Shouldn’t the teaching of philosophy also dispense moral precepts? they asked themselves. Was the Academy sure I was still the right person for such a task? Wasn’t it risky? They wouldn’t have objected, for example, if it had been my colleague, the professor of artistic anatomy, but with philosophy – you have to admit – it’s a different matter …
Ah, what a joy! What pride! I would have liked to call my father and let him know that teaching philosophy was a time bomb. That his son was a walking disaster, merely a miserable incompetent who abandoned his country in its moment of need.
I wasn’t present at the meeting with the dean of the Academy. I was only told what they’d talked about, so I never had the chance to reassure the poor nervous parents that there was nothing to fear; even if I were a serial killer or a perverted necrophile, my philosophy lessons had about the same impact on their children as a recommendation not to swim right after eating.
Despite the parents’ fears, those smug, careless kids, happy to embrace danger in the flower of their youth, showed up to class one day wearing white T-shirts on which was written WE’RE ALL PERPETRATORS. I don’t know if they all left the house that way or if they got together in the bathroom to change, but half my class were wearing that T-shirt, even the girls. Their audacity bordered on folly, considering that the word printed on their tempting breasts was ‘perpetrator’ in the masculine form, an obscene identification, unprecedented and beyond my remotest imagination. They were together with me. They were perpetrating together with me, against the Academy, against their families, against the girl who that day seemed dumbstruck in her isolation. What I wouldn’t have given to see her! Her cruel and wounded eyes. She drove me crazy when she put up all her defences. For a time we went crazy together. Then we would have fun looking at everything we’d demolished. She would smile and mockingly sweep the defences scattered on the floor. Then she would bend over to pick one up: ‘Here, this one’s a gift.’ But that day I wasn’t with her. I was against her, alongside a string of students with whom I’d never shared anything, apart from telling them to wait a couple of hours before going for a swim.
Her
I suddenly started suffering from insomnia. My doctors assured me that my baby was sleeping well, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I tried to concentrate on music. Then on his heartbeat. My boyfriend tried to make up bedtime stories; I told him to save them for our son. I hated stories. I hated his voice, too, but I let him read me poems. I didn’t understand the meaning of the poems, so I found myself easily distracted.
I thought back to when I wrote poetry myself, and to a trip I took when I was twenty to see a guy I met on a train. He introduced himself as ‘the poet’. We didn’t want to tell each other our names. ‘But if the police stop us, we’ll have to tell them,’ I pointed out one morning. What kind of worries did I have in my head, even then, at twenty, facing the poet who would write verse on my arm? It was all new for me, my first time travelling outside the country. I knew I had no hope with the poet. He would go on his way sooner or later, and I would keep worrying about the police. We stole everything we could. For no reason. And half the things we stole were abandoned along the way. One night when I couldn’t get to sleep, the poet told me, ‘Count one sheep, then forget it. Then you can count it again.’
And now I was doing just that, even though it probably wasn’t what the poet had intended. In my insomnia I counted the girl who entered the house. Then I forgot her. And then she entered again.
Him
Then came other T-shirts. Those were white too, the same make, same cut, without stitches, which I came to learn was one characteristic of a high-end T-shirt. But the writing changed: WE ARE ALL SUBJECTS. You had to admit, they were beautiful. It wasn’t by chance: in an art academy, the students are very aware of style. And I wasn’t the only one to notice, because in the space of a little time the T-shirts started circulating outside the Academy. By that point the writing no longer had anything to do with me. WE ARE ALL TREES, WE ARE ALL ONE, WE ARE ALL OBLIQUE, and other random words. My favourite was WE ARE ALL CHAIRS.
I believe they were sold outside of Miden as well. I can’t be sure, but I think the students made a little money selling T-shirts and even bags with those phrases on them. The letters simulated a typewriter’s typeface. Not so original an idea, but minimalism always seems to be profitable. In any case, for a week (dubbed by the dean as the ‘white week’ because of the colour of the T-shirts) the Academy was the theatre for this vibrant clash of slogans. My pride got a considerable boost. My colleagues looked at me with something between indignation and incredulity. I read in each gaze an inflexible sense of envy. But why should we wish each other ill, if we could all be chairs?
A rumour started that the girl didn’t want to leave her house anymore. But it wasn’t true. I wonder whose idea it was to spread such nonsense, considering that in Miden it’s practically impossible not to run into people on the street. Even my girlfriend had seen her jogging.
The dean didn’t know how to stop the titanic clash of slogans. Her only worry, repeated like a mantra with powers of absolution, was ‘We must protect the students.’ I would have liked to advise her to make us a T-shirt. Then the white week faded out. There were only a handful of hard-core students who continued to wear the shirts. One of them tweaked it by tattering the collar, another liked to wear it over a button-up shirt. It was a clothing item with versatile charm. At the Academy, my issue was never openly addressed; the girls knew how to protect themselves on their own. I happened to eavesdrop on a few conversations in the halls, nothing more elaborate than a normal chat between classes. Even among the rival T-shirt wearers there were no big ideological dramas, and they exchanged the last drags of their aniseed cigarettes before going back in for the lesson. Slowly I realised that the real crux of the issue – unfortunately – had nothing to do with me. No one was taking my side, no one hated me. I wasn’t the point of contention. If anyone had inspired the white week, it was the girl, watching from far away, from her sidereal distance, as I once used to sing. It was a harsh blow to my pride.
Her
I’ve always loved shopping in Miden. It is one of those activities that makes you feel you are contributing to the well-being of society and not just your personal well-being. On every product is a label that explains the origin, process, amount of water consumed, and income distribution in the production chain of those who have come into contact with it. The label generally tries to have its own ironic narrative style, just engaging enough to make you a more conscious consumer. Among the jobs proposed to me, once I gave birth, was that of writing labels for preserves and detergents. I would have worked together with an illustrator. That wasn’t what I’d imagined for my life, but I was comfortable with self-pity. Many of my friends who stayed home had spent their best years crying all over themselves and then regretted all their weeping. It’s true that they’re called the best years only when you regret having wasted them, so maybe there are no best years.
When I went to the market to buy tea and some strangely shaped pumpkins that grow only in the Miden greenhouses, I noticed more than one person with the same shopping bag. It was a white canvas bag with words printed in a typewriter font. A young woman beside me at the vegetable table, stroking the synthetic sheen of two perfectly spherical tomatoes, saw me and immediately turned the bag. But I had already got the chance to read the writing. I think it was one of my boyfriend’s students, whom I’d met at an Academy party. But I always mixed the female students up, their pale complexions, blond hair, handmade sweaters, skinny legs. The girl left the two red spheres on the table and began to walk away, holding her bag against her hip. I bought the two tomatoes and followed her, tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Here, keep them,’ I said. She looked at me with embarrassment.
‘Did you go to bed with the professor too?’ I asked her with a certain brutality. She took the tomatoes and shook her head.
‘What do
es that bag mean?’
‘I use it to shop.’
‘What does that writing mean?’
‘I don’t want to get into it.’
‘You walk around with a declaration on your bag and you don’t want to get into it?’
The compassionate looks to which I’d grown accustomed became more anxious. Faces afflicted with worry popped up among the aisles of the market.
The woman shrugged her shoulders as if she were a little girl. I imitated her.
‘That’s it?’ I asked.
She gave me a gracious smile, an easy admission that she didn’t know what to say, then shrugged her shoulders again with the same grace, making fun of herself. We stood there shrugging our shoulders at each other for a bit. She smiled, I smiled. But her smile became nervous as we continued to shrug at each other in a paroxysm that wasn’t easy to stop. My smile, however, was serene. The bystanders’ anxiety continued to grow. The lady who sold felt slippers meant to protect parquet floors hazarded a similarly mocking gesture, putting one slipper on each hand and moving them around like two puppets. One hand aped the other. A few long faces betrayed amused grins. I had no problem continuing to shrug and smile serenely. The young woman must have begun to feel stupid, and I couldn’t blame her; we looked silly, but not in the cute way she would have hoped. The tomatoes I’d given her created another hassle. I started staring at them, wondering what she intended to do. Stuff them in the bag that was causing all those problems, or hold them in her hand like an inept juggler, with a puppeteer behind her waving two slippers? She stopped. She emitted a forced snicker that sounded vaguely swinish.
‘You know, like, the bag is cool, right?’ she asked me.
‘No,’ I said.
The woman stopped her slipper show. We both relaxed our shoulders.
Him
My girlfriend decided that night had to become our hell. During the day she didn’t speak to me. At night she stayed awake, and I felt her gaze on me like that of a vulture on a carcass. When I opened my eyes and asked what the matter was, all she did was stare. She got up. Put on loud music. Then came back to me. At that point I was awake. ‘Do you want to talk?’ I asked. And she responded by singing. It was her new thing, singing. ‘I have an early class tomorrow,’ I told her. But she kept singing. ‘Or maybe nooo …’ she warbled. Someone at the market had told her that they intended to fire me. Or rather, to suspend me until the witnesses gave their evaluation. My girlfriend had a very intense relationship with the market. It always seemed as if she were going on an expedition to see the oracle. She no longer had any interest in what was going on in the world. All she needed was the market. Whenever I watched a news bulletin, she grumbled with scorn. ‘How many migrants drowned today?’ she asked, laughing. I didn’t find anything funny about it. But neither did she. ‘Can we talk?’ I begged her at night when she kept me awake. Yet every morning, despite everything, I continued to bring her coffee.
‘Didn’t they advise you to get therapy?’ she once asked me. ‘Why do you want to talk to me?’
She showed me all the therapy flyers they’d given her.
‘What do you think? Does this suit me?’ she said, posing with the flyer in her cleavage.
‘Or is the pale pink better? Speaking of which, do you remember the dress that –’
She didn’t finish the question.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I don’t know what I wanted to say.’
‘Can we talk?’
She put down the flyers she had in her hand. She looked like she was hurt, an animal that didn’t know where to flee. I watched her soft body as it kept our child inside with all those words. Then she burst into tears.
‘I want the life I had back!’ she shouted.
‘Me too,’ I said.
Tears streamed down her face, as they had during our first nights together. It was cruel to admit that I liked the desperate docility of her weeping. I missed it.
‘Not that one,’ she said. ‘The life before.’
After so long, we found ourselves united again, in the longing for something neither of us knew how to explain.
Her
The visitors no longer came. I wasn’t the one who chased them away. I had the feeling not so much of being avoided as of being left in peace. I’ve noticed that the only time people tend to leave others in peace is when the others have never been further from peace. So they left me, and that’s it. I still got the same looks outside the house, but no one ventured to set foot inside. Too bad, because I would have finally known what music to put on for the visit. Once you begin to regret something, it’s easy to get carried away. It all becomes a matter of focus.
I tried to remember afternoons spent with my boyfriend, coming up with a list of names for the baby. We, like everyone else, tried to think of names that went well in every language, in every country of the world, imagining our son’s future as we had once dreamt of our own. All that was left of that vision were fragments, poorly assembled like phrases in a book whose plot doesn’t hold together. I tried to zero in on a detail, but my gaze settled on an intermediate distance. It wasn’t a lack of memory; I would have been able to rewrite that list of names, remember our comments, the attempts to invent new words, the game of mental associations, me making fun of my boyfriend for his inability to roll his r’s, and him coming up with names full of r’s. This was still in focus. His hands on my thighs were also in focus. Me kissing his neck. Also in focus was our laughter over the names of our grandfathers and uncles. And the affectionate, playful way of sifting out similar elements from our past, as if we’d left behind a common story. The story of his childhood mixed with mine. And our youth. Who knows what we were trying to show, abandoning our country and then talking about grandfathers. The same people kept popping up: peasants, cobblers, labourers, or trade unionists. We needed so little to love each other.
Him
The first questionnaire to arrive was my tutor’s. According to protocol, the Commission had to examine the questionnaires and then send them to me for the sake of transparency – not just informative transparency, but emotional as well. They were supposed to prepare me for the verdict on many levels, raise my awareness according to their holistic principles. It was important that the witnesses provide an account that ‘heeded the nuances’, that took into consideration ‘possible cultural conflicts’ and expressed their opinions without separating them from any ‘sentimental sincerity’. The tutor was a nice guy, my age, always available, sharp, able to forestall a wish before you even had the chance to formulate it. When I got to Miden, he had greeted me with open arms, which is the code of welcome. You open your arms, and then you embrace the new citizen, trying not to overwhelm the other with your own body. He was the one who processed my candidacy at that time. He was struck by my musical tastes and how I drew ‘hope’. Actually it wasn’t me who drew it, it was my brother. He’d read my application and found it cold. So he did a sort of revision that made it more touching – or arse-kissing, depending on your point of view – and then drew ‘hope’ because I wouldn’t have known what to draw. But I did draw the tree near my signature. The tutor never noticed the difference in lines, not to mention creativity. He didn’t even comment on the little tree (it was more a toothpick with two skewed little arms), but hope – an abstract fresco in which my brother claimed you could make out the shape of a newborn humanoid – had ‘sincerely struck’ him. And so did my whole candidacy application, for that matter, considering I’d been accepted. There was one phrase in particular from my application that the tutor repeated to me for months, as if it had changed his life: ‘There are works of art that we’ve loved in their reproductions. But the reproductions don’t teach us anything, they don’t prepare us for the moment when we’re given the chance to see the works in person.’ I would never have written any such thing – that was my brother’s doing. But the gist of it was that I di
dn’t know what to expect from Miden; you understand things only when they’re happening.
For his part, my brother felt like a prophet when – much later – he found out that I was going to be a father. I’d obviously forgotten about his drawing. But he, unlike myself, was attuned to allusions and prophecies. His was an emotional, mystical memory. When my case broke out in Miden, I happened to think back to that drawing. To my little deception. I’d been accepted, in part, on the basis of a lie. My musical tastes, though, were authentic. And in that area I’m much more sensitive and creative than my brother, which in a certain sense might render me an even more treacherous imposter.
It was the tutor who showed me my house for the first time, raising a toast with me to the Miden Dream, showing me around the Academy. I’d already noticed the girl, and she’d noticed me. An unequivocal gaze passed between us in the hallway. I’d fantasised about that gaze for days before winding up in bed with her. They weren’t just sexual fantasies, although I have to admit they were mostly sexual. I saw her in another way. I had just got to Miden. Notwithstanding the fact that the tutor was my guardian angel, my confidant, my devoted friend for weeks, I felt lonely. My neighbours brought me welcome sweets, loaves of coloured marzipan, they introduced me to their babies, they made me gifts of hand-knitted scarves and asked me a host of questions about my country. Young mothers and young fathers, together with their children, all caught up in listening to my funny stories. I made them even funnier than was needed. They were so well disposed to me that they would have let me wear them out with some preposterous dream made up on the spot. They studied me, amused, and I let them, because that was precisely the aim of their gentle interrogation: to sketch out a laughable caricature of my country. I let myself play the game and didn’t find anything strange in it. It was a feeling I’d already experienced in my travels as a boy during study-abroad stints; when you go to a new place, it’s part of the rules of engagement to feign ignorance. You wind up drinking with someone you wouldn’t normally hang out with, tell your story as if it were a parade of absurd anecdotes. It’s a way of getting to know people; you can’t be too subtle about it. Or so I told myself.
The Girl at the Door Page 6