Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 30

The disparity in our lifestyles didn’t stop Andrea from continuing to court me for my friendship. He would invite me out for couscous royale or fillet steak at his expense. He even proposed that I join him on a business trip to Italy. My dual role would be to share the driving and keep him company.

I was far from sure about accepting. That friendship never was quite mutual. I had had my doubts about him from the start. Why did he want to meet in public? What was this notion, exactly, about me being his partner? All I had done was to advertise English lessons in the local classifieds. Out of nowhere loomed this swarthy Sicilian who seemed less interested in learning English than in coercing me into a business scheme. His approach was at best misjudged. At worst, it was sinister. What was his agenda? I wasn’t just doubtful; I was also scared. He exuded a dark Mediterranean roughness like that of a Minotaur. With my half-a-degree in English literature, I had only the flimsiest defence. He was unambiguously a man, while at twenty-one I was essentially a boy. It was like the meeting of Innocence and Experience.

In the end, I agreed to go to Italy with Andrea for the feeble reason that I had nothing better to do. When Simone went off to work, I was left to potter around the apartment or mooch about the farmers’ market. Apart from a smattering of translation work, there were just my ‘little English lessons’, as Andrea would disparagingly call them – and not so many of those, frankly. So I was free.

Too free, perhaps, like I had been at Oxford, when I had only to show my face once a week. Because freedom implies the absence of responsibility, it’s a close cousin of rootlessness. Pure freedom is bad freedom, in other words. Good freedom comes about when we securely belong. Think of children playing in the garden while their parents make Sunday lunch. The children are all the more free because they are invisibly tethered to the kitchen. It’s the feeling of being safely held which, paradoxically, releases them to play.

In my case, there was barely a tether at all. My parents never tried to talk me out of leaving Oxford. After my departure for France, I heard not a peep from them until I dropped the bombshell of Simone’s pregnancy. Up to that point, they were content to keep paying out the rope that might have kept me connected, and I was content to keep pulling away. It was all slack. That gave me a strong sense of the arbitrariness of life, of how easy it is to turn onto new paths when there’s no firm set of expectations. It lay behind my later decision to make what was, to many people, the bizarre switch from academia to management consultancy. There was never enough glue sticking me to my own track, whatever that was, never any chance of getting stuck in a rut.^fn3 The surface over which I moved was as smooth as marble. Freedom and arbitrariness went together. I could slide in any direction.