These were still the difficult years. I was very tired and wanted to write a book about cheerful, silent, active people. That was my intention. I had spent time in India, about two years, and when I got back to Italy I found everything had changed. Sadness was everywhere now. An unexpected storm cloud hovered in the skies of Europe, and nothing was the way it had been. From the doors of the old Roman buildings hung overlapping “For Sale” notices, a kind of collage that dramatized the anguish of owners having to leave or at least to withstand the blows. The highways and byways of the city swarmed with people who hid their eyes or looked at each other with guilty expressions.
Being there, just hanging about, with nothing specific to do on a working day, wasn’t the best letter of introduction. Nor did it demonstrate much social usefulness. Especially if you spent the hours in some corner café observing the transformation of the city and taking brief notes, making incoherent doodles, or drawing little men scaling mountains. That’s why it was best to change places frequently, in order not to attract attention and immediately be classified as a slacker or a piece of riffraff. When faced with a crisis, people are obsessed with respectability.
It’s understandable. When masses of people seek work without the least hope of finding it, when businesses reduce their personnel and the fashion stores announce sales out of season, the best thing to do is become a man without a face. The Invisible Man, the Man of the Crowd.
I was that man. Always observing, attentive to the slightest vibration, perhaps waiting for something, with a cup of tea or coffee in my hand, letting myself be swept along by the frantic activity of the passersby, the way active humans come and go and fill squares and avenues, like shoals of fish driven by the tides. A movement that allows cities to go on living and produce wealth. To be healthy and respectable conurbations.
Exemplary conurbations.
This story begins the day my quiet life as an observer was shaken by a small earthquake. It was something very simple. I was sitting on a café terrace on Corso Trieste, watching the stream of pedestrians pass by in the direction of the African quarter, when my cell phone vibrated on the table.
A new message, I told myself. An e-mail.
“Please go to Madrid, Consul, to the Hotel de las Letras. Book into Room 711 and wait for me. Will be in touch. Juana.”
That was the whole message, not a word more. Enough to unleash a modest storm inside me, like galleries collapsing. Juana. That apparently harmless combination of letters that had occupied my life for a brief time. My mouth still open, uttering her name. It had all happened some years before.
I looked at my watch, it was eleven in the morning. I reread the message and felt an even greater sense of sadness, as if a current of air or a tornado were lifting me from my chair, above the avenue and its tall pines. I had to hurry. To run.
“I’ll be there today, await instructions,” I replied immediately, signaling to the waiter for my check.
Before long, I, too, was in movement, energetic and active, heading for the airport.