Travelling is an act of surrender. Language is reduced to sounds, some familiar, some absolutely alien. One is left at the mercy of strangers native to lands that had only previously existed in the cartography of one’s imagination.
A virgin traveller, I played safe and chose France as my ‘first’ because the muscles of my tongue and ears still remembered the language despite having learned it almost a decade ago. And you were already there, so there was just the matter of boarding the flight, landing at CDG airport, ushering myself to the right platform that would escort me onto the TGV I’d booked to get me to Nimes, where I was scheduled to meet you at the bottom of the staircase at the station.
I saw your anxious body leaning against a shop front. You sensed my approach and turned to greet me. We grabbed a baguette stuffed with a delicious, generous serving of chorizo, and sat at the bus stop to board the bus to Arles.
These were the preliminaries of our first trip together on foreign soil, a trip that would take us through the photogenic streets of Arles, Nimes, Paris, Burgundy and Kassel in Germany, and then back to Paris.
I find myself unable to summarise the euphoria and the uncertainties I experienced during that fortnight together. I should have made notes. I should have carried a camera. I shouldn’t have been so stubborn about using words to document what my eyes were seeing when a lens could easily have sufficed. But then again, I am no photographer, and who wants to see stodgy pictures that would simply have featured the two of us framed against a river, or a monument, or the countryside. What could they have possibly recorded that I would not have been able to recall in words?
For instance, I could have flashed a camera at that bum we encountered on the metro late at night when we were returning to the apartment of a friend of a friend where we were staying. His begging bowl resembled an ashtray, and he held it out at us almost arrogantly, like it was our duty to donate a cigarette or two, or some loose change. But instead of demanding our charity, he looked first at you and then at me. We were sitting with our hands interlocked, our feet so close to each other you could sense the circulating current.
‘Lui, il est ton mari?’ he looked at me and asked.
I understood him perfectly. You didn’t.
‘We don’t speak French,’ you replied, and in the breadth of a whisper asked me not to engage with him.
‘Oui et non’ is what I would have said, had you not appealed to me to be silent.
A photograph could not have captured the sagacity behind his question. Back home I’m usually asked if you’re my father, it was refreshing to think that we could appear to someone as husband and wife.
Here, in the more tolerant French air, we found no need to disguise our relationship. We walked the streets of Arles, Nimes and Paris like lovers in heat, drenched in the humidity of a previously undiscovered strain of intimacy. There were movements our bodies felt permitted to make that seemed unimaginable back home, gestures we wouldn’t have dared to indulge in, in the suffocating conservatism of our homeland.
You and I have always worn a face to meet other faces. Our relationship never had a public persona. In the privacy of your home we could be lovers, but beyond the periphery of your door, the ‘act’ must begin, in which we perform the role of individuals who are unattached to each other. We never quite engaged in public displays of affection. It seemed inappropriate to do so, so bothered were we by moralistic eyes. Sure, we had our secret codes—a specific look to communicate attraction, or a teasing smile if one was ever chiding the other, messages relayed over the lifespan of a whisper. Our love always wore a clandestine gown each time we took it out for a stroll.
It was the Parisian air that seduced us. When we got in after journeying through the sunny towns of Arles and Nimes, it was still unusually chilly for July. It was a miracle we had made it this far given that by our third day in Arles, the insides of your body had begun to rebel, your stomach started to reject everything you devoured. I remember that night in Nimes when we walked from our hotel to the cathedral amid the wild wailing of an Argentinian Gypsy band whose music seemed to gush over the streets and seep into our very bones. We were on our way to the cathedral to hear a woman sing the ‘Ave Maria’. Mid-way, you asked if we could pause for a moment so you could sit down on a bench you had spotted. Your body was giving way again, that bilious feeling was returning, the nausea was settling in. We stayed still for a few minutes. You were beginning to surrender your body to my care. You tilted your head against mine, so it could find a resting place, however temporarily, and you closed your eyes as the gypsy music continued to ooze, drowning us in its invisible flood. We did make it to the cathedral, and we did hear the ‘Ave Maria’, but fifteen minutes into the divinity of the experience, your stomach had begun to growl once more. You looked at me with half-appealing, half-apologetic eyes.
‘I’m really sorry about this, but can we please leave. I don’t feel very good.’
I smiled and held your hand and led you out from the cathedral back onto the streets, bought a few bottles of water for you before we returned to our hotel room. Soon after we arrived, you went into the loo and closed the door behind you. I could hear the unpleasant sounds of your body expelling the nausea. You returned to bed, lay down for a bit until you felt the irrepressible urge to puke once again. This time I followed you. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before. Under normal circumstances you would never have wanted to let me see you like this. I went in on an impulse, and I held your head and I stroked your back while you attempted to banish the bile from your system.
‘What joy, to have to re-taste food one has already consumed!’ you said, and we broke into laughter, amused by the absurdity of the act of regurgitation.
You decided that night that you would temporarily stick to the softest of foods, like yoghurt, and water; a completely liquid diet minus any form of alcohol. And then, unnecessarily, you apologised once more for being sick. I stayed awake most of the night massaging your feet so I could ease you into sleep. When I was convinced you were safely tucked away in the land of dreams, I moved aside so I could also fade away. I cannot remember what hour of morning it was when I noticed you were up once again, puking into the commode, but neither of us could sleep after that. I was on high alert to make sure you were okay; you were too troubled by all the churnings inside your stomach to rest.
You felt better the next morning. At least you’d stopped vomiting. You were still weak, but you were adamant that we go sightseeing. So we did, and then got ready to leave around 4 p.m. to catch the train to Paris.
The fact of your mortality haunted us through the journey. Your stomach persistently rejected everything you devoured, although you tried to find ways around it; soft foods, easy-to-digest soups and juices, plenty of water, cut backs on cigarettes. You were almost okay the first few days in Paris, before we went off to Burgundy to see S.
When we arrived at X sur Argenteil, you seemed much better than before. We had a succulent home-cooked quiche and many glasses of rose. We returned to our room in S’s beautiful thirteenth-century stone house, and decided to indulge in a siesta. I had just begun to menstruate, yet, I woke up refreshed, painkiller magic running through my system. You found the act of waking up too tiring to attempt. You drifted in and out of sleep, and by early evening, had begun to puke once again. I was on constant standby, holding your head up, stroking your back, and then massaging your feet when you returned to bed. S had already begun to cook the veal in white wine. She’d kept the girolle ready too. You urged me to keep her company, so I left you and went into her kitchen where she was opening a bottle of rose. I sat with S for at least an hour, enjoying each minute of our conversation, savouring the warmth of her hospitality, the graciousness of her personality, and the fact that, unlike most of your friends, she took to me instantly. She’s as possessive of you as your other female friends, but not once did she patronise me or judge the merit of our relationship, unlike M, who once told me to my face (in your absence, of course) that I was everything I was because of you!
When I returned to you an hour later with a cup of tisane, you had grown even weaker.
‘Please stay with me for some time,’ you appealed.
In that moment, in that candid utterance, something changed irrevocably between us. We had arrived at a new milestone. Where before, in moments of sickness, your impulse was always to push me away, to be alone, now you sought not just my company but also my caress, as if it were possibly a form of healing. You allowed yourself to reveal to me the side of you that is vulnerable and mortal, like you were drawing me into a secret place that no one else had ever been privy to, that even I was not permitted to enter until then. Thus far, I had only loved you in health, this was my opportunity to love and care for you in sickness.
It could have gone either way, the act of compassion. An associate, the wife of a renowned artist, who was in her early fifties when I made her acquaintance, told me, when I once asked her what it was like to be with someone thirty years older, that it was no different from being with someone closer in age.
‘I have women friends who married men their age, and quite a few of their husbands had severe health problems, so they had to care for them in much the same way I’ve had to care for A,’ she said.
However, their relationship changed dramatically when her husband had a serious heart attack when he was in his late seventies.
‘It was then that he started perceiving me more as his nurse than his wife,’ she explained.
When I came to you with a bowl of clear miso soup, you were too weak to even sit up, but you mustered the courage. I held the bowl in my hand and scooped a spoonful to put into your mouth, but you wouldn’t allow me this gesture.
‘No, I’m not yet an invalid,’ you argued.
‘You’re very sick, just let me feed you. Indulge me,’ I said, after which you relented. But two spoonfuls later, you felt the urge to throw up once again. When you returned to the bed, you groaned.
‘I feel like an old man on his death bed,’ you said.
‘Shall I press your feet?’ I offered, hoping to pamper you.
‘Can you just lie with me instead?’
So I lay beside you, your legs curled around mine, your arms engulfing mine furtively with all the might of your leftover strength.
As you faded into a form of almost sleep, I closed my eyes and listened to the echoes of your snores, and together, we drifted into a strange land that I had only ever dreamed of but had never encountered before, despite all my previous dalliances with romance. In our unsteady state of unconsciousness we wandered into unchartered territory and inadvertently stumbled into un-promised land, an unmapped space, which I, in retrospect, have decided to christen Intimacy. A surreal island space with no definite cartography where language is composed entirely of gestures, where words as we know them are redundant, where any form of verbal exchange, however profound or prolific, is irrelevant, where communication can only be facilitated through acts of seeming unmeaning. A private republic, where our two disparate bodies, each programmed by its own ordinary eternal machinery, have suddenly, in the aftermath of an unexpected epiphany, understood the triviality of one without the other. So that even the act of hurting becomes a manifestation of reluctant intimacy. We were now the sole inhabitants of a previously undiscovered territory, a land we had no choice but to carry back with us when we returned home, one that stuck to us so religiously we could no longer be what we were before. In that secret emotion, in that unstructured, ominous moment, we became eternal itinerants in the land of intimacy.
Was this why the bum on the metro looked at us the way he did? Scanned our knitted limbs, sized up our form, attempted to overhear all that our bodies were saying without even speaking? He gazed at us with the guilt of an intruder, as if he had caught us in the act of making love, as if we were under the false impression that we were the sole occupants of the train, like there weren’t all these other bodies inhabiting the same space.
Until now we had always been lovers in exile, existing despite not having the comfort and security of either a designation or a destination. Now we had found a notional space, a conceptual territory in which our survival could be guaranteed. Refugees until now, we had finally found sanctuary.
Until I actually journeyed overseas, the question of why one travels at all remained a mystery. Why are we so inclined towards upsetting our settled domestic worlds in order to discover ones that we only heard existed, of which we knew so little about? Some say it is so that we can come back home, so that we realise that our destination was, in fact, to return to the point of our departure. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves, writes Alain de Botton in his Art of Travel. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life but who may not be who we essentially are, he continues. I had no intentions or illusions of travelling to France to find myself. All I wanted was to travel with you, to journey together, to experience first-hand the joy you derive from being elsewhere. So keen was I at the chance that we might finally, literally and metaphorically, always have Paris, I didn’t fathom the extent of how indelible the experience would prove. When we returned, I understood that what I had taken back with me as a souvenir was the satisfaction of having arrived together, and yet, of having only just begun our travelling.
On the verge of my return, I tried to pack in as much as I could. A salad strainer, three little clay mugs I picked up from a flea market, five cloth pouches containing lavender, and copies of Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband and Men in the Off Hours that I’d bought at The Shakespeare and Company bookstore (which I was frankly quite disappointed by; I had expected a more intense inventory). My suitcase wouldn’t clamp down, stuffed as it was with all the clothes I’d worn, all of which had imbibed the nostalgic scent of the Parisian air, and were lined with intangible, libidinous memories from all our many visits to museums and galleries. You would wrap one arm around my bust so that your fingers were perched precisely over one of my breasts. Then, while I was lost in a Caravaggio, you would lightly, almost incidentally stroke me until my body started to exude heat. If we were watching video art, you would sit on the bench while I sat on the floor with your arms placed around my shoulders and my head perched upon your crotch. The act of viewing art had never been as erotically charged.
Like that navy blue dress I’d worn on my birthday when, all day, I’d expected some kind of wildly romantic gesture. It was undoubtedly one of the best days of my life. And yet, on our way back in the metro, I accosted you about the absence of a gift. I realised later how it is so much in my passive-aggressive nature to expect too much on my birthday and set myself up for disappointment and resentment. You took great offence to my badgering, and finally hung your head down in some mixed version of despair and shame, and then, rattled by the look of disappointment that had colonised your face, I confessed that all I really wanted was for you to hold me and wish me‘Happy birthday’. The next few stations rolled by as we settled into a wild embrace, red-wine induced tears streaming down my face. We walked out of the Félix Faure metro station and about fifty metres into our stride, collapsed into each other like a pair of long-lost lovers who had finally been reunited.
‘Happy birthday,’ you said at the climax of our spontaneous embrace.
‘I love you,’ I replied.
‘And I do too, more than I care to admit.’
That cotton dress, like the rest of my clothes, is adorned with these invisible imprints that sit upon the fabric like secrets.
In Casablanca, when Rick convinces Ilsa that she must leave with her husband Victor, despite the fact of their love, because he’s ‘no good at being noble’, because it ‘doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world’, because if that plane leaves the ground and she’s not with him, she’ll regret it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of her life, he uses an argument that has now been immortalised in film history. We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we, we lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night. He seeks solace in the persistence of memory, and hopes that she too may find succour in the act of remembering that brief historic time they spent together, years ago, that had sealed their fate as lovers.
The line is the equivalent of a souvenir, the kind that one picks up en route in the course of one’s travels, one that is charged with emotional currency. Over time, this innocent souvenir assumes the equivalence of a charmed object, a talisman, one that we begin to rely on not so much to aid the process of remembering but to counter our human proclivity towards the act of forgetting.
That we must one day renounce our status as lovers is perhaps inevitable. The uncertainty of whether that will or will not come to pass is something we cannot control, despite our best intentions. If and when we part, there will be too many things I may have to surrender because they are so intrinsically linked to our affair. But Paris I will always retain.