02 -- She Just Eats

it was one of those apartments you get lost in. i turned the page of the calendar, dainty and girlie like those french ones, to May/June. Maggio/Junio it said in Italian, because i was in Genova. i couldn’t remember the last time i had owned a wall calendar. i gave up on getting them, i always forgot to turn the page, so what’s the use. i also gave up on living at one address, it’s been four years.

the apartment belongs to Lucia. i thought people don’t do that anymore — airbnb their own places. The flat has three balconies, or rather two, but three exit points: from the kitchen, study/living room and bedroom. Over the week, like a cat, i travel from one room to another chasing Italian spring sun, reading, daydreaming, scrolling my phone and reminiscing about the island in the south of Thailand that may have become my chosen end of the imagined bridge i envision in my upcoming life. to go back and forth, always staying in the summer. in my mind, the other end of this bridge can be in Italy. hence the Genova, and the field research.

in her physical absence, I study Lucia the woman, the persona living in the apartment when I am not here. My attention is instantly summoned by her collection of CDs haphazardly placed in the lower shelves of a vintage bookcase with built-in secretaire (a semi-secret shelf you open with a key that usually uncovers smaller shelves for stationery and letters but in Lucia’s case it’s a desk computer). The CD I pick up right away is Horses by Patti Smith. On the cover — the photo with Patti gazing at me in what would be called a man’s pose by wider society, wearing a white shirt and holding a black jacket over her right shoulder. There’s a little horse pin attached to the lapel — a jolly discovery from the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works on my last day in Milan where this exact photo had been blown up so big that only there I noticed that there is in fact a piece of jewellery in the photography encompassing the name of the album.

Having loved Patti as an autobiographical writer (Just Kids) rather than a musician, it’s only here, in Lucia’s apartment, that I join Patti’s writer’s voice with the sound of her singing. I had always thought her timbre would be lower. When Horses becomes too overbearing for my reading I change it to comfort jazz by Chet Baker. I believe every place that still has analogue music players like the one I am present in at the moment houses some Chet Baker.

I’m reading A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux. (She wrote her first novel in secret, fearing her husband’s ridicule. When it was published, he told her: “If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, you’re capable of cheating on me.”) I obtained it back in Milan from the curators of Miu Miu Literary Club, at the Circolo Filologico Milanese. This year’s topic: Politics of Desire.

Not yet knowing anything about the author or the story, I get carried away to the heroine’s life, the summer camp of 1959 somewhere in France. I bring the book with me everywhere I go until I have devoured all 143 pages.

“Self-narrative, in bringing to light a dominant truth that it seeks in order to ensure a continuity of being, always neglects to consider the following: our failure to understand what we experience at the moment we experience it; the opacity of the present whereby every sentence and every assertion ought to be riddled with holes. The girl whom the children call Kali, who trudges along with them down the bumpy country roads singing The camp we lo-o-o-ve / A blossoming grove, does not know, cannot put a name to ‘what the matter is’. She just eats.”

On Saturday morning when I read this passage, in the early hours of daily scrolling for better news than yesterday, I learn that the US have made unlawful the abortion pill by mail. Nationwide, including the states where that pill was the only hope for a sovereign life.

“We have art in order not to die of the truth,” Annie Ernaux quotes Nietzsche at the end of A Girl’s Story. “What counts is not the things that happen,” she writes, “but what we do with them.”