The silent period, p.16
The Silent Period, page 16
Had I been brave enough, I would have admitted to being moved by the same motive as Kurt Cobain. I would have liked to end things in the same way, but I was too proud and too proper to admit it, and not strong enough to go through with it. So instead I had resorted to a series of minor limitations, which only served to draw more attention to myself, like those children who are used to receiving attention and so have no qualms about screaming over nothing, just as a newborn might do. I thought of those stories you hear about people who jump off buildings, buildings so tall you’d have time to regret it as you fell, with your life flashing before your eyes, hidden memories, redemption and light—and that last breath where your lungs expand a little more than necessary, to take their fill of the world and then let go. I made an effort to think about the things I would regret if I happened to be on the verge of death. I thought about films. Not all of them, just a few. I thought of the Nike of Samothrace and the Rosetta Stone. The Giza Necropolis, which I would never get to see. The autumn, which would come round without me. I thought of snow. Of ice. Of great bodies of water—God knows why humans are so attracted to bodies of water. I thought of the letter I had written when I was eight years old, addressed to the house in which we then lived, telling her that I would have wanted to be like her, a solid, stable creature made solely out of her inhabitants’ emotions, with no soul and no heart, and expressing herself through nothing but sighs and creaks. I remembered how I had hidden the letter in a gap in the baseboard and hadn’t managed to get it out again, and now it would stay there, with the new owners, never to be found again.
I looked at Harpo and at the reflections of the water onto the walls and of the cars onto the street, like alien forms whose lives ran parallel to ours. I focused on my legs and my feet and the bones under my skin; I focused on the space my veins and muscles occupied for as long as my lungs let me breathe. Then I watched The Social Network for the three hundredth time on the DVD Daniele had never claimed back, and I thought that this was going to be the most I would get out of this day, and that this feeling of nothingness was, at any rate, better than nothingness itself.
Dear Silvia,
I am writing this letter because I need to talk to you.
Sometimes I daydream of coming to your house and buzzing your intercom, saying nothing and hoping you’ll figure out it’s me, waiting for you to come down and admit it’s not a problem if I don’t say anything, not anymore, because you’re like all those other people who see it as a gift to them, a chance to talk without being interrupted or judged, to talk about themselves without pause, as deep down everyone feels like they’re special and craves nothing more than to be noticed.
But you’re not like those other people.
I will not come to your house. I already tried that with Daniele, and it was a disaster. I ended up hiding in the entrance to the basement area—can you believe it?
These days I’m remembering many things. Things that take the form of vinyl records, of gray afternoons, of waking up and needing something savory to soak up the night before, of plastic bottles on the floor, endless plastic bottles on the floor, someone will eventually have the energy to get rid of them, of glasses of cold milk and Nesquik, of frozen pizzas and cookies, who says we need to distinguish between savory and sweet. Sometimes I pour myself a glass of milk and try to find the same taste again, but I’ve had it too often and it tastes different now. The problem is that in our brains, useless moments live in the same rooms as important ones, and they contaminate each other. You never know which memory will torment you on any given day—something insignificant, or a happy moment you wish you could relive, or an unpleasant one to cause you anguish.
That’s what I’ve come to realize over these past few months. Memories are on shuffle play, and there’s nothing you can do to control them. It’s an aspect of silence I hadn’t considered. Cleansing yourself of spoken words, of the effort of having to choose the right ones, means you end up being tortured by all the wrong ones.
Sometimes I feel like I can’t do anything at all. The better I get at stopping words, the more I hold on to everything else. It’s like in “Donnie Darko”: I can see the projection of future movement. But that projection is all there is of the movement, like a prophecy that won’t come true. They’re small liquid trails, like in the film, small waves that won’t leave me alone. But there are other times when I think that I am doing the right thing. If I still have so many uneasy thoughts, so many soiled words inside me, it must mean I haven’t recovered yet. Do you remember Agnese from high school (I wonder what she’s doing now?), who didn’t know what to do about her acne and was persuaded to try that healer? The healer prescribed her some kind of concoction, and when the pimples, rather than disappearing, actually increased in number, the healer claimed it was the natural course of the treatment, because acne originated in the liver and the liver needed purifying—“purging,” she’d actually said—and the impurities always passed through the skin. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me, maybe this is the time for my mind to fry so that it can free and cleanse itself, and these thoughts are just the ghosts of the words I misspoke in the past, the right words I held in, the awful ones I pictured other people saying whenever I felt I was being judged.
Agnese’s mother eventually found out what she was doing, remember? She made her get rid of the concoction and we were a little disappointed because we never found out whether the treatment worked. Well, now that I’ve started my own treatment, I want to know if it works. I bet you’re curious, too.
I wanted to tell you that I think of you often, because as you can see, I’m very good at thinking, too. Will my mind ever give up? Maybe it’s like you said. We’re not human if we don’t communicate, and this letter proves that point. In the end there is one thing I can’t seem to give up: complaining. I feel increasingly like the cat in that meme, the one where he is sitting by the window wondering why he’s so alone, and when a human approaches to stroke him, he swats them away. I suppose you have always told me I must have been a cat in my past life.
I dream a lot, and I often see you in my dreams. I can still talk and we are still only seventeen. You call me Martinez, slurring the “z” so that it sounds like an “s.” You do my eye makeup on Saturday nights because I don’t know how. Boys are both a recurring topic and a temporary diversion, and we never get too attached. We are foolish and happy, though unaware of being either. Sometimes I want to
I left the letter unfinished and eventually ripped it up. But first I stopped to study it for a moment. Not to reread what I had written, but to notice how my handwriting was the same as it had been in high school. Without practice, it had frozen in time. I tore the letter into tiny pieces, like confetti or even smaller, then mixed them up with Harpo’s feed and spread the mixture all across the surface of the water. I spent the first few minutes religiously observing his toothy mouth tearing my words up, and the next ones googling Do fish die if they eat paper?
It seemed no one had thought to ask that question before.
July
Something weird happened. A young woman stopped me in one of the corridors of the library and asked me if I would be willing to answer some questions. I thought it must be a survey, some kind of study on quality of life, the university, politics, all things I no longer had anything to do with. I looked into her eyes and hoped she’d understand that I couldn’t respond. She said: “I know you can’t talk. I’ve printed them out for you.”
She handed me a piece of paper folded into quarters. “If you want, you can write your answers underneath. I’m sorry to ambush you like this—I wasn’t trying to corner you. I asked the department for your email address but they wouldn’t give it to me, I guess due to privacy concerns, which makes sense. I looked for you on social media, but I couldn’t find you. Take as much time as you need; you don’t have to answer all of them either. I’ve put my email address on there, so if you email me I can send you the file—whatever you prefer. Otherwise you can find me in the library every afternoon except on Mondays, all the way through to the summer session. I like studying here better than at home,” she said, smiling. “My parents can be a little interfering.”
She spoke fast and gesticulated furiously. She told me she was twenty-three years old and studying philosophy. She was small, so that I needed to tilt my chin down to look at her. She wore thick glasses with black frames, and her nose was a little squashed and wide at the tip, like those rag dolls with buttons sewn into the middle of their faces.
“I come here a lot—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen me. Probably not, but it doesn’t matter, I’m used to that. You see, I think you and I have a lot in common. I know you’re not mute, and that at some point you stopped talking. I don’t want to seem nosy—it’s not that I want to know your business. It’s just that, well, if your silence is a choice, then I’d like to know more about it. I think it’s a very brave choice to make, at this particular moment. I would love to talk to you about it, though I suppose talking is not the right word,” she said, giggling. “That’s why I’m giving you this. I put loads of questions on there, probably too many, it’s just that I don’t know anything about you or about your motivations. If any of the questions seem stupid or pointless or misleading, don’t reply, and feel free to cross them out. But I would love to know a little more about your story, if you’re up for it. Whatever you feel comfortable telling me. I think it could be of great help to me, right now.”
She suddenly stopped, just as I had begun to fear she never would. She giggled again, then looked down. I thought she might crouch into a ball and roll off in the same way as she had arrived. She had the barest trace of a gap tooth, which made her look rather sexy, and I wondered if she’d ever noticed. She apologized for the tenth time and waved goodbye, pointing at the piece of paper she had given me before walking away along the bile-colored linoleum floor, against which her shoes, just like everyone’s shoes, squeaked at every step.
Back home, I kept turning the piece of paper around in my hands, but couldn’t face unfolding it. If I threw it away without looking at the questions, it would be easier to forget the whole thing; I simply wouldn’t turn up at work and that girl would never see me again. She would forget me and I would forget her and everything would go back to normal. One thing I had learned from the relatively brief yet infinite time I had spent on this earth was that the amount of worry we feel about the possible consequences of something is inversely proportional to how long its memory will endure. The things that torment us are the ones we least expect.
I went to place the sheet on the table, like they do in the movies when an important letter has arrived, a college admissions letter in a coming-of-age comedy. In those scenes they usually prop the letter up, lean it against a vase of flowers or a jug of water. I owned neither of those objects, and my piece of paper was not a letter that was going to change my life but an annoying parasite that had insinuated itself into the life I had carefully and laboriously curated in the service of silence and anonymity. So I flung the sheet onto the table without any theatrical flourishes and hoped it would just disappear. I could have torn it up and fed it to Harpo, but afterward I was likely to end up doing something to compensate—smoking a cigarette, picking at my cuticles, pouring myself a glass of water from the tap just to hear the sound, then drinking half of it because I felt thirsty and tipping the rest into the sink—and so the sheet of questions stayed where it was, staring at me. It was nearly eight in the evening and there was no sign of the heat diminishing or the sun retreating. I rolled the blinds up completely and stared at the building across the street. Some windows were closed but I could see people moving behind the curtains, picture them safe and cool in their air-conditioned rooms, making distracted conversation as they sat in front of the evening news on TV. I opened the freezer and pulled out a frozen pizza to put in the oven. I would have it with a beer and a glass of whiskey with ice cream for dessert, and I would let myself be swaddled by the heat until it became yet another simulation of death.
But that’s not what happened. What happened instead was that I woke up around three, on the sofa, with the TV still on, playing a very old underground film that had been ruined in the conversion to digital, all the voices croaky and the colors burned. I finished my glass of whiskey, the melted ice cream mixing with the alcohol and turning it into a sort of medicine that needed to be taken and that resembled a galaxy if you stopped to look, and then I sat at the table. In the half hour that followed, I filled out the questionnaire. I tried to be brief even though the words were jostling inside of me, eager to get out, like flies that had gone crazy from being shut away for too long. No more than two sentences per question, no more than one lie per answer. I used up the last fragments of semi-sober attention I had left, placed an enormous period at the end of my last response—which was longer and more honest than the others, and made me feel exposed—and finally dragged myself to bed, like a wild animal driven out of its den and looking for shelter.
I returned the questionnaire three days later, during the afternoon shift. The full stop I’d put at the end was so heavy that it had made a hole in the paper. My handwriting was practically illegible. I didn’t dwell on any of that. When I came back from lunch, the girl was sitting at her table, so I slid the paper in front of her and returned to my desk before she could say anything. I hated her, and hated myself for having fallen for it.
* * *
The self-help group was on summer break. The last meeting had been as Sara had promised us: a young man who, like her, had traveled through the dark tunnel of selective mutism and come out the other end. It was an interminable hour: the guy spoke at a rate of one word every ten seconds, and it was impossible to follow what he was saying. The logic connecting each sentence to the next grew increasingly flimsy, and his syntax was precarious. I wondered whether I too would struggle to talk, if and when I should decide to end the silence. People always say that foreign languages can be forgotten, that it’s not like riding a bike. Could the same be true of language itself?
I was so bored that I started thinking about Erica, the girl who had given me the piece of paper with the questions, and I pictured her as a scientist in disguise. Maybe she was a member of a research group focusing on the long-term effects of self-induced mutism and wanted to learn if it was possible to unlearn how to speak. My nonsensical responses would confirm her thesis. Within a few days I was bound to find myself lying on an operating table, surrounded by aspiring young neuroscientists who were about to slice my head open in search of synapses that would confirm there was permanent damage. They would be covered in glory, while I would end up like a lab rat—no need for a lobotomy, as I had performed one on myself.
I was brought back to life by Sara, who took over to thank the guy and announce the end of the hour. I leapt to my feet and went straight outside. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Tommaso watching me. I hurried back home, on foot, thinking that in some respects I must have gotten worse, because I could no longer stand people who talked too slowly. When I wasn’t at home, everything bored me. Perhaps by imposing rest on the part of my brain that was dedicated to language I had given more space to the other parts. Perhaps the language part was already being swallowed up by all the others and would soon be left permanently atrophied, as was clearly the case with the young man Sara had invited. When I got home, I fed Harpo, lay on the sofa, switched on the TV, and stopped worrying about my brain.
So the self-help group had been put on hold, and the following week I felt empty, like Marla Singer when she gets found out. At work I’d come to a kind of agreement with Patrizia. By now she was sure that I had lied to her, but—as someone must have suggested to her—she had also convinced herself that my mutism must be the consequence of some kind of shock I’d experienced, and so she had become compassionate again. She no longer tried to push me. We’d reached precisely the degree of automation and lack of participatory drive to which I had aspired.
With the summer sessions over, the university was emptying out, and in August it would close down completely. Perhaps I should go away somewhere too, just as I imagined my classmates must be doing. Probably following their families, who would spend the whole time worrying about them when all their children really wanted was to be left in peace. Every now and then I pictured myself buying a random ticket from among the day’s offers, clicking the “I’m flexible” button on Airbnb, and picking somewhere unusual to stay in, like a tiny hut at the North Pole or a historic building in a far-flung French village—any kind of place where I could get lost, where nobody would recognize me, and with the language barrier acting as an excuse for my lack of communication. I would subsist on local produce bought from grocery stores or markets, gesturing with my head, pointing at things. I’ve always admired people who have the courage to practice what they preach. To separate from society without hurting anyone, without going off to set up neo-Nazi groups, as is the habit of people who claim to hate society. When really, it’s just that society doesn’t agree with them on everything—as often happens to assholes. Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely an asshole. Is that how Italo Calvino put it? I would have liked to call Silvia to check.
And to ask her: Have I become an asshole, too?
Acts
Hi, I’m Erica and I’m majoring in philosophy.
Please find below a series of questions. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to write a thesis about this :) It’s just my own curiosity, as I’ve heard people talking about you in the corridors and have become interested in your case. I really admire the choice you’ve made and I would like to know more about it, but I promise I’ll keep your answers to myself.
