feminish

Last Thursday…

He asked if I wouldn’t mind if he took the seat next to me. I smiled and said Of course, you’re very welcome.

With a smile like that of course I feel very welcome, thank you. Smiles like yours are rare jewels. And with a sigh, You know I’ll have to be old and dying before people stop asking me to give up my seat.

Sixty-five years old (he soon said) and tiny beads of sweat filmed his face. The train seats were quite close so I could really see the glistening sweat and really smell the coffee on his breath.

His eyes twinkled as he asked whether I lived in France and how I enjoyed learning French, lurching a little as he leaned over the arm-rest into what I’d have thought was generally recognised as My Space. I noticed the slightly-puckered texture of his nose-skin, the shiny grey hairs at his temple and the dulled, bittered sadness of his eyes, as he began to do what old men sometimes think it’s a good idea to do: flirt with a woman (he was kind to point out) young enough to be his granddaughter.

He was quite determined to teach me. About the Renaissance stone choir in Limoges, the Dark Prince, the importance of ‘vous-voyez-ing’, about oddities of English law. Did I know there was still a statute in my country allowing witches to be burned? ‘Yes’, I shocked him, ‘and there’s another compelling all men to practice at the butts every Saturday, and there’s another…’ I was interrupted and the subject was changed: it wasn’t part of the plan for his ornamented chatter to be equalled. Limoges is a Dead Town, he’s only here to see his dying mother. He’ll sell the house the very next day after she dies.

I fell into following my breath and took stock of the situation. He began to tell me he was a photographer. There’s another four hours before we’ll alight at Gare d’Austerlitz. I capture beauty. I see but I don’t touch - just like sitting next to you, a beautiful woman, on this train. He closes his eyes as he drools out his words, and his shoulder brushes mine as he points me out to myself. I don’t want to touch you, to possess. Here is a fairly inoffensive man, with a fairly unpleasant manner. He gesticulates intensely with every word, expressing himself through his upper body like a cat, stretching languidly - or like a water-bed, writhing within its sack, never still.

But his unpleasantness doesn’t make me angry, or outraged - just interested…

My favourite flower is a coquelicot. The most romantic of all flowers. You see, once you pick it, immediately it wilts. It is for this fragility I love it. There’s one! He leans over me to point out a poppy in the trackside verge. I think about trenches and blood-red fields, and silence settles. There’s a Nordic glimmer about you. Tell me, what’s your ancestry?

I am here, it seems, to be charmed and taught and looked at. He wants an audience for his monologues; he wants reaction, validation - but not necessarily interaction. He wants to make me smile, I realise, not so much in the interests of making me happy, but so that I smile for him, so that he knows he has made me smile. I am a play-thing, a welcome entertainment, an object of his projections.

Would my more-feminist friends ask him politely to shut up a this point - and should I?

But I see quite clearly that he’s just another human being - exhausted, delighting in life, unhappy and bored. And for whatever reason, the universe has plonked us together ’til Paris. He’s here and he wants to talk. It doesn’t need to matter to me that he’s projecting down my cleavage a gendered world-view I vehemently oppose. That projection is his - and he can keep it. If it peeks out in his words, I’ll correct him instantly and forcefully. But so long as it’s unspoken (just writhed and slathered) that’s fine - he’s more than welcome to give himself a sore neck. As a point of principle I think talking to strangers is a good thing; in fact, it’s got to be one of the best bonuses of living in a time and continent of peace - and of being a young woman in the 21st Century, not the 19th. So I resolve to listen and to learn - not about French Nuclear policy, or the stupidity of a state subsidy for intermittent performers - but about Old Men and Young Women… And maybe, along the way, he’ll get it.

With the poppy we see the nature of existence: everything dies, everything is impermanent - we are dying all the time, everything around us is dying. This is the great teaching of Buddhism. He was teaching me again. I mused that a neither a woman his age nor a man mine would presume to teach a stranger like this. It’s definitely something about the older man taking the initiative, leading the conversation. So I pulled him up. In fact, I said, I’m fairly sure Buddhists would agree with Lavoisier: Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed. Everything is not death but transformation; the poppy has just become something else. He was surprised.

It had become hot; the air-conditioning was broken. Excuse me, I’d just like to visit Siberia he said, and wandered to the adjoining carriage, where it was working.

For Art, you need Suffering - you need to be hungry, cold. He began, as soon as he sat down. You need the motivation, the energy to find yourself money to live and then and only then you will create good work. If you have too much you just sit, lost in your beautiful house drowning in all the clothes and food and money. You may as well just sit under a tree and watch the grass grow! But, I said, it is not the suffering in itself that creates the good art. Suffering just helps us to see what matters - what we need, what we want, what we think we need and want. Suffering can help us appreciate and respect those things; and to see that even in the simplest, poorest life, we have most of what we need. In the most basic things (like emptying the wee bucket because you have no toilet), you can can develop an understanding of the world from which deeply beautiful art can be created. The art comes from the understanding, not the suffering.

You see, I continued, if you are in fact able to sit under a tree, You’re right; people who have everything never sit under trees. I mean, if you can really sit under a tree, really be there and enjoy it, then I think you’re in a perfect position to create beautiful art. He nodded.

Did I have a mobile phone, he asked, and got up to buy some water. No, I said, and smiled, sorry that he hadn’t been able to stop himself from asking.

A computer? He asked as he came to sit down, trying to cover himself. Of course, I said.

Suddenly we entered a tunnel and his ’scape of vision - the vast countryside - vanished. The light turned bluish, and the carriage felt very quickly very small. He had been proclaiming on great matters, as much to the unending horizon as to me - the ultimate had been his audience, his canvas for abstract thought. And now, everything was very concrete and very close and his face looked different under the strobes. I could see just a grey man not his big ideas; he looked like a corpse, stark and bleak, his face cloaked in tension, self-hatred and sadness. It was grotesque, but wonderfully human, and not at all sexy.

With a thud and a rumble we broke out of the tunnel and our field of vision exploded into yellows, greens and the bright clear blue of the sky.

The great Buddhist teachers say that the key is to be present in every moment - to be aware of the impermanence and preciousness of every second. Even when - and I know you won’t take this the wrong way - even when making love. It is beautiful only when you can be truly present. And then it is one of the deepest experiences of being alive. He paused. I was concentrating and held his gaze. It seemed that he was getting it after all. Take my Orangina here, I said. It is beautiful only when I’m really truly present, only when I see what’s really going on with drinking it. It’s a very sweet orange goo that’s there, outside of my body, in this little can, and then it becomes me, in my body. I patted my tummy. By this afternoon the orange goo will be my thoughts, my actions - my smiles. Precisely. All we have to do is be aware - it’s so simple, Buddhism’s so simple! Simple, yes, but not easy. You see, it’s very difficult to always drink Orangina in mindfulness. I haven’t been doing very well this past 20 minutes - it’s a question of habits, and our habits are very strong. Oh Habits!! he cried, throwing himself backwards into the aisle and crashing his back into the tea-trolley coming past. Habits, Oh I know! He recovered his centre of gravity and shook his head. I’ve got lots of bad habits, I said, and smiled. And, after a short pause: As you say yourself, everything is impermanent; we can change even our strongest habits. He looked at me.

Outside there was social housing, now, and high tenement blocks and graffiti. The track was one of a dozen, funnelling in. People were standing up, stretching, putting on jackets, posting cigarettes behind their ears and reaching up for their bags.

He turned to me and said, firmly and deliberately, Thank you for being who you are. For being who you are.

These words mattered to me. The long journey together, apart from being mildly amusing and pretty exhausting, had been worth it. A man (whose name I never knew) had first thought of me only as Young Woman, the charmable object of his projections and his desires. He had begun by playing an empty game of stereotypes but, after four hours of sharing the same cubic metre of train, he could see that his wrong perceptions had dissolved and was even grateful to recognise that I was quite simply just another human being, friendly more than sexy; provocative in words more than body. There didn’t need to be flirtation for us to interact; there didn’t need to be frivolity or pandering performances. There could be smiles and we could talk about making love - but it wasn’t charged with sexual tension.

Si vous touchez a une fleure, vous risquez deranger une etoile. He then stood up. You have made my day more beautiful. I am very happy to have had the good fortune to enjoy your company, and I hope to share this happiness with everyone I meet today.

It was my pleasure, I said, smiling. I then took down my bag, turned, walked out of the carriage, and onto the platform. I headed for the metro without looking back, wondering when on earth I’d find the time to write it all up.