Clean slate | Arrital

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April 2024 • Cristina Marconi

Clean slate

It looked like a large vermilion mouth, ready to snap open, with two panels like lips leaning against each other near the top revealing a row of ivory plates as straight as teeth. Mounted there, above the camping stove in that leaden space of hospital tiles and cracked cement, the cupboard didn’t just make an impression, it stole the scene, turned it upside down.

The entire kitchen had become this elegant red cupboard that had eaten everything.
“The important thing is to start.”
He stepped back to enjoy the result.
“Wouldn’t it be better to get a new stove?”
“This looks nicer.”
“But that’s useful!”
“We can still eat, can’t we?”
“If you say so.”

For months he’d prepared for this arrival, without telling me about it. But he was the master and I was the pupil. We’d scour the city for beautiful objects without ever buying them in an endless exploratory mission dictated by finances but also an ideal of frugality and perfection. It was important to him that I understood how they were made, that I noticed the essence of their design, their materials, and that I nipped in the bud my youthful enthusiasm for junk. Our life as roommates was a simple ceremony in which everything had value, and nothing was left to chance. “You’ll see that beauty is contagious,” he said as he polished the stove like it was Her Majesty’s silverware. Something did happen. The large red cupboard made us behave for a few days, straight-backed and elated, even just eating some soup from the chipped bowl.

I found myself arranging fruit with new focus, striving to bring out the transparency of the grapes against the light of the small window and welcoming the distant, refreshing chromatic kinship between the Hokkaido pumpkin and the cupboard. When I ran out of dish soap, I opted for a clear liquid in a simple bottle whose garish label I removed. I set some money aside and one day came home with placemats the color of anthracite, which seemed to remind the cupboard to never stop being so red. He approved, warning me not to overdo it. Against that dark background, even glasses from the supermarket suddenly took on a pleasingly spare Scandinavian look. I started paying more attention to how I did my hair and how I walked, the neckline of my shirts and the colors that actually flattered me. With all the walking and frugality, I’d also slimmed down a lot. Then one day, after so much soup, he found the money to accompany the cupboard with a long anthracite piece of furniture – perhaps inspired by me and my placemats? I took it as a tribute to my nascent taste, which found room for everything: the oven and the stove, even a little dishwasher, drawers that slid like ice skates, and shelves for pots and plates, even if they mostly dried peacefully in the rack of the red satin cupboard.

“If you think about it, the color slate is like a blank page: you can write a story on it.” When the camping stove disappeared, our dinners became more elaborate: chicken broths and sauteed vegetables, Asian experiments, and sumptuous salads. The chipped dishes shone with awareness of their dilapidated charm, like an antique dinner service handed down over the centuries. Every so often we dropped one to speed up their necessary replacement. The table with its sad court of chairs, on the other hand, refused to be infected. “Why do you think that is?” “They know they’re in the minority, they feel surrounded.” I tried covering it with a dark sheet – I wouldn’t have found a tablecloth in that place – and the kitchen suddenly felt like a shabby dinette. I removed it immediately, hoping he hadn’t seen anything.

I started paying more attention to how I did my hair and how I walked, the neckline of my shirts and the colors that actually flattered me. With all the walking and frugality, I’d also slimmed down a lot. Then one day, after so much soup, he found the money to accompany the cupboard with a long anthracite piece of furniture – perhaps inspired by me and my placemats? I took it as a tribute to my nascent taste, which found room for everything: the oven and the stove, even a little dishwasher, drawers that slid like ice skates, and shelves for pots and plates, even if they mostly dried peacefully in the rack of the red satin cupboard.

Cristina Marconi (Rome, 1979) is a journalist and writer; she graduated from the Scuola Normale di Pisa in Philosophy. She has written about foreign affairs, culture, and economics for many publications from Brussels and from London for over ten years. Her debut novel Città irreale (Ponte alle Grazie, 2019), a novel about a generation of Europeans who chose the United Kingdom before Brexit, won the Rapallo Opera Prima and Severino Cesari prizes and was short-listed for the Strega Prize. Her next works A Londra con Virginia Woolf (Giulio Perrone Editore, 2021) and a collection of love letters Come dirti addio (NeriPozza, 2022), and her new novel, Stelle solitarie (Einaudi, 2024) set in Texas. She teaches writing at Scuola Belleville and writes for Il Foglio from Milan, her current home.

One rainy day, he came home carefully rolling a small oval slab of gray cipollino marble. It was very heavy, but as soon as we put it on the old table, something happened. The chairs struck a pose, they started talking to each other with the euphoria of a puzzle that’s nearly complete. The bell rang and two young men appeared with the table’s base. When they were done assembling the set, we invited them for a glass of cheap, cold, excellent Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil. Already with just four of us it seemed like a real party. After a while they left with the Formica table, but not before it could bestow what remained of its charm, its domestic warmth, on its refined successor. A few weeks later while home alone with the cat, I found a simple chair by itself outside the door, its gray color having taken on a bit of blue but pretending to have forgotten about it. There was no doubt: it was for us. Rufus jumped on it and swished his tail across the thin laths, as if wanting to play the harp. I brought her to her companions, who clung to each other and slowly left the scene one at a time, like dancers who disappear backstage after one last grand jeté. That was it. While before we needed a bouquet of flowers to brighten up the room, now all it took was a daisy stolen from the park. Even the fridge’s mumbling sounded different landing on soft contours rather than in a void. The vermilion cupboard, whose color stood out on Paris’s many rainy days, smiled from above, showing off a row of immaculate dishes. I’d chosen them after trawling hard-discount supermarkets and department stores for the perfect design, a modest simplicity, and pure functionality. I even bought an extra bowl-shaped one for Rufus, who approved. “Beauty is contagious, what did I tell you?”