Kitabı oxu: «The Girl at the Door»

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  The Girl at the Door

8  About the Author

9  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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The Girl at the Door

Her

I was in my sixth month when the girl came knocking.

I’d got used to visits at home, almost as if I were sick. In a certain sense I was, a languid infirmity that had me spending the days doing nothing. The doctors prescribed a lot of rest. The challenge was to find new ways of resting.

People were always coming to see me. I’d learned how to receive them. People passed by to ask me how I was, give me advice, and bring me books on motherhood with covers so ugly I didn’t know where to hide them. If they didn’t bring me books, they came with something to eat. At times it was something potentially toxic, so along with their kindness came a heartfelt self-reproach: ‘How stupid of me! Tiramisu … raw eggs! How could I not have thought about it!’

The girl came empty-handed. Standing on the threshold, her hair down, her jeans tight, just the way I used to wear them before the visitors came to replenish my stock of maternity trousers. I was constantly hiding stuff.

‘Are you the professor’s wife?’ the girl asked me.

‘Girlfriend, um … partner,’ I specified, even though it embarrassed me to use that term. It felt like I was putting on airs.

‘I have to speak to you,’ she said.

The girl made herself comfortable on the sofa, her empty hands resting on her lap. More than resting, anchored: fingers tensed and knuckles rising white above the fabric of her jeans. Two bones stuck out from the points of her shoulders, two pins lodged in her skin. I sat down slowly on the sofa. My belly suddenly seemed out of place to me, a graceless and garish form I tried to conceal with my hands, which were also more swollen than usual from so much rest – giant hands, fused to my belly in a single mass, florid and vital. Hiding things again. Fortunately, the skeleton on the sofa didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes scoured the inside of the house, not suspiciously, but in a sensually empty manner, waiting to fill themselves up.

Neither I nor my boyfriend – the professor, as the girl called him – had been very good at decorating the house. He had been living there longer than I had, but my arrival hadn’t changed much. It wasn’t a female presence that was missing. Or maybe it was, but surely not mine. I was never interested in furnishings. I don’t even know the names of objects; or rather, I know the names, but not what they refer to – words that should evoke something but for me remain merely words: ‘valance’, ‘wainscot’, ‘credenza’. Anyway, it wasn’t an ugly home. When people came to see me, they always complimented it, and they seemed sincere. I know that’s what people always do. I guess they have to say something, but I did think the house was welcoming. At least I felt welcome there, even if I’d never done anything to give it more warmth, make it more familiar, more personal. I took it just as it was, as did my boyfriend when it was assigned to him – freshly cleaned – by the university. The walls were painted white, the furniture spartan but comfortable, an armchair for reading, a study where he worked. It was a house where I managed to rest well.

Every once in a while he said to me, ‘You should buy some knickknacks.’ But even that was nothing but a word. What does a knickknack look like?

When he sent me the photos of the house to entice me to join him, I made the same assessment as other people. ‘Looks really cute.’ ‘You’ll like it,’ he kept saying. And in fact, I did like it. So the girl could look around all she wanted, but she wouldn’t find anything strange to feed her gaze.

‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked her.

It had become my speciality. I spent a lot of time choosing tea at the market and a lot of time preparing it. Before I got pregnant, it had never occurred to me to think of tea as a possible beverage. Or maybe before moving here. Now it’s not just a beverage but an experience, an intellectual emptying, another act of abandonment to accompany my state of infirmity. The Miden market was full of tisanes, loose dried herbs sniffed from burlap bags or metal containers, aromatic teas rich in history, teas that spoke of distant places. I gave myself up docilely to an idea of exoticism that had never seduced me before – but if maternity manuals were the alternative, then submission was all right by me.

‘Whatever,’ the girl said.

I prepared the tea, placed it on the table between us.

‘Is green jasmine okay?’ I asked her.

‘Fine,’ she said.

‘Sugar?’

‘Okay.’

The girl’s brusque manner was beginning to irritate me. It wasn’t up to me to explain to her how much life history could be hidden in a cup of tea. Maybe it was her youth that kept her from being contaminated by all that had come before her. And yet she wasn’t much younger than I was, even though the gap had opened more substantially as soon as I’d become the professor’s girlfriend, or once my womb had borne proof that history existed. But the girl, despite her dismissive comments about the tea, had come to talk about the past.

‘I was a student of the professor’s,’ she said to me.

‘Okay,’ I responded to show I could keep up.

‘Has he ever spoken about me?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know. You’re not the only girl to have been his student.’

‘I was more than that,’ she explained.

It was clear what she wanted to tell me. I pretended not to understand.

‘The professor and I had a thing,’ she continued.

We’ve all had things, I wanted to say. No. Unfortunately, that’s not true. I thought of that reply many minutes later, and the mere fact that I didn’t think of it quickly enough made it seem particularly brilliant. I spent a few seconds meditating on the girl’s words without saying anything. Her tone seemed to suggest exactly that suspended atmosphere, and for lack of a quick retort, I followed her lead.

‘Is there a reason I should know this?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

My boyfriend and I had met fourteen months earlier in Miden. I was on vacation, and he had moved here some time before that. We were both from the same country. We spent two weeks together. It was love at first sight, or perhaps it was the complicity of two kids a little off balance in a foreign land, even though that may be a romantic way of putting it, considering that he had already been living in Miden for a while, with the prospect of a solid future and his schedule already planned for the new academic year. I could have sincerely claimed culture shock, as I really was a tourist, with no goal at the time and nothing to do either in Miden or elsewhere. So as we were toking up in a tent under the starry sky, it was more the last drops of his vacation we were sharing than the tension of heading into the unknown. And yet, I had cried on one of those nights, my cheeks wet with tears as he spoke of all we could have been. He knew I had nothing to lose, because I had almost nothing. Or at least that’s what I liked to think back then. I liked reciting the part. My studies were finished, and all I had were emails from friends who had already left home: I lived in a country you could only leave. Everyone was bailing out. Whoever stayed was infectious. Every day the papers were talking about the Crash, counting emigrants like evacuees, fencing in the survivors. It seemed as if natural disasters were in a period of remission: no earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. There were no parasites defoliating the trees, no heat waves cracking the parched earth. All they talked about was us, and it made little difference whether we were fifteen or forty. They asked us to have faith. ‘The worst is over,’ the politicians said, and then sent their children and money to the other side of the world. The truth is, the worst couldn’t be over, because it had never really come. As long as we were children, we would remain children, our mothers and fathers would take care of us. Once I got back home, when I looked at the photos of Miden again, I was convinced that I could see the possibility of life in our idiotic gazes under the Milky Way. And so I left, too. I moved to Miden, trusting that gaze, in which someone – myself, not long after – would have seen nothing more than pot-addled eyes.

I poured some more water into my still-full cup.

‘The professor raped me,’ the girl said.

I have no idea what it means to desire a child. I don’t think I desired one; when I found out I was pregnant, that sort of thought had already lost importance. He was there, like I was there. We existed together. The feeling was stronger than desire.

When I moved to Miden, my boyfriend and I made love every day, several times a day, without protection, as they say, since it was clear that our encounter was based on recklessness. Our idiotic gazes under the starry sky were also contemplating the creation of new living beings. Caution and fear belonged to the country we had left. Down there, people died of protection. They died because they held back. Because they were depressed. Because they were afraid. Down there, no one seemed capable of procreating. But we were, we who had gone away, yes, without a second thought. Miden was full of babies.

I looked at the girl. Her skinniness looked threatening, the stripped carcass of an animal come to wreak havoc at home.

‘When?’ I asked, as if the most important thing were to establish a convincing chronology. But in some ways, it was truly important.

‘It happened more than once,’ she said. ‘In a certain sense, always, all throughout our affair.’

‘I meant how long ago,’ I specified.

‘Two years ago.’

‘Would you like some more tea?’

‘My cup is full.’

I didn’t have a great appreciation for music. When I was at home, it never occurred to me to put on an album. Here, visitors never brought me CDs. My boyfriend tried to educate me, but I was too scattered, I couldn’t remember the names of the pieces. So when I got up to put on some music, I didn’t know what to choose. I was afraid the girl would judge me for a poor choice. She had the air of someone more tuned in to these things than I was. But she was simply stunned that I’d got the idea to put on some music. Maybe that’s all I was really looking for. Her dismay. I was so incapable of making a good impression that I chose a greatest hits of the nineties.

‘Why have you come to tell me now?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t even know him two years ago.’

The girl’s gaze finally filled up with something; I believe ‘scorn’ is the best word to define it. Even her body seemed more vigorous. She swayed her head back and forth as if it had accrued a weight she couldn’t balance.

‘Because he was never punished,’ she responded.

‘Did you report him?’ I asked.

‘No. I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I didn’t know then. Now I know.’

The girl’s fingers didn’t even graze the cup I’d placed in front of her. That had been my only kind gesture up until then. The cup alone cost more than her shoes.

‘What is it that you now know?’ I asked.

‘That I was subjected to violence.’

Him

I saved her knickers for months. She liked to come to my place and go home without knickers. I had a drawerful of them. Then one day when I opened the drawer, I was nauseated. The obscene odour no longer had anything to do with her. In any case I’d long lost her scent, and it was never that good. But the rest of her … Her tits, her arse, her legs. I still dreamt about the rest of her. I dreamt about her while I was banging my girlfriend, when I put my hand over her mouth so as not to hear her groan, because I wanted to hear the other girl’s groans. In my head, I mean. And then the bitch showed up at my place one day with that absurd letter from the Commission. And my girlfriend even sat there and listened to her. ‘What the fuck,’ I said to her. ‘We both left our own country because we wanted to be free, and you take this shit seriously?’ ‘These are the consequences of freedom,’ she said to me. She’d started talking like this after she moved to Miden. She spoke in slogans. Or she kept quiet. Either totally emphatic or mute, depressed or hysterical. Even the pregnancy. One day she’d talk about the man he would become, the next day about the toad in her belly. It’s not that she was much different when I met her, but she’d always been cheerful, even when she cried. We’d make love and she’d cry. I remember one time when we were camping out, just the two of us on the beach, we were stoned, and she said to me, ‘Where am I going? I have nothing! Nothing!’ her head sunk, crying. But it was as if she were laughing. She was like a baby you needed to hug and console. I said to her, ‘What does it matter? You have nothing. Good for you. That way you have nothing to throw away.’ I told her stupid shit like that.

She’s convinced that I was the one who asked her to move to Miden. Maybe that’s true. That is, I might have said something when we met. She was on vacation and kept carrying on with that same old tune, ‘I have nothing.’ So I said, ‘You have me!’ And I believed it. She was beautiful, with her big eyes full of fear, and it was moving the way she looked at me. The long flower-print skirts – I didn’t think they made them anymore, maybe they were her mother’s or grandmother’s, all frayed at the hem from dragging across the ground. At times when she got on top of me, she would keep the skirt on, her tits in the wind, her necklace bouncing from one nipple to the other, her hair tousled, and I remember the filthy hem of that skirt was a bit gross. It swept over the floor day after day. Sure, I admit I’m someone who saves knickers. But that hem still grossed me out a little. So I don’t know if it was me who asked her to move. We wrote to each other after she left. I looked at her on the computer screen, and she still had those eyes. What could I say? Come here, I told her. I let her see my place. I read the statistics to her. In Miden they’re obsessed with those things because it’s at the top of all the rankings. First place for: Quality of life. Trust in the future. Social equality. Human rights. Professional satisfaction. Women’s freedom. If you take the sum of all those factors, bingo! What comes out is the thing you’re looking for: first place for Happiness.

If I went by statistics, I was a perfectly happy and integrated man of Miden. I had a well-paid job that corresponded to my education and my ambition, with a house made available to me by the university and lots of free time to continue my research and play sports. They even gave me a free pass to the pool. I developed enviable shoulders.

Then the girl showed up with a letter from the Commission. An accusation of sexual assault. My girlfriend looked at her belly and said to me, ‘I have to think of him.’ What the hell does he have to do with it? ‘Do you know what I’m risking?’ I yelled at her. And she, as placid as she had learned to be, ‘Do you know what I’m risking?’ ‘No,’ I said to her, ‘tell me what it is you’re risking.’ ‘I risk being a rapist’s girlfriend.’ I would have liked to say, Do you remember inside the tent? With your long fucking skirts, bawling nonstop, saying I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do! Like a three-year-old girl. And now suddenly I find this cool, calm woman, as serene as a Buddha, her legs crossed under her prodigious belly, using phrases like ‘rapist’s girlfriend’. In the Commission letter they didn’t use the word ‘rapist’. There were only mythical figures in that letter. I was the Perpetrator, the one who perpetrated violence. The girl was subjected to it; she was the Subject. The violence is a dodge ball flying at her that she can’t manage to dodge, but then two years later she realises she’s covered in bruises. Where were the bruises before? She didn’t even know she could get out of the way.

Her

When I found out I was pregnant, the sky was white.

The sky is always white in Miden, which makes it hard to give memory a background. But the light changes. That day the light was ugly. There were whole mornings that had trouble impressing themselves on my memory; what was left was only the feeling of that absence, the border between day and night crumbling. I’d spoken with someone at the market, but what did we say to each other? Were there any fish with eyes more alive than usual? A pumpkin I would have liked to buy? I no longer remembered anything.

But the girl wasn’t talking about repressed memories. What a shame. Because it had become one of my favourite subjects since I arrived in Miden. I wrote many emails about what I was repressing. My friends wrote me impassioned platitudes about how important it is to burn bridges with the past. It was a continual severing of ties, as if we all had a particularly wild and noteworthy past. I get the impression that you can deal with all sorts of conversations by bringing up the idea of clean breaks. You never get anywhere, so you can go on like that for a while, which gives me all the time I need to put the water on the burner for another cup of tea. The fact is that the girl wasn’t interested in talking about repressed memories, and she hadn’t even taken a sip of her tea.

‘How did you find out?’ I asked the girl.

‘I understood,’ she responded.

‘Okay. How did you come to understand?’

‘Thanks to the Commission.’

Miden is organised by Commissions. Many scholars come here to analyze the workings of the Commissions. It had started with talk about politics from the ground up, telluric thrusts pressing against the bowels of the earth. This was after the Crash, which, like every Crash, seemed to have come from dizzying heights. My boyfriend hadn’t participated in the creation of the Commissions, he moved here later, ‘but you can still breathe that air,’ he wrote to me in an email. There have been many airs I still haven’t had time to breathe, other airs that disperse and consume themselves as I try to write this. When I arrived in Miden, the Commissions already existed, and outside the Commissions there was nothing. If you’re a citizen of Miden, you’re a member of a Commission. If you don’t want to choose one, then one will be assigned to you. I belong to Organic Pesticides. When scholars come to Miden to analyze how the Commissions work, they breathe what’s left of the air that preceded them and they go back home with the same disappointed admission: ‘It’s a mechanism that can only work in a small community.’ The inhabitants of Miden are convinced that the reason lies rather in their DNA – a particularly virtuous and creative genetic structure. They don’t know how to explain it any other way. The Crash had brought whole countries to their knees, whereas Miden emerged from the deep waters with the splendour of a Venus. When I was thinking about writing an article comparing various approaches to the Crash, the director of the department where my boyfriend worked said, ‘We didn’t roll up our sleeves. We chose to put on a new dress, more beautiful, without any stains.’ The inhabitants of Miden like to speak in images. Poetic inspiration is another characteristic of their DNA that they like to promote. At dinner there’s always someone who brings up the evolution of their stock from the time their ancestors recited sagas. They feel like descendants of the Myth, like the gods are still there, watching them excitedly from the white sky. I see no difference between the scholars’ conclusion and a purely genetic explanation. The Commissions work in a small community, and Miden is a small community, one so jealous of its own DNA that outsiders like me are welcomed enthusiastically, as long as they don’t go beyond the limits decided by the Welcome Commission. I never wrote that article about the Crash, or any other. Since I’ve been in Miden, I’ve written only emails; the poetic inspiration has yet to contaminate my DNA, even though the emails were quite pretentious.

Him

Having an affair with a student is never a good idea. There’s a reason why it’s always discouraged. In my defence I can say that I was a young professor – or, to put it more pathetically, a professor still cutting his teeth. Moreover, in Miden, a foreign land, I needed warmth. To that I can add other, more convincing extenuating circumstances. I taught philosophy at the Art Academy. My female students enjoyed the subject. They were convinced that inserting two or three concepts with a philosophical flavour into their artist statements made their inconclusive discourses more interesting. I believe that my role within the Academy was to be someone who spat out maxims to be recycled in statements. Why were there so many more women than men? I don’t know. In one class, for example, there were only three males. Otherwise there was a series of girls who listened to me with interest. Okay, I fucked one of them. It was statistically almost impossible not to, never mind the warmth. But that wasn’t the real mistake; the real mistake was to come to my senses and leave her. Once you start something that’s wrong, you might as well do it to the end. These sudden assumptions of responsibility are farcical, and it’s right to pay the consequences. But I thought I had paid them, because I missed the girl very much. In fact, I held on to her knickers.

She dropped my course, but I kept running into her at the Academy. She wouldn’t say hi; she would turn the other way. She’ll get over it, I told myself. In the meantime, I kept dreaming of her. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I wouldn’t get over it. I hadn’t realised I was in love with the girl until I met my girlfriend and fell in love with her. I don’t know why the idea of loving two people at the same time seemed more appealing than one at a time. And I hadn’t been in love with my girlfriend before realising I was in love with the girl. All this would be inexplicable in front of the Commission. Or at least it wouldn’t be a very valid argument. In any case, yes, I’d done everything the letter said I’d done. Or rather, we had, because it takes two. One time, there were even three of us, the girl and another girl. Never any orgies, but that might have been better at this point. At least I’d have witnesses.

Her

The girl handed me a letter from the Commission and crossed her legs, as if the gesture had finally conferred upon her the status of an adult. She raised her cup, drinking her first sip of lukewarm tea.

‘Please, take your time reading it,’ she said.

‘Now?’ I asked, suddenly feeling accused.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to understand everything –’

‘There’s the version in the international language,’ she interrupted me carefully.

I turned off the music and went into my room to read. The girl watched me go and gestured with her head in a way that could have signalled assent or compassion.

The letter was three pages long.

My boyfriend and I never had any problems talking about sex. In the beginning of our relationship, that was part of the excitement. I was more talkative than he was, though I tended to alter my voice. I either spoke in a falsetto, like a twelve-year-old, or with a hoarse voice. Not that we said anything special. I would tell him about past experiences, more or less true, to make myself more slutty. Or I’d pretend it was my first time, or ask him to block my arms, blindfold me, or come on my face, stuff like that. He even wanted me to pretend I was one of his students. ‘So, what is it that you mean by numen?’ he’d say, and I would look at him like I was totally vapid, and he’d play the part of the strict and perverted professor. He would slap my arse, punish me. He would sodomise me with some pseudo-didactic object. I know, when you’re recounting the story, it seems ridiculous that someone can get turned on by that stuff, but it worked. So I wasn’t surprised to read the list of things my boyfriend and the girl had practised, which the Commission drafted. I don’t deny that I was disturbed to read the details, not so much because they were about my boyfriend fucking another woman, as much as they were the same as our fucks. The only difference was, she didn’t need to pretend that she was a student, since she was. My boyfriend was called ‘the Perpetrator’ and the girl ‘the Subject’. On the last page of the letter, the list ended and a diagnosis appeared. TRAUMA no. 215.

In Miden there was an apposite Commission created expressly to evaluate the pertinence of a determined trauma, and it was subdivided into subcommissions according to the clinical scope. The exam for becoming a fully fledged citizen of Miden also included a deeper knowledge of the Traumatic Code. I hadn’t yet begun to study for the exam, as I still had more than a year before the cutoff date. So, in all honesty, I had no idea what TRAUMA no. 215 was.

When I came back to the living room, the girl had got up and was wandering around, her cup in her hand. She stopped in front of a photo of me and my boyfriend taken during the summer we met. I don’t usually hang photos, but that one was particularly beautiful. Or rather, that’s what you’re led to believe when you come out well in a photo.

‘Is that you?’ the girl asked, as if twenty years had passed since the picture was taken.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I had longer hair.’

She stood there staring at it, nodding her head, almost as if she wanted to ascertain my degree of self-indulgence.

‘Seeing a photo of the professor makes me uncomfortable,’ she said.

‘You’re in his home,’ I pointed out.

I went back to sit, with the hope that she would follow suit.

‘Listen,’ I said to her, ‘I’m starting to feel uncomfortable too. I’ll confess, reading that letter was not pleasant –’

‘Yes, but it was necessary …’

‘Why?’

‘You’re one of the witnesses.’

Him

My girlfriend was called as a witness. So there was no need for orgies, since they had already gathered enough people to give their testimony. Five colleagues – a man and four women. And five people dear to me, classified on the basis of their degree of proximity and sharing with respect to yours truly, according to the parameters of the Commission: 1) sentimental involvement, 2) frequency of meeting, 3) affinities of interest, 4) generational comparability, and 5) belonging to the same Commission (I was in Organic Pesticides, just like my girlfriend; it made us laugh, so we decided to join together). The witnesses were supposed to answer questions about my life in Miden, my relationship skills, my vision of the world. Their task wasn’t to express an opinion about my guilt so much as to furnish an emotional and behavioural framework of me as a person in order to enable the members of the Commission to draft a verdict. I had been welcomed into a community, but the point was this: Was I still worthy enough to participate? In Miden there are no unworthy citizens. If I were judged guilty, I would be banished. The germ of violence nesting in me could compromise the social fabric. It worked a little like vaccines; if not for herd immunity, we would all be in danger. A Perpetrator must be distanced to prevent other flare-ups, the fresh outbreak of a previously vanquished disease.

I’d been prohibited from going near the girl, from speaking to her. I could only come face-to-face with the witnesses, and they were required to report any attempt to taint their impartial judgment. Under those conditions, having a chat wasn’t exactly a pleasure. The saddest thing when looking at that list of people was to realise that I didn’t have a single friend in Miden. Or maybe not: even sadder was having such infantile thoughts. One of the reasons I left my country was because of the people who talked that way. At night they would go out with a few friends, get obliterated; then, the morning after, they’d brood about their shitty lives: ‘I don’t have a single friend.’ They’d sometimes have the thought that same night, looking at everyone else with the exhausted air of someone who already has a bag packed to go. Some of them really did have them packed. Not me. I packed only when I was about to leave.

In any case, none of those witnesses made me think of friendship. I’m not a difficult person, not a snob. I can bond with anyone, I have fun, get bored, I do what I need to do, but friendship is something else. My best friend, together with my previous girlfriend, left my country two months before I did. That is, by the time they left, she was technically no longer my girlfriend, but a week earlier she had been. A week earlier we’d been at my place, she with her head on my lap and an expression of terror on her face: ‘I feel lonely here. I have no one.’ And me: ‘What do you mean you have no one? I’m here.’ Who knows how I get into these situations. Likewise with my current girlfriend. I must have some sort of last-chance fascination.