In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,53

that way.

I shouldn’t have said it.

Anyway, I thought you weren’t into men.

She giggles. You know, she says, I’m not so sure. I’ve been having some thoughts.

This is something new. He knows that she was seriously involved with one or two men quite long ago, but in recent years she’s been adamantly inclined in the other direction. He wonders whether it’s not just a reaction to the strain her relationship is under at home. Anna hasn’t once written to her partner back in Cape Town, she hasn’t made a single phone call, and when I’ve encouraged her to get in touch she only shakes her head. She doesn’t want to, she says, she thinks it’s over between them, but he knows that her partner has been hurt by Anna’s silence.

He doesn’t push the point, it’s not his business, and anyway he thinks she’ll feel differently in a few days. But he experiences a complicated guilt when, perhaps that very same night, or perhaps another soon after, she goes with some American man to his room. We didn’t make love, she tells me afterwards, we just fooled around, but oh it was so wonderful to be held, to be touched like that.

This puts him into a horrible position, where his loyalties are divided. He’s in regular contact with Anna’s girlfriend back home, reporting on her condition, but how can he talk about this. Yet Anna is counting on his silence, she would regard it as betrayal if he spilled the beans. He’s angry that she’s made him complicit in what may be a widening gap, so it comes as a relief when the American takes fright. The next night, when she tries to arrange a liaison, he tells her that he has some important e-mails to write, and the following day he leaves town.

But she doesn’t give up. The idea is in her head now and she’s on the search. She’s a strikingly pretty woman and in her current state especially so, lean and glowing with inner fire. All kinds of men are sniffing around. In just a day or two she meets Jean, a fifty year old French traveller staying at the same hotel. When I come to the room that night after doing e-mail I find the two of them sitting on the balcony, cooing and giggling together. Jean’s taken some of my tranquillizers to relax, she tells me, do you want some too. No thanks, I say, and withdraw into the room, and at that moment I retreat from the pair of them in another sense as well. I don’t mention Jean to Anna’s girlfriend and I find ways to rationalize my silence to myself, this is a weightless holiday romance, nothing more, he’s leaving in a few days, perhaps it will even be good for her. And who could take Jean seriously, a sad-looking cadaverous man full of melancholic vacancy, who speaks platitudes in a sonorous voice. Back home in Paris he’s a builder by profession, but he does sculpture on the side. He claims he once danced with Nureyev.

This is what Anna’s been looking for and she falls for him in a big way, suddenly it’s all Jean this and Jean that, and then they’re heading off on a rented scooter up the coast for a few days. I am very uneasy with this arrangement, I try to talk her out of it, but she laughs me off, I’m fine don’t worry about me. And it’s true that he is ceaselessly fretting over her, perhaps his concern is making things worse, maybe she’ll be better if she has some time away from him. Mixed in with the mistrust is a good dose of relief too, it’s pleasant to have her off my hands for a while. He hasn’t come here, after all, just to be a chaperone, he’s come to do some work, and in her absence he settles down to it, filling up pages with words. The plan is that we’ll be doing some travelling ourselves when they get back, going down south together at the time of Jean’s departure for home, so that very soon this peculiar interlude will be over.

Though it isn’t so simple. The few days in Jean’s company have sealed him in Anna’s mind as her future and her fate. When she gets back she’s full of crazy talk about moving to France to live, about having his child, and this talk will only get more fantastic as the rest of the