Free Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

needed to check that it hadn’t been left behind, along with the starburst of joy, in the room with the exposed wiring and the single, cold-water tap. Recently she had dreamed of owning a chart, white lines on blue paper, with a telephone number at the bottom: 85148. All she had to do was to follow the diagram or, in the worst-case scenario, call the number. Then she would possess the city at last, its monuments and litter. Rome, like paradise, would gather her in.
      
    She was armed with a railway pass. The windows of meandering diretti framed towns and towers on rounded hills. They were teasingly familiar, touched with déjà vu. After a while, Laura realized that she was looking at the bland, pretty vistas with which the minor masters of the Quattrocento filled in their backgrounds. At any moment there would be a Crucifixion on a bald, middle-distant hill.
    La Spezia came, and the mincing sea that drowned Shelley.
    France brought Mediterranean ports and hotel rooms with a view of dank light wells where night arrived at half-past three. On the wall, turquoise roses as large as Frisbees bloomed on baleful trellises. Sometimes there was carpet there instead—the same brown moquette that exerted a squelching suction underfoot.
    The richly pink walls that in Rome had summoned berries now looked to Laura like boiled beetroot. It was just as well that along with a change of jeans and the sturdy merino jumpers of home, her backpack held a small library, even if the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere was opposed to books. A shuttered villa flanked by cypress candles might have been only hostile if it hadn’t called up the brittle modern heroines, bravely rouged, of doomed Katherine Mansfield. Laura could only envy their predicaments, the nerves that caused them to suffer and bound them to webs of human intrigue, as she grasped a paperback with woolly paws in a marble park. In every direction, leafless perspectives delivered lectures on fearful symmetry. The trees had been hacked about by someone who preferred statues. Trees and statues alike stood frozen in the wind that had set off in Russia and rushed straight down the Rhone Valley. Why did people in novels come to the south of France for winter? Laura lifted her eyes to the hills and found them blue with cold.
    Well muffled, she walked about the steep streets behind the seafront as the long evening descended, waiting for the hour when she might decently dine. Windows opening on to the street allowed her to catch the crash of cutlery or game-show laughter. She came to a square and looked up at the balconies, each with its crocheted iron. Here and there, where a lamp had been lit in the room behind, a tense chair showed or a mirror in a golden frame. But no one opened the glass doors and stepped out among the empty window boxes to say, “But who are you, mademoiselle? You simply must come up and join us!”
    In a sinister boulevard lined with bars and ugly shops, lonely North Africans hissed. Stranded in jackets, dreadfully checked, over shiny-kneed trousers, they lacked consequence. They might have been characters plucked from a story of family and politics and consigned to a footnote—even the jut of their cheekbones was mournful. At the going down of the sun they were to be observed gazing south from sea-view parks, restrained by balustrades from darkening water.
      
    When the youth hostels weren’t closed against winter, they were situated as far as possible from stations, shops, markets, bars, anything that might conceivably interest the young; a pension was in any case more Mansfield. But a fit of economy, backed by deep boredom with her own thoughts, drove Laura at last to a bunk in a dorm. During and long after dinner, she drank vin ordinaire with Daniel, Alissa, Masuko, Piotr, Kelly and a Belgian. Grievances and baguettes were sliced up and shared. Everyone had a story about trains that ran late or simply stopped between stations, and all were agreed in