August 2014 – Kathryn Amonett

Letter to a lecturer.

August 25, 2014
Bratislava

Well R, it was fairly abysmal, your Cuban bar…

Still, the cigar was a perfect pleasure (exquisite, and leaves one unsatisfied) and the rum was impeccable. I let the bartender choose it for me. Nothing quite satisfies their sense of pride than a customer deferring to his/her superior taste and you, seasoned drinking vagabond, must know the benefit of having the bartender like you. Perhaps that is manipulative; perhaps it’s just common sense (it was a lovely choice and I wouldn’t have picked it myself). In any case, it’s the sort of thing that earns me my first, and oftentimes only, ally in a place. Something I take into consideration as a solo traveller.

Speaking of solo travel, I’m reminded of an instance, the latest in a not inconsiderable history of them. Early in the evening, long before sunset, as I was writing and drinking my vino tinto, two men who had taken the table next to me said something in Slovakian as I walked (hobbled) back to my seat. I said I didn’t understand and so they asked in English were I was from (the obligatory first question). The next question was, as it invariably is…

“You are travelling alone?”

Let me properly restate that.

“You are travelling alone?”

To me, this goes without saying; I travel alone as a rule.

“Yyyyep.”

“Really? A beautiful woman, travelling by herself?”

(Even plain ladies are beautiful to lonely men).

Perhaps there is a correct response to this dubious sort of compliment, but after years of wandering, I still don’t know what it is. My own replies tend to oscillate between the bland and the acerbic. The easiest question to deal with is, “You have a boyfriend?”

I’ve found the best answer is, “Oh yeah. Several.”

Either they don’t believe me and think (correctly) I am trying to put them off, which is just as well. Mission accomplished. Or they think I am taken and they stop their advances. (Annoying that only belonging to someone else gets them to stop, but if it works, it works.) Or they are disgusted by my polyamorous ways and are no longer interested.

Or I can answer “no,” but that brings on yet more insulting surprise and unwanted interest.

Why the astonishment that a woman should travel alone?

I ask you, Richard Gwyn, in all your years of vagabondage, did you ever get the incredulous interrogative, “You’re travelling alone?”

If you have, then I’m satisfied. If not… I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for a feminist rant (what joy is yours).

Why should it matter that a woman, beautiful or not, travels alone?

Actually, let’s skip the rant and treat that as a genuine question. You must have met dozens of female travellers in your wanders; why is the woman traveller exoticised (and eroticised)? Is it because she is seen as being out of context? But a male traveller is simply a man exercising his freedom to go where he chooses?

Perhaps it is unfair to make that distinction. Literature shows that the male traveller can be romanticised (by himself if no one else). And I suppose he can be sexualised, in a byronic way.

(Book recommendations, fiction and other, on how narratives of the male traveller differs from the female are welcome. And while we’re at it, add to that any examples of byronic heroines that you can think. Sadly, I come up with nothing and I feel a fresh research project approaching.)

I think that being a woman traveller encompasses no more or less risk or appeal than simply being a woman… wherever she may be. Though it means being stigmatised as a ‘foreigner’ even in the country of your own birth. (Alistair Reid, and all that. Does he mention sexualisation of the foreigner in Whereabouts?) Is there something inherently ‘flingsome’ that suggests itself upon encountering a solo traveller? Is that it? Because that has been my (and many women’s) experience. The reaction to the female traveller ranges from confusion, to sexual interest, to mistrust, often all three at once, especially the more religious countries (no matter which religion). Does this apply to male travellers as well? And let us simplify the matter by not involving political suspicion of solo travellers, because we can both attest that political suspicion can hinder travellers of either gender. I mean on a social level. Did your travelling alone consistently baffle those you met? Did they question your decision to be where you were? Or was there acceptance?

Though I imagine that being a vagabond has its own social stigmatism separate from being a foreigner. Perhaps indigence and vagrancy widens the gap too much to fruitfully compare experiences.

But given the lack of understanding of the female foreigner, I might argue: Viajar sola es más solo que solo.

To travel alone as a woman is more isolating than to travel alone as a man.

There. You have more pages of this moleskin than necessary, but that is beside the point. I must end this letter. My penmanship has become atrocious.

(And I have a pretty new subscribe feature there on the the top right. Just enter your email address.)

August 2nd

Dear Sean,

“In the time when the coffeehouses of Budapest were differentiated not by their price lists, their coffee, and their cold meats, but exclusively by their “literary” tendencies, he too used to sit with his pale face in the baroque gallery of the New York like a faint but ever more brilliant star in the literary firmament.”

It’s a quote from Kornél Esti by Dezsó Kostelyáni. I think I mentioned it in the last letter. It’s what got me excited to go to this writerly place. But of course, it’s not a writerly place anymore.

Kostelyáni’s Budapest is not today’s Budapest, Hemingway’s Paris is not today’s Paris. The literary haunts have vanished. The days of the writers’ places are over, writing places gone.

Or should I say, writer places have gone. Any place is a writing place. Any café, park, bar, tree stump will do, obviously. But places like The New York have lost their literariness. The New York (in the Erzébet Ring Road) used to be a haunt of writers and artists so that not only did it cater specially for the impecunious tastes of its literary clientele, it also provided paper, pens and ink. A “dog’s tongue” (kutantelv) was a piece of paper one could order for a writerly jot.

A special cheap dish of cold meats for writers called The irótál, “writer’s plate,” was a specialty of the New York, an inexpensive plate of cold meats, salami, cheese, etc, served only to writers. The kis-iro-dalmi, “small literary” was a reduced version for the even less well off.

It’s no longer on the menu, and so far I haven’t yet dare try to order it. The place is completely posh now, retaining its fin de siècle grandiosity but using it as an excuse to overcharge its almost exclusively foreign visitors, among whom I must count myself.

Still, I go there often enough, get a seat near as I can to the pianist and eat my expensive but filling bread and goulash. (I don’t eat for the rest of the day, partly because I don’t feel hungry, also because I can’t afford to.)

This is rampaging and misplaced sentimentality, I know. I need to find a new shabby corner of Budapest that will serve me soup for a quarter of the price that won’t charge me three euro just for sitting down, where I can sit and read Hungarian poetry (or write about reading Hungarian poets) and have a more legitimate experience. Fortunately, I seem to run into students of Hungarian literature. My first day back in Budapest I met a guy studying Hungarian literature and philosophy at the University. I didn’t know he was studying it at the time, he was just one of the solicitous citizens, determined to feel sorry for me about the leg, but the following day the truth came out and it will help me with my research… which is less and less to do with my portfolio and more for my personal treasure trove of knowledge.

10,000 words. I shall have to start all over, I think. I tell myself I’ll begin as soon as I’ve got my apartment. We’ll see if that’s so, or if I’ll find a new excuse to put it off.

And turns out, I’m not as depressed as I hoped I’d be here. I’m quite mobile and have been reading about a book a day. My goodness, Embers (the title translated from the Hungarian word for when a candle has burned down to the very bottom) by Maira Sandor is going on the list of Favourite Books of All Time. And I am not even going to bother recommending it to you, or probably to any one. I shall greedily keep it to myself. Also, I don’t feel like it has much universal appeal. Two old men, former best friends, meeting after 41 years of being apart, discussing what happened that last night they saw each other, the day of a hunt. I don’t know, to me it reads like some dark fairy story. It has hints of DuMaurier, in that much of the book is visiting the past.

August 11,

Many many days since I’ve written, not just to you, but anything. For a while I as simply absorbed in the reading of Hungarian classics (by the way, I’ve bought 15 new volumes, one is such an enormous hardback anthology of modern poetry I’ll have to buy a new case just to transport it and the rest), then after that I spent many days stuck to my computer, absorbed in the news and growing more and more despondent. I spoke to mother about how useless I am, that, had I stuck with my earlier 2009 plan of studying migration and refugee studies of Africa and the Middle East, I might very well be doing something useful by now. But I’m not. I’m vagabonding around Eastern Europe, being completely self-indulgent. It’s a blow to hear that a former home is being marched on. Of course, it’s nothing to what those living there are going through, but I feel so helpless and useless.

About a week I did nothing but read, begging pardon for the unfair adjective, trashy novels about Napoleonic dragons and fantasy queens and girl assassins and watch the latest batman trilogy all in one go.

Pulled myself slowly out of it. Today I’m back to Hungarian classics, and even, wonder of wonders miracle of miracles, I even started (started) my portfolio which is due in exactly a month from today.

In a little red moleskin (I’ve had to buy more since coming here) I’ve pencilled in questions to put to our mother when I see her next. One of them is, will you tell me, when the time comes, what it’s like to see your own child go grey? I am sitting on the upper floor of a café just off Andrassy street. It’s summer and (as heat rises) no one else is up here but me. Down below at one of the tables outside though is a pair drinking espresso. A man and a woman. The woman is older, her hair gone white and she’s balding at the top (something I feel a bit bad about because I probably would never have noticed such a rude thing were it not for my particular vantage). The man’s hair is a pretty steel grey on top of a darker black. He still has some rosiness to his cheeks, a healthy tan to his skin which doesn’t at all sag from his face or arms. My imagination has no trouble picturing what an adorable little boy he must have been once. Mid forties now, I’m guessing, but I’ve always been rotten at determining people’s ages, so that says nothing.

(I snapped a candid photo, but felt guilty at the thought of sharing it, or even having these strangers on my camera and computer, so I deleted it.)

Have you any grey hairs? I’ve never noticed or looked. Does our sister? One’s never likely to notice, she keeps her hair covered most of the time. I think my hair would look rather nice with silver in. Silver and gold.

But what is it like, to watch your own child go grey, I wonder. I never asked Grandmamma, but perhaps she and mother talked about it. I hope so.

They are still out there, the pair of greys. I have no way of knowing if it is mother and son, but the sight of them did make me wonder.

Kellan was in my dream last night. An SUV had pulled up and I knew that I had to get in, that I had to leave and likely not come back, but I stayed outside, making the SUV wait, which it did. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for, but when my nephew came toddling up (his mother was not in sight, just the boy) I knelt in the grass and gave him a big hug, then went off to whatever duty that suburban represented.

I don’t hold much stock in the interpretation and analysis of dreams (as a few nights before I dreamt of duelling in shark tank), but I thought it was rather fine of me, to wait to say a final goodbye to Kellan first.

ARGH! No more letter writing! I need to work on the dissertation, because I’m actually starting to worry. I give myself 2 weeks to get a rough. A few days after that for editing, before I send it to my tutrix, see what she thinks.

Over and out.

P.S. The view from my room