Motion Sickness Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hollywood movie based on the life of Schubert in which various characters walk up to the composer and ask, “Why don’t you finish
The Unfinished
?” They don’t think that’s as funny as I do.

Chapter 7
     
Foreign Skins
     
AMSTERDAM
     
    On the train to Amsterdam from Milan, I sit in a compartment with other foreigners, one a Pakistani man, one an English girl of seventeen, one a Belgian man, all of us headed in the same direction for different reasons. The Pakistani and I engage in one of those fitful conversations in which neither is able to make clear what one wants to say. Finally we stand in the compartment passageway and talk about the neon lights on buildings, that blaze of created energy that gives color to our nights. Beauty, he says to me, artificial beauty. Yes, I agree. Why, he asks, are you not married? I don’t want to be. Ahh, he says, scrutinizing me, then may God be with you. I thank him. The rest of the journey he and I are noticeably silent, as if something portentous had occurred. When we arrive at Centraal Station at dusk, the Pakistani gravely shakes my hand and I bow slightly, an atavistic gesture that brings Charles to mind, but one just as grave as his handshake. With a doleful expression he takes his leave, and I’m sure he watched me throw my bag into the taxi and shook his head, certain I was meant for tragedy.
    Amsterdam doesn’t seem a suitable place for tragedy, but place—the city, for instance—is as much a mental space as a physical one, and its physical boundaries, its history, are much less concise than any term such as “city” might lead one to think. Am I headed for tragedy, I wonder as the cabdriver brings me to the three-generations hotel. And are conversations with strangers necessarily uncanny?
    They give me the same room. It still doesn’t have a television and I’m embarrassed to ask for one. The breakfasts are also the same, which pleases me enormously. Eat the same thing every day and you won’t go mad, also said to me by the friend who insisted upon keeping a diary for the same reason.
    I think I understand why so many English plays take place in the restaurants or sitting rooms of hotels. Apart from the cheapness of their production, any aggregate of people, drawn or thrown together and involuntarily in each other’s company, poses dramatic possibilities. It’s not that you expect anything very fantastic to happen—the American woman named Helen is not going to do a strip in the breakfast room, the Irish guy called Pete is not going to sing an aria just because he feels like it, the German Ulrich will not fall to his knees and confess some terrible crime—there will be no orgy. We are all remarkable for our constraint. If something like that did happen—if Olivier, the Frenchman, exposed himself to me in front of my fellow diners—the course of playwriting would have to be altered, as would the site of the hotel. And I would not now be playing at eating this raisin bun, or
krentebollen
, in the breakfast room. I’d be in a state beyond words, blood racing, or I might be laughing nervously. Olivier merely smiles at me, a sly guarded slash of a grin, throws his book, Truffaut’s
Hitchcock
, into his leather satchel, pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and strides past me, brushing against my arm ever so slightly. Why do I feel I’ve seen this scene before? And will I end up in bed with him? Is my life as predictable as it sometimes appears?
* * *
     
    It’s cold in Amsterdam and I’m lying in bed, covered by an eiderdown. The window has no view since the hotel is almost attached to another building, joined like a Siamese twin. Why are they called Siamese? A cold gray light filters in, unwelcoming but atmospheric, right for staying in bed. Called Siamese because the first pair were born there? Or, more pejoratively, another insult to the East, deeply embedded. I meditate on this, although I believe meditation is meant to free