Training in Love

by Manuela Pigna

  “Was it in that moment that you decided to be a personal trainer?” I ask him.

  He puts the last piece of pizza in his mouth and shakes his head. “To tell the truth, no. At eighteen, nineteen years old you’re not that clear headed, that immediate. It took me a while longer.”

  I nod understandingly.

  He looks at me, stopping for a second, then adds, “And then I had a sort of tormented relationship with a girl at that time. I was too wrapped up in my love life unfortunately. She wanted to leave after high-school and I only wanted to follow her and not let go of her.”

  “Ah.” But Andrea doesn’t continue. He plays with the pizza crusts on his plate and doesn’t look up. “And then?” I’m forced to say.

  The waitress arrives and asks if we want a coffee before he can continue. When we both refuse, she lingers a moment too long and then goes.

  Andrea doesn’t speak again.

  “Come on, don’t leave me hanging for the best part!” I implore without dignity.

  He gazes at me smiling. “Remember it though,” he warns.

  I nod and make a sign with my hand for him to continue.

  “She did, in fact, leave, just as she had always said she would, and I followed. We went to England. Our relationship, there, didn’t last even a month.”

  “Oh!”

  He sits back in his chair, stretches and puts his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. “Yeah but, in the end, I’ll always be thankful to her. If I hadn’t followed her to England, I may never have met the people I met, done the courses I did, etc.”

  I nod. “And her? Now?”

  “She’s still there. She married a guy from Cameroon and they have a little girl.”

  “Wow! Quick…”

  Andrea laughs. “Yes, she always was someone running at a thousand miles an hour…”

  I nod again, then another detail occurs to me. “But your sister, what happened to her then?”

  “My sister had already reached her weight before I left and has kept it since then. Now she’s a splendid nineteen-year-old.”

  If she resembles him even vaguely I can well imagine what sort of trail of heartbreak she leaves around.

  “You’re smiling,” Andrea tells me, and I realize that I was again lost in my thoughts.

  “I was thinking about your sister.”

  “Would you like to meet her?” He asks suddenly and I’m a little shocked. Frankly, we aren’t such good friends for something like that, but it would be impolite to bring it to his attention…

  “Sure,” I answer, and I realize that, in reality, I would like to know his sister.

  “Let’s go,” he says, rising. “And enough about me.”

  I puff, but follow him obediently.

  In the car I discover that he intends to take me to a place on the banks of the lake and, when we get to the place where we’re supposed to leave the car and around me I only see woods, I start to get alarmed. “Andrea, I’ll warn you, I don’t want to scale any mountains… And I’m wearing ballerinas, I don’t have the right shoes to walk in the middle of the woods for three hours…”

  He laughs. “Don’t worry, it’s just here. It seems far, but the lake is a few meters away.”

  Getting out of the car, he gets a blanket out of the trunk, a basket with six beers and a flashlight.

  “Really, your trunk is something like Mary Poppins’s bag…” I comment getting nearer and looking inside. “You’ve already put in the scale!”

  He laughs. “Tomorrow is weighing day.”

  “Yes, I know,” I grumble while he closes it and we start to walk. I take the blanket from his hand and walk beside him. “If I hurt my feet, I’ll ask you for damages…”

  He laughs. “If you hurt your feet, I’ll carry you.”

  “Yes, great. That way I’ll give you a slipped disk and goodbye Ironman!”

  He bursts out laughing harder. “You think I’m that weak?”

  “No!” I reply, surprised. “It’s me that’s too heavy!”

  “Oh Olly!” He sighs as we walk in the wood.

  Everything is dark now. Andrea points the flashlight on the road in front of him and that piece of earth in front of our feet is the only thing visible.

  We continue in silence for a little, with only the background noise of the twigs and leaves which crunch under our shoes. He’s true to his word because, after a little, I see a mirror of dark water - a little unsettling - and hear the sound of the lake.

  “Here we are,” says Andrea, pointing the flashlight on a small open space. A sort of pseudo-beach on the shore of the lake. If we keep walking, we’ll enter the water. There is no protection, no barrier or slope. I pass him the blanket and he arranges it, then he takes the beers and puts them in the lake, wedging them between the rocks while I sit on the farthest corner to the right on the blanket.

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a quiet place I discovered with my friends a good number of years ago.”

  “Are any of these friends likely to arrive now?” I ask, hugging my legs with both arms.

  He laughs. “No, I wouldn’t think so.” He sits on the other side of the blanket and puts the flashlight between us, turned towards our bodies in such a way that I can see half his face and he can see half of mine.

  “Why do you want to be a librarian?” He asks right away, point blank, without even a second of hesitation.

  I sigh. How’d I like to have already finished this and be on the way back… “I already told you – because I love books.”

  “But why don’t you open a bookshop, or a publishing house, or write a book? Why a librarian?”

  “Because that way I won’t have much contact with people.”

  “You don’t have much contact writing either.”

  “Yes, but in order to write you need talent. And then it’s not something you can decide on at the table. Like, uh, I want to be a writer, tomorrow I’ll write a book, I’ll publish it and live off it. It doesn’t work that way. It’s hard enough to be a librarian, imagine writing!”

  “You have talent.”

  “No, I don’t,” I say harshly. “And if you know something about physical fitness and diet, I know something about literature and I’m telling you that I don’t have it.”

  “But would you like to do it?”

  I stay silent for a moment before admitting, “Yes, I’d like it.”

  “Then you should do it anyway. Regardless of talent,” he answers immediately.

  “Yes, okay...” I tell him hurriedly, looking away to cut him off.

  “You should do it in order to live your life, Olly. To not let your life pass in front of you while you stay there looking on from the sidelines. And because the fact that you like to do it is in itself a valid reason to do it.”

  I swallow and don’t comment. I knew it would be painful.

  “Why do you want to limit your contact with people?”

  As I was saying.

  “Because I’m uncomfortable most of the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ve treated me badly lots of times – lots of people.”

  “Who?”

  “You want the particulars?” I ask him aggressively.

  “Yes,” he answers swiftly – calm and sincere.

  “Oh, alright. You want the goriest details… obvious,” I reply tersely, again looking away from him and staring at the darkened ground in front of my feet. “The first on the list is my mother, who, since I was twelve years old, has never passed up an opportunity to let me know just how repulsive my dimensions are. Then there have been several classmates, a few teachers, strangers in the middle of the street, men and women of a certain age, children, teenagers, people my age, people I knew, acquaintances and people I didn’t know at all. They’ve said everything to me and everywhere, at the supermarket, at the coffee bar, at the gas station… everywhere. Everywhere. There have been times when I’ve thought that people saw only that in me and coul
dn’t keep that idea inside their heads, it seems like they absolutely had to tell me to my face that I was too fat.” I pause and then ask the darkness in front of me, “I ask you, have I ever pointed out to the people in front of me that they were short, that they had big noses or acne or not too much hair? That they had a single eyebrow or hairs growing out of their nose? That they had yellow or crooked teeth? Or elephant ears? That they had thin legs and an enormous belly? That they had wrinkles around their eyes or on their neck or sagging breasts? No, I have never pointed out anything about anything to anyone!”

  Andrea doesn’t say a word. I take a breath and I ask, looking at him suddenly, “Do you want a specific story?” I don’t wait for him to answer and continue, going back to staring at the blanket under my feet. “There are several, but I’ll tell you the best one – Donato Poggi, my classmate in junior high.” I take a breath. “Donato Poggi nicknamed me ‘Tub of Lard’ in the first year of junior high on the first day of school. At the time I wasn’t even that big, but when you’re eleven and surrounded by idiot kids who are looking for a defect because they’re insecure about themselves and don’t know how to manage their changing bodies, you might hear yourself called ‘Tub of Lard’ even if you’re normal.” I sigh, still not looking at him. “Tub of Lard… Now that expression almost makes me laugh, but you don’t know how humiliating it is when you’re little and when someone calls you that in front of everybody and everybody laughs. Tub of Lard… How I cried in the evenings, when I was alone in my room over that name… a single name can do a lot of damage.” I shake my head and look straight ahead, losing my gaze in the black lake. “In the second year Donato Poggi evolved and began to call me ‘Moby’, from Moby Dick of course.”

  Andrea is so silent that every so often I turn my head to shoot him a quick look to check that he’s still here.

  “And you know something? I was almost happy, because at the end of the day, Moby isn’t as obvious as Tub of Lard. At least, not for the kids in the second year of junior high, not yet literature experts. Can you believe it? I was happy because he had changed the name he teased me with…”

  I shake my head again, a little disgusted with my twelve year old self. “Then in the third year I got my period and my breasts suddenly grew. In a short time I was wearing a D-cup, so Donato Poggi began to alternate Moby with ‘Milk Cow’ and ‘Three Heads’. Of the three heads, one is the one everyone has, I’ll leave you to imagine the other two.” I stop for a second to breathe, because I realize that I’m still bothered now, after more than ten years. “Then it happened that three months before the end of school, Donato Poggi stopped teasing me completely. On the contrary, he began to look at me in a different way. He’d sneak up behind me and give me kisses on the cheeks. He whispered in my ears that I was pretty and that he’d been an idiot to treat me badly.”

  “Ha! Typical. The ones who are most critical, buy… it’s the same all over the world.”

  I turn to look at him and realize, in the half light, that he’s smiling. “Yes, the most critical ones buy… Anyway, this went on for almost three months. Initially I was angry at him for all the hurt he had caused me for almost three years and I continued to push him away. But after a time, with all the compliments and the nice things he said to me, he began to turn my head. His brown eyes suddenly became attractive and I began to convince myself of the existence of some sort of divine justice that had made him fall in love with me. I began to think that, I too, like all my other female classmates, could have a boyfriend. So, when he asked me to meet him behind the gym at break time the last day of school because he was in love with me and wanted to kiss me, I went, all happy and smiling. I went without thinking twice.”

  I stop a moment to take a breath and look at Andrea, who is listening without smiling – completely immobile, completely silent.

  “He had me close my eyes and pucker my lips. I wasn’t allowed to touch him as he lifted my T-shirt and took off my bra. The kiss never arrived. I heard only silence for a bit until he suddenly said, ‘Hey, they really are as big as two heads!’ and someone laughed. I opened my eyes and saw Donato Poggi in front of me, swinging my bra around with his finger, and another dozen boys.” I swallow and see Andrea do the same without taking his gaze from mine. He says nothing.

  “I started to cry, I hurried to pull down my T-shirt and I asked him, still politely - can you believe what an idiot? – to give me my brassiere. He came nearer and said with a smile on his lips, ‘Come on Moby, did you really think I could fall in love with a whale like you?’ and he threw my bra up in a tree. It got caught on a branch. I decided to not try to retrieve it and I left, running, while all the others laughed.”

  I pause, but Andrea doesn’t comment, so I conclude, “So, no, I don’t have any great desire to work in contact with people.”

  He takes a deep breath and looks at his hands linked in front of him. I respect him in this moment, because he stays silent and doesn’t tell me something like, “He was just a stupid kid”. I prefer nothing to hearing a phrase like that.

  “Are we finished? Are you satisfied now?”

  He looks up, serious, and says, “No and no.”

  “Oh, okay. Fine. What other piece do you want now?” I ask sarcastically.

  “What happened afterwards?”

  I sigh. “Afterwards I went home in tears. I cried all afternoon. When my mother came back from work in the evening, I told her that I didn’t want to do the third year exams because I didn’t want to set foot in that school again. She told me I could forget it and had me tell her everything that had happened. I gave her a slightly edited version of it. I told her about the months, years, of bullying, ending up with that day, but… I left out the bit about the bra because it was too humiliating. When I finished, she told me that Donato Poggi was just a stupid kid, that soon I’d forget all about it and that they would too, and that if I had listened to her before, I would be thin and something as unpleasant as this would never have happened. Then I told her that after the exams I wanted to go and live with my father who lives in Rome, because I didn’t want to live with her anymore. She told me fine, if he wants you. So I called my father, I told him everything about what had happened, still omitting the bra part, and I asked to go and live with him. He felt very bad for me. He even threatened to come up and speak to the boy’s parents, but as far as living with him… No, because there was no room for me in the apartment where he lived with his new wife and his new children. So I continued living with my mother. I went to take the third year exams beside the boys who had seen, and made fun of, my intimate parts and I went to a high-school where some of the above mentioned boys went. I began to eat even more and to gain even more weight.”

  I stop for just a moment to catch my breath. He says nothing and, despite the fact that it disturbs me and humiliates me to tell these things to him, on the other hand I don’t want to stop either. It’s as though once the dam is opened, it is impossible to close it. “I went through periods, during high-school, when I tried everything to lose weight. Everything… I tried vomiting after binging, fasting, running in place in my room, jumping rope in my room, doing sit-ups and push-ups in hiding, alone in my room. I tried every diet, every method. I even came to hurt myself every time I wanted to eat, but not even that worked. I’d hurt myself and eat anyway. Until one day I was tired of this torment… torment, endless torment… and I abandoned the idea and gave up everything, and resigned myself to being fat for the rest of my days.”

  I am silent for a little and Andrea inhales loudly, still looking at his hands, then he jumps up. “Do you want a beer? I… think I need one.”

  “Yes please.” I grab it when he passes it to me already open.

  “What made you change your mind?” He asks me once he’s sit down in his place again.

  I sigh and drink a little before answering, “I wasn’t living completely. As you mentioned yourself before, it’s as if life is happening around us, people are living it and I’m standing
outside watching the others… And… I’m always uncomfortable. Almost all the time at least. And I’m tired of feeling uncomfortable in my own body.”

  He nods, then clears his throat, lifting his head and looking me in the eyes. “But how is it you became aware that you weren’t living? That is, what happened… I mean, there must have been something that set it off. Because why, for what reason only now and not three years ago for example? Or two years ago?”

  I inhale and hold it in. He gazes at me in silence for a while. I take another sip of the beer, which is cool and makes me a little dizzy. “From a certain point onward I did live a little – anesthetized, if you can say that – and then…” I stop because it annoys me to tell him about Gianca.

  “And then?”

  I shake my head and drink a little more. “Nothing. Then one evening, a few months ago, I met a guy.”

  He straightens up and pays attention. He murmurs in a low voice, “I knew it…”

  I roll my shoulders again.

  “Go on,” he says spinning his hand around.

  “There’s not really much to say… I saw this man, I liked him, I realized that… that…” I look at him for a moment, blushing before looking away. “That I would have liked something to happen between him and me, but at the same time no because I felt too uncomfortable about my body, and so… I decided to modify one of the factors in this problem, in hopes that, in this way, the result would be different too.”

  Andrea is quiet for a long time.

  I look around me in the dark, drink and play with the glass beer bottle. I look at my feet and don’t say anything until he breaks the silence, “Is it Nic?”