The Strongest Resistance

I find her amongst Moroccan men and rusty bikes on Via Bernardino Lanino. Her
SLR camera doesnt have a lens cap and is strapped around her like a satchel. Today
she will take 3 photos - an old man repairing watches, a trolley full of cow parts and
me reading the lunch menu.
Before the pasta arrives she explains, in frightening detail, her university report on
electrical waves and their relationship to other electrical waves. Electric relationships
are intense and complex.
She pays for my lunch with her parents money and we walk around the Saturday
market. She buys a long, skinny salami and bites it immediately. I smell it as she lists
her top 10 salamis. I buy a cabbage from my favourite old farmer, the one that the
Spanish filmmaker spent seven years filming. We walk some more. She panics and
announces her decision to go home and study (as always) but buys cheese instead.
The ratio between our hours together and her goodbyes increases steadily. I never
know which goodbye is the definitive. But I like uncertainty.
The cheese is gone and she must study.
Goodbye, I say. She asks if I want to come and drink tea at her student
accommodation.
On a tram she asks if I am good at chess. I say that I have only ever played against
kids on the high end of the Autism Spectrum and they always win. She will probably
win.
Are you good? she asks.
No, I say.
Forget it, will be boring.
The tram turns a corner and she grabs my arm with both her hands.

Ohmate, she includes words from my home. I always recognise the silence that
comes before she calls me mate, have you your identification? You need it to get
into my house.
Our eyes pause on each other, as we put her hands and my arm in a square bracket to
become their own complicated parenthesis. For a moment I am only an arm and cant
even remember what it means to have identity.
In her little room we drink the tea we planned. She lists the entire discography of the
singer, Sixto Rodriguez. I had played him to her. It was 3am and she was holding that
dusty superseded computer innard that my housemate found next to a bin. She
thought it to be the greatest thing in my house. She interrupted her verbal diagram of
where the wires of 1992 went to enquire who was singing. Since then she researched
him and every other thing. She is the greater expert on my personal interests.
I didnt know about the 70s film where a lady is naked the entire time. A song of
Rodriguez features in it. We try to download the naked lady film. There is a
connection problem. We give up and listen to Crucify Your Mind instead.
Were you tortured by your own thirst in those pleasures that you seek?
Half a cup of tea and I am on her bed. She is standing with the marker at her
whiteboard explaining calculus to me. I am sweating because tea is hot, numbers
make me nervous and the central heating is too high.
Next-door in the kitchen I can hear every other student clinking wine glasses and
singing Feliz Navidad. She is drawing lines and graphs and Y's and B's and decimal
points. She finds fault and draws a broken line of uncertainty in the middle of
everything (she dislikes uncertainty). I request a cigarette break.
In our first ever first meeting, opposite each other, she placed 2 cigarettes on the table
to demonstrate the distance between her and her Sicilian volcano.
This is me. This is my volcano. Very close. Smoke?

I watched her smoking the volcano. She watched me smoking her. The distance going
up in smoke.
On the laundry balcony we watch the lit up gym below. Its empty. I tell her we think
differently but I enjoy that. A ball rolls across court. I tell her my mind goes to some
fanciful narratives around moments and people and symbology. That is how I live as a
storyteller. She narrows it down to a maths equation of input, output and response.
Someone appears and picks up the ball. For a moment I am simplified.
She says people think she is weird and don't understand her. I want to tell her that I
do, somehow, even if I cant follow all the electro magnetic paths she has steered me
down on 5am couches. But I say, instead, they aren't the right people. She considers
this for a while. We smoke in silence in the winter darkness. She breaks the moment
and says she now must study (as always). I say I will go.
Im hugging my cabbage when she goes to the other side end of her room.
Aspetta! OhMate? She takes a small wooden box from the shelf, and pulls out
one of many neat little plastic bags filled with small wires. She places a wire in my
hand.
This is for you. Its very powerful, it has the strongest resistance.
She measured it with her yellow measure-electricity-thing machine that arrived by
express post last week. Its one of few things in her room aside from the whiteboard,
laptop and the photo of her volcano by the Sicilian sea. She says to keep it with me
always. I know already I will.
I walk out the door, leaving behind a white board with all the sums she made for us. I
turn and begin the conclusive goodbye. She ignores me, takes the cabbage from my
arms and follows me into the elevator.
We stand in the rain either side of my bike. The part we never planned.
Next week I will be back in Australia. Next week she will be opposite her Sicilian
volcano. This could equal not seeing each other ever again. We say nothing of it. (She

dislikes uncertainty). She carefully places the cabbage in the bike basket. I feel a
sudden urge to smoke two cigarettes side by side in my mouth.
Ok mate she says quietly. I nod. We streamline a series of fill in words.
Alright then,
Va bene,
Si,
Yes,
So, ok.
Allora
Bye amica and then,
Ohciao. Mate.
Our story breaks the rules of Italian romance formula and ends here with her walking
away rapidly, head down, towards unsolved sums without looking back (as always).
Me, standing like a carefully placed cabbage, imagining that not even all the
cigarettes in Italy could accurately demonstrate the distance between now and where I
want to be.
She said once that sometimes the most obvious equations dont add up and that makes
her sad. She dislikes the uncertainty. I get on my bike. The only official bike path in
Torino is from her house to mine. I ride down the broken line with a new dislike for
the uncertainty in mathematics, carrying the remainder of us all the way home. The
strongest resistance.