The Clear Confusion

By Valerio Carbone

Halfway between a surreal fairy tale and the classic comedy of errors, the “true” story of C., a seventeen-year-old girl who woke up one morning divided into two people. Recurring events and situations, intertwining between small twists, marked page after page by an ironic and fast rhythm. Like that each C. comes to life, splitting in turn into unlimited combinations, each apt to seek completeness without knowing how to renounce her own characteristic choices. A post-modern version of the fable of infinite plurality of worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Haiku
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071552605

Book preview

Series

haikujazz

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1

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Valerio Carbone

THE CLEAR CONFUSION

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I

One morning C., waking up from restless dreams, finds herself divided into two people.

Lying one on top of the other in their unexpectedly tiny bed, each immediately feels a strange warmth. What happened?, C. asks first, poking a foot in the other's side, who then cries in terror.

Both, reluctantly, realize that it was not just a bad dream.

– This is no good, we need to understand what happened! – determines C. while getting up from the bed and silencing her clone. She undresses and begins to quibble about the possible causes of that strange effect. – It is essential that we do not have anything missing! – checking her face, hands, pyjama cuffs, the rest.

Mum, having heard her scream, had meanwhile approached the room. Luckily she does not enter, only knocks on the door with the usual vehemence:

– Sweetlove, is everything all right? – she asks in a croaking mother's voice, – did you have that terrible nightmare again?

No, this time it wasn't the gleaming-gecko-exterminating-people who was the problem.

The C. who immediately proved more emotional finds herself even more terrified and with breathlessness, she flounders in tears. The other immediately closes her mouth with a quick movement: she needs to prevent that silly girl from blurting everything out to their mother.

– The usual gecko bad dream! – she says and waits for her mother to walk away. She then turns, whispering, to her most anxious part: – Stop crying, we must come up with a plan! – she mulls it over, before offering: – You get ready, go! Get down and have breakfast, go to school... Try to pretend nothing has happened. – she then grabs the anxiolytics that an old psychotherapist had prescribed. – Take these! – she slaps them in the other’s mouth, before plugging it again. – When the house will be finally empty, I’ll go out and find out the cause of this strange mitosis. – the other C. winces at the sound of that one word, swallows the pills and wipes her tears. – See you tonight with the solution.

Having said this, with a know-it-all attitude, C. finally frees the lips of the other urging her to do her duty.

***

Barely holding back the tears, the other C. begins to prepare for school. She washes quickly, distractedly gets dressed, takes her glasses from the bedside table. She goes down the stairs to the kitchen and eats silently, trying as best as she can to hide her enormous distress. She cannot.

– What’s up, sweetlove, why the odd face? – mum is nice but far too indiscreet. She knows her like the back of her hand, practically her whole life.

– That damn ugly gecko... – repeats C. unconvincingly.

Mum hugs her before giving her a more severe look:

– It's because of that philosopher, isn't it? – she refers to the bad boy C. was dating recently, and who fortunately had left her just the night before. – Do you miss him a lot, my honeybun? – with an accommodating as well as sappy voice.

C. does not answer only because she doesn’t know what to say. In fact, she feels a certain longing for that boy, a much greater pain than the previous evening. Now it’s as if she could not explain the reason for that regret.

Her mother, of course, cannot grasp the meaning of that profound confusion of hers, nor can she imagine what happened to her daughter. As a mother, she merely reproached her:

– Let's go back to aunt Giggetta on Friday. – namely her sister, the psychologist. – Fix your face though. Tie your hair up, put on another shirt, don't think about the gecko, smile. Always smile. – catches her breath: – Have you prepared for the history test?

C. swallows her milk, cloudy from crumbs and nibbles on tasteless and colourless biscuits.

Mum accompanies her pink-dressed darling to school.

***

C., in the meantime, waited for the house to empty.

Now she knows that her clone is at school and that her mother, more or less, would have reached the office. It’s still cool, she looks out the window, it's almost nine. She spent that strange time hidden inside the bathroom, in profound silence, studying a book on unified field, perhaps looking for some enlightenment. There must be a constant that allows me to understand, – she daringly reasons – a variable that explains the reason for this split....

She even thinks she has stumbled upon a strange gravitational field!

She prepares her scout backpack, fills it with compasses, books, tools. She searches among the unused stuff for an old pair of glasses, – because C. took the usual ones, – leaves the house without being seen by too many indiscreet neighbours.

She goes to the study of her ex-boyfriend, the wacky philosopher-poet-great-writer who had left her (only) to test her.

She drops in front of him without even a greeting.

– Sorry if I came here. I know you asked not to see each other... – she says without emphasis – but this morning something really incredible happened to me. I wanted an opinion from a respected philosopher. – He almost does not believe what C. is shamelessly babbling: – It is as if a part of me has left me... That is, yes, it has gone away! You understand that I had to come here to talk to you...

The