The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Monique’s logic was that everything ought to be tried, and with an open mind; that way it can be dismissed afterwards with new insight and a good conscience. That went for everything; ideas, literature, music, food and drink. And me, I have thought with hindsight. For we were as different as can be imagined. Monique was the sweetest, most captivating girl I had ever met. She was bubbly and good-humoured, and so kind to everyone around her that all I could do was give up and accept the role of bad cop. She was so unaffected by her upper-class background, her matchless intelligence and almost irritatingly flawless beauty that you had no option but to like her in spite of it all. And when she looked at you, looked at you, then of course there was nothing for it but just to give up. Abandon all resistance and fall head over heels in love. She treated her many suitors with a sweet mixture of tactful consideration and mild rejection that made you feel that, behind her principle of trying everything there was something else, something that was natural and not principled. Monique was saving herself for the right man, she was a virgin not from conviction but by inclination.

With me it was the other way round. I despised my promiscuous inclinations but couldn’t resist them. Despite the fact that I was shy, creepy in the opinion of some, and with my rather rigid and stiff formality could seem more English than Greek, my appearance was obviously attractive to members of the opposite sex. English girls especially fell for what they called my Cat Stevens looks, meaning the dark curls and brown eyes. But in addition to that — and I think it was this more than my appearance that caused them to open both their hearts and bedroom doors to me — was the fact that I had the ability to listen. Or more accurately, I was interested in listening. For me, who lived and breathed for all stories save my own, it was no great sacrifice to listen to young women’s long monologues on privileged upbringings, the difficult relationship with Mother, doubts about their sexual orientation, the most recent unhappy love story, the flat in London she couldn’t use any more now that Father had installed his young lover there, fake dilemmas and those hideous backstabbing friends who had gone off to St-Tropez without telling her. Or else — if I was a little luckier — about the longing to commit suicide, the existential compulsive-obsessive thoughts and the secret ambitions to write. Afterwards many of them wanted to have sex with me, especially if I had hardly opened my mouth. It was as though silence always worked to my advantage, being interpreted in the most favourable way possible. But these sexual intermezzos did nothing to improve my self-confidence. On the contrary, they only heightened my self-contempt. These girls went to bed with me because my silence meant that they could imagine me in whatever way they wanted. I had everything to lose by revealing who I was; a shy whoremonger devoid of self-confidence, substance or spine, just a pair of brown eyes and long ears. And before long they noticed how my gloominess, my natural darkness, extinguished the light in the room so that they had to get out, away. I can’t blame them.

With Monique all that changed. I was changed. For example, I began to talk. From the moment we helped each other to drink that first nasty-tasting Guinness we had conversations, with the accent on we, and not those monologues I had grown used to. And the topics were different too. We talked about matters outside ourselves, like the self-preserving mechanisms of poverty, like the human belief that morality — meaning, in particular, one’s own morality — represented some kind of permanent quality. Or how we more or less consciously avoid learning anything that might upset our political and religious convictions. Books we’d read, we’d not read, ought to read because they were good. Or overrated. Or simply bad but useful.

In the degree to which we spoke of ourselves and our own lives, it was always related to the general, to an idea or a conception, to la condition humaine, as Monique called it, referring not to my own favourite French writer André Malraux but to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. We tossed these and other writers at each other not in any competitive sense but as a way of testing out one’s own original thinking on a person you trusted enough to dare to be mistaken, and to admit as much. The sparks could really fly, and it was after one such furious disagreement that she, late one night and after a few glasses of wine in her room, took a swipe at me, and then put her arms around me, and for the first time we kissed.

The following day she gave me an ultimatum. If I wouldn’t be her boyfriend then we couldn’t go on meeting. It wasn’t because she was desperate or in love with me, but because an arrangement such as that involved a mutual sexual exclusivity, something that was a non-negotiable demand for her, in that she was pathologically frightened of sexual diseases, so afraid, in fact, that there was a fair chance the fear would spoil and shorten her life sooner than any sexual disease. I laughed, she laughed, and I accepted her ultimatum.

It was Monique who introduced me to climbing. She had a father who from an early age would take her to classic modern sports climbing locations in Verdon and Céüse.