Remembering Carmen Read Online Free Page B

bored or baffled, Christopher was enchanted by the spare rhythmic beauty of Cage’s composition which he found ensnaring and irresistible. Whether Carmen at his side found music or musician irresistible was a matter of no consequence to him. He happily forgot where he was or any ground he might have for behaving in a resentful or peevish fashion. At the end he applauded as vigorously as anyone else in the hall.
    As they streamed away into the night, along the Embankment and over Charing Cross footbridge they said little. Jimmy was no longer an issue of contention between them. The air was sharp and appetising. They felt alive.

Inevitably, he reflected, I am cast as the pantomime villain. Let’s blame Jimmy, the man who steals other people’s partners. In fact, I steal no one. I have no interest in possession. They come to me of their own free will and I do not seek to hold on to them. But none of this is allowed. My function as scapegoat is too necessary for the prosaic truth to be allowed to complicate the imaginary record. How often have I seen myself not as a thief but as an arbitrator, stepping in between antagonistic parties, my services demanded peremptorily, sometimes without reward. It is not always pleasant, this sense of being ancillary to something that is happening elsewhere.
    Nor am I, before we leave the metaphor of the stage, a Don Giovanni, a Casanova. The predatory male ceaselessly in pursuit of unattainable satisfaction, and destined, when time is called, to be swallowed by the jaws of hell. My amatory career began in the feminist 1970s and 1980s when the relations between the sexes were an arena of contest, challenge and mutual recrimination. In spite of my critics, I claim that I learnt from these arguments. I modified my practice but I could not stop loving women. Nor could I see it in me to apologise for what seems to me an essential activity, a necessary part of the business of being human.
    Carmen claims that Jimmy first encountered her in an expensive hotel in the south of France. He has no recollection of this. As he sees it, a series of random and inconsequential sightings in London led to their having lunch and, later, to some hurried and not entirely satisfactory assignations – once in a small hotel in West London which he found rather amusing if faintly theatrical. He felt that, contrary to the way in which the charge-sheet is customarily drawn up, it was he who was being used. Carmen interested him. Her sexual allure was obvious, but something else drew Jimmy to her. He was fascinated by her strangely combative personality. He was given the usual motor tour of her past (the pinched provincial beginnings, the convent girl’s ritual rebellions etc etc) and listened as patiently as he could. These recitals generally bored him in ways that were hardly expressible. He preferred to live for the present and nothing could be more alien to him than these obsessive English fossickings in the dusty lumber-room of class – always an uncle who is a bit of a card, a father whose flaws are re-arranged to his advantage with the passage of time, a put-upon mother whose quiet heroism is somehow considered an inspiration. He wanted to lean across and vigorously shake the composers of these retrogressive monologues – indeed that is exactly what he sometimes did – urging them to cut free from the past and march forward with a light spring in their step towards the bright prospect of the new day. They look at him with suppressed anger. “You do not understand.” Most true, he reflected. Most true.
    Jimmy and Carmen quarrelled – which he took to be normal behaviour for her. He cannot now remember whether there was any substance to their polemics. He doubted it. The point – the need – was simply to contend. She was more adept than he at this business. He was perhaps too emollient, too given to the superficialities of social charm – for which she had no time