“When you call people pond scum that means you’re respecting them as your adversaries . . .” announced an old friend of mine from Zagreb whom I ran into while I was in Milan. We knew each other from somewhere, maybe university, I couldn’t place her, and though we’d never been close, there we were, conversing about “politics.” I’d grown accustomed to the way all conversations with my compatriots end up being about politics or about the visible evasion of talk about politics.
“By branding them as scum you didn’t fix anything,” she said, and she was right.
“You wonder how our power-mongers haven’t lost steam, but it’s the new, younger, stronger, and stupider ones who keep cropping up. Surely you’ve leafed through the Croatian schoolbooks and seen the score: Partisans out, Ustashas in. Children can no longer distinguish between Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler, and even if they could, their knowing would make no difference. Croats everywhere are licking church altars and practicing the knee-jerk fascist salute “Ready for the homeland” . . . And besides, neo-fascism, big deal, like so what, there’s plenty to go around and extra left over for export: the Serbs, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Greeks, everybody’s doing it . . . Who can fill all the holes from which the stupidity yawns?! Even if you flee one place, the stupidity will be waiting for you elsewhere, the way death lurks in the tale When Death Came To Samarra . . . If a person can’t adapt, it’s time to bite his tongue. Fascism is part of our folklore. Today it’s cool to be fascist. Nobody in his right mind gets worked up about them except a handful of losers like yourself. You wield your puny paper sword and think those big strapping oafs are intimidated, guys who’d happily tattoo the checkerboard emblem on their tongue if they could! Chill, girlfriend, these things are so much shallower than you know,” she said.
“Shallow?”
“Listen, when my daughter was a kid I bought her a bichon . . . Remember Fluffy, Anči?” she said to her daughter, who responded with icy silence, eyes glued to the screen of her smartphone.
“A Bichon Frise, the curly-haired Bichon, they’re those adorable, little, white, playful, friendly dogs, live toys. Ours was so sweet it never even barked. The trouble began when we took it out for walks. As soon as our little Fluffy showed up on their radar, the racket would be deafening, the other dogs were poised to tear her to pieces. All the dogs behaved the same way, regardless of breed and size. We asked our vet. He told us our Fluffy was too refined and pure so the other dogs didn’t think of her as one of their own; they didn’t even recognize her as a dog. He advised us to roll her in dog shit. This was the only way to socialize her with her ilk. Only when they smell the shit will the dogs accept her. Pure and scentless, she was like a canine parody to them, not a dog. People are like dogs. Nobody likes being shut out. You know how good old Krleža put it . . . ‘Society smells vile but it’s cosy. Solitude is—empty. We know full well how things look under another’s tail, but without all the sniffing there’s no life’ . . .” said my acquaintance, inspired suddenly by Miroslav Krleža.
Her daughter, who had perfected an uncanny ability to self-hibernate, still hadn’t looked up from her smartphone.
“So did you roll her in shit?” I asked.
“Who?
“Fluffy?”
“We gave her to Grandma . . . Didn’t we, Anči?” said my friend, but received no response.
My acquaintance was in Milan with her daughter visiting a graduate program at some supposedly famous design program.
“Everything today is about design . . .” I said, though what I wanted to say was, “Everybody today wants to go into design . . .” but stopped myself at the last minute, realizing this might sound a bit harsh to my acquaintance’s ear. I don’t know why, but while my acquaintance, her daughter, and I sat in Café Madeira, for a second I thought I’d spotted a flash, reflecting in her eye, of the red and white checkerboard emblem. I sincerely hope I was wrong. Meanwhile, I remembered where we’d met. She was a student of Indology; the study of South Asia was all the craze when I was a student and she was a friend of my boyfriend at the time who was wild about India . . .
Later I thought of her story about the bichon. I wondered how long it would take for the detail of the support provided by the Croatian embassy in Rome in promoting my tour through Italy to reach the ears of the Croatian media. Though the sum of money they provided—rubber-stamped by the municipality of Zagreb for the Rome embassy and passed on by the Rome embassy to my Italian publisher—was less than the price of the pair of shoes the previous Croatian ambassador to the United States (a poet, my colleague!) had purchased at a swanky shop on Madison Avenue in New York, a little article appeared about the subsidy in the Croatian daily press a month or two after my tour. The thrust of the article wasn’t so much to raise eyebrows at the amount of support, but to let it be known that the Croatian authorities were backing my literary “internationalization.” This was the ritual of the public smearing the bichon with shit. I may be flattering myself, but this might have been a signal to my old friend, the Croatian ambassador in Rome, that the time had come for him to pack his bags.
7.
I could imagine just how overjoyed she’d be when I shook a great pile of chocolates out in front of her that I’d picked up in a chocolate shop in Turin, and what fun she’d have inviting her girlfriends over for chocolate pizza, chocolate spaghetti, when she offered them a cellphone-shaped piece of chocolate, a little chocolate purse, a chocolate key chain, a chocolate comb, toothpaste made of chocolate, chocolate lipstick . . .
“So when will you grow up?” I’d like to ask, but don’t.
She looks at me, rolls her eyes, shrugs, whistles, puffs air (pooh-pooh-pooh!), giggles, scribbles words in the air, pouts, but doesn’t respond. Her true answer would be: “Never!” And when I see how lively, playful, and radiant she is—my little minnow—I’m overwhelmed by the thought: What if even I don’t want her to grow up!
I notice she finds it hard to give up her toys. She hasn’t entirely discarded the Barbies yet, so though they aren’t out on the shelves, they’re still stowed away somewhere in her room. The Teletubbies, the Smurfs, Fifi, Dora, and Miffy lie hidden in real and mental boxes and are still giving signs of life. Their traces are strewn about, in the Dora shampoo bottle, on T-shirts with Miffy’s face, Smurf socks . . . She’s not ready to relinquish them, say her goodbyes, they’re family. She still watches Tom and Jerry with the same delight. She still prefers cartoons to children’s animated features. She doesn’t watch movies for grown-ups, they bore her, though she is fond of the Turkish series Suleiman the Magnificent. By her age I’d already seen a large number of grown-up Hollywood movies, but many things were different back then. She doesn’t like the feature-length, animated, 3-D hit movies; once she even burst into tears when we were at the movies, and she hasn’t gone back since. With a pleasure entirely inscrutable to me, she still watches a cartoon that stars a sponge, though I could have sworn the character was a slab of Swiss cheese. “Auuuuntie, he’s not cheese, he’s a sponge!” she said with a reproachful tone as if the difference were vast, and then she added . . .
“And his name is Bob!”
Recently, her notebooks, drawing pads, and the walls of her room have been populated by girls; they’re legion, I find it difficult to tell them apart, they all look the same, they all have big, shiny doe-eyes. All these characters come from the same “full package,” including cartoons, video games, “webisodes” of a web series, books, dolls, T-shirts, souvenirs. The package is the work of a major American multinational company for producing toys (Barbie is their offspring!), which only means that millions of little girls all over the world already know who is who in this new, wide-branching family. The whole story is an indigestible eclectic salad—salted with a dash of Harry Potter—about teenage girls attending a boarding school. The school is situated in Fairy Tale World. The characters are divided into “royals,” being “those who accept their fairy tale destinies,” and “rebels,” being “those who wan
t to write their own.” The boarding-school students are the children of famous fairy tale characters: if they break the rules and try to change their destiny, the stories they have inherited will disappear and they, too, will vanish.
Snow White’s daughter attends the school, and Sleeping Beauty’s daughter, the White Rabbit’s daughter, the daughter of Odette (the queen of the swans in Swan Lake), of the Queen of Hearts (from Alice in Wonderland), of Beauty and the Beast, of the Cheshire Cat, Cinderella’s daughter, Red Riding Hood’s daughter, Alice’s son (Alice in Wonderland), Hansel and Gretel’s children, Humpty Dumpty’s, Robin Hood’s, and Eros’s adopted daughter, who has fallen here from Olympus. The children have their parents’ genes, their powers and skills, they repeat the lines of their parents, fall in love with each other, and conspire. The children are notable for their business acumen; Cinderella’s daughter is already earning pocket money at the Glass Slipper Shoe Shop, Justine Dancer, daughter of Grimm’s Twelve Dancing Princesses, plans to open a dance studio, and the daughter of a couple of unnamed narrators, herself a “narrator-in-training,” also has aspirations (“Just because I’m destined to be the narrator doesn’t mean I don’t want to have my own story.”).
The girls are represented as cloying “young ladies” and “princesses,” teenage “models,” “shoppers,” mini-women who speak in quavering voices, just as they’ll speak when they grow up, if they ever do. They are petite female clones with big heads (from a surfeit of wavy hair); they teeter along unsteadily on high high heels and “click” on their smartphones, the devices they use instead of the more traditional magic wand. The boys are no better—they all look like Justin Bieber.
As she introduced me to her new idols with delight, she breezed through the exceedingly long list of names, explaining which of these girls had mastered which skill and how I might tell them apart. Meanwhile my head was spinning. And when I realized that each episode ends with the words “The end is just the beginning,” I thought with horror that this generation of cartoon creatures will engender some future generation of cartoon creatures, and I cautiously asked my little girl whether she might be better advised to direct her attention to their “parents” and read Alice in Wonderland or the fairy tales by the brothers Grimm.
“You never like the things I like,” she said in a sad voice.
“Not true. I like everything you like, but you’ll find it easier to understand who the daughter of the Mad Hatter is if you first get to know her daddy . . .” I lied.
“But I do know who the Mad Hatter is.”
“How?”
“From the cartoon.”
“Okay, then, fine . . .” I said.
She heard the light, sour touch in my voice.
“So do you know my friends’ names?” she asked.
“Well let’s see, there’s Thea . . .”
“And?”
“And the little one, and the two sisters, the ones living in the apartment above yours? Their names?”
“They live two floors above us . . .”
“Okay, a floor or two doesn’t matter . . .”
“Does too!”
“Sorry, it’s . . .”
“How can you not know where my best friends live?! And you don’t even know their names!”
“I do, I just forgot them this minute.”
“So what are their parents called?”
“I’m not going to remember what their parents are called, am I.”
“Well you yourself said I should be getting to know the parents!”
“Oops, I meant the literary parents, what I meant was you should first get to know the real Alice and only then that son of hers, Elistar . . .”
“His name is Alistair.”
“Okay, fine, Alistair.”
“So what’s my favorite cartoon?”
“I know you used to love the one about Miffy . . .”
“That one is for really little girls . . .” she said.
“Mouse, most of all I love you, and that means I love everything you love.”
“Well maybe . . .” she said with a sigh. “But I don’t believe you, just so you know.”
I didn’t answer. She was right. And why was I insisting on the literary side, when the industry of her lifetime was drawing her to the glibber, more appealing, electric variety that all her friends adored? And besides, hadn’t I, some thirty years ago, at a time when I was burning with fervor, championed the literary notion of promiscuity among famous characters, so confident that I was the very first person in all the world to think up such an idea. Now my youthful concept had boomeranged back to me as infantile, a mawkish pout, a noisy mass-media spit in the face, as a farce, always as a farce.
I recalled the moment when the three of them, she, her brother, and their mother, who was convalscing just then from a grueling operation, visited me in Amsterdam. This was their first, and, in that grouping, only visit. She couldn’t have been more than three. When they left, behind them yawned a physically painful void. I whimpered dog-like for her, especially for her. I’d come across the tiny toys she’d strewn about like crumbs. I picked them up, tossed them from hand to hand, warmed them with my breath, and whimpered. Some of these “crumbs” stand still today on my shelf: a rubber frog and crocodile. And a Smurf.
“Auuuuntie, you stole my Smurf . . .”
8.
I liked my Turin B&B because it was on the Via Giulia di Barolo, across from the famous “feta di polenta” building (the Casa Scaccabarozzi), and each time (during the two days I was there) I stepped out of my building, I’d cast a glance up at its fantastic, quirky façade, which stubbornly defied all architectural rules. A successful literary soirée was held in Turin: the audience was in fine spirits and the atmosphere was amicable. The Italian publisher had arranged for a get-together with students from one of the leading “recreational, creative, therapeutic workshops”: Scuola Holden. I had heard of Scuola Holden only a few days earlier, but I did have the time to re-read Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
I arrived an hour earlier than scheduled and went looking for the administrative office, which was designed like the front desk of a hotel. At the desk I was greeted by a young staff member who seemed confused. She had no idea who I was or why I’d come, and suggested I wait for her boss, who was out at lunch. I asked if I might have a look at the curriculum for the fall semester.
“We’re, you know, green,” she said, as if surprised at my asking for such a thing, as if asking for something on “paper” at an ecologically minded school was a faux pas tantamount to requesting a cigarette lighter.
“You’ll find all the information here . . .” she said brightly, and pointed to the corner where there was a table scattered with various promotional leaflets and brochures. There was also a small metal bookshelf holding several books.
The brochure, also a poster, was unusually attractive. The sketch of eight students posing as if for a school photograph, four women and four men, suggested that this was a school where there was no gender or racial discrimination (the figure of a young woman in a sari helped to convey this). And by the way, there was also no age discrimination because there were courses of study offered for children and for the over-thirty student. The main curriculum of the school was designed for students between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The school was international, equally accessible for anybody who could afford it, and there were no special admissions requirements, no talent checks or test-taking. The tuition seemed prohibitively steep. Students were not obliged to be at lectures or seminars because communication between teacher and students could go on through virtual classrooms and online lectures. The two-year course of study, as the brochure promised, ended with an “Opening Doors” pitching event at which each student had the opportunity to pitch their project and persuade the professionals in attendance (directors, film and theater producers, publishers, agents, and entrepreneurs) that it was worthwhile. This was, I assumed, along the lines of the popular BBC show Dragon�
��s Den, where the beginner entrepreneur pitches his project to a group of rich venture-capitalists, suggesting to the enchanted viewers that the world, whether fairly or not, is split into winners and losers.
My attention was drawn to certain details on the poster. A beefy young man with tattooed arms is holding the book Captain Science—a detail implying that all varieties and genres of writing are equal, that there is no hierarchical ordering into high and low, serious and popular literature. A second young man is perched on an old-fashioned television set, holding a remote control. The message here, as I read it, is that all kinds of “texts” are equal: from TV and movie screenplays and ideas for popular shows like Big Brother, to ads, cartoons, and Facebook messages and tweets. A third young man is holding a Penguin-editions mug emblazoned with the name Raymond Chandler and his famous title The Big Sleep. This detail was sending the message, I surmised, that the school had nothing against treating literary works as souvenirs and therefore approved of all other kinds of exploitation of literary works.
The school—a latter-day corporative adaptation of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry—was, according to the information provided in the brochure, organized into eight colleges. At the one called Storytelling the instruction was in English. And everything seemed fairy tale-like, if only my eye hadn’t caught one detail: all the directors of the colleges were men, all eight, and at every single college the artistic director was also a man. The dean, however, had no artistic aspirations: he was the former coach of the Italian national volleyball team. The messages conveyed by the promotional copy—that a love for sport (speed, agility, flexibility, competitive edge, playfulness), particularly soccer, was expected of the potential students—was further reinforced by the symbolic choice of a famous sports coach as dean.
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