Contagions

One warm July evening, in a place by the sea, Leo watched his little grandson Bilbo, who was waving to him and laughing on the horse of a small carousel.
At the next table a man his own age, wearing very thick glasses, was asking his teenage son to fetch three Winner ice creams. The boy, with lively but awkward movements, went up to the Algida ice-cream freezer and, after vain efforts, came back to his father, tripping over Leo's table.
The father concentrated for a moment and, fighting the darkness of their little world, managed to take hold of the ice creams, then, keeping his own on the table, brought his eyes to within a few centimetres and read aloud the single letters: W I N N E R.
The wife's shy smile spread through the little family and all of them, laughing, ate theirs in small, greedy bites.
Blessed are the one-eyed in the land of the blind, thought Leo, and he searched with his eyes for Bilbo, but saw nothing.

At a Glance

Signor Gracco, don't you hear me?
Forgive me, I was distracted.
For a moment he had met the darting gaze of the fawn and had been left troubled by it, almost paralysed.
In vain had he sought that intense, furtive gaze in every woman.
The keeper showed him the herons, the swans, the deer and all the animals of the park.
He was pleasantly tired when, after eating the last little potato croquette, filched for a lark from a fellow diner, he was about to go out and smoke a Toscano Riserva.
With savage impetuosity a hunter came in and threw onto the table a pheasant still warm with life.
Are you mad, shouted the keeper, rising to his feet.
The hunter reined in his natural arrogance and, only a moment later, realised he had come into the wrong room.
Forgive me, Signor Gracco, but it is beyond understanding how my brother, after so many years, still confuses the ecologists' room with the hunters'.

The Tired Ox

The train's step level with the platform and the wedge-shaped line of the underground carriage had appeared to him as the aesthetic of London's urban efficiency and rationality.
He was stopping for three days, and on the evening of his arrival he had been able only to breathe in, greedily, the air of Bloomsbury.
The programme was tight: Wallace Collection, Tate Gallery, Soane's Museum, National Gallery; the museums were open from 10 to 5 and afterwards he wanted to wander through the streets of the city.
On the evening of the third day he was walking along Piccadilly Road towards Gloucester Road, where he was heading to collect his bag at the hotel. His head was full of paintings and worlds and he was trying to bring order to the suggestions, the impressions, the reflections, and he realised that he loved the preparatory studies far more than the finished works of the great masters, in particular of Titian and Rubens.
The thread of his thoughts led him back to his own history, to his interrupted paths, to his vocation for incompleteness.
He had set himself against his father's trade and had abandoned the family and the patch of land that fed them. In that rejection of the land he now saw the origin of his ineptitude and the root of his bewilderment.
For a moment he imagined the peasants of his childhood who at sunset, after the labour of the whole day, walked home from the fields, and he saw himself as a tired ox that walked home from the National Gallery to a little hotel in London.

Commonplace

It was the first time Professor Perlino had crossed the threshold of a regional government office for professional reasons. Study and academic duties had kept him far from the trade of science. He had not managed, however, to escape the request of a good and unfortunate pupil of his who, by some strange chance, had obtained a consultancy on a technical-scientific committee of the Region.
The professor had a horror of committees and could barely conceal the contempt he had built up over the years for public administration. After the first meeting in the little room of the education office, seat of the committee, he was accompanied to that of general planning, where a subcommittee met, then to vocational training for another subcommittee, and finally to the President's building.
Passing through the corridors and then pausing in the offices, Professor Perlino had radically changed his judgement on one significant point. One might perhaps venture to say that the professor had come out of the last office with a feeling of civic pride and gratitude towards that Institution.
The gleaming floors, the furniture without a speck of dust, the transparent windows showed everyone the efficiency and rigour of the cleaning service.

Encounters

He had met her one evening at dinner in a friend's house and was struck by the curve of her lips, which contrasted with the brightness of her eyes and let one imagine a leaning towards melancholy
After a few days he was overcome by the desire to see her again and caught himself exclaiming aloud, "she could be the woman of my life". He was struck by the cracked sound of his own voice and thought that the detested maturity had opened a breach within his consciousness. Mature thoughts are definitive if intelligent and peremptory if foolish, he thought, but they are always ethical.
For many days he fed on fantasies and dreams, then on the strategies of the heart, and at last he was ready for action.
Two weeks had passed and it was easy to persuade his friend to repeat the dinner of their meeting. While he waited he played with the images and phrases of the encounter: he was very pleased with a brilliant idea that he would bring out, as if by chance, in the conversation. He was sure of making an impression and savoured the success in advance.
She was very happy to find him and, to show him her fondness, confided to him alone, at the end of the evening, that a few days earlier, to be exact a week ago, she had met a man she would like to love. Ah!!!, he replied, but…., to be exact, is it not in fact two weeks?
She smiled and, almost to herself, said, one, two, who knows!!… She said goodbye to everyone with a wave of her hand and went away.

Loves

"I love my mother even though she took my father's life".
She felt this sentence like a punch in the stomach; she curled up in the armchair with her elbows dug into her belly and her legs drawn up to meet her head bent over her clenched fists, and switched off the television with the remote.
She knew, having read about it in her time, the story of the woman sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for killing her jealous husband-master, and yet only now, listening to the voice of the son pleading for her pardon, did she feel within herself the dark, heavy grief of that story.
In the boy's words Laura had sensed the compressed power of the grief that sets free, but now she felt only the bitter taste of tears.
Her house had become the evening refuge of a daytime melancholy, which she kept at bay during working hours and cultivated in her lair. The existential seclusion in which she wallowed sharpened her sensitivity but dulled its reactive capacity, and she lived in a continual oscillation between boredom and anxiety, soothed by the reading of short novels or the watching of a film on television or recorded; she had daily dealings with a video shop.
It was by pure chance that, that evening, in a pause between a film and a book, she had toyed with the remote and had been caught by Franca Leosini's programme of damned interviews, and the boy's words had brought her violently back to herself.
She no longer found quiet in the idleness of her mind and felt growing within her the need for a strong, authentic feeling that would release her need to give and her capacity to receive. But how to break that vicious circle between isolation and escape that always brought her back to the starting point and made her lose rather than recover the perception of herself?
Did she keep guarded in her entrails what she sought in her mind?
When she thought of men she could recall only unpleasant sensations of ill-lived relationships.
And yet she was sure there was a way, sure even of having glimpsed it; she had only to make the effort to remember.
She caught herself uttering the boy's sentence and thought that her tragic love for her mother was driven into her body like a thorn inexpungible from the flesh, one that only her dead father could have drawn out.
This thought revealed to her the fear that only in her past lay hidden the secret to crossing the petrified threshold of love, and she saw herself with a face and a body without time and without sex, covered only by her very long hair.
It was not her own image, she was now certain, but Donatello's Magdalene, which she had seen long ago in the Cathedral Museum in Florence.