I passed the first night with a young woman called Beatrice and my flatmate Arnaud. I’m sure that these characters will emerge as chief protagonists in the story of my life here; so I am in no rush to describe them, but I will sketch them both out briefly for you, as they appeared to me, initially.
Beatrice
Beatrice is a petite young woman, around my age (twenty-five). She looks very elfin and is extremely slight, with a nose that pinches off sharply, and a generous smile which is constantly on show. I felt (for Beatrice is French and our conversation was somewhat stilted), that she is a very gentle person. Unfortunately, the day before I arrived there was a fire in her flat, and all of her clothes and possessions burnt. Luckily for her, and somewhat miraculously, the hard-drives on which she stored her ‘experimental films’ were unaffected by the blaze — so she still had her work. Arnaud told me earlier, confidentially, that she had taken the news as well as can be expected, and was not allowing herself to be depressed and angry about the situation. I took this as a sign of her strength of character – for there are not many people who could lose everything they own, and receive the news so magnanimously.
Arnaud
On day two, Arnaud told me that his father was a puppeteer. For some reason, this seemed like an important discovery for me, and explained many things about him. Like Beatrice, Arnaud is from the South of France, not far from Toulouse. He is a scientist through and through, an oceanographer. This means that he does not really read books or literature, but I can tell that he has a great respect for the arts, indeed his best-friend and ‘betrothed’ – as he likes to call him – François, is a graphic artist, whose beautiful work I had the honour of participating in, at a later date. But I will come onto this later. Arnaud is a short, muscular man of twenty-eight-years, studying his PhD here in Ghent University. He is fond of humour and making jokes, and perhaps due to his theatrical background, his facial expressions are very animated and changeable. Sometimes his eyes are warm and smile genial, at other times, when he is drinking a lot of red wine, he acts the comedy drunk. Occasionally another expression bolts quickly across his face, an angry or contemptuous expression like a snarling dog, but I have only ever seen this fleetingly, and normally when he doesn’t think I am watching him. I do not know him well enough yet, to know to what it refers.
I was introduced to Beatrice as Arnaud’s best-friend, and indeed this is what she appears to be. There is a great feeling of warmth between them and I can see that Arnaud admires her greatly. Beatrice almost seems too good for this world, which means that a slightly tragic aura clings to her. Perhaps I am deriving this interpretation from something that she herself said to me: ‘Why do bad things always happen to me?’ It is the cry of the Elizabethan actor, the cosmic disposition of tragedy. I then had a run-down of all the unlikely misfortunes, diseases, discomforts that had plagued and ravaged her tiny body over the years, and commiserated as appropriate. That first evening was a quiet evening, in which we all politely, gradually drew closer to each other. Becoming friends, especially across a language barrier, is not always easy. The more I think about the mysterious processes that underlie human contact, the more I seek out a metaphor that does it justice. It is not easy to find. All I know is that when two strangers meet, even if there is much in common, the effect of closeness is strange and rebarbative. One mind sees another, but it is not itself, it is difference. So first contact is like that: two marbles knowing against each other and then drawing back. Time, repetition and familiarity, softens the blow of contact. Then as two minds draw near to each other they begin to embrace and feel comfortable together, like two hands clasping each other. Love does not describe another state, an apotheosis, separate from ordinary human discourse and contact. It creates its own discourse or dialect, but is merely a descriptor for an extreme kind of contact, a total fusion. So that out of two glass marbles, and beyond two clasping hands, an alchemical transformtation takes place. When two beings have created a joint consciousness and physical consciousness also, when they have soldered themselves together – then, they can be described as lovers.
Excuse that digression.
833 words a day 