Malacqua

by Nicola Pugliese

  Because of the rain that was still coming down, along the facades of the buildings greenish rivulets had formed, and in places the plaster had come away and in others it showed stains of uncontrollable greenish damp, and there was that non-resistance, in the end, which ineluctably accompanied the falling rain, almost exhausted all capacity to react, as if the will had degraded into mossy patches without consistency, and along the walls the damp drew the outlines of each stone in mildew. The question remained of whether the stones would resist, with all that water coming down and coming down on that fourth day exactly as it had fallen for the previous three days, and in short it did not seem that the city intended to react, restricting itself solely and simply to absorbing the water for as long as it could, but the problem in fact is precisely that: to what extent can water be absorbed?, what in reality is the tipping point? At any rate it was as if this problem were still indistinct and confused and certainly a long way off, because resignation had turned into indifference, and in life you get used to everything. If the city too had to change its sunny destiny into a new and different rain-filled destiny, well, even that change would have been accepted, because in life you inevitably accept everything, and in the end in life life is endured, and then if the days to come had been grey and rainy it would have caused neither traumas nor open wounds, and in all likelihood even in that new dimension advantages would have been discovered, points in favour, but one would also have to say that without a doubt, along with such considerations, at a first level of reading others were confusedly formulated, and beneath the damp that reached the bones and wrinkled the eyelids, a confused and ungraspable current stirred. A vague and sinister apprehension that shook and shook and turned in a circle and darted suddenly to the surface before returning back down to the bottom where it continued its constant irregular movement, and still in people’s breasts that obscure apocalyptic question swelled, a presentiment of misfortune, an event that would alter the perspective on life. In those uncertain days of waiting there was nothing left to do but wearily survive and delay, delay everything, because in fact it is a very cruel operation taking away the prospect of a future however unlikely, what are we to do with these men and these women, and this whole city?, without a future however unlikely how do you send your children to school, get married, do what needs to be done to move house or apply for a government grant? Those thoughts were his very thoughts, because the fact of knowing the story of the doll and the story of the voices that had appeared on the first day did not in fact in any way shift the terms of the problem, any more than it determined different sensations, or different theories, the provisional state of that vague waiting was a transparent crystal flower, not a series of scattered fragments, in fact there was that beautiful concrete crystal flower on one side and on the other the uncoordinated disconnected thoughts that could not lead back to an underlying thought, no, they could not do that. And there was now no option but to take into account the greyish reality that was attacking the foundations of the buildings and digging rivulets into the asphalt and eroding the tufa of Posillipo.

  That aquatic reality had in the meantime assumed aspects of particular and immediate dramatic force especially in the district of Afragola that centres around Corso Vittorio Emanuele, because the water had undermined the uncertain foundations of a series of houses that rose precisely above the underground tunnels, and Christ!, was this city built on a void?, and the big fire engines had breathlessly arrived in the rain once more, and there had been a clearance and a dozen families were now accommodated in the elementary school on Via Marconi, but of course no one could imagine that this would be a solution to the problem, certainly not, because in fact in terms of accommodation it really left much to be desired, and blankets of coarse wool had been brought and urgent supplies of milk had been brought at least for the youngest children, and then all supplies had ceased because it had been noticed that the goods were constantly leaving the council warehouse but never actually reaching the school, someone somewhere was skimming it off, and initially in those times of extreme confusion it was impossible to identify the jackals so there was no option but to suspend all supplies. A delegation from the Council Welfare Office visited the council as soon as possible and then proceeded to identify the households and list the homeless and even that simple accounting task was not an easy one, in that the children were literally running in all directions and you could never work out if that one there with the black curls had been counted already or not, and then you had to take into account the children who had been temporarily removed, and then some women didn’t want to provide information, talk to my husband, I don’t know anything, and all in all it was necessary to trace each husband one by one and overcome those suspicions, and only just towards the end did it become reasonably clear that there were eleven households in all, a total of a hundred and fifty people, because you also need to consider that in many family units there was not only the head of the family the wife and the children, no, there were also dismal toothless irascible aunts, slobbering old women with dirty blouses constantly complaining that this is a sign from God, that this is a sign from God, and in fact they would come to understand over the days to come, they would understand, lots of people were scratching their balls and saying sciò sciò ciucciué to ward off evil and touching wood, and the old folks replied go on, touch wood, touch wood, because touching wood does no good anyway, this is a sign from God for your wicked behaviour, what do you expect?, it means nothing to us, absolutely nothing, because we haven’t long to live anyway, but what are you going to do?, eh?, what are you going to do?, but in fact even though they said they didn’t have much time left, it was clear to everyone that they were firmly attached to life and trying desperately to cling on to it, and this was not just a reaction like many others, and when they had finished counting everybody, a hundred and five in all, in the cramped council offices the decision was made to involve the Prefecture of the City of Naples in the case. Inside the school a series of folding beds had been set up with those heavy woollen blankets, and the children were really happy about what was happening, because in fact the school was the school they went to every day, they were very comfortable there, and they knew every single desk, the teacher’s table, the blackboard with the coloured chalks, the maps on the walls, the big illustrations with the letters of the alphabet, and in the end they really didn’t feel they were in a cold and inhospitable place, in fact they were entirely at ease there, and it was only much later that they realised that with all those fathers and mothers around they couldn’t enjoy themselves as they usually did. And the mothers decided that each of them would stay close to their own children to avoid confusion. When the news of Afragola reached Naples along with other more or less similar news, some people said responsibly: we will come to harm here if this rain continues. In fact many people turned their faces towards the sky, almost as if to check, but there was only that grey, high up, with that rain coming down and coming down, interminable as an animal’s agony.

  After massaging the skin of his face with his palm one last time, Carlo Andreoli ran a little water over his hand and dried it, and once it was dried with that same hand which was still his right hand he picked up his shaving brush and soaked it in the hot steaming water in the basin, and he held it there for a moment and squeezed out a little of the water but not all of it, so that the brush was still sufficiently damp and wet. As ever it was an operation, in fact a series of operations, that needed to be performed well and with great attention, because the brush must not be dry but not too wet either because otherwise it wouldn’t foam up as it should. Then he checked that everything was in the right place, and set the brush back down on the porcelain, and with his left hand he picked up the tub of shaving cream, and with his right hand he took off the cover which he placed upside down, and looked inside the tub and saw that white, shapeless magma. It was then that Carlo Andreoli thought of escaping, of course, of escaping, and in fact it was a strange thought this thoug
ht that was running through his mind, because escaping meant resolving nothing and even more so it meant, in practical terms, giving up and surrendering, if you put it like that I’m not doing it, and in fact he was not returning to his habits, he was not returning at all, and on that greyish morning drawn with threads of water he could have got into the car and crossed the strange city and reached the motorway and then gone far away, to another place where things were different, where the rules of life were concrete and precise. Without that sad softness, without that sentimental weariness and lazy intelligence sighing after lunatic ideas. Of course, he would stay behind the wheel for hours and hours, and he would see the landscape changing and changing again, and little rocky villages at the top of the hill, and lonely towers, and truck lights in the night, and service stations, their attendants washed out with exhaustion, and inside in the darkness at the end of the night he would stop somewhere to have a steaming hot coffee, and he would move his neck to the right and left to stretch the sinews, and he would look around at the advertising posters and the special two-for-one offers, and he would buy a pack of American cigarettes, and he would sit and wait in the car with that hot cigarette in his hand while the tank filled with petrol, and in the end they would run a sponge over the windscreen and then dry it with a chamois leather, and he would turn the key in the ignition again, and as it made contact all the lights would come on and the engine would draw out that engine noise and he would slip into first, gently passing the yellow lights of the streetlamps, the red lights of the waiting cars, and there, all alone in the night, he would find himself, with that need to go on and go on that would not leave him be. In the end, he would certainly arrive in another city, a different and unknown city, and what difference do you think this one or that one would make? If you leave your own city, your own place, everything else is the same, always the same where you are, isn’t it, everything is to do with severing the umbilical cord, once it’s severed then everything is the same for ever, and also you see, and you realise, you never belong to anything, not even to the sum total of roads and reasons that seem like your city, in fact you never belong, and even when you do belong there’s always that hidden zone of the mind that refuses and curls up in a ball. He would get out of the car into a large and tree-lined square, he would hear behind him the sound of the door closing and with the lit cigarette in his hand he would walk around a bit here and there, looking at the people in the streets and the girls and the windows and the trams rattling along the rails, and after a while he would go into a bar and have a steaming coffee and would ask: excuse me, which city is this? And in fact it would be a strange thought because he knew very well how attached he was to these stones, and that desolate, grey life of the sea in October, oh of course he knew very well, however unusual this thought that ran along furrows and convolutions and appeared in his half-open eye observing the confused white magma of the shaving cream in the tub that he was holding in his left hand. Then Carlo Andreoli looked at his right hand holding the brush and dipped it in, and with a rotating motion of his wrist he went on turning round and round, until a milky foam was born and grew visibly in the tub, until it gave off the smell of almonds that he always noticed every morning when performing this operation, and he turned the brush around again a little to be sure that the foam was strong and dense. A bit of foam spilled down from the tub, fell silently into the steaming water in the basin and then dissolved gradually until it disappeared.

  The news of the clearance in Afragola had created an undifferentiated growth of panic and apprehension in the operational centres of the city, oh there’s nothing else to be done with this rain but to follow the rain, and wait for warning signs, catastrophic signs of collapses and chasms, and in truth it was not only the news of Afragola, but that alarm certainly represented a link in the very long chain of dramatic omens and similar events that had appeared more or less everywhere, Sant’Antimo, San Giorgio a Cremano, Pozzuoli, Casoria. Not knowing where to turn, the fire chief, if only out of a qualm of conscience, had also called the meteorological office at Capodichino airport, and in truth no clarification had come from that office, in the sense that the metallic voice at the other end of the line had listed a series of cyclones and anticyclones which in other words provided the sad confirmation that it would go on raining as it had in the last few days in the days to come, and it was reasonably thought that if they who were the meteorological technicians said so then there was no point looking at the sky every five minutes, because it would go on as it had gone on, there was little to be done, very little, just waiting, and lighting cigarettes one after the other, and promptly transmitting any messages that came in, and if the fact of having to suffer caused a silent fury that would have liked to take concrete form perhaps in cursing and swearing if nothing else, it would also have to be said that the explosion was prevented or halted, halted completely, by that vague but concrete apprehension that in fact those alarms were merely the ominous signs of what would really happen, of that extraordinary event that no one knew but which everyone now expected from one moment to the next, because they did not know at least another full day would pass in a not particularly distressing way, they knew only about the grievous event on Via Tasso, where a whole family had been wiped out because of the bureaucracy of Social Housing, and the grievous event on Via Aniello Falcone, where the rain had undermined the road’s supporting structures, and the road had collapsed taking with it the young and undiscussed life of Rosaria De Filippis and the strained and colourless life of Wanda Zampino. This was all they knew, and it wasn’t much, and also, sad though the facts were, no extraordinary event had taken place, and in the end these facts still belonged to the realm of the possible, until that moment they belonged to the realm of atmospheric adversity, which for good or ill in some way in the end they would succeed in harnessing, Naples had experienced days even worse than the ones it was living through now, it would manage at any rate, oh of course, and it would get through this awful time, and in the summer that would later blossom these rainy days would be nothing but a disagreeable distant memory to be erased as soon as possible, let’s put a lid on it, shall we? This awareness gave people confidence, in truth, even if that kind of confidence hour by hour did not seem enough, it was not enough at all. In fact, everyone was tracing within themselves the faded signs of fear, which redrew themselves, a little at a time, on the supply of news coming not only and not so much from the poorest areas of the city, as from the immediate periphery and the surrounding villages, and it was quite certainly as if a siege had its grip on Naples, and the circle seemed to be shrinking with each hour of rain, with every alarm signal, and the suffering and rage would certainly have exploded had it not been for the fact that they were still waiting, they were still waiting for an extraordinary event which would overturn and alter their perspective on life itself. In fact, listening to the old people’s stories, this situation today was not serious enough to fill hearts with anguish, because they very clearly remembered that Naples had experienced even worse days than the ones they were living through now, and in the warmth of the pool halls they told stories of the famous Flood of Vergini, a deluge that swept away everything and entered people’s houses and destroyed their ground floors and ruined shops and bars forever, and you couldn’t walk in the streets except in rubber boots and walking on wooden boards, and that had been a very sad time, at least for those who lived in the district of Vergini, and they remembered very clearly, and that was a much more serious situation, oh boy, much much more serious. Today you can’t understand these things, today everything’s all neat and tidy, but in the old days it wasn’t like that, oh no, and you really had to earn your living, and when that unstoppable sea of water came down, there was no point shouting or cursing, oh boy, your only option was to roll up your sleeves and get to it, and put your back into it, and try to salvage the unsalvageable, and stack up all the furniture in the house so that you didn’t lose everything, and you had to upend the box springs and the mat
tresses. In fact, these stories by the old people, terrible though they were, seemed to some extent reassuring. Then, in the pool halls, you could also have a game of 10-card scopone, or a game of bocce, with that fluorescent light falling on the green baize and the scoreboard placed at the side, and all that remained in the breaks between one shot and the other was an involuntary dart of the eyes towards the window in the door to check the opaque image of rain still coming down and coming down. It hammered against the windows. The people who came in came running in saying fuck! the rain!, and they were breathless and dripping, and the people who left stopped in the doorway to look and didn’t leave at all, they stood there with their hands in their pockets instinctively waiting for it to stop, and then when it was clear that it wasn’t going to stop, then they turned up the collars of their jackets and fled beyond the windows and they could no longer be seen clearly, and every time it looked like a farewell, as if they were making a lonely escape never to return. Because with that rain coming down and coming down drawing circles on the asphalt, everyone felt more alone, and they all surprised themselves by lowering their heads, and a hundred conscious thoughts ran through their minds, and everyone even said that it seems as if we should be drawing some sort of conclusion, but what is it?, the day of judgement? But in fact for now there was nothing but those vertical threads of water plummeting towards the earth and the sea. And then, with his soaped brush, Carlo Andreoli soaped his face, taking care to spread first a uniform film everywhere and then returning to each point with a rotating motion of his wrist which covered in order his left cheek, his chin, his right cheek, and then beneath his jaws almost to the neck. With the firm and regular movement of the brush, the foam grew again and now became soft and agreeable, yes, agreeable, and this white part was now homogeneously softened, and in fact he knew very well: it is chiefly the passage of the brush over the skin that decides the good or bad outcome of a shave. And when he had finished he made only a few upward adjustments towards his cheekbones and over the right-hand side, and at last he set the brush back down on the porcelain and for a moment he paused at the mirror to check. The mirror returned to him the twisted question that kept coming back and coming back, that endless question that he tried where possible to repress, but which always rose up once more to cloud him over with a malevolent sense of awkwardness, of inexpressible unease. It threw his thoughts into chaos. And the thoughts left each of their own accord like bits of gravel in the wind and nothing managed to reassemble in the air but a pattern of provisionality, and you can’t live in provisionality, it has been scientifically demonstrated, and swirling in the void is the consequence both ineluctable and painful, even though he knew: the brain was working on its own behalf. Of course, it was working, and it would draw out the solution at any moment. And when that happened, the dead on Via Tasso and Via Aniello Falcone would be nothing but the most ordinary accidental deaths as happens every time it rains and when following the rain a collapse occurs or a sudden subsidence of the road surface, and he waited for that moment in a state of uncertainty, and he wasn’t sure in fact that it would come, not sure at all. In fact, looking carefully around, his precarious condition was the very sensation of awkward uncertainty that the city enwrapped in its greyish cloak, woven of greyish filaments, coming down the grey hill towards a grey sea. The desolate uniformity of tones, and the silence dragging itself along the line of the horizon, and in the street a few bundled passers-by hurrying under the rain, and a drinking fountain in Mergellina with its jet of water, and the cracks in the plaster on the Palazzo Reale, and the painted words on the statue of Dante Alighieri, and the plastic bin bags piled up on the street corners, and the unpaved stones of the Galleria della Vittoria, and this was what remained in the end, only this, and perhaps one day things would be different, perhaps one day the city would flourish once more, but for now the only option was to pull the covers over your head and wail gently. Illness had swept away the tinsel and the brilliant decoration, and had extinguished the cries in the street, and the geraniums on the balconies had turned yellow, and the cheerful fiction/pretence of collective action had now transformed itself into a harsh statement of loneliness. And this remained, of the priceless city, only this, and the shadow of a faded past and the rhetoric that claimed it was poetry, and nothing, and nothing, and which other city would one day live?, which city?, the city of alleyways and transvestites and smuggled cigarettes?, or the city of the New Polyclinic, the Bypass, Secondigliano 167, what would one day become of the life that climbs today among the tufa quarries of Fontanelle and the green trees of Floridiana?, and what are we going to do with this sorrowful city?, do we want to separate it for example?, that’s it: do we want to erect a playful granite wall all around it with gorse and mimosa trees and then divide it from the rest of the people? In a city like that lovers could hold each other’s hands and ask the City Council if they could remain young forever and ever, the women would have unfamiliar girlish voices, such a city would lack the anguish that now mortifies and lays siege to our hearts, the dark premonition that with this rain coming down and coming down will come the unforeseen, the extraordinary event that will upset the seeds in their furrows and burn the plane trees of Vomero, and raise the asphalt of the streets, undermine the stones of Petraio, turn back the sea. In such a city there would not be this sad waiting that now spreads to the sinews of our hands, pressing pressing and stopping every single thing, that restless waiting of consciousness that runs through a whole life checking the signs along the path, and in the end you are left with nothing, nothing but an exhausted expression and a tremulous voice, accursed city!, I will hang your women with their legs in the air on the highest battlement of Castel Sant’Elmo and leave their heads dangling in the void, I will mutilate the legs and eyes of your children and in the streets I will peer into thousands of prams containing those deformed little monsters, I will cut the fingers from the hands of your men and throw mercury into their veins, I will throw cow shit into the halls of the Palazzo Reale, and the rooms of the National Museum, and cow shit into Villa Pignatelli and the Certosa di San Martino, and bring donkeys to piss in Via dei Mille and in the Galleria Vanvitelli and the yellow brew will fill the streets of Vomero and Chiaia, I will scatter pigs’ guts inside the shops and bars and in all the offices in all the city, and this you will become, my city of sorrows, nothing but a heap of rotting malodorous offal, and your stench will mingle with the stench of the diesel that I shall pour on the sea to cover it, this you shall be and nothing else, a stinking yellow rotten puddle, with miasmas of encroaching decomposition, your big abandoned whore’s body will be putrefaction, squalid unstoppable shameful death. With these sobs and jolting spasms, Carlo Andreoli raised his razor and paused to consider the edge of the blade. And the heavy plastic handle. And the precise point where the sideburn ended and the soap foam began. And then at that point, with a precise gesture, he brought the razor down, and the blade descended to his cheek, and from below the blade the hairs of his beard could be heard crackling before the cut, and it slid, yes, for now it slid well. Five or six passes of the razor, some long and defining, others short and corrective, he finished shaving the whole of his left cheek with the growth, and suddenly washing the blade in the hot water he then began in the opposite direction, because however much he might have seemed to have cut, in reality without going against the growth you are left with an unsatisfactory amount of stubble. This time he was careful to ensure that the passage of the blade was lighter, and while the razor rose again accompanied by his right hand, with the other Carlo Andreoli held the skin of his face taut, on his cheek level with his cheekbone, and then sideways almost level with his ear. The soap fell of course into the hot steaming water with the black dots of the cut beard, and a kind of oily patina formed and floated on the water, and the light reflected in the mirror and he was forced to crane his neck to see, and from the blue maiolica tiles of the bathroom the reflections multiplied in the confusion of meanings, in the inconclusive chaotic sup
erimpositions of a life that had certainly been chaotic and inconclusive. He found himself reflecting that on the first day an agonised mournful roar had hung over the city and from the towers of Maschio Angioino it had unearthed fear, awoken the hidden stones of the hidden city, the urban mystery of a city stratified into vague magmas of contemporaneity, and there had been an exploratory mission within the castle and in the end a doll with black hair had been discovered and identified as the endless source of the terrible sorrowful voices, and even this had not been the extraordinary event but only the prologue, the prologue and nothing more, because in fact he knew very well and all the other inhabitants of the city knew very well: this had been merely the start of the transformation. A succession of slow and degrading modifications would break down the city’s present life. Of course somewhere in the shadow of the church a priest would set the chalice back down and come and sit on the first chair in the first row, and He would come down from the cross and from the altar, and He would sit down sharing that sweet weariness, the composed silence, and nothing but the two of them sitting there would survive in the church, and without words, completely without words, but that was clear, wasn’t it?, it was extremely clear that He shared his thoughts, and that elegance of the hands. Grass would grow in the cracks in the marble, spiders would weave cobwebs, on the fresco at the back mildew would advance slowly and inexorably, and flowers would sprout from the base of the marble columns, and flowers, and weeds, and a very great deal of time would pass in that ineluctable silent way, days would follow days, and outside more and more faintly those voices of the life that went on and went on would keep coming, because that life itself goes on, and only after long years of mute understanding, at the doorway, in the sudden slant of light, the figure of a little boy in short trousers would appear, and only then would they get up, to leave, leave once and for all, time for a change of shift. And he also found himself reflecting: now all that was left was to wait for another day, a whole day whose every tremor he probably knew in advance, every tiny event that would occur, and you can’t do that, no, it’s impossible to live already knowing, it’s impossible, and how would he spend those inexpressible twenty-four hours?, reading the practice and discipline of yoga?, castles in Spain?, information and mystification?, how would Carlo Andreoli spend that day of his that he already knew? In this question there now appeared the awareness of a sudden theft. Yes, life had robbed him of a whole day, a whole day of 24 hours punctuated by minutes and seconds, it had robbed him of a sunset and a night and that inexplicable darkness that always comes down with the evening and had robbed him of an exuberant awakening, with the light of the day coming in, flourishing once more, he had simply been cheated of a day that no one would ever give him back, no one ever. But in the end he would remember, of course, and at the right moment he would draw his winning card: ah no!, another moment, I have the right to one more day, and he would produce the documentation, certainly, he would arrange his cards neatly on the table, and that way he would provide his certification, with various stamps and seals: another whole day still awaited him, and certainly thinking about it now a day seems like nothing, less than nothing, but think a little about whether they might give you back this extra day in the end, try and think: there, let’s say that you are in bed and at some point the communication arrives: dear sir, with reference to the warnings we have sent in the current year, we regret to inform you that your game is definitively terminated with immediate effect. What would happen? What would happen is that you would collect yourself sitting in the middle of the bed and say to yourself with a smug smile, ah, no!, dear sirs, no!, as documents in my possession clearly reveal, I was cheated of a whole day, twenty-four hours precisely, which I was assured would be returned to me at the end, and it is not as if I want to bring the game to an end, not that, I could certainly not put up any resistance, I know that very well, just as I know very well that it would be pointless for me to come out with considerations concerning my young age, etcetera etcetera, except, my dear sirs, I now demand respect for the rules of the game, just as I have respected them, and they would have no choice but to carefully check the cards, consult one another in mysterious confabulations, and once the authenticity of the claim and the validity of the documents produced had been ascertained, they would concede, however reluctantly: ah yes, sir, you are right, wait another day, twenty-four hours precisely, and at that point albeit provisionally the matter will be closed, they would leave the house in silence closing the door behind them, and you lying in your bed would go on reflecting, with a smile of satisfaction, and one day, oh yes, a whole day to live!, sweet eternal wealth would have appeared to him, inestimable, playful wealth. In that definitive, radiant day of his Carlo Andreoli would go the chalet on the gulf with books and newspapers under his arm, a pack of American cigarettes, the box of safety matches, he would make himself comfortable in a wicker chair and on the chair opposite he would stretch out his legs and remember, yes, he would run through that brief and tender season, the flowers, and the poetry, the smells of girls, and his beloved work, and the city that stretched before him, the flickering lights of the night, the memory of his father, the sweet sweet skin of Mavie, the books under his arm when he went to school, the football games in the middle of the street, and how strange it is to have in your hands a fistful of flies and perhaps not even that, and how sweet that life was, in that new and different dimension the perspective really would be overturned, and certainly many of the things he had struggled for in the past he would not struggle for now, oh no, and furthermore he regretted nothing, nothing at all. He would spend that crucial day of his like this until sunset. He would see the line of the horizon blurring, and purple-grey shadows would come down, and with the cold air of the first evening he would come back inside the house, and in the library he would confront the countless backs of books with the fingers of his right hand, and how much how much he still had, how much he had left to do, would never do and with a big book in his hands he would make himself comfortable in the armchair and read, yes, he would read for ages, every now and again raising his eyes to the vague familiar things, and the thoughts of the book would interweave with his own thoughts, this thought of his right now that was squandering his last few hours, and this playful love that would grow between his fingers, would spread and flourish with sap and tender white petals, in the conscious serenity of a smile he would say well, let’s see what happens now, and from the window he would give one last look at the city spread out below. With a deep sentimental sigh, Carlo Andreoli checked that his left cheek appeared perfectly shaven. Strange how the skin comes out regenerated in the morning, fresh and uncontaminated, young as a young man’s skin, and then, turning his head to the left, he took his razor to the edge of his right sideburn and repeated the operation with the greatest possible attention, because one of the fundamental errors is that of losing concentration, in fact you shave on one side with extreme care and diligent attention and then you don’t even notice and you lose your concentration, you become distracted, you get caught up in your own thoughts, and on that other side you end up cutting or scratching yourself. No, my dear friend, you’re not going to mess me around this time, here too my hand will be as light as a butterfly’s wing. In fact he discovered that the razor was proceeding exactly as it was supposed to, and let us say that the shaving of the right cheek was a complete success, and by way of checking Carlo Andreoli ran two fingers over it once more and received confirmation, and in the end everything was for the best, that morning that was the fourth day of rain. That superficial sensation of well-being rising gradually would remain unchanged throughout the entire course of the day, certainly, and the day after, in all likelihood, because he could not really see how his graceful sense of balance could have been thrown out of kilter. Not least by virtue of the fact that he was aware of everything, and that compared to others he had the advantage of serene consciousness, and he alone had heard the roaring groan from the arrow-slits of the Maschio Angioino a
s a calm event already foretold, and the loud sorrowful thunder hurled against the city had dug no deep furrow in his heart, and he had waited for that inhuman cry as if of multitudes with his muscles tensed, and he had stood motionless noticing the anxiety of the city and the frantic agitation of wretched men. The voice from the street reached him again, Franceeescaaa, and the shrill laugh of the boy somewhere, hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!