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Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.

Chaconne - Diana Blackwood


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(She had worked hard, growing up, to tame her diphthongs, for she had wanted to speak like the people who introduced classical music on ABC radio and not like her mother. It occurred to her that now she was in Europe, she might aim a little higher: BBC Radio 4 announcers, perhaps, her companions over breakfast.)

      The principal invited her to his office and offered her, at eleven o’clock in the morning, a small glass of pineau des Charentes, which he declared to be a drink for jeunes filles. A girls’ drink! How should she respond to the man? Eleanor had university friends who seemed to operate out of some secret rule-book of feminism, but she lacked their brash conviction and willingness to offend. As she could not decide if he was slimy, or silly and harmless, or harmlessly slimy and silly, she replied mildly that she was well out of adolescence and if the drink was very sweet, no thank you all the same.

      On a day that opened like an autumn poem, with wisps of cloud in an azure sky, a day when she would have liked to catch a bus to Neuilly and stroll in the English garden at Bagatelle, she forced herself to attend to her conscience. To bolster her chances of being selected for an English language assistantship, she had written on her application form that she planned to study comparative literature at the University of Paris III. It sounded plausible and European, and she had thought how pleasant it would be to have mint tea at the mosque or coffee in Rue Mouffetard between classes. She had also declared on the form that she would return to Australia to teach. While that was not an outright lie, it was also unlikely to be the truth, and it troubled her just enough to make her enquire about enrolment. Also, there was Julien to consider. Despite his enthusiasm for the proletariat, he preferred the company of people who were flexing their intellects. (Not that he considered the study of literature to be true intellectual labour: la littérature peut être comprise mais n’aide pas à comprendre.) Teaching twelve hours a week of English conversation was simply not enough to fill a respectable life. Indeed, the hours were theoretically designed to enable foreigners to pursue their studies, provided they could sort out the timetable clashes between teaching and learning. One way or another, therefore, she felt propelled towards comparative literature.

      Trying to inhale as little as possible of the unclean air, she walked down Boulevard St-Michel, with its tourists and bookshops and takeaway crêpes, and then turned left into Rue Soufflot. The Panthéon, too zealous and overbearing a building to interest her, reminded her of Julien. She had visited its interior with him on one of the rare occasions that he had accompanied her anywhere in Paris. With his crooked half-smile he had announced that he hoped to be interred in the edifice along with Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo and the other grands hommes of a grateful nation. So Marie Curie was an honorary great man? He supposed she must be. Now, passing the Lycée Henri IV – what with the illustrious dead next door, the very air was heavy with masculine authority – Eleanor imagined the Oxbridge or Harvard male who would be appointed as an English language assistant to that solid old institution. It was a relief to reach Place de la Contrescarpe, intimate and unruffled as a village square. Here there was almost no traffic, and she could resume normal breathing.

      As she dawdled down Rue Mouffetard she wondered, not for the first time, why there were so many Greek restaurants in one section and why some of the upper stories of the medieval buildings tilted so far back from the street. Were they built that way, and if not, why hadn’t they collapsed? In the street market she listened to the patois of the locals and the playful cries of the vendors; breathed in the earthy smells and admired the colour and texture in the vegetable displays. Because the morning had a hopeful tint to it, she drank un grand crème at a café table and then ate a golden brioche from Les Panetons.

      She was carrying the type of slim shopping basket favoured by French women, and she planned to fill it. The pineapples in the African market just off Mouffetard tempted her briefly, but a pineapple was too much like home, and she was in search of France. At a fromagerie she bought cheese from the Jura and the Pyrenées as well as a goat’s milk cheese from the south in the form of a decapitated pyramid. (She could afford such quality, she assured herself, because she didn’t eat meat.) Behind a card table heaped with wild mushrooms, a squat woman in an old cardigan explained how to prepare a simple fricassée de champignons sauvages. Mademoiselle would also need shallots and parsley and a lemon.

      She stepped into the churchyard of St Médard to gain a better view of the ornate mural on the façade of a building opposite. The sun shone like a benediction on the animals and birds in their stylised forest of rich browns; it warmed the arthritic joints of the humans who were taking the air on the churchyard benches. Paris suddenly felt embraceable, beneficent, idiosyncratically hers. After wishing the nearest elderly threesome a good day, she left St Médard, sauntered to the end of Mouffetard, turned right, tittupped down some steps and entered La Vie Claire, whose symbol was the dove of peace. The bell gave a friendly tinkle. Paris was not bursting with vegetarians, let alone the vegans to whom this pungent little shop catered, and the bouncy woman who ran La Vie Claire greeted her cheerily. The unsprayed apples had just come in. Would mademoiselle like to try some vegetable pâté? Eleanor added lentil patties, apples, and a rustic loaf to her basket. Normally she welcomed the woman’s chattiness, but today the shopkeeper mentioned in passing that Paris was surrounded by nuclear reactors. ‘Nuclear’ was a word that in certain couplings – war, fallout, proliferation, energy, family – could drain the joy out of anything. It brought her back to comparative literature and the tiresome task she had been deferring.

      If ‘Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III’ had not been up in majuscules above the row of glass doors, Eleanor would have taken the university for a shoddy block of offices. Most of the windows had their blinds down, which gave the place a dull, inward look. Across the road was an undistinguished modern apartment building, whose proximity to Mouffetard offended her. A single tree and a square of grass on either side of the entrance way to the university warned students from the Anglo-Saxon countries not to expect a campus. She entered reluctantly, aware as she moved among the groupuscules of students, a few of whom looked thirtyish and interesting, that she was carrying a basket of groceries like a French housewife. And now, a day or two earlier than expected, came the dragging sensation in her womb, which would be followed soon enough by blood and cramping pain. She had to find the lavatories.

      All the privacy of a concentration camp, Ruth had once quipped about something Eleanor had now forgotten. At the time she had been taken aback, but now she just wished Ruth were here to shock her again. The lavatories were unisex, no Dames and Messieurs, which she supposed was something she could get used to. But she did not see how she could ever adjust to the absence of doors to the cubicles. It was the same on the floor above, and the one above that. No doors, nowhere to hide. The damaged doors were stacked in corners, and the rooms seemed to vibrate with the echoes of recent violence. It would take strength to tear those barriers off their hinges, so young men must have done it. Why? To impose their contempt for bourgeois notions of privacy on everyone else? For the wanton pleasure of destroying state property? Or just so they could perve on a young woman as she inserted a tampon? She hated them, whoever they were.

      She ran down the central stairway thinking she would leave, but when she reached the first floor she decided to give the university another chance, if only for Julien’s sake. She turned right into the corridor and followed it to the end, having noticed someone else do the same. Off to the left, in an abbreviated hallway, a guard in a dark blue uniform was sitting on a metal chair with a newspaper on his lap. He looked her up and down and gestured towards the opposite wall: Toilettes. Perhaps he was guarding them against the return of the barbarians. He watched her brazenly as she went in. Yes, the cubicles had doors. She splashed her face with cold water and found herself again in the mirror. Then, trembling a little from the pain in her belly, she locked herself in the furthest cubicle. She was alone, save for the guard outside who would know exactly how long she spent in here; who would always be there, watching her go in and come out, smirking to himself and thinking whatever it was that such men thought when they were bored.

      She could not face the administrative staff of the university today – such people always seemed to be grumpy in France – and quite possibly not on any day. Everywhere people were sucking on cigarettes, and on the way out of the building she asked a young man if smoking was allowed in the lecture rooms. He looked surprised. But of course! How uncivilised, she replied. Oh, you Americans,


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