Theatre Land

Not every road has its own fan club but the Strand deserves one. Built for practical reasons, derived from the Old English word for "shore" or "river bank"; note the term and all Germanic languages derived their word for "beach" from this root. Many beaches in Ireland are still called "strands". On the Strand gathers a campus of lit-crit élite and working class men. The near Covent Garden piazza is the hub of Victorian-style theatre and nightlife. Lights and colours are an object of astonishing beauty; Strand is a creature a mythic place like a Medusa with her sisters personified in Inner Temple, Roman Baths, Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden. Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged With snakes for hair- hated of mortal man- This street is a coronet of high grade asphalt encircling the city. It has broad lanes in each direction, sliding gentle in the theatreland. The sweeping lanes and plunging passages, the glittering turists eyes and the smooth, sound absorbent surfacing make it a pleasure to use. At night, the wave of drunkards and fetards/party animals - in English sounds not that cool as in French - form a vortex of blue and yellow lights and in low visibility, all these waves flood the lanes with a lambent blue glow. There are different service stations, positioned around this squaremile on a clock face, glass towers of dizziness and comfort with relaxation lounges, theatres, clubs and viewing galleries. One night a half 'a dozen tourists Spent the night together in Trafalgar Square. A fortnight's tour on the Continent was planned, And each had his portmanteau in his hand. Down the Rhine they meant to have a picnic Til' Jones said, "I must decline-" "Boys you'll be advised by me to stay away from Germany- What's the good a' going down the Rhine." Let's all go down the Strand - Have a banana! Let's all go down the Strand! I'll be the leader, you can march behind. Come with me and see what we can find! Let's all go down the Strand - Have a banana! Oh! What a happy land. That's the place fer fun and noise, All among the girls and boys. So let's all go down to the Strand.

This street is my life in London with the lights and shadows. It is my Proust's Madeleine. I have fallen in love with its movements, sounds and tastes. The first moment I met her I was a little more than teenager and I felt magnetism that was not only sexual attraction for that lady walking down the street who smiled at me. I can remind that moment. I was lost around the labyrinth of this area in the narrow streets and lanes. I stopped a walker. Her blue eyes opened a new perception - I felt deep inside a new genre of feelings, my stomach was aching and my heart was running madly. Even after I'd gone out for coffee, I couldn't say that what I was feeling was anything more than infatuation for her beautiful marble face and fair curly hair. But ever since that night and my first weeks in London after 10 years I went back to Adam's place regularly to find again that blue eyes charmed and wicked my heart in my 20s. Let's pretend we're Salinger characters: after having sex - she was the consequence of all my anxiety, I realise no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session, body and youth. After I had sex with her the first time I've immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping that she wouldn't get a yeast infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she'd just spent the whole night worrying wasn't, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love. Yes I said Madeleine, however, it was not her name but sure she is my Proust's Madeleine. After that period I lost her contact but I still remind her lips and her singing voice. She was in London for her first time like me. And certainly after we'd spent days at Adam's place having sex and eating fish and chips, after she'd relaxed enough to be able to come once in a while and finally to stop worrying so much about having an orgasm because her hunger for success, after she'd allowed herself to sit naked on his gross couch and to walk to the bathroom knowing that he was staring at her (imperfect) ass, to root for food in his disgusting refrigerator, to read the brilliant half page of philosophy paper sticking up out of his typewriter, and to hear him pee with taurine force into the toilet bowl, certainly, by the end of those three days, Madeleine knew she was in love. Sketches of life will come back to me everytime I sit on a bench in the Embankment gardens and I can recall times spent with her. I was usually sitting down on Sundays to the tearoom next the gardens and everytime I was sipping the tea inhalating the aroma. Walking down through the gardens how often I had her eyes fallen on the same shrubs in the lawn, and observed the same beautiful effect of the western sun. But never in such a state of spirits, never in any thing like it; and it was with difficulty that she could summon enough of her usual self to be the attentive lady of the house, or even the attentive lover. In all these years I have been in boring semiotics seminar and find myself in stalemate with her in my mind, read Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted over mussles and champagne while thinking of her. One night while I was sitting on my favourite sofa and sipping my lager I could see the boy earth-broken when she disappeared and back again to the nice moments back to her first sight. I spoke up first. "Um, let's see. I'm finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so encoded. Like, if I tell you that my name is Alessio and that I grew up in Ghemme, Piedmont, will you know who I am?

O.K. My name's Alessio and I'm from Ghemme but actually I am really from Ghemme or I am more from London or Marseille after all these years living in these cities. I'm taking this course because I read 'Of Grammatology' last summer and it blew my mind." She peeled her eyes and decided that this was a really uncommon chat-up line. I didn't really make another comment. During the rest of the time with her, she spent an hour in a tearoom with me. After she finished her coffee, she dug into his right snowmobile boot and, to my surprise, pulled out a tin of tobacco and she started rolling a cigarette. She leaned back in her chair, stretching out her long legs and smoke gently like a 1930s divette. Looking back, Madeleine realized that her college love life had fallen short of expectations. Her freshman roommate, Jennifer Boomgaard, had rushed off to Health Services the first week of school to be fitted for a diaphragm. Unaccustomed to sharing a room with anybody, much less a stranger, Madeleine felt that Jennifer was a little too quick with her intimacies. She didn't want to be shown Jennifer's diaphragm, which reminded her of an uncooked ravioli, and she certainly didn't want to feel the spermicidal jelly that Jennifer offered to squirt into her palm. Madeleine was frankly shocked when Jennifer started going to parties with the diaphragm already in place, when she wore it to the Oxford-Cambridge game, and when she left it one morning on top of their miniature fridge. That winter, when the Reverend Desmond Tutu came to campus for an anti-apartheid rally, Madeleine asked Jennifer on their way to see the great cleric, "Did you put your diaphragm in?" They lived the next four months in a twenty-by-fifteen room without speaking to each other. Though Madeleine hadn't arrived at college sexually inexperienced, her freshman learning curve resembled a flat line. Aside from one makeout session with a Uruguayan named Carlos, a sandal-wearing engineering student who in low light looked like Che Guevara, the only other boy she'd fooled around with was a high-school senior visiting campus for Early Action weekend. She found Tim standing in line at the Ratty, pushing his cafeteria tray along the metal track, and quietly crying. His blue blazer was too big for him. He'd spent the entire day wandering around campus with no one speaking to him. Now he was starving and wasn't sure if he was allowed to eat in the cafeteria or not. Tim seemed to be the only person at Brown more lost than Madeleine. She helped him negotiate the Ratty and, afterward, took him on a tour of the university. Around ten-thirty that night, they ended up back in Madeleine's dorm room. Tim had the long-lashed eyes and pretty features of an expensive Bavarian doll, a little prince or yodelling shepherd boy. His blue blazer was on the floor and Madeleine's shirt unbuttoned when Jennifer Boomgaard came through the door. "Oh," she said, "sorry," and proceeded to stand there, smiling at the floor as if already relishing how this juicy bit of gossip would play along the hall. When she finally did leave, Madeleine sat up, readjusted her clothes, and Tim picked up his blazer and went back to high school. Therefore, I would say Madeleine's life and my life are a single track of waiting for Godot; something will happen but still it has not happened - it will eventually. Waiting; attente; waiting; tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns) Waiting is an enchantment I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny, unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy).

The more I remind and the more she is in my mind - the more I look for my future and the more my past is back; the more I understand that extreme solitude don't only describe the way I am feeling about me/her. It explain how I'd always felt when I was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it. Here the telephone rang. By March, Madeleine and Leonard had gotten into a routine of spending every night together. On week nights, after Madeleine finished studying, she headed over to the library, where she'd find me staring at slides with two Chinese grad students. After she finally got Leonard to leave the lab, Madeleine then had to cajole him into sleeping at her place. At first, I had liked staying at her apartment building. He liked the 1910 elevator and the view from her bedroom. He charmed Sandra by making pancakes on Sunday mornings. But soon I began to complain that they always stayed at Madeleine's place and that he never got to wake up in his own bed. Staying at Adam's place, however, required Madeleine to bring a fresh set of clothes each night. One morning in early April, Madeleine left a message on my night table. She left with no reasons and no contacts while I was sleeping. We never made it to the park again, however, I recalled the times in the Embankment gardens many times after. We didn't picnicked again. I can still recall the last time when I pulled her toward the mattress, Madeleine dropped her packages, hoping the wine bottle wouldn't break. She slipped her dress over her head. Soon we were naked, raiding, it felt like, a huge basket of goodies. Madeleine lay on her stomach, her side, her back, nibbling all the treats, the nice-smelling fruit candies, the meaty drumsticks, as well as more sophisticated offerings, the biscotti flavored with anise, the wrinkly truffles, the salty spoonfuls of olive tapenade. She'd never been so busy in her life. At the same time, she felt strangely displaced, not quite her usual tidy ego but merged with me into a great big protoplasmic, ecstatic thing. She thought she'd been in love before. She knew she'd had sex before. But all those torrid adolescent gropings, all those awkward back-seat romps, the meaningful, performative summer nights with her high-school boyfriend Jim McManus, even the tender sessions with Barry where he insisted that they look into each other's eyes as they came, none of that had prepared her for the wallop, the all-consuming pleasure, of this. I was kissing her. When she could bear no more, Madeleine grabbed him savagely by his ears. She pulled my head away and held it still to show me the evidence of how she felt (she was crying now).

In a hoarse voice edged with something else, a sense of peril, Madeleine said, "I love you." I stared back at her. His eyebrows twitched. Suddenly, I rolled sideways off the mattress. I stood up and walked, naked, across the room. Crouching, I reached into her bag and pulled out "A Lover's Discourse." I flipped the pages until I found the one I wanted. Then he returned to the bed and handed the book to her. I Love You As she read these words, Madeleine was flooded with happiness. She glanced up at me, smiling. With my finger, I motioned for her to keep going. The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry. Suddenly Madeleine's happiness diminished, usurped by the feeling of peril. She wished she weren't naked. She narrowed her shoulders and covered herself with the bedsheet as she obediently read on. Once the first avowal has been made, "I love you" has no meaning whatever. Myself, squatting, had a smirk on his face. It was then that Madeleine threw the book at my head.