reading

PREFACE

By Andrea Pinketts1

I have good news and bad news. Which one do you want first? OK, I’ll choose for you. Let’s hit the ground running with the bad news, so we can run it over and move on. I’ve been diagnosed with a poorly-differentiated squamous cell carcinoma. Poorly-differentiated? I took it as an insult, for a man like me, who stoutly defends difference as the pillar of any kind of union. Don’t you worry, though; I intend to turn the cancer inside out, like a sock inside a sweaty, stinky Adidas. The good news is that the book I’ve just read is bright, even anti-cancer, in a way. Actually, the fact that the main character Alice’s father is an empathic oncologist is comforting in itself.

Now that I’ve talked about my private life, let’s move on and talk about what is public and published. Do you believe me? No? Good. After reading “I Will Marry Gary Barlow” by Luisa Cartei, whom I’ve never met but hope to soon, I’m pervaded by a sense of love and friendship.

Alice, the main character of the novel, crazily chases and manages to catch the ugliest guy of Take That (Ciapà chi2, as we would say in Milanese dialect.) I know that such a distilled, sketched plot could seem like bullshit, but it isn’t. It’s the condensation of a decade, which has been skilfully summarised and pumped up by an emotional and motivated entomologist who has been able to describe her genuine, naive and fatal passion for the Beatles of her generation.

There is a difference, though. My favourite dish is the adolescence of a person who is ready and able to stew it in the pot of literature. Luisa Cartei is not a sixteen-year-old in love with some pretty boy named Gary Barlow. She is a premenstrual writer, and then, finally, a menstruated writer, hence bipolar. The young Alice hasn’t had her first period yet, unlike the author, therefore she feels excluded from the circle (or circus) of her peers. She has no tits, just a hint of breast, and she is protected by a Kevlar sense of humour. Like a Mark Twain character, she ventures in her mother’s wardrobe, among the dangers of reinforced bras and leopard print leggings.

Luisa Cartei, I have learned, is a blogger. She is not an influencer. She is a real writer, who can talk about flu or menstruation, like Stephen King in Carrie, or the fear of running out of gas like in Christine. The anxiety about her first kiss, which is “diabolically” procrastinated, and the fact that her father (the oncologist … damned cancer) forces her to distribute dinosaur-shaped stickers for cancer prevention outside her school make her a real hero. She is capable of saying “‘Hey guys, would you like a free sticker?’ I had never felt so dorky. Like Giorgio Mastrota on mattress commercials on TV; there’s nothing worse than smart people who know they’re doing an extremely stupid thing.”

Among weekly publications like Oggi and Cioè, in Luisa Cartei’s book the sketches become portraits and vice versa. Maybe someday I will even introduce her to Giorgio Mastrota, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who, I’m sure, agrees with the author’s way of thinking.

In conclusion, this is a syntonic, gin-and-tonic novel for those who, like me, have never had painful period cramps; and it is a liberty novel for those who have read Isis Unveiled by Helena P. Blavatsky or listened to Finalmente Tu – Finally You by Rosario Fiorello. And it’s not an end …

1 Andrea G. Pinketts (1960–2018), award-winning Italian writer, journalist, scriptwriter and TV personality.

2 Here you go

CHAPTER 1

1993

It was summer 1993. I was 15 years old and still had not become a “signorina”, as my grandmother used to say, which meant that I hadn’t had my first period yet, and that I had no boobs. Mine was a family of doctors, a family that took care of my girlhood in a clinical way. I had undergone several ultrasound scans and gynaecological examinations in order to establish whether I was normal, since all the girls of my age had had their period already and developed, like Kodak rolls turned into photographs of beautiful women.

At the end of the school year, my parents had sent me to Pisa, where my grandmother lived, hoping that the Tuscan air would have the same effect on me that it has on tomatoes, which are “riper and more savoury down there.” They had been preparing for months for the arrival of the red river that would impetuously carry me into maturity, like the Arno River carries away rats and debris. They had booked the cake, bought the candles, put the invitations in an envelope and imagined the congratulations they would receive at the “I am a signorina” party. So, when I was 15, I was anxious to become a woman too.

Every month, a different gynaecologist ventured inside me like a miner with a flashlight on his helmet, searching for the hidden spring of maturity. I was still unripe, though, and being unripe had become a shameful flaw for me.

“Everything is OK,” the gynaecologist kept repeating to my grandmother, Nonna Tilda, with her face between my thighs. “I can’t see anything here yet, but the menstruation will come, sooner or later.” She had the husky voice of a smoker. She wore a magnifying glass on her right eye and looked like Sherlock Holmes into the maze of my vaginal canal. I was there, lying on the examination table with my legs open, waiting for the umpteenth verdict on my forthcoming womanhood. Some clinical terms were fascinating. “Will come.” Menstruation will come? I didn’t know whether to be amused or afraid. Would it look like zombies from Thriller or bleeding beefsteaks thrown by a sling? How would it come? How long would it stop by for? How would we introduce ourselves? Would it be polite or indiscreet? It was a strange feeling. I felt it as part of me, but at the same time as a stranger.

On the way home, it was always the same story. Nonna tried to comfort me with arrows of unintentional cruelty. “The hair has grown, that’s a good sign. But the breasts are still tiny though …”

“Nonna, stop it! Can you lower your voice, please?” I begged her not to let all the people on the bus know how undeveloped I was, but she kept joking with her Tuscan irony.

“You will never be a busty woman, that’s for sure! But you can always use padded bras or have plastic surgery!” Then, she burst out laughing and I felt pervaded by a sense of existential inadequacy.

Every year I used to spend the month of June at Nonna Tilda’s house in San Benedetto, a district of San Frediano a Settimo, municipality of Cascina, in the suburbs of Pisa, Tuscany, Italy. I recall the list in this precise order because Nonna Tilda made me write about 57 postcards a year, to be sent to our relatives in Boston, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro. They were all descendants of the Innocenti family, whose names and faces my grandmother could barely remember.

“One day, you might need them,” she used to say.

She had been having an epistolary relationship with an international network for years. Her network included:

» Jewish families she had hidden in her attic during the Second World War;

» university classmates who had studied paediatrics with her before moving to Calabria;

» general culture magazines, with which she had a real obsession.

She was the Reader’s Digest’s oldest subscriber, and she often sent me article clippings that she thought I would enjoy reading, with some comment attached. For example, “Washing your hair too much is bad for you.” On that occasion, in addition to her comment, she had attached a braid made of her own hair, which dated back to the post-war period. It was chopped off, antique, creepy. With a note: “I used to wash it once a month, and yet look what nice hair I had when I was young!”

Staying with Nonna Tilda was also fun. These were my favourite activities:

» going with her to Rosa’s pastry shop, where we used to buy 12 small cream cannoli, 5 of which ended up under Nonna’s mattress. She ate them in secret, except the cream smudged around her mouth gave it away every time;

» spending entire sunny afternoons in the attic, searching for old toys;

» getting her to clap for me during my tennis lessons. Despite the burning afternoon sun, she could always find the strength to smile and to cheer me on;

» convincing her to give me 50,000 lire;

» persuading her to let me use her kitchen for my disastrous culinary experiments, including my famous raw-rice rice pie;

» challenging her to pick me up in her arms.

This last one was my favourite. At bedtime, Nonna used to carry me from the living room to my bedroom, by wrapping me up in a woollen flowered blanket. She would bend over me, close her eyes to concentrate and lift me up with all the strength she had in her tiny, thin, Audrey Hepburn body. During the journey, I could smell the scent of her elderly skin mixed with her sugary Chanel perfume.

The last time she was able to pick me up I was 9. As I grew up, she became smaller and smaller. She weighed 6 stones and was only 4 ft 10. A petite old lady; still, I felt safe with my arms around her. Little did I know how much I would miss those few inches of neck.

That day, as a prize for undergoing the umpteenth gynaecological examination, she allowed me to go out by myself. The album Freak (a name I identified with), by Samuele Bersani, had just been released, and the singer was launching it at the Feltrinelli bookstore in Pisa at 4p.m. It was an extraordinary event in that wasteland of desolate tediousness. Carmela was coming to pick me up. She was a summer friend, one of those friends I used to meet once a year, when I went from Northern Italy to Tuscany to spend the holidays at Nonna Tilda’s.

My grandmother had been the most popular paediatrician in town and Carmela’s parents were simple farmers. But she was my age, and her parents had forced her to keep me company during my weeks in Tuscany. Suddenly, all the social barriers had fallen. Nonna often had a doorway chat with the farmers, who told everybody that Doctor Innocenti was a dear friend of theirs. Nevertheless, they were still tomato producers to her.

Carmela came with her 18-year-old brother, Ruggero. “Get in the backseat. If the police stop us, I’m fucked,” Ruggero welcomed us aboard his rusty red Seicento. He had just got his driving license. He was a handsome boy, even though his nails were constantly covered with hen shit. He was a farmer and collected eggs in his chicken coop every morning. And in the following 10 hours, his hands would never come across a bar of soap.

I liked Ruggero, but I avoided every thought regarding a possible relationship. I felt transparent, asexual, childish, innocent, like my surname, ‘Innocenti’, and dazed, like my namesake, ‘Alice’.

I was aware that I was flat-chested, that my nails were too short and that I had a boring baby face. I was unaware that I had pretty green cat eyes and long, shiny blonde hair. In another context, I could have been quite attractive, but my context never changed: clip-on earrings, Barbie backpack, floral circle skirts, white socks and Velcro trainers. That was the result of a fitness-addicted mother and a daughter devoid of any spirit of rebellion.

“You have a driving license, don’t you? We can sit wherever we like. We are not children, you idiot.” Unlike me, Carmela was right in the middle of her hormonal-protest phase.

“I do, but you two are minors. I don’t want to run the risk. I just got my license and I still don’t know the rules, OK? So shut up and get in the backseat. Let me listen to Bersani!” We did as he said; after all, we didn’t care about Bersani. We squeezed in the backseat, our heads together, to listen to the Walkman. With the windows down, we breathed in the smell of the summer in Tuscany, made of fresh rain, citrus fruits and freshly baked focaccia. At every red light, a different fragrance entered the car, replacing the chicken stink coming from Ruggero.

The most unforgettable scent, that day, was the sweet perfume of a fat woman with an orange scarf, who came up beside us on her moped. It reminded me of those tiny bottles of cheap perfume that one could find inside Easter eggs in the 1980s. It perfectly reflected my idea of Tuscany: simple, modest and slightly old-fashioned. Carmela protested against her brother, who had raised the volume to listen to Chicco e Spillo, in view of his meeting with the depressed singer from Romagna.

“Turn the fucking volume down!” Carmela was a “fuck” type of girl. Every time she said “fuck”, she turned into an older, experienced, woman of the world, embittered by life. She scared me, but at the same time, she instilled a sense of respect. Maybe you were only allowed to say “fuck” if you had had your period. I was sure that Carmela had already had her first period, even if we had never talked about it. It was self-evident. She was tall, had big boobs, pimples on her forehead, stinky armpits, and she talked about boys. And, actually, she looked like a boy herself. She had short hair, she was as tall as her brother and had a deep voice. There was no hope for her anymore. She had developed into a bad photograph. Or maybe she had turned into a man. Carmela used her Walkman with her chubby fingers and stuck the headphone inside my ear every time it slipped out, that is, at every pothole in the road. “Listen to this. It’s an English band. I recorded the song from Radio Dimensione Arno.”

It was right there, in the backseat of a rusty red Seicento, on the route between San Frediano and Pisa Centrale, in a genuine and proletarian province, area code 050, when people still recorded songs from the radio on cassettes – whose tapes always twisted – that I listened to a song from my future favourite band, for the very first time. I never saw Carmela again, but I still remember us. I was 15, I still hadn’t had my first period, and my farmer friend’s Walkman played Everything Changes. And from that moment on, everything changed.

CHAPTER 2

My Mother

“Bullshit! One of these days, I’ll rip up all these posters. This is your father’s fault, he shouldn’t be so indulgent. Quit listening to those 5 overpaid dancers and start studying.”

School had just gone back, and the tiger of Bengal had started to yell at me all the time, as predictable as 10 years before, when her nails were sharper and polished in red, and her hands were more 1980s, just like her shoulder pads.

In the 1990s, her claws were round and smooth, her muzzle had turned into a sweet old face, her fur had become a pair of discoloured, spotted leggings and the tiger, all in all, was no longer so fearsome. However, my mother had been a legendary tiger.

I could have had an elephant mum, a fat homemaker who cooks stews and roasted pork, who makes lasagne while watching Gerry Scotti on TV and buys Dash detergent because “It Cleans Better.” I could have had a fish mum, skinny, small, with dry blonde hair and pale skin- maybe an office worker or a secretary- one of those who get married young and have no ambitions. A mum with a gormless look, always there for you, but almost invisible, like wallpaper, a kind of peaceful species, friendly but not intrusive.

No, she was none of this; she was a tiger, a roaring tiger that imposed her rules and her life on the rest of the world. Among other things, just like a tiger, my mother could run for miles every day. She could have gone to Stockholm and back within 24 hours.

On her exercise bike, she could ride 500 miles at top speed and at the highest resistance level, with the most intense weight loss program. She used to get back home at midday, opening the door so vigorously that it would start vibrating; she would stop at the entrance of the hallway that led to my room and, if she sensed that nobody was around, she would move forward towards the bathroom, cautiously. She used to sigh rhythmically out of general disappointment, and at the same time, she would remove the picturesque armour that she had worn during her morning travels:

» my grandfather’s old, artificial leather cross-country shoes;

» purple and silver Rambo headband;

» the diving suit she had bought by mistake, which was creased on one side (shark bite);

» the double wool socks bought at the Val di Fassa Alpini Festival.

As she got undressed, revealing her muscular body, her breath grew heavier and angrier. There was never a logic to her anger, but for some strange reason, on the route from Sweden to Italy, her sighs progressively filled with hatred toward the rest of the world, as if at every glance she could notice some kind of defect in the universe.

Once out of her travel clothes, she used to take off the sweat-inducing supermarket plastic bags she had wrapped around her calves, thighs, belly and chest. Then, naked, she would sit down on the edge of the tub with her legs half-closed and, leaning towards the bathroom sink, she would empty the plastic bags. From my bedroom, I could hear the noise of sweat being poured into the tub. In the meantime, two floors downstairs, my father would place his stethoscope between the folds of an elderly cancer patient’s breasts, and coldly tell her that she had two months left to live.

It was in this context that I felt the need to fall in love with Gary Barlow. Of course, my mother disagreed and would brush everything and everybody off using her existentialist slogan: “Bullshit!”

Every afternoon it was always the same story. My mother would come to my room to check that I hadn’t hung a new poster of Gary on the blue diamond pattern wallpaper. She couldn’t help it. She tormented whoever would disturb her unstable mental balance, which was based on a few, serious obsessions:

» neatness of the house;

» no footprints on the marble floors (‘pecche’ in Venetian dialect);

» scrupulously scheduled breakfasts and dinners;

» telephone off in the evening hours;

» lights off at 9:05 p.m.;

» no unnecessary visits, doorbells or phone calls;

» no people in the kitchen while she was cooking;

» no change in the apartment decoration, including the 1980s blue diamond patterned wallpaper.

Most of the time, I would let her talk. My father, who was my secret ally, had once taken me aside and had explained that Mamma, poor thing, wasn’t completely sane and that we had to let her vent. We had to consider her clinically sick. He used to say that she was a good woman and that he had sacrificed his life for her.

“Unfortunately,” he used to add afterwards. My father and I were the smart ones, the chosen ones; therefore, we had to hold up.

My mother had had a tough life. She went to a boarding school in Switzerland when she was a child. Mean, sexually frustrated nuns forced her to eat meat, even though she was a vegetarian, and whipped her hands when she wouldn’t behave. She was the youngest of 7 siblings. Three of them had died tragically. One was hit by a lorry, one had killed himself, and another one had had a heart attack. She had contracted typhus when she was 20 and almost died. They had saved her by bringing her the penicillin by helicopter, just because she was rich. Every time I wanted to reproach my mother, I would think of all her existential pain, so I held back. I used to imagine her as a walking packet of calamity. She didn’t know that, but even when I watched her stir the risotto, what I saw was a heap of past tragedies and clinical consequences. Perhaps I was influenced by my father’s medical attitude.

It was curious how the tragedies she had experienced had affected her outfit. She had been wearing leopard print leggings and jumpers – without a bra – for 15 years. She was a fitness addict and the rest of the world seemed to her like an endless expanse of fat human beings. Unless you were anorexic, you would be obese to my mother.

“What do you want me to say? He is fat. If you only liked the dancer!”

“Do you mean Jason Orange, Mamma?”

“Yes, that one. Jacob Homage … at least he exercises.”

“I love Gary for what he is, not for his appearance. He is the brains of the band, Mamma, and the soul of their songs. He is the poet of music. Plus, Jason has acne.”

“What is that supposed to mean? I had acne too when I was young. And look at my perfect complexion now! Time to study, you have an oral test tomorrow.”

“I have gym class and religion tomorrow. Relax.”

After her daily “good parent” performance, my mother would close my bedroom’s door and would go back to focus on her own life, as she had been doing perfectly for the last 45 years.

She had never tried to understand me; she had never played with me. She had never even knelt down to talk to me face to face when my height required it. She had never let me sleep in her bed and she had never hugged me. In general, since I was born, my mother had just tolerated me. That was her job, she used to say. She had had me to please my father, and now she couldn’t back out.

I wasn’t angry, though. That was my only reality. When I was sick, she would place her cool lips on my forehead to take my temperature, and I used to pretend that she was kissing me. In the afternoon, she would let me watch TV with her and she would make me some delicious ham and cheese sandwiches, together with a glass of cold milk. At the end of the day, in her own way, she loved me very much.