somewhere else.â
He slept on the floor next to the young woman and sobbed discreetly all night.
When Steph was sacked, she persuaded the young woman to go busking with her on the Ãle Saint-Louis. Steph played guitar and she and the young woman sang a passable rendition of âChuck Eâs in Loveâ. Sometimes that summer, if the stars were in an auspicious position and the two friends felt a lyricism moving in them, they opened their mouths and joy flowed effortlessly from them.
So it was with a song in her mouth that the young woman found her next object lover. Her eyes found it first, the graceful shape of the Pont Marie, its radiant arches rising up from the darkness of the Seine. She had supposed herself tired of beauty; the soft white statues of the Louvre made her seasick, the endless rows of paintings caused her to feel faint. The sight of the bridge restored her to beauty, satisfying every idea of beauty she did not know until that moment she possessed.
Beauty enters first through the eyes and the young woman rushed towards it, hungry for its touch. There was a gap between her as the observer and the bridge as the observed and she craved to close it, to make the distance between her and beauty disappear.
The pearly stones of the Pont Marie were warm from the sun. Under her hand the stones pulsed like flesh and she was not surprised to find when she leant against it that it carried the heat of a body. It had a heartbeat, a hum, a memory of all the accumulated breaths that had breathed upon it. Its stones were barnacled with ghosts, with the collective wishes of the unrecorded vanished. For a moment the young woman was certain that if she listened hard enough the tide of souls who had passed across might break through the fabric of the perished world to fill the air with sound.
The bridge had a mystical beauty, unadorned, like the plainest whitewashed Greek church. All along its sides were empty niches, waiting perhaps for the relics of a saint. The bridgeâs beauty was sacred, and set up in the young womanâs heart a little festival of gratitude. Standing at its centre, her feet firm on its breathing stones, she felt exultant, every cell in her body roused and ready. She felt that at last she had entered the house of beauty; it had materialised, and was real.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Even dead husbands must be counted
SUPER NAN SAID THAT WHEN she lived in Orange, Rene Ferguson (short for Irene) was on her way to her husband Tedâs funeral when she was killed by his coffin. The marriage had not been happy, Super Nan confided, and it was bloody typical of him, excuse the French.
âAnywayââSuper Nan always spiced her stories liberally with âanywayâââon the way to the cemetery to bury the old b, the hearse was hit from the rear by another car,â Super Nan said. âThe coffin in the back slammed straight into poor Reneâs head.â
Isnât it right that sooner or later the body acknowledges the slam of the coffin, the fatal wound to the back of the head? Love lives in the body and when love dies the body is the first to know. My husband wanted to make love to me after I had ceased to love him, but my body had already felt the slam of the coffin.
THIRTY-NINE
France
FRANCE WAS THE YOUNG WOMANâS America, her new-found land, not so much a place as an idea. It was her landscape, hardly a country, more a sensation. A place of white roads, blossoming light, scarlet geraniums, of avenues of plane trees planted by kings to inscribe their power upon rural space.
The young woman travelled to Corsica, to Fontainebleau, to the Breton fishing village of Pornic and small stone villages high in the Pyrenees. She watched the tips of the vine leaves turn russet in Fitou in late September and walked through chestnut forests in the Aude with Steph, Nasser and a group of French friends, searching for wild mushrooms. When they found the ceps, the head of each
He slept on the floor next to the young woman and sobbed discreetly all night.
When Steph was sacked, she persuaded the young woman to go busking with her on the Ãle Saint-Louis. Steph played guitar and she and the young woman sang a passable rendition of âChuck Eâs in Loveâ. Sometimes that summer, if the stars were in an auspicious position and the two friends felt a lyricism moving in them, they opened their mouths and joy flowed effortlessly from them.
So it was with a song in her mouth that the young woman found her next object lover. Her eyes found it first, the graceful shape of the Pont Marie, its radiant arches rising up from the darkness of the Seine. She had supposed herself tired of beauty; the soft white statues of the Louvre made her seasick, the endless rows of paintings caused her to feel faint. The sight of the bridge restored her to beauty, satisfying every idea of beauty she did not know until that moment she possessed.
Beauty enters first through the eyes and the young woman rushed towards it, hungry for its touch. There was a gap between her as the observer and the bridge as the observed and she craved to close it, to make the distance between her and beauty disappear.
The pearly stones of the Pont Marie were warm from the sun. Under her hand the stones pulsed like flesh and she was not surprised to find when she leant against it that it carried the heat of a body. It had a heartbeat, a hum, a memory of all the accumulated breaths that had breathed upon it. Its stones were barnacled with ghosts, with the collective wishes of the unrecorded vanished. For a moment the young woman was certain that if she listened hard enough the tide of souls who had passed across might break through the fabric of the perished world to fill the air with sound.
The bridge had a mystical beauty, unadorned, like the plainest whitewashed Greek church. All along its sides were empty niches, waiting perhaps for the relics of a saint. The bridgeâs beauty was sacred, and set up in the young womanâs heart a little festival of gratitude. Standing at its centre, her feet firm on its breathing stones, she felt exultant, every cell in her body roused and ready. She felt that at last she had entered the house of beauty; it had materialised, and was real.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Even dead husbands must be counted
SUPER NAN SAID THAT WHEN she lived in Orange, Rene Ferguson (short for Irene) was on her way to her husband Tedâs funeral when she was killed by his coffin. The marriage had not been happy, Super Nan confided, and it was bloody typical of him, excuse the French.
âAnywayââSuper Nan always spiced her stories liberally with âanywayâââon the way to the cemetery to bury the old b, the hearse was hit from the rear by another car,â Super Nan said. âThe coffin in the back slammed straight into poor Reneâs head.â
Isnât it right that sooner or later the body acknowledges the slam of the coffin, the fatal wound to the back of the head? Love lives in the body and when love dies the body is the first to know. My husband wanted to make love to me after I had ceased to love him, but my body had already felt the slam of the coffin.
THIRTY-NINE
France
FRANCE WAS THE YOUNG WOMANâS America, her new-found land, not so much a place as an idea. It was her landscape, hardly a country, more a sensation. A place of white roads, blossoming light, scarlet geraniums, of avenues of plane trees planted by kings to inscribe their power upon rural space.
The young woman travelled to Corsica, to Fontainebleau, to the Breton fishing village of Pornic and small stone villages high in the Pyrenees. She watched the tips of the vine leaves turn russet in Fitou in late September and walked through chestnut forests in the Aude with Steph, Nasser and a group of French friends, searching for wild mushrooms. When they found the ceps, the head of each
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