29 May 2015, 9.07 a.m.

God doesn’t exist. But if He does, then he’s definitely down there . . . He doesn’t exist, but if He did, He’d live here, behind that stark front of mountains, hidden somewhere in there. Maybe even in a Burning Bush, why not? God doesn’t exist . . . But if He does then anything is possible . . . Then it’s even possible that He’s right there, just a few miles from the hotels and the discotheques on the coast . . . It’s even possible that He willed Sharm into existence, that He has it under His governance, like everything else . . .

In the taxi on the way to the airport, Ivo Brandani looks towards the nearest highlands of the Sinai. The sun, already blistering hot, rose hours ago. In his stomach is a cup of coffee and the faint nausea of having got up too early. In his head are different thoughts, which surface in fragments.

In the quasi-nothingness, where it doesn’t rain, there is a lack of multiplicity, everything seems simpler . . . And monotheism is a simplification . . . Around these parts a god is needed and you can start a religion with very little . . . In the quasi-nothingness, even the most hardened materialist isn’t going to live comfortably, he’ll find himself in a state of discomfort, he’ll wind up turning to the transcendental. Even the most hardened polytheistic pagan, even the most primitive animist will surrender to the void here, to the maximum level of subtraction. When the world becomes bare and essential the spirit gains the upper hand . . . Where it never rains, you can build airports with a tent, like a circus . . . The terminal next door must be older, in fact, it’s certainly older, so it reaches for Western modernism. This one, in contrast, means to express ancestral modernism, that is, Bedouin modernism, like the airport in Jeddah. And so it is, de facto, postmodern . . . But even contextualism is a Western contrivance.

He’s out of Egyptian pounds, he pays in Franco-German euros and gets out of the cab, the sun is already pounding down, but the air is still cool, streaked with odorous wakes of burnt jet fuel. He’s early, he lingers on the airport pavement, he looks around, the big car park is almost completely empty, there are only a dozen or so waiting motor coaches, a few taxicabs, hotel shuttles. He notices the short-cropped grass that covers the planters between the parking stalls, the sparse young palm trees, all bent over on the same side. The mountains of Sinai rise without advance warning beyond the landing strips, out of the flat expanse of the desert, beautiful and absolute. He likes the smell of the fuel burnt by the jets. He likes the savage, hoarse roar of the engines. He likes it and it scares him. Then he goes in.

There it is, Egyptair to Cairo and then on to the City of God, 11.10 a.m., Gate 24. It’s down there, there’s still not much of a line, well, that’s good. Did I take my Xanax? Yes, I took it.

Waiting in queue at the check-in desk, a young man in front of him is reading a novel by Clifford Simak.

Just think of that: Simak! I used to read him when I was a kid! Science fiction holds no appeal for me now. The Future has become the Present, it would seem that we’ve consumed everything and there’s nothing left . . . My credulity has collapsed, I’ve lost the poetry of the infinite, I’m not interested in possible worlds and I’m no longer even interested in knowing how this one ends, I don’t care about what the future will be like. Franco says that a person can be considered an adult only when he can no longer bring himself to read science fiction. The last piece of science fiction I read was more or less thirty years ago, so I was certainly an adult, and then some . . .

He peers at the cover of the book until he manages to make out the title: City. He pulls out his tablet, goes online and googles it.

That’s the original English title of the book; in Italian it was called Anni senza fine! Wonderful! The generations of sentient species that succeed one another after the extinction of man, no little more than a legend . . . Everything that ever existed, the very memory of the human race, twinkling into oblivion over the course of hundreds of thousands, millions of years . . .

The entire text of City is online. He downloads it, and on the display of his smartphone he begins reading the preface.

These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story’s done they ask many questions:

‘What is Man?’ they’ll ask.

Or perhaps: ‘What is a city?’

Or: ‘What is a war?’

There is no positive answer to any of these questions. There are suppositions and there are theories and there are many educated guesses, but there are no answers.

He looks out the windows at the mountains scoured bare by the wind, this land without a blade of grass.

Everything is the colour of dust. Purple dust at dawn, red dust at sunset. All the rest of Sharm is nothing more than a desecration of the emptiness, a gratuitous, artificial obscenity—actually, not gratuitous at all, a paid obscenity. From a plane you see dozens and dozens of hotels, they look like clumps of worms clinging to the coast, eating the dust and making their way inland. In Las Vegas, in Reno, they did the same thing, even though there the delirium has a certain tradition, a sad, demented dignity. Here thirty years ago, it must have been an absolute landscape, like what’s found to the north of Nabq, which has been declared a park: nothing but air, mountains, sand, water, no one in sight . . . Where there is nothing, you can invent anything and everything, without anything prior to deal with, without interference save for the inexplicable will of the One God of the Sands and the Void. The desert has become a theme park and now everyone tells you: ‘Here, there was nothing, and now look at it all . . .’ But it was precisely the Sacred Nothing that ought to have been preserved, instead of this tossed-together clutter of buildings, swimming pools, mini-waterfalls, neatly manicured lawns, brummagem pyramids and obelisks, streetlamps whose glare cancels out the night sky, which is so pure here . . . In Sharm, just as in all dry places, it becomes once again evident that life is humid . . . The scorpion I crushed yesterday evening on the stairs went scrrch . . . It was a shell, a recipient full of some watery substance that splattered across the still-hot stone of the stair tread . . . They, the scorpions, don’t have seawater desalination plants: where do they find the water? This morning it was dry as a stockfish, flat, mummified . . . Which is to say, un-alive . . . Here life out of water is counter-intuitive, that is to say, contrary to nature, if you can call something nature that’s essentially mineral . . . Let’s see if they’re willing to give me a window seat . . . I’m hungry . . . And this pain at the base of my neck . . . I have two hours to get another cup of coffee, and to eat something in blessed peace.

It’s been years since Brandani last said what he thought, to anyone. He can’t. If he let his tongue range free in direct connection with his brain all that would come out would be curses and insults. Directed at people, animals, things, objects, cities. And himself. An incessant gush of unbridled foul language spurts from his brain like a serum, an infected discharge that he’s forced to keep in circulation without being able to rid himself of it. That is how he poisons himself every day. A secret and compressed desperation. When he does let it vent, the words emerge in mangled incoherent knots, insults snarled out reluctantly in just a few basic combinations, always the same, stupid and repetitive. Just a short while ago, at the check-in counter, he focused on the airline employee who for no good reason had decided he didn’t want to give him a window seat. Brandani gets bored while flying, can’t seem to read, likes to look down on the earth below, the sea, the islands, the clouds.

Motherfucking cocksucker filthy piece of shit son of a bitch disgusting snot-rag faggot, why don’t you just drop dead this goddamned second right here in this goddamned shitty airport where you drag out your unappetizing life with shitballs hanging off the hairs of your ass that you haven’t once washed since the day you were born, you fucking turd . . .

The effort of repressing his inner tirade left him practically breathless, another dose of endogenous venom spurted into his veins, but now the crisis is over, he got his window seat, the quarrel is forgotten and he’s gone back to his favourite activity in places like this: observing. He finds a seat in the departure lounge, far away from the gate, where the line is forming for a flight to Stockholm. On his right, just a few yards away, there’s a continuous floor-to-ceiling wall of glass overlooking the landing strip and the nearby mountains. The peace of this place, the prospect of an hour and a half waiting in that sort of spatiotemporal hiatus so typical of airports, are restoring his serenity. If the plane is on time, he’ll be in the City of God by early afternoon. It’s as if he’d already departed, was already in flight.

It’s a common occurrence for him to be swept by gusts of contempt. It’s weariness; obstacles and hindrances of any sort tend to exasperate him, especially the tiny insignificant difficulties that arise out of the carelessness and incompetence of others: the broken toilet flush handle, the spray of water that comes out too hard, a ramshackle aeroplane seat. He’s obsessed by the continual shortfall between the way people ought to be and the way they actually are. But if he manages to keep from getting sucked into it, he’s able to express himself in fluent, well-framed language, a fossil relic of years so different from these, long lost to memory. Over the course of time he has gradually persuaded himself that, insults aside, it’s almost always a better idea for him not to speak. It’s not merely a matter of what’s opportune; it’s also the uncertainty, the insecurity, the doubt, the lack of solid data. Someone pointed out that he often repeats himself, he’s afraid he might appear senile. ‘No one ever tells you, so if your noggin stops working right, you never even know,’ a friend once said to him. ‘While you’re certain that you’re thinking sensible, even intelligent things, it may be that you actually come off as nothing more than a senile old fool blathering on about nonsense. Not even the most well meaning doctor will ever tell you: “Listen, you’re well into your second childhood.” So just resign yourself to going senile without realizing it.’ ‘But I’m not senile, not yet . . .’ ‘There, you see? You’re convinced you’re not. But just how can you be so sure?’ His name is Rasca, the friend, a little older than him. That’s his obsession. ‘When we’re young, we’re a little too ready to be convinced of other people’s ideas, and when we’re old, we’re too quick to be convinced of our own. When everything seems suddenly clear to you, be careful, because what’s probably happening is that you’re already going senile.’ Across from him sits a young couple, two kids talking raptly. Actually, the boy is the one doing all the talking, she listens and every so often answers, looks him in the eyes, smiles, nods her head. They don’t transmit a great sense of familiarity, if this is the beginning of a relationship, it’s certainly early days, seeing the seriousness, the apparent intensity of the conversation they’re absorbed in.

God, what a nightmare . . . They must have met just recently, on the beach or at a dance club . . . he’s searching for a way in, anything can back his play, anything but silence.

He’s reminded of the days when if you wanted to court a girl what you needed were rivers of words, whole evenings at a time smoking packs of cigarettes, drinking beer or whisky, gin-tonics, Coca-Cola or whatever else you could lay your hands on. Evenings in which if you wanted to make anything happen (and you never knew if or when) you had to talk & talk.

And for all he knew, it might even be a girl he didn’t much care for . . . The world was full of these half-pretty girls, half-likeable, half-intelligent, half-virgins, half-everything . . . It was full of girls I didn’t really like, but they remained a resource, the most plentiful one . . . Talking to a girl without even being sure you feel like doing anything with her, talking all evening about bullshit, the worst kind of bullshit, saying things just for the sake of it, to be there, to attract attention. Talking about travel, philosophy, work, school, politics. Talking about movies-literature-theatre, trying to say something cool, strange, original . . . They always wound up talking about religion, love and sex . . . ‘Listen, the way I see things, etc. . . .’ she’d say. These half-pretty girls always had someone . . . Donatella . . . Donatella! The half-virgin from philosophy class . . . Why on earth should she come to mind now?! I hadn’t thought of her in years . . . You wound up fooling around with her every time the two of you studied together . . . She was supposed to save herself for marriage, so no pussy, but everything else was accessible . . . Then one day she turns up and tells you: ‘Starting tomorrow we’re going to have to stop studying together, I’m getting married next week.’ She’d been engaged to some guy for who knows how long, they’d already filed all the necessary papers . . . And she kept it up with me, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. As long as there were no attempts on her virginity, which had already been deeded to the other man, you could do anything you wanted, practically . . . She was always very careful to keep from getting the bedcovers dirty. Sometimes it happened, but she knew exactly what measures to take. She had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in her desk drawer. In that same drawer I glimpsed a packet of Kleenex, and there was also a box of sterile absorbent cotton. Technical details all the girls were tremendously well read up on . . . They had sex, there was no doubt about that, but they always seemed to need a framework to justify that sex, that is, they needed that delirious preliminary verbiage and boilerplate that could last for days of dates, strolls, phone calls, afternoon teas, movies, theatre . . . Theatre . . . Theatre! To the theatre on Sunday afternoon, with the boilerplate of critical discussion during inter-mission, then continuing afterwards at the pizzeria . . . That’s what words were good for, a continuation of high school by other means and for other ends. But it was still just high school . . . In the end I realized that my problem wasn’t really with philosophy, it was really with the humanities concentration I’d chosen in high school . . . Did Donatella actually get her degree later? I never saw her again, never ran into her . . . She just vanished . . . Her father had a sports-equipment store . . .

Ivo Brandani is an old-fashioned silent male, a man who looks and says nothing because he cannot say. He remains silent so he won’t have to listen to answers, he remains silent because, if you encourage people with words, they’ll pay you back in the same coin. ‘I deserve it. Couldn’t I just have kept my mouth shut?’ is what Ivo often says to himself, every time a comment escapes him, a word of irritation, a phrase that strikes him as witty, a wisecrack whose ironic twist goes wholly misunderstood. These are unexpected ventings of the mental monologue that torments him even at night, in his sleep, when his brain sets out gratuitous spectacles, variously bloodcurdling or embarrassing, mortifying. A continuous brooding is the principal secretion of his solitude, especially when he’s travelling, as he is now. ‘Did I really have to shoot my mouth off?’ Yes, he had to, it’s something beyond his control, when it happens, it happens. To the employee manning the check-in desk he had said, in his broken English: ‘What does it cost you? Do you think it’s fun to fill the plane row by row? Is there a problem of weight distribution, static balance? I hardly think so, since I was one of the first to arrive.’ ‘It’s difficult, sir . . .’ ‘Oh spare me the difficulties,’ he’d replied in his native Peninsular, ‘just say you don’t feel like it, that you don’t give a flying fuck.’ The employee had understood him perfectly and clearly took offence. In the end, he managed to get a window seat anyway, but losing your temper isn’t something that does him any good. Now that he thinks back on it he’s sorry, it strikes him as out of keeping with his character to be so discourteous.

To speak is always compromising, risky, better to be more cautious . . . What do I give a damn by this point anyway, soon I’ll be leaving . . . The game is over . . . With my age I’ve been out of it for a while, there’s no point in hammering away at it, I’m tired, I can’t take the pressure any longer, especially on the deadlines . . . And after all, I want to buy a house somewhere the fuck out of the way, maybe I can find something on the Island . . . Get out, slip away smooth and easy, get lost somewhere, definitely on the water so I always have the horizon in my eyes, maybe on the Island . . . I’d go back there to stay, in spite of the way the tourists have ruined it, I’ll buy a boat, a plastic gozzo, an 18-footer, and I’ll go out trolling for porgies, up along the cliffs . . . That is, if they don’t establish the marine nature reserve . . . If they do, no real problem, I’ll just head the opposite way, down the coast to the south . . . It was there, in the shallows outside of the points, that Manolis would catch his oversize monsters . . . Better not speak, because no one listens to me, because the things I’d say are bound to be confused, inadequate, irritating, counter-productive . . . Because the world has changed too much . . . I say nothing through suffocation, annihilation, humiliation . . . I say nothing because at this point I’ve succumbed and nothing can get me back on my feet. Is it right to say that I’m now succumbent? Molteni always thought it was funny to refer to someone being ‘succumbent . . .’ I liked being his student, listening to him, even if what I could take from him no longer matched what I needed . . . What was it you needed, Ivo? I needed matter, concreteness, weight, gravity, action . . . I needed to ‘connect what is separate’, ‘separate what is connected’, more or less . . . A stupid undertaking, you could see that for yourself, you miserable imbecile, you never achieved fuck-all anyway . . . Imbecile, imbecile . . . I’d have just become a high-school teacher or, the best you could have hoped for, an academic, that is, a product of the Peninsular-school philosophy, the most pinchbeck of its kind in the history of world thought . . . I have a headache . . . And after all, who says that I’ve never achieved a fucking thing? For instance, what do you have to say about the work I’ve been doing on the corals? . . . That’s enough . . . Here, if you just take a look around, you see a world in sandals, in flip-flops . . . A universe of such badly made feet that you only need to take a careful look at them and you see immediately that these are nothing other than the deformed hands of a quadruman . . . But it took us centuries to realize it and even now there are those who don’t see it, those who say: ‘It’s not true, this is how we were created, with our feet.’ This whole thing about deformed hands won’t let go of me . . .’ When everything seems clear and simple to you, that’s when you need to be worried, that’s when you’re starting to go senile.’ And yet the Japanese and even the Egyptians and the people at the company, they all listened to what I had to say, they paid attention to my advice, they gave every sign of taking into consideration my recommendations, and so? I have a headache.

‘How long will it take?’ That’s the question that he’s heard most often, as long as he’s been working here at Sharm. The politicians and the technicians from the Egyptian government always asked that question, it was continually on the lips of the government commissioner for restoration. How long for the reconstruction, for the remaking? And his bosses from the City in the North constantly on the phone asking: How long? It’s not a technical question, that is, not entirely, it’s a political question asked by politicians or by para-technicians, that is, technicians who have by this point been denatured, it’s a question asked by someone who doesn’t really want to know and understand.

If you want something done right, it’s going to take the time it takes . . . The time needed to do it properly, without cutting corners, without killing yourself, without killing the workmen . . . Unless they’ve already accepted the usual prohibitive terms at headquarters, as long as they’re not negotiating on costs and timelines without asking me . . . Here, taking into account the conditions on site, I have a hard time putting together an operational plan . . . As I try to beg or borrow a few extra months, they might very well already be changing the terms without letting me know . . . I’ll come off looking like a fool and it won’t be the first time . . . But it will be one of the last, Brandani: before long, you’ll leave and so long, it’s been good to know you . . . You wanted to be a technician and here you are, you were one . . . But you never took into consideration the existence of politics, its hunger for results, money and power, you never considered the merry-go-round of positions and contracts, the minuet of bribes . . . They want it all and they want it now: they demand results but also money for themselves . . . All the same, whenever they have to make a decision, they take all the time they need . . . At the top of the decision-making chain, time can’t be compressed, but once the decision’s been made, it’s all over in a hurry, they won’t listen to reason and everything has to be done as quickly as possible . . . From that moment on, the principal question isn’t how much money, or how we should do it, or who we should have do it etc. There is just one question: How long will it take?

Puddu said to him, with his distinctive Sardinian accent: ‘Engineer, I’m a surveyor and I never studied the way you did, but I’m convinced that an engineer doesn’t understand a politician, can’t understand him, never will. From what I’ve seen over all these years, they don’t really believe anything, they don’t think anything, everything they do, they do it out of consensus. Vertical consensus and horizontal consensus, I mean to say. You follow what I’m saying, don’t you? If there’s a consensus, then it’s fine, if there isn’t, then we’re not doing it, even if it’s the right thing to do. That’s their reality, because consensus is the water they swim in. Take it away from them and they’ll drown. That’s it, they’re done for. So, Engineer, what the fuck are we even talking about? If they say yes in the City in the North, then down here we say yes and we bow nicely while we’re at it . . . Forgive me, eh, for speaking frankly.’

I like Puddu, he’s straightforward, he’s travelled practically everywhere, he knows how to deal with any situation, he’s not afraid of anyone or anything, in unfamiliar settings he’s absolutely cautious, until he starts to understand something, but once he’s figured it out, he acts . . . These are the men who build the world, who’ve always built the world, who are in it up to their necks . . . He is exactly what I would have liked to become, but was never able . . . Someone who’s comfortable everywhere he goes, solidly planted on the surface of this planet . . . And instead you, mon cher, you’ve never been fish nor fowl and now it’s too late . . . Puddu has just one defect, and it’s not a negligible one, and that is that he likes young boys . . . He’d say to me: ‘Engineer, I know your views on the matter . . . That is, we don’t share the same opinion on this . . . But, look at it this way, the politicians with personal convictions went out of style some time ago, both on the right and on the so-called left. Those were the kind of things you could have in the twentieth century, stuff they don’t make any more. Now, let’s not even talk about Communists, Fascists, Catholics, liberals, anything else you care to name—in their ranks were people who believed in what they said . . . They had a sense . . . of honour. Even the Communists were people you had to take seriously.’ He smiled. ‘Would you believe me if I tell you that I like democracy myself, even if I am . . . let’s say . . . a little bit of a right-winger? That authoritarian regimes turn my stomach? Still, democracy’s day is over, it’s in the terminal phase of its illness, on its deathbed, but it’s something that hasn’t happened before, a completely new way of passing away . . .’ He wasn’t kidding around . . . In spite of his appearance, and to use the word shabby to describe it would be an understatement, and the frenzied lust for little boys that eats him from within, Puddu knows how to become authoritative . . . He may be a paedophile and he may be a Fascist, but he isn’t stupid, he’s not uneducated, he’s not a son of a bitch, disloyal or dishonest, Puddu . . . He’s just a damned soul . . . I didn’t pry into his business . . . Let him seduce whoever he wants off the job site but I don’t want to see him dare to use the chance of work as a lure or the threat of dismissal as a way to extort young boys . . . He says that here, before getting married, all the men do it . . . I don’t give a flying fuck, if I catch him at it again I’ll talk to the people at headquarters and fix his wagon once and for all . . .

‘I’m talking about the democracy of nothing,’ Puddu has told him more than once. ‘The democracy of today for tomorrow, you know. The kind that makes promises but never proposals. Certainly, it’s not like there’s a hell of a lot left to propose these days, but I grew up with a politics that promised better worlds . . . Do you remember that, Engineer? Not all the parties were like that, but behind what they did in the present day, there was always an eye out for tomorrow . . . Because tomorrow is useful today, so that we know what to do with it, with our today . . . We are technicians, so we’re accustomed to the idea of planning, of something that doesn’t exist today, but that needs to be built, and that has to be done inside x amount of time, with a specific sum of money and with what’s available there on site . . . What do politicians know about it? When have they ever given a damn about doing something well? About tomorrow? About something lasting, precise, about building something to professional standards, according to the state of the art, or the mathematics, physics and science of construction? I’m sure you could tell me yourself, Engineer . . . What do those people know about rules, any kind of rules? All that matters to them is today, the rest is just the distant future, it doesn’t concern them, it has nothing to do with the immediate present, with an instantaneous consensus, the kind that can be measured by polling . . . I’m talking about our politicians, not about the kind that once they rise to power, stay there for the rest of their lives . . . Then someone stages a revolution and they put someone else in power to remain there for the rest of their lives . . . We are technicians, we’ll never understand them . . .’

If Puddu stays here, I can leave without worries. It’s Friday, by four, no later, I’m home. I’ll turn off my cell phone. A weekend of total laziness, a long walk, an art exhibit, dinner at some friend’s house, then Monday morning we can talk it over again . . . Fuck, though, what a headache!

Brandani here is the only one in suit and tie, the only one not in T-shirt and shorts. His snuff-coloured linen suit, wrinkled, his green roller suitcase, with a red border, easy to identify on the conveyor belts in the midst of other luggage, for the most part black, perhaps because dirt doesn’t show, but all the same, and therefore necessarily tagged with labels, ribbons, bows, splotches of paint in some cases, indelible signs drawn perhaps by someone who’s already suffered the trauma of suitcase mix-ups, who’s checked into a hotel to find that his clothing belongs to someone else, with someone else’s locked suitcase and no key. Even Engineer Brandani’s multicoloured roller suitcase required further markings, because he’s happened to spot other ones that were perfectly identical, so he availed himself of red duct tape, the really durable kind, and branded his luggage with an asymmetrically placed longitudinal stripe, like the stripes he remembers seeing long ago on souped-up cars, on Fiat I-wish-I-could-but-can’t 600s, with Abarth kits and scorpion decals. In his mind, he calls his rolling suitcase ‘the Abarth’, he loves it, it belongs to him and it bears his trademark of dishevelled contempt for the chic elegance of travel accessories. Aside from his returns to the Island, he always and only travels for work, because by now he hates travel and everything that goes with it, but he is still comfortable in airports and on aeroplanes. When he’s at the airport he goes into a sort of cataleptic trance, a stupefied state of inner peace, all the more profound the longer the delays stretch out, but then there’s a point past which he regains consciousness and starts getting pissed off at those delays. Once he’s done with the check-in, after going through all the checkpoints and submitting to every type of scanner imaginable, after allowing himself to be rummaged and searched, after removing belt and shoes and finally touching down on the other side, all he needs is to breathe and think. Sometimes to read, eat a sandwich or sip an international-style cappuccino. But most of all, what he likes is to observe. At an airport Ivo Brandani feels himself to be one of the the righteous among the righteous. There all normal human activity is suspended, it’s an existential pause, a sort of pacification, a state of nirvana: the airport is the only space of mystical decompression afforded to those who believe in nothing. From a departure lounge you set off into flight, and perhaps that is why the air already seems different. It’s nice to be here, in a legitimate and necessary state of waiting, in a sort of suspended middle ground, separate from work, holiday and any other activity save that of waiting for a plane. To him aeroplanes are sacred objects, of a sublime, because necessary, beauty. Soon a technological deity will arrive, capable of lifting us up into powered flight, in a wonderful & superhuman roar.

People who use these places to open their laptop and get straight to work . . . The mid-level manager, young, sharply dressed and churning with career ambitions, as full of work as a stuffed calamari, who sits down next to you and has on his screen all those identical PowerPoint presentations, with pie charts, trend curves, elementary slogans . . . This stuff, economic and financial plans, market research, timeline charts, etc., they may even pay a handsome price for it but it’s almost always staggeringly self-evident, when it’s not actual bullshit. We do dozens of these feasibility studies every year . . . The customer expects them, even demands them: just a few pages in colour, laid out horizontally on a letter format, with a plastic binder spine, an acetate jacket, thirty to forty copies, and they’re happy: the ‘foot soldiers’ ask for an explanation, then they carry them back to their bosses . . . The ‘foot soldiers of finance’—that’s what Franco calls them—all of them with crew cuts or heads shaved entirely, bronzed, designer sunglasses ready in their breast pockets, all dressed alike . . . One year the fashion is a navy-blue three-piece suit with three buttons and trousers with two pleats, the next year the two-buttoned charcoal-grey suit, pipe-stem suit trousers, without pleats: a real annual revolution, and woe betide anyone who fails to keep up with it . . . Two hours in the departure lounge gives me the same relief as a year of transcendental meditation . . . Then, of course, there are airports and there are airports, there are waiting rooms and there are waiting rooms, there are trousers and there are trousers, there are passenger seats and there are passenger seats . . . An uncomfortably hard passenger seat, a pair of ball-crushing trousers that can become a form of torture when those balls have already been intensely puréed by hours and hours of travel . . .

Ivo wears just a few items of clothing, all of them carefully considered, selected and made to order by his tailor: roomy jackets that practically slip off him, loose trousers, easy on the crotch, with deep pockets, broad-soled shoes with custom-made orthopaedic insoles, shirts with comfortable collars, short socks without elastic, because he can’t stand the death grip of long socks on his calves. All of which makes him look clumsy, exacerbates the advancing years, in defiance of his traditional and legendary beauty, but at least it puts him at his ease; the mere sight of a pair of skin-tight jeans makes him feel unwell: ‘How do they manage to wear them so tight? How did I ever manage?’

The perfect departure lounge is never too silent, otherwise a crying child becomes too annoying, if you happen to cut a fart there’s a risk of it being noticed, if the air is too muffled and solemn you get sleepy, whereas the ideal state is a vigilant pre-somnolence. Ivo is a connoisseur of boredom in airports and he reflects on it. In the departure area, the air already seems thinner, more rarefied, the people appear dreamy somehow, raptly absorbed in something, everyone spontaneously lowers their voices. Children take advantage of the opportunity to bust balls to greater effect, it seems that there they somehow perceive a certain weakness among the grown-ups, a diminution of their authority. You sit down and wait for someone to honour the undertaking to take charge of his body for a few hours of flight and at the same time ensure the satisfaction of certain primary necessities. You expect to be kept alive at 30,000 feet, to be set back down gently on solid earth, and finally set free. Fine, so long, get your suitcase and get the hell out of here, from here on you’re going to have to make your own way: no more flight attendants, hostesses, stewards, to look after your needs. No one with the vacant smile of those young women in uniform and self-massaging compression stockings and the gestures of well-trained counterfeit geishas, no one who’ll come if you press the right button, eager to know what it is you desire, no more directional air jets you can turn onto your face if it gets hot in the cabin. Here too at the check-in desk, there you see them, the young women in uniform, with their stewardess expressions, slightly different from those you find on the in-flight staff, but still, air-hostess expressions they remain. Brandani has been pondering the mystery of that meta-smile for years, for decades.

What is it? Boredom? Professional detachment? Is it the effect of having seen too much, travelled too much, the constant process of delocalization? Their gaze never rests on anything, least of all in your eyes, to discourage anyone who might have a mind to launch into the international courtship of stewardess, abetted by the many legends—or are the stories true?—of spectacular standing sex in the restrooms with horny flight attendants. As long as there are people who go on regaling us with these tall tales—or are the stories true?—stewardesses are going to be obliged to avoid looking you in the face with anything but the frostiest of professional smiles, frozen in place, alien. But perhaps it’s because if you take away a woman’s authentic relational sphere or, worse, if you professionalize it, then she empties out and nothing is left but a shell.

Brandani thinks that stewardesses are nothing but the rinds of women who are no longer there, who have gone elsewhere or perhaps are dead, exoskeletons, like seashells without their mollusc, lovely to look at perhaps but empty. Or else females with a hermit crab inside them, in place of the original soul. This is because, to the best of his knowledge—he knew a couple of stewardesses, years ago, one of whom had large breasts with the consistency of a cream custard—when a flight attendant is on a break or on holiday, a whole woman doesn’t reappear, only the semblance of one. There always remains an indelible patina of uncaring stewardessness, like an appalling layer of dead relational cells. The custard-breasted stewardess had a remote, distracted demeanour, during sex she kept her eyes open, she never denied herself but never really offered herself either. Once she said this to him: ‘If you’ve been flying for a few years, you wind up never coming down to earth.’

What about the stewards? Why do they all seem like faggots? Why do they all have the same slim trim physique, at the very most a size-38S jacket, a 32-inch waist, neither tall nor short, all the same age, somewhere between their mid-thirties and their mid-forties? Why are they all so unpleasant, obnoxious, lacking even the ability to form a meta-smile, without ever managing to seem courteous? What is the exact phrase? Smartly turned out, that’s it. Tanned, with manicured hands, fluid gestures, dull yet chilly gazes, and when they have nothing to do, they indulge continuously in idle chitchat with the female flight assistants, they huddle in the far back, or all the way in the front, and you can hear them chatting away and laughing. The ones that don’t seem gay have the general air of professional sex hounds, lewd, expert, you see it from the way they’re capable of eyeing up a female passenger. A lightning-fast evaluation but it’s impossible to miss. Maybe that’s how they want the cabin personnel, they choose them specially with alienating physical and personality traits.

To Brandani the stewardesses seem more differentiated one from another, but perhaps that’s just his gaze, the observing eyes of an ageing decommissioned male that rests upon them with greater attention. Every time he goes on a plane, Ivo, who is a professional envier, envies the whole crew, including the pilots, so delocalized that the world seems to be something that has nothing to do with them. He imagines atopian people who live in neighbourhoods close to the airport, who come and go from home to aeroplane, from aeroplane to home, travelling along outlying bypasses, moving across remote locations, industrial districts, residential expanses with trees and lawns. Places that make Brandani think of a hateful novel by J. G. Ballard, Crash, that he never managed to finish, but then he never finishes books by Ballard, because of the cold, excessively intelligent writing. He imagines that these pilots, these stewards and stewardesses, live in subdivisions of clean and modern townhouses—the streets spick and span, the can in the garage—and that they stay there, taking showers, going for swims in the pool, spending their days off at the gym and their nights having group sex with the neighbours or in erotic private clubs. It isn’t their lives he envies, it’s the fact that they seem to belong so wholly to this nothingness.

Belonging to nothing, being nothing. I’m getting closer.