5.16 p.m.

The cappuccino was good but now it’s got his bowels in an uproar. Brandani asks the barista to give him a plastic cup, then he heads back to the same restroom where he urinated earlier. He pulls three or four paper towels from the dispenser, fills the cup half-full of water and goes over to the stalls.

The toilets here aren’t bad, after all, even if they’re already broken here and there.

Ivo is well equipped when it comes to having to shit while travelling, at the airport or, even worse, aboard a plane. He has a procedure all his own to ensure that he can wash every time. All he needs is a few paper towels, a plastic cup half-full of water to moisten them, it takes a little time and a bit of skill but he couldn’t stand it otherwise. He was born and raised in the Peninsular culture of the bidet, which bestows that culture with its only secret superiority over all the other peoples of the earth: an asshole that’s always as clean as possible. ‘C’est vrai? Vous vous lavez chaque fois?’ Lotte had once asked him.

The asshole, clamped spasmodically shut for an entire lifetime to hold in the outgoing shit, pounds and pounds and pounds of shit, hundredweights, tons of shit produced over the course of my existence, even though I have nothing to do with my own shit . . . I’m not responsible for it, I never asked to be given an intestine, a colon, a rectum, an asshole. These are things I submit to and despise, they’ve always disgusted me. ‘It’s all yours, after all,’ the gastroenterologist told me . . . Not on your life: But you mean it’s mine? I produce shit, no doubt about that, I can’t deny it, but it was never mine. It’s something I submit to, being a digestive tube doesn’t mean that you made some choice, it means you were born . . . At one end, the mouth, which slurps up food, savours it, a mouth that waters, drools, speaks, shouts, etc. . . . At the other extremity, the foul, closed, hidden, rightly shameful, perennially stinky asshole, no matter how fastidious and scrupulous the ablutions . . . The horrendous stinkhole, I have no choice about possessing one. Clenched like a fist your whole life long . . . Then the owner dies and finally peace, rest, the definitive release, the faeces that issue freely forth into the light of day . . . The last, unclean innocent excrements spread out, wafting into the air their final guiltless stench.

The odour of shit, which he finds horrid, contentedly expands in the plastic-coated stall of the toilet that he selected, rising up into his nostrils, pushed along by the warm breath emitted by his own faeces.

How disgusting, it’s not my fault, it’s the symbiotic bacteria, which live inside me, in my gut . . . Billions of parasitic lives, unhurried, relaxed, which help me to transform everything I eat into shit. They are the ones that produce this stink. Every time it’s different, it depends on the species of bacteria that happen to be prevailing over the others at any given moment . . . I don’t know who started it, whether it was us or them. We could have created a world-without-shit . . . You’d have to ask the Burning Bush: What reason was there to create shit? Couldn’t You have skipped that step entirely? What is it? An inevitable side effect? But of what? Of life itself? You’re omnipotent, You can create anything You can think of, and what You think of is shit? What the hell kind of God are You anyway? A world population of seven billion, every one of whom wakes up every morning and takes a dump . . . Which means, let’s see here, a safe guess is half a pound apiece . . . I’m going to need the calculator again . . . Seven billion times half a pound gives us more or less 3.5 billion pounds, divide that by 2,000 and you get 1.75 million tons of shit every twenty-four hours . . . The Earth spins around on its axis and, as the Sun rises progressively, human beings get up out of bed. And what is the first thing they do once they’re up on their feet? They shit. It’s a sort of planetary stadium wave that releases a vast wake of excrements, the fruit of an immense consumption of resources, both animal and vegetable, the fruit of an immense quantity of pain & death inflicted on other living organisms . . . Leaving out the bacteria, that is, the true masters of the planet, who remain invisible and are capable of taking our shit and using it as a comfortable habitat . . . Then how can we talk about the environment, nature and a natural equilibrium—think of it, Brandani: natural equilibrium!—in decent good faith? How is it possible to even use these categories if, say, in China there are cities that grow by a million inhabitants a year? There are hundreds of millions of people who want homes and schools, health care, electric appliances, food, cars and holidays and fun, who need a basic amount of energy per capita just like us, who want to consume products the way we do, the very same products we like so much . . . People who like the Maldives and the Laccadives and the Seychelles and the Caribbean and the Marquesas Islands, every bit as much as we like them and they want to go there and they’ll wind up going there, the way they already come to Sharm in their tens of thousands . . . Here, where they too need fresh water, for showering and to drink, where they need water to cook and to sprinkle those stupid lawns around the hotels, where they need electricity, etc. . . . In other words, they consume energy & food and in exchange they dump, here too, hundreds of tons of shit, thousands and thousands of brownish turds that still contain fragments of crustacean carapaces, of macadamia nuts ingurgitated the night before during before-dinner drinks, of vegetable fibres brought here from who knows where else, since absolutely nothing actually grows here, except for that stupid bionic turf grass, imported and cut like an English lawn, except for palm trees propped up by a steady IV drip of chemical energizers . . . The Chinese tourists, who surge in waves into the restaurants that specialize in Chinese tourists in the City of God, where they are greeted at the front door by some guy dressed up as a warrior of the Ancient Empire . . . The Chinese, who already as biomass constitute a tidy business for the world trade in anything you care to name, even if that were the three-pronged thumbtack, which nobody uses in this country any more . . . How much steel do they need, they and the Indians and the people in Southeast Asia, and the Brazilians and the Russians? How much coal? Who will stop this mass of humanity in search of prosperity at any cost? Why fool ourselves into believing that the planet can withstand the impact of this great a blow? Where there’s shit, there’s life . . . Those little reddish turds, all identical, that could be found up in the gorges and the high valleys of the Island were clear evidence of animals, but which ones? As long as I can keep producing this nauseating junk, I can say that I’m still alive . . . Alive, in spite of the cervical arthrosis, in spite of the fact that the curvature of those four or five vertebrae is gone for ever . . . Alive but with his vertebrae marked by periarthritis, alive with a hiatal hernia, chronic gastritis . . . Alive like my inflamed colon, like the twists and turns of my intestine full of diverticuli, vital receptacles full of shit, full of bacteria that have never seen daylight, that have never known anything but shit . . . Alive, with this aching shoulder, alive in spite of this herniated disk, the right leg that hits the ground with forty pounds more weight than the left . . . Alive, but with high blood pressure, a pill every morning . . . Alive, but with a cock that’s now basically dead, with those deep shivers like a mummy reawakening, rising from the depths of my loins, telling me You’re alive, let your dick have the news, find a way of procuring yourself a nice prostatic contraction, a fine strong spurt of dense and impetuous sperm like in the old days . . . You’re here, alive, in spite of the fact that all this is denied you by your aged appearance, by your placement at the ass-end of the world, as a residual individual, well out of the reproductive cycle . . . Alive, in spite of the complete disinterest that all women feel towards you . . . Alive but with aching feet, the soles burning, the orthopaedic insoles in ever larger sizes of shoes . . . Alive but deprived by now of almost everything: no more sex, only occasionally paying for a blowjob, no more smoking, no more whisky, no more coffee, only a demitasse of espresso a day, only a little white wine, better if it’s red, better if it’s beer, better if it’s water . . . Alive but without hair, his ears getting bigger and bigger all the time, a series of wrinkles running out from the base of the lobes, bristling with white hairs . . . Alive but with legs that for some unknown reason were almost completely free of hair, the heads of his thighbones that were beginning to scrape against the surface of the pelvic sockets . . . It’s the skeleton that falls apart first, it starts little by little and then continues to deform and deteriorate, gathering speed: ‘The lumbar section of your spinal cord is deviated, your right leg is longer than your left, your cervical vertebrae are covered with ridges . . .’ At the Stockholm History Museum . . . Remember it, Ivo, remember the ridges on those Viking skeletons, elderly & ramshackle—you’d been brought face to face with arthritis! Finally you had a clear and heartbreaking picture of the bones of an old man . . . And yet I’m alive, I move, I walk, I eat, I chew, I swallow . . . I have practically nothing organic left in my mouth; the X-ray of my skull to see if there was some problem with the turbinate bones—such a great name: turbinate bones—showed whole rows, above and below, of extraneous objects and metal pins grafted into the osseous tissues, it looked like the skull of a cyborg . . . And in fact, I still shit, even if my shit isn’t what it used to be, even if it seems more like the putrefied slime of an ancestral swamp than the healthy expulsions of a human in robust health . . . Now it’s time to get washed up, come on, à la guerre comme à la guerre.

He takes off his trousers and hangs them on the hook on the stall door, he does the same with his underpants. Now he’s naked from the waist down, in shoes and socks. The air conditioning makes him shiver, the band around his head torments him, he feels defenceless, humiliated, ridiculous, as he wipes himself off repeatedly with the paper towels that he dips one by one into the plastic cup. Right there, centre stage, placed at the median axis of his body, peeking out from under the convexity of his belly, he can see his penis protruding, a tiny shivery wrinkly cylinder, doing its best to conceal itself in an underbrush of sparse hairs.

How ugly you are, when you do like that . . . When you try to hide yourself inside my body . . . That’s not a good sign, this fear of yours of existing, of being there in space . . .

Like every man, and practically from the day of his birth, Ivo has always had a complicated relationship with his dick. Whether or not he should say that it’s his has never been clear to him, given the independent-mindedness that gadget has always shown, since he was a newborn, standing up and lying down as it chose and pleased, emitting unwanted spurts of pee, which from a certain point onward became quite a source of embarrassment. But this initial eccentricity was nothing in comparison with the behaviour that it would display in the years that followed. First of all, let’s say that starting from age ten or twelve, it wasn’t so much a matter of his dick getting stiff but of its changing size, and considerably so, the colour of the glans, and considerably so. It took practically nothing for it to stand up and then to pulsate in time with his racing heartbeat, the poor neglected pump doing all the work, including the job of building him—at the vaguest of lascivious thoughts, at the sight of anything less than a chaste female image—an erect cock. A boy in early adolescence and his erect cock—a cock that is already a grown-up’s in size and shape but which still interests no one and which the boy, if he could, would dispense with entirely—are two inseparable entities but profoundly extraneous from each other. White-skinned and covered with infamous peach fuzz, subcutaneous eruptions, pimples, hints at a beard coming in, flakes of dandruff, red spots: the boy. Dark, wrapped in a fur as malevolent as the curls of a minotaur, bristly, like the hair of a warthog, filthy, foul-smelling and eager to disturb: the cock, ready to interfere in the least opportune moments of a young human creature’s difficult existence, uncertain & indecisive, overwhelmed by waves of emotion and discharges of hormones, devoid of the faintest idea of himself and the world. Ivo’s dick, like all dicks everywhere, became adult long before he did, and even before he had a chance to learn (in a raucous-confused-filthy way) how babies are made, his dick was already fully intentioned to make legions of babies, the fibres of his internal organs were already capable of producing quarts of sperm teeming with billions of male gametes. All of this was going on while he had his hands full with the Iliad in Vincenzo Monti’s translation, which he was still playing football or marbles in the dust of the parish field, while he was wandering aimlessly through the streets of his quarter and blushing beet-red every time he crossed paths on the stairs with the little girl from the floor above—she was homely, had braces, wore knee socks and a pleated skirt over her bare, knobby knees, scuffed up and dirty. A man’s cock attached to a boy’s body, at odds with a mind befuddled by the suffering that comes with the gift pack of life, but at the same time capable of sudden intuitions and moments of lucidity, lightning quick, useless. A cock that at school would stay swollen for hours, that he could use to lift the writing surface of his school desk. To do it he just had to press it up against the wood from below, thrust with his pelvis, and pump it up, employing a mysterious muscle, concealed somewhere between his ass cheeks, nesting in the depths of his crotch, at the root of the tool itself—the tabletop would rise a good half inch. ‘I wanted to be a perfect sphere, made of crystal,’ he told Mother one afternoon after lunch while she sat in an armchair reading the newspaper and smoking a Peer, while Father, buried in the completely darkened bedroom, was taking his angry half-hour nap before getting back into harness.

‘How could such a thing occur to you?’

‘Today we learnt about the sphere, the volume of the sphere, you know. Mrs Figus is a good maths teacher.’

‘And why would you want to be a sphere?’

‘Because I’m foul, Mamma. A sphere is perfect, clean, transparent.’

‘What are you talking about . . . Just take a bath, instead of talking nonsense.’

Mother was wisdom, reasonableness, moderation, affection, protection.

She added: ‘We’re human beings, made up of flesh, fat, sweat, poop, things that smell bad, in other words. There’s nothing you can do about that, but you can wash more regularly—you just don’t. A bath tonight? What do you say?’

‘You don’t stink, Mamma . . . You’re not foul . . .’

As he was talking to Mother, kneeling down next to her armchair, he sniffed at her bare arms, the way he always did, to get a whiff of the scent of her skin, soft and dry, that smelt of air: Mother’s Arms—there was nothing better, nothing as sweet-smelling & pure.

‘If I don’t wash I smell bad too, my dear boy, and stop rubbing yourself.’

‘No. You never do, never never never, ever at all.’

As was customary in those Postwar years, Mother and Father had scrupulously abstained from giving him any information whatsoever about the use and function of his penis: nothing. They’d abandoned him to his problems, completely alone and confused. And so, for many years, Ivo had assumed he had some sickness that made his willy get hard at the sight of just, say, the Three Little Pigs tied up together with apples in their mouths, ready to be popped in the oven by the Big Bad Wolf. It was not until he started middle school—and found himself surrounded by a pack of desperados just like him, some of them accustomed to jerking off at least once a day—that he understood that having a penis & a pair of balls was a tragic but common fate, about which it was possible/necessary to joke, and he had felt slightly reassured. Now he’s looking at himself in the mirror as he washes his hands. His linen suit is completely rumpled, his face with its eternal construction-site suntan has turned greyish, weary, bored. But that’s not it, that’s not it. It’s Father, who increasingly emerges distinctly from that face and once again almost makes him take a startled step back.

He pursues me, he’s coming after me, he won’t leave me in peace . . . There he is, the same smirk that used to make his mouth tilt to one side, the eyes that become smaller and smaller, desolate, the flaccid cheeks with that web of tiny creases that don’t look old so much as withered. He persecutes me, he got himself pointlessly hated for all the years he was alive . . . Now that he’s been dead for almost thirty years—how many years has it been?—he reappears on me, in the bones of my cranium, and he makes me hate my/his own face, the way he made me hate everything about him. And yet until just recently I was different from him . . . I used to be a good-looking hunk, I had my own expression, but now there it is, his smirk, the one he used to wear stamped on his damned face . . . What was wrong with you anyway? What was bothering you? Why couldn’t you just enjoy life? What were you lacking? You had to work? Who doesn’t have to? You were forced to obey other people’s instructions? To obey? What’s wrong with that? Who is completely free to decide whatever they want? It was horrible for you, having to obey, wasn’t it? It humiliated you and you made us pay for that . . . No, wait, you made me pay for it . . . It took me almost an entire lifetime to work up to contradicting you, to understand how stupid, and especially useless, pride really is . . . Courage & Pride, that was you in a nutshell . . . You were all physical courage, violence inflicted on minors, and pride . . . The problem, my dear stupid old turd, is that you made me believe that a person had to be like you, and I wasted more than thirty years before I understood that I needed to be different from you, that I needed to become your opposite, the anti-matter to your matter . . . But in the end I did it . . . Did you really, Brandani?

It’s Father’s face he can glimpse in tracery in the mirror, inside his own face. It’s his voice, his words, his typical manners of speech that Ivo can detect lurking in his own way of talking. It’s the fear of being like him, that reaches out and captures him even here, in this airport, at Sharm el-Sheik on the east coast of the Sinai Peninsula, even here Father’s image reaches out to grab him, that sort of carnival mask that he wears over his face, that mask he wishes he could tear off.

Inside there, it’s not him . . . It’s me! Me!

He leans in closer to the mirror, he scrutinizes his face from up close, he tries to guess at the skull underneath the now-flaccid skin of his cheeks, but the only line that has remained distinct is the bottom edge of his jaw, beyond which begin to dangle the wattles of flesh on his throat, which then disappears into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt—he isn’t Father.

I’m not Father, and yet, with every year that passes, Father appears increasingly clearly in my face, in my voice, in my way of acting, being, doing, using my hand, I can feel it from within that that’s what’s happening, he emerges from my skull like the silhouette of the pharaoh that emerges from the sand in that old movie . . . The Mummy. I recognize him, he’s pushing for more room. I’m not him, but what emerges from the sand of my face, belongs to him / belongs to me, as if we were now a single thing, as if he were willing himself to live again in me, using me as a healthy carrier of his fucked-up face, a reproduction of Father reaching out for the future . . . But I don’t have children, your genes end here, you old asshole.

Father’s legacy weighs upon him, he’s ageing the way the old man aged, he can feel it in the fibre of his own physical constitution. In his late years, Father had started to become bent, curved, hunched over, it looked as if he were shrinking, his protruding gut, his watery eyes, deceptively mild, were often bloodshot. But all it took was a few minutes of conversation and it became clear that, inside his head, inside that large hard hairless cranium—planted into the front of which, from time out of mind, from before Ivo was ever born, was a large & fleshy nose, strangely straight, which Father would blow like the blowhole of some vast cetacean—inside that tenacious bony capsule, nothing had changed: the same decrees and maxims uttered and repeated a thousand times, the same chestnuts and platitudes, the same blind determination not to understand any of what was going on around him, to cling to those few convictions he’d assimilated, you might say from his bones, in the dark & remote times of Fascism, when he too, even he, had given vent to his youth.

Even the skull resembles his, the flat brow, the marked frontal eminences, the faded, weak arch of the eyebrows, the square chin . . . But I’m better looking than him . . . At least I don’t have his nose, that piece of inflamed flesh, the flaring, snorting nostrils . . . My nose is narrow and sharp like Mother’s, I’m taller, my shoulders are broader.

Nonetheless, he can feel him lurking in the structural, constituent elements, in the very matter of which he’s made. He has his same weaknesses, but without the strong points upon which Father stood his ground and from which he was capable of holding out indefinitely, long past any limit of which Ivo could conceive. Father was irrepressible, indestructible, or at least that is how he had always seemed to Ivo.

He withstood the point load without bending, he successfully withstood the distributed load, he bore the concentrated load without swerving, but perhaps a dynamic load, and not even a particularly strong one, applied to one of his weak points, might have broken him.

But exactly what were his weak points? For the past several years Ivo has tried to compare him to a structure but without being able to picture exactly what kind of structure. If someone asked him to describe it, Ivo would express himself as an engineer, because it would be pointless to speak of Father today in natural language. And after all, if he tried to explain him: who would give a damn? Not even Big Sister would be interested, if she were still alive, nor would Little Sister, because Father was different with them.

By now he’s fallen into the blackest and most complete oblivion, everyone who ever knew him is either dead or has forgotten him by now. Except for me . . . Maybe it even happened, that he finally broke, but if he did I never knew about it, even if I saw him stagger . . . He was weakened by the intrusions into the proud idea of himself that he’d built, all by himself, over the years . . . Me too, of course, who knows who I thought I was, before life pushed me to the proper state of ripening and softening . . . I’m made of the same material as Father, he sent me out into the world to recompense his sins, to correct his thoughtless actions, to mediate with others and with life and negotiate terms for an honourable peace . . . He sent me out into the world to settle his chapter and move on, to abolish the way he butted horns with everyone and everything, the way he burnt his bridges behind him, his extraneity from all and every social interaction, every friendship . . . I didn’t ask for him, I didn’t choose him as my father, but I had to pay for him all the same and I’m paying for it still, even now—there you go, dickface that you are. What’s eating you, eh? And after all, when I sweat, I don’t stink like him . . . I have Mother’s velvety skin, I’m smooth as a woman to the touch . . . I’m not him, I have Mother’s nose . . . But if I’m not him, or at least not entirely him, then who is this guy in the mirror, tired, depressed as a water buffalo? It’s you, Ivo, you’re Ivo Brandani, that’s exactly who you are . . . In the end, the fathers resurface, they re-present themselves in the faces of their sons, in the way that they act and speak, in the way they think, the way they do. In our everyday, commonplace ethics, of each of us, our fathers are there . . . However much they may have said things to us, explicitly, however much they may have brutally imposed them upon us, however much we may have actively and dramatically opposed them, to the point of breaking off all relations, until we could say: ‘There, thank God, I’ve got him out of my hair, I never want to speak to him again, I never want to hear his name mentioned as long as I live,’ the fathers always return, we exude them from our pores, they re-form like a thin film, a layer on our flesh, a sort of phantom hologram that overlays our persona, which we’d always thought of as autonomous & distinct . . . Until the day that someone meets you and says: ‘You look just like your father!’ ‘What the fuck?’ you feel like replying. ‘I know that . . . I know it all too well, I know it without having to be told, without you coming along and pointing it out, and you might even think it’s a pleasure for me to hear it . . .’ Even his odour, which you didn’t like, one day you wind up catching a whiff of it on your skin: the acid reek of Father’s summer sweat when he arrives at the City by the Sea and gets out of the car with his wet shirt plastered to his back . . . it’s Him knocking at the door from inside, from where you kept him hidden in the cellar, locked away like a bastard son, a shameful family monster, it’s Him knocking to be let out into the open . . . And at last it’s Father, self-evident, ineluctable, come back to ask you if you were really ever able to think of yourself as different from him, if you seriously tried to put up a fight against the will of the blood, the transmission of the soma and not only that . . . Who asks you whether you really thought you’d be able to get so far away from him that he’d never be able to find you again . . . It was his being there that counted more than his saying/doing/hitting/forcing/threatening/forging . . . What counted most was the daily osmosis of the contact, however much you might try to avoid it, however much you might recoil from him . . . It was a silent, subtle, tremendously effective penetration when it came to changing you, granting that you even needed changing, that it wasn’t already written in your blood . . . His violence is your violence, the violence that you conceal . . . He didn’t conceal it, he did nothing to resist it, no one ever taught him how to do it . . . His pride is your pride, repressed & punished by life, a pride that proved so very dangerous: the thing that damaged you most, exactly as it damaged Him . . . You turned out much handsomer and more athletic than Father . . . Mother’s beauty—what did she see in that man, she, so civil, so gentle, and intelligent? So lazy?—mitigated his nose, straightened in you his crooked legs, gave you blue eyes, and yet was not able to hinder his deepest imprint, the imprint that he carved into you with his blade . . . And all this in spite of the hatred that you nurtured for him. Think if you had actually loved him . . . Because you never loved him, did you? Or did you? And if you did, why? Only his courage, which instead you would have had great need of, that alone he didn’t transmit to you, to make sure that the rest of your life you would feel less than him . . . That’s what you always were: not-up-to-his-level . . . Behind that glass door there was another door and then yet another . . . He’d had them installed to be isolated from the rest of the house and do the only thing that he really did well: sleep, sleep for an hour every afternoon, go to bed early at night . . . In his sleep, he found what you find now: oblivion, forgetfulness, curling up in a room cut off from all the rest and wait for sleep there, while thinking about the usual things: how to build a raft in order to get off a desert island, how was Odysseus’ bed built, how to jury-rig a water desalinator . . . Technical problems, the only problems that exist in and of themselves . . . And to think that on his nightstand there was always, for years, for decades, only one book, Gandhi’s Autobiography or something like that . . . Gandhi, the nonviolent one, and He, the living monument to violence, kept it on his nightstand . . . My mouth has a bad taste of iron filings, I need to brush my teeth.

However many tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes Ivo might buy, the tubes eventually get squeezed dry and the toothbrushes get worn out, the bristles bend outward and the whole thing winds up looking like something exhausted and out of sorts, useless, harmful. The same thing happens with soap bars. He’ll buy three and then run out of those three. Even though, at the moment that he bought them, it seemed to Ivo that he was stocking up wisely, laying in a good supply of soap bars for the future, the soap bars are actually used up in the course of a few weeks, running out imperceptibly but inexorably.

If you believe that you have a nice fat package of toilet paper for the days to come, let’s say a six-roll pack, you’re living in a fool’s paradise because either you die a short while later—and then you’ll have no need of it—or else you’ll go on living, in which case you’ll soon use up all six rolls and then you’ll use up the pack after that and the one that comes after that: for years and years you’ll wipe your ass, day after day, you’ll use up miles and miles of toilet paper . . . The same applies to the rolls of Scottex paper towels that from a certain point onward, from some unspecified moment in the century, changed the course of the twentieth century, replacing something, though what, perhaps cloth rags, though they still exist . . . After all, they’re just made of cellulose, that is, tree trunks, plus a few macerated rags . . . And in order to make all this paper, Kleenex, for instance, the reams of extra-strong copy paper, and the enormous quantity of newspapers and magazines and books, that people somehow believe are ruining the planet, in reality the percentage of wood required is minimal, they say, the rest is rags and recycling . . .

Ivo buys shaving cream and before long it’s used up, the blades lose their edges before long, you always need new ones, the hairs on his face keep growing and need to be cut . . . The shampoo quickly runs out, even if when it was new the quantity in the bottle seemed an infinite quantity, extending into the eons yet to come. The coffee and the tea run out, the sugar and the salt are used up. Pounds and pounds of sugar and salt and bread have passed through his body, thousands of quarts of water, quarts and quarts of olive oil, and this too, which always seems like such a substantial supply when you first buy it, eventually runs out. The petrol, first in the Moto Guzzi Trotter and later in the Lambretta, and then in the Fiat 600, and then in the Renault 4 and after that in all the other cars he’d ever owned, ran out quickly, burnt in the atmosphere to become carbon monoxide, etc. To say nothing of the pencils, the pens, the scotch tape, the scissors: all things that love to disappear, that hurry to conceal themselves in some secret place in the planet, long before they can ever really be used up. It is through the consumption and wear of dozens of objects and materials like these that Ivo obsessively measures the consummation of his own life, the irreversibility of every day that passes, its non-reproducibility. No instant will ever repeat itself, everything has to be approached as an imprint, performed to an extremely approximate and improvised script, full of gaps and traps and bloody ambushes. Bloody, as a manner of speech. Blood, the real blood, the kind that drips down into the earth, dense, in big drops, black with haemoglobin, splattering out into round stains, rimmed with the occasional residual spray that escapes the force of molecular cohesion, is something that Ivo had seen only rarely, in the street during demonstrations so many years ago, or in the foamy test tubes for his medical analyses, or those two or three times that he really hurt his head—all that red cream that oozed out of his scalp, which you would have assumed was a little less saturated with blood, so thin that to touch it it feels like nothing more than a leather sheath, a husk for the walnut of your cranium, and yet capable of bleeding quarts, blinding you, sending you into blind panic: oh Jesus I’ve shattered my head to the skull, this is it, I’m going to bleed to death. Living where and when he did, Ivo only ever saw other people’s blood at the movies, he did see it gush out freely from the shattered heads of his comrades, he saw it seep into the improvised bandages of emergency first aid, spattering the asphalt after a car crash, he saw it gurgle, black, out of Mother’s lips the night that she died; in other words, he’d never had truly bloody experiences, because he missed the war and he never took part in any guerrilla activity. As for the war, Brandani probably exists on account of it, that is, as a product of the great planetary coupling that swept over the men and women who feverishly reunited as couples as well as those who simply met for the first time, on the street, at a dance hall, at the movies, at a party at a friend’s house, at the beach, on the job, or anywhere at all. They met and they resumed their lives, they caught their breath stretched out in beds, embracing naked, in the nights of those first summers of Peace, that reeked of rubble, the dust of ruins, motorcycle exhaust, but also peace and quiet, sex, clean sheets. After the blood, it was Bread & Peace that caused the birth of Ivo, like that of so many others his age, who overran nursery schools and elementary schools, sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks and chairs. Then they overwhelmed the football fields of the parish oratories, the scout meetings, the middle schools and the high schools, the universities and the piazzas, the army barracks, the factories, the offices. A sea of young people, the children, like him, of the war, who grew up prosperous and florid in the boom years, when there was finally plenty for everyone to eat, when tb was finally subsiding, when there was hygiene and vaccinations against typhus, diphtheria and smallpox, and it was in those same years, more or less, that the nightmare of polio finally vanished, from one day to the next. It was when new brands of toothpaste and models of toothbrushes were continuously coming out, a strange abundance for such simple substances and tools, all of them with the same unkept triple promise: no more cavities, white teeth, sweet-smelling breath. Ivo grinds his teeth and, in the mirror, examines them: they’re old, yellowed, crooked, patched, but still there.

For years my gums have been receding to reveal the roots of my teeth, leaving them bare, and what had always seemed to me to be tiny gleaming compact edifices of enamel proved in fact to be platforms rearing up on blackened pile works . . . Rather than teeth, they looked like mangrove roots at low tide . . . It’s the low tide of his gums: the red flesh in which they had seemed to be so solidly bolted is going away, evaporating, it can no longer stand up, it’s dying, I don’t know . . . And it seems that the underlying bone is doing the same thing . . . You know what that means, don’t you, Brandani? It seems that once the teeth have fallen out, after a while the dental alveoli, the sockets, close up, forming a single ridge for the entire length of the jaw’s arc . . . I know that in a few years they’ll find a way of stopping this tendency of the human mouth and bones towards self-destruction, this wearing out of muscles and tissues, the hardening of the blood vessels, the erosion of the joints from excessive rubbing, the deformation of the skeletal structure, the inflammation of the fleshy ligaments that hold the bone joints together, the general clogging up of everything, the disintegration of the sphincters, the entanglement of the mental circuits, the glazing over of the corneas, the appearance of those flashes and flying specks of something, some so dark and black that you’d think they were flies, the desiccation of the retinas in the back of the eyes, the aridification of the flesh, the weariness of the arms of the legs of the hands of the fingers, the aching in the wrists, in the elbows, in the ankles, the refusal of the feet to take even a few steps, the deterioration of the intestines into countless diverticuli, the weakening of the pump, the withering of the lungs, the surrender of the stomach, of the liver, of the pancreas, the flaccidity of the scrotal sack, the irreversible inertia of the dick . . . Sure I know that before long we’ll be able to reverse the process, so the gums will grow over the roots, as will the jawbones, and even the teeth will be able to regenerate themselves, the various joints will once again become smooth and fluid, the withered musculature will appear to firm back up, pectorals and deltoids will reappear, the cock will once again be hard as steel whenever you catch a glimpse of a girl’s ass, rebuilt stomachs will digest anything you care to name, even the House White Wine, even the Pasta alla Gricia, even the Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe, and your asshole will no longer burn when you poop out the red chili peppers . . . Every-thing will be brand new again, we’ll become a repellent species of undead, made of red flesh, regenerated and revascularized, drooling with lust and eager to sin again and again, into the night of time . . . But I won’t be there, for me it’ll be like those soldiers who die in the last few days of the war, like the ones who kick off after the cessation of hostilities, like those children who caught polio when the vaccine was already in distribution but just hadn’t reached them yet, like all those who happened to die at the threshold of the new therapeutic age of antibiotics, of pneumonia or just some stupid infection . . . I’m going to have to die, but if I think about how long my ancestors lived, well, I’ve had a pretty good time of it already . . . At age sixty-nine I’m still working, I travel the world, I’m hale and healthy, even if my back hurts, and so do my feet, my right shoulder, and my stomach, even if I suffer from anxiety attacks and all the rest . . . The abolition of infancy, of youth, will be a relief to the regenerated old people of tomorrow, we’ll no longer need schools, we won’t have to listen to wailing babies like this one in front of me and the women who look like fresh young unexperienced girls will actually be consummate, delightfully expert fuckers, they too regenerated, who’ve been around the block countless times . . . And so humanity will finally be able to celebrate, along with the disappearance of child-hood, the end of the most painful and serious childhood disease, innocence . . .