Neverland
"I'm not calling for a second chance.
I'm screaming at the top of my voice.
Give me reason, but don’t give me choice.
Cause I’ll just make the same mistake again."
("Same Mistake", James Blunt)
The computer, fucking bitch, give me that damn computer. I can’t stay still here any longer. Come on. I’m going crazy. For doctors and nurses I’m already as good as dead. They wander, whisper, come in, go out, IV me, annoy me all the time. What the fuck do they think they’re doing? Keeping me forcibly alive? It’s me who will decide when to go, anyway. Only me, okay? And now I want the computer back, mine. Immediately. The laptop is my life. Without it, it's social death... my brain leaks, leaks. I move, I go, I walk. I walk on the beach, the sea touches my feet, I have a swimsuit and a diaper under it. Mommy holds my hand and I'm happy, happy and safe. How beautiful is my lady mother, I look at her from below. She’s a spectacle. She spends her life organizing exhibitions and events, something like, "You let me expose that Leonardo for the period of the exhibition at the Louvre, I in return I'll find you a Raphael to be exposed at Scuderie del Quirinale". Crazy stuff, and they even listen to her. Always with a snobbish "only-I-have-it" look. I would never even lend her a sock, she’s not reliable, but it is better not to say this around. But when I walked hand in hand with her it was cool. She met my father, the thin man in pain, at an exhibition. It was an exhibition of Modigliani in Paris, they must have told me a thousand times, both in front of that picture. Smiles, compliments, "Are you Italian too?" And then the evening looking in each other’s eyes in front of the Pont Neuf, and love, the bed, me. The arguments they had thinking I could not hear. Once Dad smashed the whole kitchen. Shit. Come on. It was bound to end badly. Modigliani is the favourite painter of both, who knows why, with the end he did... a loser like my father... He is an architect, he can’t even build dreams, go figure buildings. Okay, not everyone is a genius, and then I didn’t grow with a long, swan-like neck. I have only grown with neurosis... fuck it!
At twelve I started to lock myself in the bathroom with my computer. At that time I mostly needed a place to chat in peace without anyone asking me what I was doing, and especially why I wasn’t studying. I started off at great speed and in silence.
"Where are you Silvia?" my mother asked occasionally.
"I'm in the bathroom", I cried serenely.
Who would have gone as far as to drive me out from my hole, as to open the door forbidden by smells and physiological needs? No one dared to disturb my quiet body production. I happily sat on the toilet, like great thinkers do, with the computer on my legs, and played endlessly. There must well be a quiet corner, in a house where everyone constantly asks you about the books you should read or the essays you should write. Come on. It's horrible to be born into a family that has put culture at the first place. The laptop allows you to escape without being seen, staying exactly where you are. It's not just the ability to communicate with friends. I liked to wander from one website to another, discover singers and actors, new faces, cities, countries and borders, geographies and oddities. I believe that there, in the bathroom, my new world was born. The one that is not a tangible world, but an infinite space with no rules or barriers, where everything seems near and close at hand. A place that exists nowhere but in a computer, a non-place that makes the impossible possible. So, like Peter Pan would say, I found Neverland.
"Second button to the right, this is the way, and then straight up to the cursor, then you find the way yourself, leading to the mouse that is with you..."
If Bennato could hear me... it was he who sang the story of the boy who would not grow up, I remember it very well. I know it by heart. Come on. You sit in front of the laptop and you can talk with your best friend and no one else hears you, you can watch an episode of Hannah Montana or a clip of Happy Tree Family (Debby used to say that those cartoons without morals give stomach ache, but I've always found them exciting) even visit the shop of a great designer and dream of wearing his clothes. Me in black evening dress with the boobs I don’t have in open air... ha ha ha.
Anne Hathaway is my hero, skinny, beautiful, as white as a sheet. I loved that movie: "The Devil Wears Prada." I like all movies. Not Italian ones, they suck. I love cinema. It seems to me that the first jewel of my life was "Anastasia". All those colours and the music and Paris. I stood there, blessed, in the auditorium, with a pillow on the armchair, and I wanted to stay there forever. Watching films has always been my specialty. If they had let me study direction like I asked, if they had given me permission to enter that world, now I would not be here. But no. According to my parents I must attend classic high school. But I'm not a good daughter of Mary. And then, right at the beginning of the first year, Mom was gone. In classic school and without her. No punishment could have been worse. I can’t stand my father – the whiny one – teachers, rules, my classmates, impositions. I did not want to know anything about Latin and Greek. From the first two mark to the last that rained on me, I always rejoiced. Two plus zero two, two plus three four... forty-four cats, ring-a-ring-o’roses... But where can Cocaine be? Only the cats will know, Pavese wrote before committing suicide. Cats are for witches, but I'm not bad. I’m not bad but neither one of them. I am not aligned.
To be aligned you need to have long hair, a slightly skeletal face, fashionable sunglasses, breath-taking smiles, a few piercings in the right places, and you have to dress like an advertisement. I was not like that before high school. My size wasn’t thirty-eight or so, maybe forty-four, sometimes even forty-six, but I would never confess that, not even under torture. And I liked to eat... pizza with potatoes and then Nutella... what's better than that? Perhaps only a crispy roll with Bologna, and pasta with butter and parmesan cheese like my mother cooked it. When she put those good things on a plate for me, I loved her like a devoted daughter, and sometimes, at the peak of emotion, I gave her a kiss. With all my heart. Come on. It was so unusual that she cooked spaghetti. Or rather it was unusual that she cooked. At best, she thawed something. And also I should not eat carbohydrates, it was the rule. At home they wanted to keep me on a diet. Since I was eight. I was a tiny and lonely little ball. I stood in front of the TV, secretly eating chocolate. And they tortured me. They hid food in the oven or on the terrace, in the closet among clothes or in drawers. I always found everything, I was very good, once I even found the jar of Nutella among mom's underwear. I say, seriously? I hated them, hated them, I didn’t care about being slim, I wanted to eat. Then one day I was no longer in the mood. Mom was already gone.
"You have to eat Silvia, you won’t even be able to stand up this way", my father started saying. "You must stop eating like a Biafran. You're too thin. Eat... eat... eat."
Oh, I answered him, are you crazy? Not fat, not thin, how should I be? Come on. What do you want from me? And who are Biafrans? I never heard of them.
I didn’t care anymore. I had already chosen a side. The side of Ana, my goddess.
"Dear Ana, I offer you my life. Make me thin and light as a feather."
Come on. Ever since I read that sentence, on I don’t know which web site, my horizons expanded and I started exchanging mails with a girl in Turin. She signed them Ladyslim, she was nice and she gave me a lot of dietary advice. She followed the dissociated diet; one day just pasta, another just fruit, and then potatoes, meat and so on. I wanted to do the same. I distinctly remember a weekend spent crying. There were three boiled eggs in my diet. I was so hungry, so hungry, that I could devour a table, but I tried hard to stay there, lying on the bed, doing nothing so not to waste energy and reach the next day safe and sound. Ladyslim was able to, or so she wrote. We studied a way to check on and help each other: we weighed ourselves every day and wrote how it was going. I cheated, I always took off a few pounds, maybe more, and I weighed myself only once a day because I found that the balance needle tilted differently depending on the hour. In the evening, after dinner, y
ou are heavier, and in the early morning too. The best, the time of maximum brightness, is around two, when you have not yet eaten and you have been fasting since the night before. Then you are at the top of the figure. You should always weigh yourself around two, on an empty stomach. It takes will and brutal physical force to achieve all this without everyone else noticing. Pretend, pretend, pretend. Be thin, thin, thin, thinner and thinner.
I love you, Ana, girls write in their blogs. Every so often I find them no more. Sites are regularly obscured by some censor because they, the adults, those who want to control our thoughts and even the contents of our plates, they think they are illegal. They speak about incitement to suicide. But what does it mean? They created the world of thin people, the advertisements for models who live on cocaine to look like mannequins, and now they want to wipe us? Pretend that we became a problem because we get on the nerves of our families and they complain? As I said, they don’t think. They only think about money, success, power, but you can’t tell this in their faces, if you do you immediately end up being in the wrong. And Ladyslim... come on. I would have liked to meet her at least once and look into her eyes. To know if she, too, cried because she didn’t want to eat when she was little.
When I was thirteen they made fun of me for my size at school. I was the worst loser of the school. They called me "Superfat" and even, when they wanted to be really bad, cow Silvia. I could never find a dress my size. Shops only sell clothes for anorexics. In some of them only the one-size fits-all reigns, which is to say forty. If yours is forty-six, they will spit at you. You are out. Ah, I remember it very well. One afternoon we went out in group. All of us. I was in eighth grade. We must have been six or seven, males and females, happy to wander alone without parents. I didn’t do that often, I was not aligned, in class I was the bad one, the loser, the one to be avoided.
"We go in there?" someone said, and we landed in one of those boutique for little "bonbon" girls, in the centre.
You go down the stairs, two or three, and you're in the midst of a lot of tee shirts, pants and beautiful sweaters. A riot of buttons attached to the walls, colourful curtains and blossoming girls swarming in groups or alone. There are always anxious mothers too. There is also a space where they stick coloured post-it notes with messages like "I love you Paolo", "Friends Forever", and a bunch of crap like that. I immediately started snooping around, if I could I would have bought everything. There was a black T-shirt that read "Wanted Frog Prince" that I just loved. The drawing on it was obviously that of a fat toad with a crown on his head. It was perfect, right for me, witty, delightful. I would have looked great wearing it, but I would never ever manage to get in it. It rolled over my stomach as if it were a rattlesnake. There wasn’t a piece, not one, for me, in that store for size maniacs. Nothing, not even a pair of pants I could wear, nothing. The clerk told me that "large" size was not contemplated. She actually said that.
"It doesn’t exist here."
She looked disgusted while looking at me. Kaput. Marked in blood. Then I left in silence, unnoticed, and once in the street I started crying like a fountain. I was in the grip of a real crisis. But, damn, someone came to comfort me, but yes, it was him: Alessandro. It was Alessandro who followed me out like a loving puppy. At that time he was my friend, even if he's younger than me. Nearly two years. He had a ridiculous pair of pants, long sweaty hair, sticking to his cheeks. Some kind of monster, in short. He too was a bit chubby, but on his face he wore the fraternal expression of a good boy. You can trust someone like him, I thought at the time. He was always following me back then, who knows why.
"Silvia, Silvia, why are you crying? Did someone say something to you? "
"That’s not a shop for me. I can’t wear those shirts even if I try pulling them on me."
"Then we go to another. What do you care? Here everyone dresses the same!"
Fuck. Alessandro was tender at that time. Maybe I was a bit in love with him. What a treasure. He began to ape the squeals and faces of the girls in the group until I started to laugh like a monkey myself.
Alessandro, dammit. I shot him too. Shoot, shoot Silvia, and you’ll win a prize. We were like brothers that year, always together. I comforted him and he me. Now he's obsessed with roller-skates. He always has those things on, even in his house, because he lives in a two hundred square meters apartment and his mother, who is a distinguished hospital consultant, is never there. So if you call him he talks to you with his cordless phones and meanwhile he races, from the kitchen to the bathroom and back. He can make it in six seconds flat. He thinks of breaking records, maybe go to the Olympic games. When we were kids I talked to him about everything, we spent hours and hours talking in the courtyard, on the phone or in chat. But then I grew up, I went to high school and I met Deborah and Ana. Instead he started running after the girls, all of them. His hormones are racing. He says that sex is the new frontier, he adds even football and roller-skates, supporting speed as a lifestyle. Maybe he’s just a bit confused. We haven’t spoken, not seriously I mean, ever since. Now we're in the same class again, at Marco Polo high, because I'm repeating. One day he sat at the desk behind me, laughing, and put a hand on my ass. Strong, bold, as if I were a Barbie. I wasn’t expecting that. I slapped him. He laughed as if he had been expecting it. As if he wanted to play, send me a message, assert his power as a male. This is why I put him on the blacklist. The list of those I have to shoot. I want to shoot all those who hurt me. But now that I'm here, in this bed, alone, I could not really say any longer why Alessandro hurt me. Oh God, maybe I am the one who is confused. And I have no more friends. I mean I have no living friends.
"You can enter my site only if you love Ana, if you believe in the same Goddess as me, otherwise go away. Do not set foot here."
So my friend Ladyslim used to say, but something must have happened to her, because at some point I no longer found her in the net. She disappeared. She no longer answered me, not a single word, and she disappeared along with her blog. I wonder if she resumed eating and allowed her parents to ruin her life? Or maybe she died like Debby, or ended up in a hospital like me, attached to an IV drip to store calories. She had a beautiful picture of Audrey Hepburn on her page. Audrey is one of our heroines, not only because she was a good actress, but because she was skinny and she had style. The creators of fashion for teenagers have noticed that. They made money with our Muse. They pulled out tee-shirts with her picture printed, books and posters. I wanted to be like her. We all want to become like her. I have been starving and I became Audrey and I have no longer allowed anyone to make fun of me. Not once, ever. Deborah, instead, could not lose weight and she didn’t even try to vomit after eating. I tried to teach her all the tricks, I tried to stop her from eating compulsively.
"Silvia, I disgust myself, but I'm too hungry."
This is what Debby said. She liked sweets, buns with cream and doughnuts with sugar on top. We left school and, before going back home, she stopped at the bar and guzzled a lethal dose of calories. I kept repeating her that it was too much.
"Sweetie, now you’re going to have lunch, why are you eating this crap?"
"My mother keeps me on a diet", she replied, serious, serious and hungry.
It was impossible to restrain her. She even made me feel tenderness. I loved Deborah, and I defended her. I have never allowed anyone to do to her what had been done to me, from primary school onwards. And this, just this, is the reason why we became inseparable. The blonde and the brunette, the brain and the muscle, Thelma and Louise, the killers of the Marco Polo high.
Girls look innocent, but they are cruel. Nobody knows how bad they are when they are beautiful, perfect, well dressed and combed like Barbie. If you're different, you don’t dress like a doll, don’t always have a brush in your pocket and you're not a walking skeleton, they make fun of you and cast you aside. I spent whole school breaks sitting in the classroom, looking at the desk, quietly eating the snacks my mother sent me. She had an obsession for sandwi
ches with bresaola, she said they are healthy and not fattening. They suck. They, my classmates, didn’t talk to me. They ate apples and pears, they gloated in white lace blouse with embroidered collars and short skirts. They wore delicious wool pantyhose with drawings of flowers and teddy bears. I would have died to be that way, like them: small, sweet, skinny, perfect, ready for a fashion show. Instead I was fat and unresolved, but if Mom tried to get me to diet or gave me fruit to eat I held a grudge. Apples sucked and my alleged friends avoided me like the plague. They whispered secrets into one another’s ear, and when I approached they suddenly fell silent. They always had a commitment for the afternoon to live together, they went for a walk to Mole Adriana, or gathered for homework and snacks in the houses from which I have always been excluded. And every time I felt more alone and helpless, a little fat useless nonentity who had to find a way not to die. Wouldn’t you shoot those assholes? Wouldn’t you make them pay for all the evil they did? I did, I did. Shit, please, now I told you everything, take this IV away from me. Let me go. But beware, if you pull me out of here I’ll do it again and again and again. I have to avenge myself, I have to scream my anger, get back at those who hurt me. I'd do what I did over and over again. "Give me reason, but don’t give me choice. Cause I’ll just make the same mistake again", James Blunt sings with his perfect teddy bear voice. I would do it again too. Thousands of times. And nobody can stop me. No one. Not even an IV needle. Because I am convinced, to the end, that it wasn’t a mistake.