Looking for an old man – 04/04/2024 – Tati Bernardi

#man #Tati #Bernardi

The other day I saw an elderly couple buying a rug and I was upset. Each time the salesman unfurled a new tapestry option, it was as if the whole truth was revealed to me: I want to get old and I want someone to get old with me.

It’s not Paris, much less Machu Picchu. It’s not hallucinogenic tea, much less a gated community with fake waves in Porto Feliz. It’s someone to say “I think our lucky bamboo will look better about ten centimeters to the left”.

Don’t ask me to visit a cool place in the city center, I despise all cool places in the city center. Tell me that you’ll go with me to my colonoscopy (and that my lust won’t be shaken), read books in silence while I read books in silence (and only our lying feet meet and dance together) and wait for me while I choose, calmly, my airtight pots at good prices.

The horror I am feeling only because I foresee the revival of my spirits. Meeting new people, wearing kitten clothes, shouting into my ears near a speaker, sleeping late, anxiously waiting for messages, excitedly telling my stories in a cool place in the city center (and I was desperate without seeing the menu even with my reading glasses).

I’m terrified: maybe I’ll like you again Carnaval, kiss young boys, have those cystitis at the beginning of a relationship. And all this for what? Just thinking about it makes me feel lazy about life that repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats itself. No man wants to get old and I, who is just getting older, don’t want any more men.

I achieved much more than I imagined in my professional life, so these days I thought “well, that’s it, it’s great”. And I really came to peace with my giving up on my love life. He arrives. I’m going to read, study, take care of my daughter, work like crazy and one day die a little. But my iliac crest didn’t agree. My excitement still believes in things that not even my eyes, much less my heart, can see.

How much I miss walking hand in hand with Leroy Merlin to choose the clothesline (I don’t even remember if this scene actually happened, but I keep this image as if I had seen it in the most beautiful French film). I, who come from a tiny, disunited, broken family, had to agree with myself, as a teenager, that one day I would form a new and beautiful family. In the following decades I would still read a lot of philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, depressive authors, cynical intellectuals, but I would continue to be obsessed with the same desire.

I’m five feet tall. I was five feet tall, but apparently I shrunk an inch. If you look at me closely, and on sunny days, you will discover that I have green eyes. I spend all my money, so I come up with 37 more fun projects (we won’t lack for topics or excitement). I complain a lot, but my friends think I’m funny for that very reason. I have body aches, but they don’t take away even 1% of my splendid and endless libido.

I hadn’t been able to cry for months (you see, tired eyes don’t have time to deal with tears). I cried in the carpet store, but I still don’t know if it was rhinitis or hope.