I can still see myself as a little girl with Plasticine and clay, I liked making things, I liked molding lots of different shapes, and I liked the smell of the clay, I’ve never come across such a lovely smell, other smells can be so insignificant, a void, even unpleasant or overwhelming, mortuary smells.
All she needs is a computer, a stack of paper, and plenty of Biro pens that she arranges methodically next to her keyboard. On the left are two pencils and a sharpener. She works on the Internet; she writes content for blogs and other people’s websites and manages various social networks for businesses. Her psychologist advised her to take a break and sharpen a pencil when work gets too stressful. She wasn’t expecting advice like that. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t that. It has to be said that the psychologist doesn’t know very much about her, though he spoke with enviable confidence.
“Do it slowly, as if it’s the most important thing in the world, and do it consciously.”
She thought about it a bit then bought two pencils, and every now and then she follows the psychologist’s advice. She stops and sharpens. When he suggested it, making it sound almost like a matter of life and death, she had to stop herself from laughing—it seemed banal, ridiculous, pointless, childish; how on earth could she fight stress by sharpening pencils? And yet it’s vital. It works. With time she has come to realize that.
There are lots of different websites for which she writes copy. Agritourism, hunting and fishing. She populates the pages of Venezia per voi, a local online magazine that pays really badly, but is just about enough to get her budget to balance; yet it’s totally unrewarding work, so when she finishes a job for them, she stops, takes a deep breath, and then sharpens a pencil. She has to. She thinks they’re crazy. Writing about Venice is absurd. Venice is something you live, you don’t write about it, or even photograph it; Venice is an idea, a hologram, a refraction.
Venice is a transgression, fate. She knows that. She knows it was her fate, and she is resigned to it.
They think they’re so trendy and so up-to-date, but this site is crap, I chose Venice because I was desperate but I was drawn in by its spell, and the mysterious gloom of the lagoon that resembles my thoughts so closely, one day I’ll write an article with the headline “We’re Crap,” I’ll put it online then I’ll disappear off the radar, changing all the passwords first. I should do it as soon as possible, I know, but the money they pay me comes in handy. (Smells of kosher cooking from the restaurant below again, I understand why, of course I do, but how come they have to conspire? Don’t they know that their smells CONSPIRE against my well-being? They must realize that, damn them.)
She follows the advice of her psychologist and very slowly sharpens the yellow and black pencils; the points often break when she underlines something in one of the books taken from the towering pile on the floor. The volumes are next to a black bookcase, plain and hard-worn, that has stayed with her through so many moves, including this final one to Venice. The pile is balanced precariously, and sometimes she knocks the books to the ground deliberately.
The bookcase itself is perfectly organized, almost obsessively so, with books divided by subject and in alphabetical order. There’s a reason behind this: every day she refers to the books stacked up on the floor, picking out ideas for websites and other matters—it’s not that she copies things, she just needs inspiration and then she uses her imagination and her creativity. They come in handy; the content of the blogs she puts online is very straightforward, they don’t need much: sometimes she makes things up without any help, but sometimes she draws a total blank and gets stuck, so she looks for inspiration. It’s legitimate, after all; she changes a couple of words and, hey presto, the tone changes in a tweet, or LinkedIn, or the Facebook profile of a company or a publishing group.
She chooses the appropriate words with care. Words like transgression, live the message, chimera, corroded, snagged, dilemma. Words that lend themselves to so many different interpretations. She selects them. When she has filled in the profile, when she has tweeted on behalf of the publisher of books on Jewish history, when she has populated a site or a blog with content, she looks at what she has done and is pleased with the result. Chimera is a wild-card word she uses for various business types. Trend is another.
Dilemma also has its uses, which is only natural. There can’t be anyone who has never faced a dilemma.
Words smell good, words hide infinite meanings, words are Rubik’s Cubes, Christmas snow globes—snow falls if you turn them upside down—words are perfect, you can use them to improve reality, they aren’t like acrid body odors that flood your nose and brain: if you could simply live among words, inside them, life would be a wonderful dream, now I’ll sharpen pencils, I know it’s the right time, first I’ll find another two words, balance and run-up, I’ll dust them off and there they are, perfect for slipping into various contexts. Flexible, benign, and sterile. Just words. Nothing more. Why do I even have to live in the real world?
She asks herself this as she types furiously on the keyboard, her fingertips—especially at night—feel worn out, they become sore and cracked, they sometimes bleed. Sometimes she cuts herself and makes her fingers bleed on purpose; it’s her way of feeling like a martyr. Blood. It drips copiously from a wound on her big toe and she looks at it. It’s not good. It makes her have strange thoughts. So she goes out. She goes outside and walks along the Strada Nova to the Santi Apostoli church to admire the Tiepolo. She used to be able to gaze at it for hours, she didn’t need to sharpen pencils, she wasn’t so sensitive to smells, and she didn’t feel like she lived in a ghetto. Now she stays for two minutes at most. Even in the church there are smells she doesn’t like, and often there are people who reek. She doesn’t understand how people can go and look at the Tiepolo while giving off such a disgusting stink.
I can’t help it, it’s one of those moments, I touch myself, I trawl special websites with animated GIFs where I watch all sorts of sexual acts repeated on an endless loop, it’s the one sexual activity I’m allowed here, in my personal ghetto, in this virtual world where I often pretend to be something other than what I really am. I stay at my desk as if I am working, I watch those mindless, monotonous penetrations, and I let my hand drop down between my legs, inside my clothes. By this stage it doesn’t take much. I linger over details, I examine them minutely, I concentrate on a huge, erect member, on a breast, on a mouth, and before long I reach an orgasm, solitary and all mine. Solitary and with no smells or tastes. It’s perfect. Simply perfect, even if afterward, every time, I furiously sharpen both pencils. I need to buy two more for backup so I always have them ready.
* * *
It’s been years since she has had a boyfriend but she doesn’t feel any need for one. She couldn’t bear having to get used to a man’s smell again. Sometimes she goes to visit her one female friend. A Chinese girl who works in a restaurant on the edge of Cannaregio. She calls her Anna; she doesn’t know how to pronounce her Chinese name, nor does she care. She knows that all—or almost all—Italians call her Anna. The only Italians who use her Chinese name are the ones who want to pretend they’re not racist.
She became her friend to rescue her. In the girl’s parents’ restaurant she has inhaled some of the most disgusting smells she has ever known and has felt them seeping into her skin. Uniquely revolting. Something indescribable.
The first time when—without thinking—she ate there, she ran out and threw up in the street. That slimy food, for sad people with no sense of taste or smell, made her feel humiliated. It often happens to her, all it takes is one little thing and she becomes aware of a burning sense of humiliation that she struggles to control.
Anna has to work there but she would like to study and she loves music. At 2040 Cannaregio in Campiello Vendramin stands Palazzo Vendramin Calergi. Because of its perfect symmetry the palazzo is considered the greatest expression of the Renaissance in Venice. The design of the palazzo was entrusted to Mauro Codussi in th
e sixteenth century and, during the two hundred years that followed, it became a template for other grand Venetian houses. The great composer Richard Wagner stayed in the palazzo, and died there on February 13, 1883. She always takes Anna there: “Let’s go and see Richard,” she says. And she feels she’s doing a good deed.
However, Anna stinks of restaurant smells when they get to the palazzo. It isn’t her fault, poor thing, but she can’t help noticing. She’s more tolerant with Anna than she is with any other human being, though Anna doesn’t ask for tolerance, nor does she feel the need to talk too much. She knows she’s a bit strange and often sullen. Anna likes her because she gives her an excuse to have a break from work, but there is something that puzzles her about her friend’s behavior: she never eats with them, not even when her mother makes Peking duck, one of her most delicious recipes that their regular customers adore. She doesn’t even think about it; she refuses without looking anyone in the eye, shrugs her shoulders, and says: “I’m going back to the ghetto.”
A bloody fucking shower, next time I’ll make her understand that if she doesn’t get into the habit of taking a bloody fucking shower before she comes out for a walk with me, and there’s one next to that disgusting bathroom in the restaurant, I’ll stop coming around to take her out and save her, she MUST know that I’m saving her, she doesn’t seem to understand anything, perhaps because she’s Chinese, but she’s the only human being I have any real contact with, I’m not asking for much, just a bloody shower before she nods that perverse baby face and agrees to meet up again.
Venice, interior, night. She is at her desk, as usual, and her head’s spinning.
She has to get up and stretch. She’s been at her desk for hours and she’s done nothing but type in order to meet a deadline. She looks out of the window at the gasoline-blue night that has enveloped the ghetto and makes the city look like the lagoon and the lagoon look like the city.
She has just built a fan page on Facebook for a third-rate singer who performs in sleazy clubs.
She listened to a couple of songs. She thought they were insulting. You can’t spoil the grandeur of Venice with that type of pointless music; she immediately stopped the CD. Regardless, she accepts every piece of work, more than ever before. Absolutely everything. She doesn’t choose. She used to, and she has a flashback to that time. To those moments when she felt clear-headed and present and not alone.
I take the pills I have to take in the morning and the world stops seeming so hostile, I take the pills, I line them up, some are small and white and others are so big that I have to break them into pieces to swallow them, but they were very clear, without these pills my obsession with smells will return. At first they’ll be generic smells, they could be disgusting or delicious and they could carry on for years, but sooner or later I’ll go back to suddenly smelling the mortuary smell, and then it’s all over. They’ve told me that. We have to keep you far away from that smell, you know that. Yes, I know. That smell will destroy you. You saw your sister in the mortuary and it was a real smell. At least it seemed real to you, but mortuaries have no smell. That one had a smell, it got into me and it lives inside me. And then I read up on it: mortuaries reek of formaldehyde, of decay and rotting flowers. Especially flowers. The doctor lied to me. Don’t worry about that smell, with the medication we’ll make it go away. Of course we will; it’s okay. You have an olfactory hypersensitivity. It’s not a good thing. Well, sometimes it is, but don’t worry about it. Your sister. What are you trying to tell me? Your sister … there was an incident, that man attacked her and stabbed her, it shouldn’t have happened. I agree. It shouldn’t have happened, it really shouldn’t have. It’s a terrible tragedy for a young girl like you, but you’ll see that time can be an excellent healer. But what were they talking about, healer and time? It didn’t turn out like that.
* * *
With the medication, at one time, the ghetto around her used to fade, and sometimes she was even able to accept the fact that the terrible attack had happened to her sister, who was only twenty years old. Her beloved, extraordinary sister, cheerful and living life to the fullest, funny and intelligent. Well, she didn’t totally accept it, to be honest; she always used to think that destiny, fate, or the god she had stopped believing in had been dreadfully unfair. That life had sunk its teeth into her, with exceptional cruelty. That she had been wounded irreparably. All the more so because the only person she had was her sister, and a boyfriend she dumped immediately after the tragedy. They had lost their parents very young. Someone in the city where they lived, and whose name she didn’t want to remember, used to call them “the little orphans” but they would shrug it off and they only needed each other. That was certainly true. And it was nice to need just each other. When her sister was around she had never felt all alone like she does now. She had never needed to sharpen pencils, or stop when she was supposed to be entering the updated resume of a manager looking for work on LinkedIn.
That bitch on the floor below has overdone the perfume again, she’s drenched in it, it’s making me retch, it wasn’t enough to arrange for her cat to disappear, and make her so crazy that she’s still looking for it, pathetic, putting up posters on the lampposts, looking for Lulu, yes, you’ve got your work cut out trying to find her, I throttled Lulu and threw her in the lagoon where no one will ever find her. She was a stupid stinking cat, just like her owner, but since that wasn’t enough for her, I’ll have to think of something else, we’ll see.
Venice, interior, night, she is sharpening pencils furiously but it doesn’t help, she feels like she’s a nonreturnable bottle, a free sample with no commercial value. She’s afraid. She’s afraid that THAT smell will come back. She doesn’t want it to, but she knows she can’t do anything about it. If she takes the medication that stops her from being aware of it, it’s like she’s being unfaithful to the memory of her sister, like forgetting about her; if the smell has to come back, it will. She is fatalistic in that sense. Fatalistic is a good word, very ambiguous. It refers to fate. And fate has treated her very badly, so much so that she has had to take it out on Lulu, and on the old caretaker of the building where she and her sister used to live. “Poor little orphan, life must be tough now that you’re on your own, eh?”
Of course life’s tough, you old fuck, I’ll show you what I mean, I’m coming into your house, a house that reeks of old flesh, rotten teeth, and death, I’m coming in and asking for a bit of sugar, putting on the adorable expression of a poor little orphan, and you’ll ask me if I want some of your disgusting cordial and while you go and get it for me I’ll do what I have to do, taking you by the throat because you stink of decay and I can smell it, and anyway I’m leaving for Venice tomorrow and no one will be able to connect me to you and your death, I’m going too far away.
She sharpens and sharpens, she has just finished masturbating as she watched a really short video; this time there was a woman being treated like a slave who was eating from a bowl like a dog, an exceptionally violent S&M video, and she got so aroused that she cried out as she came, something she never does, but the violence of what she saw lit up hundreds of tiny imaginary lightbulbs around her, as if there were a swarm of fireflies in the room.
And every lightbulb had a smell, including just a hint of THAT smell.
You will never have to smell it again, don’t ever forget to take your medication, of course, doctor, thank you very much, and remember that it’s your imagination that creates the smell, there is no mortuary smell and you really can’t smell it (still the same lie).
Of course, doctor, but doesn’t that mean I’ll stop feeling that my sister’s with me? No, of course not, you’ll remember her in your heart.
My heart. How stupid people are, spouting nonsense about the heart. She updates the content of a website for soulmates and uploads an article on a portal that recommends alternative tourist routes for anyone planning their Valentine’s Day. It’s a weird evening, she can feel it. It’s an evening charged with a diff
erent fate. She’s finding it hard to get a grip, she’s aware that even her movements are clumsier than usual. She falls, she gets up again. Her head aches and her bones are sore. And that’s not all. She’s hungry. She knows that this late in Venice there isn’t much choice. And the smell is getting stronger. Venice isn’t a metropolis, she doesn’t want to go too far, she could pop into Anna’s Chinese restaurant. Yes, that’s the only solution. She could have some plain rice, or simply pick up Anna and they could head off to some old osteria that would have something nicer. Will Anna have taken a shower? While she’s thinking about that she opens the drawer where she keeps her kitchen utensils and strokes them one by one; they’re beautiful. She has a collection of knives that she ordered from a TV ad. (“Poor little orphan, you’re right to think about defending yourself,” they said to her in that other city, the one whose name—and everything else—she has erased from her mind.) They were delivered to her after just a few days, surprisingly few. Straight away she thought they were beautiful. Wonderful knives with wooden handles and blades just how she wanted them. Exactly like the ones she’d seen so many times in her nightmares. She takes one and puts it in her bag. It’s incredibly sharp. Perfect. She’s hungry. Will it be enough to stop at the Chinese place? Will she be able to control herself? Plain rice perhaps? She doubts it. She cleans her teeth twice and rinses three times with mouthwash, her usual ritual. She goes out and the ghetto embraces her with its remote beauty, but she doesn’t want to be embraced. Nocturnal Venice would embrace her too, cities are able to do that, but she feels the embrace would distance her from the smell and she doesn’t want to drive it away. She brushes off the embrace of the city like someone would brush off an annoying fly. She sways slightly. Her fingertips are still sore, she imagines a trail of blood following her.
Venice Noir Page 8