All This Has Nothing To Do With Me

by Monica Sabolo

  The memory of his male authority permeated her nerve endings for ever. Her sin haunted her consciousness but, in the months that followed, she still responded to all his letters, disturbing missives written in pencil on sheets of graph paper. He advised her to hide his letters, worried too about their terrible wrongdoing, but he always finished by asking her to give her parents a hug, which drove her into a state of bewilderment and reinforced the torment.

  At Christmas, he sent her a postcard from Crans-Montana, saying that he intended to visit her in Geneva. That was the last time she heard from him. In April, she stopped hoping to see him on the way out of school (in her dreams, he always wore his swimming trunks in the playground, which only slightly interfered with her euphoria). She threw herself at her mother, who was smoking a Muratti Ambassador whilst preparing the breakfast. ‘I won’t ever fall in love again, it hurts too much,’ she announced, while her mother gazed out of the window, in her eyes the distant resignation of an abandoned woman.

  ANXIETY

  Message written by Monica for Ambra’s birthday, October 1979.

  ‘happy birthday mummy,

  doing the howswork for mummys birthday

  hurying to finish the birthday kake

  dont tell anywon your age even if your 29

  nowing that she wont like her prezent

  I love you lots.’

  Booklet created by Monica, 1979.

  MONICA (PART 2)

  By 1984, Monica had still not kissed another boy. She was around twenty centimetres shorter than the other girls in her class, who wore mascara and looked as though they had progressed to a superior stage in life. They moved around in groups, pulled together by secret signals indicating their membership of a particular tribe of initiates. They flirted with the male species and mastered the secret protocols: Brazilian bracelets, cigarettes in the toilets, cascades of hair rolled up in a band. Monica watched them pass her in the corridors with a feeling of ashamed underdevelopment, a sense of having been betrayed by nature. In the space of several months, they had lost their cheeks and sprouted like tropical plants, while her body was fossilized in a prehistoric stage of evolution, deprived of the attributes which promised to unlock interesting prospects, such as the mixing of saliva or fingers sliding between shirt buttons.

  She was sometimes invited to parties, where she moved around cautiously, doing her utmost to appear relaxed and unconcerned by her solitude. She would daringly follow the flow of boys to where they smoked at the bedroom windows, but they were indifferent and wandered away.

  It was during one of these lively ordeals that she got to know Lyonel, who, as well as perpetually sweating like a bucket, suffered from a growth impediment.

  He was the shape of a sickly child, but his face seemed to have reached an advanced hormonal stage. He had dark rings under his eyes betraying a renal dysfunction, and hair that gleamed like the coat of an aquatic mammal. This surprising dichotomy between his size and the surge of testosterone exuded by his body had a disastrous effect on his social life. Whenever he came close to members of the female sex, they escaped like a flutter of butterflies, sentencing him to evolve on the periphery of existence. It was there, in the wings of the world, stuck at a dining room table adorned with bottles of Oasis, that he suggested smoking a cigarette. Monica cast a suspicious glance at his synthetic black shirt, hesitated, then followed him into the bathroom, which now seemed to have established itself definitively as the scene of all profanation. He took a packet of Marlboros from the back pocket of his jeans, lit one, and started to puff out smoke with the confidence of a professional. He held the cigarette out to her and while the smoke swept over her face, he was struck by a mysterious sadness, shaking his head and declaring, ‘What a shit party.’

  From that day on, Lyonel decided they were a couple, or at least that they were doomed to maintain a relationship of a sexual nature. He started to send her letters in which he announced the erotic sensations she generated in him.

  In a passionate style full of imagery, he revealed his desire to explore her anatomy or sniff her bodily fluids, and finished off with expressions such as: ‘let me nibble your ear’ or ‘so long, baby’.

  He phoned her several times a week, and overwhelmed by panic and the rules governing politeness, she always responded in an affable chirpy voice, swaying her head like a metronome to the rhythm of the slow dance music that he broadcast into the receiver. She felt as though her youth had strayed onto a deathly path, as if a mysterious anomaly was condemning her to vile mating rituals. He kissed her at the cinema when he took her to see Dune, and she let him do it, despite the disgust that this man disguised as a child roused in her and her dread that an acquaintance might suddenly appear. She looked dishevelled and was sweating almost as much as him.

  After that, he stopped telephoning and writing to her. She started to watch out for the postman, with the feeling that she had experienced this scenario before, and, sure enough, once again the empty mailbox broke the news of her downfall. In the spring she bumped into him at a party, but he was laughing with a girl in a miniskirt and when she approached, he seemed to be staring at a point behind her. The following weekend, she decided to write to him at the address he had jotted down scrupulously on the envelopes containing his libidinous prose. She never imagined she would copy it out one day, forehead creased with anxiety. She asked him how he was, signed off with her first name and surname then added a PS in increasingly sloping handwriting: ‘Is there a problem with the way I kiss, is that what it is?’

  Three days later she found a message in the mailbox, in an envelope without a return address on the back. She tore open the envelope, apprehensive as if condemned, then discovering the red letters scrawled on a sheet of A4, was seized by the same dizziness as when she had inhaled smoke from their first Marlboro: ‘Don’t worry baby, your kiss = wow.’

  Monica’s personal diary, 1984–1986.

  Despite all this, when they bumped into each other, he continued to ignore her, even when her development began to take a normal course and she had to buy herself a C-cup bra. He, on the other hand, did not really ever advance, so much so that until he took his baccalaureate he could always be found on the front row of class photos, crouching in the middle of a row of girls. It was an era of great change, as if a reversal of Earth’s magnetic fields was being witnessed: those who had repelled the most attractive secondary school students started to magnetize them with mysterious force. While Lyonel’s body refused to grow, his popularity ranking climbed dramatically. He began to go out with the prettiest girls in school, those who had intriguing reputations, like the one who had hitchhiked to Cadaques in northern Spain or another who had slept with a teaching assistant. Maybe the characters of the attractive blond boys whose names had been copied out endlessly the previous year had turned out to be disappointing. Hiding beneath their arrogant exteriors were all the qualities of frightened little girls.

  On the other hand, Lyonel’s constitution made the girls’ cheeks burn like little hot plates: all those disturbing secretions and the thick hair they now imagined running their fingers through. But while other boys began to stare at Monica’s backside in her jeans, Lyonel no longer looked at her.

  That was when she began to suffer. At night in bed she started to reread his letters, and she developed a hopeless passion for him. Like a man susceptible to subtle charm, he had loved her tiny frame in her pleated skirt, but that biological time was over. She fancied him until she left school for good, taking stock of his conquests with a masochistic joy. She always considered him to be the archetypal gentleman, even years later when she bumped into him at a supermarket checkout, and he was fat and visibly drunk.

  ALESSANDRO

  In March 2001, Monica phoned an Italian TV station and asked to speak to Alessandro F.

  She was passed from phone to phone, as if this man was as elusive in his professional life as he was elsewhere, jumping from office to office with a devilish indifference, but the c
all finally reached its intended destination. Monica revealed her personal status in one go, in a clear voice, administrative, without taking a breath. He said nothing, then pretended to be surprised, innocently shocked, and ended up by acknowledging the facts with a sigh of acceptance, like an armed robber who had been on the run for far too long.

  She travelled to Milan to meet him, and a mixture of different feelings pervaded her, none of which seemed to fit the situation. She dressed as if she was going to a job interview, and whilst waiting for him in the hotel lobby, she remembered the frosty look her mother had given her when she announced that she wanted to get in touch with her biological father. ‘Do what you want,’ Ambra had said in a dismal tone, before opening the fridge and grabbing a bottle of beer, which no one had ever seen her do, not before that day or after.

  He arrived on a Vespa scooter and, with his soft, bouncy hair and beige linen suit, looked like he was gearing up for a holiday fling.

  He took her to a café in a square off via Andrea Maria Ampère and declared with convincing charm, ‘There is electricity in the air.’ From that moment on, nothing was accurately committed to Monica’s memory. A cloud of mist seemed to erase the contours of reality as if they were spending the afternoon in a Turkish bath. The surrounding noises reached her ears as though she was submerged in magma, and the words exchanged between them, in a bizarre mixture of English, Italian and French, sounded as if they were being spoken in the depths of the ocean.

  She bathed in a gentle euphoria, a state with all the treacherous warmth of carbon monoxide. She asked several questions about the romance between her mother and him, but he claimed he could remember nothing and instead preferred to discuss his family’s claim to fame in hosting the kings of France since the fourteenth century. For a while they wandered through a labyrinth of streets, and whilst he searched in the shop windows for something he could buy her as a souvenir (a ball-point pen? stamps?), she experienced a sinking feeling, as though she was leaving the world of the living.

  He was talkative, charming and recited old maxims in Latin which she nodded along to, smiling confidently and hopelessly. She had the docility of a captive, and when she mentioned her status as an illegitimate child, he gently lectured her, blaming her shameful tendency towards negativity. ‘Just like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, but it didn’t prevent them from doing great things.’

  On returning to Paris, she received messages on her phone about her beauty or the cruelty of fate, messages that thrust her into an inappropriate state of agitation. Then, compelled to respond to the demands of his biological offspring, he recounted with remarkable literary rigour the story of his original sin with Ambra, claiming it was why he had been sent to this earth. He sent her his latest book, the title of which hinted at a life spent crushing the hearts of young girls, affectionate like kittens. He then changed his telephone number and failed to show further signs of life.

  The Useless Seducer, by Alessandro F, Lampi di Stampa.

  PART THREE

  FALLING APART

  THE END

  Transcript of text messages.

  8:13am, 12 September 2011, MS to XX.

  Do you really think this is best?

  I find it so sad. Personally, I’ve loved the last few months.

  12:05pm, 12 September 2011, XX to MS.

  I find it neither good nor bad.

  Just sad but necessary and reasonable.

  And I’ve loved the last few months as well.

  NECESSARY:

  1. Of a condition, of a process whereby its presence or action inevitably determines a result or effect.

  It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake. (LOL)

  2. That of which the existence or presence is required in order to respond to the need (of someone) or functioning (of someone).

  That which one cannot do without.

  A necessary evil.

  3. That inevitably needs to happen. ⇒ unmissable, unavoidable, inevitable, infallible, obligatory, required.

  4. That exists where there may not be a cause or condition to its existence. ⇒ absolute, unconditioned, primary.

  REASONABLE:

  Conforming to reason.

  Thinking according to reason, behaving sensibly and in moderation, having a reflective manner.

  It is always when a woman appears most resigned that she seems most reasonable (Gide).

  ANT. Unreasonable, extravagant, mad: passionate, frivolous. Aberrant, absurd, unwarranted, unjust; excessive, exorbitant.

  Necessary and reasonable: definitions from The Petit Robert, dictionary of the French language (1967 edition).

  ANALYSIS OF VOCAB

  NECESSARY

  REASONABLE

  EATING

  BRUSHING YOUR TEETH

  HOPING

  GIVING UP

  DARING

  PREVENTING

  SLEEPING

  SLEEPING

  ART

  WORDS

  (WRITING A BOOK)

  (SEEING A SHRINK)

  XX (HIM)

  YY (SOMEONE ELSE)

  DIAGRAM

  Unprompted remarks collated following the break-up of MS with the loved one.

  Guys (who don’t know him).

  — If that’s the case, it’s good news.

  — Maybe you were just doing his head in.

  — Make a fresh start.

  — You need to sleep with another man as soon as possible.3

  — A pretty girl like you . . .3

  — He’s an Italian? They are all chauvinists, the Italians.3

  — Is he married?3

  — Did he cheat on you?3

  — Did he leave you for someone else?3

  — Women can do anything in love. If a woman wants a man, she can have him.3

  — It’s like a ringroad: if it’s jammed, you have to change your route. You have to adjust.3

  — Personally, I’ve been with my wife for thirty years.3

  — Maybe you’ve had a narrow escape.3

  — What’s you star sign? Aha, Leo! Leos aren’t easy.3

  — In any case, what did you expect in this shitty place?3

  — Six months, what’s that on the geological time scale? Nothing. Dust.

  Guys (who know him).

  — Let it go.

  — Yes, but when you get to know him really well, he’s a great guy.

  — I knew his ex, she isn’t bad.

  — Fuck, drop it, life’s too short.

  — You’re healthy, that’s all that matters.

  — He was in a film wasn’t he?

  — Last year in Cannes, it was a right laugh.

  Girls (who don’t know him).

  — What a knob!

  — His ex is irrelevant.

  — Maybe he’s scared.

  — He doesn’t feel up to it.

  — Do you think he might be gay?

  — You need to make an impression on him.

  — Whatever, I don’t understand blokes.

  — I get the impression that all the nice girls I know are single.

  — Don’t take it the wrong way, but I think you’re a masochist.

  Girls (who know him).

  — What a knob!

  — He thinks the sun shines out of his arse, doesn’t he?

  — He’s just not in your league.

  — That guy doesn’t love anyone but himself.

  — In any case, in ten years’ time he’ll be bald.

  — Are you joking?

  — I didn’t think that guy had a sex life.

  — That moron with his leather jacket.

  — Still, he’s so laid back he’s horizontal. He looks like he’s on St John’s wort.

  — He could be France’s youngest regional councillor (referring to his dress sense).

  — That’s a shame, he was sweet.

  UNREST

  Transcript of text messages between MS and XX, from 13 September to 14 November 2011.


  8:02pm, 13 September 2011, MS to XX.

  I thought it would be different with me.

  8:08pm, 13 September 2011, XX to MS.

  That’s your crazy pride talking.

  10:46pm, 22 September 2011, MS to XX.

  Well there you go. I’m resigned to it.

  10:47pm, 22 September, MS to XX.

  Great, isn’t it?

  11:00pm, 22 September 2011, XX to MS.

  I don’t know.

  11:05pm, 22 September 2011, MS to XX.

  You have the right to have an opinion on things, you know.

  11:18am, 24 September 2011, MS to XX.

  I’m going to leave you a message. Please don’t reply.

  3:07pm, 24 September 2011, 15:07, XX to MS.

  Without meaning to be arrogant, I also think I’m disappointing.

  4:33am, 25 September 2011, MS to XX.

  In fact I

  10:12am, 26 September 2011, MS to XX.

  You’re in the process of losing me, you know.

  11:58am, 26 September 2011, XX to MS.

  But we’ve already lost each other.

  12:42pm, 2 October 2011, XX to MS.

  How are you doing?

  12:42pm, 2 October 2011, MS to XX.

  What the hell do you care?

  5:39pm, 6 October 2011, MS to XX.

  Do you want to meet up?

  5:45pm, 6 October 2011, XX to MS.

  I think I’d really like that, but it’s up to you . . .

  5:55pm, 6 October 2011, MS to XX.

  It’s complicated but let’s do it.