A letter of thanks to my past self (and Eduardo Krause)
This week's book musing, Brava Serena (by Brazilian author Eduardo Krause) states in its Italian title the beauty of its content. Serena, who is to me the main character, despite the fact that we read the story through Roberto's eyes, a seventy year old retired partner in an insurance firm, who decided to spend his last years in Rome, searching for the face of his late wife in the paths they visited together in their honeymoon, forty years before. Serena is, as her mother in the book describes it, a collector of people. A woman who jumps from one adventure to another, not in a bad way, but with a slightly shallow tone, and then registers her collection on her ceiling, with pictures taped right over her bed so she can see them every night.
Cut to my real life. I closed the book after reading that passage, landed in the city I was born in so I could visit my family and attend the wedding of one of my dearest friends, who I met in grad school. Most of the old "gang" was there too, some who I hadn't seen in over a decade, and we obviously couldn't help but becoming nostalgic, remembering the old stories of binge drinking, running around free and slightly crazy, driving to the beach after class just to dip of naked bodies in the ocean and returning home afterwards, in the middle of the night, to the sound of Backstreet Boys. Our now husbands were the audience, off course, because they were not a part of our lives back then (I have to say the only surviving man from those years was, in fact, the groom). And as the night unfolded I felt blissfully confused because, for some reason, as the years passed, I had developed a sort of cringy feeling when remembering those days. As if they were wonderful but a little wrong, at the same time, and coming out of that party I realized two things had happened over the years.
One, I have a really good memory. Even drunk I can still see the pictures of our beautiful moments, vividly, which does make me feel cringe, after all, the fashion and boyfriend choices one makes in their twenties are doubtful, at best. And the second thing I realized I felt sometimes, revisiting those memories, is guilt. This crazy, I dare say Catholic guilt, me and others out there I'm sure, carry when thinking of some parts of our past. Some people from back then didn't make current day's roster, so you feel guilty for friendships lost. Some of those moments actually caused some people to be heartbroken (mostly men we used to chew and spit along the way), and you feel sorry for that. You embarrassed yourself and caused scenes or whatever it is young adult women do while drunk and insanely happy, and since you are way passed that phase today, you feel shame.
And why?
"And the late teenagers we were, those immortal beings, invincible and unstoppable things, we didn't care, nor should we have cared. We got our hearts broken in equal measure, we were left behind just as much as we did the leaving, and I see now that this person that I am today only exists because of all those things. "
Those experiences we shared, the hearts we broke, the people we lost, it all happened for a reason. And the late teenagers we were, those immortal beings, invincible and unstoppable things, we didn't care, nor should we have cared. We got our hearts broken in equal measure, we were left behind just as much as we did the leaving, and I see now that this person that I am today only exists because of all those things.
And on Sunday, sitting in an uncomfortable chair at the airport waiting for my flight, in the middle of a equally nostalgic hangover, there was Serena, the character that names the book, so unapologetic in all her nonsense that, somehow, made perfect sense. It was the afternoon after the wedding, which I left with a taste of sweetness of youth, and I saw myself in her. Also a collector of people, of experiences that were only wonderful because of the people in it. The joining of my story and hers that day cemented in me that the reality of my past is that it was wonderful mess. Beautiful.
But in the book, for every step Serena takes, there's Roberto. Ah, Roberto...
I have to express how proud I am of myself for actually powering this book through, despite of Roberto. His journey from page to my heart was arduous. A seventy year old man with a bag filled with regrets and pills who arrives in Rome in search of a ghost, an image of his deceased wife he had a brief marriage with, before cancer took her away. Someone who remembered all the pleasures of Rome, every taste, and because of health and old age, refused to enjoy it. Didn't he go to Rome to spend his last days? Weren't him full of sorrow? If he went to Rome to die, why prolong his days by not experiencing the city fully?
This much hatred for an imaginary character was obviously rooted deeper in me than I realized. First of all, Roberto reminded me of my father, who worked in insurance, lived life as he saw fit but regretted most of it by the end. My pinpointing that was a triumph for my therapist. Second of all, I have little to no patience for regret. Especially of old people (and here you can judge me or cancel me, I do not care). Because, as my therapist always says, people live the way they do because they feel pleasure in living that way. After all, a masochist self inflicts pain because he enjoys it, much in the same way we choose to live the way we do because there's pleasure in the root of every decision we make. And almost no one is in therapy. In the end, it's the wasted potential that drives me insane. I understand how the generations before us saw psychotherapy, a cult of the insane, and how taboo it was to even mention mental health, but I already have to deal with old people like that in real life, why would I suffer a character like this? A toast to Eduardo Krause for managing to write Roberto so obnoxiously, and for redeeming him in the only way that was possible: Through Serena.
"He states over and over that he did the best he could with what he had, which was not a lot, but isn't that how it happens for most people? Some fear, some sense of what's right and wrong, a lot of influence from who raised us and the place we were born and there's not much more to it."
But as I reached the final chapters I came to the conclusion that, maybe, the story was not one of regret, after all. As you reach the end of Roberto and Serena's brief encounter, I was happy to realize that even though Roberto wishes he had kept in touch with his daughter, or that he had had more time with his wife, he is mostly unapologetic about how he lived. He states over and over that he did the best he could with what he had, which was not a lot, but isn't that how it happens to most people? Some fear, some sense of what's right and wrong, a lot of influence from who raised us and the place we were born and there's not much more to it. But to know you did the best with what you had is to know what you had to give in the first place, your limitations and the limitations of your time. Very few people truly know that, instead, we mirror ourselves in others and hope we could have done more, or had been more. More than we are. Roberto is nothing like I thought in the beginning, a cautionary tale of how not to grow old. He might not have collected as many people or experiences as Serena (or me), but that does not make his life any less full, and it also does not make our lives, the collector's, in any way shallow. The story is about the beauty of this encounter, of the crazy and the ordinary, that's what made this book for me. A book that together with a wedding revived my old experiences and helped me, in no small way, to be proud of my past and of being myself from growing from it.
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