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### Ilaria Vitali

## The house

## at the edge of time

The house at the edge of time

Copyright © 2012 Zerounoundici Edizioni  
Cover: Immagine Shutterstock.com

This history derives from imagination. He/she speaks of the meticulous one send her/it profane drawn by the case. He/she speaks of water and of kites of mute coincidences and of speaking coincidences. Every reference to facts, places and existing people really or existed it is to consider himself/herself/themselves a mute coincidence.

To the red ball of Maria Petrova

Hands of clock, I hate you

Vinicio Capossela

### 1

From some time it happens that the things speak to me

From some time it happens that the things speak to me.

I don't tell him/it so much to say, it is really this way. The things speak to me. This morning, for example, when I wake up the coffeepot he/she drowned in a puddle of black liquid. It seemed it lost blood from I don't know what invisible hole. I have tried to pretend of nothing. I have him cleaning up and replacement to his/her place. Nothing. It kept on bleeding the same. It was clear that he/she wanted to speak to me of one discomfort of his. But which? Can from thing suffer a coffeepot?

It had also happened to house, before mother and I departed. And then, you just arrive here, there has been the fact of the vase of tulips, what grandmother had put on the ledge of the piece of furniture in the room from lunch, next to the statuettes of the shepherdesses that boast him to know how to change color when you/he/she changes the time, but that in reality they stay always color blue of it. Really scarce as meteorologists, the shepherdesses. Stuff to bring back her to whom has sold you her. But surely they were a gift. Of those horrible that do you for Christmas and you also have to pretend that you like.

However I was saying: the vase of tulips. I wanted to draw him/it with that new colors that have given me, those in the red case box, but I have not even done in time to write in full my name on the first page of the notebook. I was to the second "and" of "Zoe Merlante" when I have felt the thud. An instant the vase of tulips there was not later, more. I have gotten up plain, plain, from the chair. I have looked down, over the table. The tulips groped in the middle of the splinters of glass as fishes out of the transparent ball, while water drew on the floor long liquid fingers that aimed right-hand to my feet.

It is useless to find excuses, to say that the weight of the flowers has unbalance downward the vase or even that they have been the shepherdesses of side to give him a beautiful push with the elbow to take him the whole space on the ledge of the piece of furniture there. Everything, the shepherdesses are too much idlers to make a similar thing. And then I know what it has happened for indeed, to the vase. You/he/she has committed suicide. It is this way. Useless to pretend of nothing. Now, what I wonder me is: why to commit suicide him really in front of me? Could not you/he/she choose him of it another, of witness? You/he/she could do him/it in front of mother, for example, or in front of the grandparents, that are the landlords and therefore they also have a certain responsibility towards their tulips. Or in front of anybody, that so much to the people doesn't interest then very the suicide of a vase of flowers, is not stuff that you/they put on the first pages of the newspapers, here.

And instead no. The vase has chosen me, really me.

I rub me the lobe of the right ear, as I always do when I am absorbed from a thought. Help me to assemble me. But this time I don't reach any reasonable explanation. I don't succeed really to understand what he/she wanted to tell me that vase.

However, the fact of the things that you/they speak to me has been happening for a few months. From when I have turned eleven years old for the precision. At night I for example feel strange noises. I know him/it that they are them. It is wood that scricchiola wall that cracks. The table wants to return tree and the cement it sand-blasts of sea. In the morning I wake up myself and the carpets are not to their place anymore. They go around on the floor believing himself/herself/itself fishes on the fund of the ocean. Of kilometers are not moved, otherwise they would realize all and it would be too much easy. No, they are moved only of some centimeter. They don't want to arouse suspicions. They slip more every day some toward right, as if the house were in descent. They are light movements theirs. Almost invisible.

Besides me, nobody acknowledges all this. Nobody decomposes him. To all it seems normal that the coffeepot bleeds, that at night the armchairs go to amusement and the carpets slips toward right. The adults lift the shoulders and they don't leastly think it. Rather, every time that I have tried to talk to an adult of it, that you/he/she is done really a laughter.

The vase of tulips he commits suicide? To grandmother, while it was picking up the splinters with the broom, it didn't seem at all strange. Really at all. "Each has the right to choose of what death to die" you/he/she has declared, ramazzando glasses before and back. Her was sorry only that the tulips had chosen to sink the accelerator toward the proper floor in that beautiful piece of glassware.

Me, however, continuous to torment me the lobe of the ear. I am certain that that vase meant me something. But thing?

### 2

Flat. All flat

Flat. All flat. A hill is not seen here in the ray of kilometers around the Great River. At all they call not her Lowland Padana. I don't now, pretend to find me of forehead the Alps innevate every time that I wake up myself. And not even to turn the handle of the door and to move of hit, that I know on the woodpeckers of a bluff whipped by the ocean. But at least I would want to see a rag of hill, the shade of a relief, here. A minuscule subsidence here and there. Instead nothing. The Lowland Padana is inflexible from this point of view. It refuses to surrender terrestrial to the smallest high ground. It accepts solo extended of fields of wheat, corn and risaie. At the most some timid poppy. And water. Of that is us of it in abundance. It is us of it for earth and for air, you also find again her/it to you in the bellows when you breathe. But as for the hills, those remain out of the door.

The only positive thing here, in the middle of the fields, it is that the sun doesn't find it hard to tramontare as in the city, where it always entangles him in the edges of some building or he/she remains inserted in the narrow passage of a road. Here it has the whole disposition horizon. And it takes advantage of it. It goes down slow, slow, the dive foretasting himself/herself/itself in the blue air that is behind the earth. It goes down so plain that a lot of people they come from all the parts of Italy, they place an easel and they photograph him/it while it is rolling down to the rallentatore. Him ago the pander, some remains suspended above the terrestrial crust, then it blushes for the shame and it hides him in hurry in the blue one.

Mother and I have arrived with the sunset of last night to breathe the air already breathed last summer. We come here to house of the grandparents every year, but this is the first one turned from when dad doesn't live with us anymore. This year we have come before the usual one because mother says that grandfather is not well. To me it seems that coop very well. It was not even in house when we have arrived. You/he/she is introduced only to the time of supper, with the straw hat crouched on the head as a patient animal and Barabau, patient animal also him, that wagged the tail behind him. Every summer that passes, grandfather is some more tanned and some more hunchback. It is around always along the river, it comes only to house to eat and to sleep.

The house is a long parallelepipedo. Long. It was an old house agricultural session in the middle of the fields as a pascià. Once all the brothers of grandfather lived us, the families were behind in line one the other as in the wagons of an immovable train. Today three of that wagons are inhabited only. My grandparents live in the first one, that more next to the road. In the locomotive, in short. Road, is then a big word, they will pass at the most ten cars a day. The city is distant kilometers and kilometers. To star here he could also convince that it doesn't exist.

"That balls."

It is my neighbor Lawrence, that tells him/it. It is also him from the grandparents for the summer. They are years that I don't see him/it. The last time had a hole to the place of the incisive ones and a very beautiful mother. Now instead the teeth it has them, it is his/her mother that has disappeared. His/her family is cut to half as mine, only to the mirror: from him there is only the masculine part.

Lawrence lives in another city, greater than mine, and for this ago the spocchioso as all those that you/they live in the great cities. It doubles even the consonants of the words, when he/she speaks. It says "Arroma" instead of "To Rome."

"It calls syntactic raddoppiamento" he/she explains me Charles that is his/her father and that insignia linguistics to the university "it is a phenomenon that strikes all the Italian, from the Brands down" it smiles "it doesn't have anything to do with it the greatness of the city."

The dad of Lawrence is a person that throws sweetness from the lips to every word that says. It smears her/it on to you as the butter and later it seems that life slips better away. I like to be about to listen to him/it while it is smearing. Another thing that I like of Charles is that he/she speaks to me as he/she would speak to any other person. To any adult, wants to say. They are not at all in so many to do this way. Rather they usually turn him to me talking to the rallentatore, as if I were foreign. They exaggerate the expression of the does, they twist the mouth in ridiculous way and the voice it becomes him of hit more acute. This whole appointment to say stupid things type: "You have him the fiancé?". But Charles no. Charles throws sweetness from the lips and speaks to me as you/he/she does with the adults. At times mother that walks looks and sweetness ends him all in the look. If you/he/she is speaking he distracts and I must bring to his lips the last word that has pronounced. Usually, after mother has passed, he doesn't remember him more thing was saying and we must restart afresh everything.

Mother ago this effect to the men. Once, when there was dad, it bothered me. But now no, it almost makes me like. For an instant I try to imagine that mother and Charles put together. They get married, even. I would like to have Charles as dad. A dad of recovery, is true, not that original, but also always a dad. He would come to live to our house with all of his/her books. Or we would perhaps go to him. I should change house city. To learn to talk to the syntactic raddoppiamento. Then it comes me to mind that I would become the sister of Lawrence. Bleah. Gate everything.

### 3

Summer 1992. Year of United Europe

Summer 1992. Year of United Europe, of mine, of your vacations. This way it sings that type that calls as my neighbor to the radio. Me, dear Lawrence, the vacations I will pass here her, on the delta of the Great River, I will eat tortelli of pumpkin and I will sleep in a house that seems a train. In the locomotive, for the precision.

To look at her/it well, seems really that the house of the grandparents has turned indeed the world for; there are everywhere memoirs of trip. Souvenirs, call them. What horrendous postcards, wood clocks of the Val of Fassa and quadretti messed up with the colors to oil of more distant beaches would be then. In short, a lot of foolish trifles. Grandmother, however, a sense has tried to give him/it for him. She likes a lot to catalog the things and in his/her house, even if it doesn't seem, all rotates according to a precise order. Understood the hands of the clocks of the Val of Fassa.

In room from lunch, on the first ledge of the piece of furniture in walnut-tree, there are the statuettes of the shepherdesses that the time foretells, but that in reality they don't do anything all day long. Of the true slackers. Next to the community of the shepherdesses nullafacenti there is a string of balls of glass that if the you turn they make to fall the snow on St. Mark or on the tower in Pisa, according to the need. Now that there are not the tulips anymore, there that is the plan devoted to the meteorology. Above, there is instead the commemorative ledge. There are the photos of the marriages of the children of the grandparents that don't even do anything them as the shepherdesses. They are there, immovable, inserted in their silver frames. There is also that of mother and dad. Mother always turns her/it every time that gives us before. Then grandmother passes, that turns her/it in the correct verse. In that photo, mother is a stem of flower in the snow. It has makes her/it verdolina because it was excited, but apart this the rest is everything white. Bianca her, white around because it was Christmas and there was the snow. It seems that some also trembles. Of cold, I think. Instead dad doesn't tremble, because you/he/she is dressed of blue instead that of white. It smiles.

The frames tell our history, they continue right-hand up to the end of the ledge and also more in there. Grandmother has thought well about continuing his/her collection over the wood, hooking the photos to the wall. A strip of images squirts as a rocket launched by the piece of furniture and ago the whole turn of the room. In the last frame there am me. You/they have put in profile me under glass, supported to the baluster of a road to peak on the sea. I am about to vomit. I am not joking, it is really this way. It is that I suffer the car, above all in summer. Dad always had to stop for making me go down to take air. But so much I vomited the same. If nothing else not in car, but to the feet of a baluster to peak on the sea. It is there that you/they have gone off the photo, before I vomited. Mother adores that photo. It says that I have an air melanconica and romantic. You sees that before vomiting him it becomes some sentimental ones. However, in reality, from the photo he/she is not seen that I was about to vomit. Let's know only it the baluster and I. And also mother, naturally, even if she has removed him and he/she insists with the history of the romanticism. I become me account that the photos are some traitresses, they fake to document a certain moment, but then they say what you/they want them.

You attach to the showcase of grandmother, they are also there a lot of postcards sent by the four angles of the planet. From who, he/she is not known. However meanwhile I am there, under the look of the shepherdesses that you/they don't know how to make the meteorological forecasts and, instead of being ashamed, if they laugh her/it. There near they are also there ugly two cats of porcelain that are to look at the whole day, apart after I have passed, that turn them of shoulders, as it is mother with the photo of his/her marriage. I like here a lot the cats but these I am a true insult to the feline kind.

Lawrence has a cat in meat and bones that you/he/she goes enough of accord with Barabau. It calls Pralina. Overweight is black and very lazy. It is always to short of breath. I strive him/it greater than it does in his/her day it is to pass from the gattaiola to go out. To recover from the work is rolled up as a bun to the feet of Charles and if he/she sleeps her/it for a mezz'oretta. The wild cats of the outskirts pick around surely her up. For this Pralina it is always with us and it doesn't estrange more than ten footsteps from the platform of the house-train. Charles has explained that the gattaiola is an invention of a some Signor Newton. This Newton was a great scientist that was spaparanzato in garden to wait that they fell the apples on his head, as you/they have explained us to school. An apple after the other, an unbelievable idea has come to mind and you/he/she has put on the paper a whole theory that calls this way: Universal gravitation. But the invention most important of Newton is not this, no. It is another, that brings a different name: the gattaiola. The history says this way, that the Signor Newton had a cat that called Marion. Marion was very beautiful, but it had the problem that you/they have all the cats: when I am inside, they want to go out and when I am out, they want to return inside. As Newton was busy with his/her apples in garden and you/he/she was gotten tired to spend the time to opening and to close, a beautiful day has taken the measures of Marion and you/he/she has done in the door a hole of the same greatness. You/he/she has also put us a sportellino, so that Marion you/he/she could go and to come to his/her liking passing us inside. Anything else other than Universal Gravitation.

While mother and I finish emptying the porter of the little that we have brought with us, from the porticina of Newton it shells out a whisker of Pralina + an ear of Pralina + four legs of Pralina = a Pralina all whole. Also this time has passed there, but it almost has the short breath as its legs. It Avoids our look, it is probably ashamed some. Once it shelled inside and out well enough, but this year gives us to work. If it keeps on eating so, you/they must widen the door of Newton. I tell him/it Charles, because it seems me an enough serious scientific problem, that could have consequences unhinging on the whole system newtoniano, understood the Universal Gravitation. He starts laughing. I insist that a serious discourse to Pralina must do for convincing to grow thin her/it. My room is upstairs, with the window that gives on the back, and that is in the garden and not on the avenue. It is small. Rather, dwarfish. They are hardly us a closet and a bed to castle, inserted as the pieces of a puzzle. I don't know indeed as has succeeded in making them pass from the door. According to me, you/they have planted some seeds in the floor and you/they have sprinkled them every day until you/they have not reached the actual dimensions. The closet and the bed are in bloom there inside and there they will stay until they won't fade. Every summer, when we arrive here, mother measures me and ago a nick on the wall with a pink pennarello. I undergo me to this Barbaric ritual hoping that I/you/he/she hurry him. From the point of view of the height I am not a granché. Instead mother is all fair of every centimeter that I succeed in tearing from the strength of gravity of the Signor Newton thanks to the courses of rhythmic gymnastics and she annotates him/it on the wall with his/her pennarello - that, I am certain, you/he/she has bought on purpose for the occasion - writing us of side, every time, my age. Ended the ritual, she must be satisfied to undo the suitcases and me I can finally put to place my things and to rub me the lobe of the ear in holy peace.

Of side to our platform, to about thirty footsteps after the garden, there is another almost equal house-train to ours, apart for the fact that falls asunder. The other summers it was uninhabited, but this year no. A family has arrived. Numerous. Numerous. They don't live in the house, however. They are out, camped in the spiazzo in three enormous trailers. I don't know well from where comes, but they speak a strange language all consonants. Charles says that you/he/she is an ancient language. Ancient. A language that comes from India and that you/he/she has crossed the whole world. I don't know if they also speak Italian. Grandmother has said that they belonged to a circus that then you/he/she is bankrupt, and since then they do some that that understands. They play in the parties of country, they pick up the copper in the houses and they resell him/it, stuff this way.

"To me they don't frighten. And then I am happy that the house of forehead is not emptier."

Grandmother is this way. In country they call her/it "the nonconformist", that wants to say that it is one who does what seems her and it doesn't interest her what the others think. The others, in fact, don't think her/it as her. You/they are picking up signatures to send them street. On the strip of earth of the bank, someone has attached a poster above the trunk of an acacia. Above you/he/she is written there: "Forbidden the standstill to the nomad."

I like to be them to look and until I am here I will look at them. It now seems also a circus that is not him/it anymore. They are so many, as. About ten people of every age. The men have long and shining hair and gold necklaces that hang from his neck. The women, to the neck, they usually have some children. In the evening, understands that they serve flames of fire as the lips and music from a kind of accordion. There is a little boy that has more or less my age. It calls Mujo. It walks on the palm of the hands as it was the plant of the feet.

Also I know him/it to do. Only for some footstep, however, then I lose the balance.

I train me against the wall. I take the push, support the fingers to some centimeter from the wall, rotate the legs and I lean on her against. I look me the hands, the fingers widened on the sidewalk, I see down the world to head. The grass above and the sky under, the suspended trees contrarily, Barabau that wags the tail to upside-down, mother afoot for air that orders me to go down that it is badly me grandfather that walks upside-down with the straw hat. Then it suits me the blood to the head, I return down. Mother says:

"Finally."

I see as before the world.

### 4

Something is about it to happen

Something is about it to happen.

I know him/it. It tells me him every thing. It tells him/it the vase of tulips that he commits suicide, it tells him/it the sun pander that never wants tramontare, they tell him/it the branches of the tiglis that chirrup in the air. Something is about it to happen. But thing?

This the branches of the tiglis don't mean him/it and to me the future frightens some. The future is a spiteful creature that materializes him in the present and of hidden it lengthens a leg to make you the trip, so you fall on him. And you/he/she cannot be done us nothing. Even if even you were very well there in your present and you didn't have anybody desire of veder to sprout one with does her/it from future. Everything that that can be done is to fall on him and enough. At the most, if you have been provident, you have thrown of there a pillow to reduce the fall, when you were still in the present.

My pillow calls "vertical against the wall." I want to strengthen the muscles of braccia and legs, I want to learn to also walk with the hands to earn an unshakable equilibrium to test of trip. It needs to be always ready, the future is quicker than that that want to make to believe the clocks.

I train me every day against the wall that looks at the garden. From the other side, I feel the housewives that speaks in a low voice to low voice. They think that I don't feel her, but this is a house-train and the platforms they are conductors, I have read him in a book. All it takes is supporting an ear to feel the kilometers appear on the surface noises and kilometers of distance.

To head down, against the wall of the house, I feel mother that says that you/he/she is worried for me, that from when it has happened what has happened I/you/they have become taciturn. What I don't laugh as before and there are some afternoons that I am immovable for times. He/she doesn't know why I do him/it. You/he/she has also talked to a doctor of it, it says, and that has explained her that it happens too much at times to the sensitive little boys, but whether to say more had to do me a test and to establish to what psychological type I belonged. It seems that we are all classified in a series of psychological types of the kinds of boxes in which you/he/she can be inserted us inside the whole world. And they are not even so many to say the truth. I am as soon as twelve. Six million people, according to the physicians, you/they can be thrusted for convenience in a dozen of boxes. Those "extrovert", with dominant function "the feeling" and function of support "the feeling"; those "introverted", with tendency "judging" and inferior function "the feeling" and so street.

This way, mother has brought me to make the test. The doctor had to be old, in fact you/he/she had all the white hair. You/he/she has asked me a lot of questions as in a television quiz, only that here it didn't win him nothing. All the answers you/he/she is marked on a piece of paper, then you/he/she has disappeared in the room of side and at the end you/he/she has returned back with the verdict: my box is the ITN. He/she wants to say that I have an orientation "introverted", with dominant function "the thought" and with function of support "the intuition."

Perched on the edge of the chair, mother has listened to the doctor with round and careful eyes from owl, as if same receiving the greatest of the revelations. Did I look at them, before him, then her, then again him, as to say "And then?". What was introverted, could I also tell you him I, know that revelation. that need there was to make me visit from this old gentleman with the white uniform, that had to be to eye and cross I ascertain as us the bookstore of the living room? And I tell him/it exploiting my function of support (what the intuition would be).

To say the truth, is me some offense that mother had had to need that old doctor to understand to what psychological type I belonged. I thought that it knew better than anyone else me on the earth. I was evidently wrong me. Who has great intuitions, he/she also takes big corners.

At the end of the visit, a nurse has accompanied again me in the room of aspect, while the doctor told in a low voice something mother, that in exchange for everything that to whisper wrote him a sonorous check. Mother and I are found again in silence to the stop of the bus there. We were all and two some you shake. You for the revelation that he/she thought about having received session on the edge of that chair, me because it doesn't suit me to make me look too much inside, considering that I belong to the psychological type ITN.

When we have arrived home, to calm down, mother has gone to mince celery-carrot-onion to make to sizzle in frying pan and me I have taken a seat in my room, of side to the white bear that grandmother has given me one December of some years ago. This is not really my room. I want to say, it is not that of before. Mother and I are transferred here there after dad if you/he/she has gone of it. We didn't need all those rooms anymore, mother has said. It was dad that had the manias of greatness and he/she wanted to live in a castle. What an exaggeration! To us two were enough very less, you/he/she has declared. And then, didn't I feel like seeing the world to depart to the adventure? To me idea to see the world was not sorry and so we have filled three suitcases and winds scatoloni and we have departed to the adventure.

In reality, the whole world that I have seen has been the grass of the lawn that separated us from the new house. To the beginning Mother had departed with ideas from unprejudiced traveller, you/he/she passed the evenings to skim through the brochures of all the aerial companies in activity. After a few days, however, the airplane was turned into a train. Then the train in a bus. The bus in a car. A week and mother you/he/she was passed it was not surer than to want to change city. And, to say the truth, also to move in another district seemed her an exaggerated pochino. However the fact stayed that could not continue to live in our house. This way we have crossed the grass of the lawn, and we have gone to live on the other side of the park. And this was my new room after the crossing. From the window I could see the same world of before, only to upside-down.

The crossing, is so that mother says. He/she never speaks of what has happened with dad. Our life divides him in before the crossing and after the crossing. There is no need to add other.

That day, the day of the physician that inserted the world in the boxes, I remember him/it well to me. I remind me that the frizzling of the soffritto of mother has entered me until in the nostrils and that the white bear of side to me has collapsed on a side and you/he/she is me missed some the breath. To calm I have looked me out of the window. There was always the usual street bit, the usual edge of building and the usual lawn. They were the same of yesterday, the same of before. For them you/he/she was not changed anything, nothing mattered. Down after all, under to the window, the grass was so calm. It is so that I have begun. To calm I have decided me to do as her, to copy the grass. With the time I/you/they have become good.

I still do him/it, sometimes. Now no. Now I am busy with the vertical one against the wall on the platform of the house-train. Braccia extended above the head, look in before, push and hop: they are down to head.

Mother, however, this thing to copy the grass to calm down himself/herself/themselves has not understood her at all. And you/he/she has not picked well at all her up. But her ago always this way. Of a small thing without importance of it ago a mountain, really here, in the Lowland Padana. Dad always told that you/he/she had a good time complicating the things. But so much, passes then, her.

As us, dad has decided to also cross him anything. You/he/she has made his/her crossing. Now he/she lives on the other side of the river. Who knows thing will be doing in this moment. I imagine his/her new house. You/he/she must be great, perfumed, bright. You/he/she must be full of mirrors and of plasters, that to be sincere doesn't know well thing is, but they have the air to be something beautiful and surely dad has them. It also has an enormous living room with three white couches and a black cat as Pralina that walks on the edge of the window, but thinner and aristocrat. A cat, in short, that would not have problems to shell inside and out of whatever door of Newton. After all in the corridor there are two rooms from bed, one for one and he for me. And it will be also perhaps another of it, for the woman with which alive now, but to the moment that room I don't see her/it. No, no. I am sure, after all in the corridor they are only there two rooms from bed and I am certain that one is mine. Dad has already invited me to go to him. You/he/she will just have finished filling of mirrors and of plasters his/her house, you/he/she has said. I swear. You/he/she has told him the last time that I have seen him. Here I feel the blood that suits me to the head. The vertical one, surely. I go down from the wall and amount carried over the feet against earth.

### 5

Grandfather has an afloat house on the river

Grandfather has an afloat house on the river. Not really a house. We say a room. A great house as a room, here.

Around I am here so many of it greater than his. There is who inside you/he/she has made us a restaurant straight. But that of grandfather is only a shop for the utensils. There inside it cares of everything. Hammers, nails, grapevines, pliers, pliers and then wood pieces, of cloth, of paper. It is there that it mends the bicycles and he/she builds the kites. Of it ago of new every summer. He/she takes the paper and it glues her/it on the thin canes that form the armor. It starts out then fishing, while glue dries. You/he/she cannot be said that form will take the kite up to when you/he/she is not ended.

This week has done to form of airplane one of it. It is beautiful. It has a yellow and chubby body. You haul green. There is even the helix and after all a garland of colors that will swing in the wind. I clap the hands, I cannot wait to see him/it in action.

On the other bank of the river I perceive Mujo the little boy of the house of forehead. It also looks at the kite him, incuriosito. Grandfather smiles satisfied, you/he/she inserts the index in mouth and you/he/she spits him/it out to make a will the air. The crickets the wings rub him. Apart this, it doesn't stir a leaf. We lift the shoulders to send away the disappointment, as they make the crickets to send away the warm one. Patience. I recover the bicycle to return to the house-train. Grandfather crushes a mosquito on the neck with the palm and sits to fish. Mujo also fishes, on the other side of the river. Before climbing on the saddle, I succeed in intercepting a smile that gives him on does her/it light as a butterfly and I am almost certain that that smile is for me. We wait for the whole day when it will get up the wind.

Grandmother, instead, of kites he/she doesn't want to know of it. It says that there would be so many lavorettis to do in the true house, that on the dry land, and instead grandfather is always in that accursed afloat house, where she cannot even enter. Grandfather doesn't want that goes to do cleaning to the house on the river, you/he/she says that he doesn't succeed anymore then in finding his/her things. However you are well happy not to have anything to do with it. The kites don't concern her/it. You he deals only with geese, hens and rabbits.

The hens are lazy, also worse of Pralina, instead the geese are of the clairvoyants; they also recognize his/her voice to distance of one hundred footsteps, also behind the trees. They just feel her/it turn the handle of the door, they begin to make a big confusion. According to me they have some powers paranormali. Grandmother opens the porticina of their house, that would be a very greater special enclosure of that of the hens, and they depart in single file toward the river. They are very orderly.

Instead the rabbits live in of the stanzettes lifted by earth to the height of my nose. Last week they were born of of it new. Grandmother puts in hand of it one minuscule, soft. It seems to touch a cotton wad. He trembles, however. The heart beats him strong, it seems must squirt out of his breast from a moment to the other. I caress him/it to reassure him/it, but it trembles even more. Horrible feeling, to be someone of which to be afraid. I don't want to hold him/it in hand anymore. I tell grandmother to recover the rabbit, but he doesn't want to be captured by the great hands of grandmother, it trembles never. The heart beats him fast, more and more fast, until a warm liquid it roars me among the fingers, yellow.

Grandmother succeeds in putting again the rabbit in the cage. I return to the house-train holding the wet and sticky hands distant from the body.

### 6

This summer is so strange that have decided

This summer is so strange that have decided to mark me from some part the things that happen. As I have not brought with me the diary, I will write everything above of the flying sheets, whatever piece of paper it will be all right, it doesn't matter. Don't lose them, will insert them in that salvadanaios to form of transparent piglet that grandmother has given me one December of some years ago. Till now you/he/she has always had the empty belly, but beginning from today I will fill her/it to you with paper. It will become a salvapensieri. I promise that I won't skip anything. I swear. Not even the things that don't seem important to the adults. Above all the things that don't seem important to the adults. Because it has happened again this morning: the things want to speak to me. There is no doubt.

This time has been the turn of the keys. You/they have thought well about closing us inside during the night for then to give her/it for him to legs. To our awakening there was no more trace of them. As if you/they had never existed.

Grandfather has grasped the handle to go out and for a little you/he/she doesn't give a heading against the wood of the stipite. The door has usually opened already when it gets up, but this morning nobody had still gone out. He is scratched some the grizzled hair, you/he/she has tried again. The handle went on and down without any intention to open the passage. Then you/he/she is bent for looking for the keys. Before on the table, on the belief, on the couch. Then under to the table, under to the belief, under to the couch. To say the truth, is bent under there everybody to the table, under to the belief, under to the couch. We have put upside-down the house. Nothing. Looked for in the places in which one would never look for. Still nothing. Tried to immedesimarci in a bunch of keys to imagine where he could be hidden. Nothing the same.

I have peered at in the hole of the lock, that seemed to know as of it it didn't give to see. The keys care in hostage, I have thought. Soon a letter written with clippings of newspaper will slip under to the crack of the door and they will ask us a ransom in exchange for the liberty.

Then grandmother has fought the palm of the hand on the forehead, as when she suddenly remembers a thing that seemed impossible to forget. You/he/she has gone with sure footstep up to the edge of the table, you/he/she has grasped the bag and you/he/she has extracted the bunch of keys, that sparkled and it tinkled never of it, as to take around us. If you/he/she had been able, you/he/she would also have started laughing. But since it was not able because it was a bunch of keys, you/he/she is limited to sparkle and to tinkle.

"I must have puts her in the purse last night when I have closed the door, so, without thinking" you/he/she has said her.

A temple is rubbed with two fingers.

"In fact I don't remember him/it to me."

The keys have returned in hurry to their place - and that is that informer of the hole of the lock \- and the door has decided to let us go out. All are returned to their occupations. We have now had lunch to the usual one, while the television spoke of the trip of the Pope in a city distant of Africa, and then of the siege of a near city, that calls Sarajevo. Nobody has more thought about the matter of the traitorous keys. Except me. I know him/it that also this time has happened something strange something to which nobody has given importance. The keys wanted to warn me on the imminent arrival of the trip of the future.

While all make the siesta after lunch, I go out. I maneuver with caution the hilt of the door, as if it dealt with the cloche of a spaceship able to ferry me in another dimension.

Instead no.

Out the world is as before. There is no anything strange. It is a harmless world a world that he/she sleeps in the first afternoon. The hen sleeps in the hen-pen, Barabau sleeps under to the tiglio. All, men and animals sleep. Apart the crickets, that keep on rubbing the wings for the warm one.

I make some footstep coasting along the platform of the house-train in point of feet as if earth had become a carpet of eggs. I turn around the eyes as it would make a secret agent, if I had the raincoat I would also lift the collar. Water, fuochino, fire. water.

The world keeps on being him of it silent. Any sign. My silent investigation I continue, until one rolled of wheels on the cement of the sidewalk it interrupts her/it; it is not the future that I was waiting, it is only Lawrence that reaches all speed above the skateboard. Sweaty hair makes a black glue on his forehead. You/he/she is worried.

"It is true that you have been closed inside the whole morning?"

I look at him/it with attention, I appraise if it is the case to tell him of the keys that wanted to care prisoners and of all the other strange things that have been happening for some time. I don't know him/it if it would understand.

I feel the ground.

"Lawrence, to you you/he/she has ever happened to see things that the others don't see?"

He shells the eyes.

"You intend UFO or stuff this way?"

I shake the head.

"No, I intend other things."

"Which things?"

I intensely look at him/it.

"And if I told yourself that I see things that any other he/she sees?"

"That is you have some visions?"

"No, no, macché! I see what you/they then will see also the others, only that. in short, s, that I see him/it before.

"You want to say that you are a clairvoyant?"

I shake the head for the second time.

"It doesn't deal with reading in the future. And is it a future however very brought closer, that confines with the present, do you understand?"

Lawrence looks me with the eyes, the nose and the mouth of one that you/he/she has not understood. I try to explain better me improvising an example.

"You have ever been to theater? Here it imagines to be sat in a beautiful armchair of red velvet. There six?"

"I am there."

"Bushels there sat and do you enjoy your show on the stage, correct?"

"Correct."

"We say that I have sat there, of side to you."

"Mmh mmh."

"Also I see the show on the stage."

"Certain."

"Only that I succeed to also see a pochino what happens behind the scenes. I don't see well it as that that happens on the stage. I realize him/it. I that there behind there are the actors and the scenographies of the next action, what you then will see you also what you/they will see everybody. Have you understood?"

Lawrence shakes the head. Here, note.

"You explain me as you do to see behind the scenes, if you have sat of side to me there?"

"Was only an example Lawrence!"

He knits the eyebrows, he gets stubborn.

"And because me that I/you/they have sat of side to you I don't succeed in seeing behind the scenes?"

It is really what I would want to know Lawrence: because the others don't see the things that are so evident to my eyes. Me, for example, that dad would have gone I had understood him beforehand. Beforehand what it told me him mother, in every case. I knew that it would have happened, what I didn't know was when. If only had been able to foresee him/it! Instead a morning I wake up and he there was not more. For some days mother has pretended of nothing, put of the excuses. Dad didn't return because you/he/she was in trip for job, you/he/she had had to stop from some part. But it returned, I had to not have on the subject however doubts. If you/he/she had not greeted me before going away, it was really because he/she knew to return soon. I looked at her/it cry in the kitchen, while it was mincing carrots and not onions. Then, one day, you/he/she has put me an arm around the shoulders and you/he/she has explained me that dad would not have returned anymore. What you/he/she had gone to live in another city with another woman. But what I had to not worry me. What he loved as before me. Rather, some more. I listened to her/it to explain me what I already knew. I had to have a face some strange, because at the end she looked me with the knitted eyebrows, surprised that I/you had picked her so well up. This way I have pretended to despair me, as if I/you had just discovered what had happened. And above all I have begun to cry to allow to also cry to her.

One year has passed since then almost. And today I feel also on the point of the fingers that strange prickle that tells me that something is about it to happen. Them, the great ones, don't acknowledge anything, but me it is as if I felt in foundation the ticking that announces a bomb. I don't know yet of what bomb he treats, but a thing I know her/it of certain: it will explode.

I rub me the lobe of the ear with stubbornness, while in front of me Lawrence keeps on speaking at random. You/he/she has been firm on the platform of the history of the armchairs of the theater, while my mind it derailed elsewhere. You feels envoy in discussion because he/she doesn't succeed in seeing behind the scenes of the things and therefore it begins to do the hard one. It makes to squirt in air the skate jumping us above with a foot, it recovers him/it to the flight with the palm of the hand. He/she speaks and he/she speaks, it puts together a lot of things that they don't have anything to do with it and it concludes with a:

"It looks that you are not more cunning than me and me I see well us how much you, dear."

I do of yes with the head to reassure him/it.

"Certain, I also think him/it. You see well us how much me.

Look me, the braccias hanging.

"And then because I don't also see me behind the scenes?"

"Probably" I say "because it doesn't interest yourself. And it doesn't even interest in the others. When people have sat on a beautiful armchair of red velvet, the show enjoys him and enough."

"It seems me correct" confirmation satisfied Lawrence, while earth riposiziona the skate "the show enjoys him."

"Already" sigh "the show enjoys him."

"Therefore don't you have any powers paranormali?"

I shake the head for the third time.

"No."

"Sinned."

A foot behind the other, Lawrence climbs on the skate and fast sleigh toward the last wagon of the house. I look at him/it get further. Better not telling him gods tulips, who knows thing would understand. I, however, continue my secret investigations without making word of it with anybody. Before the coffeepot. Then the vase of flowers. And now also the keys. If only I succeeded in understanding what scene he prepares behind the scenes.

### 7

While I am waiting for the next movement of the teatrantis

While I am waiting for the next movement of the teatrantis behind the curtain, I train me to the vertical one against the wall behind the house. I extend the muscles of braccia and legs. I want to be prepared, anything happens.

I measure well the space for the support of the ten fingers, I lift the braccias above the head, I take the push and hop, they are down to head, legs against the wall. I want to learn to change point of view to be prepared to the changes of the things. I want to learn to also accept the world when it is upside-down, as in this moment.

I look in front of me. After the garden, I see Mujo, the little boy of the house-train on the platform of forehead. It makes me sign to wait. He/she takes the push and it also puts on him on the hands, without wall. From far we smile there. Who knows if to upside-down we are us or the rest of the world. Blood begins to me to go to the head and I don't know if I/you/he/she were guilt of the vertical one or the smile of Mujo. To take back me, down the eyes on the open hands on the grey one of the sidewalk, on the hair that you/they caress the cement. When rise the look, Mujo there is not more. There are two men that go down from a car of the policemen, instead. They are in uniform, they have the pants with the red strip that climbs from the basin to the ankles. I look at them down to head. They speak in a low voice with mother, but from here him it doesn't feel what they say. They deliver her a yellow envelope cicciottella. I return feet against earth. I do as soon as in time to see the wheels of the car that make manoeuvre on the gravel of the avenue before disappearing on the road. I wonder me what in that envelope is and because has delivered her really to mother.

"Zoe?"

Lawrence calls me. He/she asks if I want to play to bell, you/he/she has already drawn the boxes with the pieces of chalk on the sidewalk. We jump in that world until mother and grandmother they reach me with their bicycles. Tonight we go to country, where the inhabitants always find some motive to celebrate something so that to have an excuse to play to trump or to bingo, and to eat sausage or tortelli of pumpkin. The other evening they celebrated because it was the day of a saint. And then the feast of the duck has come. And that of the bread. This evening, it seems me that the celebrated ones are the volunteers of the Red Cross, but I are not sure of it. When we arrive in the plaza, white furgoncinis there are a lot of, in line one behind the other, with above the writing "AZNALUBMA." To me you/he/she has always made to laugh contrarily this thing of the writing. With dad, at times we played to also upset other words. AIRECCITSAP. ETNAFELE. EOZ. It also works with the sentences. ENEB OILGOV IT. Dad said that I was very good in that game. What after some it became almost me natural. As the vertical one against the wall to head down. You sees, dad, that I have had to learn to feel me to my ease in the reverse of the things. I call contrarily mother with his/her name, to laugh, but her ago as soon as the shade of a smile bewaring of another part. This evening mother is very strange. In the piazzetta of the country I ask her what they wanted the policemen and thing there was in that yellow envelope that you/they have supported among her fingers, but it doesn't feel me for the confusion of the orchestrina. It doesn't care, I will ask you him tomorrow. To the return I go to find grandfather to the afloat house. The night is damp. He is bending the steccatures of a new kite to the light of a lantern attacked by the nighttime butterflies. I look at him/it tame the wood. In the air that I breathe there are bright dots as stars, that shine to intermittence. I ask what I am.

"Fireflies."

### 8

Lawrence and I take the bicycles

Lawrence and I take the bicycles. We have sandwiches to the ham in the backpack and a water bottle of juice of fruit to the apricot. We are dressed as explorers, but in reality we won't get further there more than a kilometer.

We depart from the platforms of the house-train and we coast along all the wagons. The locomotive, in which the grandparents are. The second wagon, where the family of Lawrence is. The third one and the quarter that are empty. And the fifth one where alive Demetrio, that would be the crazy half brother of grandfather. At the end of the house, we follow the paths that mark the border between a field and the other. We pedal toward the Great River. We make some sopralluoghi before choosing the perfect place for ours pic-nic: a cherry, after the afloat house.

Lawrence throws out the tablecloth to quadretti that his/her grandmother has prepared him. I throw out the sandwiches from the backpack. We soothe there. It is beautiful to eat sat on a tablecloth. The air plays of crickets and the branches of the trees of invisible birds. The cherry above of it strains us to us in head his/her sticky resin. I laugh, I think that if we stay here up to evening they find us among one hundred years mummified in the glue of the cherry. Finished eating it is the turn of the ants. They are not pretentious, they are satisfied with what we have left us. After some we shake all, we leave the crumbs to the grass. We return home. From the path that it separates two fields, I see grandfather that glues paper for a kite, in front of the afloat house. It makes us a regard moving the air with the hand.

To the sunset the swifts turn tall around the train of the house. Badminton fast. Fast. They are acrobats. They launch a cry to every passage, as to ask if we have seen them. Charles tells that they do so when they return to the nest in the evening, because for them you/he/she is a party to return home.

"I would like to see nearby from one of it."

It seems that he is not able. What they have the short legs and if they touch earth they don't succeed in dividing anymore. It seems that they sleep in flight straight. An alone half of the brain sleeps, the other they use her/it to check the trajectory. I would want to so also make me sleep with an alone half of the brain. If I were a swift, I would have felt dad that went that night. I would have asked to the keys of house to make that trucchettos of theirs of the disappearance. You/they would have concealed in a secret hideaway, unattainable, and you/they would not have allowed to turn the handle.

### 9

The carpets are plotting something

The carpets are plotting something.

Yesterday I had already started to notice an unwise move of that what is in the room from lunch. Today you/he/she has been the time of that along long on top of the staircases. You/he/she was lifted in the center straight, as if a mouse had dug a tunnel to pass. I, have naturally pretended of nothing. I have put again the carpet to his/her place, I have stretched well him for with the palms of the hands. Nothing to be done. Today afternoon, here it is there again, the tunnel of the mouse. It is as if a piece of the carpet was imperceptibly slipping toward right. Or perhaps it is the house that is imperceptibly slipping toward right.

"Zoe?"

I caress me the lobe between the index and the thumb and I go down the staircases, even if I don't have at all desire of it: there is people of under that it doesn't suit me to see. The summer is the moment in which you/they come to find us his/her relatives. Those that you/they live around here and that in the rest of the year we never see. Mother and grandmother are all excite ones, they make the parties as the dogs to whoever you introduce him to our door. I say: there will be also a reason if in the rest of the year we never see them.

Today it is the turn of the sisters of grandmother. One is delicate, the hair of straw, pink of leg as a stork. The storks have the pink legs and they speak Egyptian, as he/she writes that Andersen of the fables. The other one is cicciottella, pull to shiny from head afoot, with glasses to fund of bottle that you/they make to seem after all his/her eyes two minuscule fishes to a ball of glass. Unlike the first one, this has the short legs, short, and for this self I call her/it secretly "Cackle Zampacorta", as the hen in that fable always of Andersen.

These two has been defending him for the time that it passes to hits of phon and lipstick. They grasp the handle of the bag as it was a weapon. Certain times worry me seriously.

They begin to scrutinize me when they are still on the last step of the staircases, they examine well me for, without skipping nothing. They say as you are grown, as you have become beautiful. A girl. And the hair! What marvelous hair. Some shoal, however. Thin as one day without bread.

From behind their glasses and hair of straw, they measure on me the centimeters of the time that you/he/she is passed. How much they are changed. How many centimeters of time stay him.

"It doesn't resemble at all you" it says that with the aquarium on the eyes - and that is Cackle Zampacorta - looking at mother and then before me, then again mother.

"Is unbelievable! Impressive! It is identical to him.

Of hit a hand brings him enameled of red on the mouth, sudden a passage to level to stop the train of the sentence behind the teeth. Wasted work: the locomotive has already gone out.

I see mother that looks at grandmother, grandmother that looks at mother, mother that looks at Cackle Zampacorta that he/she doesn't know who to look and it is there, beating the meat of the eyelids above that stupid hen eyes.

The situation is so tense that also the ropes of violin, to comparison, they are relaxed. I would feel like speaking, to say that you/they can also name him/it, dad, that is not the case to make only so many scruples because I am present. But I know that so much would be useless.

Cackle Zampacorta the voice clears him, he/she forces the train in its mouth to make dietrofront and it looks for as it is able to convert the load-commodities in qualcos'altro. It says that he/she still remembers him of when I was four years old and I have given a bite to the wood table of his/her kitchen. It laughs. Tell him/it every summer. The others also laugh, it seems that the thing is very amusing.

It is a pleasure for me that the tension is loosened, but I don't understand because has had to loosen her/it to my expenses. Now, there earth to specify that I have not given a bite to any table. I was alone there supported above with the teeth, for boredom. They kept on speaking of sick people or, still worse, death, that for more I didn't know, and the table was there, to the correct height of the support. They still see the signs of the dentinis on the wood, they laugh.

"Next week you owe really to come to find us" Cackle peeps "you also come, Zoe. This way I make you see the table."

I nod. I also grant me the luxury of a smile. So much I know him/it that we will never go there home of the sisters of grandmother. The adults say the things so much to say, it doesn't need to take seriously their words. Around that table, we know very well all that nobody will go us their home. It is a thing that up to some a long time ago it surprised me, me if I say a thing it is because I think her/it. Also too much, at times. Grandmother says that my language is without bones, but the bones it breaks her to the others. It also says that by now I am great and I must not always say what gives me for the head. The adults don't do him/it. Rather, at times, when he is adult, you/he/she must be done really the contrary one. It is that the difference among the great and small ones. I write me him on a bigliettino to insert in my salvapensieri: to become great = to say well the lies.

To me it seems a kind of game this thing that the adults do. I/you/they have accustomed there however now, all it takes is doing as them. When they invite you as is making Cackle in this moment, does him of yes with the head, is said "certain!" and the history ends there. Nobody goes from any part and they is all happy ones.

In the meantime you/they have attached again to speak of unknown people, never sight, but that it seems a lot coop, very bad and has decided to move soon from the Aldiquà to the Aldilà.

I go out to look for Lawrence for a possible hide-and-seek or blind fly. Their corpses don't concern me.

### 10

It works this way: every evening, after supper

It works this way: every evening, after supper, we soothe under there to the branches of the tiglio of side to the platform and grandfather, before going the afloat home, it tells a history. Histories are to say the truth some odd ones, with inside of the wisecracks that don't make to laugh anybody. But I listen to her the same to spend the time. And because it is my grandfather that tells her.

In these histories they sail some grungiest sailors of Sindbad, people really denied for the sea. They just touch the rudder, they make shipwreck. This way they disembark, deader than you live on a desert island. And, it looks at case, they meet a princess. Of these princesses are galore here on the desert islands of it. They are the only inhabitants, but they don't worry him about to annoy him, because they know that sooner or later a wolf of missed sea will make shipwreck on their beaches.

Now, these princesses, perhaps because they have remained alone too much some time on the island, they are all some you play and they speak to a really strange way, that makes morir to laugh grandfather while it is telling. If the castaway, that he is already loosening of love as a candle, asks for example to the girl:

"Oh my princess, as is?"

That responds:

"As summer, so winter."

Grandfather holds the belly from the laughters, I hold me the braccias not to make her to fall entirely. The two characters are not held anything instead and they continue fearless:

"As you call you?"

"With my name."

"And where inhabited?"

"In the house with the door."

Grandfather laughs as a crazy person while you/he/she is telling I exchange him/it wisecracks between the careless sailor and the haughty princess. I laugh for being a pleasure for him, but in reality I wonder me what you pass for the head of that aspirant queen, seriously. To live on a desert island, probably gives in the long run to the head.

However, in the histories of grandfather they are also there certain portentous things. There are for example girls that throw out gold braids from the ears or silver drops from the throat. And porticine of grass that all it takes is pushing her some to find in a secret garden, full of flowers also in winter. Certain times, instead of pushing the porticina of grass, all it takes is moving a brick on the fund of a well. And they are also there of the scary things. There is for example people, that of work ago the Ugly Dream and that you/he/she can come to find at night you if you don't behave well you. They are also then there the usual frogs that him imprincipiscono to kiss them and the usual princesses that him incigniscono when it sprouts the sun. But those are always the same histories.

Certain times the stories of grandfather dig a place in my bed and I find again them to me among the sheets when I go to sleep. White horses, sacks of gold coins, red scarpette and gnomes walk me on the pillow. Mine preferred, among the characters of grandfather, it is the princess you Copper.

The princess Coppers you/he/she was as all the other princesses. It was good, it was very beautiful, it had the chestnut hair with the blue reflexes straight; you/he/she was sincerely fallen in love some prince while his/her two rivals wanted to marry him/it only because it was prince. In short, a princess with all the papers in order, as they find in the best fables. However the princess Coppers something different from the other princesses you/he/she had him: instead of the scarpettes of crystal, she had a heart of glass, transparent and crystalline. When it was moved, a tinkling boomed in her breast. When you/he/she was worried for something, the glass started to scricchiolare, as if he was cracking. All, to building, you/they were worried for her, they tried to protect her/it and to never notch the delicacy of his/her heart. All except his/her two rivals, that had a common heart of meat and they knew to be able to count on the brittleness of the heart of Branches glass to reach their perfidious purposes. And in fact Branches at the end of the history it dies, but is calm that returns in life thanks to a spell of those that I/you/they are at times there in the fables. Also in those that it tells grandfather.

Me certain times I feel me some as the princess you Copper, because of the chestnut hair and, above all, of that heart of glass. At times I feel some sparks in the middle of the breast, as if the glass was beginning to crack, and if I listen well I feel that the sparks make noise. They tinkle.

There have been being different sparks for last summer. But I try not to think of us. And if it happens me to think too much of us, I copy little by little then the grass of the lawn and the sparks they dissolve him. It is a thing some strange, to think of us. But to the moment to copy the grass of the lawn is the best that I/you/they have succeeded in finding lacking sorceries.

However I hope that a spell also exists for me. A spell disguised by kind gnome of the wood, of those tall two spans with the long long beard. Of those that can bring you in life. In case you/he/she had to break the glass.

### 11

I look lost in thought at the telephone

I look lost in thought at the telephone and that starts ringing. There is no denying it, the things keep on speaking to me. And I hate the ring of the telephone, it is a premonition of bad news. Instead of answering, I race in the other room. I cross grandmother in the corridor.

"But because you escape" it says "instead of answering?"

And here it is there, that the voice, the hair and the suit it is repaired before lifting the cornet. As if what is on the other side some thread could understand if you/he/she is combed or no.

"He/she is never known."

Grandmother, towards the technology, it has a respect that confines with the distrust. One lifts the cornet and who knows thing can happen on the other side. a scientific thing, explains me. A butterfly beats the wings to Tokyo and here is a hurricane to Los Angeles. You/he/she has told him a famous scientist and grandmother you/he/she has read him on a magazine. It calls "effect butterfly." It means that every thing, also the smallest, produces always an effect on one side or from the other of the world. Even to the beginning one don't make us case, it says: what do you want that am a butterfly that it beats the wings? But in the long run, also a wing of butterfly has its weight in the life, and you/he/she can come to change the world. I don't know whether to believe us or no. However the cornet of the telephone I don't lift her/it: the future can pass from the thread to make you the trip.

Mother shakes the head. You to the telephone give us the hours. With the friends, the colleagues. Its greater dream is that one day invents a small telephone, dwarfish, that one if it puts him/it in pocket and if the door always behind. Some as that telephones that have certain men of business in the films American, but very smaller and economic, and that can be used by everybody. I hope that such a diabolic gadget never invents him/it. And then, there is before a lot of other stuff to invent. For example, the pen that he/she writes without ever making errors. And the bicycle with the rubbers that don't puncture. And the perfume to the fragrance of paper, that is objectively the better odor of the world.

There is out a music that fills the air. It is Charles that is listening to the radio. It is not any radio, he/she explains me. It is a French radio that transmits only music jazz.

I take a seat me together with him to listen. What is playing now calls Chet Baker. Charles writes me his/her name on a sheet, because the names of the musicians are some difficult ones to learn. This Chet Baker, Charles tells me, you/he/she was one who played well the trumpet. Very well. Then one day has started quarreling with someone in front of a cafe and you/they has broken him all the teeth before with a fist. This way you/he/she has stopped playing the trumpet and you/he/she has started being a gas station attendant. One could think that you/he/she was ended there, but to that point a fact that has turned the history has happened. A guy that was one great fan of his has remained without gasoline really in front of his/her distributor. You/he/she has looked in face the gas station attendant and Chet has immediately recognized, that has told him some fist, of the teeth and of the whole rest. The man without gasoline has smiled, you/he/she has given a pacca on his shoulder and you/he/she is offered to buy him a denture, because there is to say that Chet didn't have a penny in that period, and of dentures even to speak of it. This way Chet has put on the false teeth and you/he/she has learned to play again the trumpet. With the denture he/she succeeded in playing only few notes, but with those notes there you/he/she could make all the music of the world and you/he/she has become even more famous. Then, one day, you/they have invited him to make a concert in the capital of Holland that is Amsterdam. He has said, it is all right, I come, I take my denture and my trumpet and I/you/they are suffered by you. You/he/she has played the good concert of his/her life, the trumpet sparkled in the hands and the denture in his mouth. All have still applauded and still. I don't know well then thing, it has happened. Charles has told that Chet has exchanged the moulding of the hotel for the corridor and all of a sudden the floor under to his/her feet you/he/she is ended. This history, seems however, me an example of quell' "effect butterfly" that grandmother has read on the magazine.

"In the life, everything depends on the kairos" Charles says.

I ask what it is. He responds that the kairos is the propitious moment in the language of the ancient Greek. The moment in which the things pass there, on your platform, and you understand that it is better if you catch the train and you don't allow her to you to escape. Of kairoses are not then so many of it, in a life. It is not that it passes a day one of it as the Arrow Orobica, here. Then, if you/he/she had to pass a kairos on your platform, it is better that you pick him/it to the flight up.

Chet Baker has stopped playing and the reporter of the radio tells something French. Charles explains that you/he/she is announcing all the concerts that will be this evening to Paris, that is the capital of France. Every time that speaks of Paris, Charles has the shiny eyes. It seems that I/you/he/she am the most beautiful city of the world. Charles has been in all the places that the reporter names, those where the best musicians of the world play. Almost all that places are of the undergrounds that one enter within it from a scaletta in descent and after some all they begin to smoke and to smoke and they are not seen the musicians that play anymore.

"Ah, the Caveau de the Huchette.

Charles closes the eyes and crosses the hands behind the head. It.

I wonder me really thing has of special this it extracted.

He smiles of nostalgia. In honor of the it extracted, it lights up a cigarette.

"One day you will also go there" it says "and then you will come to tell me as you/he/she has been."

### 12

To make a table it he/she takes the wood

To make a table it he/she takes the wood. To make the wood it he/she takes the tree. And to make the tree it takes the seed. Grandfather and I plant in the garden those of carrot, endive and zucchine. The summer is not good season for all the seeds. I would want to plant a true tree, even a cherry, but grandfather says that for that it needs to wait for the autumn. For now I am satisfied me with the carrots.

"Six on the good road" Charles thinks "a Jewish proverb says that in the life it needs to make three things: to plant a seed, to be a child and to write a book."

They are on the good road. I mark him/it to me on a ticket to insert in the salvapensieri. I also mark me the rest of the list of the things to do. Child and book.

While grandfather and I plant, Charles has happened next to mother with the hands in the pockets of the pants and the air of one that you/he/she passed of there by chance. Mother smiles at him and he remains a paralyzed instant. But she seems that I/you/he/she don't realize of it and it begins to speak. He/she speaks gesticulating as his usual. When it begins, not the firm more anybody. Charles remains with the silent hands in the pockets to look at her hands, that the sentences draw in the air. It seems hypnotized. Once you/he/she has said that the hands of mother seem painted by Boldini. Perhaps it is for this that looks her at so much, Charles likes a lot the painting. Who knows if it will also happen to me, one day, to hypnotize a man moving the hands. I also write me him this on a ticket to put in the salvapensieri.

Mother and I don't resemble at all there, she is very more blonde. And it has the whitest braccias. Charles says that a medieval princess seems, of those engraved on the portals of glass of the Gothic churches. Me instead, according to Charles, I seem an Indian princess, because of the eyes that I have taken from dad, and of the long hair that I have taken from mother, except that for the color. His/her hair's color, however, mother is not is not liked to never and you/he/she has always tried to imitate him/it with some dye. But you/he/she has never found one who satisfied her/it indeed of it and therefore, sooner or later you/he/she has always returned to the color of departure. Yes, because mother has the fame to be the most beautiful of the family, but also the most undecided. And not only of the family. Perhaps in the city, of the province. Of the whole region. Before taking a decision it returns on his/her footsteps thousand times. Ago so also when he dresses, it is weary. It goes on and back between the bath and the room, between the closet and the mirror, between the mirror of the corridor and the mirror of the bath and from it restarts afresh there everything, as if you/he/she had to wear the suit of the century every time that goes out. When there was still dad, he always extinguished her the radio or the TV if you/they had turned on, as to say: "End of the transmissions. We are going out. I now open the door, I climb in car and who is there is."

I don't believe that it served, however. An essential matter was escaped dad: mother didn't do so because you/he/she was slow, or lazy, or because you/he/she was doing other. It did so because it was undecided. Trench or coat? Red or turquoise scarf? Shoes with the heel or ballerinas? Black bag or of skin? And the hair, then? Loose, picked? And before and back from the bath to the room, before with the heels, then without, with the red scarf or with that turquoise, trying all the imaginable possible combinations.

Instead of extinguishing the TV you/he/she would have been enough that dad told her: "That scarf is very well with that jacket. And the shoes, then! Perfect with that purse." But to him you/he/she has never come to mind that option. You/he/she has preferred to cut the head to the bull. Rather no, you/he/she has cut only the rope. In short, if you/he/she has gone of it.

Since then mother has doubled before-back him between the mirror of the bath and that of the room from bed.

I beware her/it of my desk, while it is giving me before with a black stocking and a color meat and it tries to slip a décolleté skipping about. I keep on making the assignments shaking the head. When it finally goes out, I tear off the eyes from the sheet. Account: one, two, three, four, five. to six, I usually feel his/her heels that return back. To seven, the key turns in the lock and to the eight I see her/it reappear with the knitted eyebrows. Stacchetta on the floor stuttering that you/he/she has forgotten something. It goes out again then with some ballerinas to the feet and a scarf of another color. It closes again the door. Normally, after you/he/she has gone out, it returns twice back at least others.

And ago so also for the whole rest. It enters my room, bowl something and then goes out. After two minutes it reopens the door and cuff the omelet. And so following. It is a great voltatrice of omelets, mother. One could think that this way of his to do has brought only her problems in the life, yet it is not this way. On the job, for example, with the stratagem of the before-back you/he/she has succeeded in getting unthinkable things. It needs to put on in the cloths of whom has to whether to do with her and it doesn't know her/it well. I have accustomed there by now, but the other ones remain for strength spiazzati. They greet her convinced that deal here it is. Its head has promoted her without he/she asked you it, you/he/she had almost hypnotized him.

When it does so, I call her/it "Lieutenant Colombo Columbus."

The Lieutenant Colombo Columbus they know him/it everybody. All always know his/her consumed overcoat and the cigar to half. In reality it is everything one disguise. He is an intelligent person, and in fact it immediately understands who the assassin is. You/he/she could arrest there also it, on two feet, so much is sure of his/her intuition. But it is not able. And does thing do then? It begins to cook him/it to slow fire, playing us as it makes Pralina with the mice. That is, as you/he/she should make Pralina with the mice. However. Once roused the assassin, for Christopher Columbus it is a game from boys. All it takes is being on him and to introduce from him when less if it waits for him/it. And it is there that it enters before-back game the strategy of the. Christopher Columbus has just ended a kind talk with the assassin, that has told him a whole history on as you/he/she has spent the night of the homicide. Christopher Columbus just goes, that breathes a sigh of relief, sure to have convinced the clodhopper with the overcoat. But here that the clodhopper knocks again to the door because you/he/she had forgotten to ask something. The assassin is taken some to the unprovided one, if you/he/she didn't wait for him/it really that Christopher Columbus returned back, and the words are already stumbled some in his mouth. Something stutters until Christopher Columbus it doesn't go. But here it is. The assassin looks at him/it with the rolled eyes; it finds it hard indeed now to keep the calm. In the words it doesn't stumble us more, it directly falls us above with does her/it. Christopher Columbus snickers between itself and itself. It is so that he/she succeeds in resolving his/her cases. In all that before and back, the murderer loses the patience, he irritates and you/he/she ends up committing some fatal error. It is Lieutenant Christopher Columbus strategy and it is the same one that he/she knows how to also use mother.

One day I hope to also learn her/it me. Together with that other thing of the hands.

### 13

Afternoon of spread out clouds

Afternoon of spread out clouds on the thread of the sky and rolled cats. I make around the wheel for the courtyard. It is a thing that impresses the adults. But it is easy. All it takes is putting the hands in line, for earth, one after the other, and the body turns alone. It is not difficult as the vertical one on the hands, that it is a whole fact of head of concentration. The wheel is a fun a lightness. I turn the whole courtyard, while the swifts turn around the roof of the house. Nobody costs me work. It is strange as the easy things can seem difficult and those difficult, easy. I mark him/it to me in an angolino of the mind, to remember to put him/it to me in the salvapensieri.

Behind the garden, the family of the trailers applauds. I laugh, from far regard with a half bow.

Between us there is the distance of twenty-eight footsteps, a basket field or a whale. Mujo makes me sign to be to look. Ago the wheel also him everything around his/her house, without hands, however. I also applaud. The others also begin. They attach with the music, they dance some dances ever seen before. There is also a boy greater than it plays with balls of fire tied together by a chain, him they do around him all.

I sit on the floor me and I look.

The boy makes to rotate the chain around his/her body. His/her torso naked spark to the light of the flames dancing, that turn him around the skin of the braccias and the legs without eating him/it to him. All of a sudden it is rather him, that he/she eats the fire inserting later immediately himself/herself/itself in throat a fiammella and risputandola in air. I would want to learn to also do him/it me, but I am sure that mother would not agree.

Mujo meanwhile he is climbing on the smooth one of the house barehanded. It puts fingers among invisible cracks, braccia and legs laced to the eaves. It has the elastic body of a wild animal. With a last leap it arrives on the roof, it gets up standing on the tiles and divarica the braccias above the head, as they make the mountain climber that arrive in peak.

"Here it is."

It is the voice of Demetrio that crosses the courtyard with his/her sick chicken footstep.

"You are careful" it declares sticking out the eyes out of the head "those know one more than the devil."

I lift the shoulders and continuous to applaud. I don't understand because Demetrio has him so much with them. And I don't even understand because is said "to know more than the devil one of it." Should not you/he/she be said "to know more than God one of it?"

Mujo meanwhile you/he/she has gone down from the smooth one some wall, making contrarily the run of before. It reaches the circle of his around the sputafuoco. They clap together the hands everybody and for an instant it is as if they were an alone person. I also applaud up to the end of the show, until the mangiafuoco any boy and everything it returns around the people he disperses. To lift me, support an earth hand, takes the push with the legs, I arch back the body to the and I climb drawing a kind of bridge. From the platform of his/her house, Mujo looks me. It smiles and ago the same thing contrarily. It lifts the hands above the head and it arches back him to the. It goes down plain, plain, to the rallentatore, until when its fingers don't touch earth.

### 14

I wake up myself with the voices of mother and grandmother

I wake up myself with the voices of mother and grandmother that talk to the plan of under. They are low voices breakfast voices. Together with the odor of the coffee, I am a beautiful awakening.

Today it is one special day: they come to reap the wheat.

I jump down from the bed to castle with a new energy. I squirt in the corridor. In bath, there is a ladybird in the sink. I try to make her/it move, but that doesn't stir, you/he/she is still sleeping. I dress me without washing myself.

I do plain, plain, grandfather also sleeps him as the ladybird. I lean out me to the door of his/her room. He/she dreams. In the sleep he/she trains the hands in the gesture of the pitcher of kites. When the wind will arrive, he will know what to do.

I go down the steep wood of the staircases that scricchiolano to every step. Of under there are a cup of milk and two smiles that wait me. As when there was still dad. Two smiles, to start the day, is better than one. And three are better than two.

The coffeepot bleeds some, but I pretends not to see her/it. I eat of run, I smear half jam to do before. A confusion, strains me the red along the fingers. I squirt out with the cup of milk in hand not to lose the arrival of the mietitrebbia, after being verifies me that the keys are to their place and that the handle regularly turns.

Out it is a morning of foam of sciampagna. The grass of the lawn is still bathed dewy and the spread out cloths swing on the thread.

Sat on the sidewalk of his/her house, there is already Lawrence. It smiles for saying good morning. Also he holds his/her cup of heat. His/her grandmother goes out to beat the carpets. It tells him that you/he/she must not sit on the floor, takes a chair, that stuff to have breakfast on the sidewalk as the bums. It also tells him that you/he/she must wash him does her/it, Zoe looks how beautiful makes cleaning up, her yes that you/he/she has washed for well this morning.

The mietitrebbia is an enormous tractor. All yellow. You meets with the trees, almost it doesn't pass from the path. It steals a branch to the tiglio that has been being for fifty years there.

"Fig tree" Lawrence says.

Grandmother tells qualcos'altro instead half voice, while you/he/she is going to recover the maltolto.

Lawrence and I fork the bikes, we pursue the yellow monster. From the path, we look at her/it shave the field as a razor. It swallows the ears and it spits behind her out of in yellow rectangles. Where it passes, stubbles tall ten centimeters and straw boxes remain only sowed here and there. You/they must be for some to dry there. Lawrence and I use her as you pave for building us houses for game.

Along the bank, Demetrio pushes a wheelbarrow. It is a really strange type, that speaks few and above all it grinds the teeth. Its eyes are red as those of the rabbits and above all they are enormous. To see would seem that they are the eyes to go around the body and not the contrary. Grandmother thinks that you/he/she is not bad. It is alone that it easily becomes angry. But it is harmless. To the bad cow, the nature gives the short horns, grandmother says. I don't know her these things of cows and horns, however Demetrio seems me strange the same. To live alone in the last wagon of a house-train that doesn't depart probably makes never to become some crazy ones. His/her wife was also stranger than him. Tall almost two meters, square as a door. It went on and back for the fields the whole day. Once I have seen her stay in the middle of the path and, later, a yellowish roar has immediately gone down among her legs. I have understood that it didn't bring the underpants. When you/he/she has ended, you/he/she has taken back his/her road on the path as nothing happened. Some years it is dead ago, more or less to the epoch in which I supported the teeth on the table of the kitchen of Cackle Zampacorta. Since then Demetrio has become even more strange and everything that that does is to push his/her wheelbarrow before and back from morning to evening, nobody has ever understood for transporting what. You says around that I/you/he/she go on the bank to spy the couples that you/they are kissed of hidden. You also says that I/you/he/she am rich, that his/her wife and he have accumulated every sort of treasure and that, from some part in the middle of the country, a box there is buried full of gold dam with a padlock and nobody knows where is the key. I don't know if it needs to believe us. We say that, to see him/it, Demetrio doesn't seem really one that has the gold boxes hidden under earth.

Lawrence and I keep on playing in the field the whole day. We return to the platform of the house-train to the sunset together with the swifts, braccia and legs scratched from the stubbles as from an army of cats. Grandmother us cuff above some reproaches and of oxygenated water. It burns. They prohibit us to return in the fields.

### 15

Clean day as a sheet

Clean day as a sheet. Day that makes to come desire to pedal up to the confinements of the world. I am tired to wait for the next movement of the teatrantis behind the curtain. I have decided to do me the first footstep.

I enter to house of Lawrence but him him you/he/she is still dressing. There is Charles that smokes a cigarette in front of the typewriter. It says take a seat, Lawrence arrives. Perhaps trouble. He shakes the head: "The people as you never disturb." I would want to ask him thing it intends for "the people as me", but I am afraid to disturb and therefore I don't ask him/it.

I take a seat me on the couch. He beats the fingers against the keys fast, fast, and on the sheet the whole sentence that had in the head comes out. I look around me. There is something different in this room. Above the television there was before a crucifix. There is now the poster of a gentleman with a hat in head and a trumpet among the fingers. It has a black overcoat, a black hat and also does her/it, to say the truth, is black. It is everything black except that for the white of the eyes, that they look you and they shine, and for the trumpet, that tipsy also her. I wonder me who this gentleman is everything black apart the eyes and the trumpet.

"It is Miles Davis."

Charles answers to the question that I have not done without lifting the eyes from the typewriter. At times the adults are of the true magicians.

"The greatest trombettista of the history" it adds.

Respect for well this Mails Devis, while Charles rereads to half voice what you/he/she has written and you/he/she supports the cigarette in unstable balance on the edge of a battery of books. I like these musicians that inflate the cheeks and they have a trumpet that shines among the fingers. This seems better here also of that other with the denture. One day I want to also have her/it to us me, a trumpet to be made to shine among the fingers.

Charles extends me an album with the same photo of the poster and bottom the signature of Mails Devis, from that some different is written as you/he/she is pronounced, as all the names of the musicians.

While I look, he returns to his/her sheet, a grimace with the lips, takes ago then from the table a white barattolino, it unscrews the hood and it throws out an always brushes white. With the varnish it covers the wrong black of the words, it makes him/it return immaculate. It steals us above to dry.

"I hope really that one day invents a typewriter that allows to correct the errors before ends on the paper" it.

They agree. This yes that it would be an invention, at all as the telephone that one is always had to bring in pocket and that it would be a nightmare.

Charles says that some colleagues of his have some most evolved typewriters of his, with a kind of electronic screen, but they are not happy of it. So for now Charles is held his/her old Letter 22, even if the key of the R works badly. But the day will come that the typewriters will become more modern, it says, more "you civilize", and then he/she will buy a new of it.

On the staircases I see to appear the skate of Lawrence + two legs of Lawrence + a face of Lawrence = a Lawrence all whole.

I ask if it feels like making a bike ride. Today I want to push me at the edge of the world. That is I want to say up to the house, in which, many years ago, mother was born. And I have the whole intention to enter there inside.

We pedal fast along the aquatic hand of the delta, we choose the longest finger and we follow him/it thin to arrive to the house. Now it is uninhabited, they are born only us the weeds. We cross a small iron bridge to horse of a channel. Then the road ghiaiata widens, it becomes a spiazzo.

The house is a button in a buttonhole of poplars. We insert there inside as two unauthorized threads. The branches of the poplars rustle. Certainly that as house is imposing. Thick and all bricks redhead. Before, the lawn is tall of grass, but the circle of the well still distinguishes him, that was once a tub full of fishes of all the colors. And the stall is also seen with the horizontal iron bars on the arcades, where grandfather idled with the hands before climbing on in saddle to the horses.

I go down from the bike and the support against the round trunk of a poplar. The air flies of birds, today. It is a beautiful day. And I am ready for the enterprise.

I am in the tall grass and that disappears. I put also also the other and the lawn that he/she eats. I don't like the idea not to see what there is there under. Lawrence, that doesn't know yet that from great I will have a trumpet as that of Miles Davis and a denture as that of Chet Baker, he/she takes around me. It says that I am only a fifona, that according to him I don't even dare cross the lawn and to reach the door. Don't know with whom is speaking! I know him/it very well, as a lawn is crossed, me. I am the queen of the crossings. What does he/she know, Lawrence?

You/he/she has not even ended the sentence that I/you/they am already upstairs of the house. Follow me shouting "waits, is dangerous!" but I don't already feel him/it more. I launch me in the adventure. Down, down, down, in the den of the Rabbit as Alice.

It needs to recognize that I move me with a certain boldness, it seems that has not done anything else other than to enter precarious houses from when I/you/they were born. I have the feeling to be there been already straight. The spiders spy me from the angles while I am going around unmolested for those that once were the bedrooms. There is grass that grows, here inside. There is also a hen that he/she broods the egg. I try to individualize the room where mother was born from the descriptions that you/they have done me. I look to the right and to the left. I intrude me in each hole that I see, probably also in those that nobody has ever seen. Down, down, down, in the den of the Rabbit. I look for a sign of future.

I don't find anything. Nothing interesting, means. I am about to return of under, when my ankle is harpooned by something brown. Cry. I make back a jump to the. Then I realize me that it is not anything. No snakes or vermiciattoli as I thought. It is only a bracelet. A leather bracelet.

I draw near me plain, without making noise, as if the bracelet had the ears and you/he/she could feel me. I lengthen two fingers from the tall one. When I pick up him/it, I feel the shake. I let him/it immediately fall to the ground and I make back again a jump to the. I look for saliva to send down. I find her and I calm down me. I reapproach again me to the bracelet and with calm I pick up him/it for the second time. I turn him/it among the fingers. From a side it is rough, from the other smooth, almost shiny. It seems that you/he/she was written above something there, perhaps the owner's name, but it is everything consumed and he/she is not read anymore. I measure him/it on my wrist. It seems done he/she waits for for me.

"Zoe? Six. you are alive?"

I insert the bracelet in a pocket and return from Lawrence that it trembles worse after all to the staircases of that rabbit that has put me in hand grandmother. I hope that I/you/he/she don't also pee on him him.

"You have. you have shouted he/she succeeds in hardly saying.

I look at him/it with air of superiority, I don't tell him that it is a fifone because they are one Mrs.. Him continuous to repeat that it is dangerous what I have done, what could bounce me in head a tile or a piece of wall.

"And then because you have howled?"

I lift the shoulders, even if to the idea of the tile I have a shiver along the back. We go out in hurry of the house. Out they feel him some noises, as of sole of shoes in distance that you/they draw near. On the bank there is the outline of a man. It is a dreadful outline, gigantic. If we were in one of the histories of grandfather, this here it would certainly make the Ugly Dream of work.

It shouts us against something.

Lawrence and I howl as if you/they were skinning us alive, in the confusion we keep on meeting us the one against the other, then we succeed in forking the bicycles. The first street of earth that we find among the liquid fingers of the delta take, even if it doesn't bring homeward us. The main point is here is go suffered from. We pedal in hurry, more and more in hurry, while the continuous outline to howl us against something incomprehensible. We pedal until it doesn't disappear to the horizon, until we don't lift the look and we see above of us the white belly of the gulls. I don't know well where we are ended, but on our heads badminton the wrong birds. It is not a good sign, he/she wants to say that we have gotten further too much there.

Lawrence puts an earth foot. With two braccias it removes a curtain of grass in front of a road poster.

"Of there" it says, pointing out toward right.

"Of we put there there a life" I beat, after having examined the poster "better from this part here."

It follows me without contradicting. My enterprise in the abandoned house has made me earn points in classification. We follow a shortcut that cuts in two the green of the country among the valleys, while I enjoy me my moment. In distance I already see the house-train. I am very satisfied of my choice. It is an astute and fast road. I don't understand because grandmother doesn't want that I/you/he/she pass of here.

We are almost on the platform when the bike skids on something of smooth and muddy. I try to pedal, but the wheel is as inserted. I put down an earth foot and lunge up to half calf. Mud. I rotate the head. Lawrence is of me behind in the same condition. We wag there in the mud, to work, we push the bikes out of the slush. We reach the house-train with the legs marroncine and the wheels that don't turn anymore.

Grandmother looks us arrive shaking plain the head. Lawrence directly spins in his/her wagon and grandmother he doesn't remind me that you/he/she had already told me not to take that road; it doesn't need to add other to make me feel a small child that as it stirs it makes pies. With patience, it starts cleaning the rays of the wheels. I would want to tell her of the man that resembled to an Ugly Dream, but I am not able because I should also admit that I/you/they have been in the abandoned house and you/they have told them me thousand times not to go us for that history of the tiles that you/they fall you above the head.

Demetrio passes of there with a sneer that twists his lips. Its outline remembers that the man that we have seen on the bank of the abandoned house, but I doesn't say anything. He looks at grandmother that makes up for to my trouble. You informs. Does grandmother tell him, have you seen? It is what happens when one wants to make things that cannot be done.

Demetrio shakes the head. Stubborn, this ragazzina. Too much. It resembles really to him. When it puts on in head a thing. then he turns verse of me, it laughs with the red gigantic eyes of blood. It says:

"You like to do to iron arm with the world, eh? You pretend to win, straight. But you must be careful, sooner or later the world will do you her to pay."

### 16

In the afloat house

In the afloat house, grandfather has built a hot-air balloon. Not a true hot-air balloon. A hot-air balloon-kite.

For now thing is not understood well it is, but grandfather has explained that when the wind will blow it will inflate his belly as a ball and then it will have the correct form. To make me see steals us inside strong and for an instant the paper opens as a corolla of flower. I laugh and grandfather enjoys my smile without adding nothing. It brings her home to make her/it see. All the passengers of the house-train applaud. Mother places a kiss on his cheek, light as a wing of butterfly. Only grandmother looks at him/it and shakes the head. It keeps on shaving potatoes speaking alone. Stuff from crazy persons, to build kites in a place where it never blows the wind.

### 17

Charles says that perhaps this place

Charles says that perhaps this place is not good for the wind, but it is good to turn on the thoughts. It says really this way, that the thoughts ignite. As the light bulbs. To turn on a light bulb in a room it he/she takes the dark and this silence, here, for the thoughts, some works as the dark for the light bulb. To one it comes him spontaneous to turn on.

I take a seat me of side to him. There is so much silence that I feel the noise of the fire of his/her cigarette, when it inhales. We look far, the Great River that loosens him toward the delta and it opens the liquid fingers toward the sea.

The oblique sun makes to shine the water. Here life flows, it doesn't fry. It is always Charles that tells him/it. Of fry they are only here there the crescentines. You makes economy of the time, from these parts, a lot of respect is had for the hours. And the hours, in change, they become more generous and they flow to the rallentatore.

To me it is all right. I also tell him/it Charles, that suits me. This way I can have more time to train me and to be ready when the trip of the future will arrive.

"You cannot be never ready for the future" it shakes the head Charles, while it is blowing away the smoke of the cigarette "because you see, the future, doesn't technically exist. It is to tell her/it all, not even the present.

I shell the eyes. Does he/she take me around?

It smiles.

"You have ever felt to speak of Henri Bergson?"

I shake the head, this Signor Bersòn I don't have him really ever felt. But you/he/she had to be one smart, from what Charles tells me. It was one who the books wrote on the future, but not as those that the horoscopes compile even if in reality they don't know how to make the forecasts as the shepherdesses that are firm on the shelf of grandmother without ever changing color. The Signor Bersòn, of time, it intended seriously and it said this way, that "the pure present is the elusive progress of the past that makes taking on the future."

I am not sure to have understood well.

"It is simple. It is some as with the crescentines" continuous Charles "that once you throw in the hot oil.

At that time mother passes in bicycle and smiles. He loses the thread.

"The crescentines" I say, to bring him in mouth the end of the discourse.

Already, the crescentines. And the Signor Bersòn, also.

Mother gets further, pedaling the lifts him some in air the skirt. Charles coughs, as if the you/he/she had gone on the wrong side a thought. I beat a hand behind his back, among the shoulder blades. The thought has gone down now for the correct verse, but the same doesn't end to tell me the history.

### 18

It has happened again this morning

It has happened again this morning. But more serious than the usual one.

This time is touched to the staircase. I was about to go down to have breakfast, I have still been on the first step half dormant and instead of the usual wood there was a hole. The stair was sunk down, who knows where and who knows because. Done it is that the void had left.

I have called grandmother from the staircases. I have wakened up all those that you/they still slept. If this time they say that it is normal administration, I have thought, I escape of house. I swear.

In reality grandmother he is some frightened for the history of the orphan staircase of the step. But it is not so much the lacking stair that worries her/it. You don't think, as me, that there is something of suspect in a step that decides to sink and in the rest of the things that up to yesterday they are behaved as tame animals and then, of point in white, they decide to do for their account. No, she doesn't see in common us nothing among the staircase and the vase of tulips that it makes harakiri or the coffeepot that it bleeds. What has frightened her is the fact that I could fall in the hole. I feel her that it tells the history to Charles. To the neighbors. To his/her sisters in visit.

"You/he/she must be him disconnected this morning, after we have gone down to have breakfast. We were down all except the child. If it is aware of it her. If I think that you/he/she could fall, to leave us a leg, an arm and who knows thing other.

No, I say: the adults think that noialtri we are stupid. To fall in the hole? But if I am the only one that if is aware of it! They have probably passed there above without not even seeing him/it.

"But you are not you of it aware? Have not you felt any noise?Charles " asks, the neighbors and the sisters of grandmother ask.

But the adults don't see and they never feel anything.

"The child" grandmother repeats, squadernandosi the hands on does her/it "if you/he/she is aware of it her. Do you imagine him/it to you? And you/he/she could fall, to break a leg, an arm and who knows thing other.

Luckily mother has returned today in the city to pay the bills of the light and to make a lot of other things that I don't remember me. There is not however, otherwise you/he/she would also have suffocated me her with his/her anxiety.

A friend of grandmother that mends the things has come. In reality it is one that has down a shop in country where he/she sells some everything, toys, pens, pencils, paper, stuff for the house, but to lost time it also repairs the things of the others. You/he/she has trafficked the whole morning without combining nothing, then you/he/she has said that it went to call his/her child that it understood more of it.

For the whole day you/they have not made me climb alone, because they were afraid that I/you fell in the hole that I was the only one to have seen. If I wanted to go than above, I had to call one of the great ones that it accompanied me. I don't understand because at times they say that I am already great and others, instead, that am still small. Meanwhile I don't understand as one can be great one day and small the day later I/you had even eaten the mushroom of Alice. And then, in the change, because I must always put again us? For example, because I am already enough great to wash the dishes, but I am not him/it enough to know what the mother policemen want? Also yesterday their car has stamped on the gravel of the avenue. You/they have delivered her some papers, that she has inserted in the usual yellow envelope. When I try to touch the matter, grandmother ago the catacomb. It puts on to fumble with ladles and knives, it says that I must not hinder me any things of the great ones, because they are too much great for me. I could stumble there above and to fall.

"Who doesn't run away from the abyss, the abyss if he/she picks him/it up.

Me grandmother's proverbs some times really I don't understand them. However toward evening the history of the staircase started to become boring. To the five grandmother you/he/she has given a dreadful push with the elbow against the handrail while it was helping me to climb. To the seven grandfather you/he/she has risked to slip, you/he/she has beaten the rotula against the wall and the skin you/he/she has become him all viola. Grandmother has given me a plastic pouch full of ice to be put above his knee and then has begun to say that it is always the usual one, that cannot be trusted him. They have started discussing, mother is also inserted, of return from his/her bills. I have also had the right to his/her ration of worries, doubled by the distance. I have asked if I could restart to go than above alone. Mother has done a whole matter of it, you/he/she has said she doesn't speak. You/they have discussed for mezz'ora, but at the end you/he/she has said of yes. You always do this way. Dad said that you/he/she was an experienced in to dramatize everything in to complicate the things. It said that he/she worked secretly for the CAS, the office Complication Simple Business.

This evening I have the right to a kiss and the I turn up some sheets. I have the right to the attentions of everybody, considering that according to them I have risked seriously to fall in the hole of the staircase. I also have the right not to be stung by the mosquitos and to make some beautiful dream, believes. Domattina, before still that you wake up me, the friend of grandmother and his/her child will systematize the staircase. You/they have promised him.

After mother has gone out, dò a last glance around I examine the territory of the dark to verify me, that every thing is to its place, that is not any other besides me and to my shade in the room. It is to the hole of the lock, that keeps on spying us both in silence.

I close the eyes.

Good night, world. Who knows if for a night I can trust you. Who knows as you will be tomorrow. Who knows if everybody the steps will be indeed to their place to my awakening. The odor of mother, that you/he/she has remained in the air breathe. Who knows if he/she works indeed for the CAS. And if instead he/she worked for the CIA? The CIA, certain. This would explain all that coming and going of yellow envelopes; there could be inside of the reserved information. Reserved. I slip in the drowsiness, where I meet mother dressed by secret agent with the overcoat and the newspaper. Those of the CIA must have knows that it knows Lieutenant Christopher Columbus strategy.

Who knows that odor has the woman with which alive now dad. Who knows as it is, I think, while I am being about to put to sleep seriously me. You/he/she must be one who he/she works for the KGB, sure. Or perhaps for the SAC, the office Simplification Complex Business.

I fall asleep me dreaming a staircase to pegs that it departs from the windowsill of my window. I begin to climb. I climb and I climb, but he never arrives from any part. They miss some steps. Above of I don't see anything. Only clouds and nothing. I stay me. I look down. In low there is Charles of shoulders that holds for hand Lawrence. When they turn him to greet me, Charles it is not Charles anymore. It has does her/it of dad. And also Lawrence doesn't seem Lawrence. I almost seem. me. Feeling to see out myself from, but one myself different. One myself that I have never seen. I decide to go down. I call dad but him him you/he/she is already getting further, greeting with the hand. I shout him to wait. I go down more in hurry, but they miss some steps. More I draw near me, more they miss some steps. It is this way.

More I draw near me, more they miss some steps.

### 19

Charles has sat next to the house-train

Charles has sat next to the house-train, a book in hand. It seems a traveller that waits for the whistle of the departure, the suitcase misses only him. To think well of us, Charles almost always holds a book. I am sure that he/she catches the train to read a book instead of taking a book to read in train. Ours, is however a train that never departs.

Lawrence and I play to A, two, three. adorns with stars! in the courtyard. But Lawrence cheats. It says that you/he/she has not stirred, but it has the cunning calves that tremble still. If it is even that pigrona of Pralina aware of it, always busy to sleep. To the third time I grow weary me, I declare that I don't play anymore and I take a seat me to cross braccia on the platform of the house together with Charles. I look what he/she reads. He realizes, and pretending of nothing gives me the open book.

It is the history of one that looked a lot at the stars and that you/he/she was perhaps fallen in love of a certain Silvia, but it is not well clear if this Silvia existed really.

Charles asks if I have ever read that history, that is all writing with some short sentences that return back to every line and therefore you/he/she is a poetry. I do of no with the head. He/she asks me what we read to school. I tell him that a book we have that calls anthology and that anybody doesn't like it, because the histories are all reported ones to pezzettini, and if it likes one you never succeed in knowing of it how it will go to end.

Charles smiles, you/he/she says that anthology comes from the Greek word anthos, that means "flower." There that book is a harvest of flowers, for that there are not all the histories from the beginning at the end, they put only us the flowers, that are the most beautiful parts. I make a grimace. I tell Charles that to me it doesn't interest to read only the flowers, I want to take me the whole history, with the weeds and the thorns and the whole rest.

He smiles for the second time, he/she asks me if to school we have ever read a whole book, from the beginning at the end. I think it some. We have a book that the teachers call "of fiction" and that he/she speaks of a certain wall that is fallen in the capital of Germany that is Berlin, but that up to a year ago it was another city that I don't remember me as it calls. The book I remember him/it instead to me, it calls Wall on the heart. Charles asks if I like. I shake the head. He/she asks me if I have ever read the poetries of that gentleman that it looked a lot at the stars. I make sign of no and he responds that then I can hold the book. Was not you/he/she reading him/it him? It smiles for the third time, it says that he has already read him and it is correct that I pick him/it up.

In the time of the siesta I climb me on the bed to castle together with the book that Charles has given me. I look him/it before and back before opening him/it. Before you/he/she is written Works there. There is back a portrait. It is a gentleman with the sweet look and some undecided, strangled by a blue jacket all stiff, with the starched white collar and a black cravattino. It seems really that he doesn't like that suits, that suffocate us inside. Its eyes shout "freed me!".

I read some and I understand better this gentleman strangled by the blue jacket. It was a so good that was enough for him to lean out to the window to make two chatters with the stars of the Orsa. So good that was enough him to sit behind a hedge to sail in the sea of the endless one. It was one whom seemed that he liked on Saturdays in the villages, but then he discovered that he didn't like at all because they didn't keep the promises. It was one that to see had him/it the hump and the occhialinis, but under to that disguise it was an adventurer that had traveled for all the countries of the human mind and also more in there.

I get up me from the bed together with the book. I look out of the window, I also see me gardens and greens sod, but for the stars it is soon still. I will look again at this night.

I go out with the images of the gentleman with the blue jacket engraved in the mind. Lawrence asks me to play to hide-and-seek. I say of yes mechanically. From great I will be as that gentleman, I think, while Lawrence hides. I will have stars with which to speak from the window and a hump for disguise. I finish counting. I begin to look for Lawrence, but I am so busy to think about the sentences of the gentleman with the blue jacket that he slinks away behind me in hurry and it immediately says:

"Den for me!"

To say, to do, to kiss, letter, will. Lawrence, that doesn't know yet that from great I will become Giacomo Leopardi, it chooses the penitence to make me do. Who knows because it has a weak for the number three. Yesterday you/he/she has made me kiss for earth. Twice, because the first one had not seen well. Today he/she wanted to make me kiss a certain frog that has captured down to the river and that it holds imprisoned in a pillbox of cardboard with some holes to make her/it breathe. At all we are in one of those fables that grandfather tells, that then the frog becomes all of a sudden prince. Then he/she kisses a fish-cat. I have shaken the head.

"Then you go to kiss the gypsy that walks down to head."

I have pushed the eyes after the train of the house, after the garden, up to the trailers. Mujo there was not.

"There is not" I have said. And I have been sorry some.

### 20

One could think that

One could think that when it tells his/her histories grandfather it begins with "So many and many years ago" or "there was once." Instead no, he begins this way: "Between thousand and thousand years." They are histories ambientate in the future. But it is a future some strange, that resembles above all to the past.

"Past and future, at times, he can mix also" Charles says.

Still this confusion on the time, that I don't like at all. I prefer a future with the legs trained to the trip, spiteful even, but that is a well defined creature, that has a face, here. Someone against which to be able him to train for fighting to equal weapons. But, speaking of the time, really today an unbelievable thing has happened. Of those that make you collapse under the floor of the certainties to the feet. Today, June 30 th 1992, there has been one minute from sixty-one seconds. Am not joking, is the truth! It looks like the Earth has the fiatone, you/he/she has begun to turn more slowly on herself some and we are found again all confused in comparison to the solar time so there. Perlomeno is what has said the television. And then the scientists have founded one minute of sixty-one seconds. And is not even the first time that do him/it! It seems that this is the seventeenth one straight. Seventeen times that we lose there the seconds for road and someone puts make up on us the turns of the hands. I could not believe there. If we start to put also in discussion the clocks.

"About thing worries yourself? It is only a second" grandfather says.

But for me also a second has its importance in the life. In a second it can happen a lot of things. In a second, a writer can put a word that develops the history of a book. An inventor can find the decisive idea that had been running after for years. In a second the oven can be turned on for cooking a roast or to say of "yes" on an altar. Now, if we lose there for road this second, that is not anything in comparison to all the seconds of the time, as do we put her/it with the book, with the invention, with the roast one and with the altar?

I would want to also tell him some effect butterfly of which grandmother has spoken to me and of the kairos of which Charles has spoken to me, but I don't want to put too meat to the fire. For now the roast one seems me enough convincing as example.

In front of my theory of the lacking second, grandfather smiles and you/he/she tells me that I must not confuse the time in itself with the tools to measure him/it. But in reality it says this way because to him it doesn't interest the to flow some seconds, considering that in his/her histories the clocks go to upside-down and the characters are born between thousand and thousand years. Yes, you/he/she must be for that.

At times grandfather tells histories that I already know, that all know. Ago this way:

"Between thousand and thousand years there was a big and ugly duckling. It was so ugly that all the animals that you/they lived in the hen-pen him took game of him.

I let him/it tell even if I already know as it goes to end. And personally this ugly duckling has not convinced after all never me until. It was not at all everything a duckling, it was also a swan when it was small. It is true, you/he/she had been born in a hen-pen of ducks, but it was also always gone out of an egg of swan. Is qual the ethic then? What one should you/he/she have trust in the future? What even if is it ugly and awkward sooner or later it will become beautiful and elegant? The protagonist of the fable has never been a true duckling. What does he/she know him about thing it means to try to become swans when you/he/she was born ducklings?

Lately the histories of grandfather are some you entangle and the inhabitants of his/her fables say more foolish things of the usual one. It will be because grandfather sleeps so much. As. Almost always. It gets up every day later, he/she immediately eats and then part for the river with the reed. But I know that it doesn't go to fish. The reed the plaza there, on the eyelash of the water, and it deals him with his/her kites. More time passes to the afloat house that on the firm earth, in the true house, that in which there are us.

Today it doesn't blow also any wind. Him out the same throws the yellow and green airplane. Or the hot-air balloon. At times I feel that he/she speaks to him, as if they were of their children. I don't understand what it tells him, however.

It estranges some from the afloat house, throwing himself/herself/itself behind the kite as a tame animal. It tries the magic gesture what the pitchers of kites only know. It tosses up in the air and it makes to flow the thread. Its fingers exactly know when it is the moment of lasciar to go and what that to tighten. It is as a memory that has in the hands. But there is not enough wind. It returns home for lunch and then it goes to sleep. Only a rests, it says. He/she sleeps up to evening.

Grandmother becomes angry, draws him/it as a child. To supper it makes him the usual scolding. To him it strains on him as the water. Once he/she answered, they went on to discuss for times. He/she doesn't answer anymore today. It watches the television. The Americans that celebrate the five hundred years from the unloading of Cristoforo Colombo Columbus, French that have decided to interrupt the nuclear experiments on a distant atoll that calls Mururoa. After supper ago a whistle to Barabau, and together they take toward the river.

"But does thing do?does grandmother " ask "where you/he/she goes?"

I know him/it. It goes to give the good night to the kites.

### 21

Grandfather trains in the gesture to launch the kite

Grandfather trains in the gesture to launch the kite and me I train me to the vertical one against the wall. If a day I want to be Giacomo Leopardi, it needs that you develop well all the muscles, so then it will be a game from boys to fake to have the hump.

I take well the measures for the support of the hands on the smooth one of the sidewalk, I lift the braccias and I rotate the legs, on, up to the wall. Today I try to detach her from the plaster. I withstand in equilibrium some second. I must support again then her against a piece of wall. I feel the blood that goes to the head.

Mother doesn't want that I/you/he/she do him/it. It says that it hurts me. Stop to play her/it down to head, it says. As if my pits a game! The adults certain times don't understand a beautiful anything. Mother doesn't know how to say because you/he/she hurts, she knows how to say only "stop her/it." Stop to do her/it the vertical one, stop to be her/it immovable without speaking. It is too much comfort to say that it hurts to say the why. And then also her, certain times, it is immovable without speaking. I have seen her, after the crossing, to spend some whole afternoons in front of a window without saying a word. I don't know him/it what it did, if it also copied the grass of the lawn her. I know only that later, to supper, it looked in the dish and it didn't feel like speaking. It did of the you look for in the mashed potatoes with the fork but he/she didn't eat him/it at all. It is very sad to eat only in two to eat without men.

At times some friend came her/it to find. They spoke plain, they didn't want that I felt her. It did as a rustle of foundation. The friend told her that after it had happened what had happened, you/he/she had been very strong, indeed brave, an example for every woman. And that you/he/she had to keep on being him/it for my his/her own good. Because, I was still in short there me, even if you/he/she had lost him.

His/her children are the thing most important, the friend of mother it continued. Also she wanted to have one of it.

Who knows because the adults always say to want a child, never a child. As if it always stayed small, as if it never grew. All, around me, they always say "to have a child." I don't know him/it why. Perhaps to have a child is too much a binding thing. The adults are satisfied with a child and enough.

Blood suits me to the head and I returns feet against earth. To the joining between wall and sidewalk there is a crack to form of them that there was not yesterday. It is not a true crack. It is the beginning of a crack. I should perhaps tell him/it grandmother. But meanwhile I focus me on the vertical one. I lift the braccias, I take the push and I restart afresh. They are down to head.

Barabau comes nearby me, it wags the tail that it is a party, it pushes on me the face to understand what I am doing. I have the cheek to the correct height for a leccatina and it takes advantage of it. I rub the eyes, I tell him to stop her/it. I feels like laughing even if I am making a serious thing, serious. I return feet against earth.

### 22

Today it is Friday

Today it is Friday. Friday day of market. Mother and grandmother have gone to make a turn in country and me I take advantage to complete a sacrilege of it: I put on the fire the boiler for the tea. I do him/it only because they are not there. If he/she sees me grandmother, it lynches me. "We don't drink tea, we are coffee types" it pronounces categorical. For her it deals with a serious thing. Serious. Coffee is not a joke. It is a philosophy a principle of life. You always buy him/it some same brand. It has not changed her/it for twenty years and it doesn't have intention to do him/it unless doesn't close the firm that produces him/it.

Perhaps it is true that we are coffee types. In fact the boiler with the belly full of water that bubbles on the stove is not at all a good sign. When I drink tea it means that I am not at all well. What I/you/they have gone out of myself. For some, I want to say. As that time that the bicycle has taken for going over the river, there where dad lives now. I didn't want at all to interfere in his/her new life. I wanted only to know.

The bridge, however, was longer than as it seemed from earth and once of I didn't know anymore there where I was exactly me. That so precise map that I was drawn me in the mind for weeks now was as dissolved in the water of the river.

Charles has recovered me, you/he/she passed of there by chance. You/he/she has pretended not to be him aware that I cried.

"However, have done street of it! You have the cloth of the athlete."

With two kind braccias you/he/she has loaded the bicycle in the trunk of the car and you/he/she has opened me the door. You/he/she has not said a word of that that you/he/she has seen. Even later. Even when we have arrived to house of grandmother. Mother has looked me at worried eyes.

"You have lost" you/he/she has declared.

Yes, mother. I have lost. I wondered aimlessly for roads of country and all of a sudden I have taken that wrong. It is easier this way. Easier than to tell you that I wanted to go to him. What I wanted to understand.

The boiler puffs, it calls me to the reality back. While I am pouring warm water in a cup, I turn on the TV. There is a film with some white actors that the cowboys do shooting to other equal white actors to them but dressed from Indian. "A film without women is not a beautiful film" grandmother would say shaking the head. I push the liquid in throat. Today the tea seems also me worse than the usual one. I send him/it down as a medicine.

Charles has given me another book of poetries. This time has written him a younger gentleman of that with the hump. At least to judge from the portrait that there is behind the book. As to that other, this liked a lot also here the stars, but he was not her to beware of the window: it jumped us above dancing. You/he/she had to be a really good. So good that was not the dawn to wake up him/it, but it was him to wake up the dawn. So good that passed the seasons to the hell and it went out extending from there gold ropes and garlands of window in window, of star in star. And it kept on dancing.

I close the book and liquid the rest of the tea in the sink, as if I/you had completed the penitence. We probably mistake something in the preparation. Or it is the tea that feels him discredited by the family and then it takes revenge becoming undrinkable, above all from me. Above all the Friday.

The film on the cowboys and the Indians is ended, part the newscast. The Pope is transferred to Castel Gandolfo for the vacations. The Americans keep on celebrating the unloading of Cristoforo Colombo Columbus. I extinguish the television. I take a seat out me, on the smooth one of the sidewalk next to the garden. It is one afternoon of stray cats and lazy lizards. I support my salvapensieri to earth. I look at his/her transparent belly full of paper. Nothing. I don't succeed in turning on a thought. Perhaps if I/you had held a true diary. I wonder me as it was the diary of edge of Cristoforo Colombo Columbus, when you/he/she has crossed the Atlantic around three caravels Niña, Pint and Saint Maria. I think about the Americans that keep on celebrating us that we have discovered them. How strange to celebrate to have been open from someone. I wonder me if they know him/it, at least that have been us to discover them. According to me, no. They would not celebrate so much otherwise. Who knows if they know that the name we have given him/it for you us.

I wonder me as you/he/she must have been for Christopher Columbus when, after his/her crossing, you/he/she has finally sighted earth. You/he/she must have been grandiose, unbelievable, the most monumental of the visions. From here in the Lowland Padana, perceived not instead nothing, he/she is not seen anything, it doesn't feel him nothing. Only that ticking of clock that precedes an explosion. I feel me insecure, halfhearted, inconclusive. And inconclusa, above all. I feel me as if I were a puzzle in which you/they miss some pieces, and it is a feeling that I don't like at all. I don't understand where can be ended, that pieces there. And they were also even of the important pieces.

Puff. All guilt of mother, of grandmother, of their tulips commit suicide and of their mania to make the wiseacre! A film without women is an ugly film. In this place the wind will never blow. We don't drink tea, we are coffee types. And me, I have lost.

### 23

Rain

Rain. It is everything that that we see from this morning: rain. Grandmother is happy, "You earth is thirsty" it says. Me some less, because there is not here anything to do when it rains.

I spy the clouds from behind the glass of the window. They stir in the sky fast, fast. Ago what stops raining, ago what I/you/he/she stop raining. They continue to get excited and to change physiognomy. It is us of it one to form of it flashes, one to form of hot-air balloon and another that it seems some one umbrella an umbrella from which the rain falls. I smile. Charles has explained that these forms that one sees in the clouds they call fasmate. They call this way because they have to whether to do with the imagination, that is a different thing from the imagination. Imagination is when you can see a tree with the eyes of the mind, also without need to see indeed it for. Imagination is when, with the eyes of the mind, you succeed in upsetting down the tree to head. As when it does him the vertical one against the wall. It seems that not all succeed us to upset the tree. And perhaps even to do the vertical one against the wall.

The fasmates are beautiful, but the clouds don't have intention to listen to my prayers. The colonel of the forecasts says that it will rain at least up to next week. Sigh. From the glass, I look at the platform of forehead. The people of the trailers is closed in key. When it rains, they don't go out at all. I imagine Mujo that bewares of the window with the forehead glued to the glass as me in this moment. Who knows if he/she also sees the fasmates him.

With the finger, I write on the glass misted by my breath: OJUM OAIC. This way he/she is read from out. I mist another po' breathing us above, so he/she is seen better.

From the other room it arrives to me the voice of the television. From some time they don't speak of anything else other than of a certain Tangentopoli. Charles has explained that polis means "city" in Greek, but I already knew him/it. I know that Naples means "new city" and that Paperopoli means "city of the goslings." Tangentopoli is some as Paperopoli, only that instead of the goslings there they live us the deceitful people that take the shares. The shares are the bribes of money that the deceitful gentlemen insert him in the pockets in exchange for favors. Therefore Tangentopoli is the city where all the deceitful gentlemen live with the pockets full of stolen money.

Everything is initiated this winter, the day when you/they have arrested a gentleman that calls Mario Chiesa. He has shaken the head, you/he/she has said that there was a mistake, that him Tangentopoli didn't even know as it did him to arrive us, that he/she lived from a whole other part. The problem is that it still had in pocket an envelope with inside seven million liras. It was as if you/they had found him/it with the registered car Tangentopoli.

After the same thing it has also happened to a lot of other people that I don't remember me as they call. Charles has explained that the operation that has brought to the arrest of all these gentlemen of the shares calls "Clean Hands." I am very happy to the operation Clean Hands. Lives the soaps, lives the bagnoschiumas to the walnut of coconut and the white musk. From when Charles has explained well me thing he wants to say, I don't lose me anymore an episode of this operation in television. It is as a kind of telefilm, but with some true actors. I am just able, I go to see the TV to house of Charles, so it tells well me the history of the characters. Charles doesn't have a good time as me to look at this telenovela, however. At times understands that it also becomes angry. But it becomes usually some sad, it seems as resigned.

"Zoe?"

Grandmother always comes me to call on the most beautiful, when there is the sensation that develops the episode. It sustains that it absolutely needs of me to prepare the table or to go to look for her something in a drawer. Puff. And if then I lose me the end of Clean Hands? Charles opens a book and you/he/she inserts in the stereo a piece of a certain Michel that he listens when you/he/she is sad and that you/he/she calls Memories of Paris. It says not to worry me, that it will be a television series of those long, long. The last episode, seems that the scriptwriters have not written her yet.

### 24

You/he/she has stopped raining and this evening

You/he/she has stopped raining and there is a sunset this evening more pander that never. The sun is red, red hot. The lilac sky, dusted of clouds to form of pink striscioline and orange tree. And with the river, that every tone reflects, everything double is worth. Never sight so much bawdiness in a sunset.

As every evening, Charles takes a seat on the platform of the house-train to reread the sheets that you/he/she has written during the day a cigarette turned on among two fingers. As every evening, mother looks at intermittence. You/he/she has set a whole engineering of the look not to make himself/herself/themselves discover, but some is seen the same.

As every evening, I turn in round in bicycle, with Barabau that wags the tail behind me. And as every evening, grandmother waters garden and garden with a rubber pipe. You/he/she cannot be done before, because otherwise they burn the plants. It needs to do him/it to the sunset, pander or less that I/you/he/she am.

From inside house the television feels him that speaks alone. The Americans that keep on celebrating the five hundred years from the unloading of Cristoforo Colombo Columbus, French that are not so sure anymore to want to interrupt the nuclear experiments in that distant atoll that calls Mururoa.

While he/she is sprinkling, grandmother loses a button of the blouse among the roses. It starts rummaging to four legs mumbling incomprehensible sentences to the bulbs and the roots. It tells me to climb than above to take her needle and thread.

I open the drawer that has told me her, the first one. I don't find anything. Then I open the second. The third one. I look through with ten fingers all the drawers. In the last one, that of the laundry, finds the ball of white thread pierced through to the heart from the needle as from a sword. While I am picking up her/it in the middle of the soft one, my palm it stumbles in an edge of metal. I feel with five fingers: there is here something under. I move the piece above of a pajamas. The edge does it departs of a rectangle. The rectangle of a frame to face under.

I turn her.

I look at her.

I close the eyes. I press me strong the lobe of the ear. Feeling to fall, to fall. Down, down, down, in the den of the Rabbit.

"Zoe? How much do you put there?"

A voice from out, from the real time, distant worlds and worlds. Grandmother's voice.

I put again the photo to his/her place, to face under. I cover her with the pajamas. I go down of run the staircases. I arrive in the kitchen with the fiatone.

"Thing you have?" grandmother forfeits the ball pierced by my hands.

"Nothing."

I take a seat me to the table of kitchen, elbows supported on the wood, while grandmother closes an eye to center better the eye of the needle. I swallow. I don't stop her/it torturing me the lobe of the ear. On the table, there is the orphan button of the blouse. There are the dishes to put in table, one on the other. There is also the coffeepot, with the fierce beak and the black knob on the head as bonnet. It bleeds.

### 25

I knock to the door of Lawrence

I knock to the door of Lawrence, but nobody responds. I peer at from the porticina of Newton, but I immediately rise again then me. I have a white suit with bordini of black satin and to the feet black ballerinas. I cannot get dirty. Tonight we go to country. There is the party of the Delight Estense. They make her every year, next to the castle. Toy balloons and ribbons colored badminton from a tree to the other, the inhabitants serve free tortelli of pumpkin and to midnight it is everything one fire of artifice.

They finally open me, but Lawrence is not yet hello. His/her grandmother picks him/it around up, worse of a female, you/he/she says. What stuff to spend the hours in front of the mirrors, insists, Zoe looks as it is nice without need to be us so much to think. Lawrence presents with the hair that challenges the strength of gravity, all for air. I lengthen the hand. It seems to touch the stings of a porcupine.

There is odor of sausage. And of antizanzare. In the plaza in party there are all the passengers of the house-train, from the locomotive to the last wagon and some other person that I know. There is that friend of grandmother that repairs the things together with his/her child. There are the eyes of Demetrio that are taken around his/her body. They are also there the sisters of grandmother. There is Cackle Zampacorta that as soon as he/she sees me it attaches with the history of the bite to the edge of the table. There is people that laugh people that dance. Mother and Charles also dance. You make the movements of when it is embarrassed for something. I don't understand for what, lie very well. You/he/she has made ten years of classical dance, it also taught her/it to his/her/their children.

To the edges of the plaza the skewers shine on the fires, in line one behind the other. A little more distant, they are also in line the bears in prize for the one that wins the draught to the target. But there that bears are very calmer than the skewers, they live in that draught to the target from who knows how old and it is not certain tonight that they will move.

Lawrence is hypnotized in front of the caramel that rotates together with the almonds in the belly of a kind of round cement mixer heated by a flame. It calls crisp and it is very sweet. I am more melting chocolate type.

The inhabitants stir happy in the perimeter of the plaza, people that come and people that go. Under to the insignia of the cafe, there is who looks at the glass showcase where announcements can be put. The tickets say this way: "VENDESI UOVA." "BABYSITTER REFERENZIATISSIMA OFFRESI." "HOME MASSEUSE." There is also someone whom says that it organizes "I Raced For Diventare BARMAN", but somebody else has cancelled her/it "R" of barman and to its place has put us one "T." I almost almost enroll me.

The orchestrina plays that song that Charles likes it, that that says that we have the sun in plaza few times and the rest it is rain that bathes us. At the edge of the dance footstep there are Mujo and his/her brothers. They are dressed from hard, jackets of black skin and bracelets borchiati to the wrists, but to look at them in the eyes they seem some intimidated. I make him sign to come with the hand. Mujo smiles from far, but ago of no with the head. They go before the fires of artifice and the tortellis of pumpkin. Behind of me someone says:

"It was now."

### 26

Today afternoon has happened again

Today afternoon has happened again.

The oven. You/he/she has ignited alone, while I was being in the other room. I have felt a beep from the kitchen and then a prolonged humming. When I/you/they have arrived, it was there that it heated a baking-pan of invisible lasagnas. Risiamo, has thought there. I have thrown suffered by grandmother to tell him him, I have reached her to short of breath and of ideas. You, instead, his/her idea on the oven if the era already sort. It was not anything strange, you/he/she has said. Things that happen to the ovens.

"It is old, you/he/she can happen. The teeth of the time eat all the things."

And you/he/she has kept on drawing you look for with the sponge on the glass of the window, as if it were normal administration that the ovens ignite to betrayal, without nobody has ordered him/it to you.

Can happen! But who want to take around? If the oven is old, if, you/he/she should not work when one wants to turn on him/it, at all the contrary one.

I go out. In this house-train that never departs, nobody wants to be about to feel me. Possible that doesn't understand that there is something strange in this summer? I noisily puff but nobody realizes, apart my hair that flies away from the forehead frightened.

I make the turn of the locomotive, I emerge behind the house, next to the garden, to see if at least I succeed in training me some to the vertical one. I find Lawrence, Mujo and other children of the outskirts supported in line against the wall instead. It is the first time that I see Mujo so that nearby. It has green eyes. Green. Not me aware n'ero never. It laughs. And when it laughs, they tremble him the freckles. To me instead they tremble some the legs. I look for some word to make to go out of the lips. In this moment, it would be enough for me to find only also some it salivates to send down. Nothing. I don't succeed there really. I would never have thought about being able to have put in chessman from four incisive, two canine teeth, four premolaris and six molars. Without counting the inferior arcade.

Of hit Lawrence comes me meeting as an actor that tries to darken the photographic objective of a paparazzo. It has a strange face, it pushes back me to palm of hand, it says in a low voice that I cannot be there, that must go suffered. Why? If you/they are measuring them.

### 27

Day of immovable leaves

Day of immovable leaves, of cunning and silent cats. They are at the afloat home, I take advantage of the fact that grandfather there is not. I like to be here. I can read in peace the books that Charles has given me and to insert paper in the salvapensieri. There is no anybody that bores. Any noise. Apart the wings of the crickets and the liquid fingers of the river that slip in the delta.

From the window I see Mujo that fishes on the other bank of the river. I draw near me to the glass and I peer at him/it of hidden. It traffics with the reed, it makes to rotate the eddy until it doesn't recover a shabby fish. Look him/it at some, it is undecided whether to throw again him/it in water. It comes me to mind to write him on the glass OAIC, a regard contrarily, as I have done in the locomotive of the house-train. I mist some the glass with the breath. It is dirty here. You sees that grandmother cannot enter, who knows from how much time they don't clean him/it this glass. Continuous to breathe us above, as long as to a line I stay me.

On the glass there is already writing something. Something that I have not written and that you/he/she is written contrarily also. I cannot believe there. I feels like racing out for telling him/it Mujo, but he has disappeared together with the reed and to the shabby fish. I rub me the lobe of the ear. I return in front of the glass. I read to tall voice:

OTUIA

But who has written him? Grandfather? Impossible. Then who? Is there someone who enters the afloat house when grandfather there is not, even at night?

And if instead it were the glass to have written him/it? Yes, you/he/she could be the way that the afloat house has for communicating with the rest of the world. As you/he/she cannot speak, he/she writes on the glasses what wants to say. And he/she writes him/it to upside-down, so those that are out can see.

But because you/he/she has written proper OTUIA?

I return home maltreating me the lobe of the ear. It missed only us that the house on the river was a speaking house. I should perhaps tell him/it grandfather. No, it doesn't suit me to also tell him the matter of the things that you/they speak to me. And then the adults never understand anything. Lawrence? Let's show up us. That doesn't succeed in going besides the UFOs.

I don't know whether to think, but a thing is certain: reality is shouting me in the ears.

I leave the bike against the wall of the garden and enter house of run. Inside, all have the serious faces. Serious. Something serious must have happened, because the TV, for you/he/she is not speaking alone once; they are all before there that they are her/it to listen. I try to ask, but they immediately hiss me.

The television, meanwhile, sends images of a certain road in Palermo that it calls away Of Amelio. The voice of the journalist is making a list of people and I put some to understand there that those people are all death. There is a car rolled up that he/she still sends smoke. Dirty sheets of blood. Noise of sirens in foundation. And people. So much people all around, estate back from the white and red cords of the police. They widen the shot. There are other cars rolled up with the wheels for air. There is stuff that burns. There are buildings with the walls eaten to bites. There is a folded up handrail as if it were made out of wax. Seen by the tall one they seem some toys. But this is not a game.

It is Sunday, but we dine in silence and badly. Grandfather says what kind of country has become, this, where the judges are killed. Already the second in two months. The continuous television to send images of that road in smoke until the night rolls down as a curtain. The pillow seems me uncomfortable, today. I fall asleep me repeating to half voice: OTUIA. OTUIA.

OTUIA.

### 28

I have on a yellow suit

I have on a yellow suit that mother has given me. And among the hair a ribbon of the same color. Tonight we go to theater. Charles has taken the tickets for a concert. You/he/she has taken four of them, one also for me and for mother. To the beginning she didn't want, as usual you/he/she is made to beg some, but as usual you/he/she has said then of yes.

We go to see the pianist that listens to Charles on his/her French radio. That Michel that he/she doesn't speak of Paris, but of the memory in Paris.

We depart with his/her car toward the seven. Charles drives well, rather very well. Even if it sometimes turns him to look at mother to a semaphore and then it happens that it doesn't realize that the green has gone off and we must tell him him Lawrence and I. Then he straightens him on the back, it says to excuse him/it, it is that in these days it hurts him some the back. It is the pain that distracts him/it. According to me it is because time is too much sat in front of the Letter 22. I tell him that in country there is a masseuse that comes home. I have read him on the glass showcase in the piazzetta, under to the insignia of the cafe. It is experienced. And also reserved, you/he/she was written there. Charles makes a strange smile with the eyes, that I see through the small mirror retrovisore. It seems that there that massages don't interest him.

We have arrived. The room of the theater is great. Huge. Also greater than as I remembered her/it to me. Here inside you/he/she could quietly land us a spaceship. I take a seat me on the poltroncina of velvet of side to Charles. This evening I don't have intention to look behind the scenes. I want to do as they do the others: to enjoy me the show and enough.

The lights are finally extinguished. Michel enters, the public applauds. I rub the eyes, I have not seen well perhaps. I look at Charles. I look again at Michel. Then again Charles. But who want to take around? This is not at all here Michel. Michel is tall at least one meter and eighty, it is everything frac and black hair. It has an ivory smile with more notes of the keys of the piano. Want to smuggle this impostor for a true musician!

"He/she listens" Charles whispers me, that has realized of my nervousness.

Unwillingly I focus me on the cheat in the cone of light, to the center of the stage. It is too low to be a musician. Decidedly. And then the hands, above all the hands are impressive. You/he/she can be said that they are the greatest part of all of his/her person. Everything of its body assembles him in the hands there. When it begins to play, it moves her so fast that my eyes don't succeed in putting her to fire. However I begin to put to fire the whole rest. Michel as its music, are not Paris but the memory in Paris.

He plays, and around reality disappears. The notes stay me attached to the body and the rest of the evening it skids away without the ticking of the clocks without the voice of the things that you/they want to speak to me. I have not even realized that my yellow ribbon has slipped to earth and that Charles has slipped on the poltroncina of side to that of mother. Decidedly, this part of the world is in descent. It hangs toward right.

But it doesn't care. This evening no carpets that plot neither coffeepots that bleed. This evening I want to enjoy after all her until. I climb the staircases of house without worrying me about possible lacking steps. I cover well me with the sheet to rub the mosquitos: they won't have me as snack of midnight. There is still that creaking leading that it drags him along the walls, but I don't care because the music covers him/it and is so that it will go tonight. The hands of the clocks turn without making noise. I fall asleep me with the notes of Michel in the ears, his/her enormous hands in front of the eyes. And the memory in Paris in the mind.

### 29

A special ticket for the salvapensieri

A special ticket for the salvapensieri: you/he/she has come to find us my cousin Iris. It will be from us for a few days because his have departed and they don't want to leave her/it alone to house.

Iris is five years old in more than me, the hair as Madonna and the jeans torn on the thighs. Door of the soldier boots even if it sustains to be a pacifist. You immediately understands that that boots there, for her, they have a vital importance. It brings them even if it is summer and there am out trentacinque degrees.

"I never separate me from my Dr. Martens" you/he/she has said once.

It was the first time that I felt someone call his/her shoes for name and to also give him a title.

Behind the black glasses, Iris has the lost eyes, clearer than the usual one. Iris has the eyes of his/her/their grandfather, that are also the eyes of mother. I have the eyes of dad instead. To me the eyes of Iris seem me facts of water and certain times they also make me some impression.

Grandmother is electrified, all happy to see her/it. You continuous to nibble him the fingernails, with the bonnets on the ears from which a thread of thin music slips out. According to me it is evident that it doesn't have anybody desire to be here, where life doesn't fry. But you/he/she cannot do us nothing, this it is I break down him/it that his/her parents have chosen her for the next days. And we cannot even do there nothing us; the production has almost imposed us its entrance in scene without warning.

Iris disembarks in our summer so, with the Dr. Martens to the feet, the sunglasses among the hair, the bonnets on the ears and a trip purse that it overflows of life. It doesn't seem the purse of whom must stay only a few days. I wonder me if it will also acknowledge her that noise leading that it booms in the angles of our days, the ticking of the time bomb that is about to explode and that I don't know whether to defuse.

I accompany him than above. We will divide the same room and it will be my turn to surrender her part above of the bed in castle for matters of seniority.

For before thing she opens his/her trip purse, it throws out some rolls of paper that scatter him on the bed. Then he/she takes the scotch, salt on the mattress that bounces under the weight of the Dr. Martens and it puts on to stick the rolls. They are of the poster. Iris will be only from us few days, but you/he/she doesn't have intention to pass them in the white of the walls.

In the first poster there is one combed as her. Madonna. In the second there is one with the sunglasses of Vasco Rossi and the bandana of Vasco Rossi. It is Vasco Rossi. In the third one there are five boys dressed of white that I have never seen. It is a group, it tells me, that is not still famous in Italy, but that in England it seems they don't listen to other all day long. I ask as they call. You say a thing type teikzet, I don't understand well.

Some years ago, on that same wall, you/he/she had stuck does her/it of one who called Nick Kamen. This Nick Kamen I remember him/it well to me, because thanks to him I have won a historian hide-and-seek. Some years ago has happened, I had found all, it missed only my cousin. Impossible to succeed in rousing her/it. Then, of hit, the radio starts transmitting the last success of Nick. And here that the shutters of the closet open as for magic and my cousin it shells out of the hideaway as the snakes from the enchanters' baskets, scarfs and sweaters that slip down from her head. Den for Iris. Losing so to alone hide-and-seek to succeed in listening to the song of one that doesn't even have righter to a space on the wall above the bed.

Now the teikzets are in concert to Paris.

"Then they will certainly go to the it extracted" I say.

Iris looks me as if I/you was just disembarked by Mars. The extracted he/she doesn't know what both, but it is convinced that that teikzets will go elsewhere there to make the concerts.

I am sceptic. I look better at them. They don't convince a lot me. They don't convince at all rather me. The only one that I like is what is extended in low, with the black hair and the angles of the mouth that laugh without laughing. I ask as it calls.

"Robbie Williams."

This Robiuiliams I am sure that it will have success as singer, it has the angles of the mouth that laugh too much for one who won't have of it. Certain, however, you/he/she should learn to play the trumpet and lasciar to lose the others four.

From under, the voice of grandmother calls Iris.

"You come that I must tell you a thing."

You go down the wood of the staircases grinding a rubber among the teeth. Grandmother calls her/it in garden. I stay some to look at the angles of the mouth of Robiuiliams, while I am feeling her speak out of the window, there under. They don't know that from here I can feel her.

"Remembered to never speak of what has happened not to make any reference to the life of before. Have you understood? The child has suffered a trauma. Remembered: you must never name him/it."

I draw near me to the shutter of the window. I see Iris that lifts the shoulders, ago a pink ball with the rubber, says that however it didn't have any intention to speak of what has happened, what she doesn't care of it nothing. And if really they want to know him/it, he was also her unpleasant.

### 30

Iris tells grandmother that we go to buy an ice cream

Iris tells grandmother that we go to buy an ice cream in country, but you/he/she is only an excuse to slip in the first telephone box that she meets on the road. I don't care it, because the ice cream has bought me him the same. While I am licking the whipped cream that strains me along the fingers, I see her/it get excited through the glass. You complains that in this place there is no anything. NOTHING. It tells him/it in capital, straight. The friend on the other side some thread consoles her/it: you/he/she must be only after all here few days, at all forever. But that few days, to my cousin, they seem the longest and unfair of his/her life.

It goes out of the most depressed box of when you/he/she has entered there. We walk for a piece of grass while she is nibbled the fingernails and me I keep on licking the white of the ice cream. We reach in silence the bridge on the river. Some years ago spent together always the summers. Grandmother sewed us of the supereroe customs and us we flew around for the courtyard with our spatial mantles. We don't speak almost anymore today there.

"Looks, a flamingo!"

You turn as soon as the head toward the pink one of the feathered one, is illuminated then her eyes. You/he/she has individualized qualcos'altro in the green, something of red. A door of telephone box + a telephone of telephone box = a telephone box all whole. There him slingshot immediately inside.

Sigh. I believe that also to her, as to mother, it would like a lot the invention of that dwarfish telephone to bring in pocket, but I don't say anything. Iris from great he/she wants to be an engineer, he/she is never known that if the remembers and comes her to mind to invent for indeed that diabolic gadget.

Back to the house-train we find the sisters of grandmother. Cackle Zampacorta has brought to make to see the films some marriage of his/her daughter. A true pearl, says, beautiful, good and good.

From as he/she speaks of it, it seems a cocktail of Einstein and Claudia Schiffer. Iris asks what you/he/she does in the life. And then we discover that, besides being intelligent and noisily beautiful, the daughter of Cackle Zampacorta is also very modest and at all ambitious: he/she works in a supermarket, to the bench of the fish. That is, not really to the bench of the fish. It is there above all of side, with on a cane custom Findus, and it distributes good discount and tastes of various products of the brand. You/they have also offered her to pass to the box, but she has said of no, because he/she doesn't want to abdicate the relationship with the clients. Iris suffocates a giggle and grandmother you/he/she launches her an occhiataccia, summoning to sit her on the couch. From a side there is Cackle Zampacorta, from the other there are grandmother and mother. We are rubbed, you/they have cut us the streets of escape. It will be our turn to also assist us to the marriage of the cane.

With two pleased fingers, Cackle inserts the precious cassette in the mouth of the VCR. However he/she is not seen anything, only a to whirl of formichine. Cackle says I don't understand and he/she sends some before fast with the remote control until an image it doesn't appear.

We can finally appreciate us also the beauty of his/her daughter. The films it begins really with a shot of his/her face. There is no denying it, it is really beautiful. It has a blessed and happy expression. Cackle is all proud and looks us of hidden for to spy our faces. Then the image widens, up to also frame the bridegroom. There is no denying it, it is beautiful also him. It has the black hair, almost blue, and does her/it blessed as her. However, here it doesn't seem the image of a marriage. They seem above all two that they make gymnastics. Only that are doing her/it naked. They are in a kind of gym, standing on a rug of blue rubber, him behind of her, and they stir stuck, making some movements with the basin to the rallentatore. Nobody says a word, Cackle seems some senseless, but it pretends of nothing. Something stutters and he/she sends another po' before fast with the remote control. I am again formichine. Then the daughter of Cackle and his/her husband that make gymnastics naked leave again, this time knelt for earth to four legs and with faster movements. Just fast.

Cackle tries to extinguish, but the remote control doesn't respond to the orders anymore. You/he/she has decided to do of his/her head, some as the keys, the carpets and the other things.

Of side to me, Iris tries to suffocate a laughter. I don't know why, but so much comes to also laugh to me. We try to hold back us, but the laughter stirs in the throat. It presses, it pushes, salt on, it races up to the teeth, up to the gate of the lips that we don't succeed in holding closed anymore, until it explodes in a boato. It is a sound ever felt a rhombus of thunder. It is as if we had not given back for years, as if our laughters had been for a long time imprisoned and today, finally, the day of the scarcerazione they were enjoyed. We give back as anybody you/he/she has ever laughed from the birth of the world. We roll there on the couch caring the belly, the tears to the eyes, while mother puts in front of the screen, braccia and wide apart legs to prevent us to look, and Cackle and grandmother look for in every way to stop the recording and every thing that do you/he/she is comic even more and you/he/she adds laughters to our laughters. We keep on laughing up to when Cackle leaves the house-train, excusing himself/herself/itself so much with grandmother, saying that if it didn't wait for him/it really, that won't happen anymore. We are still laughing when we salt than above to take the shower. We keep on also laughing to supper, while grandfather asks what it has happened of so much amusing and grandmother svicola not to speak of the two that the naked gymnastics they did on the rug of blue rubber. When I lie down me in the embrace of the sheets I am still laughing. Iris has already put to sleep, in the bed above my head. I let me cradle from his/her regular breath. Good night, world. Perhaps for once I can trust you.

### 31

Grandfather and I are hypnotized in front of the television

Grandfather and I are hypnotized in front of the television. Grandmother gives us before with the broom, but we doesn't even see her/it to us. It crosses again again in opposite direction, but for us it is only a ghost that crosses the room. It returns back and he/she asks if we want an orange juice. We don't answer. Our bodies stazionano there, on the couch but us in reality we are to Barcellona, that is the capital of the Catalogna. It is there that this year they are disputed the Olympiads.

Today it is the day of the rhythmic gymnastics. Grandfather likes to see her/it together with me. He likes the rush of the gymnasts, he likes as they turn the work into beauty. It seems that has a good time, but what you/they do is difficult and very hard. To succeed in making him/it seem a game it he/she takes an enormous will power.

Grandmother passes again with a bun that smokes on a tray. I don't see her/it, but I recognize the bun from the odor. It is that with the yogurt. It starts her cooling on the windowsill. To distract he/she asks us we want a slice of it. In choir, grandfather and I shout "Shhh!". It is about to go down in platform Maria Petrova.

Maria Petrova is to the rhythmic gymnastics as Maradona it is to the kick, only that she is thinner and slender. It is more Bulgarian. A female and Bulgarian version of Maradona, here. The television cameras frame while it is drawing near to the platform with its unmistakable footstep, in its ear there is still the puff of the last recommendations of the trainer. It has a body of white lycra, in hand the red ball, shiny. The other ones go down in platform with some fires of artifice in the customs, does her/it painted, and they smile as of the fools the whole time of the exercise to ingratiate the members of the jury. Maria Petrova no. You go down in platform with a white body and it don't smile.

It has black hair, picked in a way that seems that they are on alone, that was born for being this way. The other ones choose aggressive music. You no. Of music you of it enough only a thread. Here. It goes down in platform. It dries the palm of the hands on the lycra of the custom. You/he/she has not shaken, only assembled. Ready. There is a silence that he breathes, before you begin the music. Grandfather and I hold back the breath. Let's hold back him/it for one minute and thirty seconds.

With Maria Petrova every time this thing some strange happens. It doesn't seem her to follow the music but the music that it follows her/it in every movement of his. And also the ball, the red ball, follows her/it. He/she jumps in air, yes, but then it lands in his/her palm or in the hollow of the back or among his/her ankles. In short, exactly there where you/he/she must arrive. It never loses her/it. It seems that I/you/he/she am attached to his/her body with an elastic. The ball gets further for some, but then you/he/she cannot make to less less than return from her.

Maria Petrova makes this effect to the world: the music, the utensils, the platform, the people that look at her/it on the slopes and the whole rest it seems that is for her there, only for her, that gravitates around her in natural way and cannot make to less less than do him/it.

At the end of the exercise the whole public is standing and shouts its name. We go off standing also me and grandfather, applauds as if you/he/she could feel us. And she smiles, it feels indeed perhaps it for.

You directs toward his/her trainer. Now the worse moment comes, that in which the jury sends forth the vote. Maria Petrova has a straw of nervousness in the look, while it is waiting for the verdict. It didn't have him before the exercise, when the things depended only on her. It has him now, that the things depend from somebody else. Grandfather and I return on the couch, we cross the fingers, we tighten us strong the hands. And the Italian Rai Radiotelevisione chooses that precise moment to interrupt the connection with Barcellona.

Grandfather and I jump on the pillows, we insult the reporters, we beat the fists on the television. All useless. Part initials her/it of it Returns home Lessie. Cannot believe there! Grandfather swears that you/he/she won't pay anymore the canon in his/her life.

At the end we are forced to surrender us, he returns his/her home on the river, I go out in the courtyard. I must wait for tomorrow's connection afternoon to know if Maria Petrova will win the gold medal or no.

Out, Lawrence asks if I feel like making a run of side to the house-train, from the locomotive up to the last wagon.

"We do to whom arrives for first to the river."

I lose because I am distracted, I think too much about Maria Petrova. One day I will become as her. I will have a custom of white lycra, I will dance on an Indian melody and the things they will turn around me and they will exactly do what I say me. To say, to do, to kiss, letter, will. Lawrence, that doesn't know yet that from great I will become Maria Petrova, it chooses the penitence to make me do. I see him/it disappear from my visual field and to reappear later immediately with that certain pillbox with the holes that serve for making to breathe the frog. But I don't care it. This evening I have convinced the others to eat out, in garden. There will be all the inhabitants of the house-train.

I help mother and grandmother to prepare the table. When it is ready, they pick her/it for the legs up and they move her/it in the courtyard. I climb above of run to change me. Behind the garden grandfather cooks the meat to the fire, the perfume you/he/she climbs on, up to the first floor.

Iris is happy, tonight. It has a white bodice and a skirt of jeans. Then I put also a clean suit. It is red, it has the thin shoulder strap and the wide skirt. When turn on myself seems a corolla of flower. I peer at me satisfied in the mirror of grandmother, before my look remains glued to the reflex of Iris that puts make up on him. I am immovable to look at her/it, all you brush and brillantini and colored case box. The thing that does me more impression is when he/she takes the black pencil and it makes him a line really in the eye. You/he/she must do bad. You smile, it says you come here. It unscrews the cork of a pink barattolino and it smears me on the lips a cream, pink also that. It calls lucidalabbra and he/she knows about strawberry.

This evening Iris abdicates the Dr. Martens and it is laced to the ankles of the sandals of woven leather. Then I put the shoes of mother, those with the tall heel. They are all right me. I want to say, almost. I try to walk, but the heel shells out to every footstep. I abdicate. However that leather bracelet comes to mind that I have found in the abandoned house. I rummage in the pockets of all of my shorts and at the end I find him/it. To touch I feel again it that strange shake. But it is not anything, it immediately passes. I lace him/it to the wrist in front of Iris, that he is brushing with a pink dust, thin as the sugar to veil that grandmother puts on the cakes. Look me through the mirror and to a line it jams.

"Thing is that?"

By instinct I hide the left arm behind the back. It doesn't suit me to say that I have found him in the abandoned house. Mother doesn't want that I/you/he/she go us. And he/she doesn't even want that I/you/he/she pick up the earth things.

In the mirror, for an instant, Iris has a strange face. It seems that I/you/he/she tremble her some the chin. And the eyes, above all the eyes are strange, they seem emptied of water.

Then it returns to his/her brush dipped in the pink one. It says only:

"If I were you, I would not put him/it."

I look again at the bracelet, with the tail among the legs. I untie him/it plain and I return to insert him/it in that certain pocket where I have found him. I am satisfied me with the bracelet of mother, that with the pendants to form of star. I lace him/it the steep one going down some staircases. Iris is already of under.

Out, grandfather smiles, you/he/she says as you are beautiful. It puts us in hand a crouton of bread, to press on the meat that cooks. Some to the time, the table is filled with dishes and glasses. Of baskets of bread and bottles. The meat grigliata also arrives. Grandmother reaches with the potatoes the oven. There is really everything, doesn't miss anything. There is the music that comes from the radio of Charles. There is the light of the evening, that is not already more that of the sunset and it is not still that of the night. And then there are all the inhabitants of the house and, for the occasion, also grandmother's sisters. Grandfather uncorks a bottle of Fortana of the Wood Eliceo. A toast to us, momentary of a house-train. To the kites, it adds. It is to the wind, I think, that puffs soon on our platform.

Lawrence eats with the hands, you/he/she chews to wide open mouth to make me appreciate the perfect mechanics of his/her molars. His/her grandmother tells him to eat as you/he/she is owed, that stuff, to show to the others what one has under to the teeth, Zoe you/he/she looks as you/he/she is composed, as she knows how to use knife and fork. Grandfather fills again all the glasses up to the edge, while grandmother passes the tray of the potatoes to the oven and Iris you/he/she nibbles a cutlet of pig with the rubber to still chew in mouth. Cackle Zampacorta peeps as usual. It tells private stuff of people that I don't know. Another invention comes to mind to absolutely set before the telephone to put in pocket: a spray that sprinkles him/it in the air and it hisses the people that are you before. It doesn't do him/it in brutal way, no. It creates around only yourself a kind of bell of glass; those keep on speaking but you don't feel them and continuous to eat your cutlet of pig.

As my spray doesn't exist yet, it is my turn to listen to Cackle that speaks of one who has lost the job. Of the child of somebody else that has been planted by his/her wife. And also of that friend of grandmother, what repairs the things. Cackle says that his/her neighbor has entered his/her shop because she wanted to see some toys to make a gift. To look at that toys, has remained there the whole afternoon. You/he/she must have shows them to him really all, grandmother's friend.

"I don't know if has made her also see his, of toy" it says Cackle.

All burst to laugh. Someone adds that all the women need a toy this way. Also mother. Above all mother. I would want to know why they laugh so much. And because mother should ever have need to play. You blush some, but since nobody is almost dark it doesn't realize. I realize only of it me, because you/he/she has begun to make the movements of when it is embarrassed for something. Also Charles, sat of side to her, it seems me that I/you/he/she make some strange movements. But it is not my father, therefore I don't know well the movements that it does when it is embarrassed for something. However they are all happy ones this evening. They seem happy straight. The supper rolls up to the night and also some more in there. I breathe a sigh of relief. For once the things you/they have not opened mouth.

### 32

From when Iris is in circulation

From when Iris is in circulation, we don't do anything else other than to listen to the music that is brought behind from house. It would have his/her bonnets with that small recorder that she calls uolcmen, but it says that it feels better him on the stereo that is in the house and so the whole day is our turn to feel one who complains him that the man you/they have killed Spider and an anything else other than it declares to have bought an used motorbike but held well for going to the beach. I would want to succeed in listening to some in peace my trombettistis with the denture. I shelter me to house of Lawrence, hoping to find Charles with the turned on radio.

There is, but another of his/her sheets is writing with the Letter 22. It is a long thing, that that you/he/she is writing, a kind of book for his/her students. However it says that I can turn on the stereo to insert us inside all the cassettes that I want. I choose with writing one of it above Birdland.

A music that seems me to have already felt by some part immediately departs, perhaps in a publicity, that that spoke of Milan and of stuff to drink or it said that you/he/she could also be drunk Milan, I don't remember him/it to me more. Charles him stiracchia on the chair.

"Six a connoisseur" he/she affirms.

He/she explains me that these gentlemen that play the song in the Milan to drink call Weather Report, that wants to say "meteorological bulletin." It marks him/it to me on a sheet so I learn as he/she is written. These Weather Report, in reality, they were not people a lot of course for the forecasts, however they played really well. They were particularly five, all good ones but us n'era one that it was better than everybody.

"Also him a trombettista?"

"No, a bassista."

To say the truth, continuous Charles, to the beginning it played the battery, but then one day is broken a wrist and you/he/she has begun to play the electric lower part. It played and it played with a Fender Jazz Bass and all they told him that it was really good. Good. But since he was not satisfied, one day has taken I chisel him/it and you/he/she has removed the keys from the handle of the lower part. The others said that was crazy, but he has filled the holes on the handle with the wood mastic and you/he/she has smeared us above ten layers of resin. The lower part played better of before and all kept on telling him that it was good. But since he was not satisfied yet, you/he/she has begun to use the Fender Jazz Bass as if it were another tool and instead of serving as accompaniment to the others, you/he/she has begun to do of his/her head and to play us above of the melodies.

"You/he/she has succeeded in imposing the electric lower part as I orchestrate soloist."

"As it calls?"

"Jaco. Jaco Pastorius."

I like a lot this Giaco that has detached the keys from the handle of his/her electric lower part. I would want to detach the mudguards from my white bicycle to make her/it resemble to a mountain bike.

Charles puts another piece that calls The Chicken. Who knows because it calls this way, "the chicken." Does Giaco perhaps live in the country? I ask to Charles where alive, but he explains that he/she doesn't live anymore: some years ago is dead. You/they have filled him with barrel out of a cafe. Also him! I sincerely wonder me thing doesn't go to these musicians that always crush them as soon as out of the places and then it ends that the mouldings of the roofs exchange for the corridors.

### 33

I don't believe it

I don't believe it. The television doesn't work. You/he/she has waited really today, day of the Olympic ending of rhythmic gymnastics, to decide to become an ant hill. It is a den of bugs that you/they swarm from this morning, on all the channels. I am sure that you/he/she has done him he/she waits for, as the keys and the carpets.

Grandmother has called his/her usual friend, what the things repair and make to see around his/her toy, as Cackle says. I hope that he intends as than televisions him it doesn't intend of staircases. To say the truth, seems me that doesn't understand more than me and of Lawrence of it, but I don't say anything. He maltreats the spar and the cables. It jokes with grandmother that offers him a coffee. This way distracts him/it!

Between a sip and the other, the gentleman of the toys keeps on trafficking, the language among the teeth. I lift the eyes to the sky and I pray in an angle: Ago what the television shakes him of back the formichines before the connection with Barcellona, that is the capital of the Catalogna.

Nothing to be done. The friend of grandmother insists, but you/he/she is evident that he doesn't know from what you/he/she departs to start. I don't even believe that he/she will succeed in reassembling all pieces in the order in which you/he/she has gotten off them. It says that it will return with his/her child tomorrow that it understands more of it. There risiamo.

Grandfather asks if I want to go with him on the river. If there is wind, we throw out the kites. I look out. There are the hens that peep. There are the crickets that the wings are rubbed for the warm one. There are the head of hair of the immovable trees. There is everything. The only thing that there is not, it is really the wind. I look on the ledge the shepherdesses idler that, also as meteorologists being scarce, they also know theirs that today won't blow a beautiful anything. Also grandfather seems to hear their voice, in fact he doesn't insist and goes whistling with Barabau that reaches far it from.

I also go out. I make a lazy turn around the house-train. Lazily I stay me in front of the garden. To discharge me, puts the lazy hands a step away from the wall, where the crack is lazily born, I rotate the legs above the head and I do a vertical lazy.

I wait for the good moment to detach me from the wall. I withstand more always. The braccias he is strengthening. But it is not only matter of muscles. It is above all a fact of equilibrium and the equilibrium it is a fact of head. Account: one, two, three. arrival up to sixteen. I return against the wall.

Today I feel me a swift, not because I succeed in sleeping with an alone half of the brain, but because of those minuscule zampettes that prevent from taking back once the flight fallen to earth. And earth self there are fallen, I know him/it well. I also knew him/it before seeing that old doctor, that said that my box was the ITN and that to mother you/he/she has said other words that I have not felt.

If only I succeeded in understanding what you/they want to tell me the things, if only this summer were so entangled. every day, it is as to try to loosen a ball made of broken threads: you throw one of them, but the skein never loosens him.

"It is because you are down too much to head" mother says "you must be with the feet for earth, well planted in the Aldiquà, as they do everybody."

I look me the hands supported on the smooth one of the sidewalk, I still have to the wrist his/her bracelet with the stars. Blood suits me to the head.

"Well planted feet in the Aldiquà, have understood?"

I return to earth and I look me the palm of the hand. In the meat the pendants are engraved to form of star.

### 34

Lawrence and I more often go always

Lawrence and I more often go always the afloat home. We go there in the afternoon, when grandfather sleeps. Lawrence plays with the Game Boy, at times curious between the job utensils and the kites. I write tickets to insert in the salvapensieri, I try to decipher the signals and the signs as it would be a Lieutenant Colombo Columbus. I have respected the pacts; I have written all without skipping nothing. Yet, I always have the feeling that you misses something. I shake the tickets in the belly of the salvapensieri. I try to give an order to also give a sense.

"Thing is?"

"Nothing."

I don't feel like explaining to Lawrence that from some time I pick up the messages in bottle of the world. So much would not understand and it would go on with that stupid history of the UFOs.

He lifts the shoulders, as to say that it doesn't interest him, but I know that it is not this way. It returns out to play. I keep on shaking paper before and back, but it doesn't ignite me any thought. They are to diet of ideas in this period. I look at the glass of the finestrina, to see if there is another message written to upside-down. Nothing. Grandmother must have passed of here. There is not a grain of dust in the ray of kilometers. I peer at around some, to see if I succeed at least to rouse an idea among the utensils of grandfather, even in the cassette of the utensils. Water. Nothing even there. I pass in review all of his/her kites. Fuochino, fire. The airplane, the hot-air balloon. Fuochissimo. I pick her among the hands with the idea to steal within to see the effect that does from us up, but I immediately jam me: on an angolino hidden under the mouth is written, almost invisible, the letter "L."

I allow to fall to the ground the hot-air balloon and I feel a spark that ignites in the breast. It is as a thorn that hammers him in the heart. It doesn't do bad. It is annoying, however. I look around me, I try to calm fixing me inanimate objects, immovable. It works. Until, in an angle, my eyes rouse a kick ball of white leather, with above the writing "Italy 90." I bring me a hand to the lobe of the ear, I maltreat him/it between the index and the thumb. Of a line seems me to see a whole net of secret relationships among Lawrence and grandfather, that it waits for him/it to the house on the river, that plays to kick with him, that also devotes him the kites. A net of which I don't know anything, really nothing.

I go out to take a seat on the wharf feet that graze the water that flows under. I look at Lawrence to intermittent but precise glances, as it makes Charles with mother. It dries me some that grandfather has wanted to devote to him his/her last creation. Lawrence doesn't even like the kites. Sigh. Grandfather would perhaps have preferred to have a male nephew. Perhaps also dad would have preferred to have a male child. To that thought, a shiver races me along the back.

I look at the water that flows under. To calm I try me to make to take to my thoughts another direction. I ask thing to Lawrence he/she wants to do from great.

"The veterinarian."

"I thought I wanted to make the soccer player" I throw there.

"Macché soccer player! I don't like to play to kick. I play to basket."

"As to basket? And that kick ball that there is in the afloat house?"

"But which ball?"

"That with writing above "Italy 90.""

"But of what do you speak? It is not mine. Me the kick I hate him/it."

I lift the shoulders and I don't insist. I know well that the ball is his. Of who other should be? Its words know about put make up on die. When it does so, Lawrence is unbearable. I sigh and I try to be satisfied me with the fact that wants to become a veterinarian. What a banal idea, then. You/he/she could say, that know, the pitcher of knives, the planner of spaceships. Or the pilot of comets.

"And you? What do you want to do from great?he/she " asks.

Me? Already, thing I want to do me. I think it some and the first thing that it comes me to mind it is the skin of the trumpet caressed by the fingers of Chet Baker. And I don't have doubts:

"The musician."

"But if don't even play a tool!"

"Because, have you ever taken care of a wounded animal?"

"No, however. be', it is not at all the same thing."

"Because no?"

"Be', because. perch no.

I lift the shoulders. If I cannot be a musician it is not a problem: I have a team of other ideas that you/they ride me in the mind.

"Then I will be a conjurer" I declare "or the detective. Or the collector."

"Collector? And of thing?"

"I don't know him/it, something will come me to mind. Rather, no. I will be a gymnast."

He shakes the head, serious.

"You want to make too things, too much different. He is not able at all. It needs that you decide one of it. An alone. As I have done me."

I think it some on. It doesn't suit me to give up one of that jobs. Of hit they seem me all necessary ones. More: fundamental. It doesn't suit me to abdicate the trumpet that shines in the hands of Miles Davis and to the denture that shines in the mouth of Chet Baker. The geese that walk in single file look I pour the water, long of neck and court of leg. It doesn't suit me to abdicate to inspector Christopher Columbus overcoat or to the customs of white lycra of Maria Petrova. It doesn't suit me to abdicate in general any job.

"You owe for strength" Lawrence insists "at all them you can do all. it needs that you choose one of it."

The geese lengthen the white of the neck I pour the water. An ashy heron detaches the flight. There will be a way, you/he/she must be us. A job that combines together them everybody, that any other doesn't exclude of it.

"Then?Lawrence " insists.

I think it. And of it comes only to mind one.

"The writer."

### 35

Sensation in the capital of the Catalogna

Sensation in the capital of the Catalogna, that is always Barcellona. The television is just shaken of back the ants I have known that Maria Petrova is ended scene in general classification, after a penalizzazione of well 0,20 points. A terrible thing has happened, appalling, of those things that make you definitely lose that po' of trust that you still had in the world: during the exercise with the circle, the zipper lightning of its custom is torn. You/he/she has opened to betrayal. This way you/he/she has had the penalizzazione and you/he/she is ended scene in general classification.

I don't believe that I can ever recover. It is too much, too much unfair. Grandfather tries to console me; does it say after all, does he always treat of the fifth place to the Olympiads also, no? Are speaking of the world of the whole world! I don't even want to feel them these discourses. You/he/she cannot be been satisfied us with the fifth place when it deserved him the first one, only because the fifth place is not quite badly also.

Walk along the desolate platform of the house-train, in the mind blacker thoughts of the clouds that graze the horizon. The keys of house that disappear really when you must go out, the zippers of the customs of white lycra that decide to get torn of hit he/she waits for him to make you arrive scene and those stupid shepherdesses nullafacenti that if they keep her/it on laughing in the room from lunch, instead of making to blow some wind to make to fly the kites. There is seriously something that doesn't go to this world.

Grandfather tries to distract telling me me a history of his.

"Between thousand and thousand years there was a house that resembled to a train.

I don't know him/it if they are in vein of histories, today.

From the sidewalk, Lawrence asks if I want to make a game to dame. I answer him of yes. It is an ancient game, that gives me the feeling to have been coming for another time. On the round tavolino in front of house, we move some the chubby body of Pralina to make place to the chessboard. I like it, the chessboard, country of rational and predictable trips, without the possibility of unexpected crossings. I like the pedines, biscuits of chocolate to the milk and flux. I almost always win. You are fortunate, it says him. No, Lawrence: I am good. And I am about to win again. Even if.

"Done! Have won! Have won! This time I have rubbed you."

I look at the chessboard. Don't be possible! My pedines are mice in trap, immobilized in every direction. I try in the mind to invent me some movements. Nothing. I lengthen two fingers, I choose one it tags after, I put again her/it to his/her place. I choose another of it.

"Emmuovi!Lawrence " says with the syntactic raddoppiamento.

"An instant, no?! I must think."

"Macché to think and to think. however you move you six rubbed. Have won!"

"There will be a way.

"No that there is not! There don't be!Lawrence " shouts. And he/she calls witnesses to his/her victory.

"Dad, true that there is not?"

Charles separates unwillingly from a you for you with mother. You/he/she is dragged for the cloth of the pants in front of the chessboard. It looks at the table, it looks at me, then it shakes the head. It doesn't need to stick words above the scene.

"Have won, have won!"

Lawrence goes around for all the gravel of the avenue a kind of grungy prehistoric dance that knows him only.

But I don't resign me. No, no. He/she doesn't speak. I knit the eyebrows and continuous to think. There will be a way, you/he/she must be us. Charles tries to convince me of the contrary one, you/he/she makes me see what it would happen if I moved me in that or in that other direction. After some he gets tired and it returns from mother. You Lawrence also gets tired. They get tired all and I remain alone to play to iron arm with the chessboard.

Demetrio crosses the courtyard with the usual plucked chicken footstep, it shakes the head and it chews words to half voice. Stubborn, this ragazzina. Too much. The horizon grumbles storm. I support the edge of an elbow to the circle of the tavolino. There will be a way, must be us! In the sky a pink strisciolina transits, thin. It is a flock of flamingos in escape from the storm.

### 36

As every year, the television

As every year, the television announces that this is the warmest summer of the century. Never recorded so tall temperatures from the 1860. All guilt of the Sahara. And of the hole of the ozone. And some effect shuts. They are them the persons responsible, but I don't know if really in this order. The television also advises to be in the house in the warmest hours, to avoid to be too for a long time to the sun, to drink a lot of water and to protect the head with a hat. I lift the shoulders, one month ago it sustained that this was the rainiest summer from the 1815.

It is the time of the siesta, but I lean out me the same to the door of Lawrence and I ask if he/she wants to come to make a bike ride. Him however it is so busy with the Game Boy that it doesn't even feel me. I refold on Barabau. I take the white bicycle from the edge of the house-train, I go him/it to wake up under to the tiglio. He/she just sees the wheels in movement, it gets up of rush and it comes behind me. I do him "Shhh!" with the index in front of the mouth. I don't want that the inhabitants of the house-train realize that I am destroying.

I pedal under the white light of the first afternoon. It is one silent day, in which it doesn't stir a leaf. Around nobody is seen. The crickets are the only presences apart me and Barabau. After all to the house-train, I take toward the river. I pedal fast, fast, along the bank. I tear off the hands from the handlebar. The air pushes back me the hair to the. I feel the thoughts that do to push with the elbow in my mind, they make him the trips each other and they stumble without arriving from any part. I leave half open the eyes. I would want to have a kind of can-opener as that that it uses grandmother, to free them, to throw entirely out them make them race around to the wild state. A can-opener of the thoughts. Here is another invention that must precede without doubt the telephone to put in pocket.

Also today the coffeepot has bled and I has not understood the why. It also seems me that the crack on the wall next to the garden he is some widened. I/you/they are marked him/it to me and I have put everything in the salvapensieri, even if continuous not to understand what they want to tell me the crack and the coffeepot. It is because I am too assembled on the future, Charles says. And on the future you/he/she could not have been taken if you/he/she is not taken on the past there. That gentleman also tells him/it that speaks of the time and of the crescentines, you/he/she seems me.

On the edge of the river, Barabau for sniffing the trunk of a tree. I stay me and I also sniff the air me. It is strange, it doesn't seem me to be there is ever here, yet it is not away from house. I go down from the bicycle and I look around me as an extraterrestrial just disembarked on the planet Earth. There is a strange odor, as if reality was fermenting. Barabau has shaken. Continuous to bark to blunder. I caress his head to calm him/it, but he insists. Of hit, it escapes me from under the fingers and it squirts away as a lightning.

"Barabau!"

I race behind him, but it is very faster than me. I race stronger to reach him/it. All of a sudden of the run, the bank changes face, the poplars are spaced out and earth detaches him from the water without telling. Barabau stops him in a precise point, among two trunks of tree, and it puts on to bark to an invisible creature.

"Barabau, stop her/it!"

I reach him/it panting. I don't understand what it has, it is usually so calm. Continuous to bark looking in before, toward the river. I also look, but there am no anything.

"Thing you have? What have you seen?"

Barabau keeps on barking desperate. I look for everywhere with the eyes. I look through with the look the bank of desert forehead, the branches of the trees without birds, the river that flows slow under of us. For an instant I see me reflected on the surface. Then water ripples him, the reflex disappears and I has the feeling to also disappear me. And it is then that it happens.

It is then that I faint.

White. All white. I don't know where I am me. I know only that am swimming in apnea in a sea of fog color milk. It is not an unpleasant feeling, I don't do anybody work to hold back the breath. I feel me a newborn that slips in the water as a fish. Swimming lengthening the braccias in before. There is around a kind of world, but it is as become less frequent. As if the world were still in phase of study. The outline of Barabau that he/she barks to something that he/she is not seen gives me of side rotating in the white as a figurine. I keep on swimming, an armful behind the other. I hear the voice of grandmother without seeing her/it: "Who doesn't run away from the abyss, the abyss if he/she picks him/it up." I lengthen legs and braccia in the white. Lawrence gives me of side on his/her skate, the wheels they don't make noise. While it is slipping away, he turns and he/she asks me if I succeed in seeing the UFOs. In distance there is the face famigliare of the house, the house-train. I push on and down with the legs, more, always more. On the platform, Charles extends me a gentleman's book strangled by a blue jacket.

"The doctor had said that it could happen."

In the white, mother's voice. I look for her, but I don't see her/it. I don't understand well thing it says. I succeed in intercepting a word on two, and contrarily. EMUIF, ASROCS ETATSE. And again that word, AMUART, that also to upside-down the white penetrates as a blunt object.

I keep on making armfuls in the fog, I slowly estrange me from the house-train, sailing toward the river. On the bank I someone turned back. It seems that coop throwing kicks to something, perhaps a ball. I don't succeed in seeing him/it in face, however. And I have as the impression that from does her/it of that person everything depends. Everything how much. Here it begins to turn the head.

"It looks, you/he/she is opening the eyes."

Grandmother's voice, while around me the white is spaced out.

No! Not yet, not yet!

An instant and all it disappears together with the fog. An instant and I am again glued to the skin of the world.

I wake up myself stretched out on the couch of grandmother, above of me the faces of all the passengers of the house-train. After an instant of dismay, they smile. General euphoria. They look at each other and they breathe sighs of relief. They almost almost uncork a bottle to toast.

Mother sticks me kisses on does her/it.

"Zoe, as do you feel yourself? Are you well?"

I ask what it has happened, even if a half idea I/you/they are already done me her. It looks like I/you/they have fainted on the bank of the river, probably the warm one, a hit of sun. Had not you/they told him, those of the television, that this is the warmest summer of the century? Had not you/they told him to be him of it in the house and not to go out in the warmest hours? There was a little far luckily Demetrio that has given the alarm. Stubborn, this ragazzina. Always to do to iron arm with the world. It is him that you/he/she has brought me to house and eccomi there, on that couch. In all they are spent few minutes, even if to me they are seemed days, months, whole years.

I try to put to sit me. I have the impression that has put me in a blender and that all the various pieces of myself has been slammed here and there and is lost who knows where. I feel of the livid ones from some part and the light head. Light. As emptied, flood of fog. But I am well, indeed.

I am well.

### 37

Today Iris has a strange odor

Today Iris has a strange odor. It says that it is because it has the menstruations, but according to me it is because you/he/she must depart. His have returned home and you/he/she can finally return also us her. It will also happen to you, you will see, it says. They will come you the occhiaies and you will have a strange odor in the days of the menstruations. I shake the head with stubbornness, while I am picking up the hair above the nape and I tame them with an elastic. To me it won't happen really a beautiful nothing, thinks. The menstruations are not a thing that concerns me. And not even the occhiaies.

Iris spends the day in bikini in the middle of the grass, so when you/he/she returns in the city you/he/she can invent him that you/he/she has been on a tropical beach. Only that Iris is as mother: it has the white skin. White. It would burn even if it stretched him on a bunk to the sunset. What here hard so much, is true, it is a sunset professional, but he/she remains always also a sunset.

The sisters of grandmother give to ask if we also go to the procession. Grandmother asks what procession, theirs respond that don't know him/it still, but there is however a procession. Iris lowers the sunglasses on the nose and looks her as if they had been coming for another century. For her an alone bibbia exists and calls Vogue.

To midday the follower of the sect of Vogue already has the color of the tomatoes grigliati. Grandmother, that has abdicated the procession without name, the supplication to protect at least the head with a straw hat. But she persists him, it declares that it is well, that is true that now it seems a tomato grigliato, but if really they want to know him/it tomorrow it will be an appetizing dessert to the caramel. It tells him/it his/her bibbia. From the verse 53:2 of Vogue: "If you cannot go to the beach, you leave that the sea comes to you: lay down you in bikini on the lawn of your house and tanned you, tan you, tan you."

Grandmother shakes the head. Iris passes the rest of the afternoon to sharpen his/her history of invented vacation and me I pass the rest of the afternoon to move the reality in my salvapensieri. In the last days, from when I/you/they have fainted on the river, I have felt some spark in the middle of the breast. Nothing serious, knows him/it, it is only glass that tinkles, as that of the princess Coppers. Things that head, only that her at least it was a princess. It comes me an idea. I race than above, support the salvapensieri on the comodino, undresses the sheets of grandmother of the bedspread and I wears him/it as if it were a queen mantle. The trailing fills the whole room. Here, now yes, the sparks he is extinguishing. I hold in air the pen as a scepter. Would want us a crown on the head.

While I am looking for with the eyes in the room, in the rectangle of the door I intercept two feet of Iris + two legs of Iris + an uolcmen of Iris = an Iris all whole. Look almost worse me of as you/he/she has looked at the sisters of grandmother. I swallow. It doesn't suit me that has seen me so, while I was making the princess you Copper. I feel the cheeks that become of fire. Surely you/he/she will have thought that I was playing and instead it was a serious thing. Serious. I make to slip plain the bedspread up to earth. But Iris seems not to be him aware of nothing, or you/he/she pretends of. It climbs over my mantle of occasion and it recovers the overflowing purse of life with which you/he/she has arrived. It forks the black glasses, it inserts the Dr. Martens and me riscavalca toward the exit.

"I go" it chews from the staircases stamping on the carpet that every day slips more toward right.

"Then hi" I say, when I don't already see her/it anymore.

I take a seat me on the bed, the cheeks they slowly return to their usual temperature. Suddenly I feel the Dr. Martens that stops him on the wood of the staircases. I feel that they make dietrofront, that returns in top.

Iris reappears in the rectangle of the door. With some hesitation, it unthreads the glasses and it draws near. He/she sits on the bed of side to me. Look me with the eyes that am today full of water more than the usual one. You say that it is because you/he/she has caught too much sun, but according to me it is because you/he/she must depart.

"He/she listens" it whispers taking me the hands "anything tells you them, you not to be them to feel. You go on for your road and not to turn you. Have you understood? I know him/it that you are strong, stronger than all envoys together of theirs and that history of the trauma and the loss of the memory, be', according to you have picked them around to me all up. And you have done well."

It lengthens and it tightens me strong. Strong. Almost I don't succeed in breathing. It unthreads from the neck the bonnets of the uolcmen and it says that it gives me him, not before having recovered the cassette of Vasco Rossi that there is inside. For an instant it looks me with that eyes of water, that you/they remember me so much when we raced along the river in our supereroi customs. It is a distant memory. Distant. A memory in which we are inside me, somebody else and she of which I don't succeed in seeing the face there.

It is only an instant. Before Iris forks again the sunglasses. Before you get up from the bed and that I/you/he/she feel again the noise of the Dr. Martens on the wood of the staircases.

### 38

I insert in the mouth of the uolcmen

I insert in the mouth of the uolcmen that Iris has given me the cassette that Charles has given me. I beware the blue of the window. There is a sky washed with the soap of Marsiglia. Not even a cloud to see some fasmate. I think about the sun, I think about the rain. I think about this wind that never arrives. I could ask forecasts to that community of shepherdesses in the room from lunch, but their meteorological bulletin is more improbable than that than the Weather Report.

I systematize on the shelf the books that Charles has given me. It gives of of it new every week. I skim through at random one of them. It is the history of a gentleman that one day realizes that its furniture go for a walk for house. What they go out of the door, straight, and you/he/she must go him them to repurchase from a junk dealer. It is what will also happen to me, I am certain of it, if I continue this way.

I read the author's name reflected in the mirror. TNASSAPUAM. Then I move the look from the book to me and that that I see it makes me rub the eyes. Hey, expected an instant. Am I me this? I look me of forehead and almost I don't recognize me. I bend me some side, as to peer at over the surface of the mirror, as if it were a door that can be opened. Will I be me indeed? I have a different face from that of yesterday. Yet the eyes are there, always equal, always to the same place. I am also there the nose, the mouth, the hair. The pieces, singly taken, they are yesterday always the same of, but as a whole the landscape of the does me it seems everything different. I go down of under, watching out for to shun the carpets that every day slips more toward right. I wonder me seriously if the others will recognize me.

Out, grandfather looks at a piece of country up to the river, the faithful legs of Barabau crouched to his/her feet. Lawrence is putting in line the statuettes that you/he/she has found in the merendines of the White Mill. Mother is drinking the coffee with grandmother, in choir they ask me if I want a piece of bun that makes company to a juice of fruit. I stay immovable on the platform of the house. I don't dare to move me for fear to lose me other pieces of myself and that they end so away from not to succeed in recovering them anymore.

From the door of Newton it shells out a whisker of Pralina + an ear of Pralina + four legs of Pralina = a Pralina all whole. It comes to rub his/her chubby body against my thin ankles.

"Then you want her/it, or no this bun?"

Nobody realizes that I am not me anymore.

### 39

Stray night

Stray night of cats on the roofs and mute stars. Thieves' night.

They have come from us yesterday, with the complicity of the dark without moon. The passengers of the house-train have not felt as usual anything. Me the noises I have felt them, but I have not made us case. I thought they were the usual armchairs that go for a walk taking advantage of the night, as in the stories of TNASSAPUAM.

This morning grandmother has found the drawer of the silverware desert.

"The good service!you/he/she has exclaimed, squadernandosi the hands on does her/it.

You will understand. I believe both the first time that those forks leave the belief. You/they could not probably do more than anything of it the whole day and you/they have begged the thieves to bring him her street. To Charles, you/they have stolen the Letter instead 22. But luckily you/they have left him all the sheets of that book that you/he/she is writing. They have been so kind to also be unthread the page written to half that there was in the car. You/they had to be thievish very sensitive. To Demetrio the mean of locomotion has disappeared: the wheelbarrow. He has begun to curse all, to say that it is guilt of the gypsies, that has been their. What you/he/she has seen them while they were training him to make the thieves. That poster that there was on the bank, that with the writing "Forbidden the standstill to the nomad", you/he/she has moved him nearer, really of side in our house. It spends the days to make the watch before and back. It is perhaps afraid that steals him that certain trunks full of gold that nobody has ever seen. I am not afraid instead because I don't have anything to steal. Apart my salvapensieri. But to whom could interest to steal him/it?

The people of the trailers is closed in key. They don't make him see, as when it rains. I don't see Mujo anymore. I imagine him/it to me behind the glass of a window, with the eyes that more greens become every day that passes. It is away from the poster of Demetrio as a fox it is to the wide one from the trap.

In the house, the continuous television to speak alone. The Pope is completely taken back by the operation of June. To London they hold a lecture to make to end the war in Bosnia Erzegovina. A few months ago, a ship Chinese freighter has lost a load of trentamila rubber paperelle, that really in this moment you/they are sailing in the Pacific. You foresees that they will disembark on the coasts of Europe among a few years. I look for grandfather to the afloat house to tell him this thing of the fleet of paperelle, but I don't find him/it.

Lately grandfather he wakes up late, slow. Mother says that you/he/she is because you/he/she is not well. I peer at him/it of hidden, always more often. Won't it have intention to leave also us at all him?

He smiles and it says to be calm, that is not the moment yet. But what sooner or later it will also touch to him, certain, as to everybody. It is the normal one to flow some time, it says.

Me, from when there has been the minute from sixty-one seconds, to the time I don't believe it more and I don't understand really this hurry to move from the Aldiquà to the Aldilà. Me raggomitolo on the bed of side to grandfather together with my salvapensieri, proceeds a den between the circle of his/her arm and the belly. I tell him that the colonel of the meteo thinks that a beautiful wind of libeccio is upcoming. And that we must plant a seed of cherry. And grigliare meat behind house. Besides making to fly the kites, naturally. In short we have a lot of things to do, I tell him pressing on his belly the salvapensieri. And then he/she won't want at all to lose the unloading of the rubber paperelles?

I also remember him that you/he/she has not told me the end of that history yet where the protagonist was a house that resembled to a train.

### 40

Thing other must happen

Thing other must happen because the great ones pay me attention? Why does also realize theirs that something doesn't go to this summer that fakes to be harmless?

Be', anything pits, that thing has happened really today.

This time it doesn't deal with a simple coffeepot that bleeds or of a step that lifts the skirt and it decides to run away from the staircase. This time has happened the unimaginable one: earth is sunk under to our feet. And we are not at all on the side of a mountain. Nossignori, is here in the delta of the Great River and mountains he/she doesn't even see the shade.

It has happened that, from some days, grandmother saw to appear on the surface a regurgitation of water in the lawn. It is a very strange thing because it doesn't rain from some. All the inhabitants of the house-train have told her to be calm, that was not anything. But since grandmother is stubborn and practises the unhealthy vice to always want to go after all to every thing, you/he/she has grasped a baton you/he/she is you/he/she has pressed him against the incriminated grass. In all answer, the grass has sent a funny gurgle, as if same digesting the water that you/he/she was drunk. Then the gurgle has become a boato and the lawn you/he/she is sunk of hit, so, without telling. To his/her place, you/he/she has left a hole. Round and perfect. Grandmother was frozen by the fear, you/he/she has fallen even the baton from her hands: up to two seconds before it walked on a sure grass and now, in the same place, there was the void.

Without saying a word, we have approached all to the wide open mouth of the earth there. We have looked of under. The terrestrial digestion had made to sink down the lawn, after all, who knows where, and to its place you/he/she had left a cylinder cable, some spanciato, long more than four meters and breadth at least two. The inhabitants of the house-train have remained to open mouth. Everybody. To mouth open Lawrence, to mouth open Charles, to open mouth even Demetrio. But me, me no. I know well that the things want to tell us of something. It is a piece that you/they do him/it. What I have not understood yet is of thing they want to tell us.

In the afternoon the surveyor has come to make the reliefs and you/he/she has said to be calm, that that hole in reality had a more logical explanation: it dealt with an ancient cistern for the water of the other century. When they had him dismessa, you/they had covered the round opening with wood beams and you/they had buried her lifting the level of the whole lawn. A normal procedure. Normal. With to spend some years, the wood to the mouth of the cistern had surrendered few to the time, until that day, later who knows how much time, it was sunk down bringing himself/herself/itself behind also the grass.

The passengers of the house-train have nodded lifted, comforted by the rigor of that geometric logic. Anybody likes the idea that the lawn sinks under to the feet, so, without telling. A whatever cistern of last century is all right for covering a hole in the grungy fabric of the world.

But who want to take around? Here he keeps on smuggling the reality. I know that it deals with all other. Footstep in front of the surveyor and I shake the head. With me it doesn't attach the bluff of the cistern. He looks at incuriosito the outline of a frowning ragazzina, long of leg as a heron. Then it lifts the shoulders, and it continues his/her reliefs.

Tomorrow they will come with a truck of earth to fill the hole. For them the matter is closed this way. It will be again everything normal, everything as before. But I will keep on feeling in foundation that strident note, continuous, as if reality squeaked to every gesture that we do. And now I know that also the others, despite the appearances, they start to feel her/it.

### 41

This morning mother there is not

This morning mother there is not. You/he/she has returned in the city to pay our bills and to make a lot of other things that I don't remember me. Charles inserts in the stereo Memories of Paris and I understand that you/he/she is sad. For strength. How does it do him not to be sad? The problem is not only at all the cistern and the hole in the lawn. This summer is full of holes. Of things that are not understood, that do pretense to be normal and that I am not at all it. Continuous to have the feeling to turn in round, to pursue a ghost to tag after someone who tags after me. There is a predicament in the air. There is someone who has marked the papers. I look at the house-train on his/her dead platform, I look at the immovable grass of the lawn to reassure me. Nothing to be done.

The crack on the wall of side in the garden has widened and there is something of left in that breaking. Something that scricchiola in imperceptible way, as to say: did you believe that this pits a harmless summer, a summer as all the others? Did you believe that the world was everything solid mechanisms and small wheels and well oiled gears? And instead no! It is a whole crack a crack from which you/he/she can penetrate anything. It is everything in unstable balance as a castle of papers on the nothing. And the equilibrium on the nothing is fragile. A puff and it falls everything.

Yesterday the car of the policemen has come again, you/they have talked to mother. They have been careful, you/they have made of everything not to make to be seen, but I have seen them the same. In every case, I would have acknowledged their passage however. Every time that you/they go away, mother is strange. Strange. He/she doesn't even answer to the questions when you speak to her, it seems that I/you/he/she am parks in another dimension of it. Usually, the day after the policemen have passed, she goes out to go to pay the bills.

I rub me the lobe of the ear. This summer is so strange that cannot be done anything else other than to rub the lobe of the ear. I rub him/it so strongly to me that it detaches me an earring and it goes to conceal behind the closet. Here it is there, that tipsy spiteful and unattainable, to few centimeters from my ridiculous recorded height on the wall with the pink pennarello.

I try to insert two fingers in the crack between wood and wall. Nothing. I try with an alone finger. Nothing the same. I decide for a drastic solution: to move the closet. Luckily it is small. I take a beautiful breath and I support us to me above with the whole body. An inhuman effort for one of my age that is tall only. be', you/he/she is written on the wall there.

My face becomes violet, also the body becomes violet. Around all becomes violet. But I succeed in moving the closet of some centimeter. That so much that enough to insert us behind two fingers and to recover the earring. While I/you/they have been crouching to earth, I also find the time to give a heading against the wood. I lift to work the eyes from the floor.

And it is then that I see her/it. Behind the closet, close to the writing in vertical that marks my growth in the time, it is us of it another, equal, written with a blue pennarello.

I rub the eyes, incredulous.

I try to put better her to fire. The writing proceeds parallel to mine, it is almost equal up to the three year-old age. Then the writing in blue he/she takes the rush and it begins to detach more, always more. It continues upward his/her run, lanky, until all of a sudden he stops. He/she is not seen well from here, but I am almost certain that ends to the thirteen year-old age.

"Zoe, we go out to shop. Do you also come?"

Mother's voice, of return from his/her bills.

With an inhuman effort, I push again the closet against the wall and I return in the reality. I go down of under, trying to ignore the words that flash me in the mind. Fire, fuochissimo! Fire, fuochissimo! I rub me the lobe of the ear in which I have as soon as rinfilato the earring. I am panting.

"Thing there is?mother " says.

"Nothing, has lost an earring. But I have found again him."

"Then prepared. And help to write me the list of the expense."

It looks through among the inside and the out of a purse with his/her very beautiful hands painted by Boldini before finding a blue pen. It hands me her, as nothing happened.

### 42

It is almost evening

It is almost evening. Ago warm. There is no anybody in the house besides me. I make a rapid sopralluogo in every room to verify. Green light.

I begin to look for. I open the leaves of all the furniture, I look through inside and out of every shutter. I know that what I look for must be there, from some part. I rummage everywhere, until I don't find her/it. Here it is there, the yellow envelope that you/they have delivered that day the policemen and in which the patient hands of mother have continued to insert all the other papers that have delivered her.

I fiercely rub me the lobe of the ear. Again that feeling to have been thrown in a blender. A blender of the time that mixes him back with the before, the tomorrow with it slams together yesterday them up to scatter around all the pieces. My fingers have an instant of hesitation in front of the yellow of the envelope. Am I making the correct thing? Do I feel like knowing indeed? I take time. I still rub me the lobe of the ear some. Then I decide: I open her/it.

I lift the tongue and reverse the content on the table. There is here a lot of stuff inside. There are of the sheets stung together. On one you/he/she is written there "Relationship." There is then an article of newspaper with the title "it Dies to 13 throwing himself/herself/itself from the bank." And a photo.

I lift the look from the table. I leave half open the eyes. Of hit I feel the head that pulsates, it pulsates, it is about to burst. I look at the objects on the ledges, as nothing happened, praying that the pliers that he/she snaps at me the temples releases the taking and leaves me alone. I look at the shepherdesses nullafacenti, the horrendous cats of porcelain, the postcards and the wake of photo that it squirts from the piece of furniture to the wall making the whole turn of the room. And for the first time I realize me that at the end of the photos there is a clearer shade on the wall. A rectangular shade, from the alive and perfect edges.

The telephone starts ringing and the room begins to turn of hit. He doesn't exist anymore now. And all, falls then around. It is an earthquake of the soul. The pictures fall, the frames fall with the photos, the white space falls on the wall from which someone has removed something, the walls fall one to one as papers. Everything falls and I feels a piece of past that returns. That also falls. It falls on to me, to this body that is mine and that it is not already yesterday anymore the same of, in last summer. I don't have time to think of us and I am already there inside. It is not the future that has made me the trip: it is the past. The past is the key. It was right that gentleman of the time and the crescentines. The past. An instant and I am on him fallen.

The telephone rings, it rings, continuous to ring. I draw near me breathing strong. Strong. I lift the cornet.

"Good evening, talks to Mrs Merlante? Funeral honors."

I race out, I open wide doors that beat against walls. Footstep in front of Charles and Lawrence without seeing them. I race, I race, I don't know neanch'io where. I race from another part. I race away from the train of the house. I race for running after the string of the time. To bring him/it back, to before the cut of forbice. There will be a way, must be us! I race over the afloat house. I race on the bank of the river. I race until I don't cross a road and I fall on the raw one some catrame. I am firm, immovable, hair on the asphalt. I think about the kite with that "L" written, above that won't fly never.

The "L" of Luca.

My brother's L.

From far, distant, voices that call from out, from the real world. You shout that speak me and they caress me the hair. They are those of the sisters of grandmother. My run in the time is interrupted in front of their house. The voices lift me from earth, they continue to caress me, to say that it is not anything. Only some blood on the knees. Oxygenated water and it resolves him everything. It is not the case to cry.

### 43

The night tumbles down of hit

The night tumbles down of hit. The time is rolled up on same, you/he/she has returned back as the ribbon of those songs that Charles has given me.

It is one year ago. We are in our house, that true. That than before the crossing. There are it howls in the air. They are the voices of mother and dad. I lean out me to the door of the kitchen and I see them quarrel. They don't see me to Them. It is night, only the light of the kitchen has turned on and it draws a yellow blade on the floor. I am out of the blade in the dark. But I am not alone, there is someone of side to me. Turns the look and I see him/it. There here it is is equal to me, just as Cackle you/he/she has said Zampacorta. Apart the eyes, that are full of water like those of mother. You/he/she is also looking at him. Also he has understood as the things you/they are going.

The time continues to roll up him on himself. Plain, plain, he/she returns me the memory in the fingers (Luca's skin), in the nose (his/her odor of grass just cut), in the ears (his/her words of tredicenne in crisis). It is summer and ago very warm. The warmest summer of the century, they say those some television. Mother and dad have decided to bring us the same from the grandparents, you/they have pretended that was all right everything. They have been of the enough good actors so much that I have also believed it for some. But Luca no. Luca doesn't believe it. It is greater than me and he/she already knows as it will go to end. It spends the days to throw kicks to the leather of a ball. I sometimes convince him/it to make a turn, we pedal along the bank in bicycle, up to the house in which many years ago mother was born. It is there that it tells me to have seen dad with another woman, to the exit of a commercial center. I say that I don't believe it. No, I don't believe at all it. He twists the lips in a sneer:

"You are naïve. Don't you know him/it that they keep on seeing here also him along the bank of the river? They set apart in her car, parked among two acacias. If you don't believe it, you can ask him/it to Demetrio, you/he/she has also seen them him. Mother and dad will leave, it is certain."

Luca turns back. I take his arm, but he tears him/it away from my fingers and it goes down along the staircases. It tears him/it so strongly that its leather bracelet bounces to earth.

You/he/she has been the last time that I have touched him.

After that day, there is the silence. The total silence. Luca spends alone the days, along the river, to the afloat house. He/she almost eats nothing. It decides that he/she won't talk to anybody anymore. Even with me. In the air there is the sound of the crickets. And that annoying creaking of foundation that disappears only to the sunset, when the swifts return home and they dart around the tiles of the roof. Grandfather smiles, you/he/she says to be calm, not to worry me for Luca, things that pass. All passes in the life. Next year will make a kite to form of shark. I tell that there is still perhaps hope. Or even to form of hot-air balloon, continuous. I follow him/it up to the afloat house on the river. The sunset returns us the life of before, with inside its histories.

"Between thousand and thousand years there were two brothers, a male and a female."

That history there, however, grandfather has never finished telling me her. You/he/she is entangled too much in his mouth, because you/he/she was also entangled in the reality. The last day I remember him/it well to me, now. I have done as soon as in time to see Luca sink in the water, with the grace of a stricken animal to death. The river has swallowed him in silence, without even not making a squirt.

From the shore, Barabau barked strong. I would have had to plunge me to try to bring him/it in the Aldiquà. Me, that had not even succeeded in deciphering that application of his of help writing on the glass of the afloat house, and I have discovered her when by now it was too late. I/you/they have not succeeded in doing nothing. I/you/they have fainted and enough.

Also that time has been Demetrio to launch the alarm. It was to make the watch to his/her trunks full of gold there, not in the house where mother was born, as that day that Lawrence and I have crossed his/her outline on the bank. Or it was only perhaps there for spying the coppiettes that you/they are kissed. He/she thought about seeing two that they made gymnastics naked and you/he/she has seen a suit that plunged him in the water with the grace of a wild bird instead. However. You/he/she has been him to tell the others to tell what you/he/she had seen: the boy had not slipped, you/he/she was thrown of intention, aware of to do him/it. With a perfect flight, without afterthoughts. The ragazzina was him/it to look without succeeding in moving a muscle and an instant after you/he/she had collapsed to earth.

That day you/they have dragged away me from the river and loaded on the AZNALUBMA to dead weight. Luca you/they have found later only him one year, as he/she explained that relationship in the yellow envelope.

After the faint I/you/they have remained for a piece in the hospital, with the tubicinis in the nose. From my bed, while I was swimming in the white, I felt mother and dad blame him some things. Ugly stuff they are said too much by to remember. When the tubicinis and mother have removed from me you/he/she has come me to take, my mind you/he/she had done cleaning. You/he/she had swept away some things, of those too much strong, that do the sparks come in the breast.

"The trauma has made her lose the memory of that that has happened" the physicians have said "and perhaps it is not an evil."

"As?mother has said.

"There is the possibility that his/her daughter he feels responsible of not to have succeeded in saving his/her brother. It happens too much to the sensitive little boys. His/her mind you/he/she has had to cancel what has happened, does it understand? You/he/she has had to make to survive him/it. It is a good sign" you/they have insisted "it means that his/her daughter has chosen the life. You/he/she can give him that growing the memoirs little riaffiorino to the time, up to the partial or total recovery."

"When?mother has asked.

"If" they have responded.

You/they have written her on a piece of paper the name of an old doctor with the hair all white ones. You/they have also recommended her to leave. However the house of before we could not allow her/it anymore. Then we have made the crossing. Dad there was not already more.

### 44

I hear the voice of the bell

I hear the voice of the bell sing to dead, as one year ago. But that time I was not there. Now that the policemen have found again the body of buried Luca under the water, the adults you/they have decided to bury him/it under earth. Matter of points of view. It seems that earth comforts them more. I don't know him/it, but I was not sorry the idea of a grave with the walls made of water. However, they have decided this way.

The continuous bell to play. To the beginning in the summer it seemed only also me impossible to imagine the death of someone of my family. And instead it had already happened. They tremble me the legs with the crosticines on the knees, but I insist. This time I want to be also us me.

Grandfather has preferred not to come. You/he/she has gone the afloat home and you/he/she has remained up to evening there. Today it had the eyes full of water more than the usual one. Grandmother, is empty instead of look, you/he/she walks slanting, you/he/she has the air of whom doesn't recognize the road of house anymore. You, really her, that he/she always knows from what it departs to go. Mother ago before and back in a room to the other, from a mirror to the other, it looks him as to make sure to be still there not to have disappeared. They tremble her the white braccias. And does her/it, above all its face totters. It is as if the strength that has gagged her the face for one whole year had him of hit freed. He/she cries without saying nothing and ago a strange effect to see a mother that cries.

I arrive in the church I don't know how, the feet don't respond better to the head. The priest says things any, things that you/he/she seems me they don't have anything to do with it nothing with us. I wonder me as we can be all there, in silence, while Luca is stretched out against the wood of a coffin. I wonder me as they make the others not to howl. For the time being me I don't howl, I confine me to sob and to torment my crosticines.

The priest insists, we must not cry, Luca has reached "the true life", that is not that terrestrial, that of the material goods. He/she calls Luca "George." Twice. To the third one, someone corrects him/it. It begins to wander, it is as that it doesn't have the full church and it takes advantage of it. All of a sudden it declares that "the television is the demon, as after all it also sustained Mother Teresa of Calcutta" and that we have forgotten the abc of the true life.

"You know him/it qual it is the weapon most powerful that have to disposition? Do you know him/it qual it is?"

You looks through in the white of the cowl.

"Is this!it " exults, tightening among the hands the keys of the car, from which it dangles sad a rosary.

It acknowledges the misunderstanding and straps; it eliminates from the senseless tangle the keys of the car and he/she leaves only the rosary. The mass is ended, you go to peace.

We emerge on the plaza that is a carpet of people come by every part. The message of the priest has not been of the clearest. People don't know what to say, therefore you/he/she doesn't say anything. There are the sisters of grandmother. There is Lawrence with his/her syntactic raddoppiamento, there is Charles that doesn't dare to approach to mother. There is someone who draws near plain. Seem him indelicate, but there is a matter of money in suspended. I recognize the employee of the funeral honors from the voice. There is also dad, but now I don't feel like seeing him/it. I turn me on the other side. Around, people are some confused, almost sfocata. Me, for me, continuous with the hiccups.

When we return home, the world is not before anymore the same of.

The ticking of foundation has bursted in a boato. Now the others feel him/it also, they feel him/it everybody. I am certain of it.

I take a seat me on the edge of the sidewalk behind the house, where the whole summer I have trained to the vertical one against the wall. I feel me the lead in the calves. It is in the braccias, also. I don't feel like anymore training me. I don't feel like doing nothing. I copy the grass of the lawn: I stay immovable. I won't move here me of for the next twenty years. I swear.

The people of the trailers comes to greet us, but I don't even lift the look. From the edge of the sidewalk, I the shoes of Mujo + two legs of Mujo + a face of Mujo = a Mujo all whole. I hear his/her voice that says:

"As is?"

"As summer, so winter."

I don't know why I have answered this way. None of the other ones has found best answers, however.

And then I am copying the grass, I cannot speak. I cannot even feel. I am copying her so well that I have not even realized that Mujo has spoken to me for the first time in the whole summer. And you/he/she has done him in Italian.

To supper I don't succeed in swallowing nothing. It bothers me the memory that returns, it bothers me the time that him riavvolge on himself as the ribbon of a cassette. My mind you/he/she had not made then such a wrong choice deciding to shake of back some memoirs. It also bothers me the people that try to console me, and for the occasion it says stupider things of the usual one. Gives around even me bother the braccias of mother. I have him with her. I have him with grandmother. I have him with everybody. But thing happens to this family, because all the men go? Why do all leave all and they want to make their crossing? I look her as if it were their guilt. I look her and I would feel like howling for the fear that one day also happens to me.

I go than above to chase tears in peace. Doesn't a water exist oxygenated that it disinfects these things? A water oxygenated as that of the sisters of grandmother. To the beginning it burns some, but then it passes everything. They come you the crosticines, you torment her some with the fingernails and at the end you recover.

I turn in round, in front of the mirror that reflects contrarily the world and in which recognize me every day less. I think about the house on the river, to the kites and the ball, so alone in the night. I pick her/it to me with the salvapensieri up. I open the rubber cork on the fund and it is a rain of paper that fills the floor. I read at random tickets. From some time it happens that the things speak to me. I cry. The carpets are plotting something. I throw above with the nose. Day of immovable leaves. Recovery from the pocket of the shorts the leather bracelet from which Luca never separated him. Stray night. I rub him/it between the index and the thumb as it was a talisman. I hear the voice of the bell. I think that I won't hear anymore his/her voice and it hurts me the belly. Ago really bad.

In bath, there is a stain of red that waits me on the underpants. I look better and it begins to turn me the head. I look for saliva to send down, to reassure me, to tell me that it is a normal thing, even if it doesn't seem. I sniff me the skin of the braccias to feel if I have another odor, as Iris has said.

I feels like calling mother, but I don't do him/it. I steal from the locker one of his absorbent. I do as they do in television, in the publicities. But I read well before the instructions on the box, for fear to be wrong.

I go out of the bath and I look at graze my image drawn on the glass of the mirror. I have the ruffled hair the red eyes. I seem a cat that has fought against an armed with stray dogs. I return in my room, with the wet one of the tears on the cheeks and in belly the desire to vomit. Ago warm. Warm. I beware of the window. Out, the neighbors of the house of forehead sleep in sacks to hair, trailer of side, stars above the head. I look for with the eyes Mujo, I look through, I investigate, I rummage everywhere. But there for earth there is not. I find him/it in the house, to the first floor, leaned out to a windowsill. We beware there of the squares of our windows, one in front of the other. Between us there is the distance of twenty-eight footsteps, a basket field or a whale. Yet it seems me that we are distant worlds and worlds.

With the hands, Mujo says "it Waits", it makes me sign to be to look. You bends behind the windowsill and it traffics of hands with something that I don't see, until it doesn't lift him/it and it shows him/it to me. I sharpen the look in the dark. Seem me a toy balloon. Yes, a blue toy balloon.

With the conjurer fingers, Mujo models him/it, it inserts him/it, it pushes strange noises in the night and he doesn't feel that that. When you/he/she has ended, ago the gesture to offer me him. It is a blue dog. A poodle.

I smile some, I lick the wet one some tears and they are saltier than the usual one and they don't want to stop to slip her/it me on the cheeks.

With the magic gesture that the illusionists only know, Mujo frees the animal from the window. The air if the door away, above our heads, above the boundless fields of the night. I stay to look until the dog a dot it becomes, until I don't see him/it anymore. When I lower again the look, the window of forehead is an empty hole. Mujo has disappeared together with the toy balloon.

I don't know how, but I feel something that moves me in the head, that gets excited as an ossicino in the skull. It is the bulb of a thought that is trying to ignite. Just as Charles it said.

I rub me the lobe of the ear in front of the window. Barabau doesn't stop her/it barking in the dark, head for air, four earth legs. I think about the blue dog that is sailing in the sky. I think about Mujo. Until, to a line, the bulb ignites and every thing is illuminated.

The wind! Is blowing the wind!

I lean out me from the windowsill, I insert in the blue one some night the whole head and a bit of bust. Barabau, astute ears, look me surprised. There is no doubt, what grazes me the cheeks, what combs me of side the hair, what shifts me inside and out of the shirt it is really wind. It is as if someone had finally pressed an interrupter.

In hurry, I go down the steep one some staircases. I climb over the outline of Barabau and I fork the white bicycle. I pedal fast, fast, wind among the hair, up to the house on the river.

As I imagined, Mujo is there already. Look me at all, with the ruffled hair, the red eyes and the whole rest. We don't need to tell us nothing, we exactly know thing to do. One for one, take the kites, we bring them out of the afloat house. The wind is not strong, but it is constant. In silence, we start there toward the platform of the house-train, loaded braccia of kites. We pass close to the mute river. The road is longer because it is night, it seems to never arrive.

I tag after the heels of Mujo, tracing the track of his/her footsteps in front of me and some misses me the breath: it is the damp dark that suffocates me as a thick and black fur. It is only an instant. An instant and the reality he transforms. The branches of the trees are dilated downward as long fingers, the path makes smaller him, it tightens him to excess, by now you/he/she is reduced to a thin thread suspended in the night and me I know well about as acrobat not to be good. Don't look down, not to look down.

Too late. The reflex of me on the fund of the river makes me stop the footstep. I stay to half road, petrified on the thread. I look down again. I have the impression that that black reflex is not mine but that of Luca, that calls me, that wants to drag down me with itself. Who doesn't run away from the abyss. You his/her voice mixes him to that of the water, liquid, winding. Few would be enough, so little. A footstep, a solo I pass out of the thread and I would belong also to the Great River me. A solo, small footstep.

I am about to lift a foot, when that thing happens: the red ball of Maria Petrova crosses me the mind. It shines in the night, shining. It circles on the Indian music as bottom to a spell, before being captured by the hands of Maria, sheathed in his/her custom of white lycra. One after the other, cross me the mind the trumpet of Miles Davis and the denture of Chet Baker, Lieutenant Christopher Columbus overcoat and the hump of Leopards. I shake the head. It doesn't suit me to abdicate the hump of Leopards. It doesn't even suit me to abdicate the trumpet of Miles Davis, neither to the denture of Chet Baker. It doesn't suit me not to even abdicate Lieutenant Christopher Columbus overcoat and, above all, to the customs of white lycra of Maria Petrova. It doesn't suit me to abdicate to no in general I decide.

I push downward with strength the heel and I force the reality to make dietrofront. The thread returns path and the fingers of the trees simple branches. Mujo is there still, kites among the braccias, only some more meter before. You/he/she has not acknowledged anything. I accelerate the footstep and I reach him/it. Together we start over marching toward the house-train.

The world, has started over now migrating from the past to the future, as you/he/she must be, and the river to move water from the top of the mountains toward the sea. You/he/she has put us one year, but you/he/she has now returned to have the usual usual lazy face.

Mujo and I are almost on the platforms, our footsteps puncture the dark, sure. By now anybody you/he/she can stop us. This is the kairos the correct moment. In silence Mujo climbs as a wild animal on the eaves of the house, as I has seen him make that afternoon. He was not practicing to make the thief, he was training for this night. One after the other, pass him the kites. Of now in then I think, I must teach to the world to obey me. The coffeepots won't have to bleed to blunder anymore, neither the carpets to go for a walk believing himself/herself/itself fishes on the bottom of the sea. Of now in then I must tame the things and to make her be to their place, because to become great perhaps means to learn to do this. There will be good and other moments less good person. It will be some as in that song that it likes so much to Charles, there will be the sun in plaza few times and the rest it will be rain that bathes us.

But this night no, not yet. This night steals the wind from a place where the wind never blows and every thing is granted. With two kind braccias, Mujo helps me to climb on the roof. This night we can do everything. We are not in the reality. We are in a crack a crack of the world. We are in unstable balance on the edge of the time, between thousand and thousand years.

We walk on the tiles as apprentices funamboli. Behind of us, the moon and other kilometers of things distant from here. In head to the locomotive, we support the kites plain, plain, as if we were handling eggshells. With patient fingers, we tie the threads to the fireplace. The skin of the kites is crossed by a shiver. I feel them get excited on the roof, impatient, restless, until the hiss of the wind it makes to take off their bodies of paper. They turn helixes and they wag the tail tails. One after the other, the kites get up in flight, they remain I suspended as nighttime birds on the roof of the house. The airplane with the green wings opens the flock, the hot-air balloon closes him/it.

In the night, there is only now noise of wind and a fleet some strange that the black. I stay me to look, open mouth and nose in on. When riabbasso the look, Mujo has eyes glued on me and a smile he/she fills us the lips without asking permission.

We stay firm so, without speaking, two deserters from the reality that they are enjoyed a truce by the world. We stay to look us until a scrunch it squeaks in the air and it makes to jolt our bodies on the tiles. Mujo takes me the hand and tightens her/it strong. We look around at there. The creaking continues. It is a patient movement, imperceptible, then intense, more and more definite.

Slowly, the house-train begins to stir on its dead platform. It pushes his/her carcass in the night as an old mechanical animal some rusted but intenzionato to go on. To always go before.

The wind blows strong in the belly of the kites. The locomotive is mute, it doesn't whistle, but continuous to advance. Mujo and I look at there in the silent, black and shining night. We smile, without asking us where it will bring us the wind. We smile, and it is an oasis of light in the dark.

### Thanks

An important part of this novel has been written to Bordeaux, near the Résidence de the Prévôté, where I/you/they have been invited to sojourn in 2011 in the picture of a cultural program of the region Aquitania. A special thanks goes to Olivier du Payrat, to Corinne Chiaradia and the whole équipe of Ecla Aquitaine for the extraordinary reception. It is to Threadbare Chapuis to have made her/it possible.

### The author

Ilaria Vitali was born in 1979 near the Great River.

After the degree in Languages and foreign literatures she is transferred in Paris and she has achieved the doctorate of search near the Sorbona. Translator and expert of contemporary French literature, have begun in 2011 with the novel "A tua completa traduzione", in which tells in playful way the work of the literary translator.

Currently she works as assegnista of search near the university in Bologna.

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