Free Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse Page A

morale to care about the drips which fall onto my face as I try to sleep, drunk on cheap Algerian wine.
    I burn my old manuscripts in the stove to heat the room.
    I raise ortolan in cages in my room. The cleaner complains. But the small birds cheer me. They bring to my life that small pleasure sufficient to sustain my heavy heart; their chirping helps me push from my mind any contemplation of taking the Easy Way Out.
    I will enter them in the Aviculture Foire if they survive the winter uneaten, and live on the prizemoney.
    Thus is the tale of a person who tried to be a Man of Letters in Europe, who boasted of his Very Sophisticated French Friends, who once opened champagne bottles with a sword, and who ate grand lunches and dinners while a cruel recession reduced the fortunes of his friends.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Our HERO
feels that nothing worse
can HAPPEN , he finds that the
ortolans have managed to open
their cage and escape , leaving a
rather BITTER note; he is sued by
his Lacanian analyst for
WASTING her time; his luck
appears to have changed when
he is INVITED to be guest of
honour at a BANQUET but
upon arrival at the hall in
BORROWED costume and SASH of
the Order of St Nicolas he
finds that the banquet has been
mysteriously CANCELLED

    H ERE , IN the bleak whiteness of the European winter, curled up in the old farmhouse reading curious ancient tomes by candlelight, with the warm, steaming farm animals snorting and rooting in the barn, their elemental odours rising from the fermenting straw, the sheep huddled together in their fold, birds hungrily scratching in the barnyard, a maid blowing on her frostbitten hands as she hurries to join her companions in the warm servants’ cottage, a villager cutting branches for firewood and another driving his laden donkey, I lose track of time.
    Surrounded by hectares of virgin snow, I even lose track of the tracks.
    I have moved from the Quartier Maroc while remaining in reduced circumstances. I work on a pig farm now, as well as continuing to teach Minor Characters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus.
    At the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus I have been asked this year to teach a course in Traditional Masculinity.
    They say that it is because I am Australian.
    On the other hand, I think that it could be a huge joke on me. A hoax, one of the many I have had to endure at this intellectual cesspit. I said at the staff meeting that I rather thought of myself as being anarrogant, brittle, elegant, urbane male in the French manner of the court of the ancien régime , than in the style of the traditional Australian male.
    They raised their eyebrows with amused condescension.
    Anyhow, I teach colourful swearing, accurate spitting, nasal passage clearing by hawking-and-spitting, walking with your hands in your pockets (‘pocket billiards’), throwing knives at trees, opening beer bottles with your teeth, blowing your nose by closing one nostril with the pressure of a finger, whistling with the little fingers in the corners of the mouth, sly winks, hitting below the belt, contemptuous smoking, blowing smoke rings, wolf whistles, and how to cheat at poker.
    The course was proposed by the feminists on the staff. The feminists here fear that the women’s movement has succeeded too well and gone too far.
    They complain that the European men around the place are insipid and demoralised. French men try to use the feminine form in French as often as they use the masculine.
    They are always competing among themselves to put on the apron and do the washing up after morning and afternoon tea.
    They fuss about.
    â€˜It is all very well,’ I said, ‘to choose me because I am an Australian man, but I’m not feeling that macho myself lately.
    â€˜Why don’t you get the feminist maverick Camille Paglia to do it? She says she is in favour of incestand sadomasochism, unequal power relationships in sexuality and all that tough stuff, and knows much about masculinity in all its