The Girl at the Door Read online




  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thEstate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

  Copyright © Veronica Raimo 2019

  English translation copyright © Stash Luczkiw 2019

  Cover photograph © Getty Images

  The moral right of Veronica Raimo to be identified as the author, and Stash Luczkiw as the translator of this work has been aserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008326326

  Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008326340

  Version: 2019-04-26

  Dedication

  For H

  Epigraph

  ‘Go home and practise your wooing,’ I said. ‘Go on. Go away. Take your Schubert with you. Come again when you can do better.’

  J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Girl at the Door

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  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.

&nbs
p; ‘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. Profession
al 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.