Like a Car on Gravel

On desire, hunger and the burning fire of clarity

I’ll go as far as to say that the man who came to take a look at my washing machine doesn’t do the laundry in his household.

Someone does, and I suspect it’s not him. He knows the components of the machine, what they do, and if and how to fix them. He can provide an accurate diagnosis and a solution to the damage. But once that’s done, his job is over. How his clean clothes find him when he needs them is likely neither his interest nor his bother. As long as they do.

What gave him away was his lack of empathy. As I jokingly moaned at the prospect of having to wash my clothes by hand, he gave me a condescending look followed by an elaborate, metaphor-rich explanation of all the reasons why I—The Modern Woman, The Irresponsibly Behaved—should not, under any circumstances, use the washing machine before he could fix it.

‘It’s like driving a car on gravel,’ he said. ‘When the car is fine—the shock absorbers intact, the tyres aligned—then driving on gravel is okay, as long as you don’t drive like a maniac. If the shock absorbers are off, or your tyres are deflated, then you’re going to damage other parts, too.’

‘Mm-hm,’ I nodded, avoiding any chance for further patronisation. ’Would you like a coffee?’ I asked, reverting to a form and function he might find more familiar.
’No, I’m fine, thanks. But I’ll take 50 euros as advance payment; a commitment on both ends.’

I left to fetch my wallet. When I returned to the kitchen with the cash, I found him sitting at the table with a pen and a pocket-sized notepad open to a fresh page. Without looking up, he snatched the banknote with his left hand, while with his right he wrote 50 euros next to my name and number. I looked at the notepad with incredulity. Was it meant to be an official work tool? What if he lost it? The idea didn’t seem to faze him. He had probably been using this system for fifty years and found it decently reliable—just as reliable as a laptop or iPad, I suppose. That shit could break! Or get stolen! Could be perfectly sensible counter-arguments. I had no reason to question the validity of his method. In fact, I surprised myself envying his analogue life.

‘Do you know when you’ll be able to be back for the repair?’ I asked him on his way out.
’No. I’ll be in touch when the replacements arrive so we can set an appointment.’

After he left, I went to the closet to count how many pairs of underwear I had left. Fourteen. Surely he’d call before then.

---

I was down to two pairs of underwear, and the technician hadn’t yet called. I was beginning to wonder whether he’d lost his little notepad or simply forgotten about me, given that he had no notification popping up to remind him of my existence. More likely, he was just taking his time—however much his time was. Given I had lost all sense of time outside the immediacy of contemporary digital life, I had no way of knowing. I lacked any measure for practical matters. In truth, I had no clear compass for much of anything: time, assertiveness, money, entitlement, you name it. How much is too much, how little is too little?

I was constantly unsure of whether I was allowed to require something, to want something—whether my desires were fair or, on the contrary, the result of poor judgement.

On an evening call with a friend:

‘I don’t know if I’m entitled to the time I’m taking to do what I want, even when it feels urgently vital, or even when a want is really a need. I always think there will be consequences. That this is just selfishness disguised as something else. That life will come back to bite me in the arse. There I am, reading and writing and taking walks and ignoring my phone; there I am, feeling at my happiest while the rest of my life collapses: work, housekeeping, friendships. It’s not a cause-and-effect situation, not really. It’s just what happens. I don’t know how to live.’

‘Maybe the problem is the rest of your life, then.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

‘Or maybe you just need someone to tell you what you already know. Is that what you want? I can be that for you. Do what you need to do,’ she said. ‘No one is going to be disappointed.’

‘Ah, fuck,’ I whispered, fat tears filling my eyes. I tilted my head up and blinked fast to stop them from running down my cheeks.

In the end, I gave myself that time. I had no choice. It felt like a blessing. For the record, life did come back to bite me in the arse. And I had no shield against its fangs, no reinforced pants protecting my soft tissues. I accepted what came and went on bleeding a little. Besides, I had decided not to call the technician. Instead, I went down to the store and bought more underwear. And that’s because, if there was one thing that was patently clear, it was this: fuck the handwashing. I was allowed to break the form and function that’d been given to me by birthright; I could not be The Handwasher without becoming The Selfish Witch. I was entitled to more knickers.

---

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring,
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

[T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets]

I have been thinking about desire a lot lately—how to extricate it from [Catholic-imprinted] guilt, disentangle it from thoughts of care and self-care, move beyond the false dichotomy of should versus would. What does the body desire? What does the mind? It’s hard to tell sometimes, hard to tune in amidst the noise, the merry-go-round, the muffled sensorial sphere.

Think.

I desire to walk in the cold air with earphones tuned into nothing. To bite into a crisp falafel sandwich with yoghurt sauce. To think a good thought, write a good sentence. To consume large expanses of time without watching where it goes. To be hugged. I desire to be free from expectations. I desire to live with less friction. I desire an exhausted body. Stupor. A martini. Skin.

Perhaps these thoughts circulating in my head are linked to the literary company I’ve been keeping—Maggie Nelson, Miranda July, Rebecca May Johnson. As it happens, and because it’s one of my long-time preoccupations, I have been thinking about desire in relation to the body as it moves in the direction of the kitchen—or not; as something stops it on the way there.

Not long ago, I re-read this passage from Johnson’s book, Small Fires:

It is hard when completely alone to contemplate feeding myself because it means locating my own desires in isolation and working to serve them—which is the thing I find most difficult, most alien. I have been dependent on living through the appetites and desires of others. Alone I am so often lost.

This hits very close to home.

I, too, learnt to feed myself through the act of cooking for others—for one other in particular. Never before had I spent my days imagining how my hunger could be satiated pleasurably. For a long time, my hunger was an unwanted presence, something I needed to ignore or, better still, tame. It was a lost cause, of course; hunger always managed to find its way back, screaming, reminding me of my inadequacy. You’re hungry because you’re weak, I’d tell myself. The value I attributed to myself was tied to my ability to control this weakness in a self-effacing exercise that came with the annihilation of any desiring instinct.

After that one other entered my life, however, I experienced a singular form of awakening, as though a light switch had been turned on and suddenly, a whole new portion of my consciousness had re-emerged from oblivion and was now in full view. I let it happen. Exhausted by years of crumpling control, I watched as he set out to unlock the dim cell in which my hunger had been serving its life sentence and, in a process of pardon without appeal, invited it to take a seat at the kitchen table. Hunger was given the right to speak. I was eager to hear its voice. And yet, after years in captivity, I soon discovered that it had lost any ability to assert its wants: it had no record, no solid instinct, no empirical experience. Desire thus had to be rewired into the limbic system, like a new language, one meal at a time.

Every day, we asked each other: what is it that we want to eat? And day after day, we created a life that found meaning in answering that simple question through the prism of our wants. My feral hunger turned into a purring pet. I cooked and fed and I was cooked for and I was fed. At first, it seemed visionary. But soon, it began to feel as if we were two blindfolded people groping around, feeling our way through, stuck in a constant, infinite sequence of right-nows: we had no declension for desire outside the present tense, outside of the realm of the next meal. In hindsight, this was a predictable recipe for sadness, and still I wonder when it all began to lose significance.

Now that I live alone, I feel as if my fluency in that fiercely desiring feeding language has slowly faded, partially because practicing it would seem to me as if I were talking to myself: a signal of lunacy. My desire now—or rather, my first instinct—is to go for the immediate, the practical. That seems more sensible. Hunger becomes something to attend to without bells and whistles: I acknowledge it, but it has to be acquiesced in a matter of instants. There’s rarely meaning in the preparation or pleasure in the anticipation. In my solitude, I seem to lack what’s required to make the investment—the time, the errands, the dirty pans—of cooking for myself worthwhile. I cannot bring myself to think: You are the only beneficiary of this whole production, and that’s still a perfectly good reason to put it up.

Again and again, I have to remind myself to be kind to the body I inhabit.

---

After three weeks, the technician called and asked if he could come that same day to finish the job. I was annoyed at the lack of warning but decided to zip it and say yes, you certainly can, I’ll reschedule my meetings.

He was punctual. In what seemed like three seconds, he climbed two flights of stairs and arrived at the door, skipping all formalities as he made his way to the bathroom. He worked for half an hour or so, kneeling on the hard tiles of the bathroom floor as if his knees had the built-in padding of a toddler. Here and there, he asked for a rag, a bucket, some kitchen paper. For the most part, though, I understood he didn’t need my presence and preferred to have me out of the way; I obliged by keeping to the kitchen and to myself—typing, drinking the second coffee he didn’t accept.

Only when I heard the rumbling sound of the washing machine being turned on did I dare standing up to check on him. ‘Everything OK?’ I asked, standing on the threshold to avoid invading his working space. Yes, he said. He had replaced the springs and shock absorbers, but the machine wasn’t top-notch to begin with, so I should be careful not to fill it with heavy things like duvet covers and bottom sheets in the same cycle. Fair enough, I said, restituting his metaphor for the car on gravel, telling him, not without an ironic twist in my tone, that I had learnt my lesson. He smiled at me then. ‘You can mock me if you want,’ he said. ‘I only said it because I can see you’re a bit reckless.’

Am I the driver, then? Or am I the car?

He told me to monitor the cycle and see if everything worked fine, to call him if I noticed any malfunction. I said I would, that I would move my plans and remain at home to monitor the situation. He seemed pleased by my answer: once again, form and function coincided with those he had in his head. The Reckless had been quickly replaced by The Reasonable.

I paid him and watched him rip my page from his little notepad. My case was closed. No record on file.

---

This week, I found myself cooking two dishes that used to be a recurrent presence in my life and that, somehow, had gone amiss. Both belonged to the life of purring hunger: they required time or, at the very least, some form of foresight. Both had a nourishing nature, an element of goodness that borders on self-care. Perhaps it’s this last trait I unconsciously rejected. The reasons are obscure to me, and still, the suspicion persists.

The first recipe is a fennel and bean concoction in which the braised fennel and white beans bob in a lemon- and white-wine-spiked broth. The second is a quinoa salad with roasted broccoli and avocado I used to make all the time as a packed lunch. The former is a recipe by Heidi Swanson. The latter, I have lost any record of authorship.

It’s hard to trace the igniting thought that set the process of cooking these dishes in motion—whether the recipes had already moved to the sphere of consciousness when I went to the greengrocer and asked for fennel, broccoli, and avocado, or whether it was the presence of these ingredients in my fridge, like pieces of a puzzle I had composed many times before, that summoned the flavour memory of those preparations. What’s certain is that the steps, the gestures, came to me so instinctively that I wonder whether this whole thing—this whole feeding one’s hunger thing—is really just like learning to ride a bicycle, or like an atrophied muscle that has, despite everything, the ability to bounce back.

I made both recipes over the weekend—a silent weekend in which I let the feeling of freedom and emptiness pierce me from side to side, as if I needed yet another glimpse of understanding about the space I ought to occupy whenever possible, however hard. In between, I cooked the quinoa, soaked and then cooked the dried beans, blanched and roasted the broccoli, parboiled the fennel. I tossed the quinoa with the roasted broccoli and half a sliced avocado, drizzled it with oil and lemon juice, sprinkled it with salt, sumac, and pumpkin seeds, and packed it into two lunch boxes, ready for the week.

Then, I prepared the braised fennel with the beans, browning the sliced, blanched fennel in olive oil, adding the cooked cannellini, and, once fragrant, showering the lot with a blend of wine, lemon, and a bit of water that hissed furiously the moment it touched the hot pan. I let the liquid evaporate almost completely, the juices thicken, and the sugars caramelise before scooping out a generous portion and topping it with black olive pâté, a dollop of goat’s cheese, and an afterthought of shichimi togarashi a dear friend had brought me back from Asia.

I ate while reading the last pages of A Month in Siena, a book I had bought and set aside for a time before eventually picking it up with renewed eyes. I found this passage towards the end; it resonated in the same way any piece of great literature does: by giving words to wordless feelings.

I felt as though I were, with the passing of each day, coming a step closer to a fire. It warmed and delighted but, I somehow knew, was capable of annihilating me. And I suspected, in the silence of those days, that that might be the fire’s true desire.

In solitude, I too had found the clarity I so intensely desired—wanted, needed—but then I quickly lost the ability to measure its consequences. Blindly, I had come too close to its fire and something had begun to burn.

I decided, at that very moment, to go out for a walk, get some sunshine on my face, see some people, and phone a friend. As I walked, roaming around the backroads of Castello, a strong wind pushing me around at every turn, I told this friend about the washing machine, about the technician, about about the books I’ve been reading, and she told me about her family and the books she’s been reading, and right then, in this exchange of notes, I found that the reason for my alonement wasn’t a distance from people as much as a distance from platitude. I wanted to occupy the space of a rich conversation. I desired and missed that dearly.

Before saying goodbye, she told me she was pleased to hear my voice. ‘So am I,’ I said. ‘We should do this more often.’