Chat Line - The Faceless Lover

Citation preview

Chat Line

___________________________________________________

CHAT LINE The Faceless Lover by Piero Colle Translated by Giles Watson _____________________________________________________

BOSON BOOKS Raleigh

BOSON BOOKS

2

Chat Line

Published by Boson Books 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 ISBN 1-932482-17-2 An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

© Copyright 2004 Piero Colle All rights reserved For information contact C&M Online Media Inc. 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 Tel: (919) 233-8164 e-mail:[email protected] URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com Cover art: Eresia by Isabella Pers Translation from Italian by Giles Watson

BOSON BOOKS

3

Chat Line

“The future is already rooted in the present…it has happened…” Spoken by Merlin in the film, Excalibur

BOSON BOOKS

4

Chat Line

TABLE OF CONTENTS SHERRIE NOWAY CAPTAIN CATHERINE MIA WHEELCHAIR VENUS21 MUSTAFA WOLF XAVIER

BOSON BOOKS

5

Chat Line

SHERRIE She finally decided on the nickname when, at some international swimming championship, a slightly built American girl called Sherrie Lingwood had humiliated the rest of the field – including her – with a time that made the front pages of the Amsterdam sports papers. So there she was, Jolanda Bartels, aka Sherrie, in the full glory of her recently completed eighteen years, going home from school and then on to the gym, before running in the parks or along the canals that criss-cross her city and inspire its residents with improbable pretensions to vie with Venice. In any case, the only people asleep at night are the elderly, the sick, the diligent and the dead, which for Jolanda are four aspects of the same category reflected in a single mirror. When her parents and her brother, two years her junior, have gone to bed, she leaves the house again and, jogging briskly along more out of spiritual compulsion than from any commitment to a training regime, she reaches the sports complex where at least four distinct clubs are based. And it was there that she learned how to use the Internet. The manager of the bar, which serves only non-alcoholic drinks and perversely protein-rich snacks, arranged for a computer to be installed so that his youthful patrons could keep in touch with other young people around the world. Jolanda was a practical young woman, with a matter-of-fact attitude – shared by many other Dutch people – that sometimes tilts into intellectual brutality. She always passed her exams at school because she had a good memory but Shakespeare and essays on literature merely exasperated her. That was one reason why so many hours sacrificed in the gym served at least one purpose. No one in the school was faster at getting up in class, rifling through the notes, papers and tables of the cleverest student in the class, and returning to their desk with a look of offended innocence, as if they had never moved at all. Jolanda began to explore the labyrinthine involutions of the World Wide Web. Not long after, she sent an email to a surf club in California. The pages of its website portrayed an earthly paradise reminiscent of TV commercials for soap powder. The protagonists live out their lives in an Eden where bad breath, eviction orders and spiritual angst are unknown, and a delicious soft focus swathes meek yet obviously sexy mums as they dress their twelve-year-olds that major advertising agencies have already made seriously wealthy. Jolanda’s first missive was in basic Internet English, couched in an artless jargon that would have seemed unambitious even for someone with serious learning difficulties. The reply was enthusiastic and came complete with a photo in which an instructor appeared naked on the Pacific shore, the surfboard under his arm carefully held aside to reveal his mahogany tan and a sexual organ that would have drawn admiring glances from even the most blasé of brothelkeepers. "He's just an old man with an enormous cock," a girlfriend told her, echoing a phrase that seemed particularly apposite from a book by Charles Bukowsky. Then she stared briefly at Jolanda to see if her remark had struck home before turning back to examine the photo with the pitiless gaze of a teenager capable of crushing anyone over the age of twenty-five. BOSON BOOKS

6

Chat Line

It was more or less at this time that Jolanda became Sherrie, or rather, it was around then that the surfer proposed a live conversation on a chatline. His name was Kevin Karp but on the Internet he was known by disappointingly unimaginative nickname inspired by his sporting activities, "Surfman". Observing the conventions of netiquette, he introduced himself with a brief account of his life, which nevertheless added little to what you could have found in the local registry office. He was forty-six, divorced with no children, and held five diplomas that qualified him as an instructor in five different sporting disciplines. Sherrie was above all curious, particularly because of the bizarre nature of the encounter and Surfman’s age. He was six years older than her father. And while she was thinking about him - she was actually watering the garden one Saturday afternoon after her brother had done the job three times in a row - there came into her mind when she was least expecting it a slowly delivered monologue that English lessons at school had rendered hateful to her. It was "The Life and Death of King Richard the Third". Translating it from Shakespeare's impenetrable English had forced her to skip two sessions in the gym. From the confusion of names, phrases and metaphors there leapt to her eyes only a few words. King Richard has had an ominous dream on the eve of the crucial battle ….. spirits, evil presences and insolent ghosts have tormented him through the night …. and in the end, when he opens his eyes with a start, his brow beaded with a sweat portending misfortune beyond description, he utters a phrase without thinking, and which for that very reason cuts through the nocturnal mists ……. "Richard, loves Richard……" Sherrie was intrigued by the passage, which may be an exhortation or perhaps is mere self-obsession. And so she slipped off her T-shirt, shorts and knickers, asked her willing brother to hose her down carefully, as if she was a particularly delicate flower, and then had him take an out-of-focus photo that would suggest exotic shores. Sherrie: how did u like my pic?…. it’s me in Fuerteventura last summer… she told Surfman him after sending him the picture, in which the dissimulation foreshadows a desire she expects from Kevin. Instinctively, guilelessly, she describes trees, flowers, shells, horses on beaches and days spent gathering fruit she has never actually seen, drawing his attention away from her nudity so that in fact her body will burn itself into his eyes like an iron branding a bull’s backside. Then comes the phrase, the compliment after the magical moments of suspense bracketed by pressure on the enter key: Surfman: WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i didn’t know u were so pretty…. Immediately, improbably, Kevin wanted to send her a picture which showed him standing next to the Californian surf champion. An excusable act of vanity, accepting the risk of comparison while selling what, after all, involves least cost. The photo arrived. Kevin in bermuda shorts on the beach, his arm round a young man an inch or two taller than he is – the champion. The youngster is looking at the photographer with a world-weary smile, his canines sticking out slightly. He has the air of an absent-minded vampire caught in the dawn sunlight just before he crumbles away to dust for ever. BOSON BOOKS

7

Chat Line

It was still not real passion, even though Kevin asked her how she spent her evenings and suggested she should visit him in California the following summer. Beside the ocean, obviously. With him, of course. But the invitation wouldn’t have been so explicit if both parties had not first made some thorough investigation. Inquiries unfiltered by discretion, arriving quick-fire as if in a game show where only one answer is possible, with contestants who are astute enough to avoid the heavily signalled trick questions. Sherrie: u have a girlfriend now? Surfman: oh, plenty girlfriends around……. and u? Sherrie: i don’t know yet…. maybe It was as if she had answered with the insane intention of making him repeat the question and surprising him in front of the office computer amid his cups and trophies. Meanwhile, Kevin struggled to understand what the blond Dutch girl wanted to conceal behind the concision of her message. But the man seemed to have lost interest. He played along for a while but didn’t go for the kill. Nor did Jolanda want to reveal her true feelings. She didn’t know why she kept going back every evening to a centre where – after all – the people were pretty uncool and her girlfriend, Melanie, kept making fun of her sudden passion for the Internet. "You can’t screw your wrinkly friend over the keyboard," Melanie told Jolanda with the shrewd insight of a practised prick-tease. As she walked past, she extended her arms to brush her friend’s back in an extravagant mockery of flying whose evolutions suggested various absurd images – an obscene metaphor for a huge bird or an aeroplane, now that California was increasingly often the subject of their conversations. Or it may just have been the simple tribute of a graceful shape, so well-defined in its extension of herself as if her friend wanted to embrace the world without malice. Or again it may have been a desire to shake free of everything, the girl hungering only to imagine herself breaking away from the earthly world, hanging in ecstatic ascension midway between floor and ceiling. Jolanda paid her no attention. She smiled without looking away from the computer screen and stretched a hand behind her back to pinch her friend. On the tit, since it is the other’s proud claim that she was the motor with the biggest air bags in all Amsterdam. "Watch out or I’ll deflate your safety equipment," squealed jolanda, giggling all the while. Melanie, too, laughed at the jibe and took up the exchange of insults and mutual recriminations they whispered like a secret language. "Do that, and I’ll hit you where it hurts most," Melanie replied, making it clear that she was prepared to extend the principle of "an eye for an eye" to other areas of the body. While she was speaking, her gaze wandered over to the bluecoloured computer screen where Kevin appeared to be smiling his smile for her alone. But Jolanda, alternately serious and silly, put her arms round the screen when she realised that Melanie is almost on top of her, preventing her from continuing a relationship woven from subconscious glances. She was even jealous - the lads at the bar would say – of a poorly scanned photograph. Surfman: ok darling, i really gotta go now… somebody’s waiting for me Sherrie: shall we meet tomorrow? Surfman: yes, but later… i have to give lessons in the afternoon BOSON BOOKS

8

Chat Line

Sherrie: ok then…. kiss me… She asked him for a goodnight kiss, when it was time to say goodbye, which for Jolanda meant bedtime although Kevin still hadn’t had his evening meal. Then a phrase popped up in full colour, repeated three, four, six times in row, each time in a different hue. Surfman: SURFMAN KISSES SHERRIE ON HER CHEEK!!!! Irritated and put out, Jolanda logged off without even saying goodbye, leaving Kevin’s kaleidoscopic crassness on the screen. How come he didn’t understand? She asked him for a kiss, not that cheap rainbow and the condescending peck on the cheek as if he were an uncle kissing a niece not yet old enough to wear stockings! Jolanda was sure she hated him now. Certain that she would never again let herself be surprised in front of that stupid machine, which couldn’t even keep the simplest of promises. Melanie watched her go off in silence, with the dignified arrogance of a wild creature on the verge of death. She waited until Jolanda had left the club, then skipped round the tables and went into the kitchen with the manager. The following day, Jolanda managed to stay away from the club. Luckily, her computer at home wasn’t Internet-enabled so resisting the temptation to chat was no great effort. When school was over, she went for a run in the parks, then on to the swimming pool to pass the time until supper. After her swim, she had a sauna and while her body was still glistening with heat, she decided she’d like to have her portrait done like that – dripping with sweat and buckling under the impact of heat that the thermometer indicated as having reached precisely ninety degrees Centigrade. "Oh baby…." a transitory thought transfixed her as, involuntarily, the shadow of a phrase in Dutch brushed her lips, "I’d really love to see you sweat …….." She imagined him to be there with her, "oh baby….", but for some reason strangely subservient to her whims – a docile slave who would accept the most atrocious tortures with the same smile that, since she saw the photo, she expected from him when he was riding the waves. Sitting on the sauna benches were four other people who did not seem to know each other. Two were middle-aged men, one was a teenage girl and the other a woman Jolanda had exchanged a few words with them in the past, as one does in saunas. But today, she only wanted to talk to herself. Suddenly, she hurried out, not even bothering to jump into the tub of icy water, dried herself off, got dressed and sped home bursting with anxiety. Jolanda said a cursory hello to her brother then darted into the bathroom. After locking the door - something she very rarely did – "Oh baby…." she ransacked the laundry basket and picked out one of her father’s shirts. Enraptured, she sniffed it, amazed that she could have been so unaware of the smell of an adult male. "Oh baby…." she mumbled, still uttering no more than a general invocation. But her body clung motionless to the shirt, her desire rapidly growing to distill her lover drop by drop and finish him off in a sauna that her sublime torment imagined as a sealed container with no beginning and no end. BOSON BOOKS

9

Chat Line

So she raced back to the sports centre to find the manager closing up. She begged him to let her in and booted up the computer, anxious to see Kevin’s sunburnished body, as if meeting and embracing in the electronic labyrinth were more real than a night of lovemaking under the stars in the garden. But this time, Kevin was not online so she did a whois search, again without success. And yet he was there, says the manager, for almost everyone had chatted with him. Jolanda tried to figure out the time difference and reckoned that, for today at least, she had missed out. He’d be having dinner now. Then he’d go to bed with some local lady. While she was thinking this (and she used the English term "lady", only to add a string of epithets that would have startled even the most eloquent virtuosos of invective), she said goodbye to her friend and walked away. Slowly, as if she knew her train has already left the station. "Oh baby…." she imagined him fighting back the tears but she would lick them as they descended to the corners of his mouth, tracing a Viva Zapata moustache, washing away the deep, generous blue of his eyes, an insolent blue bright as the waters behind the dykes in spring. - Oh baby…. another night in Holland to be got through, then another trivial day, with trivial people and trivial conversations ……. Now Jolanda wanted to lie in bed after drinking one of the philtres that in the epic poems she reads at high school bring sleep or death, or preferably that singular abstraction which, if only for the space of one night, transports you out of the mortal world ……. and while she was dreaming and the words were tumbling out one after the other, then, yes, of course…. beyond good and evil, it occurred to her, where her churning emotions collided with the graceless rebukes of the philosophy teacher and phrases intertwined so it was no longer possible to disentangle the stunned embrace of Nietzsche and Sappho …… for the first time since she started going to school, she felt that everything she had unenthusiastically learnt was written for her and her distant lover. That was right, because wasn't it true that the passage from Shakespeare was composed expressly for her? …. the tragic demise of King Richard desperate to escape just as she wanted to run away for ever, invoking wings and chargers to lift her above the pikes that even now transfix the king's bloody breast …… "I think there were six Kevins in the field. I have killed five today instead of him. A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" Oh baby………. or, and this was the illusory fruit that no one except her had been able to pick from the tree …. "like the reddest apple ripening on the highest bough …. no, the pickers did not forget it, but they could not reach it." Suddenly, as soon as she opened the door, her father's odour made its imperious return. Jolanda could detect it in the corridor leading to the bedrooms. She even felt tears well up at the smell of the man who is asleep in the next room but who for some perverse reason seemed further away than Kevin. In short, she felt that her family no longer existed except as a faint background noise in the night. Her father's light snore had become more insistent after his accident last year. Her mother replied with a cough stifled in her pillow, revealing her longestablished habit of sleeping with her face buried so deep that her husband had taken fright on their honeymoon. In contrast, her brother was more discreet. You wouldn't know he was in the house at all, except for the bow and arrows

BOSON BOOKS

10

Chat Line

incongruously inserted into the umbrella stand in the hall. Archery was his latest craze and he practised every afternoon at a club. It was not their presence that Jolanda perceived. She sensed them through indirect signals. Emptinesses as indefinable as memories of school. Shades that spawned a tangle of emotion and exasperation even as she realised how disporportionate they were to those tiny signals. Morning was ushered in by the household noises that had infiltrated her dreams. It was the happiest day of the week, and not just because it was Saturday. At school, she had three hours of physical education, which were given over to volleyball matches against the other educational institutions in the town. So for three hours without a break, Jolanda could forget she was Sherrie and concentrate on something that not even the tribulations of love could compromise. Briefly, on her way to the changing rooms, the sweat-glistening athlete met Melanie, but her friend didn’t play sports. Older than Jolanda, she disdained such pursuits for other, more mature, delectations. Instead, Melanie asked her how her cyber-affair was going and this simple enquiry was enough to capture Jolanda’s undivided attention. Yes, because – she was told as if it proved the truth of some astounding story Melanie was prepared to swear to – the secretary at a shipper’s had fallen in love with a Frenchman on a chat line, and now she spent more time in Paris than she did at home. Melanie smiled her ambivalent smile, without letting on whether what she said actually happened or if it was just a mischievous story she had dreamed up to exacerbate Jolanda’s disappointment. But the athlete merely phoned home to say she wouldn’t be back for lunch and jogged off to the club, picking up some fried fish at the shop on the corner. Then she sat down at the computer and searched for her lover, knowing that he wouldn’t even be awake at that hour. There was no sign of Surfman. So Jolanda decided to send him a message but she couldn’t make her mind up about what tone to adopt. Should she be firm, keeping her feelings in check behind a wall of dignified self-importance? Or should she be nonchalant and cheeky, pretending she had only just noticed the size of his tackle and perhaps reminding him what happened to the equally well-hung bulls in Hemingway (the campesinos would celebrate by roasting the animal’s testicles over an acacia wood fire and eating them while the beast was still breathing its last)? In the end, her letter was brief, and very different from how she had originally conceived it. There were four – rather formally written lines – except for the final phrase, in which the sender ceased to dissemble and the force of her emotion was mirrored by the directness of the language. ANSWER ME, YOU BASTARD! Naturally, Kevin replied. He made a date for the evening of the day after at an hour which from that moment for Jolanda lay in another dimension of time. Confusedly, Surfman hinted that he wasn’t feeling very well but it was just a ploy, a calculated exaggeration of courtesy, a weapon from the female armoury that he had noticed was always effective on the web. When she logged on to the chat line, Jolanda experienced the thrill and emotion of a really important "first time". Today, Kevin asked her for a kiss. She asked how he was, but not because she wanted to put him off. She was playing for BOSON BOOKS

11

Chat Line

time, needing to take a deep breath so she wouldn’t be awkward and screw up her appointment with happiness. Surfman: oh, i’ve got influenza, but nothing serious darling…… kiss me and i’ll soon get better! He said to her, seeming to near his lips to Sherrie’s computer screen. Without seeing him, she stared at the terminal from the other side of the world. But Jolanda jerked away. Nothing disgusted her more than physical decay. Kissing a sick man was to her like an act of blasphemy, an insult to life. And although Kevin may have been the lover for whom she was most prepared to make a sacrifice, for the time being he was just a sick man, and even more culpably had deteriorated to a state she had hitherto thought impossible. For reading between the lines that Kevin so feebly fired off, Jolanda could actually hear his voice slurring. She could see on his hunky all-American face the ignorance and insensitivity induced by a life devoted exclusively to riding the waves. She didn’t think about the virtual illusion or the sympathy of a contact that she, too, had sought. She simply said no. No kiss. No hug. There could be no complicity between a sick man and a woman who detested illness as if it were a moral failing. Sherrie: no way, Surfman, i wont kiss u….. But Kevin was convinced that this was a game in which the force of desire is conveyed more by its denial than in careless capitulation. So he continued to distill his blandishments into ever more passionate concentrations, tracing and retracing exquisitely circular arguments, losing his way in labyrinthine syllogisms without realising that by now only he was chatting. However, when he repeated his request, the verdict was unchanged. Sherrie: i told u Surfman, NO WAY!; she screamed at him in capitals, surprising herself with her vehemence. What was she to do? Kevin remained silent, after tapping out a word or two by way of an incongruous appeal for mercy. Jolanda said nothing either. She didn’t close Surfman’s window, avoiding contagion with a hygienic click of her mouse. Nor did she change the subject. But it was the adventure that won the day on-screen. Jolanda knew only too well that there was nothing else to talk about except the topic they had both met up for. And with the practical attitude of those who have something better to do, she cut off the contact without further comment. But she was still undecided. What should she do, she asked herself. So she scrolled through the list of channels open at that moment, searching for someone or something she felt close to, running down names whose very banality rendered them even more stridently ostentatious …… sexygirl thebest one4all deathwish snowboard….. Now she needed to get in touch with someone. A name that belonged only to cyberspace, or the "ether" as the guides put it with cod-poetic delicacy. She had to plunge in among those familiar presences, yet so inaccessible even when they seemed only a keystroke away. She tried contacting people simply because their nickname was particularly interesting, then clicked on status, tapped in /whois Surfman, and discovered that her cold-bedevilled lover was no longer on line. Perhaps now Jolanda could have explained why she had said no, adding a belated but love-filled apology. She’d have told him that it was nothing really – just that she was afraid of having to stay in bed, with hot lemon drinks and paper BOSON BOOKS

12

Chat Line

handkerchiefs, because of one ill-considered kiss. Tomorrow, or the next day, there’d be plenty of time to put things right. Even now, as the first inklings of summer were adorning the avenues of Amsterdam, and the canals fooled houseboat-dwellers into thinking they could drift away to distant seas if only they would cast off, close their eyes against the midday sun and let themselves be rocked in the gentle rolling waves that make seasoned sailors sad. Now that Kevin had formally invited her to spend the summer with him in California, just the two of them, surfing the Pacific breakers and riding on the beach. Now that her parents had all but agreed to pay her air fare if she passed her exams at school. But as she slowly walked home – it was her turn to water the garden today – the realised that the distance she had covered was a trap. There wouldn’t be another chance tomorrow, or ever again. Even if she was still unaware of the final act of this sad little comedy. For the past couple of days, her friend Melanie had been holding onto the return air ticket. Her parents hadn’t given her a single guilder and she had no savings. But the tourist class travel document carried an indication and signature the desk staff at KLM knew only too well – paid in advance by Mr. Kevin Karp, USA.

BOSON BOOKS

13

Chat Line

NOWAY When a friend finally installed the chat program, Kivi had to listen meekly to his solemn admonitions, in addition to facing the other problems newbies have to put up with. For about half an hour, the expert listed the appalling possible hazards. Phone bills the like of which you’ve never seen before, Internet connection failures because the number of subscribers has mushroomed, jamming the phone lines, and dodgy providers who don’t know what they’re doing. But leaving aside the friend’s nerdy failure to warn Kivi of the biggest danger of all – addiction –, these exhortations to temperance were in fact an excellent motive for getting enthusiastically stuck in. Soon, Kivi was trying out the program with the initials mIRC that look like a jockey wrestling with a particularly fractious horse. His service provider was the Helsinki-based Funet, which isn’t particularly popular ("so why was it forced on me?" he was tempted to ask). The instruction "/list" produced a complete roster of all the channels available and Kivi scrolled through it, selecting a name that looked interesting (meanwhile, the computer expert was moving the cursor to one or two others, with a nod and a wink). Kivi logged on and finally began to talk. Or rather, he began to "chat", in the infospeak meaning of a familiar term. Precisely the sort of semantic innovation that pushes the blood pressure of experienced English teachers up into the danger zone. What else? Just a test run to make sure that everything was working. Kivi the newby was spellbound. He watched as the mouse flitted across the screen like a bee that hasn’t decided which flower to land on. There it was: #writers, it said, which for any booklover certainly looked worth a visit. The number 1 next to the name – elucidated his counsellor – meant that at the moment there was only one person online. OK. With Kivi, there’d be two, and he began the ritual of introducing himself after entering the chat room. Kivi was perhaps unecessarily nervous, given that he spoke to large audiences for a living, but the chatroom had the atmosphere of anticipation that precedes major events. Yes, it was a meeting, and the difficult thing would be to find the right attitude to adopt. Formal? Scholarly? Goofy, like the teenagers that make up ninety per cent of the web’s users? Explicit? Mysterious, insofar as a formula can be mysterious, since you’ve got to say something, even if it’s only in reply to the unanswerable question of why he was there? Kivi: hi there, i’m M 43 from Northern Italy, a writer, would u like 2 chat? The welcome was encouragingly enthusiastic. Noway was a woman. She, too, was a writer and obviously an intellectual, given her mania for equivocation. "Noway" looked like a firm denial but the typing error it cleverly suggested pointed to the absent "r" that would indicate the writer’s homeland. Fetsund, she added hurriedly, a few kilometres east of Oslo. Noway studied literature at the university in the capital but she had always written short stories that no publisher had been brave enough – her definition, whether in self-deprecation or pride – to accept. And belying the coldness of her native land, she was articulate, open, optimistic about life and delighted with this virtual encounter. Noway: r u married?…. if i may ask u…. BOSON BOOKS

14

Chat Line

Certainly not, replied the author from Italy, who had never had any inclination towards matrimony. He explained his whereabouts as if proferring the map reference of a buried treasure ("…… never have been married and never will, I live in the north-east corner of Italy near Austria and Slovenia, in a house on a hill with my animals, two dogs, six cats, a horse …."), and then asked about her. Noway: i’m F 25, married, no children …… and then adding in an burst of information that had more the air of a literary expedient than a true desciption of her husband: …. he has black hair …. looks a bit french sometimes…… Above all, it was the dots that tell Kivi certain things had been left unsaid. But he was in no position to contradict. The two chatters liked each other and were both convinced they had received a little gift from heaven on that strange autumn day. The new-found intimacy led to a further round of introductions with real names. It was like tearing down a veil separating the virtual world from a potential meeting in the flesh. Eva, the woman was called. His name was Peter, he said, offering a slightly counterfeit version to take account of Scandinavian pronunciation. But he changed his mind at once, declaring himself to be mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua "piero", the real name he had so far kept hidden. There it was, carefully written with a small "p" to mitigate his ever-present embarrassment at owning up to being Italian. Talk now turned to the blank page. Speaking as she would to a colleague, Eva asked how he managed to face up to the torture of starting a story, which may not always have a form when you sit down at the computer. In short, the beginning, the initial impetus, the propitiation that every writer must perform. It depended, he replied. Sometimes you know what to write. On other occasions, the act of writing itself takes you where you never thought you would go. The plan is no more than a declaration of intent. What about Eva? For her, things weren’t quite like that. But in rejecting what for Piero was a methodical system, she still didn’t say what she wrote about or why. "I look for situations …. certain things always inspire me …..", she carried on in excellent English, with only the occasional concession to Internet jargon. Kivi sensed an emptiness. He wasn't able to put his finger on it, but the strings of suspension dots, more than any actual embarrassment, suggested a desire to conceal. But hide who? Herself? What from? Further questioning did nothing to clear up the mystery. So, as ever in such cases and implicitly revealing a professional's skill, Noway shifted the conversation over to trivial topics. Noway: describe yourself… let me know what u look like…. , she asked with a smile that anticipated a subtle duplicity in the reply. Still smiling, she told him the description she wanted was not the kind people give on the erotic channels, where "size", "expression" and "colour" refer not to the whole individual but to rather more intimate attributes. Kivi answered in short phrases - now that his technically-minded friend had left, he felt freer - seeking to pour into his words what he saw reflected in the glass of the picture hanging on the wall behind the computer. "He looks more like a Norwegian than I do", thought Eva.

BOSON BOOKS

15

Chat Line

The conversation took on a lighthearted tone but Kivi inferred many things from its very lack of seriousness. His interlocutor was intelligent, that was obvious. She was also on her own, and not because - by her own admission - she was busy doing something she herself admitted was a frequently repeated ritual, but rather because of her habit of failing to explain things, which is typical of people who are used to having only themselves to answer to. Kivi sensed her desire to give herself yet the dots revealed a fear of opening up. Their job is to hold back - to shut in - the words as if they were not supposed to venture beyond their metaphorical barrier. A glance at the clock in the bottom right of the screen informed Kivi that it was nine o'clock and someone would already be waiting for him in a restaurant in the centre of town. So he told Eva about his appointment but of course, he added, we must keep in touch. And here was the site where, among other things, Eva would be able to see his photograph and find out whether the description he had given her was accurate: Kivi: http://www.pierocolle.it / Noway: listen…. shall we meet tomorrow?…. same time… here on my channel?… Sure! Tomorrow is a date, Kivi confirmed, again noting the dots that punctuate her message. A sense of anticipation? Confusion? A way of communicating a deliberate reserve in a form that even Internet jargon can express? Her goodbye was accompanied by a big smile. Kivi hardly had barely arrived home after his meal in town when an email message from Eva arrived. She was asking for details of books and publishers with the slightly naive tone of an apprentice addressing a successful colleague. But obvious considerations apart - her question about how much he had to write before his first book was published was deliciously innocent -, Kivi was surprised by her parting shot. She wanted to know how he could stand the periods of silence when nothing at all comes into mind. There was a final note, sealing, as it were, her message: "I will tell u more of myself if u ask me something special". Kivi thought about what very special thing he would decide to ask her in the end, since it was a game where the player who doesn't lay down his or her cards wins. It'd be better just to ignore his twinges of curiosity and carry on as before, perhaps with more comments like the ones that she seemed to have enjoyed so far, even though she knew they were far from the truth (Kivi: i’m such a shy village boy! Noway: oh no dear….. u’re not shy…. AT ALL…….). When they met up that evening on Eva's channel, it was she who took the initiative without waiting for even the briefest of questions. Yes, there were two ways of writing, she argued. You can say things for a living, every day for six or seven hours, weekends and holidays excluded, like a shift worker. Otherwise, you can boot up your computer when you feel you really have to, and perhaps linger in front of the colour screen. But silence was writing, too, she went on. A profound silence, emphasised by the dots in her sentences that seemed to mark a time that was not hers. Nice, Kivi commented. You talk in absolutes. I can see you live on your own, even if your husband is often in the room next door as we speak. Oh yes, your husband. A bit French, you called him. BOSON BOOKS

16

Chat Line

Suddenly, Kivi realised that the man was part of the silence, too. "He's happy", Eva said, "I've told him about you …. He'd like to meet you". But the very affirmation that he was enthusiastic, the unmotivated satisfaction he professed, the way he made his presence clear as if to remove all doubts, hinted at just the opposite to the writer from Italy. Then, as if she was picking up from where she left off, Noway began to talk about the United States. But what was so special? A trip? Something that happened to her across the Atlantic? A lover she left in the snows of Colorado? No, she wanted to talk about Karla Faye Tucker …. Capital punishment ….. the death-bearing needle puncturing the skin. The executioner with his white coat and doctor's licence. The trolley, just like the ones in casualty. The one-way mirror window that enables you to see in to the death chamber, but not out ….. Karla's eyes staring at the ceiling in a time that no longer belongs to her …. So? A social comment? The anthropology of crime? A European intellectual's cry against - or even in favour of - the death penalty? Eva said nothing. Then, after a silence that made Kivi think the line had been cut off, she changed the subject and went back to her faculty at the university of Oslo. She only went to the lectures that interested her, once or twice a week. She spent the rest of her time at Fetsund, where she nurtured ambitions in local politics. Sooner or later, they'd make her a councillor, or else they'd give her the job she'd been after for at least two years - looking after pre-school children, organising afternoon playschools and involving toddlers in activities such as making paper collages for carnival, and pottery to decorate with painted gnomes and elves. Did she like children, then? Yes, but she didn't want any of her own. Why not? There isn't always a why for everything. She could answer with an expression stolen from a debate whose message was a ferocious attack on the propagation of the human species, but she preferred to restrict herself to a short answer. Too difficult to translate into English. Well, then, Karla Tucker? Oh, yes, she'd got nothing to do with it …. She realised she was touched by Karla's eyes and light step as she crossed the prison yard ….. the hands knitting a pullover that no one would wear …. all so imposssibly far away from the crime she committed …. Nothing, pretend I never said anything ….. it's got nothing to do with it, I was just thinking out loud ….. a creative exercise suggested to her by a writer of stories of love and hunting in the fjords. What are her books like? The biggest literary scam of the century. After Isabel Allende, of course. That Peruvian bitch. Isn't she supposed to be a Chilean? No, she was born in Lima in 1942. She moved to Chile later on. A real cow, who could have saved herself the trouble of being born in the first place! Plundering the superb novels of Garcia Márquez…… that's it then, Eva ransacks American novels …. A sort of pocket Hemingway. The world of books is crawling with killers and child molesters. And worse. Men and women who steal, rogues whose dearest wish is to be crafty ….. even Grisham is more honest – apart from being a better writer. Darling, what about seeing each other? Yes, meeting. I thought maybe London, which is quite close for you and I can get a cheap flight. Kivi, you know how much I like you …. but don't ask me to do this …. no, not because I'm married … but a meeting …… NOWAY….. she said, with a couple of smilies, using her nick as if to let him know that the subject was closed forever. BOSON BOOKS

17

Chat Line

Can I know why? So much interest and then you don't want to meet. Silence is creative, my love….. she replied with all the guile of a seasoned whore. Kivi didn't want her to think he was being too insistent. They exchanged a few more comments on books and writers, as though he had never mentioned flights and trysts in tearooms in the shade of Big Ben. But then she unexpectedly went back to the American woman who was executed. And launched into a string of extraordinary protests. Heaven knows how, but Noway had got her hands on a cassette of Karla's last moments. The quality wasn't great - she explained - but at the crucial moment, you can see her eyes looking at the executioner, then a wideangle of the white room, the window behind which invisible eyes were looking on and the leather straps that bound her to the trolley. Then there was silence, and another slow pan round the snow-white walls, the thumb slowly pressing down the plunger and the still-living eyes slowly misting over until they rolled over to one side when Karla reclined her head like a submissive ghost. The husbandchaplain at the food of the trolley, his hands on her ankles until the warmth had drained away, in the solemn stillness melded into the white of the walls. You sure you've got that cassette? Kivi asked, beginning to doubt some of the details. He was a careful observer of the world and at once wondered if the chaplain who married Tucker really stayed with her to watch her breathe her last. And there was another detail that made him want to query Eva's account. The word "plunger" hinted at anachronistic syringes while the woman certainly had the needles and tubes for the poison already inserted in her arm. For the injection killed her only after a delay of fully eight minutes and twelve seconds. As if in reply to the observations on which she made no comment, Noway poured out the recent history of the prison at Huntsville, in Texas. David Stoker, a thirty-eight year old white man, obese, toothless and so senile he looked twenty years older, was executed on 16 June 1997. And only two days later, Irineo Montoya, a hispanic of twenty nine. Then on 29 July of the same year, it was the turn of young, hunky Robert West to bare his arm to the deadly needle, oddly unforgiving of himself and the crime he had committed. Then there was another black man but she couldn't remember his name. She'd have to look in her drawer for the jotter she used for her writing notes. Then came the most spectacular execution of all. On 22 April 1998, Joe Cannon, thirty-eight, was dragged into the death chamber. It was all very "American", including the crime and the way it was carried out. Cannon tried to rape, and then killed with seven gunshot wounds, Anne Walsh, the sister of the court-appointed lawyer who had defended him in a theft trial, enabling him to obtain bail. At the time, Joe was seventeen and had a past that doesn't bear thinking about. Disabled after being run over by a car at the age of four, he had been beaten daily by his father. But the preliminaries of the final ritual were unusual. The previous evening, Joe had an attack of bulimia. Noway was very precise about certain things. The prisoner ate a triple portion of fried chicken, baked potatoes, green salad, dessert, chocolate ice cream, a chocolate milkshake and iced tea. He also asked for an entire tray of grilled ribs, perhaps in an attempt to die of a stroke before receiving the injection. But the prison director wouldn't let him have his extra rations and his mother, Doris McCay, didn't have the courage to say goodbye to him. The next day, there was an incident that made BOSON BOOKS

18

Chat Line

headlines round the world. Apart from the request for clemency, promptly refused by George Bush Jr, when the doctor was about to perform the final operation, the needle ruptured Joe's vein and the execution was postponed. Only for an hour, though. The next time, everything went smoothly, as the prison spokesman, Larry Fitzgerald, announced in the bored tones of the professional bureaucrat. Another prisoner. Another jail. Another deadly syringe. The Paraguayan, Angel Francisco Breard – rape and murder of a woman in Virginia, adds the wellinformed reporter – with another essential detail. The man screamed so loudly the windows were shaking, from the time he was taken from his cell until the moment the needle penetrated his arm. The sedative, normally sufficient to reduce the victim to a pre-comatose state, had no effect, which is a point of great interest for doctors and neurologists. It shows that physiology and pharmacology do not comply with absolute rules and are predictable only in the sense that they are probabilistic conjectures. Something more exotic? Let's go to Japan, where the president of the Supreme Court, Mitsuo Endo, rejected the appeal of a man condemned to death. Tatsuya Tamoto had kidnapped Noriaki Ueda, a university student and his former primary school companion, killing him accidentally with a shot to the head before demanding a ransom of fifty thousand yen from the young man's father. The incident took place in 1987, in the prefecture of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. You're not sure what the exchange rate for the yen is? Noway knew absolutely everything and, for her interlocutor's benefit, converted the ransom into three hundred and sixty five thousand US dollars. Finally, the emulsified expression of Patrick de Gayardon after his fatal flight in Hawaii, frozen in a posthumous perplexity over what has unfortunately just happened, his skull blown apart by the encounter of air and earth at two hundred and thirty two kilometres an hour (another expert would estimate the speed at over three hundred kph). His mouth, its corners contorted by the impact, was twisted in a sneer of sublime scepticism. Eva had revealed who she was. Her creative vein was in some way linked to the real veins of condemned prisoners in the age of Penthotal. An odd kind of lyricism, to feel you are alive only at such necrophiliac rituals. There was more inspiration in a doctor's report confirming death than in all the cantos of Pablo Neruda, she claimed, resisting the temptaion to write the sentence in capitals. Noway: oh no, darling… we wont meet each other …. She types even before Kivi has asked her anything. Then a tip for her writer colleague, a site where he can find material to write about: Noway: http://punx.plan-9.com Silence was creative, Kivi reflected again. The silent husband with the slightly French expression. The dazzling silence of the death chamber at Huntsville. The extreme silence of the least demonstrative stuntman in the world. The silence of a meeting obstinately denied. It didn't take a great effort to understand that he would find only silence at the address she had given him. The weary madness of photos taken surreptitiously in a mortuary, with a colour closeup of the brain of a former human being lying on the metal dissecting table, next to the saw the technician used to open the skull. A click, then more bodies. A BOSON BOOKS

19

Chat Line

woman slashed open from groin to chin, in a pose that - except for the fact that she was obviously dead - you might find in a magazine at the barber's. An old man with a dark-coloured liver, rendered almost black in contrast with his thick white mane. The pathologist's knife cleaving his blood-soaked tissues. A young woman run over by a lorry, now squashed road-kill flat. This entertainment, easier to resist than give in to, warned the weak of stomach and heart not to continue with descriptions that were even more repulsive than the pictures themselves. The title and subtitles caught the site's spirit - Gallery of Sickness (dead people pics). Suddenly, the screen went black and a message in several languages warned visitors that to continue further into the site, past its cemetery gate entrance, their credit card details would be required and payment of the subscription would have to be confirmed. Noway: no darling… there’s NO PLACE where we can ever meet………………………………………………….

BOSON BOOKS

20

Chat Line

CAPTAIN Ever since he was a little boy, Manolis Lagoudes had had just one ambition – to wear a uniform. But life had decided otherwise. Family circumstance had prevented him from attending the miltiary academy and he had studied at secondary school with only modest success. His brother had all the advantages, and was now an assistant manager at a small dairy product factory not far from Kavala. After a humiliating apprenticeship, and without ever passing the accountancy exams his father expected as a mark of social acceptability, Manolis was now working in his uncle’s export company. He had learned English, or at least the sloppy surrogate of the language that enables merchants the world over to discuss invoices and terms of delivery. In Greece, it’s fairly unusual for people to know foreign languages. But Manolis had never renounced his cult of the uniform. He had begun to purchase specialist journals and had taken out a subscription to an American magazine that arrived every month. He had even invested a sum that would have stretched the budget of a successful professional to purchase in instalments "The Great Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Uniforms", in which leading experts in military history presented the uniforms of Europe’s most famous military forces. But ever since his uncle had had an attack of "we must get up to date"-itis and had given in to his secretary’s entreaties to get an Internet link, Manolis had discovered a universe beyond his wildest dreams. He would stay behind in the office after work, masquerading his passion with a commitment to the job he had never actually possessed. "Papers to sort" was the excuse with which he appropriated both his employer’s admiration and the sublime thrill of transgression. He would wait until everyone else had left – his uncle lived about ten kilometres away and was unlikely to come back later to check – and then boot up the computer without switching on the lights in case he could be seen from the street. On the chat program, Manolis had created his own plausibly named channel - #uniform. But he had a long, long wait, and had inevitably fallen asleep in front of the screen after two hours of fruitless wanderings along the intricate ramifications of the web, before he had any takers. Then it came. The faint ring of the virtual doorbell woke him from his dream of a field carpeted with butterflies rising into the air when he clapped his hands, and a huge bridge in the background. At last someone, or rather one – just one – of the hundreds of millions of individuals who populate the over ten thousand Ircnet channels, was calling him. Manolis reacted with the anxiousness to please and indecent servility of a restaurant owner greeting his first customer for weeks. His soldierly nickname shone out like a beacon in the screenglow-soiled night. Captain: halloooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! come in, my soldier…. Naturally, he would have to get into character. So his greeting to the visitor, whose age, sex, domicile and origin were as yet unknown to him, was informed by a military savoir faire that even the junta colonels would have found exaggerated. BOSON BOOKS

21

Chat Line

Manolis had selected the title of Captain as his chat nickname, even though he had been rejected for military service on medical grounds. The atmosphere he wanted to create was that of the official receptions he used to listen to his grandfather describing. Before he died, the old man would tell him about banquets and formal dinners in Athens. The inflexible etiquette demanded that the highest ranking officers endure the torment of mercilessly tailored uniforms and stiff collars that cut into the underside of the jaw. At dawn, after the dancing and the incessantly emphatic speeches portending darkly dramatic decisions, the officers were expected still to have both their military bearing and the freshness of a newly blossomed flower. For many war-hardened generals, those evenings were the most heroically endured moments of their military careers. The interlocutor had an odd nick – Tiger, a code name that hinted to Captain at clandestinity and secret missions. Disappointingly, Tiger was just a teenage basketball fan from Manhattan who supported the Chicago Bulls and collected the T-shirts and uniforms of his favourite players. Tiger: u wanna trade basket champion’s tshirts and uniforms? And he reeled off the latest news about Michael Jordan, 196 cm, coloured, guard, the undisputed number one player in the world, thirty thousand points in the NBA, twelve invitations to All Star Games, and eight times the League’s top scorer. He told Captain about the slightly unconventional tastes of Dennis Rodman, 203 cm, power forward, a strange-looking individual with the habit of dying his hair a different colour for every game, tattooed from his head to the soles of his feet. And then about the great, great Scottie Pippen, 200 cm, small forward, an unshakeable pillar of the squad whose generosity had earned him the eternal, undying gratitude of all Bulls fans. Tiger even offered to send him his photo collection so that Captain could admire the audacious chromatic excesses of Rodman’s hairdresser. Captain could hardly believe how idiotic the request was. He wondered whether he had failed to understand the teenage jargon but finally realised Tiger's misapprehension. He was overcome by a pressing desire to kick the basketfall fan in the groin with a Hungarian hussar’s riding boot. But Captain controlled his impulse, not so much out of respect for his guest – he’d have been very pleased to incinerate him, along with his pedestrain, lavishly bemuscled heroes – as for two other, only apparently contradictory, reasons. First, he had still not outgrrown his initial, reverential awe of the Web, and felt obliged to behaved in a dignified, discreet fashion, as if in the presence of a higher authority. Second, he wanted to get his own back with the ingredients from one of history’s most spectacular defeats. Feverishly, he reviewed past and present campaigns, from the devastations of the goatskin-clad Attila to the modern era and the extravagant victories of Napoleon, when even the primmest of ladies sighed at the sight of a uniform, opening and closing rhythmically in welcome like shellfish before the incoming tide. His thoughts moved onto to Cyprus, and the struggle against the hated heathen Turks. Without the excuse of any plausible connection, he considered subjecting Tiger to the enemy’s tribal marriage rite. His grandfather had told him – and as he stifled a yawn, it seemed to have all happened in a time that had nothing to do with the here and now – about a new year’s party at the officers’ BOSON BOOKS

22

Chat Line

mess. But when, how or where was lost in the uncertainty of a nostalgia that mingled half-remembered stories with personal conjecture. The old man had told him (Manolis was prepared to swear) of a lamb that had been brought into the room shortly before midnight, and two uniformed servants in the train of the most exuberant marshal in the history of Greece since Alexander the Great. Although one of the ladies remembered the pagan nature of the Turkish ceremony to propitiate nuptials, no one could resist the temptation to cut the animal’s throat in the middle of the glittering room. Every officer – soldier and man, or man and soldier, without knowing which came first and which second – crowded into a circle round the executioners, one holding the legs and one offering the neck to the blade for a clean, elegant killing. All burst into smiles as the scarlet flowed, then extended a finger to dip it into the dying beast’s artery and moisten their foreheads. An hour later, the party was an orgy of blood, a whirl of red masks embracing and kissing each other with wishes for the new year, prosperity, love and good resolutions, as the first of January announced itself in the pale light of an unusually warm dawn. Captain struggled to find the right words but it was more than he could do to translate his burning anger into English. Then after a few expressions which he hoped were particularly offensive, ransacking his store of Internet slang, he launched into an attack of lavatorial fervour. Not coded insults, but the robust invective of a Piraeus sailor, going on in capital letters for three four five lines before he realised that Tiger was no longer there. The internaut's face was glistening with perspiration. He rested his forehead on the monitor more out of exhaustion than anger, and the blue-tinged light glowed brighter where the drops of sweat lingered, making his words shimmer in an aura of abrupt misgiving. Shut in his ever angrier self-obsession, he wondered what possessed him to risk having to face an emotionally disturbed colossus with dyed hair. What an idiot! Him and all the others created in the likeness of the mad divinity he represented! Manolis was so exhausted that he nearly failed to notice there was a new visitor. Ladywow made a much better impression than her rather vulgar nick. Another American, this time from Ohio. She told him straight away she hoped she had found what she had spent a long time looking for. She adored all things military, the ceremony and the uniforms, and since she started surfing the web – she didn’t say so but they way she tapped the keys revealed a very professional touch – she still hadn’t found anyone with whom to share her noble passion. Implicit in the introduction was the weight of an unasked question that Manolis’ enthusiasm would soon answer. This was the place, all right. A safe haven that would defend her, its garrison deployed against the feeble-minded fatuity of the web. Ladywow: r u a soldier urself?…. really? Sure thing, Captain was a soldier! And to corroborate the rank whose prestige must be above suspicion, he explained that he was a hussar, a light cavalryman fashioned by Europe’s most exclusive military academy. He was a linguist, too, because they didn’t just study strategy there. Ancient history. Literature. Consultancy work and conferences were his daily bread. Lady Luck, BOSON BOOKS

23

Chat Line

which a short time before appeared to have turned her back on him, now enticed him with a conversation more intense than he could have hoped for. Ladywow: a hussar u said? Captain: sure… i can explain to u where this name comes from So Ladywow had to pretend to be interested to know that the name comes from German husar and from the Hungarian huszár, which orignates from the Serbo-Croat gusar or husar, meaning “thief”, and is in turn derived from mediaeval Greek chosários, or “corsair”, formed from the decidedly vulgar Latin cursarius. One would tend to imagine a sort of privateer and in the beginning – that is, well before the aristocratic associations the word now inspires had accrued – the predecessors of the noble hussars were actually mere bandits who lived degenerate lives of plundering and highway robbery. Carried along by the flow of his story, Manolis told a story that the quagmire of his obsession had fossilised long ago, punctuating the words with the classic  smiley emoticon. He got right into the feel of things by breaking off the conversation for a few seconds, rooting through the downstairs cupboard, taking off his suede slip-ons and hauling on a pair of military-style boots that were hidden away like the improbable relic of a saint. You see, for example – he continued, now back at his desk – a hussar always wears his uniform because no fashion threads or formal clothes can match the social cachet of his uniform and boots. Captain: see, if u wanna be a real soldier, the uniform must become part of your body…. u’ve to wear it anytime, anywhere, in any season…. With the help of his encyclopaedia, open at an illustration of a hussar officer, Manolis carefully described what he has never actually worn. He even told her about the shape and size of the buttons, one of which he pretended to be ceremoniously restoring to the confining custody of the buttonhole it had slipped out of. Ladywow seemed genuinely impressed. But she went no further than to make an ambivalent expression of sentiment that Captain interpreted as adulatory in the extreme. The conversation was thus transformed into an obsessive monologue, interrupted now and then by barely hinted-at noises of assent, in evanescent, line-long repetitions of a single letter. Ladywow: mmmmmmmmmmmmm In a delirium of excitement, intensified by the pale light of the new day, Manolis tapped out typos and historical nonsense, confusing long-forgotten battles with Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare in the Gulf, the mounted warriors in the Heroes’ Square in Budapest – whose names he mentally recited in quick succession: Árpád Álmos Elôd Ond Kund Tas Huba Töhötöm – with Napoleon’s generals, or US marine camouflage jackets and the anonymous overalls of the former Yugoslavian army with the stiff fez of Italy’s fascist militia. He failed to notice that Ladywow had said nothing for ten minutes, drowned out by the welter of war-inspired whimsy. Manolis wondered why, and for the first time asked himself who his interlocutor was and what it was she wanted. Captain: milady?…. are you still there?

BOSON BOOKS

24

Chat Line

Ladywow: stop talking…. fuck me u bastard…. i always wanted to be screwed by a general…. talk nasty to me like to ur soldiers.… Feverishly, Manolis consulted his dictionary but there are some words that are not included in his standard school reference work. In any case, it didn’t take him long to figure out her meaning – an invitation to fornicate, in which his uniform would merely be an accessory to a squalid scene from a red-light film. The dirty talk that Ladywow – he could see now that the nick was very appropriate – was demanding left Captain flabbergasted. It was a sort of antimorality, entreating him to humour the shameless sensuality of a middle-aged housewife (?) from the other side of the world and betray his chivalry towards women, abjuring the dignity of the mission represented by his impeccably pressed uniform. Could it be true? Was there only trash and triviality in this machine that could hold the world, only whining teenagers false prophets with fuchsia hair and appalling women with souls as dead as a juggernaut, that week after week is loaded, emptied and reloaded with meaningless merchandise? Could it really be true that grandfather’s day was gone forever and that his formal dinner dances had slipped from memory into folklore? Manolis stared in disbelief at the lines on the screen. He looked at the words as if he was seeing a hostile message on a notice. Everything was unbearably ugly, including the new day that was peeking in through the room’s rough curtains. Then he broke off. He wrote nothing more, left the chatroom and switched off the computer without realising that the woman had already gone, showering him with insults to which his shock had made him immune. In less than three hours, he'd have to be back sitting at the same desk, in the same smoke-reeking room, looking at the same computer screen which he only wanted to have fun with but which instead had made fun of him. More than anything else, he felt a sense of emptiness, of irredeemable wickedness, weighing him down. The final defeat that quenches even a great man's spirit. "I'm unhappy", he mused distractedly as he slipped the nylon cover over the monitor, as he had seen the secretary do each evening. But then he cheered up at the realisation that he hadn't eaten for many hours, putting the depression down to his long-suffering empty stomach. He went outside. At that early hour, the streets of the provincial Greek town were deserted. But at the end of the alley that skirted the company yard, Manolis saw a man sweeping the pavement. He recognised him vaguely as a neardestitute who did occasional odd labouring jobs for the local authorities or anyone else who would pay him. Manolis made his way towards the solitary figure - the man had his back to him and was working with a concentration worthy of a higher task - keeping his eyes fixed on the cobblestones. He realised he was still wearing the greased and polished footwear of an anonymous cavalryman. So he took a deep breath, as if invoking a silence he would like to be absolute. Not the merest heartbeat or the faintest squeak of his boots. All that could be heard was the swish of the sweeping brush, becoming louder the nearer he approached, as if he were in a film.

BOSON BOOKS

25

Chat Line

As he lashed out his first kick, he had a feeling of difficulty. The streetsweeper, who had neither seen nor heard him, pitched forward, turning a somersault in the violence of the impact before falling on one side. Then it all got easier. There was an enthusiasm in his efforts. A certain joie de vivre. The thrill of a lightning war won with the weapon of surprise. The boots hammered home to the same rhythm Manolis applied to the keys a short time before, the toe pounding into stomach groin face face face face …. especially the face …. (wasn't it an echo of his grandfather's old story about the lamb that had its throat slit?), until the workman (or perhaps he could simply call him "an old man"?) lay motionless under the daylight that had scarcely begun. Manolis was sweating. Battle is first and foremost fatigue. The thrill of seeing the enemy's scattered limbs. A sense of the sacred. The devastation of the body. He passed the sleeve of his jacket across his forehead, looked around, and walked on for a few blocks. His car was always parked some way away from the office but if anyone were to ask him why, not even he would know the answer.

BOSON BOOKS

26

Chat Line

CATHERINE It began the way some stories begin one Sunday afternoon in January, when the last vestiges of the holidays have disappeared and the early darkness induce a listlessness that can make you feel you owe something to the rest of the world. After almost a week of absolute solitude and an Internet hunt that had proved fruitless, despite the assiduous interrogation of the virtual world's finest search engines for the Finnish rally driver, Markku Alen, Kivi felt a need to talk to someone. It was the same every Christmas. The holidays no longer bothered him. They merely made him aware of his contentment at being on his own, a situation facilitated by the fact he wasn't married and had no amorous relationships with women. Even his closest friends would have something else to do over the period that would take them away from the hills of Friuli and the eyrie where Kivi lived, and always would live. He had no idea who he would meet on the chat line. There was a sense of expectation and a peculiar anxiety hanging over the room that impelled Kivi to the keyboard as if he were taking over the command of a spaceship, to cast off on a mission into who knows what random horizons of the universe. The channel he selected was #funfactory, his approach the one that several months of trial and error had proved to be the most effective. He gave a brief yet complete introduction, with sex age and origin declared from the outset, but carefully including the detail he regards as not negotiable, the "North Italy" that implies a country that has nothing to do with Italy, and which in the eyes of someone on the other side of the world has the allure of an exciting first step on a new journey. The first, undisputably female, nick he came across was Catherine. He called her without being too insistent, and she replied almost at once. She was Greek, from Athens, twenty-six and married. And by some stroke of magic that Kivi's masculine credulity believed belonged to him alone, Catherine started telling him things that could only be said in the privacy of a dream. Catherine: you’re lucky that you’re not married…… strange to hear this from a married woman, eh? The initial exchange had already communicated much between the two. But it was the sense of a burgeoning complicity that excited Kivi. Without asking her directly, he urged her to tell him about herself, her life and the unhappiness he sensed behind the phrases that formed on his computer screen. That was how Kivi comes to find out that Catherine – oddly, nick and given name this time were the same – got married the previous summer but had not forgiven her husband for not telling her about an affair he had with a mutual friend, and which she had only recently found out about. Catherine: our relation can’t be the same as before now…… also, when we’re in bed he doesn’t really care about me…. he goes straight to the point, if u understand what i mean…

BOSON BOOKS

27

Chat Line

So it was also a matter of sex. He – Catherine claims – was selfish and unthinking in bed, and there could be no harsher judgement from the lips of a young bride. Kivi let her talk, intervening every now and again to ask her something else, and while Catherine carried on with an outburst that looked as if it had been brewing for some time, her interlocutor had the impression that he was stripping her to the rhythm of the secrets that were being so immodestly revealed. But when Catherine made a remark (an apparently offhand comment on gentleness as a never-failing ingredient in seduction), Kivi decided to make the fatal attack. Catherine: believe me, be sweet with a woman and she will be yours for sure… What does a male show when he reveals himself? Fear? Defiance? Professionalism? The atavistic reaction of the wolf that becomes aggressive when it fears attack? Habit? An inability to stand the tortures of courtship any longer? Kivi usually acted out of self-gratification, his attitude of egotism blended with self-deprecation tending to provoke extreme reactions in women. Kivi: i can be shy and brave….. pure and impudent….. passionate and icecold…. The pairs of oxymorons gained the upper hand, as Kivi declared himself shy and courageous, chaste and depraved, passionate yet icy …. losing himself in a string of adjectives that would be increasingly more apposite, and more cogently applied, to the biography of a seriously bewildered barbarian warrior in an age of long-forgotten daring. Catherine was overwhelmed by the vehemence of Kivi's avowals and expressed her astonishment in the only phrase that seemed to her to be appropriate. Catherine: u r a man!!!!!!!!! Kivi: no, darling…. u r totally wrong…. The reply was one that, in other circumstances, would leave an observer perplexed but now it had the air of a phrase that one can only admire, precisely because of the studied incongruity with which it was formulated. Almost as if the words bore no relation to what has gone before but only to his ill-defined yet intrusive presence, more than one thousand kilometres away from the sea of Athens. Catherine relaxed. But first of all, she wanted to see him, hear him speak, know where he was chatting from. And when she read that it was a rather miserable evening, neither cold as the season would lead you to believe nor warm, as occasionally happens on some unexpected days North Italy, when the smell of the undergrowth hints at the arrival of a false spring …… then and only then was Catherine sure that Kivi really existed, almost seeing him as he detached his gaze from the computer to glance at the newly ploughed fields, lying flat under the veil of night and restored to the truth of her eyes in the story told by the written words. Catherine: hug me…… Yes, she said it only once. But it was as if she was begging him hug me hug me hug me hug me, every repetition in a different accent, each straining to assert BOSON BOOKS

28

Chat Line

the material nature of a possession that might vanish at a single, erroneous keystroke. And Catherine, so self-possessed that she kept her elbows tucked in even when she was typing at the keyboard, revealed her sudden desire to lie panting at his side, to breathe his breath, to know him in the full sense and become one with him, man and woman, Kivi and Catherine. A frenzy of figures. A delirium of arithmetical division. Two people who up to now have been fused together in a whirl of affection-filled foolishness. Kivi played for time, trying to find an excuse to get away from her, just at the moment when the woman appeared so intensely committed. That was his limit, the abyss on whose edge he had artfully constructed a personal style. Shy yet brave. Cynical? No. Quite the reverse. It was a nervous weakness that cannot withstand the reality of a physical encounter and strove to elude the prospect with a sudden, breathtaking failure of nerve. So then, in the all-pervading darkness, with the eyes of a blind man, he struggled to make out the landscape beyond the window, half-guessing at the fields shrouded in a mist that was turning into drizzle, and the isolated trees – mulberries planted to mark the extent of a property and two elms clinging onto the rapidly steepening hillside, then the flat expanse of the arable fields that at this time of year, the sod having recently been removed, the cold renders uniform. He realised again that his heart lay in places, not people. Regret for a recently lost lover was thus linked above all with the silence of Lake Garda, or its terrifying waves – a storm-tossed ocean, that night, when the two of them were shut up in a small, poorly heated, hotel that he would now be unable to find again, and where the wash seemed to throw the movement of the water onto the walls of their room. Next, his mind wandered on to the Greek islands, which he also knew, but which after this intense dialogue, he now felt belonged to him even more completely. Kivi: yes, i’m holding u….. will u email me, Catherine? Of course the woman would email him. And the request – yes, it was only a question but his desire was plain – anticipated his goodbye, or rather deferred continuation until their next meeting, which both promised would take place very soon. Kivi was the first to log off. He needed to get outside into the dark, now. To walk across the damp-sodden fields, down a path that he would have had to imagine among the shadows in the night if he had not walked along it so many times before. It was in his own footsteps and in the scirocco's caress, when he ran his hand through his hair, already drenched with a mixture of mist and drizzle, that Kivi experienced the pleasures of being alone. He thought about Catherine, her fervour and her English, which revealed - even before she said so – that she had spent a lot of time in London. Her delightful turns of phrase were reminiscent of the idioms of an Englishwoman who doesn't give a damn about anything except a stout pair of shoes and hot cup of tea. He wondered whether the computer was a suitable tool for getting to know someone, and while he was formulating the question, he tripped, and almost fell, over the root of the tree he had just so carefully described. Somehow, the trivial incident helped him to come up with an answer. Yes, the only real way to make friends was by staying thousands of kilometres apart, watching the words form on-screen in real time and then BOSON BOOKS

29

Chat Line

disappear as soon as the contact was terminated, unless of course you had enabled the appropriate function. Kivi would have to call his technician in for that. It was pointless getting him to explain it on the phone, as he had already found out. Kivi had been helpless before the unforgiving logic of the machine and had found himself pushing, clicking, saving, highlighting the items suggested and failing to decipher the technician's orders, which were invariably and inexplicably contradictory. The ineffable limbo of his life was delightful. On on side was the countryside of Upper Friuli, so cut off from the rest of the world as to make you doubt – when you saw it, as it was now, shoruded in a veil of mist – whether the internal combustion engine had ever arrived this far. A short distance away lay his house, his study and the desk on which stood the machine that can contain the very planets. When he sat down at his computer again after his stroll, Kivi found Catherine's first email, which he translated as he read. Dear Kivi, One half of me is afraid of you. The other half wants to hug you for being so impulsive. You're a little boy, Kivi. You have a child's heart …. Your words were so impetuous that for a moment I almost wanted to forget I was married and breathe your emotions with you. Sometimes people feel empty inside. Empty in their soul. They feel no one can spread their wings because there is nowhere for them to fly to. And nearly everyone needs someone to fall in love with. To fly off into the sky, beyond the clouds. You know, dear, love is a question of time. You have to be ready and able to love. Especially when the person you love doesn't share your world. Or your interests. Or your country. Ohhhhhhhhhh leave me be, my love ….. the world would be so different if we could always follow our emotions and forget who we really are ……. It pains me to read your tender words. It hurts because I can't be near you. Yet I feel so happy to have met you …. And at the same time I despair of the distance that separates us. She goes on. You are free. You can do what you want. You can make your dreams come true at any time. That's why I'm asking you to let me live my life in peace, as I have chosen to do. Don't focus too much energy on me. Don't arouse me with your words. But, my love, let me introduce myself to you in a different way ….. you might find me even more interesting. You might even really love me. In the flesh, not in the virtual illusion of a chat. I'll always be thinking of you. C. For the first time since he started using chat channels, Kivi wanted to meet his interlocutor in person. He had thought long and hard about the corrupt nature BOSON BOOKS

30

Chat Line

of a game in which anything can be concealed because your lover or friend was not there with you. It was a game in which you could only imagine and the imagination makes desire abstract to the point where it disappears altogether. The hallucination of a copper still, distilling drop by drop by drop by drop ………….. or the phoenix that, tired of rising from its ashes, finally commits sucide out of boredom when it has no more ashes or remains from which to rise. Yet it was so exciting to read what she sent him in her two or three emails every day. As their friendship grew less casual, their meetings became more frequent than they would ever be in real life. Kivi opened a folder in his email program so that he could file them away and re-read them - together with his own missives at leisure, always finding something new to delight him. Ohhhhhhhhhhh my love!!!!!!!! I'm at my wits' end! I got back from work and my provider was engaged. I wanted to go to bed - I haven't slept for days. But I was thinking of you and I couldn't get to sleep. When I finally got through (at exactly eight o'clock, Athens time), I searched for you everywhere but I couldn't find you, no matter where I looked. I asked everyone if they'd seen you. I even asked a friend who uses #hellas but even she couldn't help. You can't imagine how I felt. Friends tell me I have the "look of love" nowadays. I'm so happy I could sing in the street, and a moment later I'm in despair ……… what is this passion you have awoken in me? What should I do to get a grip on myself? Don't worry. I'll find you, sooner or later. You can't shake me off so easily. Bye, C. P. S.: I may have travelled a lot but I've never understood how you can live in two countries at the same time. Keeping a foot in both camps, as it were. Two different places. Different people with nothing in common ….. that now share a sort of happiness and passion and ….. I don't know what else. What do we have in common, Kivi? A dream? A hope? An inspiration? A piece of life?

My love, Today, I'll tell you the story of my life. Don't worry. I won't use too many words …. Or perhaps yes, but only when I really have to. The first rule for writers is never write about anything you wouldn't want to read about. Which is to say, don't tell stories you wouldn't like to hear if you were a stranger and not the author. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was born in the middle of summer. From the start, she knew she was going to look for summer for as long as she lived. Not in the seasons, not in the weather, but inside herself. In her relationships with other people. Unfortunately, she soon had to recognise how BOSON BOOKS

31

Chat Line

absurd her wish was. She learned that people survive on their prejudices and that she would always let them down. To start with, she wasn't the "boy" her father wanted or the "young lady" her mother longed for. She had no brothers or sisters, and soon learned to live on her own. She was seven years old, and her best friend was a nice old man. She picked vegetables in the garden with him, then went into the village for an ice cream …. and one day …. the nice old man dropped dead in the middle of the road, at her feet. At first, Catherine thought it was a new game. "Come on, Grandpa," she said, "Get up. Mummy will be expecting me". But then she realised that her best friend was on his way to another world. Catherine took his hand and began to weep, and shout for help. She laid her ear on his chest. She could hear his heart beating distinctly. But it was only his pacemaker, which was still working. Someone came and took her away. Catherine didn't even have time to say goodbye to her best friend. Since that day, Catherine had learned about life's ambiguous magic. A heart could continue, technically, to work but it might have nothing to do with physiology. Years passed. She was a "restless spirit", as everyone said. The happiest and wildest - little tomboy in the world, as everyone observed. But inside, Catherine felt only a void …… She started going to funerals to defy the idea of death. She would spend hours on the top floors of skyscrapers, or atop lonely towers, to overcome her vertigo and get used to looking down from great heights. She started doing lots of unusual things for the sheer gusto of making them seem run-of-the-mill. Soon, she became a loner. She would talk to herself. She wrote her thoughts in a notebook and then locked it away so that no one would ever find out about her work. She formed the conviction that the world was cruel and that only the tough could survive. Catherine wanted to be ruthless, too, but it was so difficult …… That was why she made up her rules of life. Rule number one - Catherine will never cry, for any reason at all, with a small exception for the exigencies of her nervous system. But she would never cry out of mere unhappiness. Rule number two - Catherine would never run away from a problem. She would face it, live with it and get used to its unwelcome presence. Number three - Catherine would never know love. She would never believe anyone who made a declaration of love. Sooner or later, she would be wounded by it, as had happened with her family, and her friends …. And, a few years later, with her husband as well. When I was eleven, I had serious heart problems. The doctors said I wouldn’t reach puberty and told my family not to let me run, become excited or upset, or even climb the stairs. I did precisely what the doctors had told me not to. And a few years later, it was the doctors themselves who said that an apparently inexplicable miracle had

BOSON BOOKS

32

Chat Line

taken place. I had made a complete recovery. The tests showed that my heart was now working perfectly and all the results were within the normal range. My father even wanted to take the hospital to court but my mother convinced him not to, telling him just to be thankful. That was how I first wanted not to be an adult but instead to carry on living in a happy childhood. This is the point. Everyone was telling me to grow up and become a woman. They still tell me to. My husband forces me to buy sexy clothes, the owner of the factory where I work urges me to be more "feminine" with the customers and my mother says I should behave like a grown-up woman. In short, they want to change the only Catherine I know and like. And I just want to be happy. To breathe the energy of nature, even in a city as crowded as Athens. Career, money, power and social standing are of no interest to me. I don't want to lose Catherine again. And then I met you. I don't really know who you are but I feel that I want to follow your crazy impulses. I want to find the other half of myself. It's got to be somewhere. The Indians say that we go through life as divided souls. All of us. Looking for our "other half". And those who manage to find and hold on to the other half of their lives have found true happiness. Where's the other piece of me? Is it you?….. Tell me it is ….. But I'm not sure, though. If it really is you, then why has fate played this trick on me and stuck you on the other side of Europe? Why am I married? Why aren't I a free woman? Why do I live in a big city instead of where I can be in contact with nature? Why do I see so many abandoned animals every day yet there's nothing I can do for them? Why do I want to paint if I've already locked my palette away? Why are you telling me you're a "specialist in women" when I detest playboys? Why can't I believe in you even though I can feel you on my skin like the sunshine in the tropics and I have the same aspirations as you? I don't know …. I don't understand any more …. There you are - lots of questions but I can't find a single answer. Oh, it's time I stopped. I'll have exhausted your patience long ago (and you don't have that much, if I've understood correctly). I'm not even sure that I'll send you this email. Oh, all right. I might as well send it with this photo of me going for a walk one Sunday in spring. Take care, my baby …… BYE, C. Catherine Katerina Katya…… to call you by your three nicks….. Your letters made me think. But even more, they made me think about a phrase I read on some channel or other yesterday evening …….. reality is the only obstacle to happiness. Yes, I really do think that reality is the most serious barrier between us and happiness …… but my life is a continual challenge, for as long as I feel like challenging something or someone. And I'm well aware that this story can't go on like this.

BOSON BOOKS

33

Chat Line

I'm going to be blunt to the point of cynicism. Either we meet, make love and spend a few days together or in a week your letters will become duller and duller, my replies will be less frequent, and a mutual sense of irritation will force us to invent increasingly unlikely "previous engagements" in order not to go on corresponding. We won't even have enough courage to tell each other it's over. So, my question is, "when and where?" In this connection, I'd like to lay down just one condition - don't ask me to come to Greece. I don't like playing away from home. But I'd be quite happy not to meet in Italy, though. What about London? We can both get charters …….. It's up to you, anyway. Whatever you decide, you've only got to tell me when and where. Love, Kivi P. S. Yes, I saw your photo. You're good-looking and a little bit different from the way I imagined you (but that's almost always the case). By the way, I'm no computer expert but I think you could have zipped the photo. The quality is fine but it took me more than five minutes to download it …… (and you tell me I'm not very patient ). Hi, wizard!!!!!!!!! What should I write to you now? My head is empty. My eyes are empty. My mouth is empty ….. A taxi driver told me today that I looked like a traveller in the middle of nowhere. Happy, Kivi? Happy about what you've done? It's true, my mind is constantly on the move. Looking for sensations that will help me to regain the irresponsibility of my younger days. It might be a colour, a smell or the beating of wings hidden away in a corner. Then I think about London. You can't imagine how much I adore the city. For no particular reason. But it reminds me of a period of my life that I once loved and still do love …. All the time I spent there. Let's see now. I'm in London, where I'll be spending the next few months, and some friends have invited me to go for a drive. We're in an elderly, dilapidated red vehicle, a typical students’ car shared by people who have to have a whip-round to pay for the petrol. It's late at night. I'm in the front passenger seat and as the engine strains to the limit climbing a hill, I turn round as see the ever more distant lights disappearing one by one, like candles extinguished by a holy river. At last, we reach the top and it's so dark that I can hardly distinguish anything at all outside. It's also raining steadily. It's "raining cats and dogs", as foreign students love to say. The rain is drumming on the car roof so hard that I will never forget it's machinegun-like intensity. For some reason, I find the sound encouraging. We decide to get out of the car. That is, we want to get out but the downpour is too heavy. Clinging onto each other - there are four more people in the car than a strict interpretation of the Highway Code would permit - we can BOSON BOOKS

34

Chat Line

only laugh and giggle. How we laughed that night, Kivi! At times, our shouts were so loud they almost drowned out the rain. I was the first to act. I opened the door and began to run, encouraging the others. My friends were swift to follow my example. Madly, I ran through the trees, over wet ground redolent of pine resin. The downpour was so violent that I couldn't see where I was going. Holding my hands out to protect my face and avoid running into anything, I was soon drenched from head to foot. Never in my life have I been so happy, even when I was a little girl. I can't remember how long I ran for. I can only recall voices in th darkness. And trees - the smell of pine resin - and darkness. Suddenly, a cottage appeared among the trees in the distance, as if in a fairy tale. I ran towards the point of light with the unpleasant sensation of not being able to breathe. Then I was sitting on the wooden steps, laughing again and no longer thinking about my heart and lungs. We all arrived at almost the same time, and my friends told me I was the craziest woman they had ever met (which is quite a compliment in London, what with all the world's weirdest emigrants wandering the streets of the centre). Then I heard music. There was a melody I can still clearly remember (I'm humming it for you now …. can you hear it?). "Hey, I can hear music!" I said to my friends. They replied, laughing, "Sure you can, you nutcase! …. WE'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE A PUB!!!!!!" It was true. But I continued to hear a different tune. My own. A mystic melody that only I can hear. We went in. Drenched to the skin, we headed straight for the toilets. I took off my jersey and wrung it out, then bent over to stick my head under the handdrier. I can't recall a single happier moment in my entire life. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I saw that my hair was red and smooth as silk. It might have been raining pure balm. "Come on Catherine, look in the mirror again. Don't you see that you've got a pantile on your head?" At the time, I didn't know the meaning of the word. When I looked it up in the dictionary, I found it meant "a Flemish roofing tile, generally bright red in colour". Well, we went into the pub and drank the only thing you can on an evening like that. Beer. But I wanted to go back outside. My mind was away with the rain, still gasping for breath after our race to get here. I felt like a prisoner inside the pub. I wanted to go back out and run and run and run …. Anyway. Do you think I'm poetic? My best friend tells me I live in two worlds. The everyday one. And the world of that rainy English night. Have you ever felt you were so big you didn't have enough space around you, Kivi? Yesterday evening, I had dinner with Leonidas. Yes, it's funny that I've never told you what my husband is called. I stared at the wall without speaking. "I miss you," he said all at once. Nothing else. That was the only phrase that was spoken during the entire meal. BOSON BOOKS

35

Chat Line

I didn't reply. After a while, I got up and went to have a hot bath. C. My love, I was going to write to you tomorrow but I couldn't wait because it's raining. So I fnished writing the previous letter, had something to eat (alone Leonidas is on nights), and when I looked up and glanced outside, I could see the streets glistening with rain. That's the only reason I'm still at the computer. Because of the downpour in England and the rain here this evening in Athens. Perhaps it was raining while I was writing but I didn't notice because it's a gentle drizzle and it's falling in total silence. In fact, it creates the silence. No taptap-tap of raindrops. No splashing of footsteps in the street. In Greece, we think of the sea …. as a woman. Sometimes, I feel that emotions - my emotions - wash over each other and mingle like waves breaking on a rock. Like the surging notes of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Like autumn leaves. Have you ever watched the sea during a storm, Kivi? Sometimes, my words come flooding back like ocean breakers. Sometimes, I feel I'm drowning in tears, even though I'm not crying. Sometimes I'm here and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes, you can approach me, touch me and swim inside me. While other times, you can't even get close. I'm like the sea, Kivi. The sea can be terrifying if you don't know it well. You see …. It's raining this evening. C. Catherine, Who else? I've decided to tell you some important things that don't necessarily have anything to do with out love story. I'm alone, inside and out. And I'm proud of my loneliness. Even if I sometimes want to run away from my lovely house on the hillside, jump into the saddle and gallop across the countryside on Decko. And shout out loud. Take care, Catherine, don't let me down. I don't often say these things. Don't tell me you're not a bank but I don't know any other English expressions to say that I'm investing a lot in you. Have you ever ridden a horse? No, you've already told me. You see? That's another thing you can do with me. Another first time. I'd like to show you the hills where I walk my dogs, Andi and Juhasz, in these impulsive days when you can hear that spring is near, if you hold your breath. Yes, I made you laugh on the phone. And I could feel how excited you were. And it's really true, darling, that when I'm excited or confused, I speak Finnish. Or rather. I speak English like my friend Hannu Rysto Hamalainen, with his BOSON BOOKS

36

Chat Line

funny Helsinki sailor's accent that mangles all the vowels. Now I'm letting you know that I can speak foreign languages, even exotic ones … but do you know what the only phrase in Finnish I know how to write is? I'll tell you, but you'll have to find a dictionary and translate it for yourself. It's very .… "private"! Mina rakastan sinua. Kivi Kiviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's all I can say. Words can't express what I'm feeling. You are the wind and I am the windmill. The wind moves the windmill. The wind makes the windmill go round and brings it to life. The windmill turns …. slowly, at first …. like some huge African bird taking flight. The windmill looks uncertain. Lazy, even. Then the swirling begins, the blades go round, making a rhythmic whistling noise with each turn. And the wind gets fiercer … like a barbarian warrior. The wind and the windmill. Like lovers in time. They meet, they mingle and they vie with each other, uncaring of all else. Kivi, I feel my heart has been failing me in the last few days. It's been running away from me. To be with yours. Together, they are travelling beyond time and space. They are the wind and the windmill. The chill wind and the autumn leaves. The sand-laden scirocco blowing from Africa. The icy tramontana and its gusts of snow. The wind has stolen my soul and if I don't want to lose it forever, all I can do is run with the wind. Otherwise, it's the end. There is no life without a soul. And my soul belongs to the savage wind now. You see, my love ……. a short message was all it took to ……… capture me. You're the one who's always using that awful metaphor of the banderillafestooned bull. Now I know what you mean. Now, I even understand Hemingway and his bullfights. Death in the afternoon. The three pairs of banderillas …….. before the bull lowers its head so that all you can see is the dark stain between the shoulder blades where the sword has to be plunged. You couldn't have found another image for me, this evening. Take me as I am, Kivi. Take me with you. Thrust your sword between my shoulders. Finish me off. You, you're so good. Then take my soul and make it part of you. Teach me your art. Love me. Create me. Katerina P. S.: mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua mina rakastan sinua …..

BOSON BOOKS

37

Chat Line

I understand, Kivi. You want me to be practical because you can't manage to be practical. Do you think I don't see that? When you make an effort to discuss practical plans, you have the pathetic emphasis of a schoolboy who doesn't understand mathematics so he studies it harder than any other subject until he convinces himself he's understood it. Don't worry, darling. I can take care of the mathematics. I know how to prove the most complicated theorems. It's a question of instinct. Let's be practical, then. For once, I'll dictate the lesson. And you be an obedient schoolboy, adoring his teacher. Now then. Athens is no good. I wouldn't be free. I'd just carry on with my usual life, hemmed in by office hours and family duties. London? I've got too many memories so I'd rather not. I don't want to confuse what I'm experiencing with you with the emotions of so many years ago. So I'll let you play at home and choose Rome (yes, I know that for a north Italian it's a foreign country. What is it you say? "Like Sweden and Morocco …"). It means that we'll both be strangers in a strange land. And now we come to the "how". Olympic Airways has good weekend tariffs. I can leave on a Friday and come back on Sunday evening. Or I could get a ticket that would mean spending at least six nights away but I really don't think I could afford that. When. I need a little time to get ready for the trip. It's not the done thing here for a married woman to go off on her own for the weekend, and certainly not abroad. So don't be too impatient. It won't be next weekend, or the following one, that's for sure. Now, the excuse. This is the trickiest part of the whole story. But please don't start giving me suggestions. You don't write detective novels. I might be better at it than you. I'm thinking about a story that will amuse you. It certainly amuses me, even if I do find it a bit frightening. Anyway, this is the deal. I'll be flying to Rome to see the Pope. Sounds odd coming from an Orthodox Christian, doesn't it? You know we don't recognise the hierarchical or doctrinal supremacy of your leader. We're more levantine and less broad-minded. But that's what makes the excuse so brilliant, darling. Listen. I've got a vow to fulfil from long ago. Vows are like debts. Sooner or later you have to pay them. I told you about when I was a little girl. My miraculously cured heart. So I want to pay homage to the charisma of an enemy. Yes, for us the Pope is more of an enemy than a political opponent. We nurse grudges. We can be resentful. Especially when it comes to religion. It's all a bit stupid but Leonidas will think it's perfectly natural. He's convinced that I'm stupid. He's used to my contradictions and foolishness. And then, I've never been to Rome so there are plenty of other reasons for going. Oh, it won't be easy. Leonidas will think up all sorts of objections. But in the end, I'll be in Rome and he'll be at home microwaving his dinner and thinking that it wasn't such a bad idea to have an affair with my best friend. Sorry if I sound a bit vulgar but he's been going on for months about her tits. He can keep them.

BOSON BOOKS

38

Chat Line

But there's one thing I'd like you to do. Please wear the same jersey that you have on in your web photo. The light blue one that matches your eyes. I hope you don't think I'm a trollop, dear? Dragging the Pope into it as well as an old vow that has enabled me to live and masquerade this mystic fervour with ……. Yet I think that what I'm doing for you is also a kind of mystic fervour. Do you remember that a few weeks ago I began a letter "my God, Kivi"? OK, then. Perhaps I am a bit of a slag. Let me live, though. "Let me live out my Middle Ages!" C. P. S: Go away. I want you to call the whole thing off, there's still time. OK Catherine, Now I'll show you how practical I can be. I can get the flight from Trieste that lands in Rome at eight in the morning. Or there's another plane later, which leaves at ten fifty and gets in at twelve o'clock. I'd prefer the earlier flight. I'll sort the hotel but don't expect five-star luxury. I'll see what I can dig out on the Internet, otherwise I'll go through a travel agent's. I've told you I'm not a wealthy man. Ideally, we could arrange for the last Friday in February or the first weekend in March. I hope you can make it, for it's hard to go on like this. And I know that you have more to lose, now. A big kiss ……… I want you to feel this kiss, even more than when we are together. There's so much of me in this kiss. Here's hoping you won't be disappointed. Love, Kivi Ciao. Olympic Airways, flight OA 233, leaving Athens at eight twenty in the morning and landing in Rome at nine twenty-five. Alternatively flight OA 235, leaving at twelve ten and arriving at one fifteen in the afternoon. FRIDAY 6 MARCH. Tks for a prompt confirmation. BYE, C. Yes, flight OA 233 landing in Rome at nine twenty-five is fine. I'll wait for you at the international arrivals gate (I'll be in Fiumicino airport by eight o'clock … which will give me plenty of time to think about you). BOSON BOOKS

39

Chat Line

Oh and obvously …… FRIDAY 6 MARCH it is. Love, Kivi Now all there is to do was wait for the agreed, confirmed, one and only appointed hour. And - as if they have come to a tacit understanding - both carried on living their dull, ordinary days, to propitiate the miracle. The only talked twice on the chat line and said nothing of importance to each other. They didn't even mention their increasingly imminent encounter, as 6 March drew inexorably closer. A phone call from Catherine came through on the fifth, as final, reciprocal, confirmation. That night, neither managed to sleep a wink. The morning dawned to announce a lovely spring day. There wasn't a breath of wind. The sky was unencumbered, with one brief exception, for while Kivi was in the air, his plane flew through a bank of clouds. Like thick fog. The plane rolled slightly, producing a feeling of unforgiving emptiness as the passengers - tried and failed - to find some fixed point in the air. The fog lasted for a few minutes. Then the sky cleared in a divine portent (for the Pope or the Patriarch? ……. he thought with a kind of melancholy), Kivi made a mental note of the event and wondered when and how to tell Catherine about it. His laptop on his knees (even though he shouldn't during the flight), Kivi began to write a short but dramatic story about the flight, the impossible encounter and the desperate poetry - and logic - of loneliness. Catherine might have changed her mind. One of those hiccups that women seem to be so good at justifying, and in which fate is a willing accomplice of hesitancy. A sublimely hypocritical contretemps to break off a relationship as if neither party had really wanted to. The Pope or the Patriarch. A minor crash on the way to the airport. Her husband feeling under the weather after a night with the lads at the yacht club. The insistent Chinese water torture of a leaking pipe flooding the house and attracting a horde of plumbers, surveyors and the emergency services. The dog having an unexpected attack of indigestion and the tardy intervention of the vet, in time only to put the poor animal to sleep for ever. Leonidas finding out about the affair, calling her parents in as witnesses to - and a belated deterrent for - her shame. A general lack of faith, insufficiently bolstered by the fine phrases and many letters that mean so much to him, but which an intelligent woman could have written as a mere literary exercise or to create a personality that does not belong to her. Apprehension is apprehension. So Kivi stayed on board for a few minutes after the plane had landed to finish the story in the most disastrous fashion possible. Then he hurried down the BOSON BOOKS

40

Chat Line

ramp just in time to get onto the bus that would take the passengers to domestic arrivals, where he collected the suitcase that bore his business card in the little leather tag. He decided to buy a paper. There was more than an hour to wait. He could go straight to international arrivals, check the electronic board to see if the flight is delayed, and begin to keep an eye on the gate Catherine would emerge from. If all went well. Then Kivi thought about "Death in the Afternoon". Although he hadn't read the book, he was absolutely certain at that moment that the bullfighters did precisely what he was doing when they had to perform in a new arena. They walked the yellow sand when there were no spectators in the arena, two or even three days before the corrida. They measured their paces as if the earth had a different consistency in the arena. They looked at the gate the bull would emerge from. At the steeply sloping terraces, and the judges' box where some senescent arbiter would grant or deny them the bull's ears, enthusing over a perfect pass or condemning without appeal an uncertainly executed veronica or a clumsy rebolera. And there he was in front of the gate for flight OA 233. There were no delays, as you would expect on a two-hour journey. When the tannoy announced the flight had landed, Kivi had already selected his sniper's position - a corner of the corridor where he could see without being seen. The passengers began to appear and queue up, luggage in hand, at an unusually lax customs check. An irritable-looking but less than thorough customs officer was letting everyone through, doing little more than indicate the way out so that the little crowd would file out as quickly as possible. Suddenly, just as he thought he had spotted her copper-highlighted hair and the over-defiant expression of the photograph that revealed a tension echoing his own, he remembered a phrase of Catherine's that hurt him like a matador's sword striking bone instead of finding the animal's heart. "Internet is a game for bored divinities". At that moment, her voice came back in the memory of a phone call, when Catherine was telling him about a good book by Sepúlveda she had read in translation, leading up to the cynical declaration, cleverly paraphrased and turned into what the woman at that moment wanted him to know. But Kivi had no time to inflict new tortures on himself. It was her. He could see her. She wasn’t as tall as he had imagined. But she was waiting at the desk and the customs officer, perhaps because Catherine was the first good-looking woman to come off the flight, was taking his time over one of her bags, opening it and pulling out her clothes. Then with an indolent nod, he told her she could go through. There she was. She had arrived. Catherine looked around with the apprehension that Kivi knew only too well. Hurriedly, she stumbled away from customs, then turned back, spinning so

BOSON BOOKS

41

Chat Line

fast she nearly fell over before walking in the opposite direction, without leaving the area they had agreed to meet in. So, the miracle had happened. Quelle miracle! Up until this moment, Kivi would never have believed that a chat line could lead to a real relationship. Corridors, suitcases, the dignified squalor of a small hotel, breathing together as they have done before in the intimacy of their computers …… Kivi decided to let her suffer they way he had during the flight. But then the emotion of the miracle - even more than physical desire forced him to act. Quietly, making sure she couldn't see him, he moved towards her. Then he hugged her from behind, putting his hands over her eyes so that she had to guess at what she had wanted to see for more than two months. And Kivi rubbed his face against Catherine's hair, breathing in balm, regret and joy, and bathing in the shimmering pantile red glow that one night long ago had lit up the rainy London night.

BOSON BOOKS

42

Chat Line

MIA The disastrous first term had gone on, week after week, like rain on the Scandinavian tundra. There was no way of changing the inevitable unfolding of the days, despite the occasional break in the clouds that in fact served only to herald new and even heavier downpours. Apart from a modest improvement in science when it was too late to do anything about the final mark, the outcome was never in any doubt. But the predictability of being failed for the year did nothing to assuage the violence of his family’s reaction. Ernesto had the fourth year of accountacy high school to do again and his father was seriously thinking about putting him to work as a tiler’s mate with a friend’s building company. Not just for a few months’ experience. As a full-time career. All in all, it looked as if his upward mobility and road to a better life, above his status as a fourth-generation, horny-handed son of toil, had finally and definitively been frustrated by his academic misfortunes. Although a few people tried to see the poor result as a routine accident of adolescence, his father refused to listen. For him, it was a catastrophe to be interpreted in the light of his never-distant sense of tragedy, whose theatricality was more than a little reminiscent of the classical repertoire of Japanese theatre. But Ernesto would be able to find something better. He’d work during the summer for a removal company. A labourer earned more than he thought. However at home, a climate of austerity and privation enveloped him, crushing him in the rigour of a working class morality convinced of the therapeutic effect of suffering on the irremediably lazy. Ernesto would no longer be able to borrow his father’s car at the weekends and, worse still, he could forget about the computer. His Internet habit had made the family phone bill shoot up to at least double what his father was prepared to shell out. Ernesto took it submissively. He didn’t protest. In fact, at times he was so acquiescent that he seemed to be accepting his punishment almost with relief, as if he had actually feared worse. He wore the same mask of suffering - a suburban Saint Sebastian – that he assumed after a philosophy test at school. The teacher would reward him with the usual four out of ten, which honestly didn’t look so awful when it was being written in the register. Even having to give up his daily dates with Mia didn’t worry him. Mia. His girlfriend. But in a way that few people would understand. To begin with, this particular “girl” wouldn’t see forty-six again. Two years older than Ernesto’s mother would have been. And then, in the words of the only friend to whom he had confided his passion, “you shouldn’t believe all those stories about computers and sex ”. Who cared if there had never been any sex, apart from the odd comment made by Enrico more for his own benefit than to offend his interlocutor? What if his self-important friend actually had a girlfriend with a face so puffy it put him unnervingly in mind of his long-dead mother. And what about his friend’s face! That teacher’s-pet smirk, when a vindictive fate had actually had him failed for BOSON BOOKS

43

Chat Line

the second time in a row so that he would no longer be able to attend a state school. He’d never read a single book in nineteen years. Dull as a donkey due for the knacker’s yard, and with much the same appearance. His little apprentice seminarist’s beard made him look insincere and pretentious, even if he thought it would suit the religious college his father was going to send him to now that his state school career had come to an end. Small round glasses. Shirts with clericalstyle collars. Sad clothes whose very fabric was redolent of presbyteries and the intellectual laziness of people who refuse to take a stand on anything. A future sex maniac on account of his already notorious impotence. In short, this individual was a good companion for Ernesto, if for no other reason than the solidarity that academic rejects manage to establish with their peers. Mia. Ernesto’s girl. She from Novara, he from Montichiari, in the depths of the Brescia hinterland. They’d met through a chat channel used mainly by Italians who can’t speak any foreign languages – #italiamici. Back in real life, the removal company might pay well but it was bloody hard work. Sometimes they’d have an early start, by which was meant getting up well before dawn. They had to park the lorry at strategic points before the traffic blocked the roads. Then they’d carry the furniture down and load it onto the lorry with ropes, lifts and covers before heading off to another part of town, or often to another town entirely. Still, there was one nice surprise. They had been packing a middle-aged couple’s house. Both were civil servants in some ministry or other. In any case, the removal company had been asked to empty all the rooms except the study, where the couple were going to carry on working while they waited until their new place was connected to the utilities and the new furniture was delivered. So they wouldn’t get in the way of the workmen, and at the same time so they wouldn’t have to watch their old house being dismembered, they’d gone away for a week. Somewhere in the mountains at the top end of Lake Garda, over two thousand metres above sea level. They’d mentioned the name of a remote Alpine refuge – the “Rifugio Alpo”, perhaps, or something like that. The couple made sure everybody had the right instructions and handed over two sets of keys to the removal company manager, one for the old house and one for the new, which was less than a kilometre away. Then they said goodbye until the job was over, which would be in precisely one week's time. Payment, on presentation of the relevant invoice and after an inspection of the work done, was agreed with the bored indifference that persons of a certain standing have with regard to the trivial details of life. Especially when their office is paying for them, in this case an anonymous body represented by an all-powerful signature that would certainly not quibble over a few extra pennies here or there. For Ernesto, this was a golden opportunity. On the pretext of living nearby, he got hold of the keys in return for a promise to be there to open the door at five the next morning. Then the boss decided that the day's work was over and everyone went home. Ernesto, too, rejoined his family for dinner but by eleven o'clock he was back on the scene of the crime. He had noticed that there was a computer with a modem in the studio, next to the socket of the not yet disconnected phone line. It was a racing certainty BOSON BOOKS

44

Chat Line

there would be an Internet link. And if the two serious-minded executive types hadn't bothered to load a chat program, then he would do so himself. He had the disk in his pocket. However when he booted up the computer, the desktop revealed an mIRC icon that would let him speak to Mia. And yes! These naive bureaucrats - evidently newbies where the web was concerned - had even stuck a post-it on the bookshelf: username: formentini password: costituzione Thanks to their culpable lack of security, there would be no difficulty logging on. Ernesto wouldn't have to make wild guesses to find the password he needed for it was literally staring him in the face. In any case, he would have searched the hard disk for the document, often with the filename xxx, where many users are accustomed to storing this precious information. It's the computer version of a safe key hidden behind a picture frame - the first place an ill-intentioned visitor is going to look. At the end of the day, Ernesto had reached the fourth year of accountancy school, albeit by the skin of his teeth in previous years, and even though he had now been failed altogether. But to get even that far, he had had to become an expert at copying other people's homework and class tests. This he had managed thanks to his expression of unwavering imbecility. His ability to pass himself off as a complete moron. His long silences in and out of school. His apparently total lack of outside interests, hobbies or social relationships. Ernesto was, in short, the saddo with the permanent hang-dog look on his face. He had an unfailingly dejected air of silence, even when he was speaking. It was as if submission - to parents, bosses, teachers or peers - was for him an act of faith in a new religion. The bliss of universal nothingness, of fading into oblivion. It was no coincidence that one of the few lessons he actually remembered was the chapter of his physics textbook on absolute vacuums. Ernesto was well aware that his harmless wally looks had enabled him to survive thus far. Teachers had treated him with a mixture of condescension and convenient lenience. They passed him from one year to the next with the attitude of a vet putting a suffering animal to sleep. When he logged in to the chat room, he immediately saw the name he was interested in. It had been three weeks since he last spoke to the woman, who had two daughters of twenty and twenty-two, both at university. One was reading law, the other architecture. And she, too, was studying for a degree she would never complete. Psychology, naturally. Perhaps to make sense of a marriage that had been on the rocks after only two and a half months, or it may have been for her other contribution to the achievements of the human race. She had conceived her two children after she had separated, on the only two occasions when the estranged couple had met for a few hours. One daughter was the result of a friendly discussion over the terms of separation and the other had been the fruit of an encounter to sort out an inheritance. Apart from that, Mia was very busy indeed. She took part in film clubs and a range of un-American activities. Conferences on feminism in the 90s and initiatives to raise money for single-parent families. She patrolled the streets in a sandwich board urging the abolition of bullfighting and the Siena Palio horse BOSON BOOKS

45

Chat Line

race. She socialised with her daughters’ friends from university or elderly ladies that the rest of the world no longer cared about. She had signed up for a pottery course that clashed with her massage appointments. In other words, she did absolutely nothing from morning till night. Hers was an imaginative yet pathetic attempt to give a sense of direction to infinite leisure time. Mia: hey, where have u been …. it’s been ages! Ernesto: mind your own fucking business! Mia: don’t be like that …… can’t u say anything nice? Ernesto: go and get bumfucked by a bunch of boy scouts, bitch! Mia: will u listen to that!? ….. u really want to hurt me? Ernesto: u cow, if u were here, i’d piss on u It was always like that. A stream of bad language, with absolutely no purpose. It was almost experimental literature, unrelated to what was going on. Whatever Mia said, Ernesto would reply in the same way, his painful loquacity masking an inability to communicate. And that was exactly what Mia expected from a boy who would have been too young for her own daughters. Mia: listen, i wanna tell u what i’ve been doing Ernesto: shut it, slag! Mia: hey, i went to a yoga seminary in the Siena hills ….. near Monteriggioni Ernesto: did u take it up the arse from those bastards, too? Mia: there was this guy, Claude, from the Antilles …. he’s a …. a metre ninety tall …. couldn’t say how old …. Ernesto: the guru can go to hell! Mia: we were with him all day long … we’d get up in the morning when he came barefoot down the corridors playing a recorder ….. mountain music … like a god … Ernesto: go and blow on the recorder he’s got hanging between his legs! When Ernesto looked at the edge of the desk, he realised how much he’d missed his lover. At least as much as she had been missing the lash of his frenzied insults. He launched into a flood of bad language that was as incomprehensible as the words he chose were outrageous and hurtful. A tidal wave of unregenerate filth as he strove to find a word that would encapsulate all the insults ever voiced by human vocal chords. Glancing from the screen to the edge of the desk and back, he noted that he would have to clean up the semen before the other workmen arrived. After all, even a single grain of dust shows up on a black lacquer finish.

BOSON BOOKS

46

Chat Line

WHEELCHAIR Since reading about Dan Lansing from New Jersey, and how that young man had scaled the heights of power after an interlude in jail, Gábor Péchy had only one real hobby in life. He wanted to become a computer pirate, or to be more terminologically precise, a hacker. This is Dan's story, in a nutshell. He was a loner who didn't like studying and didn't hang out with other young people. He didn't even go to basketball games. Dan's only friend was his computer but there he seemed to have a certain talent. Confirmation came when he managed to get past the security measures of the General Motors computer system. What the world's leading IT experts failed to plan for was the intuition and barefaced cheek of an eighteen year old. The first few times, Dan restricted himself to penetrating the defences of the "top secret" department, where he would leave sarcastic messages. But then, as the operation extended to take in banks and finance houses, our ingenious cyber-delinquent had no qualms about threatening to completely destroy databanks or play other vicious, computer-delivered, practical jokes that caused many an executive to suffer long, sleepless nights. But for some strange reason that takes no account of the relative difficulties involved, Dan, who had little trouble hacking his way past sophisticated access codes and labyrinthine sequences of passwords, came off second best when he ran into the efficient, yet infinitely more predictable, state police. He was tracked down after a hunt lasting about three weeks, sent for trial and, inevitably, found guilty. In the US, you don't mess around with banks and multinationals, which is, of course, precisely why Dan had got such a buzz doing so. “It was just a challenge I set myself”, as Dan would later say to the judge, following to the letter the improbable instructions of his defence lawyer, himself soon to become famous thanks to the case, despite the exemplary sentence his client would receive. Then, a miracle happened. It looked as if Dan's career prospects had been shattered when, after serving his sentence, he got home to find a substantial volume of mail waiting for him. But America's leading corporations were asking him to name his price so that they could have the benefit of his unique skills. This was precisely the kind of moral that Gábor's wife could not approve of. In her Hungary, there was no place for such compromises. Having grown up in a family of political activists, Csilla had from birth breathed that equivocal mixture of admiration and loathing for the West that the new communist party had been unable to quash, and which it had instead taken up as the most frustrating of the legacies left by the previous ruling class. “It's the politicking that doesn't work”, Csilla would intone every time the gawky features of George W. Bush appeared on the TV screen. So, the war of attrition with Gábor was endless. Csilla couldn't stomach a husband who spent entire nights in front of a computer on the pretext of drafting new brochures for the tourist agency where BOSON BOOKS

47

Chat Line

he had been working for the past six years. And she was even less inclined to tolerate a man who could take pleasure in telling the story of Dan Lansing, a tale which - like it or not - she, too, now knew off by heart. So much so that if Gábor even hinted at it, she'd leap in and explain it in her own words to shut him up. Conjugal malevolence is heralded by imperceptible symptoms. At first, it is only a slight irritation. Then comes a period of sullen resentment. After that, an apparently unmotivated shortness of temper takes over, or a restiveness at seeing one's partner, or even simply knowing that he or she is in the house, perhaps brought on by the rhythmical breathing of the sleeping spouse. If one is not quick enough to break the chain, the outcome will be a psychiatric hospital, prison, or worse. The couple lived in Veszprém and they could have been happy, as Gábor's parents continually pointed out. He had an office job; she was a secretary at a small publisher's, and they were lucky enough to have inherited a small holiday cottage on Lake Balaton, at Balatonfüred, where they spent their weekends and summer holidays. It was there that the catastrophe occurred. Among the reedbeds and beaches of Europe's largest lake. Csilla, who in theory should have been impervious to such temptations, fell in love with a young Austrian who held the Toyota franchise in Graz and was holidaying in the hotel next door to the couple's cottage. She quite literally ran away from home, taking with her only the clothes she stood up in and leaving her husband in the dark for a week. Then a laconic email message announced that she wouldn't be coming back, not even to pick up her modest personal belongings. Gábor was free to arrange the separation as he thought fit. It was at this point that the wounded party began to make inquiries. Csilla's parents, when consulted, said nothing and perhaps actually knew very little. But the fugitive had made the mistake of sending the email from the premises of her paramour's business, in the belief that it was impossible to trace the sender's physical location. At this point, the matter became for Gábor more of a professional challenge than the concluding chapter of his marriage. If Dan had managed to uncover secrets that even the FBI was not completely aware of, then he could at least try to find out where his legitimate spouse had run off to, and with whom she was taking her pleasure. So Gábor got in touch with the service provider in Austria, extracting the information from the email address thanks to a somewhat complicated procedure, and without further ado demanded to know the address and telephone number of the customer concerned. The negative reply was predictable and entirely in line with the inflexibility of Austrians in general. Nevertheless, Gábor's own resolve was equally unbending and he at once laid his cards on the table. He had no money but, in exchange for what he considered a favour between colleagues, he would hand over a long mailing list of Internet users, which the provider would be able to exploit by sending special offers and advertising. The exchange took place with a reciprocal delivery of data. Or to be precise, the delivery was Hungary-to-Austria only because the Graz-based service provider would never have been so incautious as to leave any proof of such a blatant BOSON BOOKS

48

Chat Line

infringement of his professional code of conduct. Instead, he phoned and in his drawling English communicated name surname age occupation address, with a wealth of incidental detail that Gábor would never have dared ask for himself. He even found out the subscription category the customer had chosen and the name of the designer who had created his website. Now Gábor had everything. All he needed to do was invoke the help of certain pagan divinities, much in vogue in the former Communist bloc, to restrain him when he came face to face with the two lovers, and set off on his short journey. Yet on occasion, fate's progress can take an unexpected turn. As Gábor was passing the turn-off for Jánosháza on the E66, a juggernaut leaving the town failed to give way and ran into his Fiat Punto. The accident was accompanied by a horrendous shriek of tortured metal. Gábor barely had time to appreciate the impact before himself releasing a scream that could well have been his last contribution to the physical sphere. A disturbing detail. The juggernaut was Austrian, and was carrying timber from Carinthia. Gábor woke up three days later in a Budapest hospital. He would never again be able to stand up. His case notes mention deep coma, multiple trauma and myelic fracture of the spine. Csilla, who had somehow heard about the crash, reacted with the cynicism of a woman who didn't want to feel guilty. She wasn't a doctor so there was nothing she could – and certainly nothing she should – do for a partner who was now history. For Gábor, a new life began. He had no financial worries, thanks to the damages he would claim from the insurance company. Final sentence had not yet been passed but the money would enable him to enjoy a life-style of executive luxury. When he returned to Veszprém with his father after an interminable convalescence, Gábor looked at his house through different eyes. His new wheelchair-centred perspective transformed its proportions and volumes. His eyes, now looking upwards from below, were like a throwback to boyhood. He was a forty-nine year old child, scrutinizing a world he was forced to look at from an oblique angle. At first, he had plenty of visitors. Then his friends and colleagues stopped calling round and the Gábor's day began to take shape around the times of his cyber-appointments. First thing in the morning, there was a woman in Manila who was seven hours ahead and had just finished working. In the afternoon, a female architecture student from Haarlem would be on line from two until three precisely, as regular as clockwork. Each evening, there was a woman bank worker from New York, whom Gábor was trying to persuade to visit the puszta while avoiding all mention of his disability. And then there were other women, other countries and other conversations that were carefully logged in the margins of the world time-zone chart taped to the base of Gábor's computer screen. A vast, meaningless timespan was enclosed within Gábor's room. If he had only been able to go without sleep, he could have stayed in front of his computer round the clock, devoting some of his time to the neverBOSON BOOKS

49

Chat Line

abandoned international hacking project, which so far, unfortunately, had failed to produce any tangible results. But since he was always seated or stretched out, even sleeping became nothing more than a previously observed convention, the habit of a body that now no longer belonged to him and over which he even had some slight advantage. But at some improbable hour one morning (morning? Night day dawn snow seasons …… sitting in a darkened room it makes no difference), after surfing in a frenzy at first, then calmly until he was tapping the keys serenely, obsessively, Gábor realized there was another possibility. Scrolling down the list of channels on Ircnet, his eye fell on #disabled. He didn't visit it straight away, a little surprised that the disabled had managed to carve out a space on the net. A sense of reluctance held him back, almost as if he had been forced to face up to the calamitous consequences of the accident and his inability to move only when he decided to join the ranks of the cyber-aware wheelchair-bound. “Wheelchair people”, as they are sometimes called. So he moved on, running the back of his hand over his face in silence to find out how many days it had been since he last had a shave, and finally logged on to #angels. But then Gábor had second thoughts as his memory took him back to his time in hospital and the long conversations he had had with the psychologist. He had explained to Gábor that the biggest temptation for the disabled was religion. Nonetheless, he decided not to run away and let himself be seduced once again by a young Belgian woman who worked at the slaughterhouse in Charleroi, utterly convinced that she was an angel who could forgive the sins of those she encountered. She told him how she gave the last rites to the animals before firing the shot that would plant a nail in their brain, and how cows and horses had their throats slit with a kind of machete immediately afterwards so that the blood would be pumped out by their still-beating heart. She had even sent Gábor a photo. It was out of focus but still sufficiently distinct to reveal a small, delicately built lady who might more plausibly have run a haberdasher's in the centre of one of Europe's more historic towns. Her expression was demure and inspired, communicating the ineluctable immobility of time. The ecstasy perceptible in her words was like the smile on the lips of someone whose mouth had been twisted into position by an involuntary contraction of the facial muscles. It had no connection with her feelings. One curious detail. Despite the brutal nature of her work, the woman was a genuine animal-lover. She had a miniature poodle and two tomcats that she had had neutered when they were kittens so they would never know the torments of passion. And so Gábor began to play his game. He introduced himself as an athlete, describing himself flatteringly as a "reserve for the Hungarian national water-polo team". He also claimed that for a bet he had once swum across Lake Balaton, from Balatonfüred to Siófok, and that as a hobby he kept dogs of a breed that she would probably never have heard of – Komondors, the great sheepdogs of the puszta, whose long coats are gathered into plaits, "A hundred times bigger than a poodle", said Gábor, digging out a phrase in French from his long-gone schooldays for the delectation of his correspondent: cent fois plus grands que le caniche. BOSON BOOKS

50

Chat Line

But after a few exchanges, the conversation languished. Gábor was dazed by the Babel of voices he had been talking to for ten hours without a break. Hypnotized by their echo, he drifted back into the utter silence of his house. It was at moments like this that he became aware of the aching tragedy of his loneliness. Looking outside through a narrow gap in the half-closed shutters (it was early morning, the light barely sufficient to distinguish the profile of objects), Gábor's mind went back to the fateful day. The impact with the lorry (could he have avoided it? Could he have swerved into the ditch?). The righteous anger of a betrayed husband for whom Csilla's flight was as nothing compared with the manner in which she had run away. His body, freed from the wreck by an oxyacetylene torch and broken by an evil spell she had cast to avoid their meeting. And the lack of contact from the Austrian. His silence (but then what could he have said?), as if, by implying an outrageous parity of intentions with the "rape" he had perpetrated, he was letting it be understood that he owed Gábor nothing and had no intention of asking anything of him. In short, Gábor was not yet dead and before he turned that corner (a vaguely necrophiliac metaphor he had often heard his grandfather use many years previously), he still had one or two accounts to settle. So Gábor booted up his computer again, went back to mIRC, logged on to #disabled, and joined in the conversation. There were four people on-line at that moment but only a Canadian woman seemed inclined to talk. She said hello, introduced herself, asked him if he was disabled from birth or whether an accident had confined him to a wheelchair like all the other people who used that particular channel. It was this piece of open aggression that made Gábor react. Assuming he was disabled simply because he had come on-line, without even allowing him to talk. No, said Gábor, he was there for information only. He was helping a friend who had fallen out of a tree (offhand, he wasn't able to think of a more believable accident) and now he - the friend, not Gábor himself - was paralysed and had become one of the wheelchair people. It was also possible that the paralysis might not be permanent and that in a few months' time, when the effects of intensive therapy should be visible, he might even be able to start walking again little by little. That was why Gábor, who had Internet access, was on-line, gathering information to tell his friend what was being said and done on the net for those who shared his misfortune. No problem. There was in fact some exciting news. The following month, there was to be a major conference in Italy. New techniques were going to be presented, including one people had been talking about for some time but which no one had yet tried. It consisted in enabling those who had lost the use of their legs to walk by means of a series of electrical impulses that were harmless for the recipient's body but sufficient to stimulate the lower limbs one at a time. Canadiangirl: so, if u think ur friend might be interested, i can assure u it’s a good opportunity There was more. The Canadian girl, whose real name was Candice Hill, could supply him with the address of the physiotherapist who was co-ordinating the conference and taking enrolments. BOSON BOOKS

51

Chat Line

Gábor hurriedly scribbled down the information and immediately felt overwhelmed by anxiety. He went off-line and threw himself - from the chair to the mattress - onto the long-unmade bed with a powerful thrust that revealed his still-enviable muscle tone. Until now, he had never thought seriously about his condition. But the short chat with his new friend - the information about techniques and therapy and the news of the conference - wiped out all the other words he had tapped into his keyboard during that long night. In hospital, they had told him about that, too. For some time, he would fail to realize what his disability meant. He would be too absorbed in the novelty of moving around in the wheelchair, looking at things from below and shifting his position only a few metres in the course of the entire day. This series of sombre novelties would distract his attention, forcing him, paradoxically, to forget his sense of tragedy. But later, perhaps months later, something would happen, or someone would say something, that would bring the perpetual immobility of legs home to him. The end of the line. This was it. Now Gábor knew that his brush with #disabled was precisely "that" event, "the" word whose utterance the doctor's voice had predicted while he listened without enthusiasm. A pity. He had almost ended up believing he really was a sportsman who had swum across Lake Balaton, perhaps under an April sky when the cold was enough to make anyone give up after the first few strokes and the last nocturnal frosts decked with crystal the lakeside where the water was hidden by the reed beds. As for the dogs, Gábor's only real experience was on a school trip across the puszta at Hortobágy, many years before. His teacher wanted the class to investigate some aspects of the region's rural economy and had arranged a programme of visits to stud farms and livestock breeders along the Tisza river. It was there that Gábor had seen, for the first time, a pack of Komondors at work with a huge flock of sheep. He was sorely tempted to get closer to the primitive animals whose bite, the shepherd insisted, could slice a boy's hand off at the wrist. Ever since, he had dreamed of owning such a dog, or perhaps even a pair of them, but he was only a secondary school student at the time and his parents would brook no argument on the subject. Later on, as an adult, he had simply forgotten about the dream. Only occasionally (by strange coincidence, always when he was talking to the woman from the Belgian slaughterhouse) did his mind go back to the massive bulk and loping gait of the Komondor. Cent fois plus grand que le caniche. The lack of sleep caught up with him without warning. Gábor would barely have time to throw himself onto the bed, or more often exhaustion would surprise him in the wheelchair with the imperious irresistibility of a heart attack. Gábor would be rooted to the spot, looking to the casual observer as if he was lost in private ruminations. He learned to nap for a few minutes at a time, like a guard dog. Sometimes his head would droop and his eyes would be open, staring fixedly into a distance beyond his knees, but at such times he saw nothing He was in a limbo between drowsiness and abstraction that would give him much BOSON BOOKS

52

Chat Line

food for thought when he woke up again. You could call it an anticipation of death, different from when he had been in a deep coma, yet similar in the sense of relief, almost of being suspended in a neutral zone far above all known worlds. Now, however, he slept deeply, and for several hours without a break. He was woken by the door creaking and the sound of his father's footsteps. Gábor opened his eyes and followed the old man's progress across the room, hearing him hesitate for no reason holding a package he didn't know where to put. It was Gábor who told him to leave it on the kitchen table, guessing that it contained food. The old man did as Gábor had suggested then came back into the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and continued his silent exchange with his son. He got up and asked Gábor if he needed anything else in a tone of voice that had remained unchanged for decades. The old man left, reproducing in reverse order the domestic noises that revealed his proximity much more than did his physical presence. Footsteps, the creak of parquet flooring, doors being shut and the gentle click of the front gate closing with barely sufficient force to engage the lock. Gábor switched on his computer. Briefly, he felt a panic attack coming on. Things he had lost for ever. People he had been bound to by a slender thread were now irretrievably lost to him. But he soon found what he was looking for in the pile of road maps and scribbled notes. It was the address of Marina, the Italian physiotherapist. Gábor composed a long email message full of carefully contrived falsehoods, substantially retelling the story of the friend who had fallen out of a tree and asking for information on the conference in Florence. Fancying himself to be in that Renaissance city, which up until then he had visited only in history books, he imagined the woman and a subterfuge of two alternating men - Gábor and his unfortunate friend - present, thanks to an unexpected stroke of good luck, in the hall with its simultaneous translation facilities. But the two never appeared together and were always in some curious way dependent on each other in a symmetrical complementarity reminiscent of the intermittent on-off flashing of a shopping mall's neon lights. He had laid his plan almost without being aware of doing so. It had seemed natural to him to attribute the accident to someone else while claiming good physical health and sporting honours for himself. It was a sort of posthumous revenge that left open a narrow passageway to a life that, without metaphors or euphemisms, brutally forced him back into his wheelchair each time he leant on the arm-rests, struggling to get up. Marina's reply was swift. It's odd how astute you become when you need to imagine what a woman's personality is like from words alone. And electronic words at that. Not the movingly anachronistic calligraphy of a handwritten letter, in which the slightest hesitation of the pen is perceptible. Gábor's mind went back to the love letters he had exchanged at secondary school with a girl from Hajdúszoboszló. He had contacted her through a women's magazine and Judit had quickly become his pen friend. It was only a few years previously but it seemed like centuries, if you consider how difficult it was at the time to make even a simple STD phone call. From a pre-agricultural society to BOSON BOOKS

53

Chat Line

communication in real time. And yet how apprehensive he had been when he received the letter! What desperate conjectures he had read into that sheet of notepaper with the ink faded at the edges, perhaps because of some cider spilt over a document that was revealing physical features he had only imagined until then. And after that, because of this revelation of a ghostly figure who could entrance merely by sipping a cold drink, there was the youth's final message: "I removed the stamp from your letter and licked it as you must have on 5 April. P. S. The weather was nice here on the fifth. I came back from school and went to the lake at Balatonalmádi on a friend's moped." Marina has the professional approach of those who are used to dealing with people. Thorough, yet succinct. She tells him about the institute where she has been working for eleven years and whose name she deliberately avoids translating, but which means "Centre for Independent Living". She also talks about the conference, modestly stating at the outset that "seminar" would be a more appropriate term. The main topics of discussion are a new yoga-based therapy and a joy-filled way of socializing that involved dance. If Gábor's friend was interested in taking part, he should send his personal details, describing his disability and current treatment regime. He would also have to fill in a questionnaire that could be found on the conference website. Yes, there was also a photo of Marina, with two doctors and some patients, on the website. The image seemed to Gábor to be a little stiff, like the pictures of certain luxury hotels, whose main attraction is that they are studiedly oldfashioned, showing the managers and chefs standing in a semi-circle in the gardens. Marina looked to be of average height, with the sad smile on her face that pets sometimes acquire after years of ambivalent cohabitation with decaying gentlefolk. Fortyish. Married? Divorced? Ah yes, Gábor remembered having asked her. A personal question that had nothing to do with her work, he had noted in a courteous postscript almost apologizing for the impertinence. "No, i believe that everything's important in our relationship….you shouldn't be shy, ask me anything you or your friend would like to know." She answered his question in her message to set his mind at rest, more out of professional concern than from any willingness to humour him. She was married, with two pre-school age daughters, she hastened to tell him. And so there was nothing left to do except pack a suitcase and decide how and when to leave. The trip would be easiest by plane but Gábor was worried about flying in his condition. But after a few days' of preparations and electronic epistolary exchanges with Marina, the decision was made. He would fly on his own, without companions, even though his father and a friend had insisted on coming with him. When the travel agency he was using assured him that the airport staff would be there to help him whatever the problem, he purchased his ticket without second thoughts. Budapest – Rome, and then an internal flight to Florence, where a room had already been booked for him in a city-centre hotel. Being alone was a condition he had imposed on himself in order to feel more alive. Whereas before his accident he had been an unrepentant hell-raiser, BOSON BOOKS

54

Chat Line

avoiding company of any kind now served to assert what he had previously affirmed by embracing the opposite life-style. His first night in Florence was hard work. Not so much for the suffocatingly humid climate of the late Italian spring as for the metamorphosis he had obliged himself to undergo. He could no longer identify himself in the man he had always been, and who had corresponded with the physiotherapist, but with his other personality - the friend who had fallen out of a tree on the banks of Lake Balaton while picking forbidden fruit in a fit of adolescent defiance. *"Milyen hülye òhaj!", he muttered in Hungarian as he propelled his chair vigorously around his room. But it was too late now to go back on his original story. And besides, meeting other unfortunates like himself after the crash, he had had to admit in the end that fate could be even more imaginative than Hollywood's finest scriptwriters - rickety scaffolding, shying horses, swimmers hit by speedboats, gliders blown off course by mischievous gusts of wind and blocks of concrete clumsily manoeuvred by inexperienced crane operators. Even deckchairs that shattered under the weight of a holidaymaker during the most innocent of seaside excursions. He really didn't see why a fifty-year-old couldn't have fallen out of a tree. The next morning, the taxi deposited him outside the conference hall entrance. Gábor recognized her at once. Marina came over to him, equally certain that he was the Hungarian from Veszprém with whose friend she had been exchanging email messages about the seminar. *"What a stupid excuse!" He tried to give the impression that he didn't know her, except through what he had been told, and pretended to be unsure. But it wasn't long before he couldn't avoid making an allusion to water polo, displaying a knowledge of the sport and justifying the comment on the spur of the moment by claiming that he and his colleague had played in the same team, even though the other man was several years younger. Then had come the accident, the fall, the coma. His idea of training the team had proved a pipe dream. It proved difficult to feign ignorance about what he actually knew only too well. True, he could have been told a lot of things but there were shades of meaning that you can only grasp in conversation. And if he thought about the exchange of email messages, which had been fairly intensive before he left, then he really would have to be careful not to betray to her the degree of familiarity acquired by the "other man", and which he would therefore have to forgo. In fact, as they chatted during the conference coffee breaks, Gábor realized Marina was puzzled by her electronic correspondent. Intrigued, you might say, with that taste for discovery and the curiosity characteristic of women who have long since come through the test of a marriage free of surprises or unpleasantness. Gábor merely talked, attributing to his friend everything he would have liked to do but which life had denied him. He even gave Lajos an extremely BOSON BOOKS

55

Chat Line

attractive girlfriend, but then back-pedalled. Realizing that the detail was out of key with the plan he was beginning to formulate, he added that no, this was the sad part. The woman was certainly good-looking but the relationship had been over for months. She had gone back to her family while he was now living happily on his own. Gazing deep into Marina's eyes from the oblique perspective of his wheelchair, he recited, in the first person, a poem by Neruda that sounded as if it had been written precisely for the purpose: "…. today that I know the joy of being free and alone as the pistil of an infinite daisy ….". They were three very full days, during which, paradoxically, Gábor seemed to have no interest at all in what was going on. Except, perhaps, for the new technique to encourage interpersonal relationships - wheelchair dance championships, involving some quite extraordinary gyrations and movements. Only fifty or so people were present for the simple reason that the event was not open to the public. It had been organized as an invitation-only seminar. The upshot was that Gábor found himself in debt to his other self, who was both the same person but different from what he now was, and who thanks to the Internet had been able to win the respect of the organizers. Which is to say, Marina's trust. Or, at least, her interest. Gábor enjoyed the atmosphere of mediated courtship and his doubling as a person and a personality. Like an actor identifying with his role yet remaining outside it. In the evening, the institute bus took everyone to a typical local restaurant with wheelchair access and the conversation continued. It was exciting to move around Florence, partly because there was a natural selection after the day's proceedings. Most of the conference delegates had retired to their rooms. Only the real diehards, the wheelchair athletics champions and the plain crazy, were left. Those who had no intention of doing without a life. In those corners, lanes and churches that contain a fifth of the planet's artistic heritage, Gábor was entranced by one image in particular – Piazza del Duomo and the Baptistery, where they arrived in the late evening as the sun’s rays were fading. A trick of the light made the shop windows come alive with the exotic colours of the ice-creams that people were eating as they strolled the streets. Obviously, he also loved Piazzale Michelangelo, from where you have the physical sense of dominating not so much the finest group of Renaissance buildings in existence as the vastness of an entire period of history. The perspective reminded Gábor of Budapest stretching out at the feet of the Citadel with the Danube which, seen from above, is nothing more than its tragic solemnity, motionless between the bustle of the city and the severe angularity of the Parliament building. The day before he left, he decided to tell her. A phrase tossed aside in a deliberately careless fashion, with that sort of naive cowardice no male can resist. "Marina, I think you are just the right woman for my friend Lajos." Gábor savoured a feeling of surprise that made anything possible. It was precisely the absence of that sensation which he hated in his wife. Even though Csilla had managed to give him one, very painful, surprise, he reflected with an involuntary smile that manifested itself as an insistent nibbling at his lower lip.

BOSON BOOKS

56

Chat Line

Then, as Marina leant over him to impart a kiss that was little more than a slightly exaggerated smile, Gábor understood that he still had an account to settle with his erstwhile consort. **"Pero cae la hora de la venganza, y te amo", Neruda reminded him. How many different meanings that kiss could have had! A gesture of affection, all too "easily" conceded, that she often made to her more devoted patients. Or, under the cover of that alibi, it could become an innocent declaration acknowledging the elegant compliment of a classic gentleman. Or again, it might have been a mediated message actually meant for his "other self", who had stayed in Veszprém to languish in front of his computer. **"But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you " Or perhaps, stripped of all indirect subterfuges, it was a sign for him alone, in spite of the ghosts and athletes who, however appealing, had committed the terrible crime of not being there at that precise moment, and of not perceiving the wonderment of a kiss made more exciting because it was given almost without reflection, on an evening in May. That was when the difference between Lajos and Gábor became even more distinct. One intent on nursing the ephemeral glow of the computer screen as he spent his days talking to people he would never meet in the only life that matters, the other busy improving himself, looking for love, deciphering the electronic signals in a search for the same language of passion he had found in a cider stain left by a girl so many years before. Wouldn't the Italian woman understand that, in this scenario, the role and the real man are the same miserable person? On the pretext of a sudden desire for ice cream, Gábor moved away to a vendor's stall. Now they were at the Cascine, and if he could stay on until the following week, he would be able to visit, in those very gardens, a major dog show. There might even be the Komondors his friend bred so successfully. At this point, Gábor was torn in two directions. Part of him wanted to cast aside his mask and tell her that there was no dog-breeder or water-polo champion but merely a former travel agent who now felt more like a former human being. He was a sad case. His only act of bravery lay not so much in breathing in the springtime of that perfumed park, after an articulated lorry had run over him like a hapless hedgehog, as in having survived the treachery of a woman who had betrayed him in the saddest, most traditional, and irremediable manner. But Gábor said nothing, certain that the moment of truth had yet to arrive. Instead, he invited her to come and see them. In Hungary, of course. At Veszprém, and then perhaps, they could go to Budapest and on to the puszta at Karcag, or the lonely beaches of the river Tisza, where you felt that the universe lost itself in the water's placid swirling. Of course a mother might not be able to leave the family home. But whyever not? The following month, Marina's two girls would be going to stay with their grandparents in the country and she still had to take some of her holidays from the previous year. She could come by train, meet the two friends and continue the holiday.

BOSON BOOKS

57

Chat Line

Gábor wondered who Marina would be coming to visit. And he was about to reveal all and succumb to an embarrassing need to confess, which was growing increasingly urgent. She would be coming to see a sportsman and would find instead the sorry spectacle of a prematurely embittered paraplegic. Even Lajos's English was different, Gábor was certain. It sparkled with the brilliance of the words he invented solely for the computer. And, naturally enough, in the last few days he had done nothing but talk to her about the other man. He had even gone so far as to tempt her with a pitch worthy of a travelling salesman when he said they would make a perfect couple, a line which always inspires trust and optimism in a woman. Her interest was obvious, even when she seemed distracted or not to have been listening. For she would come back to the subject straight away, asking questions, some of them insignificant, gathering information, finding out about Lajos's house, indeed almost wanting to have it there in front of her. She wanted to be the one to discover their friendship, their swims in the lake and the affair with the beautiful girl that had ended so unexpectedly. Gábor thought about the journeys he had made in the past. Ten years or so previously, the Veszprém tourist office had been invited to Ireland on a business trip. The initiative had been organized by the respective Chambers of Commerce to develop a common promotional strategy that would boost tourism in the two countries. The exotic environment had left him above all with memories of shafts of sunlight breaking through the clouds and the town of Newgrange, on the river Boyne. That was where he had visited one of the most extraordinary marvels that archaeology could ever offer him – a Bronze Age graveyard with a funeral chamber the sun penetrates only once a year, at dawn on 21 December. Light and its negation. The mythology of cyclical resurrection. Lost in the uncertainty of his doubts, Gábor spent his last day in Florence concentrating on the hackneyed tourist routine. He carefully avoided repeating his invitation, but it was Marina who took the initiative. Before accompanying him to the airport (yes, their friendship was undeniable. Gábor was the only one to receive such treatment), she asked him to keep her up to date by email about Lajos. She had checked her schedule and spoken to the management of the institute. In the middle of the following month, she would take ten days' holiday, which could be stretched to a fortnight, if Saturdays and Sundays were included. The quickest route would be by plane to Budapest and then the train. She had already checked the times. About two hours after leaving the Hungarian capital, she would be knocking on his door. Having got into the shuttle with the help of two Alitalia stewards, Gábor looked round for Marina. He couldn't see her. She was lost in the labyrinth of shops and impenetrable windows reflecting an image that was cloudy as only the springtime sky in Florence can be. Gábor no longer knew if he would see Marina again. A peculiar distrust gripped him, despite their agreement, which even included details of the trips they would take together. During the flight, and later in the car with his father, he went back over his days in Florence. He almost wished he had never lived them. Conjecture followed conjecture, as the road became increasingly familiar. Gábor hypothesized, annotated, assessed and made forecasts. BOSON BOOKS

58

Chat Line

"Alright," he finally conceded, "let's take it that the woman is agreeable and that she's really coming for me ….." But he was then blocked by a confusion that shaded almost into apprehension or even mindless rebellion. He was no longer so sure that Lajos and Gábor were the same person. To reject her, he would have to …. refuse her affection, tell her to go to the other man, and so let her know that he knew how to say no, that he was still able to conserve the dignity of a memory …. For the time being, though, all he could do was to act out his role. So the flurry of email messages continued in an ambiguous game of two men who were really a single person. Finally, there came the moment in which the deception could be taken no further. And while he counted the minutes that separated him from the fateful ring at the door (the Budapest train was always on time and a taxi would take no more than eight or ten minutes to reach number 146 Pozsonyi ut), he couldn't resist allowing himself to be found busy at his perverse electronic hobby. Suddenly, Gábor felt stripped of all resentment. His wife and her Austrian lover no longer held any interest. None of it had anything to do with him. So he switched on his PC and challenged himself to a contest against real time. He would have to key in a passionate message of love, signed Lajos, before he heard the front gate opening with the faint metal click that, ineluctably, pitilessly, would tell him that Marina had arrived.

BOSON BOOKS

59

Chat Line

VENUS21 In a few short minutes, the #poochies chat room had become one of the most popular on the GalaxyNet server. It wasn’t that lots of people had suddenly logged on. It was the sheer number of messages each one was churning out. A tumult of questions in more or less comprehensible webspeak, the phrases reeled off in no particular order revealing desires, petty fixations, vulgarity, loneliness, playfulness and above all the sense of urgency that grips the vast herds of the African savannah on the day before the seasonal migration begins. Almost all of them were Americans and as a group, they resembled a third-rate orchestra attempting to follow the baton of VENUS21. They’d all been tempted away from other porn chat rooms by an invitation that they couldn’t refuse. The nick VENUS21 was unequivocally gender-specific and the brief message promised a mysterious game that was sufficiently intriguing to persuade an impressive number of recipients. So there they all were, waiting for something to happen. And wanting it to happen straight away. They were performing an unbeliever’s act of faith, trusting their modem to change their destiny, or at least an evening spent so far obsessively tapping the Return key. VENUS21 offered no introduction but demanded that all those present should disclose their age, sex and occupation. As she thought – and as she had carefully planned – she was the only woman. It was as if her nick was projecting a fragrance of femaleness across the web’s electronic ramifications. The men who could sense her, and who were actually sitting at a desk on the other side of the planet, breathed deeper when her allusive phrases appeared on their screens. Their eyes closed in the certainty of feeling her skin on theirs, of breathing in her breath in a way mere physical contiguity could not contrive, of guessing her movements and the colour of her eyes, of thrusting their noses under her arm to smell her sweetly aggressive odour. VENUS21: everybody u.s.a.? Glamis: i’m from North Italy VENUS21: what do u all do? BigJack: i’m a short-order cook in a diner thirty miles from Atlanta Max-M: tiler, Connecticut Trevor: porter in a private clinic, New Jersey Aja-boy: i work in my uncle’s computer and electronics company VENUS21: right, now all sit in a circle ……. round me ….. Leo: what the fuck is this game? we gonna play ring-a-round-the-rosey?….. VENUS21: u don’t like it, u go some place else …… so, who’s leaving? BigJack: i’m in, darling…. go ahead …… With a shiver of defiance tinged with terror, VENUS21 continued her questioning. She felt like a tamer in a cage with ten tigers, all eagerly waiting for the slightest sign of hesitation. As she hammered more insistently at the keyboard, she could hear her chair squeak gently. As if it were signalling the disaster she felt had been looming over her for the twenty-one years she so proudly declared in her nick, the name that on the Internet means more than a BOSON BOOKS

60

Chat Line

passport. Her home was the modest bungalow in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that belonged to her brother and where she lived with him, his wife and their three children. VENUS21 had been there for about ten months, since she had been discharged from a detox clinic and decided she couldn’t face going back to her husband. The gentleman in question was a thirty-two year old railroad worker who had kept the couple’s two children – a boy and a girl – on the entirely reasonable grounds that his wife had been a consistently catastrophic mother and would continue to be so after her extended interlude with controlled substances and a sequence of personal disasters that any court on the planet would instantly have ascribed entirely to her unstable personality and deplorable behaviour. But she did miss those kids. And while she admitted that the sight of her staggering from room to room like a zombie on downers was perhaps not an ideal example for growing youngsters, she honestly felt completely and irrevocably drug-free now. True, the only job she’d been able to find since her discharge was serving hamburgers part-time. Just twenty hours a month, all on Saturdays, which meant less than three hundred dollars plus a lot of long, empty days that swallowed her up in a swirling mist of apathy and made the hours stretch into eternity. She hardly ever went out. In any case, she wouldn’t know where to go and who to see, or what to buy with the money she didn’t have. Her parents were out of the question, and not just because they lived a hundred and twenty miles from Grand Rapids. The fact was her father hated her and her mother had always been weak, dedicating herself heart and soul to her husband like some sacrificial animal. It had been years before she’d convinced herself to slam the door in VENUS21’s face, as her husband had demanded. Nor were relations with her brother and sister-in-law particularly brilliant. She felt uncomfortable even when she was left on her own in the house because they’d gone to work, or to take the children to elementary school. Occasionally, she would feel like a stowaway discovered anew each day when she bumped into her hosts coming home from their various tasks. Not knowing what to say, she’d attempt to discuss matters of common interest as she followed them from room to room, always anxious, always craving a word or gesture to release her from embarrassment. But in fact, the only time she ever managed to talk and make herself heard was when she was sitting in front of the computer, a privilege her brother conceded in return for help with the household chores. VENUS21: now get it out, all of u, and look at me …….. what would u like to do to me? BigJack: Venus, tell us what you got on … Aja-boy: i wanna fuck u on a chair, baby. Trevor: i once fucked a patient that just came into hospital ….. and a week later, she died …… describe ur body, Venus…. tell us about ur tits … i hope this isn’t gonna be a last fuck … At this point, VENUS21 began to talk. At first, in broken, hesitant phrases. Then, as if she had been sucked into a whirlpool of dementia, she began to describe herself in a welter of obscene detail, echoed with emphatic expression by exclamations from the others, and by shouts of astonishment that excitement and urgency left mutilated in arbitrary abbreviation or the ecstasy of impenetrable anacoluthon. BOSON BOOKS

61

Chat Line

VENUS21 wanted more. She egged them on, urging them to take her and feeding their imagination with details of her room. The Formica-topped desk, her chair with its tartan seat, now worn round the edges, the curtained window overlooking a suburban street where night and day thrummed to the relentless pulse of the windowpane vibrating at the passage of heavy trucks. VENUS21 enjoyed Aja-boy’s naughty schoolboy sense of humour. But he went no further than a few dirty remarks and one or two clumsy advances, tasting on his fingertips what he called – in a gauche blend of vulgarity and poetry – “your honey”. She curbed his enthusiasm firmly. To start with, her new paramour hadn’t reckoned with the safety pin that held up her pyjamas since the elastic had gone the other day when she ripped them off in a pre-masturbatory frenzy. It was no use Aja-boy saying “I didn’t know” or querulously protesting “what’s that got to do with it ” because VENUS21 had carefully described what she was wearing. And the first rule of virtual sex is that you make your moves taking full account of all the upsets, squalor, and obstacles of real life. So the unfortunate would-be teenage lover was sidelined with a ruthlessness that the game’s logic demanded. One click and the system operator could savour the delight of consigning the no longer welcome visitor to the web’s outer darkness by excluding him from the channel. VENUS21 smiled. It reminded her of the 60s spy films in which evil villains annihilated the rivals in much the same way, pressing a button that would open a yawning abyss under the hapless victim’s feet. VENUS21: is that all? is there no one out there who can show a girl a better time than that last dork? Max-M: i wanna try, baby …. but first i want to watch while u do it …… Trevor: i’m here, Venus ….. come on, me and Max-M’ll make u scream for more … take ur clothes off real slow …. u ever done it with 2 studs before? Leo: this makes me sick …. what’s going on here? u want us to get it out and then swing it about as if we’re conducting an orchestra ….. i’m gonna find me some real pussy, SO GET FUCKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When Leo’s nick disappears, the others began to catch on. It was an elimination game and only those who were willing to play along with the girl’s flights of erotic fantasy would last the course. VENUS21: say something, words are so creative …. words R sex … Without waiting for a reply, VENUS21 began to put on her show. Slowly, she stripped while the others looked on in silence, enraptured by the thrill of a body emerging from a flood of words as implacable and rhythmic as the waves crashing on a dark Pacific beach. Only Glamis, who had so far said nothing, intervened. His phrases were brief and intense, punctuated by bursts of dots that intensified rather than interrupted the flow. Gradually, the two established a strange understanding – a complicity woven from tiny signals and glances neither could actually perceive – between two bodies that existed only in the infinite detail of gesture. All at once, VENUS21 remembered the presentations. The only nonAmerican in a group into which he had slipped unobserved precisely because of his exotic nature. In VENUS21’s phrases – where to read is to be caressed and BOSON BOOKS

62

Chat Line

touched in a new and different way, where he was watching words he preferred to a hundred embraces form before his eyes, where he physically possessed a foreign language while the girl murmured in a barely audible whisper: “Yes darling, i’m rubbing my clit ….. now i’m fingering my pussy…. sliding my finger in and out my pussy…. sucking my honey from my fingertips…..” -; ……….. in this virtual copulation, this game of chance in which words hardened to penetrate deeper and deeper still ……… Glamis realises that he is going to be VENUS21’s chosen lover. His paramour had taken off her pyjamas and woollen stockings. Naked from the waist down, she sat in an armchair, her generous white buttocks lustrous in the room’s pale light, her thighs, legs and feet poised like nocturnal fish motionless in a still pond. Now that nightfall had left a thin streak of purple peeking over the window’s lower edge, there was only the electronic glow of the computer screen to illuminate her body. Before taking off her old cardigan, she went over to the kerosene heater that gave her so much comfort in the harsh Michigan winter. Setting it about a metre from her chair, she found the perfect position – she could stretch out her legs and rest them on the top of the swiftly-warming heater. That was how Glamis saw her, at the very instant in which she offered herself to him. A vast expanse of white flesh warmed by the rising heat that drifted across her crotch like a breeze on a summer’s evening. Sex began, fading off into repeated OHHHHHHHHs of amazement, moans and strictly lower-case whispers of mmmmmmmmmmmmm that trailed on for three whole lines, and a straining desire for an intimacy that at that moment belonged to only them. Glamis took her with the care of a pathologist cutting up a corpse. She was only a microcosm of individual details, ears neck feet nipples navel perinaeum. His understated impudence, his strange, wave-like insistence, the absorption he devoted to her while ignoring her existence, that VENUS21 longed for and burned for. And what words! A discourse that pierced her to the core, cutting away painlessly like a scalpel under the surgeon’s anaesthetic. By now, the audience was down to one. Trevor looked on, listening yet feeling himself excluded from the game. Not because he didn’t want to take part but because he knew that his pleasantries about hospitals, nurses and dying whores would never break the spell. Whether it was the exotic fascination of distance or the woman’s own choice, he knew that VENUS21 had selected her lover. In fact, he suspected that Glamis had ensnared her by deciding how far to yield and when to lay his cards on the table after he had made a shrewd guess at what she wanted. Trevor said nothing. He continued to watch, more in male admiration than in the envy Glamis had inspired in the others, forcing them to leave the chat room in a torrent of abuse or the imperceptible click of a mouse dealing with the intractable problems of life. He cannot understand why his rival appears to be speaking a language – Trevor’s own – that he is hearing for the first time, at that moment. How can he talk about things Trevor would have difficulty in mentioning in a down-market cathouse, yet in such tragically inspired language that it would win the heart of a man?

BOSON BOOKS

63

Chat Line

But there was one thing he wanted to ask Glamis, and he does so as if craving a favour on which the night’s happiness will depend. Trevor: please Glamis…. make that noise… do me a favor…. Glamis: flop! The sound mimicked one of VENUS21’s big toes popping out from between his lips before he started sucking on it again. The woman, excited by a presence she had hitherto thought was only a formality, but could now not resist seducing. With an out-of-frame smile for Trevor alone, she gently withdrew her leg and turned slowly to one side, flaunting her varnished toes to disclose her sex and the vastness of her thighs. Next, she offered to her lover’s lips what she childlishly like to call her “little bridge”. This was the position in which VENUS21 came. While she was urging him on with phrases that to Glamis sounded like a fanfare announcing certain victory, she told him how good he was without explaining the misunderstanding. It was Trevor’s suffering and impotent pleading – more than Glamis’ amatory technique – that had aroused and stimulated her libido. The screen was now invaded by the insistent exclamations in which VENUS21 invested the shivering excitement of sexual climax. Her voice unsteady, with abbreviations and typing errors that the tumult of her body rendered deliciously enticing, VENUS21 asked Glamis if he had had a good time, too. Glamis: not yet, darling… i just wanted to make you come… but i’m about to shoot too… VENUS21: oh lover…. i want u to shoot your cum over my tits….PLS DO IT NOW!!!!!!! Her urging is more peremptory than an order, shouted in upper-case letters, as she demands to read Glamis’ ultimate pleasure. It’s odd, she thought, a nickname that meant nothing to her. It was almost a woman’s name, if she’d been forced to guess the sex from how the syllables sounded …….. Without meaning to, she murmured the name in every possible accent, her breath emerging slightly distorted by the hand she held close to her mouth. Then, as if she were somewhere else, she slowly began licking her fingers, trying to distinguish the flavour of her paramour in her own juices. When her lover finally came, she read only a long line of small, upright marks, a procession of exclamation marks that extended over at least three lines, implying that he was cloning himself in the shape and for a length of time that only VENUS21’s vanity would be able to determine. The woman saw a parade of identical soldiers, or the intriguing subjection of phalluses bearing tribute to her femaleness, grouped and organised by Glamis into a solemn, obscene march for her benefit. Or again, a symptom of a sea-roving sense that can only be represented by the laborious rhythm of the purest of signs. An upward stretching to unknown heights with but a single dot rooted to the earth. Or a horde of huge cypress trees whose joyful swaying belied their sombre duty as guardians of a cemetery. Or again, an audience of tall, silent guardsmen, generating first an uncertain, almost hushed murmur, then a louder internal rustling, an enjoyment that the skin cannot disclose yet that bubbles under the thin sheath of the uniform.

BOSON BOOKS

64

Chat Line

In the emphatic silence that followed, VENUS21 wanted to hear more. At this point, she was vulnerable, insistently asking how much and why she had made him come. VENUS21: how did you like it, honey? Tell me, i wanna please my lover….. Her emotion hung between the hope of being excited by his answer and an abstract desire to hear what was almost the know-how of a new occupation. Glamis played for time, refusing to answer as he tapped the keyboard to construct new words that were no more than graphic symbols, giving away nothing of the state of his heart. Trevor: oh God…. u had such a wonderful time….. u were fantastic….. Then Glamis came back with a phrase that wasn’t a reply, as if he were talking to himself, or rather conducting a soundless conversation that others could only guess at depending on what they wanted to hear from him. Glamis: i don’t like all this …. VENUS21: ?????????? Glamis: i said: i don’t like this ciarpame around…. VENUS21: what, my love? Glamis does not reply, not because the Italian expression has no meaning but because he loves keeping one step ahead, reading the woman’s haste in her increasingly abrupt phrases. Thanks to the web’s magic – Trevor was already convinced Glamis was a wizard – he was yielding to his new companion with an over-theatrical docility that hints at Mephistophelian cunning. Then he asked her for the most intense demonstration of affection that a woman can give. Taken aback, VENUS21 wondered what else she could offer him, in addition to what she had already given. Glamis: just a kiss, darling…. nothing’s more intimate than a kiss As he watched the words form on the screen, it occurred to him that a kiss really is more intense than any other carnal pleasure. He was sorry he hadn’t written “intense” instead of “intimate”. That was how Glamis yielded to her lips, and VENUS21 knew she had found the tenderness she had longed begged for from the ciarpame, or “trash”, that Glamis detested. She asked him to stay with her – she would be waiting on the same channel every day except Saturday, when she was waiting tables at the diner. VENUS21: oh lover……. say u’re mine, say u’re jealous of me…… Glamis: what’s ur real name? VENUS21: ……Tammy Tammy! That was the only thing Glamis was jealous of. No one, and by that he simply meant “not one person”, should ever sully his real name.

BOSON BOOKS

65

Chat Line

MUSTAFA His destiny – to be an eternal migrant. His confessed ambition – to be an ordinary bloke running an electronic components company. His secret hope – to live in New York or Los Angeles and earn as much as an advertising executive, from his art alone. But to trace the complicated trajectory of Mustafa’s life so far, he had been born in the Turkish part of Cyprus and as a youth had taken an active, if cautious, part in the struggle against the Greeks. He painted seascapes of Famagusta and abstract works with no particular geographical collocation. He had studied (not very much and not very well) in Istanbul. Finally, he passed all his exams but enrolled on an advanced course for computer and electronic technicians even before he had picked up his diploma. He spent entire days working in the lab he had set up in the basement of his home and after investing serious money – at least, in Turkish terms – in a latest-generation computer and Internet subscription, he devoted a week to emailing CVs and job applications to all parts of the globe. He hoped to get a reply from a company in the US, perhaps offering him a modest salary that would enough for him to be able breathe American air. And that was the only air he wanted to fill his lungs with, albeit somewhat masochistically given the levels of pollution in many US cities. But the readers of the great virtual bulletin board that is the Internet are never predictable. Mustafa might after all end up in a small family business in Hong Kong, assembling transistors. Or in Australia, miles from anywhere in some desert hell-hole. Or in another, unspecified, country (which, in his pessimistic elucubrations, he refused to identify), where men and women were content to exist, get up, go to work, go home again and double-lock the door until the following morning, and where he could forget about his art as a painter. But that was the only thing that really interested him, especially now that the new technology was tempting him to consider abandoning brush and easel for virtual art. The first emails to come back were disappointing. Mustafa was not a qualified engineer, which would have made him eligible for management jobs and opened endless doors. Sadly, the world was full of technicians with no experience and no employers were interested, or so it seemed. But then he got a auspicious reply. It was from Nordmende in Vienna, offering him an interview and – if all went well - immediate employment. Before long, Mustafa was ensconced in a tiny flat in Wachausstrasse, near the Prater, suffused by the stench of sausages and sauerkraut. By unspoken but universal agreement, the area was the meeting point for immigrants from the poorer suburbs – coloured people, unlicensed car park attendants, washers of car windows at traffic lights, peddlars of smuggled goods, newsvendors and manual labourers from the former Eastern bloc. The entire scene was dominated by the

BOSON BOOKS

66

Chat Line

huge wheel of the Prater funfair, that churned unreachable far above their heads like some scornful metaphor for life itself. Of course, this was not Mustafa’s ultimate ambition. But repairing television sets and stereos in the heart of Europe might be one way of launching himself into the whirl of contemporary art. A world he could only guess at from Cyprus as he flicked through the magazines he subscribed to. A world that in all his years of activity had permitted him to sell just two miserable paintings, both to the same civil servant in the government of former president Denktaş. And to make things worse, the man had told him quite openly that he was buying them because they matched the décor of his new house looking out onto the sea at Girne. Mustafa took full advantage of his unaccustomed Viennese surroundings. Whenever he had a few moments free, he would scurry off to visit a museum, a collective exhibition or a ballet. Above all, it was Gustav Klimt that intrigued him, for the exotic feel of his figures, somehow vaguely reminiscent of miniatures from his own homeland. For whole holiday afternoons, he would trudge through the rooms of the Österreichische Galerie, enraptured by the mad, bewitching features of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Or dawdle along the corridors of the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, leaving just in time to visit the other pagan temples of Klimt’s art, the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, where he admired the most awesome examples of twentieth-century erotic art, thrilling in silence to the ineffable intimacy of “Liegender Halbakt nach rechts”, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. He also managed to make friends with a woman who attended the Academy of Fine Art in Schillerplatz, and to whom he intended to show a painting he had just finished. He had great expectations of her, but not because of an immigrant’s sense of inferiority before a good-looking Austrian. No, Mustafa had seen her work. He was sure she would be able to introduce him to labyrinthine world of art critics and galleries. Her refusal, however, was flat to the point of brutality. Cornelia did nothing to sugar the pill. Instead, she twisted the knife with the cruelty of which only a criminal or an artist is capable – after long practice. At the end of the evening, Mustafa could physically taste the indescribable frustration of being no more than what he really was - an immigrant from an underdeveloped country whose only wealth was a load of good-quality television sets to repair, currently stored on the company’s metal shelving. It was this episode that drove him to his other, solitary, life. Shut up in his two rooms in Wachausstrasse, his only companion an obsolete computer his boss had let him take home on the pretext of tidying up the job records and customer archives. It was an old Pentium 100, slow but powerful enough to take Windows 95. His Internet access was through a computer shop that doubled as a service provider and offered rock-bottom rates to attract student business. That was how Mustafa, betrayed by his paintings, set out on a long pilgrimage through the art-related websites, increasingly fascinated by the new digital technology. The Vatican, in particular, had embarked on the monumental task of cataloguing and restoring its library, using computers to conserve the BOSON BOOKS

67

Chat Line

colours and illustrations of ancient books, some from the thirteenth century or even earlier. It was even possible to sign up on a waiting list in the hope of being invited to see for yourself, even if a rather brusque note warned aspiring visitors that no more than two thousand invitations would be made each year. Next, he stumbled on the website of Liev Prins, a Dutch artist whose works were quite similar to his own seascapes, although markedly superior in quality. Liev was constructing a giant virtual jigsaw puzzle from images made with a photocopier and then re-elaborated. There was a naked woman, sitting cheekily on the machine that faithfully reproduced her pubic hairs and vaginal mucus. Fresh-caught fish, their scales still dripping with North Sea brine, were portrayed lying dazzled by the flash of image-generating light. And the colours were whipped to a frenzy by the electronic emulsion ……. It was like entering a dream world while you’re still awake. And it was there that Mustafa realised what was needed to make art – courage, a quality in which he had perhaps too often been found wanting and for the lack of which he had made only timid attempts to break into the art world. He had simply never had sufficient chutzpah to get ahead. Was it really true what that somewhat sententious German philosopher had said in terms so abstruse that even the most up-to-date dictionaries sometimes overlooked? The great advances of humanity on the planet Earth. The wheel. Gunpowder. The internal combustion engine. The computer. The marked influence of the last-named on the lifestyle, daily habits and semantics of modern men and women, arriving at the preposterous conclusion that science, art and information technology form part of the same “intellectual apparatus”. Never before had Mustafa experienced such a desire to write. To transfix the words and images that churned inside him, to give a non-figurative form to what itself possesses no shape. That was when he found out about “writer’s block”, an expression that may equally well be applied to computer-assisted composition, since no one writes on paper any more. With its pitiless glow, a computer screen is perhaps even more scornful and despair-provoking. “Sometimes I make love and sometimes I fuck, with my circumcised yarrak.” The only phrase that the keyboard will produce. Only when he read their orderly progression, part in German and part in his own language, in the stark clarity of the 14-point typeface, did Mustafa notice that the words must have emerged from some corner of his being that had lain undiscovered until the sentence had formed. An unpardonable impulse with no recognisable meaning, yet which still meant something. Not so much for the semantic content as for the sonorous rhythms created by the alternating languages in the rush of enunciation. Mustafa sat motionless before the screen, too stunned to feel astonishment. He changed the appearance of the words, searching for new meanings in each new font - arial courier tahoma comic sans ms flexure impact harrington lucida handwriting rockwell times new roman.

BOSON BOOKS

68

Chat Line

But he was soon off on another journey, this time to the website of a young Englishman, Dominic Crinson, who created tiles decorated using digital techniques. Each object contained a universe of virtual painting while the unpredictable progression of the automatically generated signs produced the illusion of melding into a live animal that it might be dangerous to become too familiar with. Next came another painter. This one’s paintings had writing round the edges, so tiny that you had to screw your eyes up see it, as if you were examining an infinitesimally small jewel – art bowing before the technology of the new cognitive systems. Mustafa began to have fun. Wrapped in his virtual peregrinations, he almost forgot about his disappointment of a few hours previously. Cornelia could carry on attending her Akademie. She could go on doing what she had always done, with her long, copper-highlighted hair and uncertain intellectual powers. After all, she was only an art student who wanted to become an academically certified painter, as if a diploma awarded by an art college could confer worth on her canvases, which in any case Mustafa had never had the pleasure of criticising all at the same time. No, true worth was bestowed by a very different audience. Apart from her withering comments, the Austrian woman had done nothing but tell him – in her emphatic, schoolmistressy tones – about a trip she had made to Amsterdam with the sole purpose of getting a close look at a painting by Van Gogh, “Wheat Field with Crows”. “If you stare at the picture, and then immediately afterwards shut your eyes and manage not to think, you can hear the shot he killed himself with.” What a fucking nerd! Now, Mustafa could only feel antipathy and distaste for the art student. Above all, for her Viennese accent and the maniacal precision that had led her to look at the painting on 27 July, the very day on which in 1890, Vincent had shot himself in the head at Auvers sur Oise. What kind of a fool went all weepy over the death of a madman? His mother? His washerwoman? The nurse of doctor Paul Gachet, the specialist in nervous disorders who treated him for long periods of time? The “cocotte” with whom he found consolation for self-doubt on afternoons of meretricious sex? “He died instantly. On his paintings. One of the yellow ones he loved so much.” More rubbish! She was supposed to be such a great Van Gogh scholar and she didn’t even know that he didn’t die instantly, but only the following day. His brother Theo was at his bedside, and he is said to have murmured over and over again, “That’s it …. You’ve really done it now … you’ve finally done it”, alluding to his many previous unsuccessful attempts to kill himself, one only a few months previously. Then he remembered the words of an Italian critic, which would create controversy and fierce debate all over the world, “There is more life in one millimetre of a painting by Picasso than in all the art of the Renaissance”. Mustafa went on with his virtual tour. This seemed to him to be the only way to get to the heart of things. From where he was, the world was no more than an ambiguous game, burned onto a Pentium card.

BOSON BOOKS

69

Chat Line

There is one sense in which you only do something if you do it here and now.

The next site he visited concentrated on holograms and fractal geometry. Mustafa knew nothing of these subjects, and that was why they fascinated him. He paused over certain phrases without understanding either their meaning or the technological process they were supposed to illustrate. In short, he fell in love with the individual words. Molecules of water preserve the memory of where they have passed …….. Laser beams split up into two bands that interfere with each other, creating a diffraction pattern that is recorded on the plate …….. To obtain an image of the object, a single band of laser radiation, reproducing the same shadow fronts, is passed through its hologram ……. The three-dimensional image of the object is such that it is indistinguishable from the object itself ……. The main application of holography is in the restoration of works of art ……. It is possible to reproduce an image in an infinitesimal portion of the image itself. It was Borges who had the delirious dream of a picture of the world, embracing every fragment and every instant, painted on the infinity of space and time but existing within the finite boundaries of a briarwood frame. Every blink of an eye has within it eternity. The wheel of the Prater is obstinately identical to the lemon groves of Cyprus. With increasing urgency, Mustafa scrolled through the pages of a biophysics institute linked, curiously, to the website of an American artist. He soon understood why. The American had generated his images from computertortured fern fronds and the scientists were collaborating on the project, transforming crystals, cooking up all the colours of the rainbow, and manipulating without distinction molecules of vitamin C or sex hormones to contribute to the work. Like all strokes of genius, the idea arrived without warning. Mustafa got up and reached for a book on Klimt published by Taschen. Impatiently, he flicked through looking for the page he wanted to compare with what he was seeing on the VDU. Of course, Klimt hadn’t been just a painter in Vienna during the la belle époque. His wife and lover, Emilie Flöge, ran a fashion house for which Gustav designed fabrics and clothes that were identical to the landscapes in his paintings. Mustafa held the book open at the photograph of the couple (Gustav wearing an artist’s smock, Emilie in a long robe reaching nearly to the ground, decorated in the checkered pattern so dear to Sezessionstil artists), and browsed through the site he had been looking at shortly before. It was all clear now. The artist presenting these extraordinary creations was a biophysicist entranced by the beauty of his lab experiments. One of his computer-assisted creations was a lawn with programmed-growth grass that had a number of industrial applications. A combination of vegetable and synthetic material, it comprised germinating life that grew alongside electronically activated molecules of polyurethane. This was the new digital naturalism, which had nothing to do with the natural world. Artificial Nature. Tendrils snaking across a Van Gogh canvas, making its congealed colours explode into digital life.

BOSON BOOKS

70

Chat Line

That was what was already going through Mustafa’s mind. The virtual lawn would not end up in the paintings of an American artist. It could be a garment, “his” creation, made of earth leather grass plastic in the universe’s hotchpotch of horrors and delights, reeking of wet leaves, disinfectant and a young woman’s honey-sweet perspiration. When Cornelia put on this state-of-the-art yet primitive robe, he would be the bull that browsed – “browsed” as in web software; “browsed” as in grazing like a sun-lazy farm animal feeding in the lemon groves of Güzelyurt – his snout sunk in the pristine alchemy of her green body.

BOSON BOOKS

71

Chat Line

WOLF He loved impossible adventures. He adored everyday miracles, large and small, that proved to him and to the world that what we call reality is nothing more than a highly debatable opinion. He liked to entertain older people with old nursery rhymes. He took pleasure in coming to blows with the scoundrels who crossed his path, and arguing with young women of good family to the point of nursing entirely unjustifiable grudges that would stand the test of time and memory. And he liked making sad animals laugh, especially donkeys, those most despised of beasts which will nonetheless laugh without difficulty if their unsophisticated sense of humour is at all tickled. If he had been able to choose, Wolf would have associated exclusively with the elderly and animals. Which was exactly what he did since, of all the freedoms he had knowingly deprived himself of, he had kept the faculties of selection and rejection. Wolf himself had one foot in the metaphorical grave but took advantage of the ambiguous disguises of old age. He was young in years and body, elderly in outlook and infantile in his heart of hearts so that he existed in a sort of otherworldly limbo, the unique maze of a life that was his and his alone. He loved the hill country of the North East, not with the self-satisfied indulgence of a nature lover but because it was where he had been living for many years. In truth, it was the only place he could follow the unfolding seasons without losing interest. For hours, he would watch, transfixed, the April rain as it dripped from the branches of the poplars, or stride entranced along some out-of-the-way country path as view succeeded view. Often, he would talk to himself, especially in the mornings, alternating abstruse expressions in various languages with passages from the Divine Comedy he knew by heart or he would yell at the top of his voice so that the blood rushed to his head and he was forced to collapse into the compassionate arms of the fabric-covered armchair in front of the fireplace. But in either case, he grappled with every single word, and did so with the deranged insistence of an anatomist slicing up a dead body to search for some unforeseen symptom. Regularly, he would roar out the names of the seventeen districts of the city of Siena and, immediately afterwards in exactly the same tone, recite the eleventh canto of Dante’s Paradise, creating an ephemeral link between the two. Taken as a whole, it was a primitive yet hi-tech existence, for Wolf spent much of the day hunched over his computer. In a short space of time, he had become a sort of virtual raconteur. In the chat rooms of the web, he would tell, without elaboration, what he did and what he had written each morning, and people would listen to him. They would come looking for him and scold him in impassioned emails if he didn’t turn up at the appointed hour.

BOSON BOOKS

72

Chat Line

His audience was exclusively female, and made up of women whose real names were unkown to Wolf, who knew them by the nicks they had chosen as their web identity – LADY29, Natasha, dancingrl, Susy….. Sometimes, it wasn’t so easy to talk. He had to be in a state of grace. Perhaps not quite what artists call “inspiration” but a state of grace nonetheless …. Wolf knew exactly how to present himself in the very special world of chat rooms. Like a medicine man preparing to carry out a sacrifice. He would put a video in the VCR – always the same one –, and then turn away from the TV so as not to be corrupted by the images. He would listen with his eyes shut so as not to be distracted by the whitewashed walls or the reproduction Mantegna hanging on the opposite wall. It was the voice of Ilkka Kivimaki reading, in Finnish, the notes for a rally to the driver, using the tone of his voice to penetrate the engine’s tortured scream (the stage was Niinikumpu, in central Finland). But when he put on a CD of classical music, Wolf wished it would rain. Ilkka’s voice was curiously overlaid by a rather good performance of Beethoven’s Für Elise. Now, the eleventh canto of Paradise would fall silent as well. And Wolf would go over to the already booted computer, log on to the chat room and begin to tell his stories. You could almost call it a musical recital. Not because of any assonance between his words and the music coming out of the speakers but rather for the way he tapped at his keyboard, in the rapt ecstasy of a concert pianist. LADY29 had sent him two photos. Evidently, the Belgian woman was rather older than the twenty-nine years to which she admitted yet she was stunning in her dazzling nudity. What did she want from him? To be adored? To find entertainment and forget about her job in an accounts department? To hear a new voice mingle with the drumming of the Charleroi rain? Wolf spoke to her of other things – things that were not her tanned complexion, so similar in the high resolution photograph to her intensely blond hair. That was what he always did when he was interested in a woman. She kept up the conversation without revealing her anxiety. She answered in French, with the disenchanted smile of a professional. Wolf: tu m’as déjà oubliée? (“Have you forgotten me already?”) LADY29: non, bien sûr… (“Of course not”) That was progress for you. Of all possible chat-up lines, they had chosen the silliest. Wolf told her he didn’t believe her for a minute. Progress is a curious thing and may catch the unwary by surprise precisely because it is not consistent …… in fact, they were chatting now but from the following week they would be able to see each other, thanks to the webcams they were both going to buy. She smiled again. Not because, ironically, she was struggling to open a tin of tuna with the primitive key supplied when she could send her siren song to lovers all round the globe in real time with the merest click of her mouse. No, her smile was prompted by the thought of how she would present herself before the camera for her first virtual date. Just topless or completely, stunningly nude? BOSON BOOKS

73

Chat Line

The end of the world on the threshold of the Third Millennium. Think of a global super-weapon, many times more devastating than an atom bomb, or even than chemical or biological devices. Leaving people petrified all over the planet. Wolf wanted to tell her the story of the two of them. It started long ago and worked up to the present until it finally coincided with his nimble tapping at the keyboard, even leaping ahead in anticipation of what would happen after that irretrievably lost moment. He described to her a picture of a man and a woman looking at a picture, in which a man and a woman were looking at a picture that showed a man and a woman looking at a picture where you could just see, in the image’s infinitesimal perspective, a man and a woman who were looking at a picture ……….. She smiled, but this time she didn’t say “bien sûr”. That was what Wolf missed most. He might even fall in love with her, if she were to repeat it. He dropped his roundabout attempts to prompt her to say it again. He imagined the tuna fish in olive oil he had glimpsed stuck in her teeth in the first nude picture, thanks to not so much a smile as the parting of the lips in simulated amazement a professional photographic studio might suggest to recreate the spontaneity of a riverside snapshot. LADY29: la fin du monde, tu as dit? Oui, the end of the world, all right. Just in time to realise it was coming. People surprised in the middle of the road, in small-town shops, dozing on sunloungers. Running away, panicking, screaming. Only one man was stretching out his arms in a universal blessing. It was nothing to do with religion, or indeed anything else. An insignificant little man smiling at disaster, in a dark suit, like any middle-aged resident of the provinces, a knowing look on his face as if he had caused the catastrophe with his cabalistic conjuring. A sad little owl-like figure, his jacket ballooning slightly in the wind, standing over the precipice of the last kerb in the streets of the metropolis. Did he like LADY29? Babe, you’re better than Verena, whispered Wolf without typing the words. In the confusion of their intense exchange of phrases, Wolf pretended he hadn’t seen the question, writing other things as if the words weren’t getting through to her in that evening’s less frenetic ping pong. dancingrl: why did u change ur nick? Another customer. She was scolding him because he had changed his previous nickname. From Glamis to Wolf. It was a bit like rewriting your destiny. Yes, the spinner of tales agreed, Glamis was much more heroic. Evoking the three witches in Macbeth. Calamity and debauchery. Destiny hand in hand with dark conspiracy. Wolf: Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! … Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! ….. All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter! He tapped out the phrases confidently, Shakespeare’s words flooding back. Nobody understand but there were no more questions about his nick. His literary exorcism seems to satisfy the others. As he launched the words into the ether at 56,000 bps, Wolf mused upon the tin of tuna his lover was slowly consuming in a well-heated room at Charleroi. She might die if, by some regrettable mischance, she were to cut her hand on the tetanus-bearing tin, despite the image files of her body she was transmitting. She BOSON BOOKS

74

Chat Line

might die, if it only rained a little more in Belgium and a flood of Biblical dimensions were to submerge that part of Europe. Our minstrel remembered the verses of a Spanish artist on the caducity of things, “… in forty million years, your smile or a ball bearing will be the same nothing ....” Neither the conquest of space nor her own explosive breasts would save the world from tetanus, unhappiness or the insipidity of a scratch. If he’d been able to choose just one of his Internet acquaintances to make love with, Wolf would have plumped for Noway. His no way woman. Only with Noway from Norway. Penetrating the rolling, forested landscape. Whinnying protests into the clear air of the fjords. As if a woman – even an abstract webcontained woman – was too real to be tolerated. Wind. As it blows over the Lofoten islands. Raking the ground. Wild. Hostile. So be it. A storm! Wind, squall, hurricane ……. But then Wolf sought assonance from an alphabetical ally, such as t, as in typhoon, tempest, thunderstorm ……. that would change as soon as the words were transposed into another language. That was why by now, he spoke a dialect that wasn’t English, or Italian, or French. But if Noway had been standing in front of him at that minute, or he had just landed on the seafront at Stavanger after stepping off one of the silent ferries that slip out of Newcastle upon Tyne to breast the grey North Sea waves, then he might really have flirted, or made the kind of brutally vulgar comment you find in westerns, when the clatter of spurs is the only sound to disturb the silence of a backwoods saloon and in comes a stranger in a dripping hat but no one has the courage to look him in the eye. Wolf: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!.…………………….. The cry of the wolf …. Its eternal howl transformed by the keyboard into an invitation to an orgy. However, Wolf only wanted to imitate the howling wind. And make the presence of his elusive, ice-cold caress felt. Instead, their comedy of misunderstandings forced him to humour her by inventing pleasantries for a while, simulating an outburst of excessive sexual vigour that his visitors would want to possess as one might a whore in a brothel. Hurriedly. As if you were stealing something. Wolf: stormy day…. can u feel the wind on ur face?….. Stormy day …… there’s a squall brewing. Especially because of the technical lag between the moment of sending a message and getting the reply. On some evenings, it was like living in an absurd anti-time. You could get words you thought were the answer to something you had already said well before the original question had actually arrived. As ordinary time blurred, you would lose any sense of what “now” meant. A game within the game, where each dialogue was no more than its own image, poorly reflected in the metal stand of the lamp on the desk. A mirrored dome, vibrating to the tapping of your fingers on the keys. LADY29 said she had a very jealous husband. She wouldn’t be able to drive on her own to Switzerland and stop at a tea room overlooking the lake between Geneva and Evian, where Wolf could join her. How irritating ….. everyone seemed to be asleep in front of their computers this evening. Talking to yourself could try your temper. BOSON BOOKS

75

Chat Line

Natasha started sending messages in colour. Signs that took the form of hearts, or stars. Words that were lost in emphatic exclamations at no one in particular. Wolf had described the tea rooms of Switzerland at length. You could find them everywhere, but above all in the tranquillity of cool, silent, lakeside villages. They were even discreet. So reserved you could meet a wife with a jealous husband in one and not even the porters of the lakefront hotels would say any more than the dark green trees that stood on the water’s edge. And of course, bien sûr ……. There was no alcohol on the tea room verandahs, which were also so silent you could listen to the waves lapping on the shore or the gentle darting movements of the trout ….. it occurred to Wolf – and as it occurred to him, he began to type – a voice was whispering the words in his head oui, je suis sûr que tu aime les fraises avec de la chantilly pendant que tu fais l’amour…. c’est vrais?….. dis mois oui…… dis moi oui…. (“I’m sure you like strawberries and cream while you’re making love … don’t you? … tell me you do … tell me you do”). At that moment, he was caressing her thong-shod feet as the woman sipped her drink through a straw. His hand brushed away an insect that was about to land on her forehead, buzzing irritatingly from the glass to her lips. Then, yes, the waiter arrived – sixty and diminutive, with a haughty air – bearing two bowls of strawberries and whipped cream. He smiled without looking at them, as if they were in a silent film and then placed the bowls very gingerly on the table after spreading two small tablecloths to minimise the impact of the glass on the wicker top. More than fifteen hundred kilometres away, in a stadium at Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, John Doan was singing Saint Patrick in the Spirit at the concert to launch his new album, “Eire – Isle of the Saints”. Natasha snorted and muttered an unrepeatable Romany epithet in the direction of her mother, who was telling her for the third time to switch off the light. They were in an magnificent city-centre apartment in Bucharest – her father was vice-chairman of the Foreign Trade Institute and was currently away in Antwerp on business. Susy, a particularly delightful and remarkably large thirty-nine-year-old primary school teacher whose real name was Inger-Lise Sortland, had left the chat room over an hour earlier. Her ears ringing to the CD of Stones’ classics in her walkman, IngeLise lay back in the small bath of her small house on a western Norwegian island itself so small it appeared only as a minuscule dot on naval charts. Dancingrl tapped out a few apathetic phrases. Her baby had finally stopped crying and she began to glance increasingly often at the clock that hung next to the signed photo of Rudolf Nureyev on the kitchen wall in her prefabricated bungalow in the suburbs of Anacortes, in the State of Washington. Tonight, yet again, that bastard Trevor, her former ballet teacher and current companion, was going to be late.

BOSON BOOKS

76

Chat Line

XAVIER It was the total absence of any element of surprise that got him down on some days. Xavier looked for evidence of life in the smallest gestures, like a scientist studying a snowflake under an electron microscope. He was fascinated by immobility. The negation of other people’s worlds as a counterpoint to what moved in him alone. The repetition of the same actions. The impossibility of a genuine encounter. That was why the large Habsburg-style house in the centre of Trieste where he had lived for thirty-nine years (having in fact been born there) boasted a well-stocked library. Biographies of popes. All the popes with whom history, or more modestly hagiographic literature, had concerned itself. He was not interested in their individual personalities. For example, the aquiline severity of Paul VI – more dour than austere, more harsh than acute, more unforgiving than intellectually gifted – to mention just one of the occupants of the throne of Peter that Xavier knew in intimate detail. No, he was fascinated by their genius for repeating the unrepeatable as they retraced their way step by step in the labyrinths of the Vatican or Castelgandolfo, or celebrated liturgies in words that echoed but did not fade, like images multiplying in an infinity of mirrors. Now the Internet had revealed to him a treasure trove. And Xavier, perhaps because he had long been deprived of astonishment, enjoyed catching the habitués of chat rooms unawares as they poured out a tidal wave of information that was of no interest to anyone. It was almost an intellectual insult, but one that did not receive so much as a sharp, salutary, reprimand. No virtual community, fanatic or scholar would put up with that sort of treatment. If John XXIII had closed the Venice Biennale (or rather asked the mayor to close it) because some of the films were adjudged to be contrary to Catholic morality, it now sounded like an episode from a past that had imperceptibly but irretrievably ceased to exist. The phrases that formed in English, French or Spanish – for Xavier was a linguist and proud of the fact that he knew at least one word in all the world’s languages – generated the sense of a delicious pointlessness so perfect it passed almost unnoticed. The whole of modern history in a few minutes. From the Rome of Pope Julius II and his artists, fusing with each other and the celestial trinity of Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael, to information that impinged on current affairs. There was a preview of the Holy Year and a description of a set of three silver medals (0.2 micron with application, cross in 18 kt gold), depicting Pope John, Padre Pio and Pope John Paul II, garnished with the irresistible detail that all three had been officially blessed by the Holy Father’s chaplain, Monsignor Baldorini, and that they could be purchased, together with the “health bracelet”, on-line. All major credit cards accepted. It was a promotional initiative that malignant diplomatic correspondents explained was intended to repair the damage of Pope John Paul II’s flops in India and Georgia in November 1999. In New Delhi, the enormous “Jawaharlal Nehru” stadium, initially considered too small to hold the crowds, was, disappointingly, more than three-quarters empty on the day. And to rub salt in the wound, the official excuse for the fiasco was that BOSON BOOKS

77

Chat Line

the event coincided with Diwali, the Hindu feast of light, celebrating the victory of Good over Evil. Meanwhile, saddened more by the seriousness of the situation than the absence of the faithful, John Paul II could only note the polemical scenes of protest staged by the representatives of other religions. The disfigured likeness of His Holiness burned on a thousand bonfires the Hindus had lit along the roadsides and the Muslim delegate had got up to leave as soon as the Jew had started to speak. John Paul II had the curious expression of a pagan saint. A listless, tetchy general returning from a resounding defeat, he had a sleepwalker’s ecstastic grimace, especially when Italian television showed him getting off the plane at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. He descended holding onto the hand of his Polish secretary, Monsignor Stanislaus, as if proceeding uncertainly through thick fog, a gesture that only a few weeks before would have been refused with barely concealed scorn. On this occasion, he sought support with like an anxious child. One irreverent biographer has claimed that the Holy Father’s dream would be to pass away in the middle of the Holy Year, forcing history to bow its head before the greatness of his name. The death that has so often in the past brushed the features of the two hundred and sixty fourth Vicar of Christ, most famously on the occasion when Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish terrorist in the pay of who knows what dark political forces, on 13 May 1981 squeezed the trigger of the gun he was pointing at the Pope. If all this were not enough to win him universal fame of the highest degree, it might also be noted that this great Pole was also the first nonItalian pontifice since the long-gone era of Adrian VI, elected pope in 1522. Xavier threw himself into a hopeless soliloquy, his narration disregarded, spurring him to even greater heights of passion. In a rush, without so much as the brake of punctuation, he described the official limousine of the pontifice Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli the car in which the emperor of all the worlds loved to luxuriate a Mercedes Benz 300D Rio 100 P diecast 1/43 six-cylinder in-line 1996 cc engine 166 HP 5640 mm long 1360 mm wide. In rapid succession, he rattled off the encyclicals of Giovanni Battista Montini, Paul VI. Ecclesiam Suam, Mysterium fidei, Christi Matri, Populorum progressio, Sacerdotalis caelibatus and Humanae vitae. Then his travels abroad (the learned Xavier was also able to recite the precise dates) – the Holy Land (4-6 January, 1964), India (2-5 December, 1964), the UN, New York (4-5 october, 1965), Fatima (13 May, 1967), Turkey (2526 July, 1967), Colombia (22-25 August, 1968), Uganda (31 July-2 August, 1969), and the Far East (26 November-4 December 1970). It would have been easier to talk to an audience of catholics in one of the religion-oriented chat rooms but that was precisely why Xavier stayed doggedly with this channel, normally the haunt of teenegers and would-be Casanovas, because as well as the thrill of provocation, he found here a sense of unshareable – and utterly desolate – solitude. Xavier, whose real name was Guglielmo Vittis von Mahl, was the last scion of a noble Austrian family with branches in Gorizia and Trieste. The glories and rituals of its former noble status had had to go by the board as the family assets were steadily sold off. There had been no tragedy, no gambling debts, no overaudaucious investments, just the tax man’s greed and a poor nose for new sources of income. Nevertheless, after his degree in philosophy with its theology-based BOSON BOOKS

78

Chat Line

thesis, Xavier had shunned the ignominy of paid employment. He had been married for six years to a woman from Klagenfurt but was now divorced. It had been his wife who had wanted to break off the relationship because, as it said in one of the legal documents that Xavier had carefully framed and hung up in his living room, “…. for some time, the husband’s sexual demands have been intemperate, both in their frequency and method of execution, which are contrary to all propriety and decorum.” Although by birth and upbringing a catholic, Xavier alias Guglielmo was not a believer. He hated conventional religion and had a subtly contradictory relationship with the clergy. His passion for popes and saints had nothing to do with faith. But then, after ninety minutes of telematic rantings, someone answered him. Danica began with what looked like a humorous comment. She talked about South America, and how John Paul was more popular than Pelé, and the strange rituals to ward off demons. Animals with their throats slit, their stillpalpitating organs offered up with a mixture of delirium and piety in a formula that was popular in Venezuela’s hinterland. The credulous submissiveness of the campesinos. Danica was a doctor, and about to specialise in urology. She was thirty years old and almost a neighbour. Xavier: que pasa??????????????????????????? (“what’s going on?”) In her anxiety to speak, she hadn’t told him anything about her life. Her parents were Slovenes who had emigrated to Venezuela. Danica – name and nickname were one and the same – was born overseas and had lived in Venezuela until 1990. The family had returned to a country that for Danica was little better than a foreign land. Her parents had restructured, and then gone to live in, the family home at Kozina while she had enrolled at the university of Ljubljana. Xavier’s interest in meeting Danica was not aroused just because they were “neighbours”, which in terms of distance meant no more than a hundred kilometres, or one hour’s drive. Neither did he want to see her because she might be the kind of woman who did not consider the “frequency and method of execution” of sex the way he preferred it “intemperate”, as his wife’s lawyer’s fastidious phraseology had defined it. For it was Danica who sent him an invitation by email. Podriamos encontrarnos en la estacion de ferrocariles. Llamame por telefono para ponernos de acuerdo. (“We could meet at the railway station. Phone me so we can fix a date”). When the couple spoke on the phone, it was as if they were taking the first step towards a miracle. From a chat room, where words make no noise, to the sound of a voice you can imagine having a face, a woollen sweater, a way of breathing or a special laugh. As their emails became increasingly frequent, they gradually defined the details of a meeting that the topographical description of squares, buildings and landmarks made more inevitable with each passing day. Mañana nos veremos entre las 17.15 y 17.30 al frente de la UNIVERZA LJUBLJANE, ahí hay una estatua con una fuente de agua. La Universidad esta en el Congresni Trg, en el centro de la ciudad. Soy blonda de pelo corto, tendré una chaqueta maron. (“We’ll meet tomorrow between 5.15 and 5.30 pm outside the UNIVERZA LJUBLJANE. There’s a statue with a water fountain. The university is BOSON BOOKS

79

Chat Line

in Congresni Trg, in the centre of the city. I’ve got short, blond hair and I’ll be wearing a brown jacket”). Not at the railway station, then. Too impersonal and nearly always deserted. But in the heart of the city, outside the university Danica must have gone to after coming back from Venezuela. It was clear that punctuality was important to both of them. Ten minutes before the agreed time, with no hesitation and with an intuition born more of experience than romanticism, they were waving discreetly, and finally meeting. There followed a brief, embarrassed hug at having to invert the sequence of the greeting ceremony. In one sense, they already knew each other, despite being complete strangers, yet both were behaving as if it were their first meeting. Soon afterwards, they were strolling across the huge square and along the streets of the centre, where the Ljubljanica crosses the city, mirroring its disdainful buildings. It was as if the river was reflecting that evening part of an older Europe. It was autumn and there were roast chestnut sellers at the street corners, the cones of light from the streetlamps and the shops drowning forever in the leaden waters of the river. This Europe seemed even haughtier and more ancient, especially when they heard their own footsteps echo on Tromostovije bridge – es un puente formado de tres puentes (“it’s a bridge made of three bridges”) – which perhaps for that reason answered with three echoes. Blond, with the cropped hair that precisely matched the self-portrait she had sent a few days earlier, Danica spoke to him in Spanish, the language in which she was most at ease. He replied in an English she understood but which he sometimes had to enunciate laboriously, or supplement with words he dug out of the Spanish dictionary he had taken with him when he had accompanied a group of Austrian businessmen to Andalusia for an entire summer season. The popes of two millennia and the Venezuelan hinterland two hundred kilometres from Caracas were an odd way to meet. Now they were wandering the streets, glancing uninterestedly at the buildings, the kerbs polished by the pilgrimages of men and women who travelled but never met, polished smooth as the statues in the Vatican burnished by the kisses of the faithful. Talking close together, so close that the other’s breath on their necks became a shiver down the spine. That, too, was the crazy longing of an autumn evening. Danica: que esta sucediendo? (“What’s going on?”) It was just some students horsing around, celebrating a new graduate in the middle of the group with mockery and vulgarities. The noise was amplified by the narrow alleyway, which fired their shouts in the face of passers-by. Smiling, people hurried on their way to avoid getting drawn in. Danica suggested they go into a bar she knew so they could sit down. And as Guglielmo, or “Xavier” as he preferred to think of himself, entered, his jacket slung over his shoulders, he could see a sign that said, in Gothic lettering, “Slašèièarna”. This prompted him to recite the Slovene name in all the languages he could think of – pâtisserie konditorei cukràszda pastry-shop pasteleria banketbakker pastane – in a silent conversation he was only able to imagine and that curiously, preposterously, could not be coupled with this unbearable manner of being together.

BOSON BOOKS

80

Chat Line

Seated on Viennese-style chairs, they waited for the waitress to arrive with tea and hot chocolate. Gently, Xavier sought her leg with his knee under the table. He felt the rustle of her stockings, the warmth of the flesh that the evening air had not cooled, and Danica’s almost imperceptible movement as she parted her thighs slightly to let him caress her a little more intensely. She carried on talking without hinting that she was aware of what was going on, her words swooping across the table in a flamenco flourish. Then her hand dropped casually under the table and started to stroke her new friend’s leg in an increasingly insistent fashion. At that point, Xavier could no longer resist the urge to move his fingers, tapping the edge of the glass tabletop as if he were typing a word. But it was Danica who took a pen and paper out of her bag and, smiling to herself but not looking at Xavier (the two had now broken off their contact by unspoken mutual consent), she began to write. First an email address, then a subject and finally a brief message, identical to the many that she had been receiving from him and replying to in the segregated solitude of her rented room. Still without speaking, in the pregnant tension of the sudden silence, Xavier penned his reply to the email on the sachet of tea that the waitress had in the meantime served. She responded and so, too, did Xavier, with even greater fervour, overwhelmed by real time communication. Then all at once, time plunged into the immensity of the virtual, as did they, and Danica and Guglielmo could not resist the perverse pleasure of reverting to their former personas. Both realised that this would be the only meeting that really mattered. When the chandelier winked on and off to remind patrons discreetly that the bar closed at nine, the two were lost in a limbo of coffee and chocolate cake, where words unspoken took shape before their delighted eyes in the exhilarating riot they knew so well. The subdued whisper of the ballpoint on the paper recalled the whirring of a modem in a graveyard of saucers, coffeepots, cups, teapots, wastepaper, hotel bills, the quality control ticket from a pair of tights, a Municipality of Trieste car pass, the note of a PIN number for an ATM, parking meter receipts, an accountant’s invoice, tickets to Miramare castle, scribbled notes, an advert for car tyres, invitations to the opening of a hypermarket, a page torn from a Slovene magazine, the back of an envelope with an official-looking letterhead ……………….

END

BOSON BOOKS

81