YOU GET WHAT YOU NEED by Annalisa Mastronardi

Foto di Annalisa Mastronardi

Bzzz.

Bzzz.

Cristina suddenly swatted the mosquito that had been flying around the lamp. The insect got crushed against the desktop under the surprising force of her thin hand. She carefully examined the black and red stain on her palm and wiped it on her shorts, then resumed studying.

Holding the highlighters in one hand, she used the other to underline in yellow what she considered to be the most significant passages and hooped the key points in blue.

Poetry is a spiritual adventure, the poet is a great priest and literature does not have other aims than creating an ideal world.

The core of the matter was often contained in just a few words. And yet Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: A Complete Guide had more than six hundred pages. Critics always ended up repeating themselves, although in a different way, sometimes more pompous and complex. Literary criticism had always nauseated her. She thought they fantasized too much. They always searched for who knows what enigmatic meanings, what obscure products of the human mind. Like when she was studying Wuthering Heights for her English literature exam. She still couldn’t understand how Heathcliff could be a hermaphrodite. He was just a foundling avenging himself for each received injustice during his lifetime, after all. She closed the book and went to bed.

The following morning, she got up to the shrill sound of her alarm. She would gladly have slept ten minutes more but today was the day she would take the French literature exam. She couldn’t afford to be late. She put on the clothes she had deliberated over at length the previous evening, had some coffee and rushed out the door.

It was sunny that morning. Rome was still snoozing. Cristina found it pleasant to be driving through the half empty streets. There weren’t more than a couple of cars waiting at the traffic lights. However, in less than half an hour, those same streets would be congested with traffic. Exasperated drivers would lean out their windows and bark at each other. Screams and the blaring of horns would soon signal the awakening of the city.

After parking her car in the campus carpark, Cristina walked into the university. She stopped in the hall to check the LED display board on the central wall. The exam would take place at 9 am in Room 3. She breathed deeply and went to the indicated spot.

In front of the classroom, there were about thirty students. Some of them were walking back and forth reciting out loud their prepared answers. She couldn’t stand them. They always made her feel as if she didn’t study enough. She saw a ginger-haired girl sitting at the chairs fixed to the wall and walked there. She was revising for the exam.

Cristina sat down. “Worried?”

“A bit,” the girl said, slightly tilting her head to the right. “You?”

Cristina just shrugged. She noticed a butterfly tattoo on the girl’s shoulder.

“Cool,” Cristina said, pointing at it.

She turned her chin towards it. “Ah. Thanks.”

“You know, I’d love to get one, one day.”

“Nice. What would you like?”

“Clint Eastwood pointing his 44 Magnum at the observer.” Cristina chuckled. “The ideal place would be between my groin and my belly, I believe.”

The girl looked at her with a puzzled expression.

“Clint Eastwood. You know, the American director…” Cristina immediately added, gesturing.

The girl returned to her book.

Cristina smirked at her.

The French literature professor emerged at the end of the long white hallway. Mr. Calvano, a slender man in his forties, slowly advanced towards the students with a stern look.

“Here he is,” whispered one of the students.

Cristina and the ginger-haired girl stood up and joined their colleagues in following Mr. Calvano into the classroom. Once inside, the students headed to the chairs which were arranged in horizontal rows.

The professor sat down at the desk and took out his laptop from its leather case. Nobody dared to utter a word. Cristina observed the young woman at the table to her left, her legs shaking almost violently. Each student would be orally tested in alphabetical order at the top desk before the entire class.

“Mr. Abbate,” the lecturer called the first student. His deep voice resounded through the room.

A tall, slim boy slowly approached the desk and sat down before him.

“Well, Mr. Abbate.” The professor cleared his throat. “Could you please tell us who Théophile Gautier was?”

“Eh… He was… eh… a Romantic poet…” The boy brought his hand to his neck. “Eh… he wrote v-very lyrical poems... mmm…”

“What about the expression ‘art for art’s sake’?” Mr. Calvano interrupted him.

He was about to open his mouth.

“I think you’d better take the exam in the next term, don’t you?” The lecturer suddenly said.

The poor student looked down and returned to his chair.

“Next,” Mr. Calvano said, raising his voice and fixing his round glasses on his nose.

The students looked animatedly at one another.

A girl with a pink bowl haircut sat down before the professor. When asked the first question, she remained silent. Carlotta – that was her name – was immediately sent back to her place. The same happened to the following student, a Ukrainian guy.

From the chairs nobody dared to look at Mr. Calvano.

It was Cristina’s turn. She walked to the desk, showing a pleased smile on her face.

“Well, Ms…”

“Apicella,” she promptly said, coming to the rescue of the professor.

“Ms Apicella. Good.” The man scratched his temple. “Let’s start.”

Cristina strived to look into Mr. Calvano’s eyes.

“Where does Le Rouge et le Noir open? ” He asked her after a brief pause.

Cristina pulled her head back. What? Stendhal? She had already taken an exam on Realist French Fiction in the first term and frankly didn’t remember where the beginning of that novel was set. Stendhal belonged to the first part of the French Literature module. He should have asked her about nineteenth century French Poetry.

“In the Norman countryside,” she tried to answer with conviction.

Wait. Was that Madame Bovary? She wondered.

Mr. Calvano didn’t say a word. Cristina started looking around. She saw nothing but scared faces staring at her. Someone coughed.

“Le Rouge et le Noir opens in Verrières, Franche-Comté. ”  The professor said. “Firstly, we see its white houses, their roofs, then the scene widens to the surrounding environment: the hill, the chestnut trees, the fortress, the river, the mountain…just like a modern movie camera.”

Why didn’t she tell him Stendhal was part of the previous programme?

Silence.

“Next question.”

Mr. Calvano moved on to Arthur Rimbaud. He asked her about his poetry, his relationship with Paul Verlaine. Cristina answered each question, carefully choosing every single word. The professor nodded, then asked her about the Seer Letters.

“The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought. Forgive the pun. I is someone else.” Cristina confidently replied, quoting directly from Rimbaud’s 1871 letter to his teacher Geoges Izambard.

“Could you elaborate on this?” Mr. Calvano said, crossing his arms and leaning back into his chair.

“As the sixteen-year-old poet put it in his following letter to Paul Demeny too, Rimbaud wanted to be a poet. But he could achieve his goal only through a derangement of all the senses; that is – experiencing deeply all forms of sensation: love, grief, madness. This would finally enable him to reach the unknown, to truly know himself, his soul. In other words, to be a visionary. His was a search for a universal language beyond subjectivity.”

“Very good.” He cut her short. “Unluckily, I can’t give you more than twenty-eight unless…”

Cristina frowned.

“Unless I ask you one more question.”

“Sure,” she defiantly said.

Mr. Calvano narrowed his eyes.

“All right. Let’s move on to one of the poets who inspired Rimbaud – that is, Charles Baudelaire.”

Cristina smiled at the professor. She adored the so-called cursed poets.

“How do his poems differ from Romantic poetry?”

She briefly hesitated, then started talking.

“Baudelaire’s poems are a trip to hell, an infernal descent into our inner abyss. The poet invites the readers to walk arm in arm with their inner demons.”

The professor looked straight ahead.

“Scorpions, rotting carcasses, poisonous monsters are nothing but the obscure side of human nature. We all tend to God but, at the same time, are attracted to evil. We long for evil and yet despise it, ending up despising ourselves for desiring it.”

Mr Calvano touched his chin, nodding.

“You know him reader, that refined monster,

— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!” Cristina recited the final lines of Baudelaire’s introductory poem in his collection Les Fleurs du Mal.

At the back of the room the students began murmuring. She wondered what they were talking about. Had she said something wrong?

“Very well, Ms. Apicella. You have worked hard, that’s undeniable, but I must repeat myself, I can’t give you more than twenty-eight. You know, that first question….”

What an arrogant asshole, she thought.

“Good,” she only said.

Mr. Calvano registered her grade on his laptop.

“You can go now.”

Cristina got out of her chair and left the room, slamming the door behind her. The hallway was now crowded with cheerful students. It was very warm in there. She couldn’t remember when the building’s air conditioning had last worked.

She had just walked past the snack vending machine when she heard someone call her.

“Hey.”

She turned. The ginger-haired girl was rushing to her.

“Hold on.” She stopped, winded.

“What’s up?”

“I just wanted to tell you that…” She caught her breath. “Mr. Calvano was an asshole.”

“Oh.” Cristina raised her left eyebrow.

“You deserved much more,” she said. “Stendhal wasn’t part of this programme.”

“He wasn’t indeed.”

“You were great. Seriously. It was like watching a fight to death. I just needed some popcorn.” She laughed. “I’m Diana, by the way.”

“Cristina. Nice to meet you.” She shook her hand.

“I’m going to go now. It’ll be my turn shortly.”

Cristina wished her good luck before Diana returned to the room.

She walked out the glass door. It was midday. She raised her eyes toward the sky. There were no clouds that morning.

Cristina didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. She was disappointed and yet, somehow, felt excited. Could her interest in a subject or all the time she had dedicated to study really be expressed by a number? After all, she got twenty-eight. That wasn’t that bad. Then again, for someone who always expects the highest results even a good mark seemed an outrage to all their efforts. Challenging the esteemed Mr. Calvano, however, gave her a feeling of power. She kept walking in the yard.

Outside the parking area, two young girls synchronically moved in front of a smartphone propped up on a wall. She was reminded of that popular app, TikTok. Its name made her think of time’s steady march. Perhaps she should have spent her time differently. Either way, if at their age she had been like them, she would have wanted to go back in time and slap herself. The thought made her chuckle.

“Good Lord,” she muttered to herself.

Cristina approached her car, holding her French Literature book to her chest. The shade had shifted; now the car was in sunlight. Some years before, she had named it after a famous porn star, Moana Pozzi. Her friends always asked Cristina for a lift. Everybody wanted to get on it. She wondered whether they would return the favour one day. She placed the book on the roof and opened the car with the key fob. Moana flashed.

She didn’t mind about the grade anymore. The outcome of the exam would not dissuade her from her goal of becoming a lecturer one day. She thought back to Les Fleurs du Mal. The manure - one can always use it to give birth to lovely flowers, she deliberated. It’s just a pity that dogs then piss on them sometimes.

After getting into her car, Cristina fastened her seat belt and turned on the engine. The steering wheel was hot. She pulled out of the parking lot and drove to the intersection before the university. She stopped and waited for the traffic light to become green. While waiting she grabbed a CD in the glove compartment, inserted it into the CD slot and put on the last track. The radio began playing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. Like her brother, she was a Rolling Stones fan. It was him who gave her the album ‘Let It Bleed’ the previous Christmas.

As soon as the light changed colour, Cristina stepped on the gas. The car emitted a brief whine. Looking at the side-view mirror out of the corner of her eye, she saw the book that she had placed on the roof fall to the glowing asphalt. One by one, the cars behind her passed over the volume while its pages blew wildly in the wind.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then returned to focus on the street in front of her. The city quickly flowed on either side of her field of vision. Swinging her head to music, she turned the volume up. Bass boomed from the speakers, making the burning dashboard vibrate. Cristina particularly loved that song. It reminded her of her family summer road trips to Tuscany when she was a teenager.

She turned the volume on once more.

“But if you try sometimes you just might find…”

With the wind in her hair Cristina put her arm out the window and, singing at the top of her lungs, joined Mick Jagger’s voice.

“You get what you neeeeeeeeed. Oooooooh yeeeeeah.”

And while air blew in her face, life violently gusted in her heart, muddling her old convictions and giving new certainties back to her.