The Night City

“They move out of the house… so they can look back and see what’s true there” (Russel Banks)

I started dreaming about other places, whether it was on the internet with Sam, chatting to the occasional avid traveller, or experiencing my life through the frames of various writers and their voyaging narratives. I itched to outgrow my bookshelf. The 31st of October was Liz’s birthday, signalled her offer to stay in Cannes as her inexperienced translator.

My bags were packed, and the cab driver was waiting. Just outside the ferry boats pushed majestically on; the yachts were chiming in the sun, the children’s shrills floated intermittent on the wind. As the cab continued down narrow streets, my home enclosed itself, content with families, almost motionless to the bleeping world in front of me. I passed the mansions competing for harbour views, and the crude-oil silos, heaped on one side of the peninsula, leaking fumes into the air. I could see speed boats breaking waves over the oyster-caped rocks. I peered into leafier parts, scraggly, full of intruding weeds and eucalypts that held perilously onto the slope, some having collapsed into the green murky water. Planes left cirrus clouds scattered across the sky.

I had postcards stashed away in my diary from Sam for those vacuous hours between Sydney and Europe. His post-cards contained descriptions of the cicada singing landscapes of Spain, and the frustrations of his clumsy Spanish tongue. The last post-card he had sent was my favourite. Its cover featured a marine fort, looking over the port of Lisboa. Many an explorer must have stared over the same horizon, watching the sea breathe in the haze of a setting sun. I thought of his movements over this landscape. Was he amusing himself amongst the colour of the Spanish party scene? Was he still frustrated with the language and with the brats he had to teach in Badajoz? He couldn’t come and visit me because he was too poor, too disorganised, or, so I imagined, too much of an epic adventurer. I closed my diary, re-arranging its contents and drifted back to sleep.

My flight set down in London. I inhaled the old, musty air of the Heathrow terminal and the sound of Leonard Cohen. There were large Romanian men bickering over their passports who were held back at one of the security points. The labyrinth of escalators and tightly controlled security checks took me to a bus stop that would take me to the departure terminal for Cannes. A black woman, who’d been working for the United Nations on the Iraq war, and security investigations, sat next to me sharing interesting facts about the last American election. We were thrown around on the bus, looking out at the gloomy fog above. I was only barely listening, imagining a vivacious Cannes situated amongst the blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

I was meant to meet Liz at the terminal, but her plane left early. The epic journey now totalled twenty hours, and I wearily boarded the last plane. There was a girl who sat next to me who reminded me of Liz. She casually inquired to the Italo Calvino novel I was reading. She smiled at me meekly. His writing style amazed me, his narrative entanglements challenged my readership, but his mess frustrated me. It contained the clashing narratives of what Liz described as “the first postmodern novel”, which in its euphemistic irony enchanted me. She was my best friend, the feminist, the artist and the actor. She helped me to dream. I finished a chapter as the pilot announced our set down on Cannes:

“You certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voice, a second person plural, you are two tu-s, more separate and circumscribed than before.”

Italo was whispering in my ear as I looked outside my plane window, my vision blocked by the plane furrowing through clouds. The ships and yachts came into view soon to dock down on Cannes.

We lived a pretty stale life in Cannes, enjoying all the hospitality of restaurants, and stuffy English tourists, some of whom we later found out were con artists, trying to manipulate her family into a bogus business deal. Other than aesthetically, the centre of Cannes was a pretty horrible place, stuffed with money and overpriced boutiques. It was a hallowed-out cliché, with pictures of film celebrities lining the streets, a spectacle de la promenade. This attracted vulture-like upper class tourists and the rich French that clung to some 1920s version of the place. Either way, we both got plump on the dirt cheap rosé and the pasta dishes that remained from previous Italian occupancy. There was a charm hidden beneath Cannes, but it was winter. It soon got to a point where our beau couple status dulled the whole point of being on the other side of the world, our eyes tinged by the pink hue of the wine on our lips as we discussed our travel destinations.

We’d come back from a day just past the border of France, in a small village that boasted the greatest market in Northern Italy. It turned out to be full of imported goods, and clothes made of cheap synthetic materials. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying the local French company. Liz had been silent most of the day.
“I can’t act here. I can’t speak the language.” She’d locked herself in her room opposite, having one of her thespian tantrums.
“We’re on the other side of the world. It’s fucking brilliant!”
There was no answer. I slammed my door in frustration.

I left our apartment and figured it was time for some space. The light was fading prematurely, shadows being drawn by dusk. A little brown dog led me on my way through the complex of cobblestone streets, littered with the occasional video store, butcher, kebab shop or bakery until I came to the old part of Cannes. I climbed up and up, every building slowly gaining hundreds of years of age, until I reached the town church. There was an ancient oak grove here, where owls slept and made the occasional hooting noise and a huge statue of Mary with Jesus suckling on her breast surveyed the city below. There were a few benches that had young French people on them, drunk, kissing and tangled around each other. I looked over the whole place, which shone with its azure gleam. Large carnivorous gulls squawked with razor teeth on their beaks, picking at a dead pigeon on the road below. Craggy mountains bordered each side of the city and the brine-heavy air blocked the horizon, pushing the Mediterranean blue into focus. It all reduced out into stillness. My stomach churned with a strange sort of desire.

I woke the next morning with a broken message on my phone from Sam. “Something fell through in Madrid and I’m on my way to Barcelona. Meet me there on the 10th of January.” Liz was still locked away in her room, having slept close to a day. I was jumping around with excitement, relishing in the irony that he was from Adelaide and I, Sydney yet we were meeting in Spain after having shared a year of flirtations and correspondence on the internet. Liz packed her bags reticently. I wanted her to come, perhaps unfairly, as my shield against disaster. I was sure she’d come around. The seats were booked on the next train.

The train pulled into the long platforms of the Estación de Trenes Barcelona-Sants. Liz was asleep on a copy of Judi Dench’s biography until one last jolt of our cruddy seat woke her. There was a little excitement in her eyes as we alighted from the train. Above us sat a huge hull-like ceiling. Signs in Catalan directed us into tunnels leading up to Espana Square. There was a figure peering in the opposite direction dressed in a blue flannel shirt and tight black slacks looking around the square. He responded to my beckoning. He was what I’d imagined from online. Tall, blue eyes, with a well-defined face, rough with stubble. We hugged and exchanged stories on the way back to our youth hostel, hidden a few blocks away.

The night markets were in full swing. Sam and a few people from the hostel took us on our way down the stone black promenades of central Barcelona. It was lit with large shop-front displays that ran down little laneways, alive in a post new-year atmosphere. I watched the tall Catalan men with their blue-green eyes and darker hair, and the waiters from restaurants offering their saffron yellow bounty, paella. There were darker back streets that ran off these squares, empty, and funnelling a chilled breeze. I was ecstatic, a veritable tourist, occasionally brushing hands with Sam.

We were all soon drunk on sangria and cheap pizzas from a plaza that was, unawares to us, a price-trap for tourists. I felt Sam’s feet under the table playing with mine. I was a little heady, Liz getting up to go for a walk; to enjoy the “sights not the people”, putting it with an affectionate tone of sarcasm and jealousy. Sam and I wandered aimlessly, without a map into the periphery of the burgeoning night city.

A week passed and Liz slowly came to, making friends with the travellers in our youth hostel, telling me about the art galleries, and museums and the thriving club life that Barcelona offered. Yet I had become increasingly infatuated, and agitated, my blood thick. It contained no distraction for me. Sam had met other friends, but I’d convinced him to spend our last day together on our own amongst the works of the city’s most prominent architect, Antoni Gaudi.

Parque güell was sitting above Barcelona’s centre built into the foothills as a marker of Gaudi’s influence on the city, a relic from the early 1900s. Its large majestic towers curved, and bent in mosaic-tiled facades. Its quasi-extraterrestrial buildings seemed to fascinate me melding with my hankering mood - futuristic forms that were organic and bodily, ripe with ingenuity and design. The sun was soft on my skin, and Sam, off exploring the cavernous hulls that bulged out of the bedrock was noticeably distant. People were crowded on steps and rocky balconies enjoying the fine weather. The place seemed to glisten, whilst inside, my heart was thumping with the sensation of life, with a sort of alien pain. I found Sam, who was photographing a couple kissing behind a statue. A hand came to embrace me and lips to kiss me, but they didn’t settle. His presence continued on, distant and meandering down the other paths of the park. He was fascinated by the city, a traveller enthused.

Barcelona was quiet on this Tuesday night before our departure. People were emerging from their fiestas only for food to take home and cook. The streets were almost empty, except for the occasional group of sweepers. I was crying on Sam’s shoulder, drunk on cheap red wine. Passers-by stared at me with animosity as if they’d never seen a man cry, as if I were an unwanted guest. Sam just sat silently. He took me by the hand, back through the streets, wet with drizzle.

The next morning the city was bare, council workers pulling down the last lights of the new years celebrations. Liz and I were trundling our gear to the station ready for departure. My eyes were red with dark rings around them.

Liz looked at me with a knowing look, “You didn’t really live with the place”