Julia
To search for a familiar spot in a place we’re not used to is a mental habit that helps humans cope with the unknown. It’s this same principle that guides those people who desperately look for a pizza place in Thailand, or a local guide speaking their own language in the middle of the desert.
To Ben, Burano’s not so distant from that neighborhood in Bristol where he dreamt to grow up in. The long road downhill — or uphill, it’s always a matter of perspective — that faces the harbor, hugged by trees. Bright-colored Victorian houses, three floors, framed in white. No one really knows who started painting them: everyone in the area claimed the idea, and liked to credit their own ancestors. He always thought of it as the happiest corner of the city. As if there was some implicit rule of peaceful behavior that everybody loved to follow religiously. Something like “once entering the area, please leave out every bad thought or intention, thank you.”
Cliftonwood was a twenty minutes-walk from University. After class, he used to pass next to the Art Gallery, circumnavigate Berkeley Square, cross Brandon Hill and, down on Church Lane, turn right and make it to the Students Residence, where many of his colleagues found a spot, giving him an excuse to come and hang around more often. The fantasy of a child who wondered what it was like to grow there, learn to ride a bike down these streets, enjoy Sunday fun at the Community Garden, had died out. On his first year of University, the place became a fuzzy memory of late-night board games while drinking cheap beer that tasted like pee from Tesco, and the incessant rustle of the pages of his manuals.
Every now and then, the people of the area used to throw street parties that lasted a whole day. On one of those feasts, Ben brought his brother. It was a hot day in early June, when nightmarish finals had just ended, air tasted like freedom and sun stayed up till dinner time.
Sam had chosen not to go to Uni. He said he would take a gap year that eventually lasted three times longer than planned. He was unfamiliar to Hotwells and its surroundings, but he agreed immediately, as he always did when given a chance to show off. As for Ben, that was his occasion to brag a little. He and his new friends had built a common set of experiences. They shared habits, memories, even their own way of talking. This part of his life was his and no one else’s. There, he wasn’t the misfit.
A messy procession of people of all ages was crossing the streets — dressed with festoons — and moving down towards the wharfs, for no apparent reason except the pleasure of dancing and day-drinking on a feast day. Ben would never slip into the crowd. He and his group used to hang on a corner of the pub with a beer, and watch the spectacle by their special seat. After all, it was a movie he didn’t need to pay for, a human comedy.
At least until Sam declared that they needed to go with the flow. “It’s like watching life from afar,” he said, and he was right, in some way. Life is the stench of sweat and ethanol that quickly go to your head. Bodies sticking one against the other, under a hood of smoke and foul breath. Stepping over feet, pulling hair, touching and being touched. At the end of that day, he would have thanked Sam, because he honestly believed life had been waiting for him.
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All it took was stumbling into a person. Back in the crowd along Ambrose Road, Julia was no more than a mere thought. But she already made her way into his brain, like a parasite insinuates into a host, ready to corrupt any memory he had of that place.
Just a misstep, and Cliftonwood would have never been the same again.
— — —
She hasn’t always been the woman who sits at San Marco square’s cafés, drinks expensive, rigorously sparkling white wine and actually enjoys a serenade, Ben tells himself as he jumps through San Marco’s puddles.
She must have been something else, back then. When he pressed her lower back against the moist steel of the bathroom sink, in the bar on the corner of Cliftonwood’s street, and felt the grip of her short-heeled lacquer boots on the back of his calves, he thought she was something out of this world. I must be in some parallel universe, he had thought. One in which he was a man who would pick up at parties, pull it off with no severe damage, and perhaps even dares to lift up that woman’s Levi t-shirt.
He had raised his gaze, in search of approval, and stumbled upon his own reflection in the mirror. His eyes were red, and weary, and he had messy hair. Then he had turned his look at the blonde locks next to that weird figure who was not him, and decided to turn his brain off.
Back in the street, her light-blue jeans had brought with them the darker shape of the sink.
She lived up North, in a cheerful, gentrified neighborhood called Montpelier. “I hang around Cliftonwood all the time. They look so much alike, don’t they? Très bohemién.” she said, opening the bottle he brought her. Sure, he affirmed in return.
Yes, they both had pastel-colored Victorian houses, and the long lanes, but to him, Montpelier’s murals were hipsters’ huge attempt of appropriate themselves of an area they did not own by ripping its inherent sadness out. Was Julia one of them? The stranger who was pouring him a glass on her immaculate sofa and wearing one of these sleeveless silk blouses that look poorly on everyone but her. Was she the appropriator, or the victim? Maybe, he told himself while following her path upwards to the bedroom, he just didn’t know anybody who could afford to live alone in a two floor Georgian house.
Three months later they were eating oysters at the restaurant. Parents and friends had come for her. She was wearing a tight suit under her black graduation gown, and she was gorgeous. All eyes were on her, the best student in her course. They didn’t need to ask about a future plan, it had already been drawn. Her parents liked to call it Juris Doctor, to put on airs. There’s no such thing in the UK, but it goes extremely close. London, Master of Laws.
No one had said a word to him in hours, except for Francine, a girl in her inner circle of friends who liked to emphasize her French R and always felt compelled to put everyone at ease. She did the same, the first time Julia brought him at the bar. Julia had kissed him in front of everyone, and said: “This is Ben.”
“Hi, Ben.”
“Hi, Ben.”
“Hi, Ben”.
After that, everyone went back to their thread. Except for Francine.
He never understood a thing they were saying. They called themselves “sir” and “ma’am”, and he was not that sure they were doing it for mockery. They smoked tons of cigarettes, and stuffed their mouths with big words. Capitalism, values, war, power… They had a topic for every word of the alphabet, yet their conversations sounded somehow empty. He used to put an effort in listening, as it often happens with a language that is alien to us, dying to know whether she actually liked them, but never daring to ask.
Before leaving for London, she brought him to Brighton, at her parents’ house. She resented the place, she said it was a city of slobs. Ben thought they would have enjoyed the last bits of sunshine, but he was wrong. It rained almost all the time, and once greyness fell over, even sand wasn’t golden anymore. Brighton looked like a boring desolate land, a fraud the inhabitants needed to cover up by installing tacky casinos, shiny colored neon signs and absurd Ferris wheels, just to prove to god knows who that some fun still existed down there. But he didn’t care much, as long as he stood next to her on the beach, his head resting on her neckline, their bare feet buried in cold, wet sand.
A year had passed. Ben had got so used to distance, he almost was afraid of forgetting how her actual face looked like. The screen filtered every feature, and erased every tiny imperfection of her skin, replacing her moles with pixels. Her British accent had become stronger, she had cut her hair short, in a bob. She looked like one of those lawyers on TV that only represent rich, usually guilty and remorseless clients.
Julia had rented an all-white, modern furnished, fancy flat in Kensington. She lived by herself, as she did in Bristol, but once in a while her landlord’s son, a guy her age who had absolutely no perspective in life besides living at his father’s expenses, would stop by and sleep on her couch.
Ben would visit her every couple months. She was so busy he had plenty of time to stroll around, alone. So he would take long walks along river Thames, stopping once in a while to see some beautiful vines growing on brick houses, or the blurry lights of Southwark’s high buildings on the other side of the bank.
He would take the tube just for the pleasure of getting lost. On a first glance, the path to follow appeared very elementary: a straight line. In studying deeper, the chart turned out to be a labyrinth of colored, tangled branches, a web of detours and detachments.
Ben loved how, once on the train, people looked like they weren’t bothered by any external input. But he also noticed that no matter how different they were, they all were holding something. Drunken groups of students were holding cans of beer in their spare hands at ten in the morning, businessmen were holding their briefcases as if they contained some state secret, moms with shaggy hair, still in their sleepwear, held tight their babies in blankets. He lingered as the doors opened, and witnessed that ever-changing hive of people flowing out to never see each other again, and concluded that “their carelessness was just a façade.”
“I don’t know how you do it. Spend hours of your day in there. I can’t suffer the tube.” Julia used to answer.
Every last night there, before reaching King’s Cross and boarding back home, he used to go to Primrose Hill, climb it, hope of being lucky and get to enjoy a bright-purple sunset. He took it as its own good omen.
On New Year’s Eve, she came back to Bristol.
Some of her friends chose to settle there after graduation, a goal that to Ben still looked like a mirage. She said she was going to stay for a little longer, she had finished her tests earlier than her colleagues.
Cliftonwood parties had become sporadic, less of a habit, and more of an actual event. They hadn’t changed much, though. Someone had decorated the streets with the same festoons, people wore pointy hats and were covered in glitters. He threw some at her, and, to his surprise, she didn’t get mad. She grabbed a bunch as well, and blew them on his face. He laughed, and swallowed them by accident. He told her “I love you”, and his voice choked up, not because of the glitters.
It was her second year of Master when she met the new group.
Yearly, the rectorate would organize a winter trip to Lake District, a week in the snow for the most worthy — or wealthy — students. Julia was among them. She had described it as “an opportunity to broaden her acquaintances”, meaning that the Institution was attempting of breeding a new army of ruthless law-keepers by blending them together with ski passes, hot tubs and mulled wine.
She had warned Ben she would turn off her phone for most of the day. “It’s not like there’s signal”, she told him.
When she came back to London, she booked a table at a chic restaurant where everything was ivory-colored. The palette choice was supposed to make his customers feel as if they reached heaven. Instead he felt odd, and as far as he could be from there.
She would have done the talking, and he would have done the listening. It had always been like this. And somewhere between his own main course and the dessert he had to share, as she was ranting incessantly about slopes and the so-called new acquaintances — a group that was the epitome of how much the rectorate cared about the importance of diversity and inclusion in our future society — he realized something.
He thought about the last time he had felt confident in her presence. He was in that bar, where she was spread on the sink. There, all loosen up, she was at his mercy. But was she really, or it was him who had fallen under her spell? Julia was one of those people who made you feel blessed just for being in her company. If someone was worthy of her attention, that someone should have felt proud. Despite what he had believed, she had chosen him, not the other way round.
The morning after their first night together, at her old place in Montpelier, he bumped into her in the hallway, as she walked out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. She smiled, her breath smelled like peppermint. She asked him “how did you sleep?” and he started babbling like an idiot. He would have found himself babbling again in her presence, from time to time. Julia kept his senses on the verge, triggered an ever-present perception of inadequacy, stimulated a will of improvement. He strived for her approval, he wanted her to know that he knew. But she would beat him every time. He was never wrong, but neither he was right. This game never allowed him to rest. She let him have small victories, once in a while, that had the bitter taste of a consolation prize but still managed to make him feel somehow privileged, and he wasn’t sure she was completely unaware of the mechanism.
Truth hit Ben like a truck. To her, he was an open book that she had no interest in reading. As for him, he never truly felt at ease with her, because he just didn’t know that person.
She was still talking. He took his spoon, and grabbed a piece of their pudding. She had no clue, but she had won once again.
