destiny and destination
anticopyright
2013
Anthony Weir
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SINGLE
TRACK
The single-line between Toulouse and Aurillac in southern Auvergne, has not been closed. Indeed, it has recently been re-laid in parts, though some of the stations have been converted to halts - including the imposing structure at Lexos - a historic building, now dubbed the Gare-Fantôme, without any conceivable other function than a closed railway-station - or a marvellous location for a happening or a rave.
The little, very modern, train arrived dead on time, and I found myself a cosy seat in the warm interior, gazing out at the beautiful landscape now transformed by snow into something much less banal than a giant Christmas card. This ancient province of Rouergue consists largely of wooded foldy-woldy landscape cut by rivers and interspersed with farmland.
Curiously, the electronic ribbon above the door of the compartment announced that the train was going to Capdenac, which is a railway-junction on the way to Aurillac. According to the timetable, the train went right through to Aurillac. The whole journey from Toulouse to Aurillac is uphill, so the train travelled at a leisurely pace (less than 70 kph) through the magical sunlit landscape of freshly-fallen snow, passing Laguépie, Najac ('un des plus beaux villages de France', memorably described in the 1930s (when it was one of the most deprived villages in France) by Jan and Cora Gordon in one of their "Two Vagabonds in..." series. They changed its name to Janac, and lived there for at least six months. It was a village plagued by rickets, tuberculosis, diphtheria, most of whose inhabitants lived above their animals, mostly on potatoes and swedes (rutabagas). Now, you would not guess it had a past of grinding poverty, infection and misery: it is indeed one of the most beautiful villages in France. On to the handsome market town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, of surprisingly northern atmosphere, and reminding me of Dinant on the Meuse in southern Belgium, but without that town's striking cliff. Here the train left the valley of the Aveyron, heading north through more beautiful snow-covered landscape towards Capdenac-Gare and Figeac, the latter another very mediæval beautiful town on the river Lot. (It has a fine Romanesque corbel above the interior of a doorway in the old abbey-church of Saint-Sauveur.)
It was a quarter to four in the afternoon. The next train to Aurillac was at a quarter to nine. I was to be met by my gay friend. Jean-Michel, at Aurillac station. I phoned his home number - and got a message saying that the number was unobtainable. So I went to the ticket office and asked the nice lady there if she had a phone-book for the département of the Cantal. People in public service are amazingly helpful in France - so she rooted about and found that she didn't. But, she said, she could look up the White Pages on the internet for me - which she did. I had copied down the number with an erroneous digit. I thanked her profusely, and rang the correct number. He was out - presumably buying provisions on the way to the station. I left a message explaining my predicament, and said that I would now try to hitch-hike out of Capdenac-Gare and get to nearby Figeac, from which a main road led to Aurillac. It was a beautiful afternoon, quite warm and sparkly in the sun. But France (alongwith Sweden and Finland) is one of the worst countries in the world in which to try and hitch-hike. (The island of Ireland is still one of the best.) The motto of the French Republic, notoriously, is not Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, (fraternity is the last thing that the French feel for each other) - but Chacun Pour Soi. No French person would dream of picking up a piece of litter in the street, or do anything spontaneously for the 'common good'. For the Common Good there are always Associations and Societies. And for everything. Even to show at an open exhibition in the town hall you have to be a member of an artists' association. But I am not complaining. This is one of the few drawbacks in a country that I love, with whose south-western inhabitants I have great rapport. One of the beauties of it is that there is almost no litter in the streets and roads in rural areas. Capdenac, alas! is one of the most difficult towns to walk out of. Situated in a gorge, the road to Figeac climbs and zig-zags - through tunnels! I walked about a kilometre carrying a bag which contained not only a special bottle of wine (Mourvèdre, which has more than a hint of sweaty balls about its 'mouth'), a camera (which I never used), a book (in case I was stranded or taken hostage), and a home-baked Simnel cake for my host, but - inserted at the last moment - my laptop as well. Also included were some special no-tobacco joints provided by a lovely bearded, unemployable, marijuana-growing 'welfare-scrounger' with delightful dog (see picture below, taken in my kitchen in Saint-Antonin) with whom I once had dreary sex, since all he wanted was to be 'sucked off' and worshipped. These, and a couple of CDs of sensual, flowy music (David Parsons et alii) to enhance the already quite good ambiance and (I hoped) reduce the phallocentricity of the envisaged occasion(s).
I had been in a similar position once before, when I arrived by train in Toulouse to find that all other trains were cancelled due to a strike. I had just 2 hours to get to Carcassonne airport (1 hour away) for a flight to Dublin. After some cogitation and walking up and down, I took a taxi to the motorway and stood with my thumb out - in the rain - just beyond the Toll Plaza. This is illegal. Miraculously, within five minutes, a woman pulled up. She was a soldier and was heading for Limoux (where the venerable Crémant comes from), not far to the south of Carcassonne. While we drove, she got on her mobile phone (this too is illegal while driving) and arranged for a taxi to pick me up in Limoux ) and get me to Carcassonne airport - which it did with 20 minutes to spare. Taxis cost me nearly 50 euros, the price of the flight to Ireland - but almost certainly saved me a lot more money I would have had to shell out to re-book my flight and either travel back to Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val or stay in a hotel in Carcassonne for two nights. At Capdenac station I should have called a taxi to take me to the Aurillac road out of Figeac which is only seven minutes away by train. I might have been able to hitch to Aurillac, or my friend might have driven for half an hour to collect me. But I had forgotten that Capdenac was in a gorge. As you get older, your presence of mind (in my case extremely nebulous to begin with) fades. I walked until I found a spot where a car could see me from a distance and pull in. But most of the traffic was in clusters, often behind juggernauts, so there was little chance of anyone -even someone of good-will - stopping on the incline. I phoned my host again...and left another message. After about 40 minutes I walked back downhill - in the gloaming - to the station. By the time I got there, Jean-Michel had at last returned home after failing to find me at the station. He had never given me his cellphone number - perhaps because, like me, he might use one only in emergencies and while travelling. I told him I could get to Figeac easily enough by taxi, and could he possibly pick me up ? But no, there was no way he was going to take his car (on the main, if winding, road) to Figeac 'in icy conditions', which would make it a sixty-minute journey. It was not so much his refusal which got to me as his lack of sympathy and inability to offer any soothing words or suggestion (however impractical) to save the situation. Actually the main roads were completely clear - as they usually are when snowfall is light. I had driven on a much more minor one earlier in the day without the slightest problem. I cut the call and made a decision. I would abandon the plans for a cuddly-licky-sexy-nuzzly couple of days - for which I had even cut my nails and hair, changed all my clothes and anointed myself with fennel-oil. I had not showered, because I do that only three or four times a year, and in any case Jean-Michel had a luxurious bathroom. I decided to take the next train back to Lexos. At this point I realised that my watch was half an hour slow.
It is strange how certain places seem ominous. Over thirty years ago I had got "bad vibes" in the Pyrenean Aragonese town of Jaca. Last year I had a run-in with scary traffic police and am currently awaiting deportation (under a scandalous EU agreement - itself a good reason for disbanding the Union) for insulting servants of the Spanish Crown. I called them fascists, a term which could not be insulting to them since their badge and insignia feature the notorious Fasces, adopted by Mussolini as his party's insignia after the Roman lictors' phallic emblem of Control, and from which Mussolini's political/paramilitary party took its name. I have driven through Capdenac a few times and always got "a bad feel" from it. Was this premonitory ? Should I henceforth avoid revisiting all places with bad vibes ? This could curtail my movements - but then I'm becoming more sedentary as I get older. Having adjusted my watch, I found that I had about an hour to wait for the next train (delayed 20 minutes) back to Lexos. Plenty of time for a piss and a cigar behind a bush, a surprisingly-good cup of coffee from a machine, and some reflection on what this trip had "told me", for I am of the belief that any experience can be a lesson - from a Strindberg play on the radio to bad sex with a Hygiene Queen - and some should definitely be taken as admonitory. So I reflected on my life since I was 39, when, visiting the amazing 1980 Salvador Dalí exhibition, I met a guy in a tiny and crowded urinal in Paris' Centre Pompidou known to Parisians as Le Beaubourg, and decided that I was not a dog-lover of undecided sexuality, but 'gay' - and came out of an imaginary closet quite dramatically. It was something of a shock to my mother and her sister, but they adapted very well, as they had adapted to many other shocks, including running away from suffocating Campbell College with its bullying and largely incompetent teachers, my dropping out of universities (this was in the days before the cheap abbreviation uni became current) THREE TIMES, and my imprisonment for shoplifting groceries. Here is a picture of the Mexican-American who woke me up - taken recently...he must be in his mid-sixties.
He changed his return ticket from Paris to the USA at very little cost (which I gratefully paid), and went back with me to Ireland, where we spent a beautiful week. My life changed in that I started serious cruising/looking for a pal, taking off to London and Paris every few months in order to find someone who would further change my life. Perhaps I thought I was on a ladder, like the medieval vision of the Stairway to Heaven. The freak Beaubourg encounter woke me up (almost literally: in Jungian terms, I belong to the 'Sleeping Beauty' group) to the fact that I was strongly attracted to men with beards and body-hair. I had never encountered any beards or body-hair in my fatherless home...but there was a photograph of Charles Dickens on a wall. I had chased little girls into the school toilets hoping to pull down their knickers when I was a child (this would now be a Serious Offence), but never little boys - though I do remember pissing competitions. My first 'true-love' (when I was 20) was a Danish woman, for whom I was (it took me 50 years to work out) unsuited, naive and immature. But she had woken me up from an earlier sleep. This 'Sleeping Beauty' is an onion with layers of dormition. It was while I was living (briefly) in Denmark that this first love put me in touch with my nipples as extremely erogenous zones. Since then I have discovered my feet, the back of my neck, my whole back, my palms and inner arms... My queer land was new-found a couple of years before HIV struck Europe. I went to discos (which I had never done before) and gay bars, pubs, and the legendary Sauna Continental Opéra in Paris, an underground labyrinth which piped classical music through its system, had a snack-bar and a swimming-pool, and wonderful unlit areas where amazing orgies took place, enacted by people who probably would have ignored each other or run away in daylight. I picked men up easily, but few were sensually very forthcoming, and even less were they attractive as human beings. Now, over 30 years later, I was still on the hunt...for what ? Romance! But not just romance. I suspect that my philosophical bent made me a latter-day Diogenes, looking for an honest soul for a mate. But when I found him, I still went on looking! Searching and cruising can be equally addictive. It may be no accident that I discovered Brahms' chamber-music at the same time as I came out. I fantasise to this day about the blessed Johannes as a father - or a brother. Even a Dutch Uncle would be fine! Or second cousin, second remove... The sublime love-making of his Double Concerto and the exquisite orgy of his first Sextet - like Franck's Piano Quintet, which his wife called 'pornographic' - have been an inspiration in my search for Romantic Adventure. Over twenty years ago I met my 'soul-mate', a man I met in a sexual context which fairly quickly petered out as we got to know each other. He too has had little sub-erotic adventures, but nothing like the number I have had - brief flings, all of them - and none of them sensually or erotically worth writing about. He. too, had been a "problem child". But whereas I jumped off the conveyor-belt of the system as soon as I could, Malcolm, assumed to be some sort of 'retard', was never was allowed to get on it. Cruising online came with the arrival of the World-wide Web, but before that I had used contact ads in magazines, as well as physically-real means such as bars, pubs and (decreasingly, as they vanished) cruisy toilets, dubbed cottages in English and tasses or vespasiennes in French. One of my heroes, Jean Genet, had frequented them. How marvellous it would have been to meet Genet - or Foucault - in one of those pierced-metal urinals that the prudish ultra-Catholic Madame de Gaulle did away with! (Note to self and Will: If prison was 'home' to Saint-Jean Genet-des-Fleurs, it is far too good for 'queers'.) I guess I was really seeking Romance (I had read all of Dumas, from The Count of Monte Cristo to Louise de la Vallière by the time I was 15 - maybe this was a mistake. I did not like Dickens, except for his allegedly worst novel A Tale of Two Cities. I am Schiller's naive and sentimental lover - and have almost always had to make do with bad sex. I went on blind dates, sometimes travelling hundreds of miles. These included the well-bronzed Jean-Michel in Aurillac, who holidayed on Réunion Island, Guadeloupe, etc. I made the journey by car, and visited some megaliths on the way. He was very pleasant indeed, fed me well, and was an excellent host for a couple of days in early summer. His flat was large, airy and modern (i.e. without a fireplace), overlooking the river Jordanne. The sensual rapport wasn't great, because, like most men, he was too rough, and too genital - and resorted to amyl nitrite, a vasco-dilating heart-stimulant vulgarly known as poppers, because the vaporous liquid was originally packaged in little glass ampoules which were popped open. It gives me bad headaches and a horrible dissociative awareness: in fact, the effects are opposite to those of cannabis or MDMA.
I have written elsewhere on this website about the gross error that men make regarding 'sex'. They think it is phallic mechanics. And to an extent it is, but only to an extent. I have a very sensitive body, and the lightest touch can produce ecstasy. Most men are hopeless at cocksucking: they hurt! I don't like having my nipples mauled: a feather or a fingertip is fine by me. I am not so interested in mere ejaculation, I can do that 'in the comfort of my own home'. For me, with another person, what is in our primitive culture dismissed as 'foreplay' is what it's about. Men confuse ejaculation with orgasm: they are not necessarily the same thing. But I have discussed this on another page. One of my many brief lovers was a student of shiatsu, a Japanese massage therapy which I loved. Mutual massage (including tongue-massage, of course) with a bearded hairy man is heavenly for me - but this chap from Dublin was just one of a handful of men I have met who had come out of the claustrophobic and drab sex closet into the ballroom of sensuality. But my problem has been that if I meet a man I relate to sensually, I don't relate to him with my head. And if I meet a man whom I get along with very well, he is lacking in sensuality and unable to comprehend that less is more. Thus I reflected in the cosy railway waiting-room. I had made yet another less-than-rewarding rendezvous and journey. How many had I made over the years ? To the forbidding Montagne Noire in the snow to meet a guy who turned out to be a very unpleasant (and very rich) Leather Queen. To Berlin to meet a guy who hadn't told his boyfriend I was coming. To Dublin to meet a very sweet guy with cerebral palsy who wanted to be treated roughly rather than with tenderness. To Whitby where a man who fantasised about orgies had assembled five or six pretty incompatible players. To a remote-ish Tuscan shepherd's hut (via cheap flight from Belfast to Pisa) where I was asked to tattoo a man's cock with a single needle and Pelikan ink. The apparent owner of the organ had, I subsequently discovered, a trunk-full of his own shit under the bed that we both slept in. His sado-maso friend was very high up in the Benedictine order, with a flat in the Vatican. What I tattooed -in the original Greek - just below his circumcision scar was the most succinct motto of all time: GNOTHI SEAUTON- carved somewhere in or on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Which sybilline advice, being translated, means: You cannot know anything until you know yourself. To the flat of a beautiful Turk who immediately asked me to fist-fuck him.: a medical experience which I do not wish to describe or repeat. How many times had I been stood up, or been taken to flats more squalid than pissotières, with greasy carpets, Beckettian kitchens and Malone Dies bedclothes! Once to a grand town-house in Paris' Marais (just as the area was being taken over by the vapid homosexual demi-monde) whose pillared main room was as big as a ballroom. Others came to me and were likewise disappointed. One came from Canada after a wonderful and protracted correspondence. We hated each other on sight, and he left the next day for Dublin. Then there was the Visit from the wily Angelos Petroutsas, self-styled Prince of Poverty, for which I ended up paying the air-fares from Athens to Dublin - and back to Athens in a hurry. I have been invited to dinner - and had to cook it myself. I have been invited to dinner, brought along a good bottle of Château Talbot - only to be presented with a tasteless ready-meal from a freezer - or...wait for it.., muesli! Recently, I have been invited to Bali ! But never to rural Iran, where I would love to go, simply for the food and the music. God knows what those freaks thought of the freak who is writing this! In that railway-station I finally pulled myself together. I would do this no more. I am not homosexual in the 'gay' sense. I find bearded men physically and emotionally exciting - but surely enough is enough. My idea of a union of minds and bodies is more like that of Rumi and Shams-i-Tabriz than a Gay Marriage - and, indeed, my twenty year relationship with Malcolm is close to that philadelphic model. Why have I been wanting to ice his cake, so to speak ?
(He bakes a mean Simnel cake...) It's not as if I wanted what most phallocentric people now assume is Gay Sex, i.e. anal penetration. That has never appealed to me. Although direct massage of the prostate through the arsehole can be delicious, I have always been worried about shit. The arsehole is a shit-hole and best treated with caution, especially where mouths are involved. Although Freud had one or two excellent insights, they were fairly superficial and obvious - and did not include his ridiculous Œdipus-fantasy. (He would have done well to take the Delphic Oracle more seriously.) Jung, to my mind, was much subtler and deeper and wider in his intelligence. I like Jung's notion that homosexual men are, mostly, trapped in a stage of sexuality which reflects a stage of emotional development. I have noticed that most gay men I have met are stuck at an emotional age of eight, or twelve, or fifteen. Naturally, I can't quite place myself. I think I have a sexual age of about four, because I enjoy the sheer playfulness of sex and am not interested in the 'goal', so to speak. But my emotional age I am unable to gauge, because I am very mature ("an old soul") in some ways, and delightfully (?) childish in others. I guess that my "inner little boy" has been searching all his life for another little boy, who of course is always more or less coeval. This largely explains my difficulty in relating to men. especially men in groups.. So I resolved to remove myself from the gay 'bear' and 'daddy' cruising-sites. I should have done so many years ago. I would have saved myself a lot of money and a lot of disappointment. I might even have matured beyond the sexual stage in which I was trapped. That very morning - as Malcolm was travelling to Paris to stay two nights -I had received a message from a gay friend in Paris (a nice guy with whom I had never had any kind of sexual or sensual involvement) saying that he was feeling stressed and didn't want either of us to visit more than for one night on our separate journeys back to Ireland via Paris. This was ironic, since the two of us had Couchsurfed for three nights in Spain the previous October, and he had Couchsurfed across the USA in the summer. I had made the arrangement in October to stay three nights. So I had had to change my rail ticket at this late point, and of course the seats were now more expensive. On the other hand, this was more than compensated for by not having two days to spend money in Paris. I decided I simply wouldn't visit my Paris friend, neither the following week nor ever. Malcolm would be merely tolerated, unaware of the e-mail I had received. The friend in question had been driving the car from Jaca to the French border after four days in Upper Aragón, when the Royal Hispanic Fascistas pulled us in and issued a spot fine of €100 because I, the passenger, had not attached my seat-belt. So we had a significant past. The two events of the day made me realise that I had had enough of unreliable men. How many times had I fetched people from airports, brought them back, given them scenic and megalithic tours, paid for air-fares ? Dozens! Now here I was, seventy-one years old, having failed to hitch-hike out of Capdenac, and my younger host refusing to come and pick me up or offer a helpful suggestion. Seventy-one years old, having enjoyed only two or three sensual relationships in that time - the best one with a teaching-woman with delightfully-small breasts. Maybe Jean-Michel couldn't (or could no longer) drive, and was ashamed to say so. People are amazingly unforthcoming about what they think might be a defect. I have no problem about declaring my hearing loss and cataracts, my Benign Nocturnal Polyuria, and my inability to kick a football in the direction intended. The train-journey back to Lexos was through the night, nothing to see beyond the window but the occasional station platform. We passed Najac in the dark, with its wonderful, still-inhabited 13th century castle, built by a count of Toulouse-and-Rouergue on a lofty crag above the river, unglimpsed. This castle stands in contrast to the ruins (also on crags) of castles destroyed by the land-grabbing Northern Catholics during the horrible 'Albigensian Crusade'. Some of them went on to "reconquer" Spain from the Moors, grab land, and enslave peasants there. They became Hidalgos.
I drove from Lexos station the few starry miles to Saint-Antonin. The little-used road with glinting verges was perfectly navigable. I boiled pink potatoes and ate them with soft St-Félicien cheese and a mixed (locally-grown, of course, and utterly-delicious) salad. I opened a bottle of nice cold champagney Saumur. Then I went to the computer. There was an e-mail from my would-have-been host saying that he had tried to call me back on my cell-phone. I had spelled out the number in my last message to him, but either he was lying or he chose not hear the 00-44 at the beginning, indicating that it was a UK number. (Being French, and rich, he may have balked at the extra cost of calling.) I then removed myself from the gay contact sites. I had been far too long - thirty foolish years - on my single, circular, addictive and false track. It had taken a casual piece of mistaken advice on a train to bring me to my senses. A wrong instruction in any context can change - or indeed, in adverse circumstances, can cost you - your life. On sending him a draft of this my non-gay but polymorphously-perverse friend Stuart wrote back, echoing Sophocles::
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