[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_42

The garden party, Katherine Mansfield, 1922

What interested me in Katherine Mansfield was a fact reported in her biography: at the end of 1914, in her mid-twenties, she had already changed address thirty-three times. When I read it, I was in my 30s, and up to that point, I had moved about ten times and considered it a lot. This behavior seemed unusual to my family and friends, mainly because my first moves were not motivated by work or study but by a desire for “a change of scenery.”

An acquaintance, a girl who always had a great interest in helping others or, better yet, in adapting the choices of others to her vision of the world, one day asked me, "Roby, what do you want to do in life?”

At the time, I had just left Bologna, where I had stayed for a year. After a meditative semester in Urbino, which consisted of improvised jobs and walks among the hills, I had no idea what my next destination would be.

“I have no idea,” I replied.

“Look for a public sector job,” she advised me because she considered having a permanent job to be the fulfillment of life.

“You mean... to stay in the same office, in the same town, every day of my life forever?” I asked her in horror.

“You can spend a few years there, then ask for a transfer or grow professionally.”

Yes, becoming the empress of the paper wranglers, sitting at the top of the photocopiers in a suit that wouldgive me the look of a great career woman—I laughed at the idea.

In any case, what she meant and what I don't think she had the courage to say was that having a permanent job—settling down, as she said—was the only way to have some stability. That is, having a relationship with someone, buying a house, and starting a family, in this exact order. She wanted that for herself and what she would do a few years later.

“Is there anything you like to do besides working at the bar?” she continued. “Do you plan to continue like this all your life? Moving houses and changing precarious jobs from one place to another?”

Being a bartender was the job that allowed me to survive, pay rent, move, and study for almost ten years. It was always needed wherever I went, and it was as easy to get hired as it was to get fired; that's why it gave me the idea of not being stuck: I could leave it and start it all again somewhere else whenever I wanted.

“I have no idea,” I replied for the second time. I thought I liked to study, discover new things, and create, but I didn't say it because I thought it would sound stupid. Instead, I told her I only felt good when traveling; it was true; I felt very anxious about living the same routine for too long, so I constantly moved. A part of me dreamed of living on the road, as I had seen many of my university classmates do when, with backpacks on their shoulders, they left for months-long trips and then returned full of stories and beauty in their eyes.

The girl in front of me frowned, raised her chin, and, with a sarcastic smile, told me, “Then you should work for the railways. They seem to hire absolutely anyone without asking for qualifications.” I think I will remember this answer as long as I live.

There was contempt in her tone, a sense of "I understand how the world works, and you don't," a talking down that I finally noticed only then. Not coming from a middle-class family, not having been able to study abroad, and having always had to work to support myself had never made me feel "low," on the contrary. The contrast "poor" had always seemed an outdated Marxist opposition. Instead, with this sentence, I realized that whoever was in front of me was not speaking to me as a friend, much less as an equal; who was in front of me was a middle-class daddy’s girl, and she was judging me. I felt deeply humiliated. It was the first time I understood not only that I was “poor” but also that poor people have no right to dream. I was 28.

Now I'm 34, and I'm happy that I didn't become the empress of paper wranglers in a provincial town where I didn't have children with the first one that came along for fear of losing the click of my “biological clock,” happy that I didn't waste time to think about how to give up my rented apartment (because if you are poor, even if you have a permanent job, you can't buy the house on your own). I'm happy that I didn't settle and continue not to settle, even if this can destabilize those around me. Above all, I am so glad to have learned to recognize daddy’s boys and girls and to avoid them, at least those who experience their privileges as merits.

Katherine Mansfield was also a daddy's girl, but her restlessness is close to mine. I recognize myself in the naive attitude that accompanied her youth, in her interpretation of writing as the only sign of a relationship with the world, and in her constant need for emotion because, according to her, without emotion, life becomes a recording, not a revelation. And I love her gardens and rooms, where everything happens without anything happening; they are not Chekhov's conceptual living rooms but universes created from detail. Behind this detail, desperation is consumed. Her artistic production did not enjoy great success; hervery personality is the subject of conflicting opinions. No one would have blamed her for her restlessness if she had been a man. This would not have been the stigma of a life spoiled by comfort but the symptom of her troubled and profound soul (adjectives used to define characters like Baudelaire and Pollock).

A couple of years ago, during my birthday, the girl who had advised me to join the railways snuck in, bringing with her a boy to introduce me to. She told me that he was an incredible personality, an artist, and she described to me all the trips he had taken; while she was listing all his virtues, the artist was gorging himself, putting everything on my account, without having interacted with me or with the rest of the guests.

“What does he do for a living?” I asked her, in the same tone she had used with me sometime before, remembering that the permanent job was a distinctive feature for her.

“I told you, he's an artist: he's a person who's constantly searching for himself.” This meant he was unemployed. I was amazed at the response. I, too, was an artist, and I had been without a fixed occupation for a long time, moving here and there, but I seemed to her a desperate soul in need of guidance, not a fascinating character in constant search of herself.

I looked at the boy again: he had stuffed his mouth so much with food that a trickle of red wine leaked from the corner of his lips and dripped down his chin. He might have looked like a castaway who had just recovered after a week of fasting, although he was not hungry but the joy of taking advantage of the situation. He was dressed like a tramp but with an attention to detail that tramps don't have. The Hindu tattoo, the solid silver bracelets, and the new and already battered designer shoes gave way to his actualstatus. He seemed disguised as a poor man but was far from being poor.

The difference between him and me was that he didn't have to be a bartender to be a globetrotter, and he didn't have to show gratitude to anyone he met; things were owed to him. He would not have received the same admiration for his personality if he had been female, just like Katherine Mansfield hasn’t. And above all, “being poor” is cool only if the person doing it is rich.