Not My Type

by Anna Zarlenga

‘Didn’t you just make a pilot for a TV show? Maybe you’ll become famous.’

  I jump to my feet, overturning my chair. ‘I do not work with that arsehole! He can find someone else to do his dirty work!’

  Eleonora narrows her eyes. ‘Your reaction suggests to me that there is much, much more behind this mishap than you’re letting on.’

  I shake my head decisively. ‘Please! You’re a semiologist, not a psychologist.’

  Eleonora quietly crumples her napkin, maintaining her composure. ‘I may not be a psychologist, but I know you well enough. Every time I mention Teo you go mental.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I gasp, struggling to banish his arrogant smile from my mind.

  ‘The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can get over it.’

  ‘Accept what?’

  ‘That you’re smitten,’ she concludes, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  The frost takes hold of my thoughts and extends from head to toe. I can’t and won’t accept such a thing.

  ‘It was just sex,’ I whisper, more to myself than to her.

  ‘Are you sure? You can’t be afraid of your feelings. We all take a few blows now and again. You can overcome a crush gone bad.’

  I collapse back into the chair. I am adult, intelligent and pragmatic. And I’m in trouble up to my neck.

  ‘What if it’s not just a crush?’ I confess, with difficulty. The sense of oppression in my chest, the direction of all my thoughts, that smile that appears unfailingly, despite my wanting to see him dead. Everything brings me back to one explanation. An explanation that is there before my eyes and that I have pretended in vain not to see. How did I get here? I mean, I know how I got here. The problem is that I don’t want to know. The evidence of my feelings hits me with such force that it takes my breath away.

  ‘Damn. Did he really get to you this bad?’

  I nod. I can’t keep ignoring it. ‘Do you see, now, why I hate him so much?’

  Eleonora takes my hand. ‘Yeah. From a great love can arise a great hatred. Oh Sara, I’m so sorry. If he was here now, I’d teach him a damn good lesson, believe me. ‘

  In spite of everything I still smile. ‘I know you would. The idiot wouldn’t understand it though,’ I reply, finding a bit of my old spirit. Teo doesn’t deserve my sadness.

  ‘Doctor, you are wicked,’ my friend accuses me cheerfully.

  ‘Well, nobody can be completely perfect.’

  ‘Promise you’ll never change.’

  ‘I promise. I won’t let myself be bent by a stupid little thing like love.’

  Love. Of all the unlikely things I could ever have imagined, this beats them all. Me, in love. And with the last man I would have thought of. There are moments in life when everything you believed falls apart. This is one of those moments. Everything seems to be the same around me, but the truth is that I have changed, so much so that it scares me. I allowed feelings for Teo to insinuate their way inside me, despite all the barriers I set up against him, and I hate myself for it. I hate myself because I feel weak, vulnerable, because I can’t go back and change it. It hurts. It hurts like death, but I am determined not to let myself be beaten down.

  No, I won’t break, I’ll be strong. Love has deceived me, made me climb the highest peaks and then hurled me back down to earth. But I swear I will never fall for it again.

  Never again.

  27

  Teo

  My good friend Mr Whisky watches me from the mahogany table. In another life I would have embraced him happily, but in this life I look at him. I just look at him.

  That pest Silvio has been turning up at my house every night for the past few days. All he does is complain about the quarrel he had with his wife and then accuse me of being the cause of all his problems.

  Wrong. He is the cause of all his problems. If he hadn’t got married, none of this would have happened. We’d have carried on chasing anything in a skirt, I would never have met Sara and he wouldn’t have incurred the wrath of a pregnant wife, offended by his lack of respect for her family. I wouldn’t have become involved in this stupid bet with myself that led me to the sorry state I’m in now. I would have been vain, superficial and happy. I wouldn’t have thought about things, I wouldn’t have laughed with her, I wouldn’t have felt so damn comfortable. If Sara hadn’t fallen into my life, I would have continued to do what I have always done.

  And my life would have been just as shitty as it always was.

  The thing is that it didn’t seem all that shitty until a little while ago, but that woman has messed up my brain to such an extent that I really feel good for nothing. And it bothers me. I knew from the first second I met her that Sara would bring me nothing but trouble. I played the fool because I thought I could handle it… and instead I fell…

  No! Admitting that is the first step towards catastrophe.

  I mustn’t even have to think about it…

  The whisky winks in my direction, promising me oblivion for at least a few hours. But I don’t want oblivion. I want to bask in my bad mood, to savour the misery moment by moment. I deserve it.

  I watch Silvio shambling into the room and notice that he looks even worse than last night: unkempt beard, wrinkled shirt, tormented expression. Once I would have laughed at him and given him a kick in the arse back towards the good life of women and booze, but now I’m gripped with a desperate need to get rid of him. Because his attitude is unbearable and convinces me more than ever that married life is madness. I may have had my brain scrambled by a woman, but marriage is absolutely out of the question. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still the biggest load of nonsense in the world, and he is living proof of it. He may be my best friend, but these days I find him hard to bear.

  ‘I think it’s time you went home to your wife.’

  Silvio looks at me sideways: I can tell that he is torn between the desire to confide and the desire to kill me with his bare hands.

  ‘Since you messed everything up, the atmosphere in my house is very unpleasant. The least you can do is to endure my presence for a few hours.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Are you really so easily discouraged? Your wife is just having a bit of a funny turn with all the hormones. All you have to do is sweet talk her a bit and she’ll be putty in your hands in no time.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’

  ‘Try. What do you have to lose, after all? ‘

  ‘You make it sound easy. Anyway, what do you know about it? You haven’t disappointed the love of your life.’

  I look away and run my hand over my chin. ‘No.’

  Silence. Too much silence. I turn around and see Silvio with his mouth hanging open almost down to the ground.

  ‘If you don’t close your mouth, something will fly in there,’ I observe, frowning.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he mutters faintly. I pretend not to understand and remain silent.

  A strange sound, like a sob, bursts from his throat and I’m almost afraid he might be suffocating, but no… he’s just laughing!

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he continues to mumble in between sobs. ‘You’re screwed! Totally screwed!’

  ‘Says the man who is equally screwed.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s obvious how I ended up screwed,’ Silvio observes, imitating his wife’s impressive rack.

  ‘Well, for your information, she is quite well endowed too,’ I mutter. None of this is helping my bad mood.

  ‘You touched them, so I believe you. Although I don’t want the details. But that’s not the point, my friend. I fell in love with Sonia after first being attracted by her beauty. Since we both know that Sara is less blessed in that department, can you explain how it happened to you?’

  ‘I’m not in… in… No! No!’ I get up abruptly and stride across the few steps that separate us, grabbing him by his smelly shirt. ‘No! I will repeat it to the death.’

  ‘Then you’ll die repeating it. You can try to fool me, but you can’t h
ide the truth from yourself for long.’

  ‘I’ll say it again and I want you to get it through that thick head of yours: I don’t feel anything for Sara.’

  Silvio narrows his eyes. His expression is somewhere between amused and perplexed.

  ‘“But I really do like you.” I seem to remember that phrase coming from your mouth the other day.’

  ‘Exactly. I said “I like you” not… well, you know. I like her physically.’

  Silvio pulls free from my grip. The compassionate expression on his face is truly infuriating.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not buying it. There’s no use in getting upset. Love is a son of a bitch. All of a sudden you find that you care, and the only thing left is to pray that no-one gets hurt.’

  I flounder, looking for a foothold, anything, to save me from this catastrophe. There are none, of course. Where can I look for an escape route, when I’ve been caught by my own hands?

  Damn the confetti I launched, the kisses given by mistake! Damn her and her intelligence, her sharp tongue and her irreverent mouth! I fell like a child.

  What I feel, immediately after this invective against myself, is the need to understand, to attribute a reason to all this madness, even if it does mean dealing with an unexpected and absurd feeling. The words come pouring out without my having planned them at all.

  ‘I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe when I spoke to her for the first time, maybe when we had a fight or when she kissed me to challenge me. I don’t know. I think… I guess it was because I had no expectations.’

  ‘And how did that affect you?’ asks my friend, a very serious expression on his face. Too bad he’s a car dealer and not a psychologist, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  ‘I didn’t want to like her and I didn’t expect anything. So I was just myself. I didn’t use filters and, dammit Silvio, I liked it. She is… unbearable, pedantic, presumptuous. She has so many flaws, but she’s so real that I couldn’t resist what was happening. For the first time I couldn’t dictate the rules.’

  Silvio shakes his head, incredulous and amused. ‘Teo in love. The end times are upon us,’ he thinks about it for a second…and bursts out laughing again.

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  And it’s not, for pity’s sake! Especially not now that I have understood my situation so clearly.

  ‘Let me laugh at your misfortunes. It’s the least you can do after dragging me into this mess.’

  I get up and take off my shirt, intending to throw myself in the shower as soon as possible. ‘My friend, you have no way with women.’

  ‘What should I do, do you think? Sometimes still I see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.’

  ‘If I were in your shoes, I would do anything to bring a smile back to the face of the woman I loved.’

  Silvio looks at me doubtfully. ‘So why aren’t you?’

  I stiffen. ‘Because I don’t want to. This whole thing is a flash in the pan. It will pass. And anyway she has no respect for me. She thinks I’m some kind of parasite!’

  ‘Which you are,’ confirms my friend.

  ‘I know!’ I burst out, raising my arms to the sky. ‘But I don’t want her to think that about me, you know? For the first time in my life, I wanted this project to succeed, to show the world that I can do something other than shagging the secretaries.’

  ‘And not just the secretaries.’

  ‘And not just the secretaries, dammit, I know! But when you make an image for yourself, it’s very difficult to unmake it. ‘

  Silvio seems to consider the issue. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in trying to change yourself. Shagger you were and shagger you’ll be for life.’

  Well that’s just great! With friends like him to encourage me… ‘I get it, I’m a hopeless case.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But we can never change what we are, at least not completely. What we can do is try to find our place in the world. You are certainly not a responsible person, but in the end each of us has his use, don’t you think?’

  I try in vain to grasp the meaning of what he is saying. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘I mean that, even if on the outside you seem like a simple and superficial type, you have now discovered that you know how to design a format. Maybe that’s all you can do. But you made yourself useful, somehow. It’s a start.’

  ‘And should I be satisfied, with that?’

  Silvio spreads his hands. ‘What do you want from me? The magic formula? I don’t even have it for myself! You have to know what you want. I, for example, want Sonia. No ifs, no buts. The problem is that I am afraid and I don’t hesitate to admit that. With her my life makes sense. We’ll never change the world, we won’t be remembered as the couple of the century, but we’re happy.’

  Be happy. As if it were that simple. What does it take to be happy? The answer is obvious: Sara.

  We are not compatible, but complementary: what is missing from one, the other compensates for it. With her, my barriers fall, my awareness of being good for almost nothing hits me, but I overcome it: with her I can find a place in the world.

  ‘You really should go home,’ I suggest to my friend, while a new plan of action begins to form in my mind.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ he says. ‘But what about you? What will you do?’

  ‘I may not know how to do many things, mate, but I certainly don’t lack inventiveness. Sara destroyed my life by taking something I had never given to anyone.’

  ‘I’m almost afraid to ask what.’

  I smile and bring a hand to my chest. ‘This. She took this. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. And so my next move is obvious.’

  ‘Trying to live with no heart?’

  I shake my head. ‘Giving it to her of my own free will.’

  Silvio looks at me as I looked at him on his wedding day: as one who is about to condemn himself to the gallows.

  Well, perhaps I am, but it seems to me the best way in the world to die.

  28

  Sara

  After my run-in with Professor Costa, my mood has plummeted to new depths. Oh, he was neutral, calm and professional, but I knew very well what he was telling me between the lines: ‘You can kiss goodbye to your job in this faculty.’ I’m still burning with rage, and the exams start in a few minutes. I’ve a good mind to fail them all, so the genius they have taken on to replace me will have to deal with that.

  ‘There’s smoke coming out of your ears,’ Eleonora informs me.

  ‘I can’t believe what a bunch of bastards they are’ I hiss, waving the sheet in her face.

  ‘Pieces of shit, I totally agree. But they’ll be laughing on the other side of their faces when you win a chair somewhere else and become a luminary of Semiotics. You will get the better of Professor Barf-Shoes yet!

  ‘Professor Barf-Shoes?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a good name for him? I know he’s behind of all this. This nonsense about Dr. Vaio that has suddenly come up, it’s all his doing.’

  In reality I had come to the same conclusion myself, I just don’t have any evidence. After all, what could I accuse him of? My contract is about to expire, I’m not being fired. I can never prove that I’m being refused the chair because of what happened between us. I wanted to play it down, but I can’t pretend not to remember how he treated me in the days after the incident. Maybe if what happened with Teo hadn’t happened… who knows. Maybe we would have timidly approached again. It might have taken a year or two, but I could have kept my job.

  But would I have been happy?

  My heart gives me the answer in a nanosecond: no.

  I couldn’t have been happy. Teo messed up my head to the point that I don’t appreciate the things I appreciated before. The professor’s mannerisms, his painstaking way of working, which had fascinated me so much, now only provoke impatience. He looks fake to me, a relic, while Teo is… Teo.

  Spontaneous, cruel, irresistible. Too bad he’s no
t honest. He lied to me shamelessly. I knew he couldn’t really have liked me. I should never have given in to the temptation to believe otherwise. But instead, damn me, I fell.

  Why? Simply because I have never known a man like him, so free of inhibitions, so irreverent and instinctive. I’ve always been a person who thinks before acting. I never reckoned with Teo, and yet he was the best experience of my life. But that’s all over now.

  I told him he was good for nothing. I regret that. I discovered a side of his character, a tenacity and an enthusiasm that I wouldn’t have expected. I never felt so complete as when I lay in his arms. What a mess!

  ‘Hey, can I bring the candidates in?’

  ‘Are the victims ready?’

  ‘Everything is ready,” she replies with a wicked laugh. “Time to skin them alive!’

  ‘Be nice,’ I say.

  ‘I’m always nice, what do you mean?’

  While the small crowd slowly fills the classroom, I examine the list of candidates. The name on top, who I should examine first, makes me start. It can’t be!

  I look up, praying I was wrong, or that it’s another person with the same name, maybe, but neither theory is correct: the first to take the exam is none other than Teodoro Pagani.

  ‘I’m ready. Ask me any questions you want.’ Teo sits in front of me, looking like he doesn’t have a problem in the world. It’s just not possible!

  ‘I don’t think you should be here,’ I say firmly.

  ‘Why on earth not? I’m properly registered and I’ve paid all my fees, so I’m perfectly entitled to sit the exam,’ he answers, depositing a sum roughly equal to the fees payable for the last ten years onto the desk.

  ‘You’re a long way off,’ I reply, narrowing my eyes into slits. I must resist and not rise to it, whatever it is he has in mind. If he wants war, he can have it.

  ‘Tell me about Hjelmslev: sign and technical function.’

  Another pupil, sitting in the front row, shudders. It is a topic we cover in detail, but for some reason the students always seem to struggle with it. Let’s see how he does now!

  Teo doesn’t get upset. He stretches as if he were at home and smiles, before answering me in his low, velvety voice. ‘Hjelmslev does not speak of sign, but of sign function. Sign function comprises expression and content, two different, but irretrievably linked elements that create a new meaning when put together.’