My wife had long since confessed to me that, perhaps for some karmic or astrological reason /Capricorn with Sagittarius ascendant/, packing luggage always got on her nerves. I would add that her phobia also followed certain earthly patterns:
-It struck only when we were travelling by car;
-It was one-way – only before setting off /on the way back she didn't get in a flap/;
-It was directly proportional to the journey ahead, the number of passengers in the car and any overnight stays.
A specific example: we're going to drive some 30 kilometres, just the two of us, spend the night at some friends' villa and come back the next day.
She's up as early as 7 a.m. I make coffee and invite her to join me – no time for that. The doors of the wardrobes, chests and cupboards in her room begin to rattle and creak. She calls me in there to fix them. And the drawers too.
I take a sip of my coffee and turn up with a screwdriver, a hammer, a file, an oil can and a smile. I fix whatever won't close or open and oil everything that squeaks. Right now she's holding some little garment of hers /that's what she calls the cheaper ones/ and looking at it indecisively.
I ask her amiably what she's holding, so as to assist her at least in spirit, and she gives a slight start:
“Oh, this? A ‘body’ I bought about a year ago from ‘Second Hand’. I'd stuffed it away in here and then completely forgot about it!”
I'm about to tell her that now's not the time to wonder when and why we bought things, she should concentrate only on packing her luggage. Too late. She's already started putting it on. She stands in front of our big mirror in the hall:
“How do I look?”
There's so much hope in her eyes that I drop the screwdriver:
“Good Lord, simply perfect!”
“And doesn't it make my bum look flat? Bring me the table mirror too!”
She holds it behind her head and tries to get a two-dimensional /2D/ picture in the “North–South” direction.
Which means I have 5 minutes at my disposal while she's between the mirrors.
I use them to go into her room, look for more half-forgotten little garments of hers in her wardrobe and hide them in that part of it which she herself has named: “Odds and Ends”.
There she only puts things in and never takes them out, except at spring-cleaning time. Pleased with my “preventive maintenance”, I go back and look her over “in 3D”. I try to do this with the gaze of a well-meaning predator:
“My, how that body clings to you! As if it was made just for you!”
“Oh, I haven't even washed it! You know, clothes from ‘Second Hand’ have to be washed straight away! Otherwise who knows whose germs you'll pick up! Right, I'll just give it a quick rub, I mustn't leave it in my wardrobe unwashed again!”
Perhaps I should finish my coffee and have a cigarette in the kitchen?
I sit down there, light up and start listening. I drag on the smoke as if it were my last, I'm all ears.
Right now, I think, she's “rubbing” the body in the bathroom…… and now, I think, she's going to hang it out. I stub out the cigarette, but it's still smoking when my wife flies into the kitchen:
“This is no time to be smoking! Start packing your luggage!”
“Right away, I'll knock it together in just a minute!”
“Oh yes, that's how luggage gets packed – in a minute! And gather up your blasted hammers from my room, I keep tripping over them! I'll sort out my luggage, and I'll go through yours at the end! Take only the bare essentials! I'm sick of us lugging unnecessary things around and then having to rewash them when we bring them back!”
“And why do you rewash them if they haven't been worn?”
“I can't just put them back in their places – they'll smell of luggage!”
I don't understand why she always mixes up packing her luggage with purging and auditing her wardrobe.
And another thing – if she didn't keep looking round every now and then to see what else I was dawdling over, wouldn't she be ready by now?
I go into her room, ready to assist. She's in dialogue with herself:
“Don't ask me why I still haven't thrown this out! But then again, it might come in handy in the autumn? No, I'll deal with the suits some other time! But why not right now? Well, since I've got the wardrobe open anyway…..”
Some of her clothes go into the sack carefully labelled by her “Rags”. Later, some of them go into the “Odds and Ends” section of her wardrobe.
Each of her actions is preceded by a try-on, which wouldn't be so “rushed” if I weren't “hovering over her head”. At one of my appearances she orders me:
“Think about which of your things you won't be wearing any more! We'll give some to my brother!”
By 9.20 her room looks as if it's been burgled. There are piles of clothes on the floor and she walks between them like a stork.
In the middle there's a basin of water, detergent and a kitchen sponge. By 9.50 her wardrobe /except for the “Odds and Ends” section/ has been washed, and the hardest part begins – arranging it, but without try-ons.
The basin is no longer needed, but it stays there. She steps over it gracefully and, I would even say, good-naturedly, if she weren't looking so cross.
I go into her room just as she's wondering what to carry on with. I leave a large empty holdall, wiped down and with its zips loosened up personally by me, the nervous wreck.
She catches my hint and starts packing her luggage into the holdall.
I tell her: “Well done, darling, you're amazing, you've done incredible work today! The air in here is different now!” I know one of her favourite maxims will follow, and I try to guess which one she'll prefer today:
- “Everything needs to be touched by a caring human hand”
- “If every day we did something, even a little thing, for our flat”…. ;
- “Other people tidy their homes regularly, but we only do it once in a blue moon”
I'd put my money on No. 1, but I was wrong – it was 1, 2 and 3.
She goes through my holdall and my sacks “Rags” and “For her brother”. She moves some things from one to the other and wants me to throw out our “Rags” sacks.
She waters the plants, dusts, takes some things out of the fridge and puts them in a bag along with the kitchen rubbish. She gives the inside of the fridge a “quick” wipe as well.
Before we leave, my wife does a round of the flat with a critical eye. She adjusts the chairs, lays all the mats and rugs strictly parallel. She stares at my desk, which I had tidied pre-emptively.
But why were there sheets of paper and pens on it, when there were drawers for that purpose?
I'm certain of the reason she insists on perfect order in our flat when leaving it.
She definitely doesn't want us to disgrace ourselves in front of any potential burglars and have them think slobs live here. “What will people say?” – that always worries her. At around 11 o'clock we set off.
At the end of the summer, one evening we decide we need a well-deserved week's holiday at our villa in the Kazanlak area, 180 kilometres away.
We planned to leave in 2 days. Before falling asleep, I started to worry: according to the example, for 30 kilometres and one overnight stay, packing our luggage had taken about 4 hours. Purely mathematically speaking, 180 km and 7 days would require: 7 nights x 180:30 km x 4 hours = 7x6x4 = 168 hours = one week.
Horror!
On the day before the trip I didn't go to work. As well as a thorough clean of the flat /also for the burglars' sake/, I tidied her wardrobe, and mine too. My caring human hand touched everything. I packed our luggage in two large holdalls. I allowed for sunny weather, rainy weather, the beach, rucksacks for little outings, books, cards, crosswords, pens, hats. I cleaned out the fridge, and stood the flowerpots in basins so they could drink water for a whole week. I even felt annoyed that we'd have to leave such an immaculate flat.
When my wife came home in the evening, I warmed up the pizzas I'd brought from the nearby pizzeria and served them. Which took one “worry” off her mind. After we'd eaten, she fixed a troubled gaze on the ceiling:
“Tomorrow we have to sort out our luggage, and it's already wearing me out!”
“Look, I've tidied and polished everything. Even the wardrobes. I've packed the luggage – both mine and yours! You'll only need to add the toiletries you need!”
“Oh, I don't know, I'm very tired now. I hope so, thank you!”
“Tomorrow we get up, have coffee, jump in the car and go. Trust me completely and believe me that I've done a good job_, the way proper people do._ And now I'm off to bed.”
In the morning I didn't let her into the rooms until she'd drunk her coffee. I made her ask me whatever she wanted about the packed luggage. At first her questions were: “And have you taken this?”, then: “And you haven't thought of that, have you?”, and finally: “What, you've taken this too?”
I answered yes, and she couldn't believe her ears. With my help, my wife finally made the brave decision to throw herself into this adventure without thinking any more. She went round the rooms. Believe it or not, she had no comments at all.
By 9.30 we were already in the car – a family record. I was appreciated, and she was calm, and soon fell asleep. The road wound its way between two mountains.
Views to the left and to the right. Sredna Gora had nestled up close to the Balkan Mountains, just as my wife had nestled up to me.
For the first time I enjoyed driving. I had helped my wife with her phobia of packing luggage and I was proud. And why hadn't I thought of this before? I promised myself that the next day I would cut my nails in front of her. She knew that this, in turn, was my phobia. With freshly cut nails I had always felt some strange tickle and discomfort. For days afterwards I'd get jittery when touching anything at all, but I hoped this time it wouldn't be so.
She fell asleep, and I started singing to myself lovely little Italian songs from our youth. After half an hour – out loud. Soon she took up the song with me, the one once performed by the duo “Wess and Dori Ghezzi”, which she and I had once even declared our family anthem: **“**Un corpo e un anima” – **“One Body and One Soul”.**Back then our favourite joke was that in the song she was the body and I was the soul.
We had a wonderful time all week. Outings in the two mountains, with rucksacks, free, out in nature, and we paid no attention whatsoever to the villa – if it wanted, it could clean itself or pack its own luggage, it was all the same to us.
After this episode, packing luggage was no longer a phobia, a worry or a woe for my wife. She took part in it quite briskly, and for me cutting my nails was no longer an event to be afraid of. Before, I used to cut my fingernails one month and my toenails the next. Now I did both once a week, I'd even say with sadistic pleasure.
It seems that to understand someone else's phobia, you have to suffer from one yourself. That's how we humans are made – with all sorts of odd flaws and phobias, and each of us is at least a bit of a nutcase on some subject.
The two of us were firmly convinced that it's much easier if someone close supports you in your attempts to overcome them. For a person on their own it's a good deal harder; they're even inclined to grow fond of them, a sort of variant of “Stockholm syndrome”, in which the victim supposedly becomes attached to their tormentor. We had got in ahead of the moment when I would have become attached to my nails, and she to packing luggage.
