Free Europa by Tim Parks

every being always exercises all the power he has at his disposal
, and the occasion for my quoting this portentous and unhappy credo was partly brought about by a decision taken last night by the German Bundesbank and partly by my finding myself next to the Avvocato Malerba in the queue at the till for the purchase of a
café au kit
and croissant at the Chambersee Service Station.
    We filed into the Chambersee Service Station, built as was to be expected in the ubiquitous Euro-architecture of curved cement-and-glass surfaces, with a generous bristle of flagpoles outside displaying the colours of every nationality the franchise-holders hope to take money from and inside a sense of disorientation generated by flights of steps and walkways and signs that are no longer in any language but just cups and knives-and-forks and wheelchairs and crossed-out dogs all presented in stylized white lines on plastic blue squares, and in fact the moment we’re through the steamy swing doors, heavy against the cold, almost all the girls, none of whom is wearing a skirt, follow the sign displaying a human figure distinguishable from another human figure precisely and exclusively because it is wearing a skirt, or dress, rather than trousers, reminding me of something I read not so long ago in
Corriere della Sera
where a woman contributing to one of those
deja vu
debates about the discrimination against the fairer sex inherent in the insufficient provision of lavatory facilities in public places remarked, against the swim of the debate, that as she saw it the queues outside ladies’ lavatories were really caused by the fact that women like to go to the loo together, and to chat there for a while, which again reminded me, though how this can be I don’t know (perhaps just the thought of the way women are with each other, something I have always been envious of), reminded me of a desire I frequently used to express to
her
, usually immediately after we had made love, that I myself would like so much to be a woman, just for a day, or a week, I would like to know what it feels like to be a woman, and this desire was, and sometimes is, a terribly real and intense desire and part of a sort of deep biological yearning of mine, a yearning to do and to be and to have everything. A yearning against mortality, I presume. Or ultimately, since life is distinction and choice, a death wish.
    When I mentioned this to
her
, she would always reply that I wanted to be a woman so that I could make love to a man. In a very profound part of myself I was homosexual, she said, and I should try to have an
avventura
sometime with a man as part of this voyage of self-discovery that I had embarked on with her, part of this quest for
a happy healthy sex life
, as she always put it which would make me a profoundly wiser more even-tempered understanding fellow. But I said no, no, I wanted to be a woman for a while, only a day perhaps, or not even, so that I could have sex with another woman, so that I could lose myself in femininity, be all woman licking woman and woman licked by woman, so that I could have sex with
her
, but she laughed at my excitement and said what a profoundly male and banal fantasy that was and in the end perhaps nothing more than retrospective jealousy because she had once said that the best sex in her life she had had with her Filipino cleaning girl
    With these ideas flashing through my mind as we entered the service station for our ten o’clock coffee stop, I was reminded again of my new thought of ten minutes ago, that
she
might be having a. lesbian affair with my daughter, and partly because I wanted to be reassured that this was not the case, and partly because in this way I would be able to see when the girl Nicoletta came out of the Ladies and thus to contrive to go and sit next to her for the coffee and croissant I planned to eat, I decided not to go up the stairs with Colin and Vikram and Georg in the direction of the stylized