitting there, drinking wine,” she said, “while I’m here doing all the work?”
I smiled, but she didn’t smile.
“All right,” I said, “you tell me exactly what to do, and I’ll do it.”
“But you won’t do it well.”
“I’ll try. I really will try.”
She didn’t tell me what to do, but, an assistant to the chef, I kept order as she, preparing, caused disorder on the table. She accepted my assistance and I was rather pleased with myself.
The mother came in, fed her baby, and put her to bed.
As it got dark, Germaine lit the paraffin lamps.
With everything I ate my sense of taste was brought to fine attention by the fine attention Germaine had given to the food: spaghetti alla Genovese, roasted pigeons and small roasted potatoes, salad from the garden, pecorino, grapes.
After dinner, Germaine lit a fire, as an autumn chill was falling.
In my lamp-lit room, naked, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, quietly, when Germaine came in. There was a curtain in the doorway between our rooms which I had not bothered to close. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and turned away, but I said, “I don’t mind,” and she turned back and passed through the room into the bathroom.
She left the door open, and I saw her sitting in the bath, which had burning candles along the edge. Her neck, her shoulders, her breasts shone in the candlelight; she lifted water in her cupped hands to pour it on her, and the splashed water appeared to flame lightly about her.
I remained where I was on the bed, from time to time glancing at her. It was as though I had been living a long time with her, because there was, I felt, a domestic intimacy between us, she in the small bathroom, I in the bedroom off. For the first time I recognized that Germaine could do that: could create a sense of intimacy between herself and another which you’d have thought came only after a long time together, and she did it in a moment, suddenly, and without reference to anything that had recently happened or not happened.
In the still silence the water splashed in her bath.
I got into bed and was all at once very happy, feeling that being with her was and would continue to be all right; I quickly fell asleep, and was unaware of Germaine turning off the paraffin lamp on the little table by my bed.
•
In the morning I found her, at the table in the living room, doing careful detailed drawings for a dovecot she wanted to build from bricks and roof tiles. To make the drawings, she had proper drafting paper, a proper drafting pen, a ruler, a bottle of india ink.
I said, “It looks as if you’re designing a whole palazzo.”
“I’m simply doing it the way it should be done,” she said.
The mother and the child were playing outside in the sunshine.
I went with Germaine to buy the bricks and tiles. She had two cars, one a battered Cinquecento which she used on the rough, steep part of the road to her house, and, kept parked halfway down on a terrace, a Ford. We got out of the Cinquecento and into the Ford.
As she drove, she thought there was something wrong with the Ford, and she said she wouldn’t drive it to London unless she were absolutely sure it was in perfect order. We drove in short, fast bursts, then stopped abruptly. Clouds of dust from the dirt road billowed about us. It was a shock absorber, she said; she was sure it was a shock absorber. She’d take the car to the garage the next day, and if the fault couldn’t be found we’d have to fly to London.
I thought: But I’ve sold my fucking plane ticket.
She said, “I’m not going to risk the lives of that mother and daughter in any way.”
The man in the builder’s yard didn’t have the proper bricks. Germaine talked to him at great length, and I wondered how she knew so much about bricks. She had her drawing, and she discussed it with the man, who because she knew so much about building, took her seriously. She knew, in Italian, all the technical terms.
Afterward, we went to a café at the centre of the small modern town in the plain below the small ancient mountain town. We sat among oleanders flowering in wooden tubs. Germaine said her stomach was upset and ordered Fernet Branca, and as I had never had it I did also. It tasted of the juice of rotted weeds, and I could not imagine how it settled the stomach.
I asked her, “How is it that you know so much about bricks?”
She laughed.
Her dress was short, and she was sitting slouched back in her chair, her legs stretched out and open. About her neck she wore an African woman’s cache-sexe of red and blue beads. I looked from the cache-sexe down and saw that she was not wearing underpants and that her cunt was visible. She was looking about at people passing.
I knew she had an Italian lover whom she met often at this café.
She said, “I thought I might see my gentiluomo here.”
“I’ve never met him.”
“Not that I want to see him,” she said. “I don’t want to.” She laughed. “The last time I saw him here we had a fight and he hit me across the face. One day he’ll kill me.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind if he kills me. I honestly don’t.”
About her love life, I knew nothing. An article had appeared in an Italian newspaper describing her as a famous women’s liberationist who lived in a house on a mountainside, from where she telephoned, at whim, men to come up and service her. She was suing the newspaper on the grounds that she had no telephone, and she was, in the Italian court, acting as her own defense. The newspaper wanted to settle out of court, but she refused.
There was a lot of talk among the foreign community about Germaine.
On the way back to the house we stopped in the workshop of a coppersmith, a little man with one tooth and a sweat-stained fedora. In the midst of his shop, Germaine did a drawing for him of what she wanted, a copper hood to go above her fireplace, and he examined it gravely, frowned, spoke, then Germaine spoke, and after a long discussion he agreed to do the job. I did not understand much of what he said, and I didn’t understand Germaine, either; I thought for a moment that her Italian had gone peculiar, until it came to me that she was speaking to him as he spoke, in the local dialect.
Outside, I asked, “But how do you know the dialect?” “Don’t you?” she asked. “You live here. Shouldn’t you know the dialect?”
“But I don’t know Italian, really. Where did you learn your extraordinary Italian?”
She laughed lightly.
It occurred to me that Germaine did not like to be asked about her life. It was as if she had never learned Italian, but had always known it, not only Italian, but dialects, as she had always known about bricks and copper.
Her past I knew nothing of, except that she was Australian and had been to Cambridge.
She said, “I want to get back to the house now. I’ve got to make sure the baby has had lunch, as well as the mother.”
In the afternoon, after a nap, I examined Germaine’s library exclusively of women writers, and I sat on the bottom step of the wooden stairs to read one. Germaine, passing from one room into another, came in and said, “I wish I could sit down and read. I wish I could sit down and do some serious writing. I got this place thinking I’d come here and lead a quiet, contemplative life, and out of the contemplation would pour, as out of a great cornucopia, wondrous books. But I haven’t written anything here.” “Why?” I asked. “I always have people staying and I have to care for them,” she said. I said, “You’re also always doing something on your house. I don’t do anything to my house.” She said, going out, “If you have a house, you have to keep it properly. It’s a responsibility.”
When I went upstairs to my room, Germaine, naked, was in her room, her back to the door. She was against the bright window, and her large body appeared dark. She raised her long arms above her head, then lowered them. The house was quiet, and I thought, in this quiet moment, I shouldn’t disturb her to get into my room, and I went back downstairs.
Later, dressed, she came out with a basket and I went down to the kitchen garden with her, on a terrace below the house, where we picked tomatoes which she said she would conserve.
I also picked the remaining aubergines, to make, I said, a special dish for supper, but I wouldn’t tell her what it was.
“Then you decide on the menu,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Tell me what to buy and I’ll buy it.”
I was taking on a great responsibility.
On the way back to the house we walked along the parterres of white flowers, and Germaine from time to time would lean low over the beds and shout out, “Come on, you fucking flowers, come on! Bloom, bloom!”
While Germaine was out in the late afternoon, after five o’clock when the shops reopened for the day, I started to prepare the dish. This required building a fire in the fireplace and reducing the blaze to embers; but the fire kept going out, and when it caught, a little, it smoked into my face. Germaine came back to find me still trying to get a fire reduced to embers. She said, “You’re doing it like a fucking fairy. Let me do it.” “Like a what?” I asked. She made a face. Within fifteen minutes she had knocked the fire down to bright hot embers.
“What shall I do?” she asked. “Well, you can make the lamb stew.” “What kind of stew?” “In a tomato sauce.”
Between then and supper I prepared only one dish, which required grilling the aubergines over the embers till their skins were charcoal black, scraping out the insides, squeezing the bitter juices out and mixing the pulp with butter and milk, salt and lots of pepper.
Germaine had invited an elderly American friend up from the valley for supper. He said about the dish I’d prepared, which, in combination with the stew, was called, approximately, huejiabendi. “This really is different from anything I’ve ever had.” Germaine ate without expression, as if she wouldn’t recognize that the aubergine dish was in any way special. But I knew it was special.
She had prepared everything else.
I said, “The stew is really delicious.”
She could not give a compliment, I saw, and she could not accept a compliment; she remained expressionless, her mouth pulled down so her nostrils, too, were pulled down, and her face was longer than usual.
Even while sitting at the table, Germaine seemed to be doing something other than sitting at the table and eating, and that other was more important; and if she could not in fact be doing that other, she was actively thinking about it. I recognized that she was always doing something other in her mind, and as intense as her concentration was in what she was doing, there was an air about her of considering, more intensely, something else. I had the vivid impression from her of, at some high level, trying to sort out, not her personal problems, but other people’s problems.
Most of Germaine’s talk at dinner was about infibulation, female circumcision, among tribes in Africa. She described how older women performed the operation on younger, using, at best, rusty razor blades. In severe cases, the clitoris was cut out and the inner lips of the labia; what was, in fact, a bloody wound was bound shut with grass tied tightly about the thighs, a straw inserted to insure an orifice large enough for urine and menstrual discharge to pass, and the wound was allowed to heal. When the time came for the woman to give herself to her new husband, he cut her open and fucked her; then a wooden copy of his erect cock was placed in the wound, and she was bound again, so only her husband, he thought, had access to her. As men with the same size, and smaller, cocks had access to her also, Germaine said a man who wanted to keep his wife his only should naturally want to have a very small cock. Of course, the woman, whose genitals were scar tissue, did not care much if she was fucked or not. Each time she gave birth, she had to be cut open.
Often as she spoke I put my hands between my legs and held my genitals.
After the American left and the mother joined her baby, Germaine and I drank wine and talked.
She said, “All evening I’ve been thinking about that mother and her baby and what can be done for them.”
•
The next day Germaine was very active, at the house and away. Sometimes she went off alone, sometimes I went with her. I recall the results of her activity in final images: many jars of conserved tomatoes, a miniature loden coat for the little girl—
In the garage where I went with her to have the car checked, she talked to two mechanics with grease-stained arms and Tuscan golden eyes, and as she spoke to them she appeared to dance lightly about the garage, among the dismantled cars and car parts. They stared at her. Perhaps they had never known a woman who could swing her hips from side to side and clasp her hands to her breasts and pucker her mouth and know as much as they did about shock absorbers.
They, as did all the locals, called her La Dottoressa.
By the time we were ready to leave—the big Ford packed, a basket of panini with ham, of cheese, of fruit, and a bottle of brandy at my feet by Germaine in the front seat, and a bed made in the back for the baby—the sun was setting.
Germaine said, “This is going to be one fucking bad trip. I wish I were going back to London by plane.”
As we passed Cortona, the town, high on the side of a mountain among olive trees and cypresses, was still in sunlight, and beaming.
“We have a rule,” Germaine said; “no one ever points to anything and says, ‘Look at that, how beautiful it is.’”
In the plain, passing a field of the stumps of sunflowers, I said, “Look at that, how ugly it is.”
It was soon dark. The baby fell asleep, as did the mother in the back seat. Germaine drove up into northern Italy, towards the Brenner Pass. She drove very fast, so the highway lights seemed to stream about the car.
The night itself became a country, floating above the other countries, which was measured not in terms of hours, but kilometres; the night was hundreds of kilometres long. Though we stopped for passport control at the Austrian and German borders, the real frontier, I felt, was when we crossed from darkness into dawn.
All night, Germaine talked, or so I imagine now she did. What I most recall was her telling me about her sexual experiences. As often happened after I listened to Germaine talk, I recall vivid images, and the most vivid is this: a dark, thin, intense Italian used-car salesman took her to the sea outside Melbourne one summer evening, at hot, green sunset, where, lying on the beach, people were sleeping wrapped completely in white sheets; there was a sharp, hot wind, and the sheets thrashed about the still bodies, among which Germaine followed the used-car salesman down to the sea, deep green; he took her hand and led her into the sea, both of them clothed, so she felt the rising and falling water pull at her clothes, and, in the waves, he fucked her.
As Germaine told me such stories, I felt that I was being taken into her confidence, into her private world; that is, I was taken into the private world of a public woman, where I learned something about her no one else knew. But I also felt that she was not talking to me, but to anyone, and what I heard anyone could hear.
Her only secret was this: she would not reveal how she had become Germaine Greer, how she had learned everything she had had to learn to become the person she was. She would reveal everything about the Germaine Greer who actually was, who was entirely public, and about whom she kept no secrets.
As for her sexual activities, they were not dark and private, but activities in which the world was engaged and which were in large part determined by, and with study might explain something of, the world she lived in. She talked about those various activities (she preferred men for their bit of gristle) as if talking about the sexual activities of the outside world.
At a petrol station in Germany we all got out to pee. It was dark and cold. Back in the car, I waited with the mother and the woken baby for Germaine, who was, I thought, taking a long time. She came, finally, with a silver envelope containing a condom, which she had bought from a machine. I wondered if she had gone into the men’s room for it, or if there was a dispensing machine in the ladies.’ She was interested in it, she said, because it was advertised as prolonging love-making. Before she started the car, she tore open the envelope and pulled out the condom and stuck a finger in it. “Just as I thought,” she said. “It’s coated inside with a lubricant which simply numbs the cock.” A bit of evidence for some scientific research on contraception, I thought. She threw it and the envelope out.
We drove off. It began to rain. Germaine took long pulls from the bottle of brandy. We played word games. It rained harder, then stopped.
With dawn, we went into the country of light, a light rising from the flat wet green-grey countryside like a mist. The autobahn was deserted. The first sign I saw in the daylight was DACHAU. Germaine went silent.
A long time afterward I said, “Look, another sign for Ausfahrt. What a funny name for a town.”
For the first time since Dachau, she spoke, laughing. “You nit, that means exit.”
We were silent again.
She said, “Another sign for Ausfahrt. All roads in Germany lead to Ausfahrt.”
After a prolonged silence, driving very fast, she began to talk quietly to her car, sometimes patting the dashboard.
“You’re doing well, baby. You’re doing so well, my baby.”
Whenever we stopped for petrol, Germaine, I thought, spoke, not simply German, but the German of the region. She might even say, afterward, that the garage man who’d served us wasn’t from the area, but, according to his accent, from another region.
By ten in the morning we were in Belgium, a country, she said, of no shadows.
The mother and the baby woke. The baby had to pee, which she did, as before, in a pot her mother held for her. The pot was handed to me; I rolled down the window, stuck the pot far out, tipped it upside down, and the pee was sprayed back in through the window, into our faces. Pee was dripping from Germaine’s nose. She laughed. I looked at the mother and the baby; the mother, too, was laughing lightly, wiping her face with her fingers, but the baby, her pee dripping from her face, looked shocked. Perhaps she wasn’t sure if this was meant to happen or not. Perhaps, in the month away, she had had a lot of shocks.
At Ostend we waited in the car in a queue for the ferry. Germaine took out a little round mirror to look at herself, holding the mirror at different angles. Then she put on some makeup and combed out her hair; she combed it out till it stood on end.
We had a late lunch on the ferry. The American girl said something I didn’t hear, as it was said in a low voice; it made Germaine explode, and the explosion made her hair stand out more.
She said, “You and your child can just get out of my sight for a while.”
The mother and the baby went off to walk about the deck.
Germaine ordered drinks, vodka and tomato juice.
I said, “I’ll bet there’ve been a lot of people in your life whom you’ve taken on to help, and whom you’ve resented helping.”
She looked at me, her eyes narrow. “You think I ask for it, do you?”
“Well, no relationship is one-sided. If she’s with you for you, you’re with her for some reason, too.”
Her face twisted, and a shock seemed to make her hair vibrate. “I wanted to help.”
A little boy, half tripping, came running into the restaurant, followed by the American girl’s child, who ran after him.
In a loud voice, Germaine said, “I know what you’re after, baby. You want to give him a blow job.”
The little boy went out, and the little girl, toddling, went after him.
Germaine sighed.
The mother came through, looking for her daughter.
Germaine sighed again.
At Dover, Germaine said, “Here we are in the country of the grey underpants.”
I began to hallucinate, seeing, in the gathering twilight, buildings from other countries. I wondered if, after more than twenty-four hours of driving, Germaine too might be hallucinating; then I imagined that she wouldn’t hallucinate, that her strong will would keep her seeing only what was there, the dual carriageway, the lights, the signs. Her face was tense with concentration. Her hair was electric in the way it stood out. I depended on her, on the clarity and power of her concentration, to get me through my hallucinations to London.
After she left off her friend and the baby, she came to my flat, where we had scrambled eggs. If she gave in to being tired, it was by talking more and more about the mother and baby. I wondered if she were hallucinating about them. Abruptly, she stood to go to her house.
She said, “I want, I need, someone to sleep with tonight.”
I kissed her good night.
Over the following days, I thought a lot about Germaine, and my thinking made of her a large public woman obsessed with the world, the entire world; she was difficult towards people in the world because so few cared a fuck about it.
When, a week later, she came to dinner, I asked her about the mother and the baby; she said, “They’re staying with me again.” She sighed. “Well, what’s to be done for such people? What?”