On Not Knowing English
.
Gatwick
Gone is the suspense from when you still liked to travel, and expectation staved off hunger or even made you want to vomit. The noise of the aeroplane turbines doesn’t impress you. When you were little, this was like a doorway to an unparalleled experience. Now it’s routine, an occasion neither for exuberance nor for the cynical cracks of standup comedians. Whatever lies beyond the window – clouds shaped like people, alien apparitions – has ceased to hold any interest. As you follow the directions in security, you show your awareness of what it means to be in airplane mode. Your one worry is economy-class syndrome, which you combat by standing every twenty minutes, impervious to the scowls of the stewardesses. Up and down the aisle, flexing your knees like a show horse, to avoid the risk of thrombosis. The trip is short enough to save you the sight of the jetlag-haggard on transoceanic flights. When you go to the toilets, you remember them being bigger, which must mean you’ve gained weight. You’ve been invited here to take part in the Book Fair. You’re glad the trip has no sentimental connotations, and you fantasise you’re going to visit a daughter or a lover with sado-maso tendencies. You imagine nonexistent people and situations, which takes you back to when you were little and, to combat boredom, you had to come up with ways to entertain yourself for free. You’d swear the speakers had announced an imminent landing, but the passengers’ reactions – you don’t know English – lead you to conclude instead that you’ve hit a patch of rough air. It doesn’t bother you as it did when you were little. Seatbelt tight, eyes closed, you decide that, if this really is your last moment on earth and you could have one last wish, you’d wish to write. The motive for panic subsides – the turbulence was barely noticeable – and with the hypothetical disaster at an end, your thoughts turn to the chauffeur the organisers have said they’ll send to pick you up at the airport. You imagine him holding a paper in his hands with your name spelled incorrectly. You smile when you hear the landing gear lower – clunk. What you can’t imagine is that the chauffeur will be a Bangladeshi family man who will make the entire journey to London with his radio tuned to an Asian BBC affiliate. Nor that he will show up sweaty, huffing, shirt unbuttoned, apologising for the twenty-minute delay, nor that while you wait in the vestibule, speculating about what might have happened to him, you’ll feel your stomach open up, and a profound craving for some kind of hypercaloric food will overcome you.
.
Hammersmith
I distract myself with the idea that human beings can be divided into two categories: those who wait, and those who make others wait. If forced to, I’d describe myself as one of those who wait. Once you’ve realised you’re one of that tribe, you have to try and make the experience painless and productive. Some think the best remedy for waiting is a mobile phone. I disagree. Looking at a mobile is a habit so ingrained that it doesn’t allow us to appreciate the intrinsic virtues of waiting. Put otherwise: what you think about when you’re waiting has nothing to do with what you think about when you’re doing anything else. My most recent episode of waiting takes place in a hotel in Hammersmith. The day after my arrival, I see posters in the lifts and vestibule announcing a simulated evacuation, but only for the hotel staff. The alerts insist the exercise will lasty only f ive minutes and that the guests are allowed to ignore it. The hour is near, and still the employees are informing the guests of this, to avoid misunderstandings. I’ve agreed to meet one of the organisers of the fair ten minutes before the drill, and I’d prefer he show up late, so I can watch the emergency exercise. If the organiser, too, is one of those who wait – when two people from the same group meet, they neutralise each other – I could propose we wait together, but my superstition warns me against trying to foil chance. And so, with three minutes left, I submit to the unknown. The staff pretend to act normal, enforcing protocols I imagine they learned in some workplace safety course. It’s interesting, but I’d be exaggerating if I called it special (I have the tendency to believe – as the present story shows – that any anecdote may provide fodder for literature). The imminence of the simulated disaster is evident in the receptionists’ attitudes as they pick up the phone or look at their computer screens. Two minutes before the agreed-upon time, the organiser arrives. Harried, perspiring, he exhales and approaches – I am staring at the spiral pattern in the carpet, which could only be the work of a psychopath or a defective AI program, as he gestures that we should hurry up and go. I don’t know him well enough to say no, and I don’t want to abuse my privileges as a guest. And I’ve told myself I’ll make things easier on him, knowing how many writers are committed to perpetuating the myth of the eccentric, difficult author. Barely slowing down – the carpet must repel him – he grabs my arm with a forcefulness only fathers-in-law are permitted and tells me to follow him, repeating, ‘Let’s go, the evacuation drill’s about to start.’ We are people who wait, but since we can’t now, we leave, and are soaked by the oblique, impromptu London rain. As the sirens sound – impossible not to think of the populace taking shelter in the train tunnels during the Second World War, or of Churchill’s alcoholic eloquence – I follow the organiser’s directions. He feigns calm, but his body language betrays him as he tells me, ‘And one more thing: don’t look back.’
.
Olympia
It intimidates you, sharing the stage with an author so well known, an Oxford professor of German language and literature. You’ve read him with the neurotic devotion of a person maybe not cultured enough to catch all the nuances. The event, organised months ago, is a conversation between the two of you entitled ‘Literature of the Self: Truth and Fiction’. It intimidates you, and you’ve tried not to overthink how the need for an interpreter will oblige you to alternate monologues. They invited you ages ago, though there was no need to do so, to put the organisers’ minds at ease. But a long wait kills the spontaneity of these public appearances. The two of you are disciplined: you’ve both shown up in advance, as you were asked to, and have shared what cordiality you could – neither of you speaks the other’s language – through smiles and movements of the head. A sympathy soon arises between you, sabotaged by technology once the event gets underway. The microphone by your jaw is connected to an earphone so you can hear the interpreter. The writer you admire has a script at the ready, and is struggling to grasp the translation of your off-the cuff remarks. He hasn’t missed much. Sensing that his erudition is more interesting than your loquacity, you’ve encouraged him to talk at length about the deceptive convergences between truth and fiction. You’ve both chosen to repeat familiar ideas. Early on, you’ve realised he hasn’t removed his backpack. From his words, you gather that he came by train from Oxford, and you’ve observed him opening his backpack and extracting all he carried inside it, as though undergoing a security check at an airport: an iPad, a hat, a sweater, a book, a notepad, the printed sheets of his script, a phone charger and finally – his eyes light up – a tangerine. You thought he was preparing to eat it, but then you saw he only wanted to make sure he had it with him, not to feast on it but rather to consider how later, when the thing was over with – on the train, on the way back to Oxford, maybe asking himself what was the point of participating in a dialogue with a shiftless Catalan novelist – he’d be able to savour it. Recalling the title of the event, you wonder whether the tangerine might not embody the equilibrium between experience and anticipation. The anticipation of imagining what could yet happen – that is what literature is: knowing, as you speak of fiction and truth (or vice versa), that the tangerine is there inside the backpack, throbbing, the one possible conclusion.
.
Paddington
Scheduling a literary event at six in the evening on a Friday, in London or anywhere else, takes gall, especially if it’s one of those exchanges between writers brought together by a matter of larger importance – in this case, the Book Fair – extending its programming beyond the official grounds. Such is the situation of the English reporter and the Catalan author who f ind themselves in The Frontline Club. It’s a three-storey building with windows out of an Edward Hopper painting, and boasts an infinite arsenal of whiskies and beers. The restaurant is accessible through a doorway spacious enough to let customers shake their umbrellas, remove their jackets, overcoats or hats, hang their scarves, bags, shawls and caps on the hooks and then – only then – greet the friends they’re there to meet. It’s a side door with an almost clandestine little sign letting you know you’ve arrived at The Frontline Club. A movie staircase – hardwood steps ideal for a suspicious fall – climbs to the second floor, where there’s a magnificent bar. More windows, benches, yellow leather sofas, a large communal table and little bar tables scattered like satellites in the universe. On the walls, photos of wars, classic and contemporary, and over the bar, a display of soldiers’ caps, army helmets, hopefully from the losing side, and a gas mask. The members of the club have contributed these items to the collection to remind us, though there’s no need to, of the existence of the hell they lived through. This is the origin of the club’s name: the frontline that unites active or retired reporters with the memory of the dead, whose names are listed beside their photos in an honour roll – I recognise Marie Colvin’s cyclopic eye – of colleagues killed by enemy fire, by friendly fire or by accident. The waiters facilitate the exchange of confessions which, though everyone knows they’re true, no official source will ever corroborate. This is a place to drink: to drink, to sing and to cry. And to share silences which, as the English reporter tells the Catalan writer – both speak French, both are the sons of well-known writers and both feel, in other circumstances, they might have been friends – transform the club into a decompression chamber for PTSD. When the club was founded, the reporter says, they chose this neighbourhood not because it happened to be available, but with the express purpose of being near – five minutes on foot – Paddington station, where the train departs London for Heathrow airport. After covering wars, invasions, humanitarian catastrophes, coups d’état and revolutions, reporters come back with physical and psychological scars, often it’s hard to tell them apart, and the oasis of the second floor is a refuge free of judgement or reproof. ‘You can tell your family you’ll be here on Thursday and take shelter here from Monday on,’ the reporter says, sounding like someone who’s lived this rather than heard it. On the third floor is a room where history courses are taught on the correspondents’ work, where workshops and film screenings are held, where talks are given like the one they are anxiously awaiting. On the restroom walls are framed covers of Paris Match from the days when it was one of only a few magazines that offered work to war and crime-scene photographers in the trenches. The event itself follows a predictable pattern. Few but generous spectators, seduced by the reporter’s adrenaline and verbosity. A graduate in philosophy and political science, he says he’s a dissident in everything (ideology, religion, fashion). He admits the need to temper his dissidence with sacrosanct loyalties: to his football team, Juventus; to Jacques Tati; to the operas of Verdi. His magnetism is such that, when the talk is over, no one wants to leave. It’s a Friday night, and all assembled seem inclined to stretch the evening on into dinner. The group is diverse, and includes Spanish immigrants seeking in London things Spain has refused to give them. In the restaurant on the ground floor, the first, still innocuous beers are knocked back. The emigrants speak of the hardships of life in London and the fraternity that unites them. This reminds the narrator of the brotherhood of the Republican exiles, who helped his parents survive the postwar years. He’s sitting between two women who work in film and television and across from a telecommunications engineer trapped between Brexit and the pandemic. Condemned to remote work, he lives among computer screens connected to a globalised data centre. When the London rain ceases to fall across the windows, he still sees it there, like a screen saver for his existence. The narrator senses that the exiles are sharing a friendship that puts origins before affinities. He listens to them, seeking resonances of the present, a vampire of the lives of others who open themselves with therapeutic generosity. They must suppose he will turn everything he hears into something beyond the table talk that has followed an event – on a Friday evening, who in their right mind… – doomed to failure. At the next table over, immune to such failure, the reporter is ebullient. His gestures grow more sweeping with the magnitude of his recollections, from the Balkan wars to the Mexican border. He glances around for the person he calls his last shot at love. She’s the manager of the restaurant, an exile or an emigrant, Polish, a castaway from one of the thousand effluents of exodus. And, as though caught up in one of those operas the reporter likes so well, the narrator realises that fate is offering him an unforeseen temptation: the temptation to shed the taciturnity he adopts to cover up his meekness; to accept the gift of an elusive happiness that fraternity now offers him. But he knows himself well enough to guess he’ll let the temptation pass. He’ll say a hurried goodbye to all, return to Hammersmith in a taxi, hypnotised by the reflection of bright letters on the rain-drenched asphalt, and with furore, as though it were his last will and testament, submerge himself in the pleasure of writing about what might have happened if he had joined the dissident front, with the reporter at its head. A reporter who, in these moments, seeking sympathy from his Polish lover and the loyalty of the brave soldiers who have joined him, offers, in the ardour of the night, to pay for another round of beers.
.
.
Sergi Pàmies is one of the most widely read contemporary writers in Catalan. Born in exile to the writer Teresa Pàmies and the politician Gregorio López Raimundo, he first gained recognition with the story collection T’hauria de caure la cara de vergonya (1986). His books include L’instint (1992), the novel La gran novel·la sobre Barcelona (1997), Si menges una llimona sense fer ganyotes (2006), La bicicleta estàtica (2010), Cançons d’amor i pluja (2013) and L’art de portar gavardina (2018), as well as the recent collection A les dues seran les tres (2023). His work has been widely translated, and he is also a journalist and translator of writers including Guillaume Apollinaire, Agota Kristof, Daniel Pennac and Amélie Nothomb.
Adrian Nathan West is the author of the novel My Father’s Diet, a literary translator from German, Spanish and Catalan and an essayist whose work has appeared in The Baffler, Liberties and The New York Times Magazine.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.