[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_65

Two or three things I know for sure, Dorothy Allison, 1995

Dorothy Allison tells the story of her life, and she does so between a caress and a punch in the stomach.

Telling your own story is problematic not only because it means giving more importance to your testimony than your self-image. But also because storytelling necessarily means communicating with all the different selves within us: the adult and the child, the rational and the irrational, the perfectionist and the chaotic, the tragic and the comic. And choose which one to let speak.

“If I could convince myself, I can convince you […]. When I began, there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive and remake the world in story […]. Take one story and follow it through, beginning, middle, and end. I don’t do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.”

Allison opens and closes each story with a refrain, the anaphora of “Two or three things I know for sure.”

While I was reading her book, I was in London, trying to orient myself and manage the sense of lostness that comes over me every time I find myself in a big city. As I read the subway map and realized I didn't understand it, I thought, "Oh gosh, I never learned to read maps!"

A chain of things I had never learned surfaced in my mind, like bubbles from a deep past: I never learned to use a knife with the right hand, I never learned to braid my hair, I never learned to drive a car even though I got my license. I realized that each one told a story. So, almost for fun, I started writing them down, one after the other, in my notebook, recreating the same Dorothy Allison anaphora, but with a different incipit "I never learned to...".

I’ve never learned the meaning of Christian parables. At eight years old, during a summer camp in the mountains, the catechists made us play a game of carrying water from one end of the forest to the other. There were no other instructions. To carry out the operation,we had a glass, a bucket, and a giant pot at our disposal. All the children transported the water with the glass to make less effort, except the catechist's son, who used the pot with immense physical effort. At the forest's exit, a sack full of chocolate was rewarded to whoever had carried the heaviest load. The activity was the staging of I don't know what Christian parable, whose meaning was "those who are willing to give more get their reward in the end." To me, the meaning seemed different: if you are the catechist's son, then thanks to mum's tips, you can eat all the chocolates without sharing them with anyone. When I said it out loud in front of everyone, and the catechist discovered that, instead of having carried the water with the glass, I had drunk it, she said that it is essential for girls to read and understand the Holy Scriptures because their nature is different from that of men. They must "correct themselves in time". “Especially those who think they are smarter than the others,” she added, looking at me.

I’ve never learned how to ride the escalator without tripping. My mother once told me about a little girl with a very long scarf who went up the escalator and ended up sucked by the staircase because the scarf got stuck in the gears. Even though my mother's message was only meant to be a warning against uncomfortable objects and female vanity - and the particular link between uncomfortable objects and female vanity - every time I set foot on the escalator, I think that it could be the last thing I do. I wonder if I deserve to die for the outfit I’m wearing.

I’ve never learned to walk straight. My grandmothers tried in every way to explain to me how posture is everything for a woman. You need to walk with your shoulders straight, your stomach back, and your chest out; take small steps; don't run and sit with your legs closed, "otherwise, no man will marry you," they told me while embroidering my dowry sheets. Unfortunately, I never learned. I suffer the weight of gravity; Itake significant steps so I don't get bored strolling; my body sags in the chair as soon as I lean on it, and keeping my legs crossed cuts off my circulation. As my grandmothers predicted, no man has married me indeed.

I’ve never learned to pee standing up. Some women can do it. My ex-girlfriend, for example, used to pee standing up: she lowered her trousers, spread her legs wide apart, thrust her pelvis forward, and taaac. A jet of pee that men can only dream of. “It's all about pelvic muscles and control,” she told me. I have never envied the penis; I already find it challenging to manage my body; having an extra piece of meat between my legs would be too much. Yet it has happened to me many times that I want a penis just to be able to piss comfortably; for example, when the women's bathroom has a kilometer-long queue, and I can't hold it back, or when there is no queue but the only toilet available is for people with disabilities. Therefore it is too tall to piss in: because if you are short, you cannot sit on a toilet for disabled people, much less piss in it squatting. So you dream of the penis, just for a little more ease, because the spaces of the world are tailor-made for male bodies, toilets included, or you go out into the street because you've had too many beers. Youreally can't hold them, and you decide to do it standing up because your girlfriend can, ending up pissing on your trousers and your white canvas shoes.