A scruffy figure in a fading-grey tweed jacket. A bleary-eyed hunchbacked figure, hobbling down to the end of the platform, intent on not missing the next métro. I follow him. I have always felt drawn to strange characters. The métro pulls into the station. He boards and slumps down onto a seat, opposite the young woman.
I watch him. I watch her. Him. Her. Them. Can’t help it. I try to take in every little detail. He must be 40, 45 at the most, but looks at least 60. The skin on his face is rough, almost cracked at the corners of his mouth and near the eyes. Bleary pea-green eyes, like treacherous pond water. He is wearing moss-green corduroy trousers and worn mud-tipped army boots. Toussled hair. Frostbitten cheeks. Filthy fingernails. A drunkard’s smile – a hopeless smile – revealing two uneven rows of yellowing teeth. She is young, much younger than him, somewhere in her mid-20S. A lovely pale-skinned brunette with freckled cheeks and crystal-blue eyes. Slender, chic, raffinée. The typical young-and-successful French woman. A stylish haircut. Expensive perfume, expensive handbag, expensive boots.
by Nadia Mifsud
He’s slouching forward; she’s sitting upright, all very prim and proper. He is aware of her attractiveness. He can’t take his pea-green eyes off her. There’s a hungry, aching look on his face. A hurt look. As if he had been cheated out of a magical encounter simply because life had dealt him the wrong cards. She is aware of his presence, but not of his hungry, aching look. His hurt look. Her eyes are riveted on her sleek new mobile phone, her delicate manicured fingers tapping away nervously at the keypad. A slight twitch in her upper lip reveals her discomfort.
The métro pulls into the next station. In three smooth strides, she makes it to the door and steps off lightly onto the platform. He heaves himself up from his seat, and inches his way after her. As the métro pulls out again with me still on it, I catch a quick and last glimpse of him plodding along after her, hopelessly, desperately trying to catch up with her. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just my imagination, playing another one of its dirty tricks on me. I search for pencil and paper, but I have none. It will have to wait. Never mind. I have to get off at the next station anyway. I’m already running late for work. On mornings like these, I hate my job. I wish I were rich enough to afford staying at home and focus on my writing. But then, if I didn’t have to go to work, I probably wouldn’t have been on the 7.42 métro this morning, and would never have come across such an unlikely couple. Still, I yearn to be back home, back to my notebook.
It’s 10pm. The children have been bathed, fed and happily tucked into bed. I’m finally alone with my notebook. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all day. The picture is still there. Can’t erase it. Can’t change it either – the colours, the particular light in the métro station, his moss-green trousers reeking of cheap alcohol, her expensive perfume… Yet the words won’t come. I try French, English, Maltese. The words have deserted me. A good day turned bad. One of those days when the city feeds me with writeable material, but my mind simply goes blank – as blank as the white page that is now staring up at me defiantly. The only thing I can do before I resign myself to going to bed empty-handed is store that snapshot away somewhere in my mind, in a file that says “ready for further use”.
Luckily, however, there are the bad-nights-turned-good. It’s 4.48am (as in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis) and I’ve been tossing and turning in my bed for the past four hours at least, every now and then extracting a discontented grunt from my sleeping partner. My mind is under siege. One of those preciously preserved snapshots has somehow dislodged itself from its sleeping quarters and has come hurtling down the corridors of my mind. Words flood in. No use trying to shut them out, I know they will seep in anyway. So I simply sit up in bed and let my fingers feel their way in the dark to my ever-faithful notebook. That done, I start fumbling away for my ever-disappearing pencil and the best Christmas present I ever got, a mini-torch that I keep on my bedside table. I pull the quilt over my head and let the text unfold itself to me. I don’t try to make sense of it, not straightaway at least. I usually put it aside, for a couple of days or so, sometimes for weeks or months, like a wine that needs to stand. Nearly all the poems in żugraga were written in this way.
Then comes the toughest part: the revising, the rewriting… and a grumpy me who can’t stand having anything or anyone interrupt her train of thought. No kids. No husband. No supper to fix (Chinese or Indian take-away will do very nicely, thank you )! No emails. No phone calls. Especially no phone calls. But then, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should do like Paul Auster who just can’t help picking up the phone, believing that a random call, a misdialled number, can alter the course of a life. Maybe!
First published on The Malta Independent of 1 August 2010.
https://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2010-08-01/local-news/How-I-Write—Nadia-Mifsud-278073
