The Girl at the Door

by Veronica Raimo

  Apart from looking at my legs? It’s a thorny question. The professor comes from a culture very different from ours, and I believe that certain mind-sets are hard to change. If you’re used to focusing on parts of a woman’s body, then it’s not easy to take it in as a whole. Though it’s not really my place to say, I wonder if it might not have been more useful to pair him with a cultural mediator – rather than a tutor – during his first days in Miden. Moreover, the professor is certainly not a troglodyte (with all due respect to troglodytes), but an intellectual, so it was not always easy to discuss sexism with him. He always found a way to turn the tables and make it seem like even his sexism was natural …

  Do you know the professor’s partner?

  Yes, I’ve met her a few times.

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

  Back then I didn’t see them together much, so this is just my impression. To me it seemed as if the professor’s partner lived a little in his shadow. She doesn’t seem to have integrated much into Miden life. In fact, she’s always on her own. I know that they’re both registered in Organic Pesticides, but my best friend, who is also in Organic Pesticides, told me that his partner hardly ever participates in the discussions and initiatives. According to my friend, she signed up only because the professor did. I also know she was exempted from the tutorship period because the professor himself was her tutor. In my opinion, that wasn’t a good idea. The way I see it, it would have been better to assimilate into Miden society independently. The bond between a couple is surely important, but community bonds are more important. Especially if you come from a culture so different from ours, a culture where the role of the woman is unfortunately still subordinate to that of the man. I’ve read certain things about their country, many interesting articles, and if I can allow myself … they have a long way to go! I think it was a mistake to overlook those factors.

  In any case, on the rare occasions when I saw them together, his partner was rather taciturn. In the beginning I thought it was shyness, but now I think it’s a symptom of indifference, or a passive-aggressive attitude. I, for example, have trouble speaking when I don’t sleep well. I invert syllables, can’t remember words, so I might seem more laconic than usual if I haven’t slept enough. Now people understand that if I’m quiet, it’s nothing against them. But we shouldn’t look for the source of the problem in the language, as much as in the fact that I didn’t sleep well. Thanks to a sleep therapist, I’ve discovered things I never knew – for example, that female insomnia is very different from male insomnia. After all, melatonin is a hormone, isn’t it? They asked me lots of questions: Do your eyes change with the light? Do you prefer sweet or savoury tastes? Do you have more strength in your arms or in your legs? So my point is that you have to delve into the causes, not the symptoms. Obviously, that works only if someone wants to know themselves and improve. For me, improving oneself is a moral and civic duty. I always teach that to my students. It’s the first thing I say, and if I see them looking a little sceptical, I’ll spend the whole lesson explaining it to them without even letting them get into the pool. They can complain all they want, but one day they’ll be grateful. And not just them, their families too, their friends, their life partners, their cats, the whole society. Isn’t that the Miden Dream? Whereas his partner was always quiet and warmed up only when she drank, and then all she would do was complain about the Miden wine. One time I courteously suggested, ‘Why don’t you deal with it in the Organic Pesticides group?’ She looked at me as if I’d just uttered some sort of gobbledygook. Exactly the kind of look I don’t like! I’m a pragmatic woman. Complaining doesn’t help anything; in the long run it only leads to an accumulation of negative energy. Speaking of which, I’d like to also point out that the partner is always wearing gloomy colours. I have a degree in chromotherapy, so I know what I’m talking about. I’ve often seen her wrapped in her grey coat, which she wears almost as if it were armour. Grey is no-man’s-land. It’s the colour of indifference, the colour of fog, the archetype of ashes. It indicates the need to defend oneself, to seek shelter in anonymity. Even when she got pregnant, she kept wearing that coat. She suffocates the baby under that grey blanket. You don’t need to be an expert in chromotherapy to understand the symbolic violence inherent in this coercion. So, through the professor, I gave her an orange poncho with a floral pattern. That way she could put it on over her coat and activate a reverse energetic process without necessarily triggering a substitution that at this point could prove damaging to the baby. Orange cleanses the chakras and stimulates creativity and the immune system (very important in pregnancy!). It also expels toxins and instills enthusiasm and optimism.

  To be honest, I’ve never seen her wearing my poncho.

  Him

  I started wondering whether I’d be a good father. I was surprised that the questionnaire neglected this question. Wasn’t that a fundamental point in considering the prospect of my raising a family in Miden? There was a great deal of enthusiasm at the news of the pregnancy – smiles, hugs, bad drinks, and then silence. A tangle of congratulations turned into a tacit suspension of judgment, as if, after the resounding applause at the end of a concert, the spectators lifted the collars of their coats on the way home, disturbed by their own enthusiasm. That suspension couldn’t last forever. In a sense, I was in it too, with my own collar raised. I never shared my girlfriend’s paranoid temperament, but she was right about one thing: the pregnancy had been transformed into a sickness of uncertain outcome. She was a sickly woman beside a controversial man. In other times I would have been cheered by that ambiguous vision of myself. I would have seen it as proof of a complex, ephemeral personality. But I was no longer so young. I no longer had that ambition. I just wanted to be a good father. And I wanted to know how others saw me in a parental role. Reading the questionnaires was a wonderful perversion, like finding an email about you open on the computer. Denigration feeds narcissism too; what’s important is that they talk about you. And yet, no one expressed an opinion about my impending fatherhood. In my search for answers, I had even begun reading horoscopes, but astrologers are incapable of writing in concrete terms. They write sophisticated cryptographs to be deciphered, an irritating hermeneutical exercise garnished with a bland irony. I was certain that the failed students in my classes would find excellent jobs writing fun and useless horoscopes, even though the concept of failure was unthinkable in Miden.

  Her

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ my boyfriend said to me in an upswell of courage – or cowardice. ‘We can still do anything we want.’

  ‘It seems you’ve already done enough.’

  He’s always had an obsession with pioneers. But maybe he lacked the right spirit, a certain penchant for canned beans, a lone-wolf air about him. You don’t go exploring the frontier to fuck girls. Pioneers stay on their own, around a campfire. At the most they take a stray kid on as their own. They fare forth across the desolate earth. Anyway, I would’ve had to find another dole. And splitting the victuals would have been less romantic than imagined.

  Questionnaire No. 3

  The Photography Teacher

  How would you describe your relationship with the professor?

  I’m one of his colleagues at the Academy. We don’t have a close relationship, but I respect him as a teacher and a person. I chat with him readily, even though I’ve never seen him outside the Academy. I don’t know why we’ve never socialised outside work. Maybe I didn’t want him to think my friendliness was a forced social ritual, something that would make him feel like a trapped tourist covered in a garland of flowers. I preferred to give it time.

  Could you list three of the professor’s positive qualities and three of his defects?

  I believe a person’s qualities and defects tend to get confused. It’s hard to separate them. A quality can turn out to be a defect in certain circumstances, and vice versa. Allow me to make the o
nly distinction of any value for me: there are people who are interested in others, and there are people who are indifferent. I’m not talking about altruism, I’m talking more about curiosity, or vision. A certain fervour of the heart; I can’t say it any better than that. It’s something very evident in my students, in their way of approaching a subject, in the intention behind it, in their willingness to get involved. The professor doesn’t merely contemplate the world; he takes part in it. He has his prejudices, but he’s a passionate man.

  Can you describe the first time you met him?

  It was at the Academy. He introduced himself, shook my hand, apologised for his pronunciation. He asked me to repeat my name. Then he repeated it too. He waited for me to correct him, but I had no objections. I remember he was well dressed, wearing a dark green velour blazer. You don’t often see a man wearing a blazer in Miden. I don’t mean that the blazer made him seem out of place; in fact, it looked good on him, gave him a certain air of elegance. It looked so good on him that I was convinced his eyes were the same dark green. Actually they were brown.

  Come to think of it, I find it very significant that the professor wore that blazer. He had just moved to Miden; those were his first days at the Academy. Someone else – in his place – would have tried to blend in, not stand out. I’d always tried to do that when I travelled the world as a freelance photographer, before I began teaching. It’s pointless to try to conform through clothes; you have to study the ways of a place as you would the customs of a tribe. Miden is a tribe from my point of view, though I know many of you will be horrified by such a statement. Anyway, I don’t mean that the professor was the eccentric type. Far from it. In reality we’re talking about a rather sober blazer, but it’s his distinctive trait. He was the only one who wore a blazer, and you understood, it seemed to me, that he was attached to it. That he had put it in his bag with a certain amount of affection, like a memory. In short, I got the impression of a man with some aesthetic integrity.

  Did the professor ever disrespect you?

  As I said, the professor is a man interested in others. He loves to discuss. For me this is a form of respect. Indifference is a lack of respect. He worries, for example, about not boring others in his company. I find that to be a worthy concern.

  Do you know the young woman?

  Yes. She was in my class.

  Did the professor ever speak of the young woman?

  Yes, but certainly not in romantic terms. We’re not close enough to confide such things. If we talked about the girl, it was about her academic path. I had never noticed any favouritism on his part. Or rather, nothing that made me suspect extracurricular activity. But this consideration is somewhat problematic, since we should always engage with our students in a broader context. How could it be otherwise? Isn’t that our task? The professor appreciated the young woman’s intelligence, even though she didn’t excel in his subject. Nor in mine, for that matter. Both of us, however, agreed on one point: as a student, she did as little as possible to get by. I’m the exact opposite, so the young woman aroused my admiration as well as my antipathy, but that’s another discussion, and I’m working on myself to balance out my own relationship dynamics.

  Have you ever noticed any sexist attitudes on the part of the professor?

  I think it would be impossible for a sexist man to teach in classes composed almost entirely of women and maintain the professor’s level of dedication. It might seem optimistic of me to see things this way, but I’m convinced. I don’t deny that I’ve heard him make sexist jokes. And they weren’t particularly funny – not because they outraged me, they were just outdated. I got the impression that politically incorrect humour is still fashionable in his country. For that reason his humour struck me as not so much out of place, but out of time. I shouldn’t be so indulgent, but those sorts of jokes only stirred in me a kindly feeling, the same as I have for people nostalgic for hard rock. I imagine it’s more complicated to organise a revival evening of passé humour. Irony just gets stale with age. If it stops making you laugh, it loses its quality; it’s not a whisky that improves as it ages in the barrel. That’s why I believe the professor will shed certain habits. He can’t handle the sight of an audience bored by his dated sense of humour. The velour blazer won’t be enough to protect him.

  In my own travels I’ve also tried to win others over by being brilliant, or using whatever I had. But this created a cognitive dissonance, and it took me a while to realise it could produce spiteful reactions. It was a form of vanity you find in romantic explorers. Entrusting myself to that vanity, I’ve taken a lot of ugly photos. All that emerged was the froth, a tropical light that was too intense, expressive faces brimming over with life. It was blinding. That light didn’t exist, and neither did that life. It’s easy to fall in love with images that are so estranged from one’s own reality that they seem even more real. And yet, I was the one projecting that estrangement, and the instant I recognised it, I thought I’d grasped something. It was exhilarating. The beauty quickly faded. The tropical light seemed noisy, the expressive faces like comical masks. It wasn’t easy admitting to myself that I understood nothing of a place.

  The professor seems to be a man who latches on to certain habits of his bygone life. I find it very human to chase after youth, after what will never return. I believe he has idealised many of the things he believes he has lost for good.

  Him

  I’ve never had a direct relationship with death. Two of my grandparents are still alive, the other two died before I was born. I’ve never lost any relatives, friends, or parents of friends. I’ve never been to a funeral. I’ve never had pets that could abandon me, apart from a goldfish that I insisted on throwing back into the water. I don’t know if this is why I have a somewhat corrupted and limited idea of irreversibility.

  I’ve often heard people say ‘we’re at the point of no return’. I considered it merely an expression. In fact, I do think there’s the possibility of return. I couldn’t imagine those points – like islands in the ocean, sunk into the water. You can always return, if that’s what you want, but if you don’t want to return, there’s no need to hark back to Atlantis. Even when I left my country, I didn’t think I’d reached a point of no return. I don’t like that kind of hysterical desperation. I find it criminal. That’s how a murderer needs to think: ‘I had no choice’.

  But ever since I started seeing the responses to the questionnaires, I felt increasingly nudged towards a malign point of no return, carried adrift by sheer momentum. I put up no resistance, a dead man floating, at the mercy of the waves, wind, and the words of others. I was surprised by my photography colleague’s assessment. That whole paean about my ability to be interested in others, written by a woman in whom I had no interest. It’s as if she’d captured something invisible to me. My bogus detachment, that couldn’t-care-less attitude. The cheap arrogance. You despise what you desire when you can’t have it, my mother always said. The truth is that I’d grown fond of Miden. I felt good here. I liked teaching. I liked the smell of the Academy. Organic turpentine and the hormones of young bodies. Watching my students overcome their shyness and change hairstyles. They came to see me after lessons with the vulnerable enthusiasm of someone who has just had an epiphany and can’t wait to share it. They got worked up over fatal and fragile questions, as if the world’s destiny were in their hands. And it was, in a certain sense.

  I liked waking up in a house where nothing spoke of the past. And yet I used my own regrets to cover the fear. I came up with new ones every day. I wrapped them with care. I thought back to my country like a wistful old fart I would have once hated. The idea of leaving Miden terrified me.

  Her

  Do we really know the person we love?

  I would have liked to feel the weight of such a doubt, the shiver along my spine at the sudden revelation: discovering that you don’t know the person beside you. But as I read the responses to the questionnaires,
it didn’t seem like I was unearthing anything new about my boyfriend, just like when I read the letter from the Commission. Instead I felt like I was being asked another question: Do we really love the person we know?

  They were compiling an encyclopedia entry about my boyfriend, all working as a team, with open content. Even I had contributed my share.

  I confess that I shivered for a second when the photography teacher used that beautiful expression: ‘aesthetic integrity’. I saw my boyfriend’s forest green blazer in a new light. Or rather, in an old light that had regained its splendour, through the eyes of another woman who appreciated his style, as had happened to me when I first met him. Miden was full of emaciated boys with fine blond hair, formless wool sweaters that covered their hands, quick elfin eyes. My boyfriend ironed his shirts, he never had holes in his gloves or socks. When he had a beard, it never had the rancid odour of food. There was nothing childish or unfinished about him. When I first met him, he was a man in every respect, a distinguished figure with aesthetic integrity. Without ever mentioning that possibility, he seemed like a father even before I got pregnant. He was so like a father that I played the little girl. We joked about my filthy skirts and hippie necklaces. On him there were always buttons to unbutton, belts to unfasten, blazers to take off. And during the lazy days of my vacation, stripping him was one of the few activities that kept me busy. Access to my body was less complex. All you needed was a gesture to undress me, or – more simply – it was enough to slip a hand under my skirt.

  Did I, too, have aesthetic integrity? To judge from how I transformed myself after a few months, I’d say no. I’d have pathetic scenes in front of the mirror. I practised a gaze charged with intensity, made faces with my mouth. I inspected myself for a long time, talked to myself without uttering any words. In films these intimate feminine moments in front of the mirror are always revelatory, the reflection revealing occulted truths. There was a tenderness to my features that I didn’t know how to judge. I was expecting to see signs of damage due to my insomnia and recent paranoia, but it seemed that everything was polished by an unsuspected inner peace. My skin was taut, luminous. The girl had absorbed beauty through her trauma. I was looking for mine – the deep gouge she must have dug into my features – but the baby I was carrying inside me tinged my flesh pink, smoothed my hair. I had a healthy, blooming glow. What kind of torment could such a healthy woman possibly allow herself? Nothing more than a veil of sadness over her face.