She deadens herself. This self, this self not yet formed. What damaging effect can that have, that ability to vacate the premises?
With a moan, he lies down on top of her.
It as if they had destroyed beforehand the words with which one might grasp them.
— Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Ruth grits her teeth at the tourists who cannot read the Please Stand On Your Right sign posted above the escalator. It is morning rush hour. She is late. Again. She has overslept. Again. Is she conscious of these tiny insurrections of the self? Her train roars past downstairs.
Excuse me! Excuse me! She pipes up to the crowd of Germans in front of her, cameras swinging like oversized medallions. They either don’t hear or don’t understand or don’t care. She grows more and more furious with every plea. But the Excuse me! comes out the same, high-pitched, fluttering, lost in the air. She does not push herself down the escalator, like she has seen Londoners do.
She misses the whish of the doors of the next train. Business suits dive inside like clowns. A briefcase, hand, tie, knee almost get caught in the door. Ruth gasps. She waits for the next train, the next train, the next, the next. All full.
Finally she catches one that is almost completely empty, like a phantom train. Except for two men in long robes across from her. They are praying hunched over a book. The one with the olive skullcap has muddy sneakers with laces pricked up like elephant ears. The one with the black skullcap bends over his shiny wingtips.
She looks out the window and sees herself reflected in the darkness. She automatically smiles at herself.
Late for work. Again. The terrible girls roll their eyes at each other as she races in, having sprinted from the tube stop, cheeks flushed, head down, muttering inarticulate apologies.
She rushes downstairs towards the locker room. Where’s the fire? Slow down. She can’t. She is always late, late, late. She must pass by the luggage department to go to the locker room. He is behind the desk, leaning back, like he has nothing to do. The boy with the enflamed face. He waves at her as she passes, a lightning bolt, as if he had been expecting her. She waves back.
Once she has stored her belongings in her locker (she just throws them in there, she has forgotten the combination on her lock), she approaches him. She points at herself by way of introduction. Ruth. His red head bobs up and down gently. Rhys. Rhys that’s a nice name where is that from. I’m from Wales. Wow. She says. She doesn’t know why she says that. She doesn’t really know where Wales is. She thinks it’s near Scotland. You’re a temp right? Rhys asks. That’s right. Me too.
Just then the horrible head strolls past them, as if he had been looking for her. His thick leather face frowns.
Well, I’m being beckoned. Sorry. (Why is she always apologizing?) For some reason Ruth feels compelled to hold out her hand. He holds out his long bony hand and they shake. He is freckled all over, little brown spots confusing each other. Nice to meet you, Rhys, was it? A pleasure, Ruth. As if he already knew her name.
And then afterwards, all day, she takes with her a tiny flame of something, what it is, she does not know.
Rush hour. Heading home. Car so crowded everyone crushes up against each other. Smell of spearmint gum, beer, sweat, hairspray, warming chicken breasts collapsing in a plastic Sainsbury’s bag. A man is behind Ruth the entire ride home. He presses up against her. We are partners for the ride she thinks. I allow him to press up against me, to make room. It is almost curiously moving.
I’m afraid of everything—birds, storms, lifts, needles—and now, this great fear of death...
— Corinne Marchand in Agnès Varda’s
Cléo de 5 à 7
She has all of these questions she carries around with her she doesn’t know whom to ask. They are the questions of a child. Sometimes at night she sits up and thinks of these whys, like they are filling a page.
Why do people leave? Why are we here? What happens when we die? This is what she really wanted to know.
Where was her mother? Everyone fed her metaphors and lies. All the answers were excuses. She is with us now. Literally? No, not literally. She needed to know answers. Was her mother there? Actually watching after her? She needed to know.
How come when people talk of death or dying, they look up? she thinks. Like they’re hoping to find the belly of some traveling hotel? She thinks that perhaps people need to visualize something. It eases them to imagine heaven as a sort of extended holiday. She is beginning to think that people tell themselves fantasies.
But what is the alternative? she wonders. We are born, then we die. Nothing else? Nothing, nothing else?
Sometimes she needed to shudder out loud at night, a quick lunge of air, in recognition of her own mortality.
What do you think happens afterwards? she asks Agnes, who is dyeing her hair back to an orangey-red. The rickety white sink in her room had become permanently dyed with the black and red splotches of an abstract painting. Ruth is sitting on Agnes’ bed, smoking out the window. Smoking was something to do. Every time she struck a match she could imagine that first cell of terror forming until it grew and grew and became her. And still she kept smoking, filling up her chest until it felt tight.
What do you mean afterwards?
You know, when we die.
Oh I don’t know. Agnes has wrapped her hair in a towel and is now plucking her eyebrows.
How could you not think about it? What else is there to think about? Agnes shrugs.
To avoid thinking about anything they watch
Stage Door
. The boarding house of actresses remind them of their Hell, complete with terrible food, although the girls skirting the halls in their bathrobes are not imbued with the
bon mots
of Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn, in the roles of warring roommates.
Hepburn: I see that in addition to your other charms you have that insolence generated by an inferior upbringing.
Rogers: Fancy clothes, fancy language, and everything!
Hepburn: Unfortunately, I learned to speak English correctly.
Rogers: That won’t be much use to you here. We all talk Pig Latin.
(Afterwards)
Agnes (yawning): Aren’t you sick of this place? It’s such rubbish. I feel like I’m going to die here.
Ruth (looking about at the green walls closing in): It’s pretty terrible.
Agnes: I can’t believe we have a curfew. Or that we can’t let men into our rooms. It’s like we’re still in Victorian times.
Ruth: I can’t believe we have to turn in our keys when we leave. It’s like we’re living in a hotel.
Agnes: A hotel. A hotel! An institution with towel service! The women’s ward of Bedlam! (throwing herself on the bed with theatrics that would have made Hepburn proud).
So in December, Ruth moved with an insistent Agnes to the East End, into a shivering attic flat on Brick Lane above a curry restaurant. There was one large room in which they both slept, Agnes in the bed and Ruth on a mattress on the floor, a creaky bathroom with the sad absence of both a bathtub and hot water, and then a kitchen off to the side. Out of the kitchen window Ruth could watch men in shawls walk with canes down the cobbled street or stand outside their fruit stands and video stores, conversing with the evening rush. Bengali men stood outside the neon signs to beckon people into their restaurant, bartering over Londoners who had arrived already loud and inebriated in black mini-cabs. Ruth referred to them as the callers. Sometimes as Ruth walked home from work, a caller would keep pace with her, as she repeatedly shook her head no. No, she was not interested in having a lovely dinner tonight. No, she didn’t care if it was half-off. They were worse than the flierers in their persistence.
Many evenings Ruth had the flat to herself. Agnes usually out, somewhere. Sometimes Agnes would not come home until the next morning, when she would then try to interest Ruth in her stories of her snogging and shagging, which Ruth thought should be sounds zoo animals made.
In the evening when she would get home from work she sat on a stool by the windows and watched the goings-on like a film unfolding. Relaxing into the stoic pose of the observer. She would smoke and watch the world go by. She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.
I was never anything to you, was I? Nothing, nothing at all.
On Friday and Saturday nights sometimes fights would break out among the inebriated, and from her privileged distance she would watch the violent pantomime, their silver-haired landlord talking to the bobbies when they eventually arrived. Sometimes people would glance up and see her watching them. She appeared to be quite deep in thought, but actually she wasn’t thinking of much at all.
Sometimes her mind was completely vacant. Sometimes no one was at home. The only thing she could mourn was herself.
40 percent off, 50 percent off, Half Off Half Off.
40 percent, 50 percent, Half Off, Half Off, Half Off for you nice ladies tonight…
To live is to feel oneself lost.
— José Ortega y Gasset
Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection. Outgoing was much more preferable.
Usually they met up in central London, near Agnes’ work, teeming with rabble-rousers standing outside pubs beer in hand pouring down cobblestones occupying bored queues at cashpoints. Or they went to dark places in their new neighborhood, a complex web of alleys and streets Ruth had not yet tried to learn. Agnes could never understand why Ruth refused to go back to that pub with the bartender. That was the scene in which to be seen. You are terribly BIZ-arre Ruth, she would whine, but Ruth remained intractable.
Agnes needed to wash away the grind, the coffee grinds and molesting eyes of the masses (she preferred the molesting eyes of the select chosen few). Drinking was the best way to wash away CoffeegirlAgnes, who was different than AgnesAgnes. CoffegirlAgnes wore a different costume, it was a mandated uniform, which is such an insult to Agnes because Agnes is an individual. Ruth was the ear to Agnes’ steady stream of complaints as they pounded down the cobblestones.