YOU’RE BALDING ALREADY, and you have a beer belly. You hide your nose in my neck. You’re wearing a black t-shirt and baggy jeans; you’re not photogenic; your complexion is pale; your sweaty forehead, like mine, is shaped like a bomb; your beard is patchy and your head clean shaven; your eyes are little and nondescript; your face is well meaning, bordering on dumb; you have flat nostrils and a clueless little nose that turns out a bit at the end, a perfect way to underline your critical stares, which are really barely critical at all but tender, gentle, cartoonlike.
—
YOUR COCK TILTS left. It’s pale, neither small nor big, and you always keep it clean, like you’re washing it throughout the day.
—
YOU’RE AN INTIMIST Fascist. You have a few eccentric friends from university whose reading list tends toward the futurist; you go to mod nights, but you stay off the dance floor. You wear a black bomber jacket, just like the Fascists in your neighborhood do. You say that Rome is a Fascist city and that for anyone to try to build an imaginary non-Fascist city on top of Fascist Rome, for anyone to go—as I do—to Via Tasso every April 25 or to San Giovanni every May 1 is to indulge in ahistorical cultural nonsense. You say we should be niche everymen—straightforward, commonsensical people—because otherwise we’ll end up bourgeois like Tullius, and it’s people like him who are the real fasci: “I mean, the only way not to be Fascists is to be Fascists.” You play Sonic Youth covers with left-wing rockers who treat your words as the whole truth, as sheer punk Geist.
—
“I THINK WHAT you had with Tullio was a case of intermittent, low-frequency sexual violence that began with brainwashing.”
You call Tullio Bone Machine, Brainwash Machine, The Big Cocker, Satan, The Anticock.
—
ONE DAY WHEN the school year had just started, my mother and I were on our way to buy textbooks. She was a cold woman. “Pleasure,” she explained, “is not frowned upon in our home. You have to learn to know yourself. No one will think it’s a tragedy if you lock yourself in your room; they won’t panic. In our house the only intolerable things are AIDS and drug addiction. We don’t like mothers like mine, mothers who make their children’s lives impossible.” Thus my mother saved me from the quintessentially Italian fear of parents suddenly opening a bedroom door and discovering the naked bodies of their child and their child’s lover. Unlike so many other children of Italian parents, I never had to keep my door open at all times, never had to subject myself to the stuffy smell of the hallway. My mother allowed me countless hours of undisturbed sexual intercourse with Tullio. But my orgasm has disappeared, and it has never returned.
—
YOUR R SOUNDS French, but whenever you start preaching at me, you end up leaning on your bad-ass Roman accent, which makes your French r sound funny, so you conceal it in subtle ways because you don’t want to sound too much like the child of aristocrats slumming it with the general population. It’s weird: it’s just a matter of phonetics, outside your control, but you’re ashamed of the sound, and it ends up dulling your speeches, seeping them of power.
“Boy scouts are fucking bourgeois hypocrites. This fucking totem ceremony—it’s scandalous but crucial to the whole project. Greasy, conformist Catholic values during the day, right? And abuse and power at night. You don’t get it. Same as with the UN and secret societies: officially you support UNICEF, but deep down you long for a superstrict order, for ritual. Man, I hate the bourgeoisie. I fucking hate them. Really, Daria, I raise my arm in Roman salute against the bourgeoisie, and long live Mussolini. Duce Duce Duce!”
“Oh but my scouts, you know, they were Fascists. You would have liked them.”
“I’m focused on Tulliooooo. Tullio thinks he’s reached a crossroads in his life. He plays the part of the man with a struggle. He thinks he’ll be a saint and stop harassing people, and then what does he do? He inaugurates his holy period with an act that I don’t think anyone could call selfless. He thinks he’s saving the two of you from scout torture. Ha! But what he really wanted was to fuck you. Tell me, what does any of this have to do with holiness? I won’t abuse people anymore—no, no, never ever—but I’ll head into the woods to finger you. Is that holy behavior? He spins it exactly the way he wants to. Again. First he’s sensitive enough to realize that the very idea of your trials, your tortures, is perverse, because the whole thing is designed to shame the other girl, the fat one. Then, he ends up fingering you while the fat girl is forced to watch. Those losers—they roam around the countryside in their dark blue argyle shorts as if there weren’t a Tangentopoli, as if the lira hadn’t collapsed, as if we still lived in an age when Baden-Powell was fighting and winning his little wars against lesser cultures…”
And throughout all this, Sergino makes sure to keep his rs hidden between consonants, so that he doesn’t sound lame.
“But listen, Sergino, this was all before Tangentopoli.”
So you yell at me, and then I humor you by going down on you.
Then you go home and finish in your bathroom.
—
I MET YOU in line at the Italian department, two years after breaking up with Tullio. You were coming from Political Science and you needed information about an exam you were going to take in the building. Ten minutes later you were lecturing me—in straight Italian, without a trace of the Roman accent—about the “guilty homogeneity of grunge music—a Baedeker of counterculture for the bourgeois.” You were forcing this stranger, me, to listen to the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Suicide, Battisti, Ivan Graziani, Battiato, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane. We sat on the dirty steps outside the bar, and I told you that my ex listened to grunge bands. By sundown you knew everything about me: that I was nice, that I was fun, that I couldn’t climax. You were already beginning to take my side when I told you that my mother wished I were still dating straight-A Tullio.
Three days later, I got the knees of my overalls wet in the hard grass in the park, behind a pine tree near the pond. It was a bleak, cold day—Rome in November—and after fifteen minutes, you announced you weren’t going to climax until the day I did (so delusional). Hands and mouths forever, no climaxes, and God forbid, no coitus.
—
“SEE, TULLIO DOESN’T think with his cock, only his colonial thirst. I mean, think about the very act by which this bourgeois douche bag attained his holiness: it’s a sham, a total quid pro quo, just like invading a country to bring it religion. These nasty feats of charity, they’re classic bourgeois moves: they’re holy, righteous, no, self-righteous ass-wipes. It’s freemasonry, it’s the boy scouts. Tullio is the Andreotti of the boy scouts, and he’s fucking us all in the ass with his big cock.”
—
WE WERE TOGETHER for three months at an age when three months amounted to something: a whole era of tastes and quirks and bus or car routes never tried before and never attempted later.
I try to make you come, but you’ve developed a technique to avoid it: you breathe deeply, regularly, and after a while I give up because my back aches. You’re lying on my bed, in my room, legs protruding, feet touching the ground. Your breathing allows you to absorb any spikes in pleasure that occur when I shift my position or change my rhythm (which was always the excuse Tullio used whenever he came on my face—“Sorry! You caught me off guard”), and you refuse to fly among the weightless clouds preceding climax.
—
I TAKE YOU to the hall in Piazza Fiume where your band rehearses, then I blow you in my car outside the Villa Ada, on the charming hilly roads that run among the villini and in my locked room, especially in my locked room.
—
MY BELOVED SERGIO, you preach about my engagement to Tullio and my junior role in it. “Come on,” I say, “you’re exaggerating,” and you freak out. “Oh yeah? I’m exaggerating? You were brainwashed! He ruined your life!”
“You know you really take gender roles too seriously, as if I were just a woman and nothing else. But don’t you see, I’m n
ot a woman; I don’t behave like a woman. It’s like you think my womanhood alone makes me a victim.” I read aloud from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, try to trip you up. “And you’re not an alpha male; you’re a brainwasher, like Tullius.”
“The ugliest thing”—you don’t even pretend to listen, you’re off on a tangent— “is that you think of him as just this high school sweetheart, but you’ll pay for it your entire life. I’m 100 percent positive about this. I know it; I can feel that you don’t belong to me, not really.”
—
BUT SERGINO, ALL this scrutiny, all this obsessive analysis make the time we spend together feel thin and fragile. They open up a door to the past, and as a result the present feels dull, unpolished. Tullio lingers like an old recording on a worn-out tape. I try to stay with you, but I’m constantly plunged back into my high school years, into long afternoons and homework. The room is the same, though the posters are different. In Tullio’s era it was tidier, a sliver of a room right next to Marzio’s, a mirror image. (When we were younger it was one big room for the two of us, but the drywall went up as soon I got my first period.) I’d put the stereo on to mask the sound of sex while my brother strummed his electric guitar with his headphones in. After Tullio dumped me, I painted one entire wall light green, verde speranza, his favorite color. The two eras now discolor each other, and the posthumous green wall weaves itself into Tullio’s high-pitched moaning: different eras, inseparable.
—
I KNEEL IN front of you on the carpeted floor. I close my eyes and return to the tidier room with fewer posters, with a different bedspread. After a light meal—arugula, robiola cheese, boiled zucchini, Rosetta bread straight from the oven—he lays me down on my bed and proceeds to massage my butt cheeks, then plays his favorite game: the imaginary ring that circles the perineum. After this, he stops and waits for me to finish my homework, so that he can stick it in my backside.
—
THE ROOM PULSES and breathes one year in and the other year out. Then it breathes the latter in and the first one out.
—
WHOLE AFTERNOONS ARE spent locked up in this tropical room, the wash of rain in the fall, sweating in the springtime and sneezing on the bed till we pass out. Then he scolds me: “What do you think you’ll accomplish in life if you don’t do your homework properly? Do you want your children to have a mediocre mother?”
—
WE HAVE SEX at my apartment because we can’t lock our doors at yours; you’re both the children of Italian mothers, Roman mothers. All I see are your tiny children’s rooms in that elusive city, a city made up only of parking spots, university bars, two pubs in San Lorenzo, the rehearsal space, car rides and bus rides, a political rally through the city center. And we always end up in my room to have sex. Rome has no history, no future. There are no drastic changes ahead: no new influx of poor immigrants from the south to make the city poor and sad but no onslaught of rich foreigners with coke, either. My father moonlights as a private Latin tutor, my mother does the same at home, after school. In town there are very few of the Romanians and the Chinese you’ll become so obsessed with, Sergino, only Africans lining up their trinkets on canvas sheets on the sidewalks, and even then they’re only in the center; they haven’t reached your neighborhood, where in fifteen years they’ll sell acrylic socks, a new merchant every seventy meters. The Calabrians haven’t shown up yet—you can’t smell them, you don’t hate them yet.
—
YOUR ROOM, WHERE I never blew you, was once your father’s office. Your mother is not to be disturbed, but she’s a lively, passionate woman who asks me about my life and my interests. She always wears a skirt and has a classic Roman face, scrappy and round, her nose a straight line between the five circles of forehead, cheekbones, and cheeks. When she’s tired, her face tends to sag instead of hardening. It has more dark spots than my mother’s, but it feels freer somehow, unsealed.
—
TULLIUS SHARES A room with his brother. Their house isn’t very big, and his father needs one of the rooms as his private office—he’s a clerk, but he also builds model cars in his spare time. He glues little doors to convertibles and carefully hangs the wheels on the axles, displaying the results on an ever-expanding series of pedestals.
Tullio treats my room as though it were his. He goes out to the kitchen to make coffee and returns with a tray, and from then on I’m not allowed to do anything until I finish my homework. If I try to touch his pants or anything else, he starts preaching in cold, curt sentences that seem to emanate directly from his nose.
He calls his room the “sperm room” in English. It has a windowless bathroom, a cramped space—an illegal addition. I don’t visit him because I want to get my homework done. When I’m there he throws me against a closet built into the wall, spits on his hand and slips it into the back of my panties, plays the ring game, then slips inside me in a state of desperation.
But by the time we start having sex at his place, we’re no longer a couple. We keep having sex for years without telling anyone. Why do we lock ourselves away in his room? Frantic booty calls, uncontrollable urges, mournful itches that have to be scratched. By then his mother isn’t troubled by whatever it is we are anymore.
My parents allow me to install my own phone number, though I can only receive calls. Which is why my mother is unaware that Tullio is still a part of my life, even though we broke off the engagement she was so fond of. When Tullius calls, I take a bus down Via Tiburtina, get off at Via Morgagni, a half-hour–long trip to spend less than that at his apartment and go back home with wobbly legs and a bottle of water in my hand.
—
HE DOES IT in silence, suppressing his high-pitched moans as they form. I no longer love the music he chooses, and I’m frustrated enough to order him to change it. But I don’t find an adequate replacement on the vertical CD shelf. When we finish, I always pass by the living room, where Tullio’s mother watches TV amid the smells of old fabric and meatballs and tomato sauce and coffee and cigarettes. It’s an old-fashioned Roman home, cozy and neat, a little group of Chinese statuettes on a round table in the corner, a copy of Il Tempo, the right-wing paper, folded over on a small glass coffee table. She sits in her kingdom of certainty and sees me as I walk out staring down at the floor. She guesses, but she doesn’t acknowledge me.
—
WHEN SERGIO LEAVES my room to rush home and unload, my mother sees me close the door and never smiles. When she’s done working in the living room she says: “You let your life pass you by without even thinking about it. If you’re happy like that…”
“But I’m studying for my exams. What else should I be doing?”
“You used to bring people home who had a spark in their eyes.”
“By people you mean Tullio.”
“If I mean Tullio, I say Tullio.”
“If I meant Tullio, I would have said Tullio.”
“No, I can say it that way, too.”
“Yes but still, you meant Tullio.”
“You’re so difficult, Daria, I don’t know how you’ll ever find a new boyfriend.”
“Who told you Sergio wasn’t my boyfriend?”
“Or a husband.”
“Who told you I want a husband?”
“Leave me alone. A mother isn’t allowed to be alone with her disappointment even for a second.”
“Disappointment? With what! With what! With what!”
“You keep shouting, and I’ll show you the door.”
—
YOU CALL ME on my private line and ask me what my mother said about you. I don’t keep anything from you because I love hearing you say that my mother is evil. My father defends her: “Mom had grown fond of Gustavo; you should try not to mind it too much.”
“You haven’t, though, right?”
“No I haven’t, love—there’s only you.”
—
YOU AND I discuss corruption scandals or the mafia’s links to terrorism. We lie in bed na
ked and listen to music.
—
TULLIO WANTS ME to have at least an 8/10 average. We stop working at seven p.m.: he comes inside me, preferably from behind and with no condom. The Greek ideal: “Socrates is the synonym of man.” Gustavo never uses Roman slang, doesn’t have a Roman accent. Sometimes when he leaves the room I weep; I’m tired, and I try to understand why I don’t climax anymore. Tullio stays in the kitchen or the living room to chat with my mom. He leaves before my father gets home.
—
WHEN I KNEEL in front of Sergio, my memory is a ghost that tingles at the bottom of my numb back. Afterward, Sergio and I hug naked on the bed, a fetid cloud between our mouths.
—
TULLIO BREAKS UP with me on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. “We’re not equal; there’s no parity between us. And I know that you’re not someone who could ever bear my children.” I stop being a good student overnight. My homework feels like it belongs to him, and I want him gone from my life completely. I score 52/60 on my final exams, the “maturità,” though I was expected to get 60/60.
—
TIME CIRCLES AROUND and travels through both holes, piercing the membrane.
—
MY MOTHER’S ALWAYS considered me dull compared to Marzio. He’s beautiful and cheerful and busy with music and a friend to everyone. With Tullio, she says, I’d finally “found” myself after a “pretty lackluster adolescence,” and now I was “lost.” “Again.”
—
AFTERNOON AT SERGINO’S grandmother’s apartment in the wealthy Parioli neighborhood, for a paper I’m writing about everyday fascism inspired by the French Annales School. Buttery biscuits, tea from old teapots, triumphantly ancient furniture, paintings of weak smiles in heavy frames, hunting scenes, oranges with moldy skin. Grandma and her sister, who Sergino also calls Grandma, regale us with tales of their Fascist youth in houses Il Duce built for wounded soldiers. I brought a recorder and am pumped.
“Here on the piazza you had several houses for the war wounded, two here and two there. The road in the back had the less beautiful houses—let’s just say smaller, they were still very nice. The soldiers injured during World War I built a cooperative here: they expropriated land that belonged to the Felicetti, and the Felicetti owned everything here. I believe it was 1,000 lire per square meter—nothing, really. They were all basically tramps; they couldn’t afford anything. Here you had the wealthier ones, the ones who bought houses for 3,000 lire, like my father. The poorest of the injured got the smallest houses, which you can see on Via Eleonora Duse. They were nice, though, and well built. And this house—it has strong walls. We clean it thoroughly, of course, but it’s never needed major repairs—never.”
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