It doesn’t take much to realize that it’s best to set aside any ideas of writing a batch of incendiary songs with more personalized targets than the old ones. Apart from the lawsuits and ostracism they would provoke, and the fact that musically the songs might not be much to write home about, who would they really be of any interest to? A minuscule minority of idealists? Of utopians? Of fanatics? Would they be able to shift something in the general public opinion? It’s very unlikely; even if the other Bebonkers were willing to throw themselves in with him in such an enterprise (very unlikely) and were able to overcome Baz’s opposition (practically impossible), the commercial results would almost certainly be disastrous. And it’s almost equally certain that they wouldn’t even be taken seriously: theirs would seem like a marketing gimmick, a cynical attempt to regain a lost virginity, speculating on the wounds of the planet to freshen up their image. It would happen even if they decided to donate the proceeds of albums and concerts to charitable causes: just look at the wild accusations and ridiculous comments raining down on account of this coming Sunday’s charity concert.
Most of all: Why should they use their music to unleash potentially devastating forces in anything more than a ritual context outside the secure perimeter of a stadium or arena? Because there are so many things going wrong in the world, so many things off-track and unacceptable? Yet they’ve lived long enough by now to realize that instability isn’t necessarily better than stability, especially when you’re talking about complex social systems. All you have to do is look at the Middle East or North Africa to be reminded that a despotic state is still better than a collapsed state at the mercy of the most atrocious of civil wars; or look around the West to realize that a flawed democracy is still preferable to a democracy held hostage by some freewheeling populist who’s foaming at the mouth. Fanatics and aspiring dictators lie in wait behind every mob, with their nooses to swing and their hidden agendas; and it’s highly unlikely they’d do any better than the ones they want to replace.
So? So that’s it: the Bebonkers will continue playing “Enough Isn’t Enough” with angry determination as long as they’re able, and tens of thousands of people will continue jumping in the stands or on the grass in the 120-decibel sound wave, pumping their arms and going red in the face and venting all the frustration they’ve accumulated in their lives, then that night they’ll return home exhausted and satisfied, and the next day they’ll show up at work and tell their colleagues that they’ve gone to see the Bebonkers, who even after all these years haven’t lost a bit of their original rage, to the contrary.
“You think it would be possible to get some tea with lemon, maybe?” Baz gives him his most lovable smile, which is nonetheless chilling.
“I think so.” Nick Cruickshank is relieved to have an excuse to extract himself from these thoughts and this studio; he opens the door, pushes Baz into the hallway.
SEVENTEEN
MILENA MIGLIARI WALKS at a vigorous pace along the high road that leads from Seillans to Fayence, cut into the side of the foothills, despite knowing that the light will soon begin to fade. But she left the van in the parking lot above the shop and has no desire to stay home, as Viviane suggested before running off to her studio in Draguignan, already treating her like she’s semi-incapacitated and needs to save her strength. Furthermore, she absolutely wants to check how the chestnut gelato has come out; even if Guadalupe told her on the phone that she’d followed all her instructions scrupulously, she has to see it and taste it to be sure. And even though it’s highly unlikely that someone will come by for a gelato on a late Thursday afternoon, it still might happen; in such a destabilizing moment she could really use some validation of why she does what she does.
She likes walking this intensely, the way it works every muscle in her body and helps her think a thousand times more clearly than when she’s shut up in a room. It also seems like a way to confirm her knowledge of the territory, step-by-step, one dry-stone wall after another, tree after tree, hedge after hedge, curve after curve. She knows this area well by now; she feels quite at home there, even if not completely. But then she’s never felt truly at home anywhere: not Verona, where she was born, not even Padua, where she studied foreign languages in university or the other cities where she spent months or years studying or working or exploring the world. She has often wondered whether she’ll ever be free of this stateless condition of hers, whether sooner or later she’ll find a place that corresponds to her completely, naturally, effortlessly. Sometimes she’s afraid that familiarity with a place is as elusive as that with people and objects, even with herself: an illusion born of repetition that generates predictability, that generates reassurance. A little like walking along this road, which she’s gone down so many times that she knows it by heart, but which certainly doesn’t feel like hers. All it would take is someone to yell something nasty at her from a passing car, or a dog to come out barking and growling from a yard and bare its teeth, and she would already feel lost, her compass broken.
For as long as she can remember, she’s had two recurring dreams, one good and one bad. In the good one she walks slowly into the sea, and when her head is underwater she realizes she’s perfectly capable of breathing normally. She feels a sensation of immense calm and euphoria in knowing she can, to dedicate herself to exploring and underwater games and acrobatics, without anyone on land being able to see her. Whereas in the bad dream she finds herself in a city or town she has no knowledge of, and she realizes she no longer has her purse with her wallet and phone and other belongings, she has no idea where to go or where she comes from or why, she doesn’t remember the names of any friends or acquaintances to call for information or help; not even her own name. Each time it comes she wakes up in a state of utter anxiety, drenched in sweat and her heart racing, so scared that she’s unable to fall back asleep. The two dreams usually alternate, with intervals of a few months, but lately she’s been having the bad one more often. She doesn’t need a psychologist to see the connections to the doubts and anxieties in her own life, the senses of foreignness and the disorientation that continue manifesting themselves.
Yet when she first came here with Viviane, the summer they met, it did seem like home to her: even before finding the real house they have now, when they were in the tiny rental apartment above Madame Voclain’s haberdashery. Even though they were crammed into a single room with a kitchenette, and the bathroom was so small you couldn’t even fully extend your arm inside the shower, with the plastic flowered curtain that clung to your wet body. Back then it never occurred to her to want more space, or a better view than the one they had, of a small courtyard with a fig tree in the corner. Back then, being at home simply meant being with Viviane; home was the two of them. And she continued feeling at home when they moved into the apartment on the floor above, where they now had two rooms and there was an actual kitchen in which to prepare her gelato without having to do any balancing acts.
Come to think of it, she stopped feeling at home precisely when they bought a home: the house with the glass-ceilinged patio, so much prettier and more solid and spacious than their previous accommodations, the one they chose as the container for their life together in the long run, rather than for a few weeks or months. What does this mean? That the only house in which she can feel at home isn’t physical, but mental? An emotional house? A place intangible by definition, not permanent, entrusted to the fluctuating fortunes of sensations and emotions?
So her home is her character? Her so-called personality? Her dreams, undefined as they are? Her body, even though so many times she’s wished it were different? Her femininity, with all the pleasant and unacceptable consequences that come with it? Her work? Her passion for gelato, the time and research she puts into it, the joy and preoccupation she gets out of it? If she were a man, she would probably say yes: men identify themselves so completely with what they do, like turtles taking their shells with them wherever they go. They might buy their houses, but they certainly don�
�t take care of them; they leave that to women. And women take on the burden, out of a sense of duty or pleasure or a kind of natural vocation, even when they have a million other responsibilities; they end up dedicating to it an incredible amount of their time and energy. To the upkeep of a box, essentially: cleaning it and getting it in order and making it run and comfortable, one room to the next, one piece of furniture after another, object after object. Okay, but before she wasn’t talking about homes, she was talking about feeling at home, about having a degree of total familiarity with a small piece of the world. Well, she never has. Not even as a little girl, not even when her parents were still together and it seemed like she enjoyed a certain degree of protection, a certain degree of definition with respect to the formless universe. From then on, wherever she’s been it’s always seemed like her bond with the place was precarious. Which certainly hasn’t been entirely negative; knowing that sooner or later she’d be able to leave a place or situation has saved her life countless times, preserved her curiosity and desire to explore.
However, if someone never truly feels at home anywhere, how can they take on the responsibility of bringing another person into the world? Condemning her (or him) as well to never truly feeling at home anywhere? Or might bringing someone else into the world be a way to feel truly at home? Could this be the solution, to create a family? But wouldn’t she feel trapped, with no way out for years and years and years? Like with Roberto, and the other guys before him, when it was just the two of them and they talked intermittently about a family on a purely hypothetical basis? The way it’s happening now with Viviane, well before the so-called other person begins turning into a reality? The way it began happening when she and Viviane bought the house, and she stopped feeling at home?
It seems to her like the vast majority of people don’t even pose themselves the question: apart from those who don’t have a home because it’s been destroyed by artillery or they have to leave it because they can no longer afford the rent, billions of people feel at home right where they are. They feel at home even in the ugliest and saddest-looking houses, the ritziest or the most conventional or the most squalid, in those that look out on the ceaseless traffic of a city boulevard or a heart-shaped swimming pool or the north side of a valley where the sun never shines. She has never tried it, but she’s sure that if she knocked on a random door and asked the person who came to open it if they felt at home, they would say yes. Looking at her like a lunatic, surely, and with a show of defending their territory, proudly, underlining their identification with their home, the visible and tangible proof of their legitimately occupying a small portion of the world.
Maybe the problem is that she is not a normal person, that she’s essentially a misfit, her head full of ideas that never gel with the real world. And the real world is well aware of it, and smacks her around every chance it gets, to remind her who’s in charge; or tries to build walls around her, to lock her door when her instinct would be to burst out and breathe free air and gaze at the sky.
They’re considerations she’s made far too often, and nothing useful has ever come of them. Milena Migliari puts all her strength into her leg muscles, pushing herself forward as fast as she can. Fayence has already come into view, its houses perched on the hillside, inhabited by people who have no doubt that they feel at home.
EIGHTEEN
AT TEN IN the evening Nick Cruickshank gets up from the table before dinner is over, with the excuse of having to make a phone call. He ignores Wally, who squawks at him a couple of times, “Who’re you calling?” goes to put on a sweatshirt and jacket, sneaks out of the house without even Aldino realizing it. He doesn’t have any particular destination in mind; he’s only interested in getting away from all those moving eyes and lips and hands, from all those insistent and irrelevant affirmations and claims and observations that have intruded on his living space.
He slips inside the little Mazda, drives slowly with the lights off across the parking area behind the house and down the access road to the gate, presses the remote control; as soon as he’s outside his relief is comparable to someone who’s just broken out of prison. He turns on the headlights, continues slowly down the narrow road between the short stone walls on one side and the trees on the other, up to the fork between Mons and Callian. He hesitates for a second or two between going up toward the mountains or down toward the plain, between a thicker darkness or a more illuminated one, then turns right, toward Callian. He doesn’t shift gears much, pressing on the accelerator with the tips of his toes as little as possible. Nonetheless, in ten minutes he’s in town: there’s no one around, it seems much later than it actually is. Without really choosing to do so he continues down the road, indolently following the descending curves. He’s unable to focus on any particular thought but feels the same sense of generalized nonbelonging he felt as a small child and as an older boy, and then as an adult every time he finds himself ripping out the wires that connect him to a situation, whether out of impatience or intolerance, boredom, stupid or legitimate reasons, a misunderstanding, a question of principle, a mistake.
He reaches the low road, goes right, almost drifting. He passes beneath Tourrettes, beneath Fayence; he makes as if to continue straight in the direction of Draguignan and at the last second veers right, goes up the snaking road with the same sense of inertia he felt coming down. He gets to the town, passes beneath the arch of the town hall, continues on to the outdoor multilevel parking lot that in summer is never big enough for all the tourists’ cars and now is almost empty. He asks himself for a moment whether he should continue driving and head back home, and instead turns left and parks randomly in one of the dozens and dozens of free spaces.
He gets out. The air is humid, the temperature down much lower than during the day, a mist hangs in the air. Nick Cruickshank goes down the stairs toward the center of town, passes by the windows of the summer café with its blown-up images of hamburgers and toasted sandwiches and surreally colored ice cream; by the windows of one of the many real estate agencies with photos of pseudo-Provençal villas and houses, their extremely blue swimming pools in the foreground.
Fayence is as deserted as Callian was: not a car on the main road he drove up three minutes ago. The only place open is the bar next to the store selling imitation local specialties, where several silhouettes move behind the illuminated windows; from several buildings the light from televisions filters out through the slats of closed shutters. The semi-lethargy into which the entire zone withdraws in low season is even more evident at night, the silence so dense you can almost feel it. But tomorrow some of the guests of Saturday’s party will come here in search of a bare minimum of local color: they’ll get a couple of restaurants to open, bring in some money, voices, gestures. There will certainly be some journalists and photographers hunting for interesting subjects, preferably in an altered state or with some illegitimate companion. There will certainly be some fans hoping for a miraculous encounter; some curious locals, some stalkers. Then on Saturday those who want to stake out their place for the concert a day in advance will arrive down at the airfield; they’ll set up their tents and sleeping bags as close as possible to the stage. In spite of the decree of the mayor, who claims he doesn’t want them there for health and safety reasons, but who, like his colleagues in the surrounding towns, is quite content to be part of such a major event, with the people, the television footage, the attention, the town’s name in lights around the world.
The window of the Italian girl Milena’s gelateria is dark, closed; the window of the jeweler’s just below it, dark, closed; the window of the pizzeria below that, ditto. In the market square that three days a week plays host to stands selling fruit and vegetables and cheeses, ground-level lamps project swaths of warm light onto the sycamores and the church façade. And in the middle of the empty space are roughly a dozen people standing in a circle: they’re rocking back and forth on their legs and hitting their arms with their hands, like in an extremely restrained and
musicless tribal dance.
Nick Cruickshank pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt, a gesture he makes instinctively the rare times he happens to be out alone among strangers. He wonders why that circle of people is down there: Is it a flash mob of protest, or celebration? For what? Against what? And what could be the point of having a flash mob in a place where there’s no one to see it besides him, who is looking on unseen from above, flush against the wall of an old building saturated with moisture? Unless they’re Bebonkers fans who have arrived three days before the concert, intent on somehow warming themselves and passing the time. It does happen: they adapt to sleeping on the ground, in the cold and even in the rain for nights on end, just to have the privilege of marking their territory before the others, gaining a right of precedence, gearing themselves up with anticipation. But if they were fans of the Bebonkers they’d certainly have a portable stereo to play their songs on, or at least a cell phone with a Bluetooth minispeaker, or a guitar to strum; they’d certainly be launching into the usual mangled choruses, passing back and forth cans and bottles of beer, joints, chillums. But these people are totally silent, and so coordinated, absorbed.
Imperfect Delight Page 14
