[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_57

Ten steps to Nanette: a memoir situation, Hannah Gadsby, 2022

A few days ago, I spent more than one hour on a video call with a friend from Italy, "we haven't seen each other for a year," he scolded me.

Returning to Venice to visit friends has become, over the years, an increasingly bitter occasion for me. I thought this bitterness was nostalgia, gradually seeing the city change with the people there. Instead, what worries me is that I have changed while everything else has always remained the same. It's an alienating sensation, like when you're convinced that the train you're on has left because you see the train next to it moving. But in this case, I am not the stopped train but the one who has left.

In the first four minutes of the call, my friend tried to give me attention, in his way, that is, dedicating a democratic space both to formal curiosity and to his need to victimize himself: “Where are you? You never keep in touch!”, “What are you doing? You never say anything to me!” “How are you? Of course, you have a good life." Divining my life for the last year, in the fifth minute, he had already started to let off steam by telling me about his misadventures, the same ones that had been repeating themselves for ten years: problems with women.

There was no more space for dialogue between him and me after the fourth minute, assuming the first could be considered a dialogue. He didn't want to ask me for advice or help; there was no desire to confide and noreal need to vent. There was only a desire to fill the space by complaining. His monologue was an exhausting and annoying logorrhea. I use these adjectives – exhausting, annoying - because when, with an excuse, I had to interrupt the call, I was emotionally drained and deeply hurt.

“Women are all the same / they all want the man with money, but when you make love well they come back/ women are manipulators / I let myself be fooled because I'm a too good person/women use men/ women always lie/ However, I get to meet several girls, but they are dumb and insignificant."

Where did he place my person in this frame since, spoiler alert, I am also a woman in addition to being his friend? And where do I put my friendship with him in this misogynistic frame?

As the stereotypical soliloquy grew, I realized that I had neither the desire nor the energy to counter: both because I needed a lightsaber to cut through his adamantine verbal flow and be able to say "A" and because I realized that it wasn't worth it anymore. I have spent years arguing with him about these same things, with various arguments so demanding that it could fill a manual. But above all, with infinite and sincere compassion. Now, I believe compassion has given way to resignation, which is why I am silent.

Is this my friend? Yes, it was still him, damned identical to himself.

Am I his friend? I do not know. But certainly, I no longer want to wait, tolerate, or educate.

I wondered if he still loved me, if he ever did, or if he called me just because he had no one else, just because he knew I was “the one who listens.”

Only then did I realize how much he embodied a good part of what I fight against and how much the distance that separates us has little to do with kilometers and geographical borders?

After the phone call, I thought about the words of Hannah Gadsby on her show “Nanette”; by pure chance,I had just finished reading the book in which she talks about the making of her stand-up comedy. At some point, she says a phrase that struck me a lot: that misogyny is a mental illness, especially for heterosexual men. It leads them to live in the contradiction of despising what they desire. She gets there by telling - and deconstructing - the stories of Van Gogh and Picasso. She gets there by explaining the importance of telling people's lives well, "properly," to avoid reducing them to clichés and prevent these clichés from becoming our examples. She also lists names of famous and influential people who are misogynists, rapists, and pedophiles, reminding us how their reputation pushes their crimes into the background; and how we, too,are inclined to do the same, to justify what should not be justified with success; or with the myth of genius, separating the art from the artist.

I thought about the responsibility that each of us has in this macro storytelling, which is life. I thought about my friend: what is the role of stories not “properly” told in his view of women? What is the

role of his not wanting to listen when someone tells those stories differently? And what is my role in this relationship? I left him the link to the Nanette show in our chat.

I've decided that certain things should be adequately said anyway, even if someone on the other side has chosen to be deaf.

He hasn’t replied.