In a Heartbeat

by Sandrone Dazieri

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Spillo.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Anyway, to use the dog as a logo reflected my father’s sense of humour. But he lost his sense of humour when Manetti named Mariano the CEO. Daddy didn’t agree, but he was in the minority and had relatively little say in the day-to-day business of the company.’ When Manetti died his heirs wanted to respect his wishes: his son became president, a purely symbolic role, and Mariano remained CEO.

  ‘If you’re the boss’s daughter, why are you my secretary?’

  ‘I’m your assistant, not your secretary. I’m your second-in- command. I may help you with your meetings, but I never bring you coffee. That’s what Rina does, your real secretary, actually our secretary. I only started recently. I was out of the country up until three years ago, and I didn’t know anything about advertising. You taught me everything I know.’

  ‘How wonderful!’

  I stretched and then stood up. ‘I’m starving. Let’s see if there’s something to eat in the house that isn’t spelt or barley.’

  ‘Rosario’s wife always cooks for you unless you tell her not to. Always vegetarian, sorry to say.’

  ‘We’re going to have to change that.’

  I put on my trousers. Monica didn’t move.

  ‘Saint … ’

  ‘You’re not hungry?’

  ‘Saint, what are we going to do now?’

  ‘Let’s stick to the programme. I have to go back to work and pretend I’m the person from before. At least until after the investigation or until I come up with something better.’

  ‘You don’t remember anything … ’

  ‘You’ll show me.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘What time do I usually show up for work? Do I have to punch in or something like that?’

  ‘No, you’re a director; you set your own hours. You usually get there around nine.’

  ‘So … we have a good seven hours.’

  8

  We decided to start with the mobile phone, since everyone had one; I had to learn how to use it. Monica showed me how to switch it on and how to check the address book. There were a hundred and twenty names that I didn’t know besides Rosario, Office and Monica. She also showed me how to write a text message and send it, and how to take photos.

  I had heard about digital cameras before, but they had cost a lot and they were also enormous. Now, you had everything that you could possibly want, and it came in the size of a cigarette pack. You could send images around the world just by dialling a number. It was either genius or just plain stupidity, I couldn’t decide. I could even choose a ring tone from a selection of fifty different ones, annoying and also in stereo. There was everything from ‘La Cucaracha’ to the soundtrack from The Sting. Did this bother anyone? My neighbours complained even if I had the volume of the TV too loud; now with a phone I could torture everyone to death.

  The Ad Exec had chosen the vibrate option; it was the drilling sound that had woken me up this morning.

  ‘You save messages here.’

  Pressing the buttons, she showed me a list. Three or four were hers, from ‘Where are you?’ sent the night we were at La Scala, to ‘Call me, the police are here!!’ sent that morning. The others were unknown and more or less were Call me or Are you there? There was one that came from a Father Zurloni, Don’t forget our meeting at 9:30pm, Regards. I thought about asking Monica who it was, but she was already showing me the voice mail.

  ‘Press here, and you can listen to your messages.’

  She put the phone to my ear and I heard her voice that had called me desperately the night at La Scala. Next was her sad message where she told me about Roveda. There was an accident sob sob and then there was one from Rina that asked me in a choked voice to come to the office for urgent news. Who knows if it was her who told the cops about the comments I had made about Roveda? Then there was a voice that asked me if I wanted to delete the message or listen again.

  ‘You can also catch up on the recent news or send a fax, but these functions aren’t that important at the moment.’

  I agreed. I already felt exhausted and the lesson was just beginning.

  ‘Now here’s the fun part. The computer,’ Monica said.

  Back then I had an IBM 286 that was heavy and packed with all the video games that I could find. I got it from a junkie who owed me. Inside was the previous owner’s diary written with a programme called WordStar. His pathetic writing had made me roar with laughter. The computer that I had now was in the office on the third floor (I hadn’t even noticed that there was a top floor with a terrace.) It had a screen only a few centimetres thick. There was no external hard drive, no wires connected the keyboard to the screen, and there wasn’t even a wire for the mouse. It didn’t have a ball but a red light. A laser.

  ‘Bluetooth,’ Monica said. ‘Radio waves.’

  Monica showed me how to use the commands. There weren’t any cursors or lines, no C: Open File, Delete, Print, but little drawings that I had to press with a pointer. Icons. I realised that it was an Apple by the apple shape inscribed on the milky white plastic. The computer that I remembered was a greyish cube with a tiny screen.

  Fascinated, I let Monica show me the menu. She said that the machine had a hard disk of 200GB. Gigabytes, that means a thousand megabytes! The computer that I had left behind at my old apartment, the apartment that wasn’t there anymore, had 20MB of memory and was still half-empty.

  Then she showed me the internet.

  I had already heard about it in my time but it was only something that the Americans had; now I discovered that it was a kind of infinite encyclopaedia subdivided into millions of computers scattered all over the world. Networked, 24 hours a day.

  I could join as well if I had wanted to and create my own webpage. Webpages opened in every language in the world when I pressed the mouse button, actually when I clicked the mouse. Inserting any word into Google, a list of pages opened for me to click with all the information that I requested. Even an idiot could understand!

  At the third click a page opened where a black woman was giving a blowjob. ‘Not bad. There was a time when you used to have to pay for this,’ I said.

  ‘Same now. If you click on it they’ll ask for your credit card. It’s spam.’

  ‘What’s spam?’

  ‘It’s unwanted advertising.’

  ‘So they’re one of us.’

  Spam was everywhere. A new ad would pop up with something else to sell: sex, medicine, travel. Mostly sex. When I tried to close a window, more appeared to the point of clogging the screen and forcing me to close the programme.

  I was mesmerised by the colours. My Olivetti PC 1 was in black and white. Now, on that thin slice of plastic screen the images ran like a three-dimensional film. The sounds came out of it as if they were coming from a hi-fi stereo. The amount of information was infinite, all linked. Clicking on a page, you wound up on another one on the other side of the world. I started to play on another website and then another, while Monica gave up at four in the morning. When she crashed, I went ahead alone. I learned quickly and the thought that I actually wasn’t learning but simply remembering was depressing. But I didn’t panic. I kept going with my big dose of the Third Millennium.

  By dawn, I had come to a conclusion about what the new century was like: to sum up, it was all shit. They hadn’t put men on Mars, there was no teleportation, they hadn’t eliminated world hunger, they hadn’t reduced pollution, they hadn’t cured cancer, they hadn’t got rid of AIDS, and instead there was a whole load of new diseases. One was because they fed cows ground up dead meat instead of grass. This said a lot about the general intelligence of the time.

  Learn: Prion. Learn: Avian flu.

  These bastards continued to kill each other all over the world. Weekend warriors went to Somalia and left the country worse than what it was before. Now they were being blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, global terrorism. Attacks and live beheadings, Osa
ma bin Laden.

  Holy shit!

  I saw the Twin Towers crumble, and I asked myself if I had ever had the chance to visit them, in that black hole of my lost years. I followed the recorded footage of funerals for soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. There was the tricolour flag of Italy, the army, and the mourning crowds. The only missing thing was Il Duce with his hands on his hips. Learn: September 11th. Learn: Peace Mission. Learn: Al-Qaeda.

  The future wasn’t Asimov’s future with fun robots; it was Blade Runner without the replicants. At least now they cloned things, but it wasn’t like the film. They crossed things at random. Strawberries with scorpions, tomatoes with jellyfish, seeds with pesticides, sheep with spiders. No wonder the Ad Exec was so careful about what he ate. For dinner, the Filipina maid had cooked wild chestnuts with whole-grain rice. I still had it stuck to my teeth.

  Learn: transgenic. Learn: GMO (Genetically Modified Organism). Learn: Global Market. Learn: No Global.

  At five in the morning I toasted the new pope with a cup of coffee. I had missed the other one by a hair’s breadth. Two million people went to see him lying in state. They took pictures of him with their phones. It was the most photographed dead body in history. There was always someone taking pictures: they killed a child, click, a car went over a bridge, click, somebody was stoned to death, click. The photos went from one phone to the next and in the end they all wound up on the internet. How wonderful.

  Cuba was still there, along with Castro. Yugoslavia was gone and also … The Soviet Union! Unbelievable! No more Evil Empire. Goodbye, Red Army. I saw videos of cannons firing on the Kremlin, goodbye Gorbachev and that stain on his head. Now I had to buy an atlas to learn the names of the new countries that weren’t there before. The United States was still there and the president was still Bush. Bush Jr.? For half an hour I was convinced that the United States had become a hereditary monarchy. Then I saw the story about the president in between them. He was almost impeached for a blowjob. He even played the saxophone. He, he, he. In Italy they would have given him a Medal of Honour.

  Learn: Inappropriate sexual relations.

  The world was going to hell. Tsunamis, hurricanes, global warming. Poor New Orleans. Learn: Kyoto Accords. Nicaragua was a disaster, China was killing us with merchandise, Africa was a mess before, and it’s a mess now. Half of the population was dying of hunger and disease, nothing new. Mandela was the president, wasn’t he in jail? Apartheid was over, and now he was an ex-president. He also won the Nobel Prize.

  Italy. Here’s a crash course in Italian politics.

  Learn: Mani Pulite. Learn: Conflict of Interest.

  The old political parties were gone soon after I made the jump through time. Most of the people who were in power had disappeared. They had been either indicted or were in jail. Former President Bettino Craxi had died in exile in Tunisia. He had fled Italy after being condemned on corruption charges. Now his son was in power, trying to clear the family name. I remember him from the clubs where I pushed pills. Whores always surrounded the bastard.

  The Christian Democratic Party had broken up into a myriad of smaller parties that constantly fought amongst themselves. The Communist Party had changed their name a number of times after what had happened to their friends in the East.

  The Northern League, however, prospered.

  I watched them rise to power with their parades against immigrants and southern Italians. I was sure that they would not have lasted six months, but they were still here using the same xenophobic rhetoric as well as good old-fashioned fear and intimidation, and were now in government.

  The prime minister now was Silvio Berlusconi. His political party was called Forza Italia. I remembered seeing the name around on giant billboards with the Italian flag. At first I thought that they were advertisements for the national football team.

  Monica was stretched out over an armchair. I pinched her nose.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Berlusconi, is it that Silvio Berlusconi?’

  ‘You woke me up for this? Yes it’s him,’ she yawned. ‘In your time he was the one from Channel 5. We vote for him as well as my father.’

  ‘Is he liberal?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘I figured as much.’

  She went back to sleep. I plunged ahead. At six in the morning I was still clicking feverishly trying to remember. Learn: European Parliament. Learn: Transgender, DSL, Care Worker, Millennium Bug, Mobbing, Priority Mail, Work at Home, disabled, print on demand, Satellite TV, GPRS, Anthrax, Migrant, G8 …

  Tired, I crashed and dreamt that I was with a group of illegal immigrants in a small sinking boat. I woke up with my trousers soaked in coffee. On the screen was a page entitled ‘Horny Teen Babes,’ and you could put everything imaginable into these Horny Teen Babes. How could anyone work without jerking off every five minutes? I still couldn’t understand.

  I woke Monica up again.

  ‘I’ve finished. I’m worn out and I don’t remember a thing.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s seven.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, stretching every muscle. ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘It’s horrible. When the Berlin Wall fell … all of us were convinced that a fantastic world was waiting for us. No war, just peace … you guys really screwed things up.’

  ‘We did it. You were also there. Did you see the Beagle & Manetti website?’

  ‘There’s a website? Of course, everybody has one.’

  ‘Wait.’ She reached for the keyboard and began to hit the keys. ‘Why is it so sticky?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Don’t do it in the office, or Rina will have a heart attack. There you go.’

  The screen lit up; at first I thought that it was spam, but it was the agency homepage. First there was a green field, then a dog-pig that sniffed around, and when he got to the flower it grew bigger and filled the page. Every petal took you to a different part of the site.

  ‘Here’s who we are.’

  She clicked on a petal and the image became a waterfall, the water became a series of bubbles filled with slogans.

  OUR GOLDEN RULES

  WE DARE TO CREATE NEW IDEAS, forget the past, forget fear.

  WE DARE TO BREAK THE RULES, push the boat out.

  WE DARE TO BECOME one with the Client. Share the same objectives, the same hopes, the same desires, and the same vision of the world.

  WE DARE TO ALWAYS REACH HIGHER. As Giu says: ‘We must never stop aiming for the best, mediocrity is not in our vocabulary.’

  ‘Giu is Giuseppe Manetti, ‘ said Monica.

  ‘You don’t think this guy is a bit full of himself?’

  ‘Why?’ she yawned again. ‘Let’s get to the interesting part. This was Mariano.’ She clicked on a new section and some guy appeared with a weasel face and white hair. Mariano Roveda read the caption. ‘Do you remember anything?’

  ‘Absolute darkness.’

  ‘And this?’ She showed me my photo. I was sitting and smiling behind a desk with the same black suit.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Read and learn.’

  Santo Denti, Class of 1965. After a long period of no-profit activity …

  ‘No-profit?’

  ‘You can’t say drug dealing. You said that you were a volunteer who worked the streets helping homeless children and prostitutes.’

  ‘The prostitutes maybe.’

  ‘Keep reading, you pig.’

  … Denti went back to university and in 1998 graduated at the top of his class majoring in political science.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Monica, I barely got my high school diploma. School isn’t really my thing. Here it says that I have a degree.’

  ‘I told you, you changed.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a fake one.’

  ‘It’s hanging right there: look.’

  It was right above the computer with my name on it. Magna
cum laude. I was a nerd? I went ahead.

  He made his first moves in the advertising world as a copywriter …

  ‘Copywriter?’

  ‘You wrote text, slogans, catchphrases … ’

  … for the client Armando Zucca. For his work on the promotion of IBM inkjet printers, ‘Print It All Baby,’ he was awarded the Mercurio D’Oro Advertising Award in 1999. In 2000, he was hired as a creative consultant at Beagle & Manetti and won another Mercurio D’Oro for the Martini Beverage Campaign. ‘Stir It, Shake It, Any Way You Take It!’ Other successful campaigns include: ‘Prunes Rule!’ (Yogurt Dericoni), ‘Who the Heck is Brutus?’ (Encyclopedia De Agostini), ‘The Big Wave’ (Agnis washing machines), ‘I Want It Pure’ (Sangiovanni Mineral Water). In 2003 he was promoted to Creative Director. Despite his new commitments he continued his obligations to no-profit organisations such as The Flock of the Good Shepherd, founded by Father Zurloni in 1970.

  ‘Oh God, The Flock? As in sheep?’

  ‘Really? Who the hell are they anyway?’

  ‘It’s a conservative Catholic movement.’

  ‘Do we go out and graze together?’

  ‘It’s something serious and wonderful. You try to bring the Word of Christ to everyday life. You’re very active, especially with charities involving people affected by war. It’s how you met my father.’

  Suddenly, she looked more tired than before.

  ‘Father Zurloni was supposed to marry us, you know?’

  She was waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything intelligent.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower. You should take one too because you stink, shave while you’re at it.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  I stayed in front of the screen, staring at my face. The Flock … Now I understood why there were crucifixes around the house.

  Did I really believe in this crap? I wasn’t an atheist before, I just never really pondered the thought seriously, I suppose. I was convinced that God, if he existed at all, was doing his own thing while we were working our arses off down here on Earth. And after death, who the hell knows? We’ll see who’s right one day. Maybe we’ll find out that those pain-in-the-neck Jehovah’s Witnesses got it right in the end. The Ad Exec, however, was rooting for a specific team. Speaking of teams …