Being a foreigner almost by profession...
Alberto Manguel




The bus was full of business suits and school uniforms, but a scattering of shopping bags defined for Suzanne the time of day, and she sat comfortably in the back as if she had been riding Mediterranean buses for ever, for all her indefinable years. She held a yellow ticket by its ear and fanned her face - she knew very ineffectually - with its wilting length. Everyone on the bus was fanning with something. Newspapers crackled, unread. A large rattan fan, shaped like a stiff flag, wagged in front of the leathery face of a thin rigid woman, tough from a fourth decade of summers.
       A light blue folded handkerchief wobbled to the left. Suzanne squeezed herself into a hotter, tighter bundle as a large woman whoomped down on the empty half of her seat, and turned to smile welcomingly as she had seen others do. She was rewarded with a stream of muttered words, more like prayers than conversation: a stream of rhetoric not needing answers, she hoped and nodded, and the large woman presently crossed herself heartily. Had they passed a shrine?
       The bus jolted into a lurching movement and most of the passengers crossed themselves. Suzanne fanned herself more energetically, and found herself counting stops. Thirteen to her destination, an unsure one, since there were no bus routes marked on the map and the catacombs seemed to be the least popular on the index, being placed last and out of the quasi-alphabetical list.

       Although everyone on the bus was engaged in some conversation or other, it seemed a quiet ride. Politeness was apparently a national custom. Men with briefcases rose to accommodate hefty women in their places. Children with school badges stood in the aisle when adults had filled the seats. The bus driver actually looked round to check that everyone was seated, or at least wedged or anchored in some way, before he lurched off at every stop, even though he frowned at having to give change for notes.
       Much later, in the dark luxury of her small but spotless pensione room, where the beautiful threadbare upholstery of the velvet armchair matched the green stripe in the bedspread, she spoke into an old Bakelite telephone receiver. She heard the disembodied voice of Charles, and had to stave off again the questions about her return.
       He never said, 'But you will come back, wont you?' because he must have known the reply she had rehearsed would be totally non-responsive. He did not say, 'We are to expect you for Easter, then,' because she would have given a negative answer to anything he asked.
       She ordered a cheese omelette and endive salad from room service, which she knew only foreigners did, and enjoyed a totally silent evening watching distant, silent fireworks in the summer night sky over a bay where grey flat-roofed houses crowded around a tideless sea.
       Canberra seemed very far away now; The Carillon, Lake Burley Griffin or Lake Bee-Gee, as she had always called it, and the curly roads so mystifying to foreigners all felt now to belong to a holiday experience rather than a home town where she had lived for over ten years. 'A Comprehensive Tax and Excise Guide for Foreigners' lay on the bed, open in the middle, its spine pointing away from the lamp. In the circle of yellow, Suzanne shared the light with the book and her discarded bra. Its pink taffeta shone with a newness that matched its mate, a pair of slinky briefs she still wore as she lounged back on the flat bedspread. The department store where she had shopped for lingerie had been crowded with tourists: she had felt absurdly foreign, trying and shedding skimpy designer garments in a stifling booth where nudity was commonplace.
       The overstuffed mattress was unusually comfortable, the water from the bathroom taps very hot, and the food delicious, in this pensione whose owners retreated, faded into the old but tasteful wallpaper every time she walked past reception. They muttered something like Bon giorno and she always nodded animatedly in reply.
       Her hand reached for the telephone then withdrew. She would have to put something on before she rang. 'You sound naked,' Charles had said once, when she was speaking from a hotel in New Zealand and he had asked what she was wearing. On that occasion she had felt a complete foreigner even among other members of the package tour, but had extended her visit by over a fortnight, perhaps for that very reason.
       She drew on a robe and dialled numbers; changed her mind before the last two, putting down the heavy receiver. Pulling her long straight hair into a ponytail with her only remaining rubber band, she shrugged off the robe and applied a careful coat of cream to her face and neck. Her skin was yellow from the diffusion the yellow lamp emitted around the bed. As she sat across one of its corners, the springs sang loudly and she changed that seat quickly for the stool. It was cold and silky.
       'I would like a cold beer and a bowl of ice,' she said slowly, with unaccented well-rehearsed words, but not in the language of the man on the other end of the wire. The tray arrived almost immediately, and she had to belt her robe rather fast. The young waiter was all brown eyes and no smile, and his solemn movements forced her to attempt a few more words she had memorised.
       'I speak English,' he said, equally correctly.
       'So you do,' she replied politely.
       His eyes rested on the bed, the pink bra, then her robe. 'Perlera,' he said. 'That's a very unusual name, even for a foreigner.'

       He tongued his Rs very lightly, which was very unusual for a foreigner, she thought, but said, 'I come from an unusual family.'
       'Oh yes?' He seemed prepared to spend some time in curious conversation, when all she wanted was for him to go. He spoke again, this time in his tongue, and the words were nothing she could remember from the phrasebook. She looked up, trying not to look apprehensive or threatened. Charles would tell her she had asked for trouble. She thought it was a bizarre time to think of Charles, but she always thought about him.
       The young room service waiter smiled at her tilted face and mumbled something in English she thought was, 'I am off duty now,' but he stepped backward and opened the door expertly behind his back, without looking, and was gone before she could devise words to send him away.
       Melbourne had been much the same: three years in that uncomfortable city and she still had to ask her way around after she had left the sanctuary of Queen and Bourke, Elisabeth and Collins. In the suburbs she had entered many a coffee shop or milk bar to be told foreigners always found things confusing. Her unaccented speech provoked questions, her untanned skin sideways glances. She bought postcards and calendars and was told to enjoy the holiday. Charles was never mistaken for anything else but a fourth generation farmer, which he was.
       Living in the country had been easiest of all. That was where people asked least questions, in spite of the gaping distance she felt existed between them and her. She grew tomatoes and zucchini ably and distributed her glut in boxes of home-bottled chutney, receiving gratitude, smiles and acceptance. A Greek petrol-station owner once reminded her of an unshared but strangely familiar history when he consciously pulled her into his ethnic ring by saying they would always be foreigners because of their surnames, and she wondered how he knew hers until she remembered her bank card, which he thumbed easily into the pay machine.
       After another shower, whilst patting powder over her thighs in an absentminded way she had cultivated almost on purpose, she was starting to wish she had spoken more nicely to the young waiter, when the telephone rang. Well into the conversation, her eyes fixed steadily on the stream of traffic in the street far below, she realised she had not put her robe back on this time. Perhaps nakedness was discernible over the phone, but she did not care. What she held in her artificial voice as she spoke to the pensione owner was pragmatic rather than lustful. She was beginning to wish for company.
Museums were notorious in her circle for absorbing her for afternoons at a time, and she had felt a stranger with friends more than once. When even Emily had refused to join her at the National Art Gallery or the War Memorial, it was plain she was being cut. Here, in this strange hot country where all men eyed her curiously, she was being eyed and silently desired.
       An afternoon at the Ossuary spat her dazed and myopic onto darkening streets. Her hotel drew her. She craved conversation, craved silent companionship: craved something not exactly clear as she rang for beer that evening at almost the identical time as previously. Even though she had a glass of wine with dinner and was still conscious of its effect. Perhaps she wanted to dizzy herself with something other than loneliness. Or was it the risk she was taking that induced light-headedness? She staged her appearance and position carefully.
       He knocked on the door very lightly and she saw his eyes go immediately to the bed where her bra had lain the night before. He deftly pulled the door to behind him. 'The beer,'he said in his own language, and she nodded.
She was fully dressed for the street but felt vulnerable and foolish as she signed the chit. 'Are you off-duty now?'
       'Meet me at the wine bar on the curved avenue,' he mumbled as an answer, and she almost gasped at this confidence, this affront, this knowledge of her mind, even if the thought had naturally visited the margins of her intention, like a stranger.
       He did not wait for either nodded assent or verbal answer, but glided out and she immediately regretted again not having voiced a sentence of assurance. She got out of her formal clothes very swiftly and slipped on a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved silky jumper, a heavy silver bracelet, leaving off the bra. Her hair was knotted quickly into a loose knot on the top of her head.
       Suzanne had to ask the way to the curved avenue he mentioned, and got lost twice. Finally she found the obscure wine bar where he appeared immediately, touched her arm and presented her with a stemmed glass of something thick and red. There was no conversation in the hubbub of a crowd among which she found herself conspicuous, faded, and far too blonde. He drank intently, looking at her sideways without smiling, and she felt a fool with a grotesque permanent smile. He looked at her jeans.
       His room was surprisingly large and bare, and surprisingly untidy, since he must have planned to take her there. But the sheets were stiff and new. There was a bottle of expensive sauterne sticking out of a bucket of half melted ice on the floor. It was a blue plastic bucket with a price label still sticking to its side. Its blue startled her and delayed her attempt at conversation. Undecided whether it was embarrassment or lust, she held a swelling in her throat like a marble.
       He spoke in English to her, leading her to the great bed where thin pillows had been arranged side by side in a parody of marriage.
       Perhaps he has brought many foreign women here. Her thoughts came from another head: a stranger's.
       As if he had seen her thought in a word bubble over her head, he said, 'I love blonde ladies. You are very fair, very light and beautiful, and I can see into your eyes.'
      Not too naive not to recognise the flattery of a quick courtship, she accepted it silently. At least he did not pretend she was the first and only tourist he had seduced.
       He was brisk and expert, fondling her and listening for sighs of pleasure, which she found hard to contain. She stopped trying very soon, and let go of artifice, shouting her pleasure at his walls with a voice she recognised very well. Then she slept there exhausted, in spite of her earlier resolution to return to the pensione in good time to write letters. He was probably back at his shift when she left his empty room very early in the morning, feeling a voyeuse in the bustling unfamiliar streets, where vegetable vendors and patissiers eyed her knowingly as she side-stepped them like a new immigrant on an initial exploration.
       'Yes, another fortnight,'she said into the black telephone. Charles was a disembodied croak whose protestations she did not ingest. She very nearly spoke to him in the language that had floated around her like a mosquito cloud for more than three months, but let him finish and repeated something vague she had said earlier. Her pink bra was on the flat tightly made-up bed, and she looked at it as she re-cradled the receiver.
       She wondered if the swarthy waiter would be at the wine bar again that night, and although her feet ached from a long walk among ancient ruins in the morning, where she had joined the ranks of an American group to listen to the guide, she sauntered self-consciously down the curved avenue.
       At the corner, she could not remember which way to turn, or bring herself to think whether she would turn that way if she knew. But he was across the street. Like a beguiling souvenir seller, he was standing at a clever distance, watching her from the opposite corner, and he was smoking.
       'These are very unusual,'he said later, holding up white knickers with a single finger.
       'We call them French.'
       He laughed, but his eyes were averted. It was intentional that he did not approach her more warmly. 'I don't know about these foreign things.'His voice was smooth and brown. It was an attempt at irony she recognised well, so she returned sleek caresses equally expertly. Somewhere close by, a brass band struck up and she missed a rhythm she once thought she would never mis-time.

 
The airport bus was crowded with rudeness and distress, a form of panic she had learnt to read early in her travels, her seeking of difference, of novelty. Hand luggage was a tangle of hurry, the driver anonymous and predictably female. Caught in a wrestle, she tried a glance at her wrist watch and found she was on time, but the gabble of foreigners irritated her, and she thought of Charles. His body, after an absence of four months, would feel like a stranger's. And that - after all - was what she craved.

**