The Girl at the Door Read online

  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.

  W
hen 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.

  Her

  The Commission had prepared a questionnaire about my relationship with my boyfriend. The girl had asked only that I be sincere, and she gave me the email address of the director of the Commission in case I had any questions for her.

  ‘If you like,’ she said with sudden kindness, ‘I’ll tell her to come and see you.’

  I knew the director. My boyfriend had introduced me to her shortly after I’d moved. In the beginning he was rather worried about my poor social skills. Or maybe he was just channelling everyone else’s fear. In Miden, nobody had anything against two hearts sharing the same hearth – or even one solitary heart. And yet you felt the pressure of a greater, more generous idyll: the Miden Dream, which claimed a tribute of universal love from you. But I never joined any of the spontaneous groups they organised to spend free time together. Even my boyfriend belonged to only two groups, and the pool group was not his choice, since the university had given him a free pass. The other was the wine lovers’ group. I would have gone too, but, for one thing, I didn’t want to seem so attached to him, and for another, the wine in Miden was undrinkable. There were also tea lovers, and every morning I woke up with the sincere intention of signing up. But I lacked a certain ease. I still spoke the international language; it seemed a bit senseless to enter a circle of enthusiasts and not be able to catch the nuances and secrets.

  In any case, my boyfriend introduced me to the director ‘before anyone knew better’. This has become an overused expression in my life since the girl’s visit. From that day on, it seemed that everyone knew better. I wouldn’t say that the director and I had become friends, but we did do some activities together. On Thursdays, for example, we went to the movies. Neither of us had particularly brilliant commentary on the movies we saw, so we just kept repeating how pleasant it was to have that weekly date, to remember with insincere nostalgia the time of projectionists, and once in a while to complain about someone whispering during the movie. One afternoon we even went to the steam bath. We discreetly examined each other’s nude bodies. Mine was essentially hairless apart from my pussy; hers was the exact opposite. Then we lay down on the couches at the entry, reading our horoscopes aloud from the gossip magazines and trying to amuse ourselves. I didn’t catch the funny bits, because I only understood half of what was being read, so I wound up laughing more than I should have.

  After missing our appointment two Thursdays in a row, we stopped seeing each other. If we happened to meet on the street, we reassured each other that we would call soon. Neither of us did. Many of my relationships in Miden were like that. I guess a lot of relationships anyplace in the world are like that. The only inconvenience is that in Miden, you often meet people by chance.

  That said, there was no reason to send an email to the director, because the questionnaire was very simple, too simple. I would have liked some more insidious questions, to pause a few seconds with the pen in my mouth to follow a thought, the way I did when I tried to write. In fact, I was almost offended by such an inane questionnaire. It made me feel like an imbecile. Let’s not aggravate a pregnant woman, the questions seemed to suggest. So I thought about writing the director an email. I’d tell her that the sight of her hairy body in the steam bath was disgusting, that I forced myself to look at her because it would have been embarrassing not to. That the idea of her germs accidentally coming into contact with my skin revolted me. That her breath while she was lying next to me reading the horoscope – even mitigated by the ginger tea they offered us – reeked of rotten cabbage. That if she really wanted to know, I found the memory of that afternoon much more repugnant than the image of the girl taking it up the arse from my boyfriend.

  Him

  All the witnesses agreed on one thing: I should never have started that affair. ‘She was your student!’ they kept repeating, as if the concept itself should have been enough to deter me. But the affair started, and was finished, so to keep brooding on that point didn’t seem like a great idea. And yet, that was exactly what I was supposed to do from the moment I started my meetings wit
h the witnesses, which consisted of sifting through a ‘real ugly story’. That was how my colleague from artistic anatomy, for example, defined it. It was beautiful, too, I pointed out to him, but he shook his head the way you would with a student as thick as he was recidivist, a student you would gladly smack upside the head if it were allowed. My colleague couldn’t come to terms with the fact that a philosophy professor could have such a maggot-ridden notion of beauty. For that matter, he couldn’t even come to terms with my presence in the Academy. What point was there in studying philosophy if you wanted to be an artist? It was a more-than-legitimate doubt, so much more that it became my doubt too. Apart from our common vision about the utility of philosophy (which I was never self-indulgent enough to share with him), he and I never really liked each other. It might be in bad taste to mention the Aesop story of the fox and his sour grapes, but I’m sure my colleague was writhing with envy when he found out I’d been fucking the girl. I have my reasons for believing this. He had put himself out like a madman to organise a terrible exhibition for her in a friend’s gallery and had obliged all his colleagues to go to it, like a company field trip. Her work barely filled half a room; the other half was occupied by a row of wine glasses and female students eager to doll themselves up in their artsy way. The girl wore a lamé dress that brushed her arse, with a granny cardigan over it. The night of the show, half drunk, my colleague made a move on her. She told me when we were at my place, an hour after the opening, when she finally took off her cardigan and straddled me, still wearing that lamé dress. I asked her why she didn’t go for it. ‘He would’ve fixed you up with another show,’ I said. She called me an arsehole, but she laughed. She said my colleague creeped her out because his Adam’s apple was always reddish, like a skinned bollock. She always came out with stuff like that to drive me crazy. So I ordered her to touch it next time and tell me how it felt. First she called me an arsehole, then a pervert as she licked my throat and sucked my Adam’s apple. It felt weird, like I had a dick under my chin, and she started getting wet on my lap. Fortunately, that anecdote doesn’t appear in the list of practices between me and the girl. Maybe she was ashamed. And yet, she had the idea of making a sculpture called The Skinned Bollock and offering it to me as a trophy.