[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_85

And then there were none, Agatha Christie, 1939

I thought about telling how “And then there were none” kept me glued to its pages for two days, robbing me of sleep at night and preventing me from thinking about anything other than who the murderer could be. I also thought about writing about the delicate issue of the title, its translations into different languages, and the normalization of racism in mainstream literature of the early twentieth century. Still, I decided to borrow the title as a starting point for a very personal story: my attempts to find love and to understand my sexuality. At the end of my attempts, there were indeed none, including love, lovers, and definitions of sexuality. When I was 18, I realized I had a big problem.

Family expectations, friendships, cultural references, and everything around me pushed me to believe that since I had a vagina, I had to find someone who had a penis. And when I say "find someone," I mean falling prey to a psychophysical upheaval that consumes your physiological and cognitive functions, which does not allow your soul to die with your body, but which makes you wander the moor without peace like Heatcliffe in Wuthering Heights.

My problem was precisely this: no love consumed me. It was a problem as big as a house for a person who was at the end of adolescence in the early 2000s, raised with Barbie and Ken, Berlusconi's television, American romantic comedies, and Catholic indoctrination that underlined the privilege of having a uterus, only to highlight the moral duty of producing many beautiful children, future faithful of the Christian church. The destiny of a little girl was already mapped out: a straight line that started from her father's house and ended at her future partner's house, with a beautiful garden for her numerous offspring to play in.

In front of me, those who knew what was best for me had already foreseen my goals in life: love and childbearing; in this necessary order (for childbearing without love - and perhaps without marriage - there was already a place reserved in Hell). I didn't know what love was; I just felt that it was expected of me that I would be overwhelmed by it sooner or later; better sooner than later, because love, I was told, was a "normal" thing for "young people," while in adults, it was often ridiculous and anachronistic.

I soon understood that love wasn't a feeling that could be provoked; it wasn't like expecting to be hit by a truck, for which it was enough to sit in the middle of the ring road and wait for your turn. It took luck, the right coincidences, foresight, and even a bit of strategy, or, as the aunts said, “knowing how to deal with men.” Above all, a girl had to take care of her “reputation": the grandmothers told me that men only married "chaste" women; that if a woman had sex with multiple men, she was seen as an "aircraft carrier." When I replied by giving the opposite example of the man with more women, I was asked: "Do you prefer a key that opens all the doors or a lock that all the keys can open?". The comparison between lock, key, and the private parts of the two sexes was grotesquely clear, just as it was clear that a magic key was better than a broken lock, which is why I never found anything to reply with.

Love and sex became two huge taboos for me. Or at least something to keep away from my family and the gossip of the town I grew up in. I pretended to have a boyfriend for several years, enjoying the engaged girl's privileges: no one asking you why you aren't engaged, why you don't want to get involved if you've been dumped or cheated on, why you don't fall in love. This torture was valid that time for a 16-year-old girl and is valid today for a 40-year-old woman. Saying that you have a partner saves you from a lot of pain in the ass, and when I started this theatre, I had already understood it well, even though I was only 16 years old. My big problem was that I didn't feel “love,” at least not the love they taught me was love.

I said I loved my fake boyfriend and acted out scenes of a distressed lover with my friends, desperately trying to believe that what came out of my mouth was also what came out of my heart. Still, the truth was that I imitated what I had seen others do and did what I believed others expected of me. A dense, heavy, and mysterious word like "love" sounded empty like walnut shells in my mouth.

I had feelings of affection, sympathy, tenderness, and understanding, which could be included in the macro-ensemble of friendship. But love? I don't know. And without love, I couldn't have sex either because the two things had always been presented to me as linked and consequential. Unable to get to the bottom of the problem, I used the best strategy in cases of Philosophical aporia: I proceeded by experiments, according to the empirical method, moving forward by trial and exclusion, and ended up no longer having anything to exclude (“and then there were none”).

I thought that perhaps I didn't like the “penis bearers” that much since they weren't capable of arousing overwhelming emotions in me, so I turned my attention to carriers of my sex. And things went better on several fronts: having an intimate relationship with a girl was much easier than trying to have one with a boy; girls of my age were very mature compared to my male peers, who looked like they had just learned to hold a fork after decades of baby bottles and breast milk. And relationships with males also became simpler: it was as if they no longer saw me as a female, that is, as prey or a being a thousand miles away from them, but as an unidentified but curious creature, a creature with whom one could even create a true friendship; that is, a relationship for which, very often, playing video games or talking about football was enough.

Being considered a lesbian freed me from a conflictual relationship with the opposite sex and many heavy duties: dressing pretty, putting on makeup, sitting with legs closed, chewing with my mouth closed, walking with straight shoulders and held stomach, going around accompanied, say no to an extra glass because it's terrible; eating less than I needed due to dieting (even though I wasn't on any diet); always say something nice because a nice girl who doesn't say nice things isn't forgiven, etc. Despite all these liberating notes, this shocking and passionate love had not yet overwhelmed me, not even when I was with a girl.

I then decided to change the logical chain love>sex to see if, by reversing the terms in sex>love, love would make its triumphal entry into my arid existence because living without love, I was told, made no sense, and, among other things, I had little time to bring this wave of meaning into my life before officially becoming an adult and therefore out of time for all the significant strong emotions of youth. Nothing changed; I didn't find love. However, I started to enjoy myself and know my body and that of others. This was a turning point and an excellent growth period for me.

I had relationships with girls and occasionally even with some boys, which sometimes caused me confusion: what was my sexuality? What did I like? At the time, it was difficult for me to accept the possibility that I could enjoy everything. It was as if I needed to fit into one of the many bipolar categories that marked the black-and-white world to feel in the right place.

In this new phase of my life, which was still an orphan of the great god of love, the bond with the boys had become more languid. What was labeled as my “bisexuality” was a nobody's land, without precise boundaries, without concrete evidence. It was scary and embarrassing. Many told me I was confused; others said to me that I behaved like this to attract attention; still, others, especially alpha machos, took this bisexuality as a challenge: "I'll make you choose which side you're on," I was told several times.

On my part, there was some confusion, yes, but not about my pleasure. I was confused because I didn't know how to integrate this nuanced pleasure of mine into a world that only recognized transparent colors. I was confused because everything around me seemed to suggest that sexuality and love were a tick to tick off a handful of well-defined boxes.

No one had ever taught me to distinguish and separate the three great emotional and sentimental spheres: friendship, sex, and love. No one had ever explained to me that our sexual appetites are unique and personal and that there is no single way of experiencing sex, pleasure, or relationships. I only saw frustrated straight couples around me who shamelessly lied about their happiness; my homosexual friends lived like undercover infiltrators, and their relationships had more the air of clandestine affairs than "normal" relationships; gays on TV were only men and only hyper-feminized; conversations between straight female friends were only about males (with the prospect of a fabulous life together); conversations between straight male friends would focus on females (to list all the ones they had slept with) and then talk about football; mainstream filmography has been giving out one-sided love stories for at least 70 years; the songs praised love as the summit of feelings and life; poems from straight lovers overflowed everywhere, from chocolate wrappers and detergent ads to the Latin version you had to translate at school. Confusion was inevitable, not about what you felt but what you should have felt!

There was nothing, anywhere in the commercial world, that gave voice to my doubts and insecurities. Nothing that even remotely represented the blurry path I was walking alone. And in all this, a terrible thought began to creep into me: but do I know how to love? I had never experienced all those extraordinary emotions I read about and often heard old and young people talk about ("The most beautiful moment in life is when you fall in love for the first time"). I mean, I had experienced some strong emotions! Obviously.

For example, when I was discussing philosophy until 5 in the morning, I was drinking whiskey and beer with some passing stranger. When I used to fight outside some club to make the night enjoyable, when I left for an unplanned trip with a backpack on my shoulder and two pennies in my pocket, I returned with a thousand adventures to tell. But the "creative power" of love (what they call it), the understanding and complicity of the pair of lovers remained a burdensome unknown. I hadn't doubted the existence of that type of love because I was convinced there wouldn't be a thousand years of culture on a non-existent thing! That's why I started to think there was something wrong with me.

Out of empirical self-denial, I had tried them all: heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and then there were none. Love was nowhere to be found. Growing up, I developed a strong interest in mythologies and their deconstruction, perhaps precisely because, for years, I was a victim of them, mortifying my truths instead of spitting on the lies of others.

Now that I am a few years older and have some awareness, I still see many women living as prisoners of the same myths of straight sexuality, of the canonical relationship, of transformative love, like me a few years ago. For those who live according to feminist principles and who have deconstructed the stereotyped and idealized figure of the male, the situation is even worse than what I experienced: they have killed the idea of "man of the past," "man without blemish," of "prince charming" and "savior" but they have kept alive the idea of love as the first feeling in the hierarchy of affections. And so they find themselves living like those Dostoevsky characters who killed God but continue to speak with the Devil: they have eliminated the possibility of salvation and have made their damnation eternal. If the result is that then there were none, perhaps it is because there was no one or nothing at all in the first place: because love does not exist in the way they presented it to us nor in the way we look for it; life is meaningless anyway, whether we try to justify it with love or not. No one has the right to decide what gives meaning to our lives except ourselves.