The Girl at the Door

by Veronica Raimo

  After the girl came to see me, I couldn’t get rid of her presence in the house. She was beautiful. Violently skinny. I thought that my boyfriend had never enjoyed such beauty while hugging me. It just wasn’t possible with my body. I envied the girl and envied what he must have felt while possessing her. I wondered how many times that body came back to him in his dreams. I thought of his anguish when they separated. You get used to loss at the end of a love, but losing beauty must be dreadful. It had never happened to me. I tried to see it through my boyfriend’s eyes. I imagined his days at the Academy in front of that body, and I felt a pain I hadn’t known. I hated that pain. But I envied it with all my being.

  Him

  I got a letter from the girl’s father. Back then, she had often spoken to me about him. She’d been raised with the myth of her father. In her wallet she kept photos of him as a young man: a vertical strip of snapshots in black and white, wearing sunglasses in all four photos, with an affable smile and a leather jacket I’d seen the girl wearing. It was important to her that I admire his beauty. I don’t know what kind of feelings she wanted to stir in me when she showed me those photos. I always had to be careful not to reveal my embarrassment, because it was clearly something she didn’t know how to deal with.

  My weakness pushed her away. If I had a fever, if I strained a tendon, she would look at me with a vicious distance. Any weakness whatsoever made her angry – even a headache, a cold with too many tissues involved. So I looked at the photos without betraying any unease. But I never understood why she was showing them to me. Did she want to offer me proof of her genetic pedigree? She never spoke to me about her mother, who could have been dead. She wasn’t dead.

  I was one of the founders of Miden, her father wrote. I believed in that Dream. I want to keep believing in its justice. I know that you are also about to become a father. If one day you happen to receive a file regarding your daughter’s sexual relations, I assure you it won’t be pleasant. I’m not a violent man, in all my life I’ve never come to blows, but my first instinct was to hit you. I can’t say that instinct has been assuaged. Perhaps I wouldn’t even be able to hit you. You might even get the better of me. It’s not important, that’s not what made me drop it. Miden exists because we are not beasts dominated by instinct. I don’t want to write you this letter as a father. As a father, I only feel hatred for you. I hope I never have to meet you.

  I don’t know what your life was like before you came here. Miden has been a haven for many, for others an escape, but for those like myself, who created it, Miden is an act of faith. It means believing in humanity. You must have taken an oath, sworn allegiance to the Miden Dream yourself. I don’t know what you felt at that moment, beyond the ephemeral pleasure of a ritual. For my part, every time someone pledges allegiance to that Dream, I feel that my struggle has had meaning. For those who come to Miden today it’s hard to imagine that there was really a struggle, perhaps because no one had ever taken up arms, devastated a land, defeated another people. We never sacrificed human lives, shed blood, erected monuments to our martyrs. We didn’t have any martyrs. We don’t want martyrs. We want to be happy. That’s our Dream. That’s what you swore to. Martyrs have sad faces – proud gazes, but sad. They look to the future, and yet they are dead. We are alive.

  In the corridor of the Academy there were portraits made by students of the Miden Dream founders. Each was in a different style, though the styles tended to converge in a single cartoonish vision. Indeed, the faces betrayed no sense of martyrdom. I never stopped to think about whether they looked happy, but I have to admit that those faces transmitted a sense of vital serenity. In part – I believe – this was due to the contrast between those portraits and the work of my students, which I’d grown accustomed to, where all vitality had been warded off as if it were the plague. I asked myself if the portraits were commissioned according to precise directives, some sort of Midenite socialist realism, as if at the time of its foundation they’d made an effort to lay down some theoretical guidelines that would reinforce certain values, even though those values were limited to the dogma of happiness. Or maybe the portraits aspired to sacred art, and the mere fact of asking myself such questions betrayed all my bad faith. ‘I don’t know what you felt at that moment,’ the father said. I tried to think back to the oath. What did I swear allegiance to? I had wagered on my future. That’s it. And for a while it went well for me.

  Her

  One night I felt bad. I had severe shivers, nausea. ‘I’m about to lose the baby,’ I said to my boyfriend in a flat tone. I don’t know how seriously he took me, but he rushed me to the clinic. I had a fever, not much more. I wasn’t losing the baby.

  I wondered what would have happened if I had. Whether the community’s attention would have shifted to this even more tragic event, like a nail pushing in another nail amid the general emotional apprehension. I decided that I would have instead added a perfect tessera to the tearful mosaic under construction.

  In Miden there are no longer any diminutives or pet names (they remain only in nursery rhymes). They were eliminated from the language to keep women from being harangued in an untoward or debasing way. So they couldn’t use the equivalent of ‘poor girl’ for my situation, which was comforting. I’d often heard ‘poor girl’ in my country. It was almost always a woman saying it to another woman. My mother was always going on about some ‘poor girl’, referring to cousins, nieces, and daughters of acquaintances. There were various reasons why a girl would be saddled with that term: a failed exam (‘poor girl, she studied so hard’), an abrupt weight gain (‘poor girl, I didn’t want to say anything to her’), getting ripped off in a shop (‘poor girl, and she thought she was getting a bargain’).

  My mother called me poor girl countless times. It seemed like she was expressly waiting for a possible disappointment to console me in the soft embrace of ‘poor girl’. One afternoon, when I had put some order to the things I was leaving behind in the house where I grew up, looking through old diaries and letters saved in drawers, she said to me, ‘Poor girl, you suffered a lot in your adolescence.’ My suffering never had anything to do with her. Obviously it never crossed her mind that reading her daughter’s private writings could be considered disrespectful. When I pointed it out, her compassion became more full-bodied: ‘I’m sorry that you still need all these secrets.’ It was proof that I had things to be ashamed of, proof that, deep down, I was still a poor girl, even after crossing the threshold of maturity.

  But there was an even more irritating use of that phrase. One of my friends, who sincerely aspired to have a ‘normal love affair’ and yet tended to become a secret lover, always referred to the ‘official’ girlfriends of the men she went to bed with as ‘poor girl’. She especially liked to have these men recount to her the absurd excuses, alibis, and subterfuges by which they managed to carve out time with her. After which she would be there to dispense indulgences. ‘Can you imagine?’ she said to me. ‘The poor girl is in the hospital getting a lump cut out and he’s taking advantage of it to fuck me.’

  I was happy that I wouldn’t be a poor girl for the inhabitants of Miden. And not even poor, for that matter, because that was another word banned from the language. Technically, there were no poor people in Miden, in the sense of indigent, because everyone had a standard of living consonant with their needs. And there were no poor in the sense of unhappy, because the society couldn’t conceive of them. The only meaning allowed was ‘poor’ in the sense of ‘lacking’ (cholesterol, sodium, sugar, gluten, contradictions). So all the compassionate looks I kept getting had nothing to do with my emotional misery. I wasn’t unhappy, I was merely a woman put to a test. Despite the trepidation, they were all convinced that I would come out brilliantly. In any case, my baby was healthy and safe in my belly. How could I yield to dejection?

  Him

  I’ll vote against your expulsion, the girl’s father wrote to me. I tried to imagine how much those words m
ust have cost him, not so much with regard to me – the man he hated – but when it came to his wife and the girl. Neither of them agreed with his choice, so he wrote to me: They don’t understand. Through Mediation they’ll come to understand, even though they won’t approve. He was eager to let me know that he hadn’t overlooked anything.

  The Mediators were part of one of the most important Commissions in Miden and were subjected to constant monitoring and psychological stress tests in which they had to demonstrate their objectivity even in the most controversial situations – and what was often meant by controversy was just life. The Mediators were guarantors of the established order, even as they gave the impression that there wasn’t any established order. They had a maieutic approach, trying to draw out the most obscure reasons for an estrangement or a squabble between two individuals. They tried to draw out from the black vortex of conscience the tranquil star of common sense. They intervened in family relations, in relationships between couples, in quarrels among friends, in cultural misunderstandings. But there were limits beyond which they wouldn’t push. My case, for example, could not be examined by the Mediators; it was explicitly a matter of ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’. The vortex of my conscience was so black that it swallowed any glint of common sense. Fishing down there would risk soiling even the net, to use an ugly metaphor. It wasn’t my metaphor, but one used by the director of the Commission one of the last times I spoke to her. ‘Let’s not blur boundaries,’ she said, making reference – I think – to our previous friendship. The director had also had some sporadic contacts with my girlfriend. I don’t think they really hit it off – not from any sense of antipathy, but more from genuine indifference. And yet, their meetings must have further blurred the levels of their relationship. In Miden everyone was very wary about ‘blurring levels of relationship’, mixing the personal with the professional. They must have imagined their own existence like a building.

  If my country had gone to the whores (and, alas, not just for a stroll), it’s because there was so much blurring of levels that the building collapsed in a heap of rubble. Things were only done out of friendship, as payback, because of fear, threats, or out of spite. Wasn’t that the reason I left for Miden?

  Her

  I’d got into the habit of walking along the shore. I told myself that any kind of habit would be better than chaos, even though talking about chaos in Miden sounded like an oxymoron. I liked that word, it was very fashionable in my country. In the past few years there had been a relentless increase of oxymorons in our lives, in our emotional relations, in the newspaper headlines – a sort of epidemic. But chaos in Miden remained an oxymoron. So maybe I didn’t need any habitual routine, just to do what I normally did: nothing. Above all, I would have had to accept that little dose of chaos as a blessing, because few received it as a gift.

  As I walked placidly along the shore, I saw the girl running in the distance. Not running towards a radiant future or into the arms of a lover – as I would have imagined – but jogging. She surprised me. I hadn’t imagined her staying in shape that way, I thought she was more punk than that. She was no longer the fragile, gloomy creature who had dropped into my living room, but a healthy girl who jogged in a matching outfit. She had an enviable arse. And in fact, I envied it. All my life I never did sports, or rather, I’d stopped when I was a little girl. But I admire people who do, even though it’s hard for me to admit, especially since it would be so easy to imitate them. I admire people who have the candid self-satisfaction of doing something that’s good for them.

  Sports aren’t exactly obligatory in Miden, but they are strongly encouraged. The public parks are full of sports equipment. The gyms are almost free of charge, and kids in their last year of high school get their licence to become personal trainers. It’s a way for the young to care for the adults. There’s almost one pool per inhabitant, and as soon as you get out of the city, there are little natural lakes. And obviously, there is the sea, even if it’s always freezing. Those who don’t get a personal training licence can get one as a lifeguard and accompany people who are incapable, like myself, of swimming with a wetsuit. It’s almost impossible to deliberately ignore all these stimuli. Even an invitation to play ping-pong makes me uneasy, and so does the national sport of Miden, which is a sort of badminton with two small balls. It was born as a parody. It’s an ironic sport. You play with irony. The basic goal is to get confused, make a mess, and bust a gut with laughter. Another effect is that of getting very upset. So almost all the women of Miden have fantastic legs, well-tapered calves, and visible adductors. The kind of legs that look perfect with heels in a panty hose advert. But high heels, apart from clogs, are not worn much. They wanted to encourage Miden’s local craftsmanship, so they started producing low, very minimalist sandals, with a single strap to hold them on the feet. Usually they’re made of leather, but there are also vegan versions. And then there are clogs. Just as minimalist, with that one thin leather strap. It’s all local, kilometre zero – Miden cows, Miden wood – in part because imported goods make the inhabitants feel destabilised by the unknown. And yet, in that unknown, in the world outside of Miden, those shoes have become a cult object. Taking into account the exchange rate, they are ridiculously expensive. Many of my friends were happy that I moved to Miden, because I could buy and send them shoes without the extra charge. It was a clandestine operation, which I can’t deny elicited a quiver of excitement in me. Then there were the handmade raw wool sweaters in Miden colours: small red or orange rectangles – like the houses – against a light grey background. When I went to the Academy parties, all my boyfriend’s female students had those boatneck sweaters. With nothing underneath, they showed off the fine clavicles that I believe are a fundamental element of youthful eroticism.

  I made all these considerations as my gaze followed the running girl. I wondered why I didn’t wear clogs anymore, and long skirts and little necklaces, and all those hippie baubles that would have at least served to create a little noise and distraction as I walked silently in Miden. Then maybe people would look at me with annoyance and not compassion. Even in that moment, for example, if I’d had my baubles on, I could have called the girl’s attention, but she was focused on her own rhythm. If there was anything she had kept from our last encounter, it was her distance from anyone else.

  Him

  People tend to sublimate unpleasant events in their own lives, inserting them into a broader design. As if our mistakes will always teach us something. Often they convince themselves that it was all somehow ‘useful’. To me that’s rhetoric for the weak-spirited. I don’t know you, and I can’t judge whether you’ve learned any lesson. But I’d like to tell you one thing: do not make any effort to find meaning in what you did. Make peace with your mistakes. Live with your remorse. Don’t try to transform it into something else.

  It was clear that this man was looking for my admiration. Perhaps he didn’t know that I had already been forced to show his daughter that I admired him, he didn’t know that I had looked at her photos of him with a humiliating feeling of competition, he didn’t know that those pictures had sometimes undermined my ability to get a hard-on. In the name of the Miden Dream, he was ready to vote against my expulsion without offering his forgiveness. I wondered what I would have done in his place. What kind of letter I would have written. And yet, I would have loved to wallow a little in my weakness of spirit, if I were indeed that sort of man. But I didn’t even know how to respond to a basic question I’d asked myself: Would I have wanted the girl to look at me the way she looked at her father, or the way she had once looked at me?

  Her

  I started to appreciate the narcotic power of music. I didn’t want to hear stories, and the TV didn’t give me anything but. And forget about films. I couldn’t care in the least if someone escaped alive from a chase, if the kid who ran away from home would reconcile with his family, or if the uptight single girl would fall for her best friend from childhood. I w
asn’t interested in what others were doing. Surely they had something to say, but I wasn’t interested in finding out what. Faces, events, stories. Everything tired me. I didn’t even want to know about the news in my country. I didn’t want to understand anything. I started spending many hours listening to music, something I’d never done in my life. Maybe it was my boyfriend’s fault, the meticulous care with which he tried to structure my musical education: listening in chronological order, little riddles about the bass line. But there, too, I was trying to draw conclusions. It was nobody’s fault. Or maybe it was someone’s fault, but who cares. I wasn’t even able to say what I liked to listen to, it was enough to have the sound fill the house, take space away from the facts of the day, from the extenuating circumstances, from the girl’s bony body, her arse in the jogging outfit, from my thoughts full of resentment. I even started to sing. Poorly, without understanding the words. I emitted only sounds. I hoped the baby would hear them, hoped he might learn to live outside of history.

  Him

  One good thing about teaching in an art academy is that you can count on the students’ flashes of inspiration.

  The Commission had tried to keep quiet about my case so as to not compromise my lessons, but it didn’t take long for rumours to spread in a community like Miden. In any event, the principle of due process held, so I was still considered an excellent teacher and a respectable citizen of Miden. (It couldn’t have been otherwise, because there were no non-respectable citizens. Once you lost your respectability, you lost your citizenship as well.) But various parents protested to the dean of the Academy. Mothers and fathers equally respectable, genuinely convinced by ‘innocent until proven otherwise’, nevertheless felt obliged to raise doubts ‘given the particular circumstances’. It perked me up considerably when I heard about these doubts.