70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola Di Grado

Author:Viola Di Grado
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2012-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

I didn’t leave the house again. Stretched out on the couch, I watched stupid sitcoms and read the catalogs and fliers they threw against the door. The sitcoms offered a very limited inventory of keys. Especially the reruns of Baywatch, where the characters went to the beach during the day and drank at night, and if you consider that “beach” and “alcohol” share the same key, you can imagine the boredom of writing the same key on my skin over and over again, the same symbol on each finger. I always ended up falling asleep.

When I awoke I felt worse than before. Even the treacherous sun that had spied on me while I begged Wen to make love to me had abandoned me. In its place in the middle of the sky floated a Virgin blimp.

Meanwhile, the filth had accumulated on my mother. Not only was she not bathing, she no longer moved from the couch. She was becoming a landing pad for every kind of bug, and was seemingly proud of this role because she refused to flick off the winged monsters that shat all over her. A fashion show at Southwark Exhibition Center was showing on TV, one like she and I used to go see on the first Saturday of every month when I was fifteen. Riding the bus there we were always so excited. But my mother gave me the look called Change channels, as if she didn’t know that the remote had been lost forever in the dusty folds of the couch.

It took a week before I forgot that it was the twenty-second of February. If you weren’t careful, it would become the twenty-third, and then the twenty-fourth, and without even realizing what was happening you’d wake up in March. Even the batteries in the wall clock ran out, and I had no desire to go and buy more.

I was laying the foundations for another bout of verbal fasting, but how could I go back to silence after taking such a big step? I had committed suicide in reverse, throwing myself into life without a parachute, and down there, naturally, another goddamned hole was waiting for me.

I occasionally went to the video store to rent the Icelandic movie, but to my great disappointment I always found the Icelandic movie in the case.

*

Little by little I fell back into the fear that I had when I was little, the fear of stories.

But now it was worse: I was terrified of being dragged into some story or other, and the terror prevented me from even approaching the window and looking out. “You just have to look at people on the street,” Stefano Mega would say, with his notebook in his hands. So I sewed the checkered curtains in the living room together, closing them forever.

“You know, even if you glance at another face for a second it’s enough,” he said, and on that unnumbered afternoon I covered the curtainless kitchen window with my ideograms.

All it takes is a passerby’s glance and next thing you know you’re imprisoned in somebody else’s story.

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