On her birthday Ms. Einstein gets to her lab at 2 a.m. For several hours she focuses all her concentration on a new prototype of the bacteria-powered battery, a model that encompasses everything learned so far. Sucking on slivers of candied ginger, she adds nutrients and the agreed-upon inocula, sets the temperature and the pressure, and programs the survey of electrical conductivity and other factors at established intervals. She likes the rapt silence of nighttime, likes to feel the energy of dawn’s first glimmers on her, when the birds begin to stir on the blighted grounds around the Institute. She doesn’t yet know what will come out of this, but the back of her neck and the lining of her lungs tell her it will be very interesting. Those are points whose sensations she trusts.
When she’s finished taking samples of genetic material she returns all the equipment to its place and hides the battery, which unfortunately is quite a bit more voluminous than the earlier one. In the meantime the laboratory is filling up, and the young pretender with the phosphorescent pimples sits down in front of the atomic absorption spectrometer, aiming his pleading looks her way, something she can’t bear. At a certain point the lab director also shows up but she doesn’t notice him, so taken is she with the article she’s writing, not to mention the South African rap music blasting through her earbuds. The boss coughs politely, shifting a foot to one side as if to crush a harmful insect. That Catholic vibrato is familiar to her and she raises her eyes from his elegant shoes to his well-rested face, his phony indifference masking memories of their intimacy, so out of place. He smiles, showing all his teeth.
While she’s removing the earbuds he’s describing a job he wants her to do, his short stout hands (mole’s paws, she thinks) making wide circles in the air to accompany his words, which repeatedly contradict what he’s just said, even as his traffic-cop gestures struggle to make them come together in a single ordered flow. She doesn’t understand a thing, it being materially impossible to understand. She’d be amazed if she did. Patting his firm cheek (smooth as a baby’s butt, she thinks), he concludes by saying that in fact it isn’t urgent. He then smiles intently at her with his baby eyes, as if he’s very pleased with her reply (she hasn’t said a thing). The 15,000-rpm centrifuge where their two–zero took place is just a few yards away, but their eyes don’t stray toward the spot where that kinetic frenzy occurred.
The reason he’s so affable is that the hiring committee for the job she’d applied for had met the previous day. And he, president of the committee, wielding his usual flutter of jokey remarks had got everyone to agree they hire the one who looks like the TV showgirl. So it’s she, so clever at dispensing smiles and glimpses into her cleavage, who’ll be hired, while the beanpole will be out on the street. There’s not enough extra in next year’s budget to keep her on as an adjunct. The boss doesn’t regret what he’s done, no. There will be many fewer articles published, but his life will also be considerably less stressful. His rather severe German wife is now also working for the courts, where so many divorce cases come up. As a good Catholic, though, he feels ever so slightly uneasy, which is why he’s come by to interrupt her.*
* Despite their reputation as irreprehensible, Italian Catholics are capable of the most nefarious behavior, even toward friends and closest relatives. Afterward, though, they suffer strange abdominal upsets not unlike digestive problems, and try to make up for it with hypocritical smiles and witty remarks while they prepare to clear their criminal records by visiting the confessional booth.
At lunchtime Daphne heads off on the bike to inseminate a dozen Friesians. She’s slightly late and has to pass up the usual couple of bignè alla crema from the pasticceria right on the main road, the ones she particularly likes. The cowshed, in a town not very distant from the city, is quite large and bordered on three sides by abandoned industrial shells. They already know her here and they trust her, so she’s left alone. As she introduces an arm into the anus of the first Friesian she’s thinking that the wee zoologist isn’t entirely wrong: it would be better not to eat animals. But these are dairy cows, not beef cattle.† Still, her friend would be horrified if she saw the assembly line conditions here. For the first time she feels uncomfortable.
† With that incoherence so typical of human thought (an intrinsic cerebral opportunism?) she’s not counting the fact that dairy cows, when their milk days are up, are also sliced and ground. And never mind about the male veal calves.
On the way home she stops at her usual garage. Since the last time the bike was repaired it’s been running fine, but all the same she puts it up on the kickstand in the square and goes inside. The owner tells her that the mechanic who worked on it has gone to race an Enduro. So she sits down to wait on her doubly erect twin-cylinder and looks at the other bikes parked around hers, imagining how she would improve them. She’s never studied mechanical engineering but she knows enough to mentally scan a bike body or engine quickly, identifying structural defects and little flaws. When the mechanic with the boxer’s flat nose shows up she smiles at him and says she’s reconsidered, and would like to do that checkup he was proposing. They discuss the terms for a few minutes, then she’s off. She stops in a church she often visits—and here I must ask that we cast a veil over what she’s up to—and then to the supermarket.
Back home in the old fishmonger’s, she begins cleaning house. It’s that type of ruthless cleaning that precedes some very important occasion, some special party. She polishes the two big windows facing the inside court where the old entrance to the fishmonger’s was, she shines up the inclined surface where the fish were laid out, now her kitchen counter, removes the three-quarter mattress from the old trout basin, vacuums, disposes of the dust balls from the coils of computer cords, washes the sky-blue tiled floor. You can see it’s not a burden, that she’s actually happy to clean up. She folds the balled-up clothes lying around, dusts the knickknacks atop the “furniture,” changes the cat box, for which the cat, though blind, seems to be grateful. Now she’s working on the atmosphere: incense, candles, plates of biscotti and candied ginger like votive offerings.
You’d think she was arranging a sacred ceremony, while it’s nothing but a banal copulation. Sex for sex’s sake, without even the appearance of moral pretext (never mind the institution of the family and the ceremony that seals it). When I think of this I feel a hard-to-define discomfort, a pang I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, almost misery. This is depraved materialism at its worst, unfolding in a context where the individual and his/her corporal nature are fetishistically sacralized under the specious sombrero of sexual freedom. But am I not partly responsible, when I allow them to copulate in that wild way the randy one favors? Doesn’t that mean I’ve given her a sort of license?
It would be child’s play for me to blow young Randy’s plans to smithereens. I mean, what does it take to knock down a bicycle ridden by a guy with one arm in a sling and mysterious stomach pains, just as an old van whose brakes are shot comes along—or better, might as well do things properly—a tractor trailer? The cyclists are asking for it, in a way, trying to glide through the anarchy of Italian traffic. It often happens without me raising a finger. A hard blow to the temple, I’m thinking; no blood or other distressing fluids. Just a cranium smashed in at the parietal lobe. Fate can be so cruel, people would whisper. At least he didn’t suffer, poor guy. All those agnostic remarks that by now no longer even touch me.
I’m ready to intervene. I already have the bike in my crosshairs, and needless to say, it’s red. I’m merely waiting while the rider,‡ who’s now bent over the seat, gets on and begins to pedal. I’m rubbing my hands with glee (forgive me if I turn up the hype, a story shouldn’t be boring) the way every killer does. I sense the slight tension in me that marks the approach of the fatal hour. I’m already feeling slightly better because this nightmare (so it seems to me at times) will soon be over. I’ll be back to my old self; I’ll cease to think about these matters once and for all. I’ll take up my old duties.
‡ Perhaps someone will think I’m the mastermind (so to speak) behind his fractured elbow on the night of the toads. That is utterly untrue. Here is what actually happened. When I saw that he was about to step on a very slippery spot (a toad flattened by a car tire) I slightly corrected the spin of his fall to prevent him from putting his hand down in the same slimy mess. Now it’s true that he smashed his elbow instead of dirtying his hand, but my intentions were nothing but the best, as befits a merciful god.
But then, as Daphne meticulously bathes her long asymmetrical body, I reflect that the situation that’s been created (by whom? I need a break here) is utterly ridiculous. Whatever it may say in the Bible, where there’s entirely too much emphasis on those rare occasions when I lost my head, I believe in being fair and impartial. And it’s obvious that I would completely disqualify (not to say something much saltier) myself if I were to behave like some grandee pursuing only his own interests. In time the word would spread, and with it, complaints and protests. In the long run no one would believe in me, and atheism would triumph.
I therefore surrender to my own infinite wisdom, and put down the (metaphorical) high-power precision rifle. The red bicycle will not be run over, at least not on account of any special intervention of mine. If a tractor trailer involved in an ordinary accident were to crush it, that would be another kettle of fish. Meanwhile the old fishmonger’s will once again be transformed into a temple of sex and host the nth profane sexual congress. I can do nothing about it.§ Take it up with the Last Judgment.
§ I want to be sure this point is crystal clear: although I ultimately pull the strings of all that takes place in the cosmos and on tiny planet Earth, there are many details that I leave to so-called chance to arrange as it sees fit and proper. Amen.