Or so I like to think, at least.
Tatiana is a very old-fashioned young girl.
I imagine her imagining a rather surly heart-throb,
dark-eyed, rough, even cruel to start with;
the kind of man who’s been through things
that no young girl can even imagine.
Encountering Tatiana, however,
this bull of a man,
transfixed by her beauty and her virtue,
experiences a pulsating, life-changing love
which will of course be thwarted by various
incidents
and events.
For example:
One time, she might be kidnapped by the mafia (or
some sort of hoodlums anyway) – in the shape of three
very bad (but not bad-looking) men,
who want to dig up dirt
on her mystery man,
because he’s working as a spy for their enemy
(or something);
so they threaten to hurt
Tatiana,
to torture her, even,
unless
she confesses
everything she knows about him!
(Though in fact it’s not the kind of torture
that would actually hurt her:
electrical wires that aren’t plugged in;
ropes not tied so tightly that they burn her skin;
her torturer too susceptible to her beauty
to really do his duty.)
And suddenly one of the gangsters will stop
and stare
and shout in a panicked voice:
Who’s there?
And she will be saved in the nick of time
by the man who loves her,
and they will walk off hand in hand into the sunset
to be wed,
but,
inevitably,
he will already be married!
(An arranged marriage, obviously,
as never, before Tatiana, will he ever have loved anyone
else at all.
Ever.
Tatiana will be his first.)
And his first wife, who is still alive
(and whom he hates, naturally)
will return and try to kill
them both –
but she won’t succeed. Because
Tatiana’s husband will protect her, holding off his
wretched wife easily at first, but then, distracted by his
overwhelming love for Tatiana, he will be stabbed in the
back and he’ll start to bleed profusely; Tatiana, courageous
and cunning, will bring down a chandelier on the woman’s
head, before fashioning a tourniquet for her wounded
husband with a strip of cloth torn from her dress.
Filled with admiration, her husband will tell her
over and over again how much he loves her.
There are, of course, upon this theme,
an almost infinite number of variations.
Tatiana does not lack imagination.
At the Alexander-Pushkin Secondary School,
where she goes every day,
Tatiana finds nobody worthy of her love.
Obviously,
since the boys are all fools.
God they’re stupid those boys
they’re all so dumb
they’re really annoying
they pinch our bums
they’re so immature they fart
and they snigger
idiotically they talk about
whose willy is bigger and that
is all they think about those pathetic prats
The girls talk about how boys change
when their balls descend.
Apparently, that hasn’t yet happened.
anyway everyone knows that girls are more intelligent.
*
But one day
everything changes.
One day, Eugene arrives in the leafy suburb.
Where does he come from?
Eugene is from a wealthy background,
a family based in Paris
but who are aristocratic,
originally from the North,
conservative and Catholic.
Eugene is the youngest; he has three older sisters.
He’s been to several private schools.
He’s not what anyone would call
a good student,
even if he ‘has the ability’, as people say:
in other words, his parents still pray
that one day he will pull his bloody finger out
(to quote his impatient father),
that he will discover the value
of hard work and deep thought
(in the words of his more refined mother),
and that he will pass his Baccalaureate exam, then ascend
to higher education.
An icy silence is Eugene’s only reaction.
He feels lost, in the age of the smiley;
Heir to a bitter, old-fashioned melancholy.
Everything bores him; there’s no consolation
In his arid desolation.
He’s done all the stuff he’s supposed to, of course –
Smoking, sleeping around, drinking, drugs, or worse.
He’s painted, he’s written, he’s roamed the whole planet,
But nothing gave him any real pleasure, damn it!
At night, on the verge of sleep, Eugene often
Imagines it all ending with the implosion of the sun.
Since everything one day will be this vast absence,
Why bother trying to give meaning to existence?
Why expend such futile effort, why get annoyed,
When everything is doomed to end up in the void?
How stupid they are, those idiots who strain
Themselves by working or trying to entertain
Others or themselves, who seek pleasure and delight,
Just to distract their minds from the impending night!
At seventeen, Eugene knows all about the world:
And as life is so pointless, he does nothing at all.
The summer before his final year of school,
in the depths of boredom,
Eugene considers his options:
• kill himself
• stay with Lensky for the holidays
After due
mature reflection,
he chooses
option number two.
Lensky is his only friend, kind of.
He met him first on a forum and then in real life.
Eugene likes Lensky because they’re
like brothers:
both live at a distance
from the world of others.
Lensky lives metaphorically. He doesn’t care
about things; he dares
to love madly,
to transcend the ordinary,
to create his own world of drama and poetry.
He’s a wild-eyed optimist, a daydream believer.
In Lensky, Eugene sees himself flipped
like a reflection in a mirror.
So in early July, Eugene tells his parents,
in their apartment
in the eighth arrondissement,
that he’s made an important decision:
he’s going to spend the summer with Lensky
and not in a coffin.
His mother, sitting on a blue
Louis XVI chair, can only nod
her approval of this choice.
Living in the suburbs,
though not without its faults,
is generally preferable to lying dead in a vault.
And as he seems in a good mood,
she decides to add:
‘I bought some past exam papers
for business school; you can pack them in your bag.’
Arriving at Lensky’s place, Eugene qui
ckly notes
that his friend now has only one thing on his mind;
one word, obsessive and grandiose:
Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga
And even though Eugene thinks all love is dumb,
he adores seeing Lensky so possessed by this girl.
It thrills him to think that one day the sun
will implode, swallowing up the world
and everything in it – including this reason-defying love,
this love as pure as dreaming,
as bright as a window’s reflection.
For Eugene, this thought is
perfection.
For him, it’s the ultimate proof
of the absolute insignificance of being.
*
The day after Eugene arrives, Lensky persuades
him to go next door to meet Olga,
because he’s sure they’ll get on well,
and most of all because
he wants to hear him say
that she is the most beautiful, intelligent girl
in the known universe
(and also because he hasn’t slept with her
for two whole days
and he feels like his balls are about to burst).
Eugene is not
expecting much from this meeting,
but then he never expects
anything much of anything.
For Lensky’s sake, he composes a socially acceptable
expression,
puts on a pair of 501s, white Converse trainers,
thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses.
Stifling a yawn,
he follows his friend out onto the lawn.
In the garden next door, Olga and Tatiana await
unseen.
Tatiana’s nose, as ever, is buried in a book.
Olga: split skirt, sandals, magazine.
‘Mesdames,’ Lensky bows, with a look
of pride, then kisses Olga’s hand
and Tatiana’s cheek,
before introducing them to Eugene, who claims he is
enchanted
to meet
them both. ‘Enchanted, truly,’ he lies,
this boy who has never been enchanted
by anything in his life,
and certainly not by the mundane sight
of two suburban teenagers in their garden,
sipping Coca-Cola,
crossing and uncrossing their long slender thighs
to the background hum
of buzzing bees
in a honeysuckle mountain
that crowns a wooden pergola.
All this too will be swallowed by the sun.
As Lensky recites his latest poem to Olga in a
corner of the lawn
(‘I love you from dawn till dusk,
from dusk till dawn!’),
Eugene feels compelled by the rules of decorum
to talk to Tatiana, who would have been perfectly content
to continue reading.
‘What you reading?’ Eugene enquires.
It’s La princesse de Clèves, one of the most
boring books ever written
in Eugene’s opinion.
‘I haven’t read it,’ he claims. ‘What’s the story?’
Studious Tatiana, who has read the book ten times,
gives him a passionate account of the plot,
with its unconsummated romance
(‘That’s true, I’d forgotten,’ Eugene recalls.
‘They don’t even get in each other’s pants.’)
between the Princess of Clèves and the Duke of Nemours.
After listening to this for ten minutes –
and it wasn’t such a chore,
in fact, when he thinks about it –
Eugene decides it is his turn to entertain the young lady, so
he begins
to tell her about his life, employing all his charm
and skill at conversation,
with his number one weapon:
the power of exaggeration.
‘I’ve just come from Paris,
where my uncle kicked the bucket.’
‘Oh, that’s awful! I’m so sorry,’
says Tatiana, who’s easily impressed.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’
says Eugene. ‘Fuck it –
we needed the rest.
We’d spent months plumping his damn pillows and
bringing him cup after cup
of lapsang souchong tea –
it smells like smoked salmon,
you know the one I mean?
The guy was the CEO of an oil company,
responsible for a dozen spills at sea.
So he killed entire families of seagulls and penguins and
other sea creatures, most of them probably very cute!
Seals, Tatiana, baby seals! This guy strangled baby seals
with his own bare hands! Surely you can see
that it’s wrong to mourn the passing of someone who spent
his time plotting the death of cute aquatic creatures?
And because he was so bloody despotic,
he forced all his cousins,
nephews, nieces and grandchildren
to visit him
during his death throes (which dragged on
for a frankly inconvenient length of time)
and be really kind and nice and all that crap,
even though he’d been such a bastard
all his life.
This is a man, Tatiana, who gave me a sponge bag
for my ninth birthday.
A check, sand-coloured sponge bag.
What kind of sick jerk does something like that?’
Hearing these words, Tatiana’s emotions are divided
between
horror and fascination
but she quickly opts for the second
of these sensations,
which has the advantage of being
the same thing she feels
when her gaze dwells
on Eugene’s rugged face,
those precipitous cheekbones, that abrupt
that lopsided smile, those
beautiful eyes
so blue … Russian blue,
Tatiana decides;
the blue of Russian palaces on pillows of snow.
She notices the way he crosses his legs,
right calf resting on left knee, and how
he has forearms in the shape of triangles;
the boys she knows at school
God they’re stupid those boys
have forearms thin as Pringles,
forearms that might snap if they tried to lift a heavy tool.
they’re all so dumb
And his hands, with their knotty ligaments and veins,
not like the soft round hands of the boys she knows
they’ve got no brains
those rubbery little hands, that doughy skin;
Eugene’s hands are models of power and precision,
hands that let you see their structure, their mechanism.
And those wiry veins bulge and pulse from within
the muscles of his hands, his arms, his neck.
(And I think at this point, it isn’t too hasty
to say that Tatiana is in love already.)
She and Eugene continue to chat about this and that
while Lensky does whatever he’s doing with Olga;
and Tatiana, who adores his presence near her
and wants him to stay there forever,
is at the same time eager for him to leave;
she can’t wait
to lock herself in her room, alone,
giddy with emotion,
to lean her hot forehead on the cold windowpane,
free at last to imagine herself with Eugene.
Which is paradoxical, because right now he is with her.
But she wants him to leave, so she can be with him better.
Finally the two lovers return,
Lensky relaxed and smiling,
Olga warm and pink,
both calm and quiet, sedated by their love.
While they pour themselves lashings of Coke,
Tatiana thinks
to ask Eugene if he’s on MSN.
He gives her his address,
though the idea that she will write to him
makes him want to spew.
‘Hi Eugene, its Tatiana, how r u?
Smileys make Eugene cringe,
those pathetic pixelated phony feelings,
those insipid idiotic infantile emotions;
he has to remind himself that one day,
they, too, will be swallowed by the sun.
But he has a recurring nightmare
where, with tragic irony,
those brainless heads with their dumb
smiling lips,
sole survivors of the Apocalypse,
float through a liquid plasma universe
laughing or crying or blushing into infinity.
But Eugene has no reason to worry:
Tatiana has no intention of chatting with him,
least of all on MSN;
the address is merely an accessory,
a prop for her theatre of the mind,
intended to decorate a corner
of her cosy dream
where she could,
if she wanted,
spend all night talking with Eugene,
and where he would be happy to talk with her too.
The address makes her fantasy feel real
but with no actual obligation to do
anything at all.
*
And so, in a frenzy of impatience,
Tatiana goes back into the house;
there are still
four hours
before bedtime.
At dinner, Olga too is miles away;
she’s thinking
about Lensky, who’s gone for the evening,
about the afternoon they spent together,
but most of all about the texts she’s sent him,
and whether
he will ever reply to any of them, ever.
She knows he’s going out in Paris with Eugene tonight.
Maybe – maybe – he hasn’t received her texts because
there’s no reception on the train?
She should give him the benefit of the doubt,
she thinks;
And yet
it is almost more probable, for Olga,
that he’s already with another girl,
for example in the toilets of a bar
or out on the street, up against a wall,
or in some seedy hotel in Pigalle.