A woman bends over me

French Wine

Inizio

‘It's hard to describe the feeling of wonder and terror that accompanies life when you are living it without knowing it. The terror of not having any experience background to compare your living moments to, for most of the things you live you are living for the first time. To have to navigate life entirely through your cognitive abilities, much like when you were a kid, asking questions non-stop to try and get an answer for your big life questions. You can't quite put the words out there, for questions like "Why is it that adults are so sad and kids are so happy? And why is it that the older you get, the sadder you seem, and teenagers are just a weird in-between?". You couldn't ask an adult that, they would just get offended and offer you an answer that was not quite true, trying to decieve you just because you are little and backgroundless. Your 20s are much like that. You have to break your big life questions into small whys and whats little questions, because if you ask the big ones, someone might get offended, give you an inaccurate answer and take advantage of your littleness.

French Wine

We were drinking fancy French wine Marie had brought us and eating Parmesan cheese Ravenna’s parents had produced themselves. We were spread on our couch, with the TV turned on on the Italian parliament TV channel for Nico to soak in the news. 

He had some kind of obsession with this fucking channel. And if you asked him about it, he started speaking very fast in a very Chilean way about how it was his duty as an expat to be informed on Italian politics to best know how to position himself in the country’s political spectrum. He really just wanted to pick up topic conversations with Italian people and be able to mouthfully call people fascista with proper local arguments. 

"Nicolás, would you please stop obsessing over the Parlamento and give us your very interesting opinion on the difference between the European cinema and the American cinema." said Marie in an elongated voice, showing how bored she was by taking the last long drag of her cigarette and watching it fall through the window. "S'il vous plait."

"I am neither European nor North American. I can't give my opinion on it. Besides, I think both are shit.” Nico answered.

The Europeans in the room gasped in horror, and Nico and I laughed. I picked up his joke. 

"Yeah, I mean. European cinema is always about divorce or an invisible existential dread only Europeans have time and money to not only feel it, but also make a high-budgeted film about it." I said, trying to laugh to Marie, my poor French friend looking like the ground had fallen beneath her feet. 

"We get that you feel bad, you know." completed Nico. "Colonialism was shit, and the weight of carrying it might be a true burden on the soul. But would you, s'il vous plait, stop making movies about your collective karma."

Our European friends were looking at us like we had just invaded their country and killed its population. But none of them said anything, because we have been here before. They knew if they bought our joke, Nico and I would just keep making fun of them. 

"Sorry, ragazzi, we were just kidding. I actually like European cinema a lot." I said to break the tension.

"Well, I don’t. I really think it’s shit." Nico said without taking his eyes from the deputati arguing very passionately on the TV. "But you shall be forgiven for your ancestors’ dirty work."

"My ancestors had nothing to do with it." Said Ravenna, patting her crown as to remind us although she was Italian, she was black. "Anyway, aren’t you half Italian, you little piece of shit?" Ravenna inquired me, laughing.

"Well, if your country made me officially half Italian, è il tuo problema. I’m not involved in cinema or colonialism. I’m fully Brazilian."

Just as Ravenna and I were laughing, the intercom rang. Nico stood up to pick it up excitedly, cheering on how amazing it was that we were gonna meet his new friends from Advanced Physics class.