Ten minutes before the start of the show, the twenty-four streetlights in Piazza Industriale suddenly went out. The vast no-man’s land littered with defunct factories and truck parks was engulfed in darkness. The Teatro della Luce, which they were inaugurating that evening, was the only light source still operating: its wide open atrium flashed like the mouth of a gigantic extraterrestrial fire eater. The mist around the vortex of light, sick with smog, looked like a ball of incandescent milk. We were still three hundred meters away and the route over the dirt road wasn’t the most comfortable. Adele tripped over a stone and I was just in time to grab her arm and stop her from falling. She laughed: not with happiness but with pain, due to her injured ankle. Let’s go back, I proposed unsuccessfully. The car was a few steps behind us. It was her idea to go to hear Senator Lavinia. “I want to see what she looks like.” Senator? I didn’t like rallies and Adele knew it. It’s not a rally, she replied. And she’s not a senator, even though they call her that. This Lavinia, whom no one seemed to have seen in person and of whom there were no published portraits, edited a column (Thou Shalt Not Steal) in Futura, a slim monthly magazine printed on recycled paper and distributed free of charge door to door, in letterboxes. My copies quickly ended up in the wastepaper bin. Adele, on the other hand, willingly took a look at them and maintained that Lavinia was a commentator sui generis, a kind of preacher committed to the moral renewal of the nation. At the Teatro della Luce, a hastily renovated former slaughterhouse, the presumed senator was making her debut as a lecturer and showgirl. The program promised shocks and astonishment. “The Honorable Lavinia has chosen this city as the starting point for a long and extensive tour. Her show The Light That Counts will change our way of seeing and interpreting the things of the world.”
It was an experience that Adele wanted to indulge in at all costs. She found me recalcitrant and prejudiced, and perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong. If you love a woman you have to please her at least a little. Follow her on some daring venture, before she judges you cowardly or boring. Thus it was that, after a few minutes, we emerged from the dark night and let ourselves be absorbed by that riot of watts. As I feared, the theatre was of a provincial and insolent ugliness. Those responsible for the “renovation” had relied on two safe cards: parsimony and bad taste. The sconces on the walls were topped with steer heads. I gritted my teeth and pushed through the crowd – the typical free-entry gathering. The audience was full of new but already creaking seats, all occupied by real people but also by bags and jackets. I argued with an old hag who claimed to rule half the row, holding it hostage with her junk, and I managed to snatch a place from her to offer it to Adele. Her ankle hurt. I told her not to worry about me, I preferred to stand, within reach of the exit and the bar. I carefully chose the most strategic place to stand, in view of a possible escape; and as I approached it, I saw a drunken spectator striding down the central corridor. Right in the middle of the room he projected a long flare of vomit in front of him, decorating at least four meters of linoleum. The bystanders narrowly escaped unscathed and the liberated man turned around and took to his heels so as not to have to support the weight of universal contempt on his poor shoulders. The sour smell of ill digested wine quickly spread throughout the room, especially getting into the fabrics – the curtains, clothes, scarves. A team of industrious youngsters, in orange overalls with TEATROLUCE written on them, burst into the humiliated area armed with buckets and brooms. Others invaded the field with spray cans, busy squirting the scent of lavender into the air.
It was well after nine when, finally, the lights were dimmed and the curtain rose on four musicians from some municipal band. A fifth character, bearded and overweight, with a white shirt half inside his jeans and half outside, came on stage with the sole purpose of placing drinking water on a table and lowering the microphone stand by twenty or thirty centimeters. “Holy shit! Lavinia is a dwarf,” exclaimed an invisible spectator in the group standing near me. But no: she was just a child. A bizarre creature ten or eleven years old. She emerged from behind the scenes wearing a carnival costume and cracking a whip. With that she pounced on the musicians, lashing them mercilessly, and in her enthusiasm she quoted a bit of Dante tainted with errors. “Wow unto you, ye marmalade! Hope nevermore to look upon the Heavens...” Once the musicians had dispersed (the last one, a trumpeter, was bleeding from the nose and was soothing his eye with his handkerchief), the little girl Lavinia calmed down and approached the microphone with the most placid air in the world. A small smile played on her lips. She placed one hand over the other and waited for the right moment to begin her spiel, whatever it was. Only then did the spectators give her, in unison, an oh! of wonder. Lavinia looked like a miniature Mona Lisa. The same dress as hers, the same brown, the same neckline, the same posture, the same two bands of straight hair at the sides of her face. “Hands up!” she commanded suddenly, in the shrillest voice in the world. In response, the audience exploded in laughter. The little girl gave a fierce look. “Show me your hands, I said!” When a forest of arms rose from the seats like a squad of plants shown in slow-motion in a nature documentary, Lavinia once again produced the smile – amiable and sarcastic – of the prima donna of the Louvre. She, bathed as she was in the spotlights, could see nothing but a forest of faint shadows; yet she, satisfied, said: “Well done, that’s the way. Your hands are opaque. Wouldn’t you like to have them brighter?”
The audience was silent. She repeated: “I asked you if you wanted opaque or luminous skin. Answer. And rest assured, I’m not selling moisturizers. I am your spiritual guide, not a pusher of herbs, herbal teas and cosmetics. So: do you want shinier hands or not?”
“Yes,” shouted a chorus of fans.
“I am the senator of your future. Say it with me: we hate theft. We hate waste.”
“We hate theft! We hate waste!” replied the amused crowd.
“Liars!”, accused the little girl, pointing an index finger at the audience. “You do not know purity. But I am here to help you recognize your opacity. You are not evil, you are just unaware of the light that counts. You have been deceived for generations. You are in good faith, but blind. To demonstrate this, I will ask some of you some simple questions. Any volunteers? I want an artist here, if there is one. Painter, sculptor, musician: it doesn’t matter.”
Silence.
“No volunteers? I’d also be happy with a writer. Or an architect.”
Silence.
“What did I tell you? All of you, absolutely everyone, have something to hide.”
The provocation worked. A paunchy middle-aged gentleman, with a professorial air, moved from the last row, went down the corridor with his head held high, approached the stage and gingerly climbed the few dark steps that separated him from the presumptuous little girl.
“Welcome, sir. A round of applause for his courage.”
The audience happily obeyed.
“Here’s the first question, easy as pie. What do you think of public fountains?”
The gentleman looked perplexed, but only for a moment. “What do you want me to think, my little one? They are fine. Decorative. They adorn cities.”
“Don’t call me ‘my little one’: I’m not your little one. I’m Lavinia and that’s it. If you really want to be nice, call me senator. Well: fountains adorn cities. Have you ever wondered how much they cost?”
“I actually never thought about it, Senator.”
“I could have sworn it. We have loads and loads of unemployed people and we allow ourselves the luxury of decorative fountains. And tell me: what kind of artist are you?”
“I’m not an artist, I just teach art history.”
“Art is the opium of the people.”
“Truly that would be religion...”
“Don’t be funny. One opium does not exclude the other. We are intoxicated by different varieties of opium: art, religion, music, literature, cinema, theatre, fashion, perfumes, cosmetics, dances... And we never think about the costs of all this. About the vanity of these frills. I announce to you a different world. Spartan. I proclaim to you the superior light of accounting, to purify a world contaminated by corruption and waste.”
Thunderous applause arose from the audience. My veins felt full of flies. I kept my fists clenched in my pockets and dreamed of infanticide. The language of adults flowed from that little mouth of milk and roses like a torrent of sulfuric acid.
The professor (and I was thinking of Unrat in the perverse coils of Lola-Lola) seemed to disagree with the little girl’s thesis. “Senator, will you allow me a minor reflection? You say that art is bad. But have you seen yourself in the mirror? You yourself are a work of art. Haven’t you dressed up as Mona Lisa? The Mona Lisa in miniature format?”
The little senator’s face contorted in a grimace of disgust. “I knew you would say that. Opacity makes you predictable. I don’t look like that woman at all, but I try to imitate her attitude to remind people like you that there is more meaning in real life than in painted life. Opaque people paint an unreal life and society to rid themselves of the superior light of accounting.”
“Can I ask you a few questions?”
“One. There are other taxpayers who would like to come up onto this stage.”
“How can you talk about complex things like accounting, at your age?”
“I graduated high school at the age of eight and would be close to getting my degree if there was a university suited to my principles.”
“Do you already know how to draw up a budget?”
“I said: just one question. Now you can go. However, yes, I know when a balance sheet is transparent and when it is not. And I’ll tell you something, so that you learn it once and for all: no budget is transparent. The ideal for which we are fighting is to illuminate it.”
Then, out of faith or derision, other masochists no less audacious than the professor took to the stage. Lavinia used them to illustrate her theories on the light that counts. She said that of the seven deadly sins, avarice, understood as cupidity, greed and theft, is the most repugnant: more than pride and lust, envy and gluttony, sloth and anger, which indeed, if practiced with moderation and control, become virtues. But she must have been passionate about paradoxes because, after having argued that avarice is the worst of vices, she announced that it was also the most luminous of values, a powerful natural defense against all squandering.
She struck up a particularly cutting invective on the inevitable fate of politics and governments, that of power that contaminates and corrodes and reveals the thief hidden in each of us. She urged the audience to proclaim in chorus, seven times in a row, the slogan “No more rulers! No more thieves!” The light that counts was the light of honesty, temperance and savings: “We must show respect for money, especially that of others. We must respect the taxpayer, because the taxpayer is our brother.” Pure and transparent accounting “must be our faith, our commitment, our future.”
The lights came back on in the auditorium in a dissonant concert of applause and squeals of enthusiasm; few of us were whistling. I went to get Adele. Her good mood clashed with my drained state. She asked me if I had observed the people in the front rows, the followers of the budding senator. No, I didn’t want to observe anyone, I wasn’t interested in them, I just wanted to get out of that bedlam. Her insistence was so great that I was obliged to force my way through the outgoing human tide to go, against the current, to spy on the spectators in the front row, still nailed to their seats in the absurd hope that the show would continue until the end of time. They were all – men, women and children – exact replicas of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Entire families in the image and likeness of their inspiration, the unlikely leader of a sect as childish as it was menacing. Mona Lisas of both sexes in adoration of that posthumous remnant of Shirley Temple: only that Shirley behaved like a child in a fairy-tale paradise of golden curls, while this one gave herself the airs of a moralizer and did not hesitate to flaunt the primacy of the “healthy economy” over any other human value or need – peace, solidarity, the rejection of violence in its most tragic and traditional senses.
The prefecture was much criticized, but in a whisper, for having granted permission to celebrate the No Festival in the largest space in the city. From the early hours of the morning, Piazza Industriale looked like a colorful amusement park. I went there with Adele to take some photos: it was worth it, the area was set up in an even more evocative way than De Chirico and Dalí combined could have imagined. In the center of the open space, a pedal concert harp was burning slowly. The red-hot strings tumbled in turn from the burning frame, groaning and writhing. The early birds swore that the bonfire of the piano – a Steinway grand, now reduced to embers – had been even more spectacular. Among the most popular (but also most disappointing) attractions was a pavilion with the sign “The Fate of the Flying Saucers.” A smaller sign warned: “Free entry at your own risk.” At the edge of the square there were police squad cars and ambulances ready for any eventuality. The flying saucers were nothing more than simple long-playing vinyl records, hurled in rapid succession at the spectators by a hand-loaded launcher. Not everyone in the audience was able to avoid that barrage of improper Frisbees: people left the pavilion injured by strikes from Zappa and Elvis, but also from Mozart (Exsultate! Jubilate!) and Armstrong, Brahms and Nirvana. The love of music may have claimed its victims, but the hatred of music can cause even more.
The merchants drove Jesus out of a fake temple, built in a rough and ready manner with materials used to build sets worthy of a cinema museum. The period costumes worn for the staging were also false, but the beatings given to Jesus were truer than life, and the foreigner who impersonated the Nazarene did not seem to suffer them willingly: at every attempt to escape he was caught again and forced to repeat his role from the beginning. It was just as I was filming yet another lynching that a so-called security thug swooped down on me, snatched the Canon from my hand and destroyed it with the heels of his boots. Our protests produced an unexpected result: the police, attracted by the noise, took the bad guy’s side and ordered us to leave the square immediately. Alternative: handcuffs, paddy wagon and jail.
We left that inferno, me sans Canon, Adele with a small cut on her right eyebrow – a John Lennon LP, Imagine, I think.
Immediately after the abolition of civil and religious holidays, loudly supported by the new dissidents and granted by the government and parliament out of some form of pre-election prudence, the magazine Governo Ladro, the “official organ of transparency”, came out in a special edition with a list – amply accompanied by explanatory notes – of the new theological virtues and the new deadly sins. The virtues coincided with the accounting principles established by the civil code for the preparation of a correct financial statement: continuity, prudence, competence, separation, constancy, prevalence of substance over form; these six technical items came accompanied by a more metaphorical seventh, “light”. The vices were apparently the same as before, but significantly modified: cultural pride, managerial greed, promiscuity with foreign countries (formerly lust), envy of those who spend money wastefully, indulgence in gluttony and smoking, socio-communist ideological wrath, currency sloth.
The cover story took up many pages of the magazine; a smaller, but respectable space was dedicated to the article “Judas and the thirty pieces of silver. Investigation into the fairness of compensation.”
There was no longer any need for extravagant makeup and costumes to allude to Leonardo’s famous portrait. The creature was easy to imitate: the placid attitude, the sarcastic smile, that certain way of holding the hands were enough. When the first Mona Lisas “in plain clothes” appeared in my local bar, they sowed some uncertainty, but the curiosity was short-lived and did not alarm anyone (except me). After all, there were few topics in vogue in that bar, so peripheral to the city center and the centers of knowledge. The morning had begun in the most down-to-earth way. There had been fervent discussions about the latest football team sold to the Chinese, obviously. Moreover, the bar had also passed into Chinese hands, as someone did not fail to point out. It was deduced, almost unanimously, that the whole of Italy would soon become a colony of Beijing; and there was much joking on the subject, but in a joyless way. One fellow said that soon we would have yellow priests saying mass; another prophesied the advent of a party called PCI, nothing to do with the old Communist Party of Italy, simply the Chinese Party of Italy in name and in fact. I pretended to read my book but listened to their ramblings, interested not so much in the fate of soccer or the church but in the reputation of the Chinese in the customers’ opinion. Ortolano, the neighborhood greengrocer, claimed that they were “hard workers”, as if that recognition were the result of a meticulous and distrustful investigation. The efficiency of the young oriental couple, he at the counter and she at the cash register, was a source of shared amazement; a kind of amazement never reserved with equal spontaneity for the Italian managers who had alternated over time, as far as I knew. There were three tables occupied by about ten regulars, seven men and three women, small pensioners with shrill voices. Four meters away, a couple who had just entered sat down, two forty-year-olds so similar that one would think they were brother and sister.
“They must be strangers,” said a customer whom everyone called Big Nose.
“Why’s that?”, asked a woman with thinning hair, dyed orange-red, who shortly before had expressed sorrow for the many bars in Lombardy that had fallen “under the Chinese flag”.
“I’ve never seen them before.”
“Come on!”, Blood Orange mocked him, “don’t you recognize him? He’s Pina’s boy.”
“Does Pina have such a great big son?”
“He looks like a commendatore but he’s a young man. He must be around thirty-five, thirty-six years old.”
“And that’s his sister?”
“Sister schmister! Pina has only two sons, this one is the elder.”
“They look like two peas in a pod. Either Pina or her husband must have got busy. Sometimes one nest isn’t enough.”
Madame Beretti, who gave herself the air of a beautician and wore makeup accordingly, emerged in all her thinness to speak her mind.
“He’s an accountant with a sanitary ware company.”
“A toilet salesman?”
“No, a good person,” Madame assured, as if toilet sellers belonged to some diabolical sect.
“He reminds me of someone,” Cat’s Eye said.
“Don’t tell me he looks like his mother. He doesn’t even look a bit like her. Nor even his father, as I remember him.”
“But he’s the spitting image of someone else. Maybe someone from the television.”
“No television,” murmured the third woman, who enjoyed a reputation as a Relentless Observer. “But he has a famous face. Especially when he smiles.”
“That’s to say, always,” Mr. Sleepy pointed out. “He’s been grinning ever since he came in.”
“Actually, he has a kind of grimace on his lips that looks like a smile.”
“It depends on what they’re saying to each other,” Pulpy Eyelids said. “Can’t you see she’s smiling too? In the same way?”
“That’s why they look alike,” said Big Nose. “The way of grinning is the same, a little like a priest and a little like Mona Lisa. Otherwise they are quite different.”
“Did you say Mona Lisa? Leonardo’s Mona Lisa?”
“Look at how she holds her hands. Equal and precise.”
“Her too!?”
“O God have mercy, two Mona Lisas at once!”
“Mona Lisa and her male counterpart.”
“Escaped from a painting.”
I looked closer at the table under examination. There was something plausible in what they said. The two mysterious customers were surrounded by a vaguely Renaissance aura. Rounded faces on rounded bodies, the sharing of a smile between the skeptical and the papal, a palpable sarcasm – good-natured or mock-good-natured – displayed with grace. Strangely, the man’s baldness accentuated, rather than attenuated, his affinity with the greatest “cult” icon in the history of art: it made one think of the side effects of chemotherapy on the face of a noblewoman, rather than of male crudity. While I studied the couple – mirrored like two bedside lamps on the sides of a double bed – the advertising images of certain miraculous products for hair regrowth came to mind, where the before-and-after cure was rendered, with demonstrative intent, through two side-by-side portraits. The man didn’t change his expression even when he jumped up to take off his jacket and tie. Not so much for the heat, I thought, but to get rid of an obstacle, a constraint that was too formal and conservative.
Madame Beretti was wringing her hands and not taking her eyes off the couple.
“I went to a lab on Wednesday to get a chest x-ray,” she said in a low, hoarse, even voice. Some, concerned, inquired about her state of health. Health was a winning topic, especially among women her age.
“No, I just smoke too much,” she cut them short. “But what I wanted to say is that there was another Mona Lisa at the reception.”
“Oh my god, it must be an invasion.”
“I saw a Mona Lisa in the gym where I go for physiotherapy,” said il Vegliardo, the oldster, a very old man miraculously still on his feet. “But she wasn’t really Leonardo’s lady, she was a man with loads of muscles.”
“And what will happen!”, blurted out Mr. Sleepy, who was getting bored with this conversation. “Leonardo da Vinci was in these parts, he got up to a lot of things, because he was a genius. You can see that he brought that Mona Lisa with him there and that the lady sowed descendants galore.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Blood Orange scolded him, and the other two women in the group also gave him disapproving looks. “You men talk nonsense. I rather think that it must be a fashion, trying to imitate Mona Lisa with the demeanor and the smile.”
“And what do men have to do with it? Are they gays?”
“Gays who?”
“The one sitting there and the physio guy.”
“Pina’s son isn’t gay.”
“Where does it say that?”
“It says that if he was gay we would have known.”
As usual, the chat had taken a turn so far from etiquette as to be farcical. I lost all interest, paid for my spritz and left the company. The train station was a stone’s throw away. I went there with the idea of buying cigarettes and a magazine. While I was there, I walked for a while along one of the platforms for no practical reason: trains have always fascinated me, and there was a very long one waiting for the signal to depart. I liked getting lost in the excitement of the latecomers, of the hugs exchanged, of the railroad workers in uniform. I couldn’t help but notice the people looking out the windows. I may be wrong, but at least four individuals looked like framed Mona Lisas, regardless of gender and age.
That same night I dreamed of the Mona Lisa, the original one, coming out of the painting and advancing towards me on roller skates, without altering the expression of her face and the position of her arms and hands. There was something alarming about her approach. In the dream, the smile, admired for centuries and generations, was an authentic threat.
“What do you want from me?”, I must have asked her while sleeping and breathing very badly.
And she: “I want all of it.”
“All of what?”
“The receipts, the invoices, the tax returns.”
“Are you an accountant?”
“I am the soul of virgin accounting.”
“Let me sleep in peace. Go back to your maison de Paris.”
“Don’t you love me even a little?”
“No.”
“Then fuck you,” she concluded in a very sweet voice.
I woke up with a start, sweating like a sponge. I lit a cigarette – it was something like four, I don’t think I’d ever smoked at that hour – and I was overcome by a nervous laugh. I imagined our world suddenly populated with real Mona Lisas of both sexes. Tall, short, young, old, women, men – but all with a touch of Leonardo about their features and postures. They smiled in a disturbing way. I hated the painting.
I spent the rest of the night leafing through art books and yawning, my eyes burning from insomnia. I couldn’t wait for daylight. I wanted to get out as soon as possible from that sort of prison that was my single apartment and check the appearance of passers-by. I was planning, to myself, an unprecedented reconnaissance program. Count the Mona Lisas, take notes in my notebook, raise – if necessary – a global alarm. I mechanically picked up the magazine I had bought at the station. Startled, I looked closer at the cover. A female, photographic portrait, but just like Leonardo’s painting. A woman of our times, a modern-day clone of that other one. Neither ugly nor beautiful – with that subtle shade, or light, of inhumanity that distinguishes painted figures from real ones. The magazine spoke of a successful woman, an entrepreneur tempted by a political career “to moralize power”. I tossed the magazine to the foot of the bed, between my socks and underwear, and decided to take a longer shower than usual the better to wake up from the torpor that was suffocating me.
That morning hour finally came when certain stretches of the street smell of coffee roasting and freshly baked croissants. There is no better time for those who lead semi-solitary lives: better if threatened by some resentment or uncertainty (I should propose to Adele to come and live with me, but I’m afraid of refusal). I entered the bar: “my” bar, manned by the Chinese that I fantasized about having adopted (I have adopted a bit of the future, it came to mind every time I saw them smile – which is to say rarely).
As I feared, the bar had been stormed by a group of Mona Lisas. I gave up on the coffee and brioche, backtracking like a panicked horse.
Once out of the door, I was almost hit by a Lisa on a bicycle, traveling without brakes on the sidewalk. I yelled something offensive at her. In response she turned slightly, still pedaling, and rewarded me with a smile even more ambiguous than the one immortalized on the famous panel in the Louvre. I was so off-kilter that I neglected to observe whether she kept her hands on the handlebars in an orthodox manner or whether she proceeded with her hands folded, with only her legs moving. I rushed to the station newsstand expecting revelations, opinions and scoops on the ongoing phenomenon – the invasion of Lisa Gherardinis. I was not able to understand its meaning, its scope, its substance. Reality or hallucination? Mine or collective? No, it couldn’t have been just mine: the afternoon of the day before, others had underlined the “Lisaness” of those two customers. There were others, before me, who had marveled at that surreal proliferation.
As I crossed the street without paying attention to the red light, my nerves were jolted by an imperious whistle. It was a traffic cop who was angry with me. First he stopped the traffic with his lollipop, then he strode towards me, grabbed me by the elbow and pushed me abruptly back onto the sidewalk I came from. “You’re totally irresponsible,” he said. He was a big man with an upturned mustache, but under the mustache he was just like a Duchamp version of the Mona Lisa. He filled out a report and fined me, but it was his hands that piqued my interest. Plump and feminine hands, sprouting from wrists without even the shadow of a hair. “Who are you?” I asked, staring into his eyes. “Who are you who? You call me sir.” There was nothing polite in his voice or attitude. “You all look like Mona Lisa’s children,” I ventured. He got really angry, as if I had called him a son of a bitch. He accused me of insulting a public official, he tried to arrest me; but when, cowardly, I apologized to him, he let it go and advised me to get examined as soon as possible. “The hospital is less than a hundred meters in that direction,” he concluded, as if I didn’t know.
I took it literally. I walked towards the hospital pondering the words I would use at the emergency room check-in. “I see Mona Lisas everywhere” was out of the question, they would have put me in a straightjacket. Better to report something vague, for example a persistent migraine that is refractory to aspirin.
“I have a violent headache,” I anxiously communicated to the Mona Lisa on duty. “I feel like I’m going to pass out.”
“That’s all?” she replied. “Have you tried aspirin?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Today is only Thursday. You should consult your doctor instead of coming here.”
“Why?” I asked stupidly.
“Can’t you see the crowd in here? I would have to assign you a code white, and you would risk waiting until tonight for your turn to come.”
“But I need a code red,” I replied. “Or at least a yellow.”
“Trust me, sir: go to the pharmacy if you can’t consult your doctor immediately. And relax. There are people dying here, there’s no time for headaches.”
“Give me a code red. Or at least a yellow. I’m sick, I have that right.”
The woman rested her hands exactly as in the painting. Without losing her patience and without giving up the sweet bovine look, she came out with something maternal and definitive: “My good sir, perhaps you don’t realize it but you are stealing time and resourcesfrom me and from the taxpayers queuing behind you.”
Stealing time and resources. Taxpayers. I decided to return to the bar, hoping that the metaphysical group had disappeared in the meantime.
Yes, it was no longer there. I breathed refreshed. I ordered a double espresso and a brioche and sat down on a chair, tired as a sloth, forgetful of sunrises, sunsets, hours. I felt my eyelids heavy, my heart adrift. I regained some of my lost energy when someone familiar to me entered. The very thin lady, dressed and made up early in the morning as if she were going to a gala dinner. Madame, as everyone called her. After a nod of greeting she sat down in front of me. In a low voice, so as not to be heard by the Chinese, she whispered three words as simple as knife cuts: “We are surrounded.” Maybe I turned pale and maybe not, I was out of sight of the faux-liberty mirror that served as the backdrop to a devotee of Coke.
“Yes, but who are they?”, I asked her. Women always know something that men don’t.
“They’re from another planet,” she stated calmly.
“How can Pina’s son come from space?”
“He is not Pina’s son.”
“Yesterday you seemed convinced of it.”
“Yesterday was yesterday. Did you look around today when you came here?”
I nodded disheartened. “But what do they want from us?”
“This I don’t know. But they say we are thieves. All thieves.”
“Thou shalt not steal...”
“They didn’t study the catechism well. Of the Ten Commandments, they’re only interested in number 7.”
“How do you explain that?”
“They are specialized moralists. Their specialization is the fight against theft.”
“If that were the case, I would feel more at peace. Thieves scare me and, fear or no fear, they irritate me.”
“Right. But what if they attack us?”
“Why would they attack us? Neither you nor I are thieves.”
“If they gained a foothold, they might decide to support forces and governments hostile to democracy...”
“It sounds like science fiction.”
“Call it what you want. But I don’t trust anti-theft moralists.”
“Why on earth?”
“I believe in the multiplicity of sins and crimes. I believe that not killing is more important than not stealing.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that the Mona Lisa clones intend to kill us...”
“No, my dear, the idea of killing us doesn’t even cross their minds. They don’t have such drastic plans. But if they seize power...”
“If they seize power will they cut our throats?”
“Don’t talk nonsense and listen to me, for God’s sake! Try to be a little more serious! If they take power they’ll focus on theft, on fraud, on cheating, on corruption, on waste, and let everything else go down the drain. Have I made myself clear?”
“What do you mean everything else?”
“Shut up.”
The two Mona Lisas had entered again. I saw them too. They sat at the same table as the day before. They were up to something, it was obvious. They had smooth, oversized hands, larger than they had seemed to me the first time. They presided over the silence in silence, as if waiting for accomplices. And after five minutes, in fact, another couple joined them. Identical to the first. I saw four Mona Lisas, determined to change life on the planet. They multiplied exponentially, therefore. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two... Many grains of sand on a chessboard of 64 squares. When they have occupied the last one, I thought, a great Sahara will engulf us.
How would this story have ended? I was guessing: street demonstrations in costume, Mona blocks, attacks on museums, ambushes on politicians, party headquarters, trade unionists, banks. Free castor oil. Out with Versace, in with orbace – the raw fabric of fascist uniforms. And finally a superb bonfire of books in all the villages and all the cities. A new era, made of immaculate records and turned off streetlights, of sudden lapidations and broken alliances, of grotesque children and freaked out adults, was about to open up on the horizon. To console ourselves there would be nothing left but fitness.
I made my decision. That same day I would have asked Adele to marry me. I didn’t like the prospect of being alone during the coming curfew.
The firm resolve to marry Adele, made at 10.45am on any given morning, lasted exactly six hours and fifteen minutes. It expired the moment we met at the meeting place, a tea room with black painted walls.
“You’ve been to the hairdresser,” I whispered.
That is usually the moment when a woman asks you how she looks, showing her profile in a flirtatious way. She just smiled.
I ordered her tea with her favorite pastries. I swallowed a neat coffee, without sugar and without enthusiasm. She had her hair straightened and pulled into a parting right down the center of her head. I took her to the cinema to see a film she suggested, and I slept the whole time. When she nudged me awake, I knew the movie was over.
© Pasquale Barbella, Dixit Café. Translated, from the Italian, by Alastair McEwen.