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The notary takes a sip of wine.
I look at my glass and at the few bubbles left.
«Passion, attraction, desire, impulse: love, eros. It all makes sense, Brando.»
«Èros pushes everything: I could almost agree with you» I say. I look out the glass window: two youths are hugging each other walking up the street, towards me. The blue glow materialises again in my mind. The vision I had in the morning is certainly perfect to trigger off a considerable feeling of attraction: an urge, a simple instinct not slowed down by a lengthy neuronal processing.
«Why almost?»
«Not to make you feel that you are quite right.»
I take my glass and I get rid of the bubbles left. There could be more to it, though. Life is not just based on impulses, there is more to it, a bunch of different feelings and emotions, without taking into account the reason and all the rest of it.»
«Brando, look at this table between us: it is square and wooden. Look at it all, in its whole.»
I push my vertebrae against the back of my chair, I move the chair a few centimetres back and I look at the table.
«Can you see the table completely from where you are?»
«Yes, notary. I can see it all, in its whole.»
«How many legs has it got?» he asks laughing.
«I’d say four» I reply, looking at him askance.
«Are you really sure?»
«Yes, I am sure» I reply, shaking my head a bit as a sign of disapproval for his sneaky and vindictive rhetorical question.
«Do you know why you see four?» he asks. «Because this table has four legs, like the one in my office: sic et simpliciter!»
1.3 IMPULSES - FOUR
I lower down the windows of my car a bit. The cool air lashes my face, while I set the volume on 24; this morning I played the Solstafir album, it is not that bad.
I glance at the display, looking for the title of the track now playing, and I identify it as Sjúki skugginn1 (#ulink_31e2798e-6e05-59e6-8d94-804e3e265722). As I have already done now more than twelve hours ago, I think that each track should have a meaning, no matter how difficult the language is. I am going to read the lyrics again, or at least to give the titles some sort of meaning.
Bass guitars play really low: let’s higher up to 32.
I overcome the humps and I swirl to the left, I cut through the roundabout, keeping an eye on the central kerb, I merge onto the avenue that leads to the university. The lanes are all free from traffic.
I get it into second gear, driving along the wide roundabout of the emergency room and I press my foot on the accelerator. In about three hundred metres, as soon as I get to the roundabout of the baseball field, I have to drive along it and take the third exit, towards the avenue leading to my house.
When the engine is around 4.700 revolutions, I take a wide turn on the right and I see an electric blue car coming in front of me, in the opposite direction. It seems quite slow and quite far away: it will get to the roundabout after me.
I press my break and I put my car into second gear to prepare for the narrow roundabout, while I am looking at the porphyry stripe that borders the central island, where I want to drive over with my two inner tires. I steer to the left, while I just feel a sudden tingling in my nose: I sneeze. The air that comes out so suddenly from my lungs makes me jump. My left hand swerves the steering wheel and brings it back to the standard position.
Bloody hell, I lost control, I ended up in the camellias. The car jolts a little. I go straight and I slow down. I stop by the roadside, and I put the hazard lights on.
The electric blue car drives past me and goes on.
I get out of the car and I head to the porphyry stripe which runs around the camellias. I made such a mess. I have driven over the three plants on the outer side.
I squat down and I reach out to the plants: they snapped, crushed into the soil, broken up. Poor them.
I get back to my car, feeling sad.
The electric blue car too has stopped with the hazard lights on beyond the roundabout. I look at it for a few seconds: the LED light bulbs off the lamppost light it up from up above, making it a more sparkling blue.
I make a U-turn and I take the road leading to the university. I drive to the very end, I turn left and drive into my driveway.
1 (#ulink_92047517-7303-5f9f-802c-cbad6e3f1601) Sólstafir (artist), Svartir sandar (album title), Sjúki skuggin (track title), 2011 (year)
2 A DAY IN THE LIFE
2.1 INTRO
I say hi to Mauro, busy reading the Giornale di Brescia every morning in his small glass house, and I head for the lifts.
A dark spot materializes down there. I continue with a slow pace and reach the area in front of the push button panel. The black spot greets me and I reciprocate. Maybe I smiled too much, but I did it naturally, surprised by the friendliness of a character with such a gloomy appearance.
The central lift reaches the ground floor and we go in. I’ve never seen him, but he behaves as if the place is very familiar to him, so I don’t think he’s an occasional visitor in the building. His gaze is gentle as he asks me what floor I’m going to.
«Seven, please» I smile. Maybe too much again. But this time I smile because of his hair, really messy.
After pressing the buttons, he sticks his two thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. His other fingers stroke his thin legs, not very masculine, which look perfectly straight though, inside his tight jeans.
I am examining him. His appearance looks a bit dark to me, but with an implicit elegance: educated and from a good family, quite probably. The body is lean and his height is probably a few centimetres above average. He has green, almost phosphorescent eyes. I think he may be an alien.
The elevator reaches the seventh floor.
«Hello.»
The black spot wishes me a good day. I get out and walk to the office.
I get a sense of restlessness and warmth all over my body: if I weren’t stoned, I would think that I had never seen anything so amazing.
2.2 LIFE
2.2 LIFE - ONE
I take the keys out of my bag and put the long one in the lock, placed under the writing Sbandofin in gold lettering. Four turns of the key and I open the door.
The office is still empty: the foggy light that filters through the windows makes it even more sleepy than it appears at this time.
It is only the second day that, after so many years, I see the office in this new light, after so many years. With the clock gone back, everything is postponed: I no longer arrive at nine, but an hour earlier, so I can leave the office at 1:00 pm instead of 2:00 pm. I always work five hours, but I have the whole afternoon to do what I want. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before: all it took was asking Teresa to change the timetable, and so it’s much handier.
I have got here early because there is no traffic at this time, so a cup of coffee, drunk in peace and quiet, can help me kill the twenty minutes left till the official start of my working day.
I sip the squeezed espresso and look out the windows, staring at the fog and the slow setting in of the sun. The landscape looks rather bleak to me.
Amedeo also made me nervous last night: he is increasingly jealous and pictures ridiculous stories in his mind, he accuses me of having flings and of betraying him, even just on a mental level. It will be the fault of work, indeed, of his non-work, but he is more and more unbearable.
We’ve been together for just over seven years now. The first few years went by quite smoothly and happily. We were in love and I always thought of him as my only serious relationship. There had obviously been other previous individuals, but nothing significant, just a few short-lived acquaintances, randomly scattered over my thirty-five years of life. Then, I began to long for a lasting relationship, I felt mature enough to handle it.
I have been thinking about it for some time, but I cannot be sure if it was just my will or whether it was influenced by my parents, especially my mother: all the stories about getting older, about the need to settle down, to give your life some sort of stability...
In any case, a hidden force, an invisible hand, the flow of events or whatever else, brought me closer to Amedeo. We met at a friends’ party, and I found him nice, funny and quite attractive. It was 2010 and I had already been working here at Sbandofin for a few years; he was a real estate agent: he was still with the Borgosatollo agency. Later, when we decided to move in together in the house we now live in, he continued to work as an independent agent, getting business straight from building companies and specializing in the sale and rental of large compounds.
The first few years of our life together were not bad, thinking about them now or, perhaps, they surface like this in my memories only because I make an inevitable comparison with the current situation: heavy, stressful life together with an ill-tempered, sad, depressed, detached and certainly not loving person. Sometimes almost violent. Verbally abusive.
Amedeo has always been jealous and controlling, but never like the way he has been lately. If he had any real evidence, I could actually think that he is not going crazy; his scenes would make sense if I behaved like so many acquaintances of mine who regard themselves as being happily married, despite the fact that they constantly go out with other men. But since we’ve been together I’ve only ever been with him. And not so much because I wanted to but as a matter of principle: if I wanted a different situation, I would break up with him. Four months ago, we have in fact legally registered at the Town Hall as a couple living together: we are a real couple, but we could just say it and we would no longer be.
Yes. So, at the moment, I’m stoned: stoned in a relationship.
But it is a momentary situation, that is, not a temporary one, but not even an indissoluble one. This is a recent event and I can’t remember welcoming so much Amedeo’s idea of registering our relationship, but, I agreed to avoid a scene on his part. After all, we had already lived together for quite some time, as an actual fact, nothing would have changed.
It is now 7:53 am and I have to start working. I have to settle the issue regarding consumer credit that I was looking into yesterday, that is sending customers’ documents relating to loans already approved and granted to the various institutions.
We work as mediators: we look into people’s requests, evaluate all the various offers and suggest the best solution to the customer. The lowest rate loan or the financing suitable for specific needs and, for these low amounts and concerning consumer credit, the choice almost always ends up on the blue puppet: everyone likes it and it is the most advantageous.
I head to the bathroom, rinse the plastic cup of coffee and throw it into the waste bin. I go back to the cupboard at the back of the room, near my desk, in the last row, I take the stack of folders from the consumer credit binder and go back to my desk. One, two, three... there are eleven: ten from the puppet and one from Telefin. I take all the documents and move to the middle of the room, towards the multifunction printer set against the glass that separates the room from the corridor. I place the folders on the nearby table. The device is still in standby, I hit the green button to turn it back on. After a few seconds, I read the familiar ready-to scan-text on the small liquid crystal display. I open the first folder, starting to take the staples off and scan the documents.
As I perform these operations, I think about how many things I have discovered in the last few days. An hour was enough to discover a world that stays the same and it is all different at the same time: changes in the traffic flow, different light, different smells and equipment in standby. And it is darker, much darker. The people I meet are also different. Apart from Mauro, who reads the Giornale di Brescia already at around 7:30.
I take out all the contracts from the folders, realizing that in this way the whole process can be faster, I remove the staples from all the signed papers and put in the copies of the documents after each contract. I go through all the documents, making sure that each of them follows the pertaining contract: several photographs run before my eyes and I smile instantly when I get to the last one which portrays the plump version of Tom Sellek that I saw yesterday. On the identity card, the similarity is almost more evident. I realize now that himself and his friend were born in Poland, they wanted a quick cash loan to set up an online dating company.
The appointment with them was not fully relaxing. My feeling of discomfort begun with the description of the business, had gradually increased, until it reached its peak talking about the many cute girls that you can meet online and with the following vague comments, always polite though, about my clothing. I don’t know what the point was, as my appearance wasn’t too flashy. At least, not like the cyber-whores that I am sure pack up sites like theirs.
I make a single stack of a hundred pages and put it all on the automatic scanning unit. I look at the sheets that are swallowed one after the other and appear again after a few moments. I realize that I haven’t bumped into the girls from the fifth floor in the lift that, for several years, I used to meet almost every morning.
Times: it is a matter of times. Maybe he has always been here too, but he would go to the common areas of the building at different times from mine.
Himself: the surprising one. But all this, however, cannot interest me.
2.2 LIFE - TWO
I hear the front door open at the back of the room: it is Serena coming in.
I look at the clock on my PC, which indicates 8:31, while she screams: «Hello Lavi!»
«Hi» I reply in a lower tone of voice and waving a hand to greet her.
I glance over my monitor and see Serena hanging her black fur coat in the closet, then she goes over the desk behind the counter in the hall and stores her bag. I look down at the monitor again and start writing the first e-mail with the list of contracts attached in pdf.
The sound of Serena’s heels distracts me. She is walking to my right down the hall, past the glass window, towards the coffee room. Her body is almost completely hidden behind the plants placed close to the transparent partition. I only notice the highlights of her dark blond shatush protruding beyond the green shrubs and the black heels that can be seen among the vases.
Hi Carmela, I am attaching ten contracts signed yesterday. Do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance or if it is necessary, I write.
«Lavi, is everything okay? What are you doing?»
«Hi Sere, all right. I’m sending the contracts to Carmela. Are you all right?»
«Yes, all is fine.» She walks over to the window with the cup of coffee in her hand: her slender figure stands out against the light, while I notice that the fog is rising.
I stare at her legs: they look really nice in her tight jeans with those high heels. Lean, but toned. Then I look up.
«Has your son still got a fever?»
«No, I just dropped him off to school, this morning he wasn’t even 36.5.»
«But wasn’t he 39.5 yesterday?»
«Yes, but you know what children are like, they recover immediately» she replies and keeps on looking out the window.
«It depends on the children, I would say. And also on your illness.»
«Yes, I would so. Probably the virus that affected my son was a bit weak and he recovered quickly. Luckily, since I didn’t know what to do with him. I am running out of days off because of his flus...». She turns around.
I watch Serena as she arches her back stretching, she presses her shoulders against the window and pushes her chest up. The quadriceps tighten and show the toned muscles underneath her tight jeans; the back of her feet, hidden by the black nylon stockings, lifts up making her heels protrude from high heels.
«Has your coffee not fully gone into your system yet, Sere?»
«I think I’ll need at least another four or five, or maybe I should change drug» she replies while examining me.
«Aren’t you cold dressed so lightly?»
«No, I’m not: here in the office, it is always around twenty-eight degrees, so I decided to put on my three-quarter sleeves, which are not really three-quarters. You see» I explain pulling the left sleeve down, «it’s the pattern that gets it to stay up, actually if you pull it down, it comes to my wrist.»
«Yes, actually it’s always very hot in here. Anyway, that stretchable three-quarters thing there is really nice, it suits you just fine. Did you buy it at one of your auctions?»
«Actually, no, I got this in a small shop in Verona. A few weeks ago, Amedeo and I went on a trip there» I explain. «Anyway, I asked Teresa just yesterday, but it seems that the temperature of the thermostats is already set to a minimum: you can’t lower it down and it just seems a bit of a waste to me.»
«Yes, it doesn’t make much sense to have such a temperature in winter» she replies as she looks at the pile of documents I have on my desk: her gaze seems to float between the sheets and the neckline on my sweater.
«You know Serena, you just made me realize that I think I left my jacket in the car this morning when I arrived. I just realized it: I must have come up the internal stairs of the building dressed like that and it didn’t occur to me at all.»
«The stairs leading down to the garages are always damp and cold: I think you had something else on your mind.»
«It may be the new time.»
«It probably is. Do you know that today you are even more glowing than usual?»
«Why, am I usually glowing? Like a human torch?»
«Of course, not like a torch» she replies, laughing. «Glowing like...» she says, interrupting herself for a few seconds, «I don’t know: radiant.»
«Anyway, I am the same as every morning, apart from being up an hour earlier and the fact that I forgot my jacket in the car.»
