The Girl at the Door

by Veronica Raimo

  I felt lonely. And I hated marzipan. Not to mention handmade scarves. I thought the age for wearing them had long gone. And then I remembered one of my ex-girlfriends who always gave me handmade scarves as gifts. She had a devastating dedication; to judge by the heap of scarves she’d given me, she must have spent her entire life knitting. At one point she even started selling them on the street. She sat down amidst the buskers and unrolled a sheet on the tarmac. I never passed by, because I was ashamed to see her cast into the street among the stockinged legs of ladies doing their shopping downtown. Then one day I caught her at the flea market, rifling through the used scarves in search of merchandise. The ways in which an affair can end are incredible.

  Anyway, those first few nights in Miden, as I was moving through the house, I had only the girl’s gaze to latch on to. She didn’t watch me as if I were a strange creature, she just looked at me. I felt her near me. We’d noticed each other in the hallway while the tutor was taking me by the hand, as a friend, a brother, a companion, showing me a future full of trust.

  Questionnaire No. 1

  The Tutor

  You were the professor’s tutor. What kind of relationship did you establish with him?

  I became his friend.

  Your final tutorship report was extremely positive. Do you feel you made any errors in your evaluation?

  I’m still thinking about it. I wonder if our friendship may have compromised my clarity of judgment. I love my work and believe I’ve matured over time and developed a complex sensitivity for the human soul. I wouldn’t want this to seem like a presumptuous statement in the eyes of the Commission, I’m not a presumptuous man, but I’ve come to trust my intuition. It’s part of my profession, and I try my best to serve the Miden Dream. Anyone who thinks that sensitivity is an innate gift is mistaken. It must be cultivated, like everything. It’s a matter of craftsmanship, requiring care and the will to improve. The more it’s honed, the more it becomes spontaneous. Even enthusiasm requires application. It might seem paradoxical, but that’s exactly how it works. My sensitivity led me to believe that the professor could become not only an exemplary citizen of Miden but also a dear friend. Now I’m tormented by the fear that I may have blurred our relationship.

  Do you remember your first meeting with the professor?

  The day the professor first arrived in Miden was my birthday. It was an unusually clear day, and the sky was striped with pink. The rocks that lined the desolate road from the airport looked like giant quartzes, as he himself commented while admiring the view from the window of my car. Excuse me for delving into such detail, but I was happy that the professor could enjoy such rare beauty in his discovery of Miden. He certainly wasn’t the first foreigner entrusted to me, but his candidacy had sincerely struck me. Perhaps it was naïve on my part to welcome his arrival as a gift for my birthday. But I’m wary of those who don’t know how to appreciate the signs, and I believe that only the envious can accuse others of naïveté.

  In the course of your relationship, did the professor ever speak to you about the young woman?

  Yes. When the professor told me about the girl, shortly after his arrival in Miden, I was disturbed by the casualness of his words, but I wasn’t surprised by the revelation. The first time I accompanied him to the Academy, I immediately noticed a look pass between them. At that moment, though, perhaps out of wilful blindness, I chose to underestimate the significance of that gaze. He talked to me about the young woman several weeks later. Then he stopped. When I asked him about her, he was evasive. I asked him if they’d had an affair, and he said no. Only later did I find out that it wasn’t true. Perhaps I should have reported his lie back then, in my final tutorship report. I didn’t do so because I attributed it to a weakness on his part. I saw in him a man enamoured who looks to protect the object of his love. It was neither a matter of censorship nor of clemency, but of trust. I thought I was acting for the best, because I was sure that the professor would soon realise the inappropriate nature of his relationship. And in fact, time proved me right. The professor ended the affair with the student. At that point he himself told me the truth. He needed consolation from a friend.

  If yes, then how did you judge the relationship between the professor and the young woman?

  At the time, I didn’t have the proper clarity to judge. We sometimes talked about women, yet there was something particularly obscene about the way the professor talked about his student. At times I felt uncomfortable with his abrasiveness. He teased me, made fun of my prudishness and my straight-arrow nature. It was part of our friendship. When he drank more than he should, he let himself go and confided things I imagined had been distorted by the alcohol. He had an urge to possess that had nothing to do with love. Still, I felt I had to justify him, even though I couldn’t empathise with him. I thought that being uprooted from his country had led to a sort of sublimation, a transitional phase that accompanied the violent shocks of adjustment: the desire to possess another body because a land had been lost.

  Do you know the professor’s partner?

  Yes.

  If yes, how do you judge the relationship between the professor and his partner?

  I was the one who facilitated his partner’s acceptance to Miden, even though her candidacy was not among the best received. I don’t judge applications on the basis of merit, but on the quality of the dreams. We don’t need engineers to build our roads, we need happy people to travel them. The professor, though, needed a partner. I realised that his life here was incomplete; love at a distance intensifies desire, but distance deforms it as well, it wears out the spirit. I wanted to believe I was acting for the best, even though I was a bit hasty. I even expressed my doubts to the professor. We were in a bar by the sea. He listened to me, continuing to stare at the horizon, as if on the other side of that line there was a land he hadn’t been able to forget. I was born in Miden, I saw the Dream grow. I don’t understand that kind of nostalgia. At times I regret not being able to experience it. I realised that what the professor felt for his partner, what they shared together, was something I had never felt in my entire life. This realisation, instead of estranging me, brought me closer to him. We wound up drinking an entire flask of absinthe. In the sweetness of the sugar melting in the glass, I felt part of his story. I, too, awaited the arrival of his partner, and sometime later we all celebrated the news that they were expecting a child. I felt overwhelmed by that intimate familial joy. The Miden Dream would have the privilege of three new citizens united by happiness. I was proud of my role in bringing these two together. So much so that perhaps, yes, I indulged the sin of pride.

  How did you react to the student’s accusations of violence?

  When I received the file from the Commission, my first reaction was disdain. I thought the girl was taking revenge against the professor. I didn’t know her personally, but I know how blinding one’s resentment can be at a young age. I even ventured another theory, that the girl was trying to hurt her parents with those confessions, that it was an irresponsible act of rebellion. Only now do I understand how wrong I was.

  I remember meeting the professor outside the Academy. He invited me to a bar, but I refused, not wanting alcohol to erode any responsibility for our words. We sat on a park bench and talked while the students passed in front of us. The professor looked at them without any particular emotion. He didn’t seem tormented, only bothered. Even my own concern bothered him. ‘So what do you want?’ he asked me brusquely at one point, as if I’d become his enemy.

  ‘I’m on your side,’ I said.

  ‘I’m on no side,’ he replied.

  How do you judge your conversations with the professor following the student’s accusation of violence?

  The professor didn’t deny anything that was written in the file. His position remains the same. I admired his honesty, and still do. Nevertheless, I lost respect for him. It mustn’t have seemed like a grave loss to him, considering
that he, I now understand, never felt any respect for me, nor for the student, nor for his partner, nor for the Miden Dream, nor for TRAUMA no. 215. But I’ll always have some fond memories of him.

  Her

  I came to Miden thanks to the tutor’s intercession. He had already examined my boyfriend’s candidacy, and he took care of my application. In our long-distance communications it was hard for me to distinguish between the zeal of a bureaucrat carrying out a protocol and the sincere interest of a friend looking to reunite two lovers. Thinking back on it now, I don’t believe there was a substantial difference. I can say that the tutor acted as a friend trying to optimise the development of a love story. There’s no need to dwell on the disconnect he must have felt later. Human beings are always inherently torn, by temperament, nature, or existential quirks. And anyway, I felt more torn than he did. Why had I prepared my candidacy for Miden? I spent days questioning myself about the real reason. My answers changed and came apart, pieces were added to them. How many practical considerations had already stained my supposed choice of love? We were no longer inured to romanticism. For years they’d spoken of us as a lost generation. When investigating the events that had condemned us to the Crash, no one had asked us if we were in love. We didn’t even ask ourselves. Unhappiness was measured on another scale. Indeed, unhappiness had vanished from our conversations. There were only inconveniences, frustration, stagnation. Something had been irremediably broken, they said. We didn’t even have the courage to use certain words. Without any children to take care of, we took care of ourselves with the angry compassion of those who had never chosen anything. Even our distress seemed desolate. Deserted, we looked back on that age of anxiety with nostalgia. Each one of us cradled a random memory and tinkered with it for days and days. And somewhere within that mass of memories was the image of all that had been lost. It could have been the end of high school, the chorus of demonstrators just before the bludgeons, an unruly lock of hair in the breeze, a trip to gather mushrooms, a train ride, soft-pack cigarettes.

  I thought of a memory that was much more recent and livable: our tent flapping in the wind on the Miden beach, the arctic cold outside, and my boyfriend holding me tight. I decided I missed him, and wrote him a bunch of emails. I embellished my memories. The love inside our shelter – and my boyfriend had a job. The sex was magnificent, the thrill of his body, and I was able to get welfare for a year. ‘Dress in layers, like an onion’ he wrote to me, among other suggestions, as I was about to leave for Miden. I liked the fact that he took care of me from a distance, that he imagined my body under so many layers, keeping out the cold. For my arrival at the airport in Miden I tried to look sexy, even though I was dressed like an onion, but I didn’t know what to pack for the rest of the time. (How long would I stay? How many onion layers should I pack in the wheelie suitcase?) In the end I packed only what I thought was cute. I picked other clothes by following the sole principle of cuteness. ‘Keep covered,’ my mother kept saying. ‘Dress in layers,’ my boyfriend said. ‘Do you need money?’ my father asked. Surrounded by all that affection, I prepared my giant wheelie suitcase. I was happy.

  I soon discovered that dressing in layers was one of Miden’s regulations. When I landed at the airport, I received a pamphlet in which a group of people were photographed first nude, then in sporty undergarments, and ultimately looking like polar bears. That pamphlet captured the Miden spirit for me – the ironic and carefree depiction of nude and imperfect bodies (though actually they were all in shape) subsequently fused in a uniform woollen awkwardness. In the same pamphlet, an elf with an otoscope unrolled a poster illustrating ‘bad’ objects. The objects were anthropomorphised, their malevolence expressed in spiteful mean-faces. ‘Our ears,’ the elf said in a bubble, ‘are made to hear the pitter-patter of a fawn in the woods.’ In the iconography of annoying sounds depicted in the poster, the wheelie suitcase was rendered as a huge piece of luggage, all arrogant and full of itself, its two wheels endowed with spikes. My boyfriend had forgotten to warn me. I was the only one with a wheelie suitcase. As the wheels crossed the halls of the airport, I received only a few mildly embarrassed looks, but once I was outside, when the wheels rattled as they came into contact with the tarmac, I saw a woman plug her child’s ears and two girls wince with sudden pain. My boyfriend was happy to see me, but we had no way of hiding the wheelie suitcase, considering that it came up to my elbow. I burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation, and he kissed me instinctively on the mouth. Only later did I realise that he kissed me to keep from attracting any more attention with the noise.

  Him

  The tutor suffered like a dog in writing his responses to the questionnaire. I felt bad for him. I imagined him racking his brain, searching for the words that would offend neither me nor the Commission. And then other words – words of impotence – to give substance to his moral dilemma. I believe that was his real torment. He had nothing exceptional with which to torment himself, but I let him anguish, because it was clear that he got an almost sexual pleasure out of it. (I had no idea what else could give him the same type of thrill. I’d never seen him excited, apart from when he was anguishing.) He didn’t look for signs of remorse in me. Not right away, at least. Instead he sought an entry into what must have seemed to him an impossible abyss. It wasn’t my intention to prevent him from gaining access, but it’s hard to open wide the door to an abyss if we don’t feel it. He wanted me to show him the stigmata of my corruption so he could stick his finger inside, horrified, and feel the thrill. But I continued to talk to him stubbornly of love. He shook his head. He couldn’t stand it and plunged back into his anguish. So eventually I let him in. Gave him whatever he wanted. A violent relationship? Unspeakable violence! Abuse, degradation, shame. Here, take all the horror you can handle. He needed his dilemma: to be the friend of a despicable man. I did it for him. I was his abject friend. And yet, I kept talking about love. And that was when he shuffled the cards on the table and started haranguing me about remorse. But c’mon, that’s unfair. That wasn’t the deal. I couldn’t be the one who drew the character arc of his conscience. He introduced himself as an innocent young man, then an accomplice, then a redeemer. ‘I’m confused,’ he said to me. Never get involved in others’ confusion. Especially if you have no desire to take them to bed.

  Her

  The first responses to the questionnaire started to arrive. I liked having something to read together with my boyfriend. When we met, we would get together and lie down in the tent, flipping through the same book. The camping lantern silhouetted our bodies. What usually happened is that we’d chuck the book aside and start fucking. Reading the tutor’s questionnaire was the least erotic experience in the world, so it was hard to get my libido going. I knew the tutor was never crazy about me, but I never thought he was secretly in love with my boyfriend. It would have been an almost touching infatuation but for his wallowing in resentment during the waning phase of that sentimental thrall. Not that I cared what he thought, but for the sake of decency, if they ask you to analyze my relationship with my boyfriend, you could at least avoid all that stuff about your own complex role as procurer. It seemed not only out of place, but even off-topic. He just didn’t get the question. I think I had a mildly hysterical reaction to his questionnaire because I burst into laughter without being able to stop. Usually laughter is contagious, but my boyfriend seemed content to sit there unmoved, apparently studying the neurotic source of my giddiness. It wasn’t a good feeling, but I continued to laugh. Then I stopped. I thought about my own responses to the questionnaire. I stayed on-topic. I carried out my task. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to make an impression when the possibility was offered? The tutor had even described the sky’s pink highlights. Not to mention the ‘giant quartzes’, even though it was my boyfriend who first came up with that image. He must have liked it a lot, considering that he recycled it on one of our first nights together in Miden. ‘Don’t they seem like giant quartzes?’ he as
ked as he led me out of the tent, holding my hand. He asked me that question as if I were a little girl. In those days he often spoke to me as if I were a little girl. And I nodded like a little girl. Who knows if he remembers? Later, I didn’t ask. By that time I was busy chasing down more insidious concerns. And if I had asked for my questionnaire back in order to embellish the answers? Would I have seemed ridiculous? It wasn’t my style to scatter pink highlights and quartz dust through my writing, but I could certainly have talked about myself. My life before Miden. My life beyond the sea. A castaway. Where did I come from? There was more beauty in that question than in the Miden Dream.

  I felt sick just thinking about it. My boyfriend hugged me; he thought I was offended by the tutor’s words. For a moment I mulled over whether to enjoy his hug and forget the rest. But I no longer knew what I should forget. My recalcitrant mind came back to my questionnaire. Had the Committee already read it? If my candidacy wasn’t among the best, then my questionnaire wasn’t even remotely satisfactory.

  Questionnaire No. 2

  The Swimming Instructor

  What is your relationship with the professor?

  I’m his friend, I believe.

  How did you meet him?

  We go to the same pool.

  Do you remember your first encounter with the professor?

  Yes. I remember him staring at my legs! Not that he’s ever stopped! ☺

  Have you ever noticed sexist attitudes in the professor’s behaviour?