Eleonora, the Northern Leaguer
"At school the seat is empty, Marco is inside me... huge distances seem to divide us. But my heart beats strong within me. I wonder if you’ll think about me.
If you ever speak with your parents.
If you hide like me.”
("La Solitudine", Laura Pausini)
Eleonora Cremaschi, with her face like a Northern Leaguer and her fifteen years of protected life in Milan, had arrived in Rome in the middle of August, with her heart in turmoil.
"We'll find less traffic on the highway, the desert city, we will do everything more quickly", her mother had sentenced. She seemed more tired every passing day.
She had packed some suitcase of colourful Summer clothes, colourful sandals and makeup tools. She had entrusted a dozen diligently prepared boxes to the terrible and vibrating cares of the transport company. Inside she had stuffed books, clothes, accessories, trinkets, shoes, boots, her collection of small perfume bottles – with the small pink wooden show-case on which she used to expose them in her bedroom – and the collection of fashion magazines she had been accumulating for some months. On each package she had attached a blue label on which the contents of the box was handwritten. She had then followed with her eyes the precious boxes as they were being loaded onto the truck by two labourers who didn’t even speak Italian, and had jumped for the way in which they were putting one package on top of the other at top speed, without even caring about the "fragile" sign. At each collision, even small, she felt a sting: she felt like she was seeing parts of her life being shattered. Having to pack her things in a hurry had cost her, but not as much as the choice of her parents to move town, to change work and lifestyle. For her it had meant leaving her nest in Corso Sempione – where she had grown up – her great love, Marco, her friends, pretty much everything.
"You'll see, you'll like Rome, it’s beautiful, and you will have more chances... I understand, it will be difficult at the beginning, but I could not do otherwise, I had to accept the transfer... It’s a professional opportunity I can’t afford to lose. Really, believe me, eventually you will like it. Moving will be good for you too", her father had said, looking good-naturedly at her as he was giving her the solemn announcement.
She only nodded, in shock. She was accustomed not to complain at home. Obedient and well-bred, that was her fate, she thought. That was how she had been brought up. Even during the trip in the car she had just stood in silence, obstinately looking out the window, the iPod in her ears endlessly repeating the song by Laura Pausini that better described her at the time, "The loneliness". She had shed on it a few tears, hidden by her Prada sunglasses. She did not know that it was going to be the last journey of her life.
Rome was hot – perhaps more than Milan – full of monuments – for sure more than Milan – made of shops in every street – more than Milan – and almost closed for holidays, like Milan. The first days of the new life in the capital had been spent emptying boxes and walking in the neighbourhood to explore the city and find a school dance worthy of the great passion that animated her. She had worn a tutu for the first time at five years of age, before the eyes of a hundred enthralled parents. Since then she had always loved to have the looks on her, her red hair tied in an elegant chignon, her hands outstretched towards success. Yeah, success. Eleonora saw it close at hand, just like perfection. She had learned that from her father, Francesco. From an early age she had been admiring him, bent over books at night, in a small study he had obtained in the loft. She looked at him from below, lying on the carpet with her elbows on the ground to hold her head facing up, in love with her father like every girl. One day, she used to think, she would do the same, wrapped in that aura of sacred respect that the house took when he came back. Everything seemed to stand on attention, from books to items, even the dishes, and especially her mother. That was why studying wasn’t hard for her, on the contrary it seemed natural. It was only the prelude to a triumphal march towards a future as princess of the court, diaphanous and elegant, like a crossbreed between a popular fashion model and a career woman. Or so she imagined before coming to Rome and becoming a student at the Marco Polo high, fifth E, the class of "illiterate peasants", as she labelled it after the first day of school.
Having no new acquaintances to pass the time with, neither new boyfriends, Eleonora kept venting evening after evening with her best friend. She sat at the computer, opened the chat room and talked with Chicca in Milan. By then she was the only confidant she had left, the only contact with the life she had led before moving to Rome, the life she had so loved. Between her and Marco, after the first days of phone calls and text messages, silence had fallen, as if by tacit agreement they no longer knew what to say or no longer wanted to hurt each other too much. Sometimes Eleonora stopped to stare, with nostalgia, at the photos on Facebook portraying them together, hugging, in love. She stared at them intently, as if they belonged to a distant time, but when she was about to write a greeting, just a simple hello, her hand stood suspended in mid-air and she could not even type a letter. Then she resumed her woes to her best friend.
"I can’t stand it, Chicca. I can’t. I'm losing the will to go to school, study, dress, eat. I’m desperate."
"You were always the best. Professors were crazy for you. Do you remember Sister Agnes? She said you were too good to be in class with us. She made me mad... but I was happy for you, proud to be your best friend."
"It was totally different. A different time! Now every time I have to go to school I get a stomach ache."
"You are strange. I don’t recognize you you, Ele."
"If you only knew. It's a madhouse. They treat me like an enemy, a danger. They even call me the Northern Leaguer."
"You must denounce them. You have to stop accepting this, talk to someone, the principal, a teacher... You must seek help, and soon."
"I don’t think so. They'll think I'm a spy."
"Please Ele, I don’t know what they did to you in Rome, but come to your senses. I don’t know you anymore. Do you want me to call your parents? They would listen, they trust me."
"No, please do not drag my parents in this! Mom is too sick.”
"And you? How are you? "
"Like shit."
"You see? Please listen to me. Do something, you can’t live like this."
Eleonora spent this way even the evening before the slaughter, talking with her best friend. They had always been like sisters; same friends, same tastes, same dance class twice a week. As children on the tips of their feet, then with hip hop music as the soundtrack of their rhythm. They had chosen each other in first grade, a look and that empty desk for two to be filled had been enough. Since then they had kept walking together, they shared secrets, affinities, anxieties and certainties, until the day in which the news of Eleonora's family moving to Rome had come. But those six hundred kilometres were not enough to separate them. They kept living in symbiosis in some way, constantly talking on the phone or via the internet, with mails and chat.
"I miss you Chicca."
"I miss you too, sweetie."
"At eighteen, however, we’re going to live together."
"Yes, in London. We'll have a lot of laughs."
"We’ll study as well."
"We have to. I want to shake the world, go on the most important stage, be remembered as a great actress."
"And I'll be your legal advisor. Everyone will keep asking you who is the beautiful lady who takes care of your possessions. Hey, how is Marco?"
"How do you think? He misses you."
"Maybe..."
"Why not give him a call?"
"Come on, don’t start again. I don’t feel like doing that."
"It seems madness to me."
"I’m not talking about it."
"Ok. Do you remember the Slim? "
"Sure! He was an item with Laura."
"Yeah, but now they broke and he invited me to dance, next Saturday."
&
nbsp; "Good Chicca. I too have had an invitation. At a football game."
"And Marco?"
"You know. I have to forget him."
As if it were easy, she thought. Marco was a curious boy, tall just enough to seem protective, always wearing a baseball hat, tight jeans, his black hair cropped short. A few break dance steps made up on the fly, the books he read compulsively, his polished and polite way of speaking. Eleonora had learned to love him on the school desks. Classmates and life mates first, best friends and sweethearts later. When they kissed for the first time, under the front door, it had really seemed to her to hear bells, like in an old fairy tale. And it would not even be easy to replace Chicca, another breed compared to the girls she was getting to know in Rome. She had something more, a deep inner wisdom which already made an adult of her. Eleonora considered her the best possible confidante, a kind of psychoanalyst at hand. Nobody could ever call her beautiful; she was physically insignificant, she still looked like a little girl with thick glasses and devastating braces on her teeth, of which she was very ashamed. But when she climbed on a stage to dance or play a character, she became someone else, she changed, she lived the typical metamorphosis of the actress and pulled out the best of her. The life of Eleonora stopped with them. She repeated that in her mind at night, curled up in bed crying, avoiding being seen or heard. Alone. That’s how she felt, a little abandoned girl. Despite the many technological possibilities available to her, Milan had become unreachable, near the heart and the sky, but so far to the touch. In Milan, there were the Navigli, the old and whooping convent school where she had studied since the time of nursery-school, the park where she met her friends, the disco on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the bar where she went to chat, the walks with Marco, who reached out with his hands and made blood rush to her head, but she didn’t want to think about that now.
From a few days she had been having more serious problems than homesickness to deal with. Now she had to decide about the present and the future, about study and especially about how to survive in a class of hooligans.
The blame, she repeated, was all on her parents. They had decided to leave Milan in a flash, without consulting her, transplanting her in a city of lunatics and putting her into a public school, chosen simply for its location.
"Stop complaining. You just have to study", they had boomed when Eleonora had stubbornly asked for further assurances about the choice of the school.
"We do it for your own good", they had replied.
So she had found herself drawn into a small high school in the heart of Prati, which sole merit was being two steps away from their new apartment, that one actually chosen with care, a few meters from the Court of Cassation. It was there that her father would work, after his years as a magistrate in Milan. An improvement just for him, Eleonora thought with hidden resentment.
"Thugs, they are just thugs", she had vented with Chicca after the first day of school. "They immediately said I was of the Northern League because I am from Milan. They called me a bitch because I'm cute and dress well. They treated me like shit. And you don’t know how they are. Scary. I don’t know how long I will be able to resist with those illiterate. I miss you, I miss you all."
And in writing these words, she had started to cry, but she had not told that to her friend. She had kept it to herself, for fear of appearing suddenly too fragile, at the mercy of some fifteen aliens who looked at her as if she was an alien herself. There was no possibility of contact between them. They were too different.
Yet she had tried hard to be polite and up to the situation. She had dressed with particular care for her debut in the classroom, designer low-waist jeans, white sneakers with flowers, the polo highlighting her quite good cleavage, freshly shampooed hair, light but determined makeup. I am really cute, she had thought a few steps from the entrance gate, plucking up courage to face the new adventure. Soon after, however, she had had to hide a grimace of disgust. The school had made a bad impression on her. The boys and girls were different from those she usually frequented. There weren’t the faces of loved ones waiting for her, but disordered groups of teenagers with caps, earrings, piercings, and boys with their hair held high and erect with gel, like columns on their heads. A totally Roman disorder, she had said herself, slipping fearfully amid that chaos. On the floor, writings immortalized in white chalk. " I love you vale" or "One, ten, a hundred, a thousand Raciti." A great desire to turn around and go home, to start shouting, had overcome her.
She missed Milan and her friends, the nun who ringed the bell and the large yard where they could chat and where everybody knew everybody. She had spent ten happy years in that school. She even remembered distinctly the stones of the building, the hiding places, the makeshift outdoor seats where her and Chicca sat, talking about boys, the stairs to be climbed to go to the classroom, the thrills of fear when the mother superior arrived and someone was smoking, the voices of students she would have recognized even with her eyes closed. And there she was now, transplanted in a disorderly Rome where everyone seemed friendly and was not at all.
"You’ll see, you’ll make new friends and fall in love with another boy, and soon Milan will be but a memory", her mother had told her not long ago, kissing her on the doormat, still in her night gown, her hair tousled, looking sleepy.
Eleonora had looked at her aghast. How couldn’t she understand how difficult it was to start over, how hard it was going to be for her to join a different class without even Marco’s presence as consolation? No, that woman could not remember having been fifteen anymore.
She made up her mind, took courage, entered the school.
"Hello everybody. I am Eleonora."
In the classroom she had been met with a chilled silence. A horrible classroom, she had thought, watching the walls daubed with graffiti and faded posters. She had sat quietly in the only available desk, near the window, suffering a little for having to settle for a wobbling chair covered in ink stains. She had started to place pens and pencils in random order. That sloppiness gave her a sense of nausea.
"So you're the newcomer. I'm Silvia. Where do you come from?"
A very skinny girl had approached her aggressively, some kind of spider dressed in black, heavy lines of eye-pencil over her eyes, hair pulled up, supported by a series of coloured pegs, a piercing just below her lower lip. She looked older than her.
Eleonora had swallowed, answering politely.
"Milan. I moved a few days ago."
"Milan? Come on. Don’t you know we hate Milanese? We’re fucking Roman!"
Silvia had stretched her face towards her as if she wanted to get inside her. Eleonora had felt a chill pass through her back. They say the first impression when you meet a person is what counts. She had to be afraid of her.
"Fuck, guys, charge, we have a Northern Leaguer in the classroom."
Silvia had labelled her such, turning away with contempt. It had been the signal, a declaration of war to which the loyalists had immediately associated. A kind of ringleader, Eleonora called her. She was accustomed to perceive the moods of others by sensitivity, empathy. In the old school, in Milan, she had been on the other side, having always been considered one of the most popular girls, one to be imitated. She had never had to assert themselves or struggle up the slope.
"Actually I have nothing to do with Bossi and his people", she tried to say, embarrassed, forcing a smile.
"Ah, Nordic, speak Italian", a stocky boy, who was to good manners as she was to karate, told her. She discovered soon after that he was called Alessandro.
"Sure you won’t always come so attired to school!" a plump, haunted-looking girl had addressed her.
"Go Deborah", Silvia had cried, and she had approached her, lifting from her bench, with a touch of envy, the Prada sunglasses that Eleonora had absentmindedly placed next to her diary.
"Can I have them? No? Such a louse you are, than take them."
With scorn, Deborah had let them fall. Eleonora had taken them mi
d-fall by a miracle, and of course she had carefully refrained from adding that she had two other pairs and alternated between them, matching the colour of her clothes. If she had still been in Milan there wouldn’t have been any problem. She could have proudly announced it to Chicca and her friends, who would just start to compete for primacy in the field of looking good.
"What does your father do to buy you Prada, the pimp?" Alessandro had said this new compliment, and Eleonora had looked at him, startled by the piercing he boldly wore on his right eyebrow.
"See that rich-girl backpack! Have you been sent here to make us angry? What do you think Marina? Isn’t it an insult?", Deborah had added with a touch of arrogance, in the midst of the general clamour, turning to the friend close to her.
"I say it is pure crap! This one’s really a Northern Leaguer", the addressed girl had commented. She was the most striking of the class, with a long, tight-fitting, white tee shirt worn over black leggings. Her hair was black, cropped short, and she had coloured earrings and a heavy makeup that Eleonora mentally branded as vulgar. Marina, meanwhile, had gotten close to Alessandro, hugging him as if to show he was her property, and began beating her diary on the desk, as if it were a drum.
"It takes the wave, guys", she said laughing, and at that point they had all stood up and had started singing in choir, rhythmically "Nor-thern Lea-guer. Nor-thern Lea-guer ".
Eleonora had not responded. She had just blushed. Embarrassed. Humiliated. On the verge of a panic attack. She had looked around, shocked. Looking for a touch of humanity. She had noticed the little Alessia – a petite teenager who, half-hidden behind her backpack, was pretending that nothing had happened – and a young man with curly hair and a skin darker than that of the others, who looked at her from the other side of the room, motionless, undecided about what to do. Eleonora had found herself praying that the bell rung as soon as possible.
It had gone like that, there was nothing she could do. That classroom was some kind of Dante circle. On one side stood Silvia and Deborah, laying down the law, then two or three people who carried out their orders. Then came the rest of the class, a silent and apathetic group hiding in the general chaos. Choosing the path of abstention. However and wherever she turned, Eleonora felt hostility. The two leaders called her "the Leaguer", for all others she was a stranger to be avoided, a danger, the "red-haired vamp". They looked disgusted at her clothes and turned around. On her desk, on the third day of school, someone had written in large letters "lousy Milanese." She had brought alcohol from home to delete the epithet, among the laughter and jeers of Silvia.
"Come on. Lousy and Leaguer, you're hygienist too! Boring to death."
Eleonora had looked down and kept rubbing the cotton swab hard on the writing, with the same ardour with which she would have willingly deleted from her eyesight Silvia and the rest of her party. She did not know what to say. She had nothing to say, but in order to survive she had decided to adapt to what seemed to be the hypothetical typical Roman student at Marco Polo high. She went to school always with the same pair of jeans and only indulged in an occasional colourful golf and some trendy short jackets she had started to buy at the stalls in via Cola di Rienzo or at the little market in Viale Tiziano.
Her new style hadn’t gone unnoticed with her mother.
"Rome is really changing you, or maybe you're just growing up. You have become sober, almost discreet, as if you were hiding. Don’t you like those boots you made me pay an arm and a leg last winter anymore? Back then it seemed that you'd be dead without them. And why don’t you make up anymore? Not that it hurts, mind you. I like you even so, but you look different. What's wrong?" she asked her one morning before she left to go to school. But Eleonora did not answer. By then she lacked the words.
"I know it's hard, it is difficult even for me to settle down. Milan is another world, and we know few people here, I still take the wrong turn with the car and struggle with the parking for hours and hours. But it could have been worse, what if we had moved to Palermo or Naples, or in a small suburban town. Are you really so unhappy?"
"I'm unhappy, but this is not the point, Dad has to work", she whispered at the end of the sermon, with her head down.
Her mother had stopped talking, pleased by the sensible answer that sounded like an acquittal. She had caressed her cheek, convinced she had understood everything. She ignored, however, that Eleonora had started to be seriously afraid of going to school, after what had happened the day of the first history examination.
"Eleonora, you want to come?"
Professor Maria Boschi had an easy-going air of respectability printed on her forehead, huge Mary Poppins-style bags from which pens, class assignments, books, records and colourful shawls – in which she wrapped when the atmosphere in the classroom seemed stifling – came out at random. Her hair were cut just below the ears. She wore baggy pants, oriental style. She was a school teacher who had passed through the Sixties, feminism and the occupations of the first university, before seeing TV and showgirls turn off the light of reason. She knew how to treat the kids and what to expect from them. An old suffragette, she had not forgotten that the job of a teacher can be revolutionary, and she tried, with tenacity, with all means. She was irreducible. She entered the class with a copy of the Republic, waved it and then sighed.
"You should read a newspaper sometime. Hegel said that the newspaper is the morning prayer of the modern man."
"Negative, we have the iPod. We can’t read and listen to the music at the same time, professor ", Alessandro retorted, and the class laughed.
Mrs. Boschi laughed too, to keep the pace. She worked hard to remain at their level, even in physical appearance. Despite her merciless wrinkles, she still retained a young dressing style, like an enlightened intellectual. Pearl gray hair, result of a skilful dye, glasses with a light black rim, kept tied around the neck with a silver chain, coloured short jackets. Eleonora, who was looking for someone in which she could mirror, thought she had taste.
"Well, Eleonora, how do you find Rome? You come from Milan, right? I saw your votes, you look like a model student."
She had smiled awkwardly.
"I still have to get used to this city. I arrived only a few weeks ago. I like it, of course, it is rich in history and monuments. So many things to discover and understand and I can’t wait. I don’t ever pull back, especially if I have to study."
Someone had booed behind her, Mrs. Boschi had ignored the comment, waving down her hand as if to invite the class to silence.
"Then, since we are repeating for the umpteenth time Ancient Romans, you could begin by telling me something about the chapters that we reviewed."
Eleonora had stood in front of the teacher’s desk, hands behind her back, and had started to declaim notions with her heavy Milanese accent. She was a good talker and she didn’t know about that period of history only from textbooks. She had recently visited the Coliseum, following the words of the guide as if they had been a lesson in the open, and she had also read some novels set during the early years of Christianity. In her own way she had prepared herself to approach the capital, and she was pleased to be able to talk about the world she had discovered.
"Congratulations. I'm really happy to have you with us. Do you like reading Eleonora? "
"Actually... it's one of my favourite pastimes."
"What do you like to read? Tell us."
"I read a bit of everything, from the Trilogy of the Submerged World to Harry Potter, from mysteries to novels I find in my house. My parents have a great library and I can read everything I want, I just have to ask for permission. Lately, for example, I was forbidden to read Lolita. I would have liked it, but they claim that I am too young."
"They are absolutely right. There is a time for everything. Go back to your place and keep up the good work."
Eleonora had turned back to sit down, flushed and happy, but looking up at her companions she had found herself instantly executed by some thirty eyes full of
hatred and envy. On a sheet she found on her desk, somebody had written "Swot". She looked around, turned it into a ball and put it in her backpack. Professor Boschi, who had started talking about the decline of the Roman Empire, didn’t notice anything.
"Keep up like that, Leaguer, and you'll pay."
Eleonora looked up and saw them. Silvia and Deborah, the two terrible black-dressed classmates. They were sitting on a low wall, right in the street bordering the school, their legs stretched out, their backpacks resting nearby. They chewed gums with their mouths open, holding a cigarette between their fingers. If not for the difference in their body shapes, they would have looked like twins. She tried to ignore and surpass them, but Silvia outstretched one arm to stop her.
"Come on, when we talk to you, you have to look at us and answer, you understand, Leaguer?"
"I don’t know what you want from me. Let me go. I haven’t done anything."
"Don’t worry, we’re not going to hit you sweetie. Then you would go to the police and we would even have to apologize. But... you fucked professor Boschi in front of our eyes and you call that nothing?"
"She was drooling in front of you. She doesn’t treat us like that."
Eleonora had opened her mouth and said nothing. She had looked at them as if they had been crazy. She had never found herself having to face an aggression, she would never have expected one from two classmates.
"You have to stop it, get it? You have to stop studying. You're too good for our class. You make us look like assholes."
"But I..."
"If you keep being such a swot you’ll be black and blue all over."
"Let me go home. My father is waiting for me."
"Yes, go and cry to daddy, so he buys you another pair of sunglasses."
Deborah had gotten up and stood in front of her with a threatening move, head to head. They faced each other like in a duel. Eleonora had been afraid that she could receive a slap or a punch at any moment. She was afraid, but unexpectedly Silvia had rescued her, reaching out to move her friend away.
"Come on. Think very well about it bitch", she had said, as if weighing her words, with eyes like the ones of a crazed preacher. "Go fuck anyone you want, but not Mrs. Boschi and not in our presence. In class we don’t study. Are you connected? Do you understand? Here at best you get a promotion with a strained six. Nothing more. Who makes a mistake is out and pays for it. Do you understand?"
"You want money? I have none."
Eleonora had kept looking at them as if she were living a nightmare. Bewildered, incredulous, scared.
"We're not thieves. You'll find out what we want. And now go, Nordic, we hate dolls and you still smell of mom, milk, books and who knows what else. Don’t you smoke?"
"Not at all."
"So you don’t drink, don’t smoke weed, don’t fuck. What the fuck do you live for? To study?"
Silvia had stopped, bothered, picked up her backpack and pulled her friend's arm.
"Calm down Deborah. Let's go. Don’t you see she's out? Come on. She doesn’t know a fuck. We told her what we had to. Leaguer, you have been warned. Consider it a gift. Truly a welcome gift. If you keep being a swot you will pay! You will fucking pay."
Eleonora had looked at them moving boldly on the sidewalk. She had stood watching them from behind as they walked away, their steps made heavy by their military boots. Only when she hadn’t been able to see them any longer, she had started to cry. Her tears had fallen slowly down her cheeks, as if they had been frightened too, and could not find their way. She had trembled with fear and anger and helplessness. She did not know what to do and had felt like she was in a waking nightmare. If only she had had Marco or her friends in Milan to talk to. If only it had been easier to live her life and study, without feeling threatened by those two little nonentities!
"Please. Tell me what I can do."
As soon as she had been back home she had ran to the computer to let off steam with Chicca.
"Oh God! What a story. Are you being threatened by a baby gang? One of those mentioned in the news? I beg you, you have to do something. Talk to your, teachers. Seek help."
"Seriously? Those two would take revenge. No, I have to pretend nothing happened."
"Next questioning will be a mess, Ele. I know you, you are not able to study just for sufficiency. You have always been the first of the class."
"I know, but if I denounce them, the teachers will try to intervene, they will talk to the crazies, and they will break me to pieces."
"They are two girls like us. How can they beat you?"
"I don’t know. But I know they could. You haven’t seen their faces. They are crazy or sick. I'm afraid. More than if they were males."
"Then speak with your parents. Have them come to pick you up after school for a few days maybe."
"Chicca, you don’t understand. They already called me the Leaguer, add my parents picking me up and I will really become a caricature."
"What about your mother?"
"My mother? No, I don’t want to tell her. What can she understand of these barbarians? And then she’s been feeling bad since we came to live in Rome. She’s increasingly depressed. I don’t want to scare her unnecessarily."
"Do as you like, but it seems nonsense to me. And at least leave the school with other students, walk in groups. Don’t go alone."
"I'll try. Bye Chicca, see you later. I love you."
"Me too. "