girl in clover

I spend my days in this pristine, empty, brand new school, making myself useful and surfing the net on about a fifty-fifty split. We have a dedicated chocolate drawer, a very, very large TV (good for after-hours Twin Peaks sessions) and wireless everything. I am surrounded by teachers I respect, for their pedagogical know-how and their capacity to hold their whiskey, and we are building a school together. A school the likes of which this country has never seen.

It's all so shiny and bright. There are no defeated-looking old hacks sloping around the hallways telling you that 'we don't do it that way here.' We are making up the rules as we go so, yes, if I do it that way, then that is the way it is done here. You know what the first month of a job feels like, when you are straining every muscle to 'show initiative' in the middle of a stack of bureaucratic procedures that haven't made sense to anybody for the last five years? I feel like all of that confusion and irritation is getting its pay-off now. Say I have a project to do, like make a written placement test (it's only going to get teacher-geekier from here on, I warn you). I talk to the others about it, and they say things I haven't thought of before. Then I think about what the ultimate written placement test would be to me--the one that is better than all the annoying, inadequate placement tests I've ever seen. Then I make it. Then everyone is happy, and we go and eat pizzas the size of monster truck wheels, and then we drink a lot.

It was really very hard to take this job. I was schlepping around Italy on my own, trying to evaluate towns for liveability without knowing anyone or any nice places to eat, sharing hostel rooms with crazies or cheap hotel rooms with my neurotic self. I had a tremendous urge to return to Sydney. I was making frantic teary calls to Matt, Lily and anyone else who would listen, from phone booths where I couldn't hear the person on the other end properly for all the mopeds burning past. My parents were AWOL in Morocco. Whose parents go missing for two weeks in Africa? Freaks. It is a matter of family legend that I never take advice, but it's amazing how much suspiciously advice-like information my parents can impart in a half-hour phone call.

It seems quite a miracle, therefore, that I've landed up in about the best job I could have hoped for. Assuming the school gets some clients. I think my boss is quietly worried about it (I have had many opportunities to observe her psychological state, since I am presently crashing on her floor, along with three other teachers who are yet to find apartments--everyone tells me that people live in each other's pockets in this town, but this is ridiculous). But Kathryn and her husband seem to know everyone in Reggio, and word of mouth among their friends alone could keep us going for the first three months. I'm still not sure how long I want to stay here. I'm mentally divided between Reggio and Sydney. But I am starting to recognise the feel of the days here--it's the life that people have been describing to me for the past five years: their season on The Continent. In fact, what with all the Jeff Buckley playing in the bars, and the seedy clubs on the edge of town with late-nineties electronica, and the fashion, it feels like Europe has waited five years for me to arrive. Me, solipsistic?

the italian job

My new boss dropped my laundry off at my hostel this morning. She apologised that one of the shirts was still damp--it hadn't washed clean the first time 'round, so she went ahead and washed it again. My underwear was folded and the socks were paired. I was still a bit groggy from being out with her husband and another teacher the night before. They only go to excellent restaurants, and two bottles of wine are considered reasonable with dinner. Nobody ever produces any cash--they just have running tabs with all these places. Kathryn's out of the office today, so I thought I might buy my own lunch, but she thoughtfully left 30€ under a paperweight for me.

I'm in a town called Reggio Emilia. It's near Parma: the graffiti on my bunkbed says 'let's grate the Parmesans' and underneath, in a different hand, 'Reggio Emilians are hairy oafs'. A more realistic demonstration of the campanilismo concept, I suppose. I had an interview here a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't sure about the place. I called the director to turn down the job, and she asked me to come back and see the town again before I made my decision. I've been here since then. Kathryn's setting up a new school. She has a resources cupboard that would make an ESL teacher weep. Any time you want a new book (or CD-Rom or DVD or laminator or whatever) she buys it. Reggio seems like a moneyed town, and she's providing a very good, pricey service to people who can afford it. She's committed to making everything absolutely perfect. I balked at the nine-month teaching contract after all, so she's got me doing contract stuff--producing lesson plans and handbooks and stuff. So far it doesn't feel like work, which is excellent. Excuse the reportage but, unfortunately for the cause of literature, there is actually stuff to report at the moment.

I have a bike and everything, so I guess I'll be here for a little while. Bikes are great. I haven't ridden one since I was in Japan ten years ago. I was terrible at it then, and I'm marginally worse now, but I still feel like a kid in a Spielberg film, rattling along the cobblestones with that satisfying sense of speed. I keep waiting for it to turn Fassbinder as I hit a rock on the pavement and veer out in front of a maniac Italian driver (score one for the clichés).

So. Reggio. I saw a lady cop yesterday. She looked like she'd been recruited from Central Casting and styled by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Her gun holster matched her jaunty white cap. Yes, she did have mirrored aviators on.

I saw a man yelling into his mobile phone while he was parked in a service station. Ten minutes later a woman pulled up alongside him, and stared at him meaningfully through the window. He glared straight ahead, all sulky, until she sped away in rage. Still later, though, she turned up on foot and calmly got into his car. That's amore.

At the train stations, they don't announce which platform the train will be on until a minute before it arrives. So all the people in the station congregate in front of the announcements board, all eyes expectantly raised, like citizens waiting to hear Ceasar's latest speech at the forum. When the platform is announced, the room clears. All of those people, lugging bags, kids and bikes, have to squeeze themselves at high speed through the underpass and emerge on the platform just as the train is pulling in. It adds a certain frisson to the whole train-catching experience.

The only person I know in Reggio of my own age is another teacher from the school. I call him Belligerent B. He's a literature grad from Torquay. He's very professional and the kids adore him--he spent the better part of a day colouring-in and laminating a frieze of The owl and the pussycat for the kids' classroom--but he nevertheless has The Rage. 'This country drives me fucking nuts, thank Christ. I mean, you've got to have something to fight against, don't you? Well I do, anyway. I'm English. Put me on a tropical island with beautiful girls and coconut cocktails and I'd be slitting my wrists within seconds. Yeah. I'm thinking of going down south next year, Sicily or something. It'll give me a whole new set of things to hate.' There's a story there, but there are stories I'll steal and stories I won't. Even a blogging hack has some standards.

mysteries

When you need a loo you have to buy a drink at a bar--it's a sort of tourist economy perpetual motion machine. So I'm in a cafe in Verona, squirming in my seat because I need the waiter to take my order before I can go. There he stands, not five metres away, looking everywhere but at me. After a small eternity I break a cardinal rule and go up to him, make my salutation and ask for the toilet. He swivels his head, eyes me coldly and turns away. I dash for the loo thinking, oh great. Here's some Italian ragazzo waiting for a friend, looking very smart in his white trousers and salon-bleached flicky hair and strap-on manbag, and I've ruined his day by mistaking him for a waiter. I get back from the toilet, sit down as casually as I can, and the dude brings me a menu.

So now I have to tell you the story of The Man Who Wouldn't Serve Nick T. Nick is a writer, director, student of everything and very nice guy. In other words, just another prodigy out of that hothouse of fabulousness that is Perth (is it the isolation? do they put something in the water?). He used to go with Matt to a bar in Perth called Caffe Sport. It had cheap pasta and cheaper red wine and was open late, so they went there all the time. There'd be four people, say, and they'd all give their orders to this one guy, who would return with the goods soon afterwards--minus Nick T's order. There'd be three glasses of wine, three plates of pasta, and a sad, empty space where Nick's food ought to be. He never found out what this waiter's gripe was, in fact not a word was ever said about it on either side. His friends just took to ordering extra portions for him. But cutlery? Forget about it.

another departure

i campanili e il campanilismo

Or, in the less elegant translation: bell towers and parochialism. The two things drawing me back to Italy. I love that the Italian word for 'parochialism' is related to bell towers. There really is a tower in every little community here (or every few blocks in a bigger town), and I like to think that people cluster around them, making little worlds for themselves. I like to see the towers rising above the rooves, and I like to think they signify something I might find here. I am a bit scared of being lonely, you see. That's why I'm not looking for work in a big cosmopolitan centre like Rome or Naples. While I speak only rudimentary Italian, I want to be somewhere manageable where I am less likely to slip through the cracks. Searching for exactly the right town is difficult--too small or too large, and I could feel too isolated. It's a delicate balance and I'm relying on gut instinct to tell me when I see it. Wish me luck.

I started out in Trieste, that little top-right corner of Italy that is practically in Slovenia's pocket. I like it a lot--it's a working port town on the lake-smooth Adriatic. By the water's edge it looks a bit like Bondi, but the people and the sea are equally calmer. No dice there so far, though. I had a big interview set up that I was very excited about, but it turned out nobody had told the director I don't speak English. She suggested I take an intensive (read: expensive) Italian course and call her in a month. I had a suggestion for her, but I didn't share it.

I've just been offered a job in a little town in the middle of northern Italy called Reggio Emilia. I like the director a lot, but I'm not sure about Reggio. It's really very small. And I just visited the next town over--Modena, of the vinegar--and I have fallen in love with it. It's like getting a new boyfriend and then discovering you like his big brother more. I have a few days to decide what to do.

It's strange when you're standing on the edge of a decision that will affect your happiness for the next year to come. It's stranger still to be trying to make such a decision while you are completely stripped of context yourself. Here I am in a country where I don't speak the language, bumping around from one drab, neutral hotel room to the next, and trying to keep some hold on my sense of self. Thankfully I have chosen some good companions for my trip: my iPod, which is full of add-on personality to keep the cheap hotel blues at bay (I am not this bland, nothing space: I am Guero, I am Abbatoir Blues, I am Rachmaninoff’s 3rd); and Moby-Dick, which is subtitled or, The Whale, but which might as well be subtitled or, How To Live. If call-me Ishmael isn’t enough to inspire with his cheerful stoicism, there is his friend Queequeg, the cannibal prince:

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.

Anyway. My last few days in Paris were very sociable. I had some quality time with Macgregor before he left for a holiday in Berlin, I saw Hellzapoppin’ (which can only be described as wacky) with David and Angie, and generally had a nice time. Below are some stories to commemorate my Paris apartment, which was the scene of many good meals and conversations with funny Australians. It is so, so weird how quickly we peel off our old experiences as soon as we are thrust into the new. Already I feel like this was another life.


rear window

I said bonjour to a guy in the hallway and he responded with, “You live on the fourth floor, right?” Mmmm? “Me too, across the way.” Oh. “You work late, don’t you?” He mimed typing. I guessed that was true. “Me, I play guitar.” He mimed this too, somewhat redundantly. “Ah. You play very well,” I lied. “You sticky-beaking weirdo,” I didn’t add.


on doit se souvenir

I guess it’s built in, not to be constantly astonished, or else we’d all blow some sort of circuit. But when some place really captures you, you should remember it and be glad. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont did it, Venice did too. Port Stephens still has a hold on me, where my family used to go for holidays when my sister and I were really young. When I leaned out Macgregor’s window on hot nights it reminded me of Port Stephens. The warm wind, the sodium lights with their yellow dandelion halos, the ugly white eighties apartment blocks (the eleventh arrondissement harbours some of the vilest buildings inside the peripherique, I keep forgetting to mention that. When Pete arrived, primed from reading my blog, he could only say that he’d thought it might be more… picturesque). And there’s the two lines of parked cars that look, from up on the fourth floor, like some parallel-or-not-parellel perspective puzzle. It is only a small leap to add in the shushing of the little wavelets from the beach that ought to be two streets away, and the Pancake House with its white mayonnaisey mornays and chocolate fudge sauces, the catamarans for hire and the frangipani trees and the happy safety of it all.


chungking unimpressed

The other night Macgregor and I looked out the window and saw a fire truck in the street, with a lone fireman out front. A few people came out of our building coughing. I told Mac to call down and ask them what was going on and he wouldn’t do it, and I refuse to yell out a window in bad French, so we were left guessing. There was no smoke in the stairway or anything. We went back to our magazine reading. When I looked out again a quarter of an hour later, there were five fireys, and they had been joined by a group of girls in triangle bikinis and very small denim skirts with gold thongs on their tawny-tanned feet. Everyone just seemed to be milling and flirting, and I thought it was impressive of the teenlets to have appeared so quickly after the arrival of men in uniform. Mac and I watched the firemen for a few minutes, trying to decide which one was cutest, but nothing was happening. Then maybe half an hour later we could hear them all out in the central courtyard of the apartment block, and the fireys were breaking into a ground floor apartment.

I had other things on my mind, though, because I had just mentioned to Macgregor that I had some nasty mosquito bites and I didn’t know where I could have got them. He asked me if they were new since I got back from London, I said yes. Then he told me that his friend Sebastian, who crashed in my bed while I was away, had come from a stop-over in Hong Kong, where he had stayed in the Chungking Mansions, and that he’d had nasty welts on him for the rest of the week. We pulled apart my bed, inspecting it layer by layer, and under the mattress cover we found a great many furry caterpillar things, crawling around and having a party and generally looking drunk and bloated on human blood. So we ran down four flights of stairs with the mattress protector and tried very ineffectually to shake it out in the dark courtyard.

It was about that point that the police turned up and checked out the apartment that the fire fighters had broken into. I hissed to Macgregor to ask the police what was going on, since he’d chickened out of asking the firemen, but he wouldn’t do it. I didn’t have the guts either. We gave up on the shaking-out plan, which was a bad plan, and decided to leave the offending article by the apartment door until morning and pray the little furry bastards wouldn’t crawl far. But all the bustle in the courtyard had woken up the scary old lady who lives directly below us. As we got back up to our landing, she stepped out of her door and yelled “Who is that in the stairwell?” We both froze and Macgregor motioned to me to be quiet. We thought she’d give up, but she called out again. We don’t like this scary lady—Macgregor because she’s bossy, and me because she rants at me in French long after any socially-adjusted person would have noticed that I wasn’t understanding one word in five. Still, we should probably have said something. I was making emphatic gestures to Macgregor, opening and shutting my hand like a glove puppet and then pointing through the floor at the crazy lady, which is charades for “say something, damn it!” but he seemed to be having a sublimely uncommunicative evening, and just shook his head. To be fair, being over seventy isn’t really an excuse for yelling at people after midnight and demanding to know what they’re doing in their own stairwell. When she followed up with, “You don’t want to answer, unh? Unh?! What kind of games are you playing?” we just tip-toed into our apartment and locked the door.

We still don’t know what was up with that ground-floor apartment, but all that incident must have disrupted the chi of the entire building, because people were up clattering plates and watching bad telly into the wee hours. As for the bugs, I still don’t know what they were—google let me down this time—but I put the mattress protector in a hot spin dryer and that seems to have done for them. Damn those Chungking Mansions.

my contact details

I am including my email addy so that people who want to get in touch with me even if they don't want to leave a public comment on the blog. I love emails! The spaces are in it so I can't be contactible by any random who googles my name. Yeah, I wrote the Anais Nin Review. Yeah, Kirsten's my cousin, I'm very proud of her. Yes I know I share my name with what is widely regarded as the worst movie ever.

So here it is (remove the asterisks obviously):

k*a*t*r*i*n*a.z*a*a*t*@*g*m*a*i*l.c*o*m

Or friends can phone/text me on: +33 675 313 012 (France) or +39 340 856 0510 (Italy)

Don't be a stranger.