Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [16]
Across the road is the surgery to which Freddy was carried by his father when he fell off his bike, where an old-lady doctor with chopped-off white hair put three prickly black stitches in his chin and called him a “brave handsome Yankee lad”—giving him, he realizes now, not only an encomium but an identity. The name on the brass plate is unfamiliar, but the heavy door with its stained-glass panel of haloed tomatoes is intact, and still seems to be a sign that this house is a kind of church—though now he knows the glass to be Art Nouveau and the holy tomatoes pomegranates. For a few hundred feet along one road in Kensington, Fred’s senses and his sensibility function supernormally; everywhere else London remains cold, dim, flat, and flavorless.
He doesn’t blame his inability to have an authentic experience of the city entirely on the loss of Roo. Partly he attributes it to tourist disorientation; he has noticed the same reaction in other Americans who have recently arrived, and back home he has seen it in friends and relatives returned from abroad. The main problem is, he thinks, that visitors to a foreign country are allowed the full use of only two of their five senses. Sight is permitted—hence the term “sightseeing.” The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event, a proof that you were “really there.”
But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks—plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Even in Britain, accent, intonation, and vocabulary are often unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear, and they speak mostly to functionaries. The sense of smell still operates; but it is likely to be baffled or disgusted by many foreign odors. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible Keep Off signs appear on almost everything and everyone.
Two senses aren’t enough for contact with the world, and as a result places visited as a tourist tend to be experienced as blurry silent areas spotted with flashes of light. A window box bursting with purple-veined white crocuses; the shouting, anger-gorged red face of a taxi driver; a handful of hot fish-and-chips wrapped in the News of the World—these rare moments of sensation stand out in Fred’s memory of the past month like colored snapshots against the gray blotting-paper of an old photograph album. Appropriately—for what tourists take home are, typically, snapshots.
Tourists also bring back special meretricious objects called “souvenirs”—which as the word suggests are not so much actual things as embodied memories; and like all memories somewhat exaggerated and distorted. Souvenirs have little in common with anything actually made for and used by the natives—who’s ever seen a real Greek woman in a headscarf bordered by fake tinny gold coins, or a French fisherman wearing the kind of Authentic Fisherman’s Smock sold in tourist shops? But these false symbolic objects are meant to indemnify the tourist for having been, for weeks or months, cut off from an authentic experience of the world, from physical contact with other human beings—
Yeh, that’s where it’s at. If Roo were here, he wouldn’t be having these theories, probably. His state of mind is unnatural, the grayness of London projection. What he probably ought to do is find someone who would not replace Roo or make him forget her—that’s impossible—but distract him and warm him.
Preceded by a rush of chilly air, a hollow roar, the inbound Underground train arrives. It is more than half empty, for it’s after six in the evening and most travelers are on their way home to the suburbs. Several of the people in the car glance with interest at Fred as he sits down. Directly across from him a pretty young woman in a dark-green wool cape gives him a