Loose Living (3 page)

T
HE MOST
exciting thing in our village is that the Sydney University Continuing Education course on gastronomy, based on Chef Bilson's and my 1000 Great Restaurants of Europe Tour, is being beamed here on television by satellite.

An estimated forty-seven million viewers tuned in to hear Chef Bilson, and his words were greeted with acclamation while I mused bitterly on the fact that he had got away scot-free while I did time.

However, I rose above these demeaning feelings and in my speech I managed to be generous towards his great talents and not be petty minded. I think the village people quietly noted my magnanimity and that I rose in their estimation.

In the poorer villages crowds gathered around the electronics shops where the sets in the window were tuned to the program.

I paid for a giant TV screen to be installed in the Place Voltaire, with an Australian flag either side, so that all could watch.

It was quite a
fête
and, as I moved among the people shaking hands, I could tell that the poorer members of the community very much appreciated my gesture and that I, together with Australia, rose in their estimation.

The proceeds of the TV show are going to aid the village of Fagot, which is having a bad time.

After the show I cooked a marvellous supper for all using a sauce made from the ink of 150-million-year-old fossil squids, the last available at the peasants' market. Few people know that the melanin molecules last longer than perhaps any other biological molecule.

I received many complimentary remarks on both my generosity and the innovation of my cooking.

It seems only yesterday that I was sent here to France as a cultural ambassador to attend a literary conference, never to be heard of again. My appointment as correspondent of a small but noble publication was more a grace and favour gesture by a kind and loving editor. It permitted me to have a business card printed which gave me free entry to dog shows and other events.

I imagine that it was all extensively reported in what is left of the Australian media and, yes, it's true that I had difficulties with my fellow delegates at the time and was advised not to return.

Much of the difficulty arose from my desire to demonstrate the Colloquy Chair, which I had designed and which I had hoped to market over here to help Australia out of the recession.

The feeling among my fellow delegates was that mar keting this chair while representing Australia at the conference—held, by the way, in the village of Bourbourg—was crass.

I said something about intellectuals having to learn that commercial activity was not ‘unclean'. Oh well, and then one thing led to another.

I think I rose in the estimation of the French, though. They understand that variation and nuance in all things is the path to cultivation. They have chairs designed for listening to the harpsichord, chairs for drinking wine, chairs for eating pastries, chairs for playing cards. Consequently, wherever I went an excited bunch of French sophisticates gathered around while I demonstrated the Colloquy Chair.

It is something of a combination of a high-tech dentist's chair and an incapacitated-person chair, but made of lightweight space alloys (it uses magnesium, which is easy to cast into complex shapes and gives more strength and stiffness per gram than any other common metal and, I scramble to say, is an environmentally clean metal). The chair is collapsible and folds up to about the size of a lap-top computer. I thought of calling it the bum-top but advice from the marketing people went against this.

Naturally, it has a voice-triggered simultaneous translation computer so that you can choose the language in which you wish to listen to the conference.

Being semi-capsulised, it is air-conditioned or, if needed, say at a conference in India, a supply of reconstituted off-shore air can be breathed through an unobtrusive mask.

It has an iced water dispenser and, again in the case of India or Adelaide, it can supply potable
water by recycling your urine (a spin-off from space technology).

It has a small bar and a gourmet snack section which can dispense things like hot
bouillabaisse
and croutons (takes five minutes). Live fish (or any animal, really) can be fed into a small
ouverture de cuisine
which carries it then to the autochef.

The chair has a Cheats' Photocopier which fits over your own hand like a glove and allows the surreptitious copying of conference papers and other documents without permission and without paying photocopying fees.

The computer in the chair is linked to the Liars' Reference databank so that you can instantly check on statistical information being used by an intellectually dubious speaker or which will, conversely, supply ‘plausible' statistics to support any argument. There is a Liars' Bell which can be manually rung or put on automatic and which detects dubious statistics.

If, in the slot provided, you insert a good colour photograph of yourself sitting in the chair, the chair can then create a three-dimensional laser image of yourself ‘sitting in the chair', so that you can, as it were, go to sleep ‘behind' this image of your attentive self.

It has a back-hatch through which you can slip away, leaving the attentive self-image functioning (this feature operates on a three-day battery making it useful for conferences where you wish to slip away to do some shopping or to appear at another conference).

For further realism, the chair will emit sound effects, giving off groans, grunts, sneezes, derisive laughter, and will say ‘hear-hear' and shout ‘bullshit' in an Australian academic accent at timed intervals. The chair comes with a built-in bullshit meter for use by other nationalities—all Australians are, of course, born with one (ho, ho, ho, the things we choose to believe).

It has a built-in WC (see ‘potable water' above) and handbasin, and I rush to say that it is ergonomically sound and can be converted to an exercise station quite easily and unobtrusively.

It has an illuminated multicoloured conference identification tag which can also be made to flash, wink, run a continuous message or a digital poem.

It has an ultrasound device which compels the gaze of the chairperson to your raised hand; it has an international telephone and fax with a gadget which allows you to bill all calls and fax charges to the conference organisers unbeknown to them; and it writes, signs and sends clever postcards and facsimiles to friends at home.

Ideally, all conference-goers would own, or be supplied with, one of these chairs, which would permit chair-to-chair communication for the arranging of lunch and for saying ‘bullshit' sotto voce after a contribution by another delegate.

The chair could ‘introduce' you to another chair by giving your background, preferences and lines of interest via the small computer screen. If you wanted to discreetly know about someone else at the conference
you would hack into their chair's computer and it would give you a quick run-down on your screen.

The chair offers a vibrator which can massage the whole body or part thereof according to taste and predilection.

The chair is highly mobile and you can scoot and twist-and-shout about the conference room without any trouble. I think it was my use of some of these more acrobatic gizmos which caused friction between myself and the other Australian delegates, who were, of course, soberly seated at their conventional chairs.

I admit that the design of the chair is still evolving and its behaviour is still somewhat unpredictable. The chair can sometimes unintentionally career off and perform in what seems to be an insulting way.

Looking back now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I can see why my fellow delegates were quite understandably embarrassed at times.

As a correspondent, I weasel my way into many conferences and I have to say that my reputation, and that of Australia, has risen because of the spirited yet witty way I present the naissance of our culture since government funding of the arts was introduced. Everyone enjoys my amusing before-and-after slides which I use to illustrate my talk titled ‘No Bucks: No Buck Rogers'. The slides show Australian artists as they were to be before government funding of the arts and after.

Everywhere I go, I take my demonstration model Colloquy Chair. In fact, if I don't have to go a great
distance I drive the chair to the conference and I receive much excited attention at the
autoroute
bars and restaurants.

In the village of Langue, I ingratiated myself into a French literary festival called the Eighth Festival of Verbs, which aimed to ‘bang, ring and echo the rhythms of the planet'. Being a little chair-lagged from having travelled 700 kilometres in the Colloquy Chair, I registered in the section on passive verbs.

I was gratified to learn that my reputation in France for the use of verbs is quite high and despite my chair-lag, I argued, contradicted, conferred, contested, disputed and almost duelled my way through the Festival.

I told them that my ability with verbs came from my belonging to such a vigorous young nation. This cast a pall over the conference because everyone there came from such tired old nations. They had a renaissance once but it was a long way back.

Curiously, just when Australian writers are ‘finding their identity', European writers are looking forward to losing theirs.

My identity is hardly fixed anyhow—sometimes this, sometimes that.

The fashionable literary magazine in Europe is
Lettre International
, which is printed in nine languages not including English. Jorge Semprun praised the magazine for giving a ‘literary coherence' to Europe. I told Jorge that I have never really felt coherent—another of life's blessings which I read of in magazines and which seems to have passed me by.

But believe me, I said to him, to have to live with the feeling that life is incoherent, empty and without meaning isn't as bad as it sounds. There are many worse things.

He was interested to hear that Australians felt this way.

On the way to the Festival of Verbs, I fell in with a troupe of travelling Bulgarians who were on their way to the Adelaide Festival. As it turns out, they have been on their way to the Adelaide Festival for twelve years. They kept making appalling suggestions to me which I coyly resisted.

At the Festival, I was worriedly telling my highly Sophisticated French Friends how in Australia I was wanted on charges of Having Had More Than His Share and also on charges of Writing Mock Political Allegories.

My defence is that it was a strategic manoeuvre necessary for the stability of my personality at that time.

I explained how in Australia we have self-appointed Inspectors (in fact we seem to have Inspectors for everything) who keep an eye out for people in the arts who've Had More Than Their Share.

My Sophisticated French Friends found this ‘share' concept difficult to understand.

They said that Australia must be in the grip of some strange theology which saw life in terms of ‘shares'.

I said that in Australia there were people who believed there had to be a very low limit on good times
for artists or otherwise they risked becoming smug and happy.

In France, by contrast, once recognised as a writer, I have never had to pay for a taxi ride or meal or for a suit of clothes. Manufacturers of luxury goods such as cars, tablecloths and tapestries send me samples. The handling of requests for endorsements by watchmakers alone can be time-consuming.

My Sophisticated French Friends asked about other ‘vows' that writers were required to take in Australia.

I said that there was pressure for writers to take a Vow of Modesty but there wasn't much chance of that.

Others wanted a vow to use only Positive Role Models as characters. My French Friends were astonished.

I pointed out to them that vows are only valid for ten years. We took a lot of them in the sixties—we took the vow that All The World Needs Is Love, for example—and now look at us.

My French Friends said that, philosophically, they found the idea that one should only expect to have a limited amount of reward, support and encouragement from life incomprehensible.

In the arts in France there was a concept of ‘one's due', but it had no upper limit.

I wrote that down and said that I would make a submission along those lines to The People Concerned.

I
N THE
last twenty-five years the French have changed their eating habits.

They're eating half as much bread. A third less potatoes. Fewer vegetables. About the same amount of beef and veal. Twice as much pork. More from the
charcuterie
—smoked meats, sausages and so on. More poultry. More fish. Fewer eggs. Less butter. A third less sugar. A third less wine. Fifty per cent less beer. More bananas, slightly more fruit generally. Much more cheese. Much, much more yoghurt. The French now have very low heart disease figures. Curiously, the south-west, where goose fat is a regional speciality, has the lowest rate of heart disease (the molecular structure of the fat of ducks and geese has been found to be very similar to that of olive oil, which is also fine for reducing the risk of heart disease).
²

The French are crowing about the rout of the dietary prohibitionists and the rehabilitation of the good life.

In my weekly lecture to the village I spoke on Gender in the Making of Europe (the week before I spoke on Cheese-Making and Gender).

I explained that as a mythological concept, Europe, or Europa, is feminine. It allowed me to tell a seventeenth-century nightclub gag which I thought went over very well:

(
Adult themes
,
coarse language.
)

First man: Europa?

Second man: Rope her? No, it went the other way.

Up to the seventeenth century, art always showed Europa as leader of the world, wearing a crown. A cornucopia was at her feet to indicate that this part of the world was the most fertile and abundant.

She was usually surrounded by a horse, weapons, an owl (for wisdom), books and musical instruments to illustrate that Europe was superior in arms, letters and the liberal arts.

I haven't had Europa to visit at the
château
but I have had a beautiful woman calling herself the Queen of Commas staying with me.

The Bulgarian troupe of sword swallowers is also camped in the lower meadow in their gaily painted wagons awaiting visas to the Adelaide Festival.

They'll wait a long time after the report I put in to the Embassy about them and their mores.

The butler's brother won't let them into the
château.
He said archly that we had enough weird and wonderful things happening since I'd arrived without adding a theatrical troupe from Bulgaria.

In part, he was referring to the mysterious fire in the west wing. He also takes a cheerless view of my castrato friend.

The Queen of Commas and her boyfriend arrived while I was in the workshop tinkering with my Colloquy Chair, having also just finished shoeing the horses.

I switched off the oxyacetylene torch, pushed up my goggles, wiped my greasy hands on my King Gee overalls, grinned charmingly and said, ‘G'day.'

She said that it was a pity that I had stopped. ‘So rarely does one see a true artist at work with an oxyacetylene torch.'

I replied that at Wollongong Tech we were all artists with the oxyacetylene torch.

Later, around drinks on the north
terrasse
of the
château
, she explained to me that she came by her name because of her passion for punctuation, especially the placement of commas.

At first I found this curious and, as I chatted to her, I had the butler's brother fax Paris to verify her credentials.

He came back a little later and whispered to me that her credentials appeared to be in order, and I relaxed.

I then instructed the butler's brother to set up chairs and tables under the fruit trees, which are in blossom, amid the green orchard grass and yellow dandelions, where we drank Passiona imported from Australia by the Duc de Berry as a gesture to my nationality.

I asked the Queen of Commas whether she had any children. She said she hadn't. Why did I ask?

I suggested, speculatively, that her interest in commas might have to do with their resemblance to the shape of spermatozoa.

She burst into appreciative laughter. ‘What a lovely idea.' She said that she liked conversation which is ‘read against itself'. I took this to mean that she appreciated my candid Australian style.

Her boyfriend did not appreciate my candid Australian style and became grumpy. He wouldn't eat the pistachio nuts we had with the Passiona.

He said there was ‘too much work' involved and he went off among the fruit trees in a rage, kicking the tops of the dandelions with his Doc Martens.

I can see trouble looming with him. Swords will flash.

She admires my books because they are ‘comma rich'. Evidently on the Left Bank I am somewhat a star of the comma. I told her that the legendary editor of the
New Yorker
, Harold Ross, once gave one of his writers a page of commas as a birthday present.

She says that the comma comma–nds the precipitance and cadence of prose. She announced that the days of breathless prose are over. Commas also institute an intricate ‘visual pattern' on the page and, by so doing, set off subliminal rhythms which clamped onto and steered the metabolic rate of the reader.

‘Tadpoles in the pond of prose,' was her rather vivid expression.

I was impressed by the thought that she had given the matter and I found myself warming to her. In turn, I think that as a younger person she appreciated my efforts to put her at ease, especially the gags from my nightclub days.

As one of the other projects in her life, the Queen of Commas sleeps in literary beds. She will go, say, to the
château
of George Sand, now a museum, and hide in the building until the museum is closed. She then sleeps in the ancient, musty bedding amid the odours of George Sand. She explained to me that this gives her personality a tonal profundity or ‘moxie'.

So, apart from wanting to discuss my use of commas in great detail, she had also come to visit me at the
château
so that she could sleep in my bed. Her request seemed reasonable enough and I could see no harm in it. After due consideration and consultation with the butler's brother, I agreed to indulge her whimsy.

I did ask that her boyfriend sleep in another chamber but this seemed to be understood between them. I did not fancy him in my bed. As Robert Hughes says, ‘You could almost hear the viruses mutating in him.'

She said it was important that I not change the sheets so that she could absorb my ‘aura'.

I could see no harm in this either, although I was a trifle embarrassed by the idea of her finding ‘comma stains' on the sheets. But, regardless, I instructed the Maid to this end. The Maid raised an eyebrow in a typical Gallic manner.

It being summer and unseasonably warm, I, myself, slept in the wicker basket of the hot-air balloon anchored at 150 metres above the
château
to catch the night breeze off the Juras and to keep me out of the hands of the Bulgarians.

I was awoken in the morning by the Queen of Commas tugging on my rope. I descended slowly. I was looking forward to having a long, animated breakfast on the east
terrasse
and hearing from her about my ‘aura'.

She said my bed had the odour of a man engaged in a mighty battle with words, yet, at the same time, a man afraid.

I explained to her my encounters with the Dutch Sensible Living Inspector and how there were still warrants out for my arrest on charges of Loose Living.

She said that probably explained the peculiar nature of the terror which she detected in my sweat.

She was impressed that I was now a gastronomic outlaw. ‘You say in your country “the bushranger of food”? Yes?'

She said there was also a metallic odour which she couldn't explain.

I laughed, wiping flakes of croissant from the steely grey hairs of my chest, exposed beneath the monogrammed silk robe.

‘That is easily explained,' I said. ‘Apart from what would come from my steely grey hairs, on some nights after revels I am too tired to change and I sleep in my armour.'

She became interested in that. She said that she thought of me as a man in armour with a mace over his shoulder.

I suggested gruffly that we should finish breakfast, that I had much to do on the estate.

She reached across and put a hand on mine. I glanced uneasily at the boyfriend, who was paring his nails with a table knife.

She said, ‘I did not mean that in a critical way. A World Spirit like yourself has to be somewhat cruel to carve your way through the obstacles and enemies of art.' What she called my need for a Hard Self to protect the Soft True Self from the psychic assaults of my mother. She said that I must learn that there was both redemption and atonement in taking from life as generously as one gave to life.

This made a lot of sense to me and I was much reassured. I announced to all that I would begin my book tomorrow.

The announcement was received with much jubilation among the servants at the
château
and raised morale, and the news spread rapidly to the village where the priest rang the church bell for an hour.

I was touched to see the servants prepare my desk with freshly pressed paper and newly ground ink.
³
Peasants soon arrived with metre-long peacock quills.

Finishing breakfast at about eleven-thirty, we all piled into the 1932 Citroën and I drove them to the Fête des Escargots in the nearby village of Pace.

On the way to the Fête des Escargots I joked that at the
fête
we might meet the Comte of Semi-colons.

I thought everyone enjoyed the joke immensely and that they were genuinely impressed by my clever and warm sense of humour, even if it did conceal a cruel nature.

Later the boyfriend took me aside and asked me aggressively what I had meant by ‘meeting the Comte of Semi-colons'.

For one moment, I feared that he considered himself the Comte of Semi-colons. It is true that he was proving himself to be something of a comte.

He said he didn't understand the gag.

I drew him a picture of the semi-colon and pointed out how it resembled a snail,
un escargot
, seen from above.

He said he couldn't see that at all. I explained that it was an abstracted version of a snail.

‘I don't comprehend,' he said stubbornly.

I drew him a number of pictures and placed a live snail on the page beside an enlarged semi-colon. He shook his head.

I asked him to stand on the table and look down on the snail and the drawing of the semi-colon through half-closed eyes. He did so.

‘See,' I said patiently, ‘the full stop is the shell and the comma, in this case, is not a tadpole or a spermatozoa, it is the tail of the snail.'

‘Is a dot and a comma,' he said, looming above me as he stood on the table in his Doc Martens. I edged aside, fearing one of his rages.

I said calmly, ‘It is not a dot and a comma. It is a semi-colon and I was likening it to a snail.'

He got down from the table.

‘The comma can be seen as a tadpole,' I said, ‘you understand that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, the semi-colon can be seen as a snail.'

‘It is a tadpole with a dot. The dot is a flea, maybe.'

He refused to make the imaginative leap and I gave up. He picked up the drawing and turned it around and around, then, folding it into an origami shape, he put it in his pocket.

Something worried me, too, about the way he then crushed the snail with the heel of his hand and licked off the raw snail and shell fragments.

To lighten him up, I told him some of the snail gags from my old nightclub act.

First man: So you went to the Fête des Escargots. How was it?

Second man: I found it a bit slow but it was strange to see snails in the (s)limelight.

First man: Was it expensive?

Second man: I ended up shelling out quite a lot.

He refused to laugh and said he didn't get it. I decided that maybe it was a language problem.

I left him to his own moody devices and went over to where the others were drinking champagne and
eating
escargot
sandwiches from the massive cane picnic hamper we had strapped to the Citroën.

The butler's brother was, for once, doing a proper job of his butlerage.

All in all, we had a pleasant day, although the boyfriend continued to glare at me from time to time.

Now and then he would take out the drawing of the semi-colon and, unfolding this dirty little package of folded paper, would stare at it.

Talking of snails:

I don't know about you, but I am forever staining my silk Forward Australia tie with food. Here's a tip. Rub the stain with the edge of a silver coin. Of course, a silk tie can only be truly cared for by taking it apart, cleaning it and restitching it. This should be
done weekly. If your valet isn't doing this, fire her/him. I had a nasty incident of this kind only recently with the butler's brother. But that is another story.
⁴