“I am from the lowest class of society”, said my dinner companion without any sign of affectation.
She continued, “In France you can’t change your class. It is very, very hard. You understand? At school, my best friend’s mother told her not to talk to me. When I told this to my mother, she cried”.
We had started in French but she switched to English after around an hour, when she started speaking of intimate things. “I don’t want people here to hear me complaining about my life”
We were on the terrace of a café with outdoor heating, sharing glasses of chilled wine and a bottle of sparkling water. This part of the old town seemed free of tourists. I could only hear French around us and my brown-haired acquaintance had been waved at by a grinning gentleman — perhaps a neighbor. “To this row of bistros, people often come after their work, it’s easy”, she explained.
“The life here is a struggle. I have a job for the afternoons. It is the minimum salary, ok? But it gives me some security. All the time at the gallery I sit in front of a screen and manage the inventory. My health is bad because of this. But I need the money. And I don’t have children. What have I done with my life?”
She spoke rapidly, interrupting immediately any response I made, but pausing thereafter with a promise to return to my point. I waved away happily the apologies. I was enjoying her discourse and the local chickpea speciality that I re-ordered. How should I indicate politely that I wished to pay for all the food and drink, I wondered?
“My boyfriend left me during the pandemic. I also had to look after the mother of a friend. She was all alone. I cleaned her house, I cooked. We watched TV. It wasn’t easy. I do tours of the city in the morning. 90% of my guests are Americans. So I speak English. I try to talk about history in general, because they don’t know Europe”
“At least the Americans tip a lot”, I observed.
She ignored me. “My mother is not well”
“I’m so sorry”, I exclaimed.
“All my life, I tried to save my mother. You know, from my father. But I couldn’t save her from herself. Now I take care of her. I will escort her to the opera for her birthday. It is called Giselle, and that is her name”
“How nice”, I congratulated her. “You know the first time we met, it must have been in 2019. You told me about a local heroine? Catherine something, from five centuries ago”
“Yes! She was a washerwoman who fought the invading Turks sent by François I. She beat them with her wooden paddle. She was very, very, very ugly. She raised her dress and showed them her buttocks”, pointing with her delicate pale fingers down at her genitalia.
Chuckling, I rejoined, “Feminists would not like that story, with its insistence upon Catherine having been so ugly”
She broke into a charming smile, “A feminist would say that her physical attractiveness is not important!”
“True, true”, I conceded.
At various points I brought up Nietzsche (on the striving for happiness), Dante (on being unrepentant even in Hell), and Chateaubriand (on the French preferring égalité to liberté) — she nodded vigorously in each instance. She knew the names but had not read them.
Her voice dropped when she spoke about her abandoned career. “I was creative every day. That was my life. But it did not pay. Only rich people can be artists just for fun. It was so important to me to be creative. But I had to stop”
“That’s a pity. A modern German poem is about that. It’s titled, I translate: And so the female pig triumphs over Art. Khalil Gibran too has this line — about the desire for comfort murdering passion, and then walking at the funeral with a smirk”
“Whose funeral?”
“That of passion”
“Gibran is beautiful”
“Yes, but he lied. About his family. Even he felt the need to conform to the idea of a social elite”
“A pity. I used to be a Buddhist. Now I don’t know. I visited tribal people in India once. We came to a hut and I knocked and said we need shelter. They invited us inside, without asking anything in return. They are a joyful people. But the women must marry who they are told to. Choice is stressful, one girl told me, when I described my day to her. I said I have to decide each morning what to wear. They have only two dresses. One is worn, one is dirty. I went back to that family every autumn for eight years”
The cheerful waiter arrived with our pizza. I moved aside my phone to make room.
“You know, we always have these things with us. We are never bored now!”, she giggled.
“I agree. I deleted my Twitter two months ago, to spend less time on the device. But even so, I don’t have the time to be bored. A friend and I had a disagreement about the nature of our society. I said that we work so that someone makes pizza for us and pretty bottles of wine. But she did not accept that we need to pay this high price — of doing things that we dislike. It’s a new idea for me, and I respect it”
“I used to live like that”, she said wistfully.
“Really? It is a luxury — to be able to afford being idle”
“Idle”, she repeated slowly.
“Yes, it means…”
“I know what it means. I first encountered that word in Calcutta. I did not understand it but I saw that it is elegant, in the shape of its letters. I used to be a graphic artist”
Seekers of beauty are, of course, themselves beautiful and her radiant face was proof of it. Done with her side of the pizza, she aligned her cutlery carefully. I asked our host for the bill. When it came, she thanked me after my insistence.
“I’ll walk with you”, she announced.
“With pleasure”. We set off, passing a jazz vocalist in full swing.
“I met my current boyfriend online. On Facebook. He is really good but it must end. Not his fault; also not mine. But he works from seven in the morning to nine at night. On the weekends, he goes to his two sons. Every Friday”
“No one can work that much”, I declared, suspecting some sort of deceit.
“No”, she countered despondently. “I’ve seen him set the alarm for six, so that he can be at work at seven. He is in construction. So, your hotel is along that road. I live down here”
We had reached a bifurcation near a grand church. “Thank you for the lovely evening”, I said as we embraced.
“It was magic”, she replied. “You know, I wish I could travel around the world. I would ask people everywhere the same question”
“Which one?”
“What does love mean to you? In one word only. What’s your answer?”
“Friendship, I think”
She repeated my response, evidently savoring it. “That’s good. My ex-boyfriend said, habit. I was shocked. What does that mean!”
Snorting, I asked, “And what’s your opinion?”
“Choice. I choose this person, I choose that person”
“That makes sense”. We kissed goodnight.
As she crossed the street, she shouted, “Do you know what I really want?”
I smiled and nodded invitingly.
“Ten lives”
