A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
The further off from England
Who am i?
“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France —
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 10
BETWEEN THE END OF HIGH school in Buenos Aires and the beginnings of a full-time publishing career in Europe, I spent a splendid decade in Paris and London reading in an almost perfectly haphazard way, dipping into books that were too expensive for me to buy, skimming over others that incautious friends had lent me, borrowing a few from public libraries for company rather than for instruction’s sake, and hardly ever finishing anything. No method, erudite order, sense of duty, or rigorous curiosity ruled my reading. In body as in mind, I drifted.
The year of the Beatles’ last LP I left Paris, where I had been living happily for a year or so, and settled for a few months in London, sharing a house with three other guys and paying five pounds a week. My Argentinean passport made it impossible for me to get a work permit in Europe, so I made a living selling painted leather belts, which I hawked on Carnaby Street and later in a store called Mr. Fish. My hour of glory came when Mick Jagger Himself bought one of my belts and wore it onstage during a concert. Life was never that magnanimous again.
But we trifle with Fortune. On the spur of the moment, I accompanied a friend back to Paris and spent a few days nursing a coffee at the Café de Flore and wondering why I had ever left this most rousing of cities; then, having visions of irate clients storming beltless up and down Piccadilly, I decided it was time to get back to London. This was in the prehistoric days before the Eurostar, and the train fare was fairly inexpensive. I bought my ticket and set off for Calais in the late afternoon.
The caramel-colored coach of the express Garde-du-Nord-Calais, with cracked leatherette seats and curiously encrusted window frames, was not the most welcoming of places. I tried to read but felt distracted, uneasy. As we left the gray neighborhoods and started crossing the ugly districts of the northern banlieues, the entire coach seemed to be momentarily possessed by a mood of collective melancholy: the woman in the corner seat stopped humming, the baby stifled its crying, the rowdy group of adolescents talked no more, and in eerie silence we entered the flat countryside of Normandy under cover of darkness. We sped through Arras, a town I never visited, and which in my imagination carried the copyright of Saint-Exupéry. Then the air became musty and salty, and the signs along the platform announced that we had reached Calais.
Crossing what the British like to call the English Channel is, as everyone knows, a sickening experience, unrelieved by the sight of the white cliffs of Dover, which, in the pale moonlight, greet the nauseated traveler like huge piles of slightly off cottage cheese. I walked unsteadily up the gangplank and waited in line for passport control.
French ticket controllers are strict but just. One imagines them writing sonnets in the evening and tending to their fruit trees on weekends, rigorous in the application of both rhyme and aphid poison. Immigration officials are different. Whether French or British (especially in those days before the now quasi-borderless European Community), these clerks are ruled not by the Spirit of Justice but by the Phantom of Power, and they delight, like butchers, in holding in their cold hands your identity papers as if it were your liver or your shank. The officer behind the passport desk looked very much like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He cast pale blue eyes on my passport, raised them to look at me, looked back at the passport, and once again at me. What he saw seemed to make him immensely sad.
I was dressed in the style appropriate to Carnaby Street at the time, in clothing found at the Marché aux Puces of Clignancourt. My sandals and flowing white cotton shirt were Indian, my cerise-colored trousers had bell bottoms, I was wearing a belt of my own design on which I had painted Leda and the Swan in the exact style (if I say it myself) of Poussin. My hair curled coquettishly over my shoulders.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” asked Peter in a low, pained voice.
Suddenly I realized that, just as if I’d been confronted by his namesake in Heaven above, I had to give Peter a good reason to let me into his kingdom. My brain made a quick deduction. This man was a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats are impressed by officialdom. My father had been, fifteen years earlier, the Argentinean ambassador. There are few people more official than ambassadors. In my best pseudo-Argentinean accent, I told him that I had come to meet my father, the ex-Argentinean ambassador.
Peter’s eyebrows arched ever so slightly.
“And where are you to meet the … ehm … ambassador?”
Again, my brain desperately scrambled for an answer. Once I had stayed at a Salvation Army hostel in London, just across from (what seemed to me at the time) a very chic hotel. I remembered the name.
“Hotel St James,’” I said.
(Years later I found out that the St James is what the French call a hôtel de passe, lodging an inordinate number of Mr. and Mrs. Smiths.)
“Have you got a reservation at the … ehm … St James?” asked Peter. “I think … father made reservation.” “Let us phone then, shall we?” said Peter.
By now the other passengers had drifted past and were boarding the ferry. I had no idea how I’d get across the Channel and on to London. I had ten francs and two pounds in my pocket. Hitchhiking in England didn’t have a good reputation.
Peter put the phone down.
“At the St James they have no reservation for … ehm … Ambassador Manguel.”
Another officer joined us. The hint of a smile appeared on Peter’s face, dispelling some of the sadness.
“This gentleman says his father is an Argentinean ambassador and that he is to meet him in London, at the St James.”
“At the St James?”
The other officer’s eyes rolled up and down.
“I see.”
“But they have no reservation under the name of Manguel. Perhaps we should call the Argentinean embassy.”
I argued that there would be no one at this hour. It was shortly before midnight.
“We’ll try, shall we?” said the other officer.
He tried and someone answered who obviously only spoke Spanish. The other officer handed me the phone.
“Ask him whether he knows your father and will vouch for you.” I asked, in Spanish, whom was I speaking to. “This is José,” said the voice.
“José,” I said. “Whoever you are, will you please tell the officer that you know my father, ex-ambassador Manguel?” “Sure,” said José.
I silently blessed the Argentinean sense of camaraderie and passed the phone back to the other officer. “He’ll tell you,” I said.
The other officer listened to Jose’s declaration in Spanish.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you try repeating it in English? Aha. Yes. And what is your position at the embassy, sir? I see. Thank you.”
He put down the phone.
“I’m afraid that the janitor’s vouching for you isn’t sufficient,” he said.
In the meantime, Peter was going through my rucksack with keen interest. He opened my tube of toothpaste, squeezed some out, and tasted it. He flicked through my copy of Siddhartha. He sniffed at my joss sticks. Finally he found my address book. He disappeared with it inside the office. When he reemerged, he had a smile on his face, like that of Lawrence after the capture of Khartoum.
“It seems that you failed to tell us you were sharing a house in London. One of your friends there told me that you work selling knickknacks on Carnaby Street. I assume you haven’t got a work permit? Now why would the ambassador’s son do that?”
I was taken to a small white room with a cot and told that I’d have to wait there until the first train back to Paris. All night long I thought about what I was about to lose: my room, the books I had collected, my artistic career, which had received the blessing of Mick Jagger. Ever since I had started to read, London had been in my mind a sort of Garden of Eden. The stories I liked best took place there; Chesterton and Dickens had made it familiar to me; it was what to others are the North Pole or Samarkand. And now, because of two pesky, prissy officials, it had become just as remote and unattainable. Bureaucracy, unfair immigration laws, power given to blue-eyed employees who are allowed to squeeze other people’s toothpaste seemed to me then (and now) despicable abominations. France, on the other hand, was the land of Freedom, Fraternity, Equality, though perhaps not in that order. I thought fondly of Robespierre.
And that is how, in November 1970, I became a moderate anarchist.