by I’m near the end of the third book in Elena Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan series. It’s dramatic and unputdownable, and very hard to read at the same time. The violence, the backstabbing, everybody’s lives being so intertwined, every moment of every day being no more than the next move in an impossible game. I would like to visit Naples sometime, but the life portrayed in the series of books is my idea of hell, and there’s only so much of that I can take. A lot of it is just me, I’m sure. I think I’m a nice person, and I’m able to get on with and connect with most other people. But I rarely have close relationships, I’ve never been part of an in-group (with a complementary out-group), never at school, never at work, never anywhere; I’m just me, navigating my way through life as unobtrusively as possible. That’s how upending my life and coming to Romania wasn’t that hard, psychologically, even if it was somewhat challenging on a practical level. Quite possibly I have low-level autism – I used to attend groups for autistic people in New Zealand, originally because I wanted to work with autistic people – and found the frankness, the crap-cutting, to be refreshing. But in these books you’ve got the exact opposite of autism, if such a thing exists, where every word or action is hyper-analysed, given a secondary, tertiary meaning. It’s a fascinating read, but just gimme someone quiet and unassuming, somebody likeable, just one among the dozens of characters. Fundamentally, the lack of likeable characters is a problem for me.
Last night I tried staying up to watch the women’s US Open final between Naomi Osaka and Viktoria Azarenka, but even though it didn’t start that late – 11pm – I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was a good match, the bits I saw anyway, and fortunes whipsawed wildly. Azarenka stormed out to 6-1 2-0, but Osaka then raced into a 1-6 6-3 4-1 lead. Then I woke up and things got exciting. Azarenka won a pair of long games to get back to 3-4 with her serve to come, but Osaka broke in the next game and served out for her second US Open title and third grand slam overall. Osaka was the first woman to win the final after dropping the first set since Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario way back in 1994. Osaka became something of a sensation for her masks. For each match, she wore a mask bearing the name of a black victim of police violence. Last night’s mask carried the name of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland six years ago. Her quarter-final mask had George Floyd’s name on it. The men’s final between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem takes place tonight, but I can’t realistically watch it. Incredibly, it will be the first time that a man born in the nineties wins a grand slam. It hasn’t been a normal tournament. No juniors, no qualifying, no mixed doubles (though, outside Wimbledon, that functions as an exhibition anyway), and the men’s and women’s doubles draws reduced from 64 pairs to 32. Importantly, nobody was allowed to play both singles and doubles.
I should be playing tennis tonight. Last Sunday was our first session for four weeks, as some of the regulars had been away on holiday. The bloke who lives on my floor had grown a beard in that time, and I remarked upon that. He told me that his elderly mother had died, and it was a Romanian tradition for men not to shave for forty days afterwards. Death rites are quite complex here – a big part of them is the pomană – sharing of food at specific intervals after someone dies, with the final “feast” occurring after seven years.
Last Monday I played Monopoly for the first time this century, with the Romanian version. The eleven-year-old boy wanted to play. We were both pretty hazy about the rules. He started to build houses and hotels willy-nilly before I figured that something was probably amiss. Everything was in Romanian, and once I did myself out of £300 (euros, dollars, I honestly don’t know), thinking I had to pay £150 instead of receive it. I took photos of the board and bits and pieces, and we’ll resume tomorrow. Getting paid (real money) to play Monopoly isn’t too bad.
My aunt has had a lot of stomach trouble, and has been almost unable to see anybody about it. Waiting hours on a phone line that you have to pay for, and spending more hours in a waiting room if you even get that far – that’s all normal now in Britain’s almost third-world health system. It was bad enough before Covid, but since March the gaping holes have been laid bare for all to see. In the last six months, people have died in their tens of thousands of cancer and other non-Covid-related conditions, and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter – Covid case numbers are now climbing fast. My aunt would be better off in Romania.
Mum and Dad got back from Moeraki on Friday night, their time. They had better weather than was forecast. I was quite envious when they told me about getting fish and chips in Temuka on the way back, from the fairly rough-and-ready shop just around the corner from where my grandparents used to live.
