Europa Read Free Page A

geographical entity (was it Theocritus?) referred only to the Peloponnese, and only in order to 
distinguish
the Peloponnese from Asia, only to demonstrate that the small peninsula had
not
been swallowed up into the amorphous mass of an ever-invasive Asia. Or so I recall, rightly, or perhaps wrongly, from a book she made me read, re-read, in her insistent and one must suppose laudable attempt to have me recover my vocation, to have me become, perhaps this was the nub, somebody she could respect. It was a claim to distinction, Europe, as I recall.
    In any event, I am far from alone, here on the back seat, which is to say that on my right, trapped between myself and the window, I have a rather plain young woman with somehow swollen lips who has been chattering intermittently with the two girls in the seat in front of us and, ignoring myself, with the girl, over made-up, to my left, who is dead in the centre of the coach’s, one has to confess, comfortable big back seat, while to her left sits the handsome Georg, a German of Polish extraction, who is exchanging occasional pleasantries with the girl to his left, trapped between himself and the window, and again with the boy and girl in the seat in front of them, one of whom, the girl, is standing up with one knee on her seat and one very long and attractive leg out in the corridor, holding forth absolutely non-stop, in Italian, as is to be expected of a young Italian, on a variety of entirely predictable topics, as for example, the quality of different makes of jeans, including the pair she has on (allowing Georg to examine her leg and plump crotch attentively); the impossibility of finding a place in one of the smaller university class- rooms when somebody ‘important’ (not myself) is lecturing; the credibility of astrology and numerology; the ‘stupendous’ sound system in a new discotheque recently opened in the small satellite town of Busto Arsizio; and the extraordinary behaviour, in love and out, of her cousin Paola, who studies law at the Cattolica and who, on being left by her boy-friend of long standing, got a friend to phone him in the middle of the night as though from a hospital to say that a girl with red hair (i.e. herself) had been found in a coma after a horrendous car crash, the only piece of identification found on her being a photo of a young man with a phone-number on the back, the boy-friend’s - all this to
make him feel sorry for her and guilty about leaping her
and to have him rush off to hospital imagining he would find her dying, whereas in fact what he, the ex-boy-friend, did was to call her parents, who, and particularly the mother, went almost out of their minds with grief before Paola came in through the front door in an advanced state of drunkenness.
    How adolescent that is, I reflect, watching the girl’s animated face. And how attractive. You have always had a fatal attraction to adolescent behaviour, I tell myself. Most of your own behaviour, I tell myself, is irretrievably adolescent. And in the meantime this stream, indeed this torrent of juvenile and absolutely indiscriminating, but at least unpretentious chatter has, for the half an hour or so that we have been forcing our way through Milan’s cluttered thoroughfares, together of course with an occasional burst of communal song when a new voice takes over on the airwaves crooning without fail of love whether happy or unhappy - this chatter and the singing, sometimes choral, of insipid songs, has so far been offering an excellent cover for what I’m perfectly aware will be perceived as my misanthropic behaviour, sitting silent and slightly off-centre in the back seat of this coach, the only place left unoccupied on my late (studiedly late) arrival, my face buried in a book, an attitude which unfortunately legitimizes the innocent question of the girl in the seat in front.
    What are you reading?
    This girl must be kneeling on her seat, because her arms are