She had a melancholy expression. For once, she made coffee for me. She drinks it black and can’t imagine anyone wanting sugar. I appreciated the fact that she served it to me in bed with a glass of water. Those little gestures were important to me. I was easily moved.
‘I answered the questionnaire too,’ she told me.
‘I know.’
We’d never spoken about her responses. In those days it took nothing for things to slide into the realm of taboo. The Commission had not yet sent me her completed questionnaire, and according to the regulations, I wasn’t allowed to read it before they sent it to me. But no one would know. It was just a question of conscience – or rather, of induced conscience – as was everything in Miden.
‘I wrote that we’d had violent sex.’
Just the expression made me smile. It sounded like a vague porn category when you don’t know what to look for.
‘You did well,’ I told her. ‘But what does that phrase mean?’
‘You know very well.’
‘No, I don’t. It seems like a pretty generic concept.’
She became even more melancholy, and I felt like an arsehole. I was treating her like a member of the Commission.
‘My love,’ I said.
We hugged. I felt the soft embrace of her body. I’d surprised myself in calling her that and was enjoying my sincere amazement.
‘I feel like I’ve betrayed you,’ she said, pulling away.
‘In what way?’
‘I wasn’t on your side.’
It had become so easy to lose our moments of sincerity. She said she wanted to talk, then spoke in clichés. I thought of my dream about the girl, our playful teasing. More clichés. Was that all I was capable of?
‘You did what you had to do,’ I said, continuing the exchange of insipid platitudes. But with my tone of voice I at least tried to convey a little trust – in her as well as in me.
‘Do you think we’re in love?’ she asked me like a scared teenager.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And that’s enough for us?’
‘Of course,’ I answered.
‘Why did you trust the girl? If she ruins our life, I won’t be able to forgive you.’
‘That’s like asking me why I trust you.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘We’re building a future. You didn’t have to build shit with her.’
She took her cup of coffee and walked away. I hate having to chase people. What’s more, it was one of the rare occasions when I could enjoy coffee in bed. I heard her weeping in the other room. I tried to pronounce those words again mentally – ‘my love’ – but I just couldn’t. They were still true, but they’d lost all their weight. Or maybe the opposite; they were just heavy.
When she spoke to me of the future in that doomed and threatening way, I lost my mind. The future had become a form of blackmail. I heard her crying and couldn’t get up. I thought about her forgetfulness and couldn’t get up. What did it take to put a spoonful of sugar in the coffee? I started hating the future with all my being.
Her
I could start the story like this:
It’s a holiday. The wind blows a gentle rain against the glowing windows of the house. There’s ice on the streets and the parade seems to slide amusedly along the tarmac towards the sea. The banners hanging outside the window create the effect of a coloured wave. Children file out holding hands. They wear funny hats and vests with the Miden symbol, a cute little fish with bulging eyes. The woman is facing the window, peeling an orange with hands red from the cold. She never knew the story of the fish, and she tries to make one up. She hears the children sing ‘Oh my little fish, I caught you, but you were already in my heart!’
And what’s in the woman’s heart? Creatures from a bygone time, memories that reanimate her. She recalls the coypu around the lake in her faraway country. When she was little, her grandfather would accompany her there with a bag full of crumbs. She knew all the coypu by heart. ‘They’re rats!’ another girl shouted to her one day to scare her, but she didn’t get scared, because she could call them all by their names. One morning, there were no more coypu. The lake was covered with water lilies. ‘Grandpa, where did they go?’
The woman had long been afraid of the water. The dark lake had swallowed her coypu. Death nestled under the quilt of water lilies. But today the woman is not afraid of the water, and she doesn’t fear death. From her window she watches the children walk by, and in her heart are the memories of what she was, next to her heart the pulse of what will be.
Him
It was on the Miden celebration day that I started to seriously think of leaving. I’d already talked about it with my girlfriend, but it was more of a rant, a moment of rage when you want to break away and be a rebel. With each passing day, as I read the questionnaires, blunted by their words, I started to really wonder what I was doing in Miden.
It was just like years earlier, when I was thinking about leaving my country. Something snapped, as they say in certain situations. This seemed to be one of those situations. I could allow myself to reason in terms of ruptures too, to put up some resistance to the flow of time. I was more mature than before, perhaps less sensitive to the allure of change, but as much as we diligently try to transform our lives into a comfortable cage, there remains a margin of resistance. Being childish for the sheer pleasure of it; feeling offended if things don’t go the way we want and then threatening to give it all up. The more we delude ourselves that we make choices, the more we need to prove it to others. I felt like a kid who packs his things and thinks about running away from home. The only difference is that I chose that home in the first place. All the more reason why there was nothing to stop me from turning around and retracing my steps. All I had to do was change perspective; it wasn’t me who disappointed Miden, it was Miden that disappointed me. It would be Miden that would regret my going.
The girl had endured TRAUMA no. 215, and I was enduring my own trauma. With a delayed reaction – just like her. Almost everything that had attracted me to Miden was now showing its deceptive face. In the official survey results, I would still count as a happy man. A happy man fearful of losing the things on the survey checklist that proved his own status as such. So fearful that he confused the fear of loss for proof of happiness. Perhaps the deceptive face was my face, the confident sneer of a boy preparing to flee.
After much time I realised that I’d left my country simply as payback, even if I didn’t know what the payback was for. The individual motives of each person who left were lost in the great exodus. One day someone will write the definitive novel about our listless migration. We’ll read it at a distance, so estranged from who we were that we’ll be able to recognise ourselves in every detail. My ex-girlfriend who had gone off with my friend would embody the erosion of the welfare state. All her tears in those last months sublimated years of social security contributions she never had a chance to pay. My sudden sexual impotence, those desperate nightly ambushes in an effort to rise to the occasion, my frustration as I prepared the application for Miden: these were all the interchangeable effects of the financial crisis. I convinced myself that I could get an erection again in a prosperous country. But the fact remained that I didn’t have money to afford an analyst or to go to a doctor or a prostitute. So no matter what I believed, no one could contradict me. Anyway, there was no longer any reason to contradict. Our misery merely fed off our company, and love just bored us. This is shit, we all nodded in agreement; the shit accumulated, we got high on pot, then we could say good night and go to bed. My impotence lasted only twelve weeks. Then one evening I went to my mother’s place. She was in the company of a colleague and her daughter. ‘Can you give them a ride home?’ she asked. I gave them a ride. My mother’s colleague stepped out of the car and winked: ‘You kids want to
go out and have a drink?’ She held out a banknote, as if we were still wet behind the ears. Her daughter immediately pocketed the money. ‘We’re in a reality show about shameless mothers,’ she joked. I liked her immediately. I moved the car ten metres to roll a joint. She started unbuttoning my trousers and I had a hard-on.
Her
I could start it like this and end it in another way.
I, too, hung the banner out of my window on the holiday, but I didn’t leave the house. I watched the kids walk by and didn’t even lean out, didn’t even expose my hand to the wind to wave to them. Entrenched in the house, I spied on them. Later the students would walk by. Then all the others, to gather at the beach, light a bonfire, sit around it – legs crossed, wearing oilskin fisherman’s jackets – for a final concert. A band I liked was playing. My boyfriend had turned me on to them. The drummer was a student of his, a cute guy I once tried to chat up in a café with one of those pointless comments that was supposed to elicit a smile, but I ended up doing most of the talking. The guy turned out to be as taciturn as he was cute, so it wasn’t my most successful pickup, but I liked the music they played and would have gladly gone to hear them had I not been terrified by the idea of sitting with my legs crossed in front of the big stage set up for the Miden celebrations, seeing as how I couldn’t manage to hold that position for more than half a minute. And that was only part of the problem.
I hadn’t shown up at the Organic Pesticides Commission to help set up our little procession; I hadn’t shown myself anywhere for days. I hadn’t made a dessert or a quiche, or anything else to bring to the beach for the evening. I didn’t go to the window to wave to the kids, I didn’t count off the number of days on the calendar until the big Miden party. My boyfriend had gone out that morning. ‘Let me see what the situation is like,’ he said. He’d never really cared much for the Miden celebrations, but he always went to the concert. At one time he also played music, back in our country. He let me listen to a few tunes, nothing original, but a couple of the pieces were cool. Then he stopped playing altogether, and it led to an extended and indefinite period of mourning. When he talked to me about it, I nodded, but I didn’t understand. He never put it in terms of simple frustration, instead he described it as existential friction, which gave him a certain aura. The friction was like a violent form of diffidence that for him was vital and for me just seemed like trivial self-pity. Anyway, every time I said ‘C’mon, play me something,’ his eyes glazed over with sadness, as if to rue the fact that I just couldn’t understand him. And in fact, he was right, because I didn’t understand him.
I knew he’d thought about starting a band with the girl. Before things went south. I had even encouraged him to get in touch with her again. But he was an enigma. With every mention of the girl, he fell silent, as if overwhelmed by intolerable memories. I don’t know why I kept pushing the music stuff for so long. Maybe I liked the idea of seeing my boyfriend with an instrument in his hand. It aroused me. In a somewhat perverse way I was even aroused by the idea of having this band of kids around the house, after rehearsals, before rehearsals, during an idle moment in the evening. I would have felt like part of the group, vaping weed in the living room, cuddling with my boyfriend while two others made out and someone else showed up in leather trousers. It seemed exciting, even if I felt stupid for thinking about it. But all of us would have been stupid, a little stoned, a little wired. I would have come up with some cryptic lyrics, someone else would improvise a melody. The morning after, we would have laughed, mangling those lyrics, our mouths like paste. I missed those laughs, hearing people make fun of me with a familiarity that no longer seemed possible.
Him
I went home before the procession got to the beach. The sea ebbed away a little before I did. My girlfriend didn’t even go outside. I found her in front of the window, like a figure in a painting. Her belly created the silhouette of a strange animal sleeping on the wall. I took the cap with the pom-pom that they’d given me on the street and slipped it on her head. I didn’t know how to tell her. So I looked at her with the hat on her head and took a photo.
‘Souvenir snapshot?’ I asked her.
In that period we were taking a bunch of photos to document her pregnancy, so it wasn’t clear what I meant.
‘Imagine that one day this picture will define our memory,’ I said, throwing a vaguely apocalyptic light on my inability to express myself.
‘Are you leaving me?’ she asked, taking the cap off her head.
Her tremendous optimism always struck me. Up to now I’d managed to sidestep it.
‘No. Actually, the opposite.’
She looked at me, as if trying to figure out what the opposite of leaving could be, aside from staying together.
‘We could be the ones who return,’ I continued mistily. ‘Maybe one day they’ll talk about us as a generation. The generation that returned.’
That evening I prepared a dinner that I hoped would be better than it turned out. There were days when my girlfriend and I talked fervently about our favourite childhood dishes. That kind of nostalgia already prevailed before people started leaving our country, before I left for Miden, before she came to join me. When the Crash started to erode everyone’s lives, pockets of resistance were created around that distant communitarian principle: ‘Do you remember those tellina clams fished from the sea?’ ‘The taste of hazelnut gelato?’
In those days it seemed that if only we could have grandma’s sauce again, as if it were the primordial broth that had spawned us, we could set things straight.
The munchies after drawn-out nights of smoking pot had been more than just a chemical reaction; it was the need to tap into a heritage. We listened to songs on the radio. We were amused by the extravagant shallowness, the deft rhymes to keep the lyrics going; we revelled in others’ foolishness because it vindicated the squandering of our intellects. Jesters wound up on the radio – not us, we wouldn’t even come close. We sang the worst refrains without caring – the words weren’t directed at us, we weren’t obliged to feel those emotions. We made heaps of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and even that became a nostalgic ritual because we’d already been young that way, we’d already lived through that time.
Then we became adults, we went to restaurants, began our clinical dissertations about food. We hated each other, envied each other, imagined that we knew how to drink better than our parents. We furnished cute homes, accumulated magazines that talked about us, wrote for magazines that talked about us, picked out the right music, produced it, dished out geometric steak tartare, planted dill and lemon thyme. We even grew the best weed and stopped smoking dirt. And then there we were again, back to being housemates because we couldn’t afford the rent after the Crash, sunk into a second youth, this one imposed on us, where we knew how to distinguish between good wine and swill but didn’t want anything more than the belated consolation of a heap of pasta with tomato sauce. It became evident that we had no choice but to leave, unless we planned to spend the rest of our lives getting wasted on cannabis and carbohydrates. As exiles, our social media profiles were filled with attempts to recover all the food that had nurtured us. We posted photos of food we knew, recipes that never came out the same as they did back home. There was always something wrong – which seemed funny – in the shape, the colour, or the consistency.
That’s how we talked about our faraway lives: ‘What did you cook today?’
Other forms of love, which were just as communicable, eluded us.
But now that I’d made a decision, that was the form love took: my girlfriend, my son, my country.
I seemed to have so many pasts behind me, I wouldn’t have known where to put the girl.
There was no more room to welcome her. There was nothing I wanted to give her.
In my memory it continued to be the best sex I’d ever had. But the sad thing was that I’d never get it back – not even in my imaginatio
n.
Her
‘We could be the ones who return,’ my boyfriend said to me. It sounded like a horror film plot. But we would have been milder zombies; we hadn’t seen horrors that made us mute, we hadn’t known death, we weren’t thirsty for blood, only for good wine.
Unpacking is an extremely annoying operation, and I’ve often left luggage untouched for entire months after a trip. I would justify my laziness with a sense of doom, as if it would actually be painful to stick my dirty laundry into the washing machine, slip my shoes into the empty spaces in the shoe rack, take my makeup out of the beauty case stained with lotion. I pretended I could detect an oppressive determinism in that pretence of new order. So I let the luggage clutter the corridor or threw it into the corner of my room, an intentional form of procrastination, although I knew it was my own sloth that inspired it. Still, I grumbled when anyone complained about the encumbrance, and I sighed so pathetically that it drowned out any desire to retort, if only with even more pathetic sighs.
Leave me alone, was what the sigh meant, exactly the same message that the luggage conveyed.
And yet, there is that first exciting moment of unpacking your bags, when you pull out the things you bought during the trip. Gifts, a bolder-than-usual dress, a novelty snack. If I imagined that moment, then the idea of going back made me happy, a happiness that was simple and light, one I hadn’t felt in a while, like a successful surprise party. My friends and I would try on the clogs in front of the mirror, and I’d give the bars of dried fish to little cousins who would give them a lick and then spit in disgust. I would show them my photos and we’d take even more: my father posing in raw wool mittens – in Miden they all wear them, Dad – my mother with her poster of a film I’d never heard of, chosen only for the turquoise background, her favourite colour. I would try on the cap with the pom-pom. I like souvenirs. They don’t have to show anything, they have their own stories, and that’s enough. I could spend a whole afternoon, for example, choosing a nice hat to flatter my face. If I imagined my return in those terms, I would get the impression that my life was nothing more than the flow of similar afternoons. But the cap with the pom-pom would always remain beyond such worries, beyond the little theatre of insecurity and approval. I loved its docility. All I had to do was put it on my head like a cup on a saucer.
The Girl at the Door Page 10