Jolts

by Fernando Sdrigotti

  The days in the kitchen will be punctuated by nights of drink. Friday night binges that extend into Sunday nights. Culturally-impaired bloated bladders being relieved against walls in dark alleys. Stumbling all the way to Fred’s, getting lost, arriving somehow, getting lost again, arriving again, but arriving differently. And strange moods in which I will find myself, unaccustomed to so much booze, to the national lack of guilt around this carnivalesque self-destruction. And failed attempts at courting — fictitious telephone numbers being handed by also drunk but smarter locals. Confidence and self-esteem averaging negative numbers and Fred and I staggering horny and pissed all the way home, saying and doing things we will regret.

  So there will be a heavier kind of silence on the way to work, the kitchen a momentary break, Fred leaving work early to see a man about a dog or the Irish equivalent, and me finding a room of my own, where the heating won’t work, and I will never know the name or face of my housemates, if there is actually any other human being in the house. At least my move will bring some peace. And Fred and I will start speaking again, like an old spring returning to its usual form.

  Then there will be more gallons of petroleum-coloured beer. More Argentines with irrelevant names, from whom I will run away in order to avoid acting the nostalgic Argentine abroad in the company of others acting their own nostalgic character. And short escapades in slow trains that will leave me in the middle of nowhere, in small stations I won’t leave, where I will just cross to the other platform and ride the train back to Dublin. Walks in St Stephen’s Green, Phoenix Park, the banks of the Liffey somewhere near the sea, an attempt to enjoy Belfast during a two-hour visit with Fred, and a place full of rocks on the west coast but that could be anywhere else in Ireland. Time that flies when you are either scrubbing a pot or drunk — a visa that nears its end. And then one night a party in Sandymouth, where I’ll get seriously stoned and start thinking that I’m far away from everyone who knows me, and feel scared and exhilarated, free for the first time, alone yes, and about to become illegal too, but also divorced from everything and everyone that ever held me back — everything and everyone but Fred. And you can’t start from zero unless you reach a proper blank page. One hundred per cents; all of nothings. I need to offload the existential weight that remains, get rid of the detritus and so on. While I get another stamp on my passport and avoid being sent back home.

  _________

  After all of this has been consigned to the past, I may be sitting in a café in London. Seventeen years will have elapsed between Milan Malpensa, and the scooping out of sugar from the bottom of a sour espresso in a place with ironic posters of Bruce Springsteen and heavily tattooed people.

  Maybe another Thomas Cook guide will have decided the next destination. I might have found it on a table at the Kylemore, or some pub. Or maybe it won’t have been another Thomas Cook guide and the idea will have come into my head in a bookshop near Trinity College, when I accidentally bump into a Cortázar book. Or maybe it will have been a cheap flight announced in a travel agent’s window, or an advert in a newspaper, someone wearing a beret, the perfume of hot bread and the thought of a baguette, a documentary about Jim Morrison’s final days, overhearing someone say ‘hors d’oeuvre’, wondering what it means, what secrets these words conceal, going after these words, or the promise of relaxed passport controls. Somehow the choice will have been Paris, in a couple of weeks from that night in Sandymouth, in just under three months from now.

  And then a taciturn trip with Fred to the same airport that is about to welcome me in a while. A quick farewell but really a goodbye, that I will have made sure is quick and clinical by rushing through security after some poor excuse about planes, anxiety, toilets. Then there will have been an uneventful flight. Another arrival at one of those places that look like a shopping mall. A bus ride to a station, some station. An extortionate taxi ride to a hostel someone — who? — will have booked for me. Then some months in Paris, the clichéd birth of writing in a picturesque café. Yes, the Birth of Writing. The handling of pens, notebooks, pointless notes towards pointless books, some that will be written, some that won’t.

  And after this all my life will have tuned into an amorphous mass. Hostages of the narcissism of first person narration, the I who writes, and the written I, will have mixed to the point of unrecognition. So I may be sitting in a café in London reading these words. And I may be trying to figure out what is actually real, and what made-up. Or I might well be rejoicing in the uncertainty. Or aware of the fantasy, I might be rejoicing in the fabrication. Or maybe I will read these four thousand or so words, one more time, as I correct the punctuation here and there, and find that everything written here is my life, verbatim. That regardless of how much I have tried to hide I have failed, and I am naked on the page.

  But all this I don’t know yet.

  And if I did know, would it even matter?

  THE KID AND THE TELEPHONE BOX

  The sign said Rome and pointed to the left but we pressed right ahead. It was an average circular road with scattered flat houses, advertisement boards, cars rushing in this or that direction, smog, vast expanses of industrial space, empty soft drink cans and rubbish lying on the hard shoulder. Manuel was driving, I was sitting next to him, and Mika was in the back, filming everything with a small camcorder.

  ‘Why didn’t you turn left?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There was a sign for Rome. I thought we were going to Rome.’

  ‘You take it easy and let me do the driving. Just relax.’

  Relax… Everybody says that all roads lead to Rome but apparently this is a myth — at least in its periphery. And to make matters worse all circular roads look the same. We could have been driving near Rosario, São Paulo, London, Paris, Kathmandu, Leeds, Johannesburg, Mexico DF, San Francisco, Ontario, Reykjavik, anywhere or almost anywhere.

  Manuel took a right turn and we went over a level crossing. The car slowed down and this guy who was standing by the barrier looked into my eyes, I don’t know why. Soon we took a narrow street uphill. Manuel drove fast and the cars driving towards us drove fast too. Once or twice in the space of a hundred metres we narrowly avoided a crash, but everything seemed calculated, precise — there was a prearranged agreement. Mika was quiet, her mind focused on her camera and the camera was focused on me. Or maybe she was just filming the passing cars. I didn’t turn around to find out.

  ‘We’re not going to Rome,’ Manuel said.

  ‘Cool,’ I said. He was waiting for me to ask where we were going. It felt right to keep him waiting.

  And more narrow roads, more steep roads, the smell of pine trees. Manuel would occasionally point to this or that place. He wouldn’t give any explanation, just point to this or that place and tell me to look at something.

  Look there, a typical Italian house.

  Look there, a church.

  Look there, a path getting lost somewhere.

  A pig.

  A mountain.

  Greenish fields.

  Vineyards.

  A convent.

  A dog.

  More vineyards, another vineyard, another convent.

  That’s not a pig, it’s a Great Dane.

  And so on.

  _________

  Twenty minutes later we reached a town called Rocca di Papa. Manuel parked the car by a little square.

  ‘Fancy a walk?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  It must have been three o’clock in the afternoon, the streets were empty and the sun was already weak. We left the car and crossed to the other side of the road, where there was a viewpoint on top of a steep cliff. Manuel leaned against the railing and lit up a cigarette; he passed me the pack and I lit up too. Mika was pointing the camcorder at me and I looked down below and saw a dog scavenging food from a bin bag. It was full of rubbish down there, in what looked like someone’s back garden. How irritating it must be, to have everyone in town and every visitor dumping their shit
into your backyard. I turned around to look at Mika and instead of seeing Mika I saw a camera lens. She gestured from behind the lens — I passed the cigarettes her way; Manuel elbowed me.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Over there, that’s where Rome is. Happy now?’ I looked towards the horizon: a palette of yellows and light greens and grey clouds coming from what looked like small garden bonfires.

  ‘I can’t see anything, only smoke,’ I said.

  ‘Can you repeat that again? I forgot to press REC,’ Mika said. She nodded and smiled.

  ‘I can’t see anything, only smoke,’ I repeated. She gave me the thumbs up.

  ‘Behind the smoke is Rome,’ Manuel said.

  Mika had been with the camera in my face since I had arrived the day before. Cameras feel like guns sometimes and it’s impossible to get used to them and everybody hates a close-up. But I didn’t complain, it’s the direction things are going right now, no point in fighting that. We are constantly observed, photographed, filmed — Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ dictum taken to its logical conclusion: we’ll all have our fifteen minutes of registered irrelevance on a daily basis. When Mika finished her cigarette she tossed it down the rock face and filmed it; I looked at the cigarette all the way to the bottom and so did Manuel. The cigarette fell on the rubbish but missed the dog.

  _________

  Soon we started walking again, sloping upward a narrow street that seemed to get narrower with every step. The sun, barely visible, dropped between tall houses, breaking through clothes hanging out to dry from side to side. My eyes hurt from the sun even though it was almost gone. The scene was too picturesque to be taken seriously, too typically Italian, in a way I couldn’t really explain although I’m half Italian, or so says my passport.

  ‘Tomorrow we can go to Rome… if you want,’ he said. I didn’t reply but I thought that I would just take the train to Rome and fuck him and his car — he was in control of the situation as long as he could drive me around. I was going to go to Rome on my own. Or maybe just stay in bed all day. Or maybe just take the plane back to London and spend Christmas on my own, waiting for Sabina to change her mind. I didn’t know. Mika, who was lagging a few metres behind, turned back to the little square we had just left, filming, of course; Manuel caught me staring at her.

  ‘I bought the camera for her birthday,’ he said. ‘She wants to do films.’

  ‘Nice camera.’

  ‘It would be good if you talked to her about it, give her a few tips. You know the drill.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I thought you worked with films…’

  ‘I do. I did. But I don’t do films.’

  ‘I thought you wrote a couple of scripts or things like that?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Writing is different. But I could never do a film. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Still. Talk to her about films when you have a chance. Give her a list of films to see, a book to read, something. She’s a nice girl. A bit slow, but good with visual things. She’s obsessed with that fucking camera. She says she wants to do a documentary, but she doesn’t have a clue.’

  ‘That’s commendable,’ I said. ‘I mean, documentaries are great.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever; it keeps her busy. Talk to her. I hate documentaries…’

  ‘Manu, can I have your shades, please?’

  ‘No way!’ he said. ‘It’s not even sunny!’

  ‘I didn’t sleep last night and I’ve got this terrible hangover. Lend me the shades, will you?’

  He passed me a pair of aviators; I put them on. The sky was nicer staring from behind them; the sky is always nicer from behind a pair of sunglasses.

  We continued walking and soon we reached what looked like the town centre. The streets were empty and all the shops were closed — it was dead quiet.

  ‘Take me to a bar, Manu. This is depressing,’ I said.

  ‘Have you seen any bars?’

  ‘There MUST be a bar…’

  ‘Don’t bet on it.’

  He was right, maybe there wasn’t a bar. The only visible thing was the end of the hill and a group of teenage girls coming our way. Manuel stared at them as they walked past. He turned around and saw that Mika was quite far, filming something high above, probably the clouds.

  ‘They wear too much make-up but I’d do them anyway.’

  ‘They are too young.’

  ‘You think too much…’ I knew he would say that. I didn’t reply.

  We reached the top of the hill — there was a church. All of the town was standing there, on the sidewalk, in the middle of the square. Cars parked everywhere. The old and the young, kids running around. A funeral, a wedding, a baptism, something, a reason to put make-up on, to wear your good clothes, to turn up in a shiny car. We walked past a group of teenage boys — I found it striking that several of them had plucked eyebrows. It must have been a fad.

  ‘Salve,’ said Manuel . ‘C’è un bar qui intorno?’

  He spoke with them for a while, then said grazie a couple of times and we kept walking.

  ‘There’s a café up there,’ he said. Mika caught up with us.

  ‘I shouldn’t be filming you from behind,’ she told Manuel. ‘You’re going bald.’ Manuel didn’t answer. She stopped filming him and directed the camera towards me. I threw my cigarette on the floor and tried to crush it with my left foot but missed it, stumbled, and kept walking to break a fall.

  ‘You missed the cigarette butt. Why?’ asked Mika.

  ‘What do you mean "why"?’

  ‘Yes. Did you miss it on purpose?’

  ‘Not really. I should have tried with my right foot,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to do another take?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’ We went back some metres and she filmed me trampling on the butt. Manuel watched from the distance. I found the second take easier than the first one.

  ‘Cut,’ said Mika and we kept walking.

  _________

  At some point, we reached a little square with a fountain, a telephone box, a café, and a couple of tables by the sidewalk. Manuel walked into the café; Mika and I sat at one of the little tables. It crossed my mind that Manuel hadn’t asked what we wanted to have. He would probably bring a coffee when all I wanted was a large glass of red wine.

  ‘He didn’t ask…’ I said.

  ‘He never asks,’ said Mika from behind the camera. She was filming the centrepiece, some floral tacky thing. I looked around — there was a fat kid playing with the telephone box, shoving a piece of wire manically into the coin slot. I became hypnotised with him, jerking the wire, completely taken over by his piece of wire and the phone box, on and on and on, making love to it. God knows what he was trying to achieve or if he could even think of achieving anything. He was one with that wire and the phone box. I envied him.

  ‘Film that retard,’ I said to Mika and she pointed the camera towards him and eyed me from behind the lens — she didn’t say anything but I felt her disapproval. ‘Yes, I shouldn’t use that word,’ I said and winked at her. She smiled back and then kept filming the kid.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve run out of batteries!’ She laughed very loud; I laughed too.

  ‘Just look at him instead. Then film yourself talking about him, at home. Film yourself talking about not being able to capture what you see, something like that,’ I said. ‘It would work well. It’s self-reflexive and people like self-reflexive things.’

  ‘What do you mean by "self-reflexive"?’ she asked.

  ‘As in a film about making a film,’ I said.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ she said and lit up a new cigarette. She stayed quiet, watching the kid. ‘You know a lot about film,’ she added a bit later.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Give me a tip.’

  ‘Oh, that’s hard.’

  ‘Just one tip,’ she said.

&nbs
p; ‘You mean another one!’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘It’s all in the details.’

  ‘Interesting… How?’

  ‘Yes… In the details, like that kid and the phone booth. If this was a film about me… Let’s say it’s a film about me going through some unspeakable shit: I’d pay more attention to details like that kid and the telephone box instead of paying much attention to me.’

  ‘What does he have to do with you?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Exactly! It’s in the details, the mood.’

  She stayed quiet.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said at last, and smiled, just as Manuel came back and placed a tray with three espressos on our table.

  _________