I'm sitting in a hotel restaurant waiting for the waiter to bring a club sandwich. It's February and I have just flown to Monaco. I'm tired and restless. My life is at an impasse. On my right four very loud people discuss the weather in French. It is cold. It will get warmer. Who cares? I am seated in front of a large window overlooking an even larger stone patio filled with black tables spiked with pastel coloured umbrellas. An old man in a black coat sits outside at one of the tables sipping his drink and looking out to sea.
The waiter returns with my food and smiles. He speaks in French. I answer him in French. He smiles again and walks away. I silently thank my French teacher for her determination to get me fluent. She died a few years ago. I read it in my old school blog. She would have liked that I had remembered her. She would have liked even more my ability to compose complex foody French sentences about club sandwiches and Perrier. For a moment I am back in her classroom. I can hear her voice. I can see her face and that wonderful smile. You are missed dear lady and you are still loved.
The waiter returns and asks if everything is ok. I nod and my eyes go back to the old man. His gaze has never left the ocean. But I can see nothing on the horizon. For me the ocean is as empty as my thoughts. The waves offer nothing. The sunlight is weak and the wind hardly stirs the umbrellas. Maybe like me he waits for life to lay down its hand and show him something new. Maybe we're both just waiting for a ship to carry us to a new world and a new dawn.
The waiter has returned. My plate is lifted and taken away with the sleight of hand that would make a magician jealous. But when I look up it is the old man who has vanished. How did I miss him? I sit there for a while with my wild imaginings. Maybe he was the Dutchman. Maybe his tenure to the land had expired and he was called back to sea, reclaimed by his curse. I then recall an old film. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. One of my favourite actors, James Mason played the lead. His character would come ashore every seven years for six months. In that time, if he could find a woman that was prepared to die for him, then he would be released from his eternal curse.
I think about love for a moment. I wonder if it exists anymore. To love someone so much that you would die for them? There is a nobility to that. I think about my own curse and I wonder what will set me free. Then I remember that moment in the film when the Dutchman hears her confess that she loves him so much, that she would die for him without any hesitation. She then asks him, "and what would you give up for me?" He pauses for just a moment and then replies, "My salvation." In the end she swims to his boat and they both perish. He is released from his tormented life whilst her body is found on the shore the following morning. Here endeth their love and the movie.
We all have demons to fight and curses to carry. We all experience love, albeit to varying degrees. But in the end, life has taught me that it is only true love that condemns or releases us. The other types of love are fleeting and often shallow. Love is now a branded commodity that is sold through a social platform or app. It has been re-built with paper towers and cardboard walls. It is also meaningless and often cruel. As I get up to leave I suddenly feel a longing for this love that stands apart. A love that has walls of stone and towers that reach above the clouds. But like the Dutchman I am forced to sail alone with my own curse. I pay for my meal and thank the waiter. I then pick up my own black coat and walk out, hand in hand with my fate.
