In Parco Solari, naked cyclists and skaters have taken over the scene, 1920s swing music blaring from their eighties-style ghetto blasters. Nearby residents are leaning out of windows and balconies, clamouring for the police, the army, the Avengers…anyone to make the din stop.
In Largo Marinai d’Italia, the park built on the grounds of a former Austro-Hungarian fortress, a six-foot-five, copper-skinned, very muscular woman dressed in a Victorian gown and armed with a huge parasol is leading a crowd of similarly dressed people against a cluster of scared-looking Austro-Hungarian soldiers.
“Independence or Death!” she yells with a strong Brazilian accent.
There are pagan rites at Parco Nord; mass pillow fights explode in Viale Padova; dancers perform around a machine that blows giant soap bubbles in front of the Lambrate station; a torchlit, 17th century penitential procession marches down Corso di Porta Ticinese so that the plague of racism and intolerance will stop, and, to top it all, Charles VIII of France has descended through the Alps yet again and a few Milanese knights are engaged in strenuous battle with his bodyguard at Stazione Centrale.
The whole city has exploded into insanity all at once.
Random, mostly innocuous, spontaneous gatherings spread all across the map as late-night partygoers in various states of inebriation join the impromptu festival. Most people don’t know what it is all about, but it does not matter.
It’s Saturday night, it’s summer, the music is on. That’s all they need to know. People play, dance, act out of context and have fun.
The law enforcement is at the end of their collective wits. Patrol cars are zooming around the city, heading to the sites of the disturbances to restore public order and make sure everybody goes home and stays there. Officers are debating whether to call in people from the day shifts, and intelligence analysts are tearing their hair out, asking themselves how they could have missed something so big, how it could get organised right under their noses in spite of their strict surveillance of social media.
The transmissions on the police frequencies are increasingly frantic with a jumble of calls and counter-calls, shouted instructions and even a couple of on-air, public nervous breakdowns.
From her perch at the center of the network, Webby grins and contributes to the chaos, generating nuisance calls, while Stabby types frantic streams of instructions to zir accomplices on the group’s encrypted chat, directing the performers to draw the law enforcement farther away from the city centre and avoid disbandment or arrest for as long as they can.
***
Piazza della Scala is the eye of this perfect storm of joyous chaos, but the atmosphere is no less frantic. Dawn rushes towards them, inexorable. They will have to be well out of the way by then and there are a lot of actions to coordinate still.
Stabby represses a surge of anxiety. Zie has planned the operation with a reasonable amount of grace time to allow for delays and mishaps, but zie can’t help but feel the pressure.
“This is much worse than managing a scientific grant…” zie ruminates, checking the progress of the various units on zir tablet.
Thankfully, the first wave of troops is on time: a false rubbish collection vehicle and assorted civilian trucks have converged on the site, disgorging a small army of co-conspirators and several tons of extra gear.
A squad of gardeners, under the direction of Sprouty and of Loopy’s uncle, starts unloading bags upon bags of soil from the back of the skip.
The rich, dark loam spreads on the flagstones, raked by expert hands, then the gardeners unroll bright green tiles of grass upon it, as if laying down a carpet.
Flowering plants appear, placed in slightly raised flowerbeds: dahlias, daisies, marigolds, sunflowers, and flowering lavender and rosemary bushes. Their clean, crisp aromas permeate the air, their colours light up the night.
Little by little, a garden takes shape around the statue of Leonardo da Vinci and his apprentices/boyfriends, scrupulously laid out according to the plan tacked on the side of the gardeners’ main truck.
Dotty directs the operations with an iron hand, armed with charts, diagrams, and a laser theodolite.
She has spent long nights calculating the angles of incidence of the sun all over the square and has even taken a leaf out of Stabby’s book to check the data for herself.
She’s borrowed her mum’s best Sunday dress, a delightful halter-top number done in a turquoise, ochre and gold print with a matching headscarf, hidden her very recognisable rainbow locs in the soft folds of a turban, and, disguised as a wealthy Nigerian tourist, has pretended to take endless selfies next to her similarly dressed sister and cousin in order to take solar irradiance measurements with her phone.
They’re really pushing the limits of the technology and of their half-improvised equipment, there is no margin for error and she wants it to be perfect.
It is not just a matter of professional pride: this issue matters a lot to her.
Her dad is Italian, so she has gotten double citizenship right from the start, but many young people she knows and cares for, including her baby cousins, born in Milan from extra-EU parents, are on the edge of uncertainty as they approach their eighteenth birthday because the government refuses to recognise that they are as Italian as anyone else, no matter how loudly they ask for it. She is going to do anything in her power to push for change.
“No, move that lavender half a meter to the right!” she instructs, taking another measurement.
I can go on like this all night, she thinks, repressing a face-splitting yawn.
***
“The knights have been dislodged from the Station.” Webby’s message pings on Stabby’s tablet, alongside the current disposition of the police forces in the area. The biologist curses inwardly and calls Tanky, the leader of the knights, directing them to form up for a rear-guard action along Viale Abruzzi.
“Get ready for pickup,” zie alerts another accomplice, setting vans running towards the knights.
“Shall we bring the Longobards in?” Webby writes.
Stabby mulls over the thought. It’s only about three AM and one of their main disturbance events has already been almost dispersed. They need the extra bodies in the way.
“The Longobards and the Elves, I think,” Stabby writes back.
“On it,” Webby confirms.
Soon a few more coloured dots appear on the map: the Longobards, in red, are clustered around Viale Monza, where they are acclaiming Theodelinda and Authari as their new legitimate sovereigns, while the Elves, in green, are locked in a ferocious battle against a bunch of Goblins in Corso di Porta Vittoria.
“It does pay off to have friends in different subcultures,” Stabby writes.
“Hopefully these units will last a bit longer than the HEMA folks,” Webby counters. She doesn’t sound very convinced.
They are still a long way from being finished and the last thing they want is for some police to wander their way while they are still doing their thing.
***
The gardeners finish their work slightly ahead of schedule. They pick up their gear and shove it pell-mell in the back of their vans and hop on board for a quick retreat, leaving the floor to the electricians and engineers.
The first van arrives on time with five people, a load of cables and connectors, and part of the payload.
“Where are the others?” Sparky asks.
The squad leader shrugs.
“We came a different way.”
“They’ll be here soon,” Loopy tries to reassure her, but his eyes betray exhaustion and worry.
Sparky nods and pats him on the back, but whips out her phone nonetheless.
“Where are you folks?!” she asks.
“We’re getting there, we have a flat tyre.” Leccy sounds way too chill about it, given the situation.
“Four EngDs and two PhDs between the six of you and you can’t change a bloody tyre?!” Sparky yells, temper rising. She lives up to her nickname in more ways than one.
“We’re trying! With all the stuff you asked us to carry, the van’s too heavy to lift!” Leccy sounds a lot less calm than before.
Sparky stamps her foot on the ground, mindful of the flowers, and bites her lower lip in frustration. Leccy and her team are carrying three more pieces of payload and quite a bit of the IT stuff. They need to arrive at battle stations as soon as possible.
“What’s going on?” Loopy is at her side again, silent as a shadow.
The engineer covers her phone with her hand. “Leccy’s van has broken down. We need to mount a rescue and recovery action.”
“Damn…” Loopy curses, but he’s already looking around for a solution.
“Let’s unload our van and start setting up the stuff that’s already here. Then someone can drive to them and pick up the rest.”
“Or tow them,” Sparky butts in, nodding to herself. They surely have enough rope and chains in the back of their vehicle to pull it off, literally.
“That too. Do you want me to go?” Loopy offers.
He knows how to drive quite well, thanks to the lessons of his father, who used to be a semi-professional racing pilot, but he does not feel incredibly comfortable behind the steering wheel. His real talents lie elsewhere.
She shakes her head.
“You hold the fort, mate. I’ll go.”
Loopy nods and throws the back doors of the van open, yelling at the others to hurry up and help him. Bundles of cables start to appear, hauled by the volunteers, then bulky slabs of material, wrapped in green tarpaulin.
“Hey Leccy, I am on my way. Just send me your coordinates, all right?” Sparky turns back to the phone.
The data pings on the chat almost immediately and she forwards it to Stabby.
“Clear a path for me!”
“On it, fam!” the biologist replies.
Sparky jumps back in the van, turns the transponder back on to allow Stabby to track her, and docks her tablet on the dashboard, tapping away until it displays their custom, real-time map.
Swarms of dots are moving about, some with a clear intent and purpose, some approximating quite well a Brownian motion.
A notification appears, then a path through the maze of narrow, one-way streets of downtown Milan.
Webby has pulled some open-source path minimisation algorithm from Github and tweaked it to respond to the movements of the grey dots representing the police. With it equipped and a bit of luck, it will be no harder than a run of GTA, Sparky thinks.
“All clear! Have a safe trip!” Loopy yells from the back.
The engineer revs the engine and pulls off at speed with a squealing of tyres, disappearing almost immediately around a bend.
***
“Come on, folks! Let’s put our backs to it!” Dotty instructs, clapping her hands together. She is the first to follow her own advice, putting to good use her athletic form, honed by years of semi-professional rugby.
They move in groups of four, carrying what at first glance looks like colourful window-panes and placing them in the slots left by the gardeners, solidly secured in weighted floor-mounts, which they have disguised with trays of flowers.
Their work was conceived to be used and enjoyed, not to stay safe behind barriers. They have designed the sturdy mounts to prevent the solar stelae from tipping over when kids eventually try to climb upon them, or if people bump into them, so that the safety of the users will be guaranteed.
They’re not exactly lightweight, their creations.
Loopy wipes the sweat from his brow and wishes they had kept some of the gardeners around, or recruited a few more of Dotty’s friends from the rugby team.
From the other side of the stela, Sprouty seems to second his sentiment. He’s the tallest of the gang, but he’s also built like a bundle of spaghetti and his freckled face is all red from the effort he’s putting in.
It’s worth it, though.
Upright and unveiled, the stelae glimmer and glint with a multitude of colours in the glow of the streetlights. Multicoloured tesserae create patterns and figures at the back of Dotty’s solar concentrators.
Loopy’s grandmother and her colleagues at the Civic School of Mosaic and Stained Glass, the youngest of whom is sixty-six, have been working hard to assemble them by hand, one sliver of coloured glass, stone, or ceramic at a time, silver heads bent on the task with intense concentration and purpose.
Medieval stained glass, art nouveau revival, trencadìs;s, theirs is a disappearing art, but tonight it shines in the spotlight, as bright as the stars, and perhaps upon seeing this a few young people will be captivated enough to try their hand at it.
Two of the ten stelae, plus the centrepiece, are still somewhere out there in the back of Leccy’s van, the largest of the fleet, and those which are in situ have to be hauled by hand one by one and slotted in place with the help of a pulley rig.
The arrangement slowly takes its form, gaping in places like the smile of a six-year old, but the next wave of troops has already arrived, and they waste no time in getting to work.
AV technicians from the Accademia Della Scala, including Loopy’s brother Prof Racket and up-and-coming Italo-Eritrean rapper Ahmed Brown, are placing loudspeakers and other pieces of kit in strategic locations to maximise the acoustics of the square.
Trailing cables sneak out from each piece of kit, running along guides laid through the garden to reach their destination at the bottom of the stelae. Every new connection put in place is double and triple-checked to everyone’s satisfaction. Come the morrow every bit of the setup will have its role to play.
Once all the ground equipment is in place, Loopy swaps his sneakers for a pair of climbing shoes, chalks up and climbs fearlessly on the façade of Palazzo Marino, using the bugnato and the protruding frames and decorations as hand- and foot-holds, a heavy-duty cord tied around his waist.
Racket and Brown place a chunky bouldering mat underneath and hover around it anxiously, but Loopy seems totally confident and assured.
It’s a V4, maybe a V5, nothing he hasn’t conquered before in the gym and on the crags, only a bit taller than his usual highballers, he judges. He doesn’t usually get the chance to climb solo, totally unsupported, and he’s loving it.
He tops out on the balcony on the first floor and unties the cord from his waist, pulling on it to retrieve the pulley mechanism. He installs it on the rail and threads the cord through, letting it drop back to the ground.
Prof Racket and his crew load up first one speaker, then another, and finally a large banner, hand-lettered with an Art Nouveau font on a quilt of old bedclothes.
Loopy installs each piece, aligning it with loving care, then uninstalls the pulley and lowers it down to the ground.
He climbs down the same way with unhurried, easy grace and is off again, up another building, almost as soon as he touches down.
***
Sparky’s rescue run is surprisingly uneventful. From the low pinging noise in the background, she infers that Stabby and Webby must be pulling the strings of the decoy units to give her the maximum possible berth.
She ignores all the still-functioning traffic lights and drives the wrong way up quite a few one-way streets and before she knows it she has reached her destination, a fairly inconspicuous street in the maze of ex-industrial facilities between Viale Ripamonti and the Rogoredo station.
“Wow, that was quick. Even for you…” Leccy comments with a low whistle as Sparky skids the van to a stop.
“Any joy swapping that tyre?” Sparky asks.
“Not a chance. The jack can’t cope.” Leccy shakes her head. She still looks calm, but her fingernails have been bitten nearly bloody.
“I have another one in the back, but we have to be quick. It’s past four AM already. Our window of opportunity is narrowing.”
Leccy nods.
“And we have the centrepiece. Let’s get cracking.”
They have just managed to get it in place underneath the van when Sparky’s phone ri
ngs.
“You gotta get out of there! Nuddy has been arrested, the naked cyclists have broken ranks. They are running your way!” Stabby’s voice betrays a very worrying hint of panic that makes the engineers perk up in spite of fatigue and pay attention.
Sparky runs back to the front of the van and checks the map: a group of pink dots is shooting down Viale Ripamonti, followed by a cluster of grey dots. They are approaching quite fast and, even if they don’t come exactly their way, soon they will be closing their main escape route.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” she exclaims, tapping her fist on the dashboard.
“Are we screwed?” one of Leccy’s comrades asks.
“Depends. How much do you care about the van?” Sparky retorts.
“Less than about not getting arrested,” Leccy replies, seconded by all her crew.
“Then forget about the tyre. Who of you lot has ever played GTA?” Sparky asks.
A ginger guy with a massive hipster beard raises his freckled hand.
“Let’s swap vans, then.” She throws him the keys.
He looks so surprised he nearly fumbles the catch.
“Are you going to drive it like that?!” another engineer asks, paling visibly.
“I am.”
The front left tyre looks quite deflated and with that much weight on the van it is going to deflate even more as it goes. The whole thing is going to pull left with all it has: it’s going to be a wrestling match more than a drive if she wants to keep it on the road.
Sparky is not really relishing the perspective, but the alternative is definitely worse, and beggars cannot be choosers.
“The rest of you are going to ride with him. The lighter the van is, the better.”
The ginger hipster nods and cracks his knuckles.
“Lead the way and I’ll follow.”
“That’s the spirit!” Sparky approves.
She hops in Leccy’s van, adjusts the seat and mirrors and turns the key. The powerful engine purrs like a tame tiger, but the whole frame is vibrating slightly, as if in pain.
“I know, I know…” she croons, smoothing her hand gently on the dashboard. “We’ll get you fixed up as soon as this is over.” She revs the engine and pulls away from the kerb.
Glass and Gardens Page 14