the refectory, where for an hour and a half they partake in leisurely fashion of fresh fruit, tropical fruit, dried fruit, ice cream, cakes, pies, sorbets, biscuits, wafers and chocolates: plain, mint and liqueur, whilst simultaneously circulating, at great speed and in a clockwise direction, several bottles or rather carafes of various rare ports unobtainable at any ordinary vintners. During this second more auspicious phase of the supper, more medieval than eighteenth-century in flavour and known locally as "eating bananas in the moonlight", one can finally change one's conversational partners, talk to anyone for as long as one likes, and, as the port both sharpens the desire to make up for lost time and puts the finishing touches to the verbal deterioration wrought by the wines drunk during the first phase, the conversation grows generalised, unruly, violent and chaotic, even indecent at times. There is also the remote possibility that at some point the Warden (like everything else this is entirely at his discretion) will decide to toast the Queen, which is the signal that one can at last smoke. But the moment of great solemnity and (plastic) beauty I mentioned occurs when the guests leave the refectory, for as they do so each one bears in his or her hand, the napkin they've been using, however stained and crumpled, and the swaying passage of that small piece of white cloth (the moment has the slightly martial air about it inevitable when people walk in single or double file) contrasts sublimely with the slow billowing line of black gowns. As we marched in, Clare, with a nicely ironic touch, tucked her napkin into her neckline like a bib, thus covering up her décolletage. She started laughing and, I think, included me in her laughter. Afterwards, during dessert and for what remained of the evening, she sat far off from me next to Toby Rylands and near her husband and did not look at me again. After a certain moment I was free once more to smoke cigarette after cigarette, thanks to an unexpected show of tolerance or perhaps a sudden display of loyalty to the Crown on the part of the Warden.
THAT WAS THE NIGHT I knew for certain that I would remember my time in the city of Oxford as a time of unease and that whatever was begun or whatever happened there would be touched or contaminated by that one overriding feeling and would, therefore, in the context of the rest of my life, which is not on the whole troubled or uneasy, be condemned to insignificance, to dispersal and forgetting like the tales told in novels or like most of our dreams. That's why now I'm making this effort of memory and writing, because I know that otherwise it will all be obliterated, as will those who have died, those who make up one half of our lives, the half who, together with the living, complete our lives, although, in fact, it isn't always easy to tell what separates and distinguishes one from the other, I mean, what distinguishes the living from the dead whom we knew when alive. I would end up obliterating the dead of Oxford. My dead. My example.
In a way, since everyone who lives in Oxford either feels or is in some way troubled, there's nothing remarkable about the fact that my time in the city was one of unease. For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time. But I was used to existing in time and in the world (in Madrid, for example) and consequently, as I discovered that night, my unease wasbound to be of a different order, perhaps contrary to the norm. Having always been in the world (having spent my life in the world) I suddenly found myself outside it, as if I'd been transplanted into another element, water
THAT WAS THE NIGHT I knew for certain that I would remember my time in the city of Oxford as a time of unease and that whatever was begun or whatever happened there would be touched or contaminated by that one overriding feeling and would, therefore, in the context of the rest of my life, which is not on the whole troubled or uneasy, be condemned to insignificance, to dispersal and forgetting like the tales told in novels or like most of our dreams. That's why now I'm making this effort of memory and writing, because I know that otherwise it will all be obliterated, as will those who have died, those who make up one half of our lives, the half who, together with the living, complete our lives, although, in fact, it isn't always easy to tell what separates and distinguishes one from the other, I mean, what distinguishes the living from the dead whom we knew when alive. I would end up obliterating the dead of Oxford. My dead. My example.
In a way, since everyone who lives in Oxford either feels or is in some way troubled, there's nothing remarkable about the fact that my time in the city was one of unease. For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time. But I was used to existing in time and in the world (in Madrid, for example) and consequently, as I discovered that night, my unease wasbound to be of a different order, perhaps contrary to the norm. Having always been in the world (having spent my life in the world) I suddenly found myself outside it, as if I'd been transplanted into another element, water
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