Читать книгу Malafemmena - Louisa Ermelino - Страница 11

MARGUERITE

“You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles across the Border,” I said. “You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it.”

—Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King

The first time I met Marguerite she was wearing bedsheets. She had dyed them colors, pinks and purples, and sewn them into pajamas. She wore many sets, one on top of the other, and told me she would shed them, one by one, as the weather got warmer, until in Goa she would be naked. Her hair was orange from henna and her eyes half shut from opium but I didn’t understand that then.

We were in Istanbul, sleeping at the Gülhane, drinking tea at the Pudding Shop in Sultanahmet. Marguerite was alone but I was with Oliver who, as I saw it, had rescued me from a life measured in church bells and cheap cigarettes. I had seduced him on the floor of the dining room where we had set our sleeping bags side by side in the home of mutual friends when I heard he was on his way to India. I had been calculating. Men were easy to seduce, unless you loved them. It was always easier not to love them. God knows, they could be cruel.

Even Oliver, fragile as a flower, would in the end be heartless. Oliver, brilliant and beautiful, with his clipped overwrought language ripened at Cambridge, The Golden Bough in his rucksack. Where I come from, a man is said to be beautiful when he looks like a girl. Handsome was something else. Handsome made the heart beat. Beauty made you sigh. You wanted to reach out and touch its cheek.

Oliver was beautiful, with the perfect face of a fairy-tale prince. He wore his hair in a pageboy and I called him Prince Valiant but not to his beautiful face. I was living an interior life. Where I come from, men have rough ways and big noses and are always touching their crotches.

I was smug when we left the next morning, hand in hand. We took the train to Istanbul. Even Oliver, who counted the pennies in his palm, had to let go of hitchhiking somewhere in the south of Yugoslavia.

THE ISTANBUL TRAIN STATION

NOVEMBER 15, 1969

5:00 A.M.

When the train pulled into the station I saw him standing there and at that moment I remembered the warnings I had been given as a girl about the colpo di fulmine, when your heart is split open as though by lightning. A dangerous event. How can you protect yourself when your heart is split in two?

He was all I could see. Black curls, black eyes, hands in pockets, alone, grinning. A mythological creature, a satyr.

I think of him standing on the tracks in front of the train. How could he have been? I was delusional, too long alone on the road with the beautiful, brilliant, parsimonious Oliver. I closed my eyes. The train moved further into the station and he was gone.

Oliver went to rent us dormitory beds and I made my way down to the Pudding Shop. The Pudding Shop. Germans, Dutch, French, English back from the East, draped in satin and silk and beads, languorous, with kohled eyes, and, yes, beautiful.

And there was Marguerite, in her bedsheets, carefully rolling an English joint. “I’m Dutch,” she said, between licking the many papers it took to make a real English joint. She had a chipped front tooth and slurred the words, her accent heavy. “My English is not so good.”

“Your English is great,” I said.

“I go to India,” she said.

“Me, too,” I told her.

“We go together. Ja, why not?” she said. She ran her tongue the length of the joint to seal it and tore a piece of cardboard from a package of Murad cigarettes to make a filter. The joint was conical and when she lit it, the tip burned red in a circle the size of a nickel. “Ja, you come with us. We go tomorrow. We take the train.” She handed me the joint.

“I’m with someone,” I said. “An Englishman.”

“You bring him. Good. He comes too.” She closed her eyes and seemed to sleep.

Oliver came in and sat down. He put another sugar cube in my tea glass and drank what was left. “This is Marguerite,” I said. “She’s going to India on the train tomorrow and wants us to go with her.” Oliver blinked. I handed him the joint. Marguerite’s eyes fluttered open.

“She’s a junkie,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere with her. And besides, we are stopping at Ankara. There are things I want to see there.”

Marguerite looked at Oliver and she shrugged. I was sad and a little bit pissed. I moved closer to her on the bench until she was leaning against me. I had fallen a little bit in love with her. I loved her more in the days that were to come. This was not the end by any means.

Oliver left and I ordered another tea and a rice pudding. “He is pretty,” Marguerite said.

Oliver was pretty, I thought. I had a beautiful man. My old man was beautiful. Still, since that night on the dining room floor, we hadn’t touched. It would be many weeks before he touched me again. And terrible things had to happen before he did. I will tell you but you will have to wait.

“But why do you go with him?” she asked me.

I looked at her. Until she asked, it had been obvious to me what I was doing with Oliver. I told her even as I told myself. “He’s taking me to India,” I said, and watched her eyelids close again.

I had been living in Italy with the spoiled only son of a rich Milanese family who did not use their influence when he was called up for compulsory military service. His father might have thought it would make him a man. And so I followed him to a dark mountain village where the children threw stones when I came to the square to shop. His mother had sent us off with a small cheese grater for parmigiano.

The dark village was most likely beautiful, the birthplace of popes, high in the Dolomites, but I have never loved mountains, I told Marguerite. What I did love was the preening Alpini of the elite Italian army unit, who came to the bars in their medieval velvet hats with long white plumes. My Milanese was not one of these.

Enter an invitation to Sorrento, enter Oliver, the piece of cake passing through Sorrento on his way to India, enter me, the seducer, looking for a way out.

“And your Italian lover?” The question startled me. I didn’t think she was listening.

We passed through Belluno to get my things. I left Oliver in the bar with the plumed Alpini. I came into the house like a thief in the night although it was mid-afternoon. The plan was to gather up my things and disappear. I didn’t consider a note. I can be a sneak.

But my Milanese also came like a thief in the night. He cursed me, and tore my photograph into small pieces and threw them in my face. I stood and took my medicine. I understood consequences. Where I come from, you pay for your sins. I left the cheese grater. I felt badly but I just wanted to go. I wanted to get away from the terrible curses.

So, is there a happy ending? Does the adventurer/seductress make her way to the East and find fulfillment? Hell, no. I blame the curses, which, eventually, hit their mark.

Marguerite started another joint and told me she had left Amsterdam alone. The dope was getting too expensive. She didn’t like the cold. She kept getting pregnant. She had a fake passport in a man’s name and sixty US dollars in traveler’s checks that someone had given her. She was going to Goa. For Christmas. “Everyone,” she said, waving her hand to indicate the room. “All. Goa for Christmas!”

The youth of Western Europe and America were on the move. I smoked with Marguerite until I thought I had gone blind, paid for her tea and found my way to the dormitory room in the Gülhane. I fell asleep on the narrow cot next to Oliver’s wearing all my clothes. It was cold in Istanbul.

THE ISTANBUL TRAIN STATION

NOVEMBER 16, 1969

2:00 P.M.

We came to buy our tickets to Ankara, Oliver and I, according to his plan.

“Where are you going to, mate?”

I stood mute while my Istanbul train station satyr, my destiny, my destruction, spoke to Oliver. I looked over at Oliver and, at that moment, it seemed to me that his heart too had been struck. Oliver stared at Rick.

I was ignored by both of them. I stayed silent. I listened to Rick, his name was Rick, he said, from Yorkshire, tell Oliver that we couldn’t stop in Ankara. We had to push on through Turkey. There was a group of them leaving that night. It was important to be in a group, Rick said. “The Turks, the women . . .” He pointed his chin at me. “You don’t know what you’re doing, mate, traveling with a bird.”

And just like that, we were in the Grand Bazaar buying kilos of nuts and dried fruit. Rick bought cashews and apricots and figs. Oliver, pennies in his palm, stuck to peanuts and raisins.

Oliver, we would say where I come from, as I may have convinced you by now, didn’t go for spit. Oliver wouldn’t spend a wooden nickel. Oliver could squeeze a dollar until it cried. Oliver, we would say where I come from, was a cheap son-of-a-bitch. But Oliver was my ticket to ride.

THE ISTANBUL TRAIN STATION

NOVEMBER 16, 1969

8:00 P.M.

Rick saw us when we came into the station. He smiled, he waved. Oliver and I moved toward him. He stood in the center of a group, the one he insisted we go with to India.