Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  About the Book

  Sometimes I think it’s possible to live with anything. That we’re wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think, it’s not possible to live at all. Not at all.

  Blueberries could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification; a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling. In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?

  For Dominic.

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Yellow City

  Blueberries

  The Museum of Rape

  Satellite

  Allen Ginsberg

  Unwed Teen Mum Mary

  Holidays with Men

  You Dirty Phony Saint and Martyr

  Friendship between Women

  The Literature of Sadness

  Turning Thirty

  Houses

  Notes to Unlived Time

  Portrait of the Writer as Worker (after Dieter Lesage)

  Antimemoir, as in, Fuck You (as in, Fuck Me)

  Books cited

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Yellow City

  1 February 2017

  A worn-out black turtleneck, skin-tight black jeans. The same clothes I wore when I travelled here alone, eleven years ago. I notice this only while sitting in the back seat of the taxi into Lisbon with Dom. Now, however, I am one-and-a-half dress sizes larger. Now, my jeans are tailored and my sweater has a designer label. Now, I don’t wear whimsical fur-collared coats or charming hats from the 1920s to suggest the possibility that I am interesting.

  The last time I came to Lisbon, eleven years ago, I could talk to any person in the world. I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year; with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus. I saw no problem in taking time from others, or accepting their hospitality, because I was paying it forward. I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealised potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered.

  —In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, you, you don’t have much left to give.

  —But it’s true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didn’t get any better.

  2 February 2017

  This is where it began. Lisbon, May 2006. Outside the club at the Santo Amaro docks, I dangled my legs over the edge of the wide river, my feet swinging like a purse at the end of a long strap. Above me, Lisbon’s big bridge, red and hung, just like the Golden Gate. I puffed smoke into the air excessively, the way I always do on long boozy nights, though I hadn’t had a drink for a couple of hours.

  —She’s lying.

  I drank water from a flimsy plastic bottle!

  —Or vodka lime soda? Though you might still have been on your caipirinha bent, after Coimbra.

  The girl I had gone to the club with, the woman, was kissing her new man inside while I waited. They had brought me here, in his car, from the bar with pink fairy lights that he owned in the Bairro Alto.

  The woman with whom I had come was a stray I had ‘saved’ several hours earlier. She was walking, alone, with a brawny shadow behind her. Locking eyes with me, she called out, ‘It’s so good to see you!’

  ‘It’s good to see you, too,’ I replied. Like that, I rescued her from a man who might have hurt her. We struck up a conversation. We kept it going. Later, she said, ‘I’m going to meet a friend; would you like to come?’

  —She might have helped the woman find a cab.

  —It was just a twenty-minute walk. And the glorious amber of Lisbon at night.

  It’s true—others were with us. To celebrate the woman’s escape, we stepped into a bar that smelled of yeast and bought a round of frothy beers. Her hair was long and wavy and she laughed at all my jokes. She was smaller than me and more beautiful. I wanted to follow her.

  —A night opens up. Who are you to say no to it?

  —Don’t go.

  —Too late.

  The man she was kissing inside the club was in possession of a figure that didn’t support his gut. Tall and fine-boned, he would have been slim but for the soft pouch of his belly, his hangdog chin. I couldn’t imagine what my new friend saw in him.

  —Why had she not chosen you?

  But then, I was fresh out of high school. What did I know about sex? Sitting by the river I talked loud-mouthedly to two young men, nineteen-year-olds with faces they’d one day grow into. Lit with vexation,

  —The woman with wavy hair had dropped her.

  I endeavoured to make my own way through the night. Conversation unfurled between the two young guys and me as we shared a diminishing supply of cigarettes.

  I was on a break from school, working in bars and maxing out my credit cards for the privilege of seeing a world that wasn’t mine. I was enrolled in a law degree, which I was to start the following year (which I never did). Law, of all things.

  —No more second-hand bedsheets.

  —You thought you could evade me.

  —Her feeling of entitlement, of significance, not yet knowing that it doesn’t come.

  The boys with callow faces, were they business students? They longed to visit Australia. We swapped email addresses, just as I had swapped them, dropped them, in every city I stepped through. Did anyone ever email? Yes. But only the boys who thought I’d come with them to Corsica.

  —The Corsicans were the worst.

  It was light, now. I looked across the Tagus at the harsh stare of Jesus, Christ the King, the grand monument, arms outstretched from the mountaintop across the river. Christ the King, installed there by the fascist government, was in no position, I thought, to judge me. The boys promised me breakfast, the best pastel de Belém in Belém. I accepted. I went to say goodbye to my new friend. She told me not to go with them.

  —She was right to sense danger.

  —Did she think that instead you’d go back with her, to his place? Watch them screw?

  Just one chance. One more in a series of chances that had led me to her, to this.

  I’ll go with them, I said. It’s fine. I’m a big girl. The woman with long wavy hair wrote her number on a piece of card that I slipped into a fold in my wallet.

  —You didn’t have a phone.

  3 February 2017

  When I am asked what the first news story I remember is—and because I cannot organise my memories in such a way—I say Princess Di. Other people my age say this, and so it has become my first news memory, too. Though it may have to do with the film Amélie, which romanticises the princess-death. The Thredbo disaster was a month earlier, however, and I remember that perfectly. I was nine.

  She, the blonde princess, didn’t mean all that much to me, and so in her death I didn’t lose anything personal except perhaps a belief in the myth that blonde princesses live happily ever after. What I gained instead was a sensation of hot metal folding into my body, of boiling black oil spilling over my arms and face. Unlike the funerals of elderly family members, their peaceful grey bodies packaged smartly in timber boxes, Princess Diana, Lady Die, gave me the flesh knowledge of violent death. A useful memory to hold within your skin, as an
y one of us might take our last breath in a state of absolute terror.

  Today I will call the police. I mean, I will call the ‘tourist police’, who take down tourists’ statements on official stationery and stamp them, so that tourists may claim the value of their stolen purses with their travel insurance companies. When I last came into contact with Lisbon’s tourist police, eleven years ago, I had to wait for an hour against a wall lined with orange plastic chairs—or maybe they were blue?—as an endless parade of dusty-haired English and French couples reported acts of petty theft against them. I was there to report an almost-rape.

  —A sexual assault?

  An encounter during which my flesh remembered the possibility of a violent death. When my body understood for a second that corpses are dismembered to cover up crimes. By kicking and screaming and running, I had got away from the death, so what was there to report?

  —An attempt.

  —A terror.

  —A scare.

  Waiting for the tourist police then, eleven years ago, my organs felt heavy from the no-sleep, from the trauma, from the traces of alcohol still left in my blood. But I was chipper and businesslike. I buried my shame deep alongside my fear, and I gave my statement, describing how two young men had conspired to rape me and almost succeeded, but I weaselled my way out by agreeing to other acts of violence, and then by my hysteria, and then by my physical desperation to flee. I was so chipper that, once I’d finished and signed my statement, the tourist policeman wrote his number on a piece of paper and said, ‘I finish at ten—let me take you out and show you the real Lisbon.’

  4 February 2017

  I didn’t call the tourist police yesterday; today, Saturday, the office is closed. This might have been unconscious, an avoidance.

  —Or, lazy?

  —Un-pleasure avoidance through pleasure? She wouldn’t go that far.

  I’m not in the habit of living by Freud, but I admit that he has given me useful words to sort through my actions. I knew, for example, that I would come to Lisbon to find a copy of the police investigation; I knew that for many months. I knew, too, that I’d be searching for the documents that detail, in some kind of truth of their time, what happened to me, eleven years ago. But now that I’m here, I can’t even pick up the phone. I don’t want to know.

  —But you do.

  —She doesn’t want to know the words she gave that tourist police officer, so revealing will they be of what essence she’s made.

  —Were made ofthen, whichmakes you now, no threshold between you.

  I know what the pleasure principle is: it is not calling up the tourist police when I intend to. It is preserving the self that I am used to living with and going to great lengths to protect it from disruptions. Freud’s exact words won’t assist me here unless I’ve already been living by them.

  Instead, I’ve been living with the detritus of pop psychology, like:

  + Strength can be willed.

  + Fear can be conquered.

  + It’s not difficult to be truthful.

  The idea that ‘confronting demons’ is, firstly, possible, and, secondly, a good idea.

  5 February 2017

  —One can only conceptualise memory through metaphor. A sieve a warehouse an attic a skeleton a cupboard a filing system a database a basement an encyclopaedia a landscape a dustbin a grab bag. A tape recorder. RAM. A cathedral.

  —Memory is the scribe of the soul. (Aristotle)

  —That’s romantic—ergo, bullshit.

  —Memory is a reconstructive process. (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)

  —Or in the living arena of speech, memory is idiomatic. ________ like an elephant tripping down ________ lane jogging your ________ commit it to ________ a living ________ know it by ________ allow me to refresh your ________.

  —If memory is not a tape recorder starting at zero, then how can a self exist, truly?

  —To attach to memory some order, an architecture, helps assuage the sense that one has slipped into a warm pond, only to turn around and find oneself in treacherous waters, far from land.

  —Anchor memories to signposts that suggest linear time. How old was I then. What was my mother doing. I was a size eight. Tony Moretti loved me.

  —‘My first memory.’

  —Is buttressed by recalling it.

  —‘My first memory.’ A fiction fixed to the linear self.

  —If only to survive the terror of selflessness.

  —But I remember mine. My first memory, Paula, an artist at the residency, said. I was three, and I remember thinking, ‘I’m not so young anymore. I’m three.’

  —‘Her first memory.’ It was pink pink pink. And red, peach light, close-up mottled black. Eyelids stuck pressed shut pressed against the breast. Vitreous fluid moves against. Breast. The muted sound of booming voices, dense. Everything thick all wet velvet dusky stuck together.

  —Time precedes you. A framework for the private self, totally. Alone.

  —‘And yet the image we have of ourselves is mediated through the other. Indeed, it is only the other who can see us, as it were, “objectively”.’ (Hans Ruin)

  —‘It takes two to witness the unconscious.’ (Freud, via Shoshana Felman)

  —Does trauma need a witness? If it does, you’ll need to have this published. Or else you will be your only witness.

  6 February 2017 (Absolutely no meaning whatsoever)

  Polícia de Segurança Pública.

  Olá. Hi. Do you speak English?

  Yes.

  I have a strange request. In 2006, I was the victim of a crime in Lisbon, and it went to court, but I had to leave Portugal before I was able to find out what happened, so I’d like to see if I can track down the documents from this time.

  Okay, so it was eleven years ago. So the problem is, eleven years later our paper has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

  What…does that mean.

  It means the situation was a long time ago and the situation is in the archives; it has been archived for ten years.

  Is it possible to access the file from the archives? I don’t intend to pursue the matter at all, I just want to read it.

  I can print it for you, but it has absolutely no meaning. If you want, you can send an email to the police. The situation is that we don’t give the police report in email.

  Can I come in person? I’m here in Lisbon.

  Okay, you can come here. Bring your ID.

  7 February 2017 (A bad day)

  Sometimes I think it’s possible to live with anything. That we’re wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think it’s not possible to live at all. Not at all.

  —Is that how you preface a flurry of complaints?

  —A knuckle clenched in her gut.

  After phoning the tourist police, we—Dom and I—walk to a police station near our building. But Dom has the address wrong in his phone and, with no internet, we wander round like puppies, following indecipherable directions given to us by fruiterers. Each time we turn a corner, one of his work boots crunches down on my much smaller foot, by accident.

  —Found it.

  I explain ‘the situation’ to a group of eight male officers in severe boots, military haircuts. None of them speak English.

  —They sent you home!

  —To another station, downtown.

  —The sun was miraculous in the sky.

  —Tomorrow. Her breasts are heavy today, back aching.

  We stop to rest in our room before heading to the other station. Once back at the studio, lethargy takes over. In bed, I listen to an audiobook history of the Salem witch trials. Unbelievable! I think, and then, somewhat believable—the madness of myth and misogyny and violence. I laugh, then, at the absurdity. These girls, swaying and chanting with the viral madness that possessed them. The men’s horror at the collapse of their neutral, natural power.

  —The blanket beneath her legs is hot and dry in
the sun. Her insides throb, but the blood does not arrive.

  The artist residency we are staying at is highly disorganised. We don’t have a stovetop in the studio, we don’t have a key to the communal kitchen downstairs. In the cupboard, there is one butter knife, two bowls, two forks. A chopping board. A microwave on the bench. For these first few days, I cooked pasta in the microwave, which I then used to boil canned tomatoes with a clove of garlic (not recommended).

  The air in our room is damp and it smells like the sea.

  —You don’t want to read the police report.

  —But she is itchy all over. In the legs. Itchy in the shoulder blades.

  After building up some guts again, we embark on the second journey downtown. Once there, I explain myself again. The man at the desk prints off the information he finds, the initial report I made in 2006. He sends me to another location, the Polícia Judiciária, an enormous, modern building bustling with detectives who are investigating serious crimes such as attempted rape.

  At the Polícia Judiciária I explain to six, seven, eight more people ‘the situation’. Finally, someone seems to know what I am after. The report. The file. The verdict of the trial that I never found out. I am told to wait.

  Dom reaches for my hand and holds it lovingly, devotedly, as every cell in my body buzzes.

  ‘Don’t,’ I say to Dom, shrugging off his love, trying to settle my hands down. ‘Sorry. Just…frustrated.’

  Hundreds of thickset detectives with charcoal overcoats and leather shoes cut out of the building for their lunch break. The lobby, wide and open as a gallery, is left empty.

  Eventually, a middle-aged female detective, Cristina, comes out to explain that I will need to call yet another department. And that there will be a different reference number for my case after all—my name was incorrectly spelled in the initial report.