The Girl at the Door

by Veronica Raimo

  Him

  While waiting for the verdict, I was kept away from the Academy. The dean called me in the morning and told me to stay home. She advised me to take a walk in the unusually sunny weather. ‘I’d like to go for a little stroll myself,’ she said with a phony, saccherine voice.

  ‘But … shouldn’t I tell my students in person?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  The illusion evaporated all of a sudden. It was the first time I heard ‘no’ pronounced so assertively, a no as intimidating and crystalline as the air of Miden.

  ‘The students are going through a difficult time,’ she added. ‘It’s better for everyone to take a little break.’

  Naturally I’d already heard similar words in my life.

  ‘Let’s take a break,’ my first girlfriend told me when we weren’t even twenty. Back then, time had a different quality to it, and taking a break meant the opposite, it meant letting things flow, pulling away from the stagnation to start living again. But now I wouldn’t know how to fix that break, and it struck me in all its monumental weariness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the dean added before hanging up.

  ‘Me too, very sorry.’

  I walked out of the house without saying anything. I wasn’t ready to speak to my girlfriend yet.

  So what are you supposed to do? You wake up in the morning, you get prepared, you walk out of the house, pretend to go to work, and then?

  You get to the point where you grow fond of your own imposture, like an arrogant chain-smoker staring at a spot in the distance for hours and crushing the butts under his shoe. Sitting on a bench in the park. Reading the newspaper front to back. Waiting for the sunset in a place where the light dims gradually. I couldn’t picture myself doing it.

  Around the time I would have been finishing my lesson, I got a phone call from a student. He invited me to his studio to show me something.

  I had been to students’ studios many times before. During my relationship with the girl I often went to hers in the middle of the night to fuck in her little room. The next day, when she returned to finish the project, she would get turned on imagining herself under the table or tied to a sawhorse as if crucified, and I would get turned on imagining her trying to work with the memory of herself moaning naked in the room. In her letter to the Commission she underscored the fact that my violence had even invaded her creative space and so was even more cunning and malicious. It was a manipulation that kept her from being free in her own space. It’s true. That was the reason we liked fucking in there, so that every fantasy would be polluted, so that we wouldn’t be able to feel free of each other.

  One night I went there later than usual and found her curled up in her chair wearing only a large chequered shirt. On the chair there was a sign written in my language: YOUR WHORE SLEPT. HIT HER.

  The clumsiness of that sentence was terribly endearing. I took off her shirt and kissed her all over. She was so happy when she woke up that she kept repeating, ‘Hit her! Hit her!’

  She couldn’t really pronounce it right.

  But she carried on, singing jokingly, ‘Hit, hit.’

  ‘C’mon, stop it.’

  She wouldn’t stop saying it, and I started to get irritated. She no longer seemed endearing, she was petulant. Selfish. I was disturbed by the mangled sound of my language, her mannered little-girl voice. I wanted her to keep quiet. I slapped her in the face. Backhanded, hard. I’d never done that, and she got scared. I got scared too. I apologised more than once. I hugged her as if she were about to burst out crying, but she stayed stiff in my arms without saying anything at all.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  Maybe it wasn’t true. And maybe fellatio wasn’t an unequivocal sign of her forgiveness. In that moment I wanted to think that it was, I needed to feel her close to me, and having my cock in her mouth seemed to me a form of closeness. It wasn’t even pleasurable. I came quickly so that the ugly night could be over. It’s the only episode that pains me to remember. And yet, she never mentioned it to the Commission.

  The following day, in class, she still had the slap mark on her face. You couldn’t see it well, a light red, but her translucent skin hid nothing. That morning I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She sensed my unease, but there was no challenge in her gaze, as perhaps I would have wished, nor was there pity, as I had feared. Only distance.

  I apologised again in the hallway outside the class. She cut me short. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand people who apologise.’

  A few days later I gave her a comic book in my language that I had ordered expressly from my country. I wrote her an inscription I hoped sounded funny: ‘To work on your pronunciation.’ I don’t think she ever read it.

  The other student’s studio was identical to the girl’s, but much tidier. It felt almost like a punishment to be brought there, recognising everything and nothing. On the wooden table, just like the one that had loomed over the girl on all fours, there was a sculpture the student had just finished.

  ‘I made it thinking of you two,’ he said.

  ‘Us two?’

  Then I understood that ‘you two’ was the most beautiful gift I could have wished for. I knew the student and the girl were friends, but he had never spoken to me about her. It seemed that no one before that moment had ever recognised our union, but now we were the inspirational ‘you two’. The sculpture was called Solution to the Porcupine Dilemma. I had talked about that dilemma in class: ‘On a cold winter’s day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt one another’s quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought them closer together again, their quills again forced them apart. They were driven back and forth at the mercy of their discomforts until they found the distance from one another that provided both a maximum of warmth and a minimum of pain.’

  I remember that the students took notes and seemed interested in what the porcupines were going through, perhaps more for its fable-like quality than for its deeper meaning. It ended, ‘So as not to feel cold or pain, the porcupines kept a moderate distance, and for them that was the best position.’

  On the student’s table there were two smooth porcupines, shorn of their quills, presumably made of modelling clay. They had a fragile but happy air, staring at the fire in front of them, an LED flame burning from a little bonfire made of quills.

  ‘An interesting solution to the dilemma,’ I said to the student.

  ‘It’s a gift for you.’

  He packed the sculpture in a cardboard box. To keep from seeming embarrassed and clumsy, I thought about asking him a few technical questions about the process, but I didn’t know what to ask. I felt so moved, I was speechless, paralysed by gratitude.

  ‘Hey, you didn’t by chance kill a porcupine to get the quills, did you?’ I asked.

  He flashed an indulgent smile, and I felt even more like an idiot, my box in my hand in that familiar and estranged room. I thanked him in the same tone I would have used to give condolences.

  How did you manage to fall in love with someone like that? That’s what I imagined the student saying to the girl, leaning against the wall, smoking casually, sensually. It seemed like a more than legitimate question.

  Her

  The Midenites have a word in their language that they proudly claim reflects their spirit. It can be translated roughly as ‘welcoming’, but in a warm, cosy sense that implies the intimate atmosphere of the hearth fire. It was a word that existed before the Miden language was reformed by the designated Commission, and even then it reflected the spirit of the place. You heard it in the national anthem, scattered among verses about forests, birds, fire. It was one of the first words children learned, and the concept was taught like a catechism. It was the way young people, in the throes of their first infatuations, described an even
ing that ended well. Obviously it wasn’t an explicit reference to sex, but if a first date wound up being intense and pleasurable, the evening on the whole would be described as ‘welcoming’. After the language reform and the advent of the Miden Dream, the word’s meaning expanded. They tried to make the cemeteries, landfills, and intensive care units ‘welcoming’. Likewise, they even pushed sex to the limits of embarrassment, obliging everyone to characterise it as ‘welcoming’, regardless of whether it was a fleeting affair or a lasting relationship.

  In the questionnaire they asked me if I deemed sex with my partner ‘welcoming’. More precisely, they asked if my partner and I had the capacity to have ‘welcoming’ sex. It’s not easy for me to evaluate the good faith of my responses. I tried to navigate through sincerity, utilitarianism, apprehension for the future of my child (which could be classified as a more generous form of utilitarianism), and resentment towards my boyfriend for putting me in that situation and towards Miden for having generated it. Moreover, I felt I needed to manipulate events so that my role graduated from extra to costar. In those days it was easier for me to imagine my life as a screenplay. I wasn’t interested in epic scenes, but in the tidy resolution of the drama. It shouldn’t have been such a bizarre idea, because in Miden they even had therapeutic sessions that entailed role-play. They pushed people going through particularly confused moments of their lives to recount their personal stories as if they were film plots. Then they created scenes with actors. This was nothing new; the Family Constellations therapy that had become so fashionable in my country followed a similar process. But in that approach the mechanism was one of estrangement, seeing oneself personified in another. In my case I didn’t need that distance from myself to ‘understand’. Rather, I needed some events to happen. Since the girl’s arrival at my house that day, in order to make these events happen, I needed action to form a robust, compelling plot. But I could only make out my own efforts. I was a shoddy, quixotic director. I felt doubly defeated from both an ethical and aesthetic point of view. I had failed to counter Miden’s visionary pragmatism, its captivating simplicity. I thought I was more complex, full of contradictions, but I didn’t have a shred of proof that I really was. Wasn’t the doggedness with which they had managed to transform sex into something ‘welcoming’ perhaps much more controversial? A doggedness that was then occulted with stylistic flair, leaving nothing behind but the final result in all its clarity. Meanwhile, I tormented myself by constantly replaying all the camera angles and close-ups. To get where? To unwelcoming sex? Was that really the extent of all my efforts?

  Him

  I tried to take my release from the Academy in a sportsmanlike manner. Quite literally, I dedicated myself to sports. In the morning I went running on the beach. I’d stopped swimming, with the excuse that the chlorine irritated my skin, but the truth was, I didn’t want to meet anyone at the pool. In the afternoon I played imaginary games of basketball. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway.

  I imagined my boy in the future, in the phase when boys adore their fathers. I could see him forced to bear the boredom of those afternoons in the driveway. But perhaps we’d have fun, my son and I, or daughter – in Miden they don’t allow parents to know the sex of the baby before birth so as to avoid any prenatal psychological conditioning. I built a cradle out of wood and painted it yellow, and my girlfriend drew abstract figures on it with a marker. When it was finished, it looked more like a kennel, but it was beautiful, and I’d made it with my own hands. I looked at it with pride. We deserved such happiness. I’d spent three afternoons building the cradle. My girlfriend would smile as she passed me the screws, hugging me from behind as I measured. She nodded when I suggested ‘Yellow?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we consult with the chromotherapist?’ she joked.

  She welcomed me again with her irony. She welcomed me, and that was it. I felt like a prodigal son for her, and she for me. So if there were fattened calves to kill, we were ready. Our hands all smudged with yellow paint, wearing our work-at-home wardrobe. We dressed like a cute couple tinkering around the house together: she in overalls with her hair up in a scarf, me in those Indian drawstring trousers that were actually hers. Normally, I never would have worn those clothes, but in the photos we took, I looked like the man I was supposed to be. We looked like two young parents expecting a child.

  Now that I was spending more time at home, I realised that my girlfriend and I had turned our house into a fortress against Miden’s sinister glare. We worked with contrasts to subdue the sense of luminous rarefaction, of air, of vastness. The space had become more cramped than was necessary, going against the basic rules of interior design. Many pieces of furniture were intentionally out of place, even out of function, as if they were huge insects that had suddenly succumbed to heart attacks. And we, too, looked like giant moths knocking against the obstacles because we lacked vision, so I tried to convince myself that our vision had already taken our knocking into account, that it was the food our bond needed. And our gaze was shortsighted, yet warm and centred: What did we care about infinite space when the convulsive sizzling of a lightbulb would have sufficed?

  Her

  And so our second photography phase began.

  The first was during our courtship, when I was getting to know my boyfriend. I’d travelled around with my grandfather’s old Rolleiflex, trying to make an artistic reportage of my vacation, which then transformed itself into a series of postcards made by neophyte lovers. Miden is particularly photogenic. My future boyfriend and I tried not to clash with the landscape. We took shaky portrait shots inside the tent. The black-and-white photos did their work, as did our desire. Those photos were what convinced me to move to Miden. Or at least that’s what I told myself. In the end, what you tell yourself winds up becoming the truth. Then my grandfather’s old Rolleiflex was left abandoned beside the expired rolls of film I’d brought from my country. As soon as I moved to Miden, I wound up walking through the city, wanting to take photos. I wondered what effect any deterioration of the film might have, but I didn’t find out, because I inserted the roll into the camera incorrectly and didn’t manage to get any photos. The rest of the rolls were left to expire a little longer. One day my boyfriend took them and threw them out. I didn’t protest.

  Then came the second photography phase. We jokingly came up with names for it. Our blue period. Pink. African Arctic. Our shit period. Our expecting period. We built a cradle and painted it yellow, a colour I’d always hated. It seemed like a good beginning. We tried to take photos for our child. We wanted him to one day see his parents as they were preparing for adulthood, even though they were already adults.

  I had my side project, a challenge all my own. My parents asked me for photos of my belly, as if it were possible to feel a heartbeat through the film grain. I scrupulously denied them that satisfaction, sending them photos of our blue, pink, shit, and expecting periods, in which I was posing with my boyfriend. Two parents so busy that the belly was a distraction. You could never see my belly in the photos. There was my face, my hair under the bandanna. Miden’s crystalline air. The yellow cradle. The paper butterflies hanging in the room. My body from behind, wider, but without any declaration. My maternal arse in silhouette. Could they feel the baby’s heartbeat all the same? My mother always sent me a bunch of hugs in response. She never hugged me, but always sent me hugs. I sent her photos, subtracting the belly. She sent hugs, subtracting contact. We were two women who had never touched each other in their lives. I hated her body, and now I saw it appropriating mine. Some years ago I’d begun to resemble her. And she sent hugs to her daughter’s body, which had become an extension of her maternity.

  ‘It’s your fault I won’t ever have children,’ I’d shouted at her so many times. She never got upset and always gave that singularly irrefutable response: ‘When you become a mother, you’ll understand.’

  And what did I understand now that I was becoming a mother? That
there are dark places, deep miseries and sedated ambition under that timeless truth.

  So I accepted her hugs and took photos. At times I was surprised by the unexpected beauty of my smile. I’ll be a better mother than she was, just because of that, I thought. I didn’t remember my mother smiling, not even in a photo. But that was a lie. We had the same smile, and she smiled in every photo. You don’t have to be happy to simper in front of a camera.

  Him

  I dreamt that the girl was apologising to me. But she said, ‘You have to apologise too.’ And I said, ‘No way.’ And she said, ‘Yes way.’ And it went on that way for a while. Just like that, I said no and she said yes. But it was clear that she was having fun and provoking me. In the end we wound up fucking. Maybe it’s a little wrong to call it a dream, because it started in a half-sleep, guided by my thoughts, but sex with the girl must have happened in my sleep, because I had a wet dream. I don’t know if my girlfriend realised. I’m not ruling it out, considering that her insomnia, once pathological, had now become almost ideological. I got the impression that she was controlling me as I slept. I got the impression that she was controlling me while awake. She said she didn’t want to lose intimacy with me. It wasn’t control; she was keeping me from becoming a stranger. One morning she said, ‘Can we talk a little?’