Bergolo
It was the summer of 2021 when I first arrived in Bergolo. I came here because I didn’t know what to do, where else to be? I didn’t have much money, I didn’t have friends to stay with, I didn’t have a job or any clarity on what I wanted to do. I was simply an explorer, writing my little journal on Facebook, making stories, and hoping that my crush would see them and be impressed by the hippie I am.
It was more than 2 years ago. The same year when I was looking in desperation to the sky in Korinthos, asking for a solution from the God of Cocoa and the stars. Where shall I go? What shall I do? It all seems so vain.
It was more than 2 years ago, when I was walking across that bridge in Ommen, wondering shall I stay here for a while? My friend back then asked me what is my reason. “I want to save 4000 euros so that I can go and travel in South America.”, I said. Back then saving 4k was something to achieve. I didn’t have a job, a house, or a plan. Just that moment there, on a cold September day in the Netherlands, walking around the market and looking at the hats.
Once I decided to stay, everything came into its place. The same day I found a home, a roommate, and my dream job. As if the Universe was pouring all its gifts on me so that I could be happy and grow. Little did I know, that two years and a half later, I would think about that day, on that bridge, with bitterness and regret.
I remember a talk with my dad, more than 2 years ago, a few days before that bridge scene. “I am so tired of that”, I said. So tired of traveling alone, hoping to find my answers somewhere out there, in the next person or on the next train. I was 27 and exhausted of the homeless-ness. Caring a little grief in my chest everywhere, always with me.
It was in Bergolo, more than 2 years ago, the first time I arrived here. My little green tent was hidden in the forest, close to the camping. There were no other people and I was really afraid to stay. My first night alone in the forest. The context is lost, yet I remember receiving that message from my dad: “How long do you want to carry that sorrow?” Which sorrow? How did he know better than me what was living in my throat?
That day, we were walking and talking, a conversation where all was welcomed and nobody expected anything. I said “yes” on that bridge and today I wonder, what did I say yes to?
Was it a yes to my future or was it a yes for the past? Did I think I could hold the past by staying there? That my community, my careless days, my dreams, it will all just stay because I am staying? Was it an attempt to nest in a place that was meant to be left behind? Or I wanted to prove that I am a winner, that I can have it all.
After that, days were rolling one after the other. New jobs, new money, some new people, new places. I took off the hippie clothes, the long black skirt, the hoodies. The big dark blue backpack was exchanged for a big dark blue suitcase that my mother gave me as a present. The smelly bungalow in Ommen was exchanged for comfortable apartments in beige. Naples, Rome, Paris, London. Europe was mine to travel. The cheap hostels and my little tent were in the past. It was time for artistic AIRBNB rooms and SPA centers. The 4000 Euro that I dreamed of saving, now seemed so little. My monthly budget.
For two years I had the chance to enter the life of a new social class, where I suddenly felt way more at home. I liked wearing these socks for 25 euros or to take the plane just for a party or a concert. I loved my big bed, cotton linen, the expensive tea boxes, the yoga classes, and the way my face cream was touching my skin in the morning. I loved to listen to the New Yorker’s podcasts and that sense of belonging, because I can afford the subscription. I enjoyed that somebody was cleaning my house when I was not there and all my food was organic.
The grief, the sadness that I was carrying in my throat and chest for so long, it was gone. Replaced by a vague desire to live. To reach out to the world and bath in its abundance. When I say “the world”, I mean the cultured world of concerts, sex parties, polyamory, family restaurants with stars, and lazy community brunches on a Saturday morning. I mean the little island of safety and pleasure, where poverty and bad taste do not exist.
Exactly when I was ready to live my dreams of freedom and mental stimulation, life brought me back here, in Bergolo. The same little town in the mountains that I came to visit out of desperation more than 2 years ago.
I was given a tiny room, half the size of my bathroom back home. The room was part of a tiny wooden bungalow, situated only a minute's walk from where my old tent was more than 2 years ago. I was left with the silence, broken only by the sound of the heating system. And a bottle of Nebbiolo that I had nobody to share with. And the thought that in less than two months I am turning 30.
“My 20s are over” is what woke me up in the morning. My 20’s are over and my dream to save 4000 euros and travel around South America seems even further away. I remember how, in the summer of 2018, when I was just 24, we were lying in bed with my ex after another crazy night out, and dreaming. He would hug me and in the warm little room, we would imagine how we would travel to Bogota. Well, back then our dreams were simple - to drink rhum from the casks and do the best cocaine in the world. We would listen to Stan Getz on my little JBL Go, unable to fall asleep, but too drunk to have sex. In that helplessness, we could find a little comfort before the next long working shift.
Later, when I was 26, with my two friends and flatmates in the Netherlands, we were dreaming of going to Brazil, to understand the big meaning behind everything. We would learn how to do coaching with horses and volunteer in communities. We would do ayahuasca and take shrooms in the jungle. Life seemed to be so juicy there and we could get lost in that ancient virgin land from our imagination. Yet, the spring was coming and there was a garden to be planted. There was another love story and Brazil could wait.
Brazil could wait also one year later, when I was sitting on the shore in Athens, watching the waves breaking on the big rocks under me. The sun was down, coloring the horizon in golden and pink. I was thinking about that Italian lover. It would be so great to travel around South America with him. To have wild sex in abandoned places and do peyote. But he didn’t call back and Athens was so beautiful in the Fall.
On that bridge in Ommen, it was the last time to dream about South America. “I will save 4000 euros and go travel in South America”, I said and it was over. After that moment, the days were rolling one after another and success seemed to be closer and closer. Yet there were no more dreams. No more big dreams that could warm me in the night before my long day tomorrow. No more conversations in the middle of the night, all sweaty in the tiny bed. After that moment, there were no more bottles of wine, gently emptied over a conversation that left shivers in my chest. There was no more holding hands and saying big words, taking crazy trips, no more last kisses and crying together. No more lovers, no more moments to remember. No more big decisions were taken.
Maybe just some tears over a song, in the bus. Maybe a memory that I would wave to disperse, as I am doing with an annoying fly. Maybe a short talk, where half of the sentences are left unsaid. Maybe a moment of bursting emotion, captured in a letter or a poem, never published.
After that bridge, she was gone. The girl with a hippie black skirt and curly short hair, smiling at life with wonder. She left.
Yesterday, in the middle of the night, while listening to the silence and enjoying alone that bottle of Nebbiolo, I was thinking: “I miss that girl! I miss her so much.” Maybe this is why today while chewing on my apple, I heard her speaking to me. “If I was so funny and nice, why did nobody stay? Why did no one choose to come with me to Brazil? Why nobody was there to have wild sex in the jungle? Why did none of my big dreams come true? Why did I visit the best places on Earth all alone? Why all the nights when there was nobody to dream with?”
Suddenly there were tears in my eyes. No anger or regret, just sadness. Like crying over something broken that you know it was time to let go of. I wished that I could call a friend and they would come by, and pick me up in a warm car, where my feet would finally relax. I wished that we would go to a little place, where we could laugh over a warm plate of ragu and a glass of unpretentious wine. I wished for those simple pleasures of connection. A brief reflection over a book, or watching a movie together. Maybe the peyote and the cocaine were in the past, but the long walks in the woods, accompanied by silence, were still longed for.
There was nobody I wanted to call and nobody nearby. The few people in Bergolo were busy with their things, just like my friends outside of the village. The distance was growing. The distance of our souls in the frame of a conversation. And not because of the others. Suddenly the beginning of “L’etranger” was in my head. “Mama est mort.” and I could sense the meaning of that alienation on my skin and in my guts.
Were the red wine and the warm ragu a tool to magically melt the layer of the daily dust, collected and thick with each day? Maybe the purpose of that hand I was imagining, that fingers of the other, was to dig up in the dust, violently, with the right of a passion or lust, and to press me in the places where I could hear her voice again? The voice of the girl with the big backpack, who is maybe still traveling around Europe and getting enthusiastic over a handful of hazelnuts.
Suddenly I wanted to leave everything behind and hold her. “Let’s go! Let’s go, Joanna! We will take the train and stop at Porta Nuova. There, in your favorite bookstore, you will buy a copy of Kafka’s books. Doesn’t matter which one. We will eat ragu and then go somewhere far, far away. So far, where the sun is warm and you can swim in the shallows of the sea. We will read, contemplating the beauty and the sadness of life, secretly waiting for another love on the horizon. We would meet strangers and ask them to watch Fellini with us. Maybe even write on a Sunday morning…”
I felt she was happy. Suddenly, she was dreaming again. We were good together and I felt sensing her, after so many months of separation, was quite special. But then another voice appeared to remind me of the deadlines. I liked this one as well. She helped me put things in order and rent that nice flat. She was also in a hurry to be a mother, to be fitter, and to make more money at the end of the year.
It was cold again and I was standing there, in the middle, listening to those two arguing over the meaning of life. Realizing there was nothing else to do, I continued writing
