cara Esther,
I’m not yet thirty – but I’m dangerously close – and I almost feel tired already. I collect disasters, and instead of avoiding them, I put my hand in them and enjoy watching the fires I cause spread. The worst is that I don’t know how to live any other way.
Over the years I have collected the adjectives that each of my exes have attributed to me. For good measure, in addition to the boyfriends, I also included any lovers and “friends” (how bad the word fuckfriend is and forgive me if I don’t use it) and a nightmarish picture emerged: jealous, bitchy, raw, impatient, insatiable, cryptic, nymphomaniac, crafty, aloof, antisocial.
I admit I’m not a saint at all, but shall we hear the other bell?
Example 1: Official boyfriend cheats on me. The coward to the end hides behind a finger, and then throws himself at my feet as a contrite sinner (he only needed to put on a bag and arrive barefoot). I take it back because I loved him, but also because this story distracted me from the university block I was experiencing. But I can’t resist the temptation to warm up his sins for breakfast in the most diabolical ways, reducing him to a rag. Inevitably he leaves me, I cry for a while but I never regret it, what a relief to not have him around anymore.
Example 2: the Great Sexual Love that like him no one ever. I know him going to work on the other side of Italy with a fixed-term contract. I’m new in the village, I’m the “foreigner” in the office. I have a clandestine relationship with a colleague whose fiancée is abroad, a winding down relationship, he says. He will never leave her, I say. I know very well that I don’t have to expect anything, that he is a textbook Sarratore, but he falls for it and I fall in love. I’m jealous not of the remote girlfriend, but that he’s also having an affair with someone else in the office, and I don’t think I’m wrong. How do I take revenge? One evening I seduce her brother, who had had his eye on me for some time and whom I don’t disdain at all. A fateful evening, unrepeatable. It wasn’t necessary for my Sarratore to ever know, I greatly enjoyed his unfounded confidence in believing himself master of the situation. It still breaks my heart, because the fiancée never leaves her and the brother ends up betraying himself (makes a scene as if I had really cuckolded him), but do you want to put the satisfaction of having done it under his nose?
Example 3: at a certain point out of boredom, I enter one of those infamous “friendships”. It’s not for me, I wanted above all the company, and in fact I stop soon. I’m moving, but we keep in touch, but for me it’s just a friendship, the sex chapter is closed. One New Year’s Eve I have nothing to do and he invites me into town for an evening somewhere with a certain class. Shortly before my arrival, when I can no longer hold back, I discover that she has rented an apartment so as not to have to drive back drunk to her village, where I was a guest, but that it is within earshot of her parents. During the day, he spares no expense between lunches and dinners outside and the trendy restaurant. Obviously at the end of the evening, having arrived at the elusive apartment, sex is expected. With everything she paid. I, on the other hand, enjoyed watching him swing left and right all day, and I have no intention of following the script he imagined. I put on my pajamas and go to sleep in the room he paid for. He never spoke to me again after this experience.
Tell me, am I really what they say I am, this kind of virago, or am I just one to do as I please instead of doing as they would like? And not only do I send them to hell, I enjoy beating them at their own game with almost sadistic enthusiasm.
It would be easier to turn away and continue with everyday life, instead I feel like the Master’s Margarita, who goes around Moscow, free and powerful, playing cruel jokes on those who have ruined her life and to her lover.
I could live off this. Piccolo Amore Quieto is not for everyone, there are those who live in excesses and are even happy. Still, I look at my sentimental curriculum, and I realize that I don’t know the normality, the famous Saturday night pizzas. I miss it, but at the same time I can’t live without fires.
I’m curious to know your opinion,
L.
Esther Viola’s answer
Dear L,
But what an opinion. Only applause. Are you looking for compliments? I really think so. Here they are, and deserved.
You are the best at enjoying life.
First, abandon this fake self-accuse naïve. Don’t become like those who “oh god oh god, I’m fine like this, selfish and triumphant, but am I wrong to behave the way I like?”.
You know well that the sentimental offer is from a hypermarket and instead of worrying you, you take advantage of it: you always find someone available for the evening, for a chat, for a delivery, for a sexual assault, to fall in love, to suffer for you. Modern times for modern times, might as well take advantage of the benefits.
And do you want to put? What do you do with normality, there’s always time for normality. Everyone survives their twenties – but also their thirties – as best they can.
It is coming to you – it seems to me – very well.
Is stable love really the finish line?
Thought is how one puts it, they say in Naples. If you convince yourself that you are the bearer of everything, god bless you and all the better for you, you will still have an audience: you. And you know that people are fools: someone else falls for it.
You will be the enemy corpse that has to come down from the river: everyone sitting waiting, and you who never arrive.
You fall in love – badly, at the beginning – after which, to be able to learn the lesson, we begin to divide the world in two, like the opportunists: what is good for me and what is not good for me.
Desiring a life together very much happens especially when you’re not in a couple. Then, as soon as the blessing arrives, in the form of a Great Stable Relationship, that is, having had what you thought you wanted, your half apple finally sewn back to the other half (progress that you expected to be enormous), you can finally look in the mirror and do the math again. Very bitter surprise: peace is not enough to live happily. Eventually happiness unnerves, wrote Marguerite Yourcenar.
Love: how much is enough?
Here is the classic review, but you already know it: great love which goes downhill unhappy because it could only go down, little love that slowly strengthens and devours you, unrequited love at all, love paid to the minimum, love-passiononly cerebral love, platonic lovejumping love, chatting love.
It seems to me that the division, if one day it were ever necessary to make one, however, will only be between love that is enough and love that is not enough. And how much of that love is enough, whoever receives it decides.
For now L. you’re dodging the dents. Then, “Knowing what’s best to do for the future” can only be found in the next day’s agenda, the problem sleeps elsewhere: will you be good at handling expectations? Will you always be on top of everything, and the rest will manage? There are those who fall in love lightly and those others, even more blessed, who lightly know how to get over it. You have both. I would tell you: if she succeeds, don’t move an iota.
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