Free Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser Page A

their opinion of the French. The hostel had only two long rooms for sleeping. Daniel and Alissa had spread the contents of their packs in the first room to show how things stood. At midnight, Alissa, one of those girls with emphatic eyes, was ready to go to bed, but Daniel and Kelly were on to politics. Every time Kelly used her Swiss Army knife or a tube of mayonnaise to designate injustice—“Say this is Gaza here, right?”—Piotr’s gaze rested on whatever she had touched. So Alissa was driven back on the Belgian. His face was a wedge of cheese, but Alissa was determined now to stay and fascinate. She undid the knot of her hair, releasing a torrent of light, and saw herself at thirty: rare, mysterious, wrapped in a cloak, the latest door softly closing behind her on the sound of masculine tears. She spoke a confident French sprinkled with literally translated idioms and didn’t hesitate now to confess to itchy feet: “J’ai les pieds qui grattent.” She meant it kindly, as a warning: Do not imagine your devotion can conquer my need for freedom. “Un eczéma?” suggested the Belgian. He moved smoothly into the first of his long, bitter tales about a race called the Ongleesh.
    In fine, cold rain, Laura and Masuko walked the two kilometers to the nearest bus stop. The new day was still black; they hadn’t bothered with bed. Their flashlights went ahead, pausing on coiled dog turds colored a bold orange. Masuko, considerably widened by her backpack, sported a beret and a perm. In Japan, curly hair designated a free spirit, Laura learned. She, too, wore an angled beret. There was nothing more useful to the French, marking the tourist below. An architecture student, Masuko was on her way to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Why not go there together? she proposed. She held strong opinions on subjects that rarely crossed Laura’s mind, declaring, “I hate the revolution of 1848” and “Upholstery was put on earth by enemy aliens.” Now, “The only tolerable utopia is a shabby one,” she flung into the first stirrings of dawn. The idea of a shabby utopia almost persuaded Laura, but she didn’t want to double back to Marseille. Also, she was on a pilgrimage of her own. In the bakery opposite the bus stop, the young women bought warm, greasy pains au chocolat, and Laura Fraser, stuffing her face, showed the paperback she carried in her coat. She wanted to visit Saint-Jean-de-Luz because Patrick White had written one novel in the town and drawn on it for another. Masuko had never heard of White or The Aunt’s Story, but remarked, as they boarded the bus, that she had no time at all for Mishima: “A very arrogant man.” At the station, they waved from opposite platforms. Encouragement, regret and undying friendship can only be expressed for so long in mime; it was a relief when Laura’s train pulled in. Travel was only really tolerable when solitary. Two was a group barricaded behind we. It offered conversation and someone to blame for disappointments, but the dream of transcending tourism wasn’t available—there was always another foreigner in a foolish hat.
      
    A magical morning in Madrid brought the white annihilation of snow. The olives were wonderful, purple and full-flavored. But in a bar all the profiles were Picassos, the line of the forehead continuous with the bridge of the nose. Fairy-light-entwined among the bottles, the Virgin’s plaster robe shone Aryan blue. Laura left without ordering, and from every radio along the street, Madonna II declared that it was just like a prayer; a song that had pursued Laura across the globe, fanning out from the bus station in Tamil Nadu where it had first emerged in tinsel tinkles from someone else’s Walkman.
    She escaped to Cintra, where her passport was pinched on a Romantic stair. The upset this caused was undeniable. Laura remembered France, her solitary plats du jour in out-of-season cafes where there were always postcards fading to yellow