Monsoon

The weather channels were showing a low-pressure vortex hovering stationary over the Country. Something was keeping it anchored there, a sort of conspiracy of the surrounding high-pressure fronts, southern and northern, western and eastern; wedges of depression were trying fruitlessly to break out of the encirclement towards the east—the satellites showed an increasingly dense vortex that instead of contracting was expanding northward, day by day, involving other geographies and other nations, perhaps more accustomed to this intensity of clouds and rains. No, that’s not right, since these were practically monsoon-like precipitations—which means when unheard-of quantities of rain gush down and the cars come to a halt because no windshield wipers can keep up with this, or they slow down and put on their emergency blinkers, when the underpasses all flash-flood and anyone who happens to be down there can easily be killed—rains like this create problems even in the Northern Countries of the Continent. Even in places right above the mountain chain that encloses and circumscribes the Peninsula, such heavy rains are rare, because up there it drizzles light and continuous, for days at a time, creating grass and pasturage, keeping the meadows green even in the summer, when down here everything turns yellow and you need a sprinkler system to keep your lawn at an acceptable level of green, instead of the dust it would turn into if abandoned to the summer drought.

But it wasn’t summer, this was rather a late autumn pervaded with a muggy heat, and it was growing particularly vicious in those last days of November, turning into weeks and weeks of clouds and increasingly intense rains, until that vortex that, they were saying on TV, was making it rain harder than it ever had in the past two hundred years, even though there were some who objected, pointing out that yes, it was certainly raining a good deal but two hundred years ago they didn’t have the proper tools to measure precipitation, and the various levels reached in previous floods of the River, engraved into marble plaques inset everywhere on the ancient walls of the City of God, proved a prehistory of tremendous rains, and in any case those four hundred years of cold weather that they referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age’ couldn’t have been a stroll in the park for anyone.

‘A sick autumn,’ he said to himself, an autumn that was muggy and wet with rain loaded with red sand, whose provenance was the Great Southern Desert, something that alone proved how many things on this planet can change over time, and not just slightly. The television was showing rain and more rain in every part of the Country, with landslides, masses of mud coming down off liquefied mountains, burying everything before it, floods and bridges with the arches semi-submerged in the waters of rivers so swollen as to be unrecognizable. Rivers that in just a few days had swollen into savage monsters tearing at breakneck speed downstream, that is, towards one of the two or three seas that surround the Peninsula, to empty vast quantities of dissolved silt into them, and you’d say from the colour of the water that it was dark, cold cappuccino.

The River, enclosed between its high retaining walls, poured through the City, its level rising ‘hour by hour’. ‘The warnings are growing more serious,’ the television announced, and then it reported that the River had ‘reached the danger level’, adding that it was constantly being ‘monitored’ by the experts at the National Emergency Protection Agency, as if once it began to overflow its banks there were actually anything that could be done. Evacuate the neighbourhoods ‘at risk’? And just how?

Large exhausted nutrias had made it up onto the parapets of the stairways that once led down to the gravel riverbed but were now lost in the swirling current; ducks and cormorants had taken refuge who knows where, while the seagulls truly had no problems at all and were merely looking around in bafflement at all the people clustered along the parapets, and on the bridges, people who were watching in fascination the succession of whirlpools moving in deeply etched depressions across that shifting dark surface, itself rising visibly all the while.

Every time a train from the underground rail system rose to cross the River, the passengers fell silent at the sight of the swollen stream, while someone in the crowd inevitably reiterated the well-known facts, that is, that one of those large moored barges had broken free and had floated downstream, getting wedged under an arch of the Ancestral Bridge downstream, with the risk that the water might build up there so massively the River might finally overflow its banks. But no one really believed it—that the River would overflow.

The morning he started his job at the District, Engineer Ivo Brandani had a chance himself to stare out at the rain-swollen River and to mull over the prospects in the near future for the City, as well as to listen to the commentary from the travellers on the underground rail system, as it emerged onto the surface and the Cement Bridge.

‘It hasn’t happened in a hundred years or more, but still, it could happen. Who says that the embankments can’t be breached?’ he thought to himself.

First day at the Eighth Urban District, Technological Manage-ment, Supervision of the Public Patrimony. He needed it, that position. After the fiasco at Ediltekne, he needed a job, he needed a salary, and retirement was far in the future but not so far that he could afford simply not to think about it. He had to go on paying his mortgage and his insurance, he was cutting into the money he’d set aside, but he was tired of travelling. He’s heard that at the Governorship they were looking for managers to work on a contract basis, and by contravening his innermost instincts he managed to force himself to hustle his friends who worked there, until a breach opened in the wall and he managed to wangle a temporary position, on a contract that could be renewed from year to year. He’d hoped to secure the directorship of a central office, but that had proved impossible.

‘Trust me, they’re never going to give you that’—Polano had told him—‘go and take a directorship outside of here, in some outlying district. Life is horrible in the districts, they’re a fever nightmare of fuck-ups, you’re on the firing line, not much staff, not much money, zero equipment, you have all the local politicians busting your balls every other day, into the mix. That’s why no one wants those jobs, you’re much more likely to get a full contract as a director there. Trust me, things are set up already so you either have to give up the idea entirely or you go spit blood in a district. You know I love you but that’s the way things stand. For a directorship here, my hands are tied, but I know that there are districts that have gone without a director for months now and others that have a director with good inside connections who’s looking for another position. In places like that, you’d have an even better chance. I can give you a hand. The salary is good just the same.’

He’d liked Polano’s frankly straightforward way ever since they had both worked together at Megatecton, and once again he proved useful. Not even there at the Governorship was there anything that he could claim for clearly established merit, for his years of work, for the quality of his outstanding CV, a quality, for that matter, that he self-attributed: they’d taken him and this, for someone as isolated and out of the game as he was, had been a sort of miracle.

‘Never forget that the Governorship is a cold monster and that you, like all the rest of us, will be a matter of complete indifference to it. It will gnaw on you for a lifetime and then, when it no longer needs you, it will spit you out again wherever it chances to be. If you haven’t been sufficiently farsighted to procure yourself some cosy niche somewhere, then, my dear Ivo, you would be well advised to grab onto the Eighth District and keep mum . . . There are people doing much worse than you and me . . . By the way, did you hear about De Klerk? You don’t know? He’s dead. He stayed at Megatecton, rose through the ranks, he’d become the managing director. A few years ago, I had dealings with him again, they were involved in a major real-estate deal . . . Apparently he had a fulminating heart attack right there in the office . . . All that work—you remember how hard he worked?—all that power, and he just dropped dead at his desk . . .’

As the train crossed over the bridge, Ivo Brandani thought back to De Klerk, to the summer all those years ago. There was nothing in him now of the emotions that had so troubled him back then. It was all over, freeze-dried, reduced to dust and carried away by the passage of time.

A few days earlier, in the Eighth District, he had met with the outgoing director for a sort of changing of the guard. The fact that Brandani had managed to land a contract was largely to the director’s credit: the technicians working in the Administration would stop at nothing and were exerting political pressure of all kinds to avoid winding up in places like the Eighth, so for this guy to find a presentable replacement, even though Ivo came from the private sector, had made things all that much easier. The guy could scarcely believe his good luck, now that he was actually leaving: you could see he was about to burst with happiness, that he was once again filling his lungs with fresh air and when he said, ‘You know, it’s not at all bad here,’ anyone could have told that he was lying. But Brandani didn’t realize how badly.

It was daunting to see the sheer violence with which that brownish mass of foaming water swept downstream, rushing just a few yards beneath the subway car.

‘What’s become of the cormorants? And the ducks? How do the fish manage to stay in one place with this current? Are they all going to be swept out to sea? Will they find shelters in certain cavities on the riverbed? Along the embankments?’

He thought about the deep, dark caverns of the River, excavated in a bed of millennia-old detritus, where the City’s weighty memories were stacked: statues and fragments of statues, pieces of decorated cornices, weapons, sarcophagi, gold sunk in the silt, pistols, muskets, weapons and objects from every era. In the dark, fish chilled by the cold of the water, seeking shelter from the immense power of the stream. The image of the River bed had always made him shudder. The ancient filth, the bacteria and the viruses, the mud, the rubble, the scrap, the water so muddy you couldn’t see a foot from your face.

He had recently read that in Amazonia—or perhaps in Asia, he didn’t really remember—there are catfish living in the silty slimy rivers that practically cannot see, because of the murk. And so they not only use the sort of vibrissae, or whiskers, that they have under their throats or on either side of their mouths but can also feel what’s in the water through their skin. ‘They sniff the water, or actually they taste the water with their whole body, they have tastebuds all over their body, as if it were tongue tissue. They’re completely covered with sensors, what they can’t see they feel with their skin, and from the taste of the water they decide whether what they have near them is an enemy or a friend, whether it’s something good to eat or whether they had better take to their tails.’

He had always made use of the aquatic image of the filter-feeding mollusc to explain to himself the role of the Politico, other-wise incomprehensible to him. But not the fact that the Politico was a mollusc, the fact that he was a filter-feeder. ‘Politicians, like bivalves, breathe and feed at the same time, preserving the particles of consensus/dissent in suspension in the environment where they work and live . . .’ But now the catfish, capable of tasting the water in which it swims, struck him as a more precise and pertinent image.

‘How do the cormorants along the River manage to hold their breath when they dive under to fish? When they go under, how do they see with all that mud?’

He’d often see them go flying past, labouring through the air at a low altitude, skimming over bridges that in this stretch of the River dated back more than a hundred years. They reminded him of the cormorants on the Island, but these were from some larger species and their eyes were circled with yellow. They perched on the occasional trunk rising from the water or on the branches of tenacious saplings that had grown in the cracks between the rocks of the embankment; he’d watched them dry their outstretched wings in the sunlight.

‘They lack the waterproof substance on their wings that all other marine birds possess. Theirs is a life of tribulations. I can’t claim to possess any protective substances either. And in fact here I am on the train from the Eighth District of this horrible city. If they’d told you, you never would have believed it, Brandani. You’re a miserable fool, Brandani.’

‘The first thing to go under has always been the Pagan Temple. It’s the lowest point’—someone nearby was saying in an accent that belonged unmistakably to the City, that sounded like poached, pan-fried chicory—‘The water comes gushing up out of the sewers before it rises over the parapets, the Temple goes underwater when everything around it is still dry. Then if the water really does rise, it’s a fucked situation. Go take a look at the plaques around there, the ones on the facade of Santa Maria—there are marks at various heights, the tallest one might be 10 feet high, you wouldn’t believe it.’

The City of God, which had also become the capital of the entire nation in recognition of an ancient pre-eminence, was said always to have been the favourite of one god, the only god capable of separating the lands from the waters, at least at first, until he broke his promise—after nearly one hundred forty years since the last flood, the City of God was in danger of going underwater once again.

Brandani, who had always loved the Apocalypse as his once chance to witness something truly stirring, deep down actually wished for it. It was the young boy who still rode along with him inside, a reckless half-criminal, who so desired it. He wanted to watch that odious city drown, even though it was a place where he’d been born and would probably die alone, struggling in his death throes at the dark end of a hospital ward, at the mercy of the adepts of the religion, the proponents of the official pietas who oversee the passage into the next world. A life, his had been, spent in the vain attempt to mitigate the sensation that he’d long, indeed always, been caught in a trap. Over time he’d developed a razor-edged hatred for all that human and divine stuff that constituted the City, so that now the prospect of watching it sink underwater—under 10 or 12 feet of water, he grimly hoped—would have given him a deranged, self-destructive sense of delight, of ultimate triumph.

‘The millenarian city can go fuck itself, at last some genuine destruction. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m up high, up in the Adobe Clay Valley, the water won’t reach up there . . . There was a time, fifty thousand years ago, when the River apparently ran through there. That’s the reason for all the clay, the ruins of the ancient kilns . . .’

On the Cement Bridge, the train had practically crawled to a halt. It often happened, as if the drivers had been instructed to handle the trains with care, as if they might break them. In what couldn’t have been any more than half a minute, the cars were deluged with a solid wall of rain, and if the River hadn’t been there, just a few yards beneath the bridge, with its dense and impetuous swells, they wouldn’t have been able to see a thing.

At the next station, the people boarding the train were drenched, their folding umbrellas dripping. As they entered the car, they muttered or grumbled phrases as if in search of solidarity and justification for the state they were in. The sense of a looming apocalypse brought people together with their fellow souls who were usually reciprocally chilly and indifferent.

At last Engineer Brandani got out of the train, onto the slush of the rubber flooring in the Piazza of the Imprint Station, and trooped into line for the long escalator that would carry him, steeped in the smell of wet fabric and wet metal, up to the surface. Once out in the open air, he’d have to face up to that wall of water with his old raincoat and a fragile techno-folding umbrella.

Gradually, as he got closer to the surface, Brandani saw people coming downstairs drenched with rain, women with their hair plastered to their foreheads, carrying dripping umbrellas. At the foot of the ramp leading out to the open air, the rubber flooring had become a puddle where the hesitant, the under-equipped, the protectionless mustered and gathered—there weren’t many of them, considering that it had been raining for days—immediately set upon by unlicensed vendors trying to foist off their pinchbeck umbrellas for a relative pittance. From there he could hear and see the water come pelting down in a violent rush, gulped down with difficulty by the grate of the drain under the riser of the first step.

He dodged the street vendors, pulled up his collar and lapels, undid the strap that held his umbrella tightly furled, pushed the button and watched it burst open, spring-loaded, not without a surge of engineer’s delight at its automatic efficiency, and then started quickly up the stairs; he didn’t want to come in late on his first day at work.

But the water pouring out of the sky was too much, he hurried his pace with the result that, when he reached the top of the stairs, he was out of breath. At that moment, it was impossible to cross the piazza on foot. The rain was creating a sort of solid wall and the cars, though they were moving slowly, kicked up sprays as tall as a man—this was no time to try to get across. He cut to one side and took shelter under the portico, meaning to wait for the downpour to slacken.

The semicircular porticoes housed small settlements of homeless people, customary in that part of town because they were drawn into the gravitational field of the nearby Big Train Station which, as is so often the case in all cities, constituted for them the chief reference point, and always had. The Station was certainly a resource for tramps and hobos, perhaps because of the large enclosed public spaces where they were able to find hoboish company, spend their day, eat, panhandle, maybe steal, while at night they could find places to hole up and sleep in the surrounding neighbourhoods. From that immense, beautiful and structurally daring railroad station there had always emanated out into the surrounding city a sordid aura of physical and moral deterioration that made it unpleasant to cross through those spaces, but on that particular day, everything appeared ravaged and seemingly purified by the tepid deluge that was showering down.

That was one of the areas of the City in which one could most unmistakably perceive—it was there in the very name of the subway stop—the footprint of a past that had left substantial and visible traces there, configuring the City’s plan in its semblance. The urban fabric all around there, when it didn’t actually simply leave them in plain sight, incorporated the ruins of the Ancient Empire, ruins that in the city were the object of a veritable cult. A cult celebrated in institutions founded for that purpose, staffed by hundreds of functionaries, employed in tens of thousands of square feet of office space, all of them assigned responsibilities for the maintenance, restoration and ‘exploitation’ of that immense agglo-merate of ruins, for the most part still underground, which constituted the glorious and unforgettable Dead City: ‘unforgettable my ass,’ Brandani would say to himself, because even as a child he had detested the archaeological relics that surfaced everywhere you looked. They were traces of a great power of Antiquity, something that the Living City still boasted about, and which it still considered a source of pride that sank its roots deep in the heart of every single inhabitant, even though all and every cultural link, and possibly the biological ones too, had long since been cut between the living citizenry and those ancient forefathers.

While he was there, waiting for the rain to diminish, Brandani thought back to the words of Enzo Rossetti. Rossetti had some time ago accepted the position of technological director of the Twelfth District and a couple of weeks earlier had told him: ‘Here, it’s like playing tennis . . . Yeah, let me explain. At first you’re just terrified, then when you start to understand a few things, you fool yourself into thinking that you can make and do, manage, control, plan—at that point you tend to relax and think, OK, I can do this. Wrong. You thought you understood. Things are much more complex and dangerous than you ever realized. And just as all this starts to dawn on you mentally, you get the first real missile up your ass . . . What missile? Huh. Hold on. I was telling you that it’s like playing tennis, except that instead of a tennis ball, anything can hit you and you have to react, you have to smash this anything back over the net. It might turn out to actually be a tennis ball, or else a missile, or a hand grenade, a medieval mace-and-chain, a cube of candyfloss. Let me say it again: Anything. And it’s usually against you and it’s dangerous. Maybe it’s a time bomb that actually looks more like a baby doll. If you don’t know what it is, it can blow up in your face when you least expect it. Basically, there are two things you need: unwavering attention plus an assurance against legal risks. Then there’s the whole chapter on the delegates, that is, the politicians. I’m not even turning that page, it’s a book all its own. You’ll see. I’m not trying to frighten you. There are people who wind up even liking it. Look at me, I’ve been in the job for a few years now and I don’t have any intention of quitting—by this point the challenges are something I almost enjoy . . . It’s action, you understand? It has an allure all its own. You’re accustomed to the private sector, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Here if you need money you won’t get it, if you need technicians you won’t get them—you’re on the front line but you’re unarmed. It’s one thing to know it and you can brace yourself mentally, but even so, for the job of Technological Director of a district, the only thing is on-the-job training.’

Under the portico, amid all those people waiting to be able to venture across the street on foot—they all kept a safe distance from the tousled rumpled dirty men, bundled up in rags, who had slept there all night and still lay stretched out on their flattened cardboard boxes, or else sat up smoking a cigarette with their dog curled up at their feet—Brandani took a moment to observe the stress being placed on the piazza’s rainwater-collection-and-dispersal system.

The water was running clean and impetuous along the paving, made up of small basalt cubes that had been scrubbed for days right down to the tiniest cracks, a pavement that now looked reasonably clean, perhaps even too clean, considering the depth of the erosion between one cube and the next. Brandani’s mind, though on the one hand he was filled with worries about his new position, was on the other hand engineerishly occupied with the observation of this entirely exceptional weather event and its consequences.

The rain was pounding the ground furiously and then rushing along the various inclines that had been built with the collection of that very rainwater in mind; the rushing flow did its best to drop down drain grates that had been designed for much smaller capacities and were therefore incapable of gulping it all down. As a result, around each drain grate, large puddles and small lakes began to form, and there the car tires kicked up towering jets of water. Brandani knew perfectly well that the people behind the wheels enjoyed making those sprays.

As he watched in fascination that convulsive blast of rain, the people around him spoke and sympathized in the local parlance. It appeared that they were thinking of themselves as a community once again, that they felt they all belonged to one shared fate. Formulations sprang to their lips along the lines of: We’re all in God’s hands now; sooner or later Mother Nature will have her way. Or, more prosaically: It’s that global warm-up.

Brandani, engineer that he was, knew that if the River had overflowed upstream, it was unlikely to overtop its banks here in the city, provided that they manage to keep the arches of the bridges free of flotsam, provided the water level didn’t rise above the keystone of the Ancestral Bridge, which was low, with three arches and no drain openings. That was certainly dangerous—it constituted the one real problem, the point to keep in mind.

On television, he had seen that in fact, to the north of the city, vast areas of the ancient river valley dating back to the Pleistocene were several yards deep in slimy river water, while the flood plains closer to the densely populated urban areas remained dry. A sign that the time had come? It all depended on a flood bore expected—and feared—to come downstream later than morning or, at the very latest, in the early afternoon of that day. It all depended on how massive the swell proved to be and how much flotsam capable of blocking the bridges it would sweep with it.

Brandani agreed inwardly with himself: ‘Yes, We Are All in God’s Hands Now, even though I’m on the seventh floor and, what’s more, high on a hill . . . Provided, that is, that the downspout of the gutter system finally opens up—right now the drip area is spreading a little too wide. Would I mind seeing this city go underwater? I can’t say . . . Admit it, Brando, you wouldn’t mind a bit. There’ve always been floods and here comes a nice big fat one. And after all, the City deserves it, we deserve it. So we believe in nothing? We don’t give a flying fuck about nothing? Well, then here’s a healthy helping of nothing. It’s on its way. What other city deserves it more than this one, the Eternal City? Will they evacuate us? My district is far away and, most important of all, it’s up high, even though it overlooks the valley of the Little River. That river, sure, it’s a beast, but it has a deep bed and it’s well banked. Oh, certainly, all those shacks along the banks and the garbage tossed down onto the gravel . . . By now all that’s been swept out to sea.’

All the people who had made their homes in the flood plains of the Little River, shacks and shanties thrown together haphazardly with scrap wood, plywood, old doors and new, galvanized sheet metal roofs weighed down with blocks of cement . . . They’d run electric lines down to them, TV sets, all properly installed and organized there, in the midst of the mud, where years ago, while out on a hike, he had seen large red-haired sewer rats perfectly at their ease rummaging through piles of river trash, mountains of stolen roller suitcases discarded down along the gravel banks. The eternal metropolitan rubbish heaps that formed outside his own home, as well. All it took was for the street sweepers and garbage trucks to stop coming, stop cleaning for a couple of nights and anything you care to name started piling up next to the overflowing dumpsters, including clothing to wear and building materials to make a home. He liked seeing the water flow like that—scrubbing the city’s pavements, it carried off all the filth that had accumulated.

‘By now the purifying flood will have swept everything away, so long, it’s been good to know you. Before two months are up, it will all be just as it was along the Little River.’

The automobiles, the buses running the public transportation lines, the taxis had never once stopped going by for an instant, kicking up waves of water as they went. The only difference from the traffic on normal days was the absence of motorcycles and scooters, with the very rare exception of a truly well-equipped motorcyclists, that is, wearing a waterproof jumpsuit covering his feet as well, a full-face helmet, waterproof gloves—motorcycles are motorcycles, they seemed to be saying, they demand dedication, you don’t turn your back on them just because of a little rain.

‘There are always people who play with water, even when there’s too much it, even when there are people left homeless, or drowned, garages and cellars that flood, along with tunnels and underpasses. The city is full of hollows and ravines, the drainage system is clogged up, the sewers are full of leaks, blockages, defects. The shack towns along the Little River, but also the ones to the north of the Rapids on the Big River, have built up over time, ignoring the danger that always looms along the banks of a watercourse: What can have become of them?’

The downpour was starting to subside, but the street was still a rushing torrent and the people sheltering under the porticoes were hesitating. Brandani looked at his watch.

‘The first day of my new job I don’t want to get there too late. But the whole city is in these same conditions. Well then. Years ago, do you remember those people who built themselves that hut on the subway-track escarpment near where you lived, in the midst of the underbrush and saplings that grow up everywhere. There was that insane cloudburst, so powerful that I got my camera out. I was taking pictures of that wall of water that practically cut visibility to zero so you couldn’t see what was around you when I started to notice pieces of wood coming down the slope, like matchsticks in a rivulet, the hut was coming apart under the impact of the flooding, a man and a woman with some children were doing their best to get out of there, a bundle of rags, garbage just melting in the flood. Rudimentary, prehistoric living conditions, in the heart of a major Western city, built in cement, up-to-date, organized, with all its impressive roofs and shingles, rain gutters and downspouts. People who were fleeing the downpour. Drenched children, the traffic on the main road at the base of the escarpment moving along placidly, inside the cars were people who were warm and dry, listening to the radio, making calls on their cell phones, while the primitive hut-dwellers were fleeing the cloudburst and taking shelter under the viaduct, standing on the pavement which at that point might at the most be two, two and a half feet wide, clutching their children close . . . Ah, now I can cross the street.’

He reopened his umbrella, once again enjoying the click and the snap, and joined the group of pedestrians on the zebra crossing trying to make their way to the far side of the street. They constituted a critical mass and the traffic came to a halt to let them get across. At this point all he had to do was head up the street that cut through the middle of the Great Ruin. Divarication Street, along which Engineer Brandani was now walking briskly, sidestepping one puddle after the other, trying not to drench his pants legs and his shoes, had been given that name because instead of coming to a respectful halt in the presence of the majesty and complexity of the Ruin, it brashly ran through it from one end to the other, splitting it in two, revealing in cross-section its powerful structure, revealing the dozens and dozens of rooms, by now stripped of roofs and vaults, that constituted it, some of those rooms large enough to contain a modern block of flats, others smaller, but all of them with a primary shape that remained autonomous with respect to the adjoining space. Squares, circles and apsidal semicircles, linear galleries, porticoes and cryptoportici, lengthy lines of rooms, all apparently windowless. It had been years since he last took these pavements on foot, in fact, he might very well have never walked on them at all, and so he observed the walls of bricks and rain-black rubble, interrupted by what seemed to be ancient collapses, or perhaps intentional caesurae carved out by the Living City to make way through the viscera of the Dead City. On the pavements and on the stone parapets overlooking the deep archaeological ditches he saw drenched traces of homelessness, layers of water-soaked cardboard laid out on the ground as a pallet, abandoned tin cans, filth and human shit that the pouring rain had swept away and almost deleted, but only in the areas directly exposed to the downpour. He walked past a couple of niches reduced to genuine and full-fledged latrines, the bricks coated and corroded by the yellow patina of urine, the stone pavement smeared with shit: he clamped his nostrils shut with his free hand and accelerated his pace.

‘Tomorrow I’ll take the opposite pavement.’

Suddenly it dawned on him that this was already territory under his jurisdiction, that is, it belonged to that Eighth Urban District of which he was accepting the post of techno-director. ‘This is a veritable latrine . . . We’ll have to find a solution . . .’ The idea that he had a say in how to handle such a vast physical stretch of the city gave him a strange sensation of unease (‘will I be up to it?’), but also of satisfaction (‘at last I can get my hands into something concrete’). In fact, more than a feeling of satisfaction, Brandani felt an urge to do, to intervene and improve. With regard to those places, he no longer had the status of an ordinary citizen who approves/disapproves, who praises/condemns: he could take concrete initiatives for which he would assume complete responsibility.

Divarication Street, after carving itself a breach through that massive and massively ancient imperial complex, literally ripping it limb from limb, pushed off into a section of the city that Brandani knew dated back more or less a hundred years.

‘Here, no doubt about it, there must already be the jurisdiction of the Superintendency over the Patrimony . . .’

The urban fabric here had a repetitive regularity that had been imposed a century earlier by planners and architects steeped in Masonic geometry and rationality, but over time that clarity and cleanliness had been altered by the proximity of the Big Station, whose gravitational force emanated a certain soupçon of sordidness, like some veil of moral opacity drawn over the entire neighbourhood.

‘Ugly. That is, beautiful but ugly.’

Buildings in bad shape, or barely restored, for office use, streets empty of pedestrians, everywhere pedestrian barriers and mass transit lanes down which large buses roar, striped with dirt-streaked rain, no-parking and one-way signs, electronics stores, model and hobby stores, Bangladeshi emporiums, dimly lit ethnic restaurants and everywhere enormous puddles marking clogged sections of the sewer system. Down the enfilades of those streets, running at strictly perpendicular angles, jutted out the numerous signs of hotels and pensiones and bed-and-breakfasts, all more-or-less seedy and rundown, two stars or three stars at the most.

As he was walking briskly along those pavements, trying to dodge the torrential rivulets rushing down parallel to the building facades from broken rain gutters, he was struck by the appearance of the bars he was passing: they were all small and dreary, dirty-looking, the furnishings dating back to previous and now obsolete phases of modernity. Compelled by necessity to go into one of these to take a pee, he ordered an espresso and asked to use the bathroom. Someone gave him the keys and pointed him to a narrow and almost vertical flight of stairs. He descended cautiously, but that didn’t keep him from slamming his forehead straight into the corner of the intrados of a spine wall, hard and cold and painful. Clamping his hands to his cranium, he continued down the stairs until he reached a dark cubbyhole of a bathroom devoid of toilet paper and hand towels, piled high with cafe equipment and buckets full of floor rags. He rinsed his forehead, cursing all the while, and then dried it with his raincoat sleeve.

Once he returned to street level, he gulped down a bitter espresso, while the pain still throbbed strong, paid at a cash register almost entirely hemmed in by tall display cases crowded with chewing-gum-candy mints-sweets-pastry snack-batteries-razors-etc., to the point that the money had to be thrust through a sort of canyon no wider than a foot or so, at the far end of which sat the supreme indifference of a withered old cashier.

‘Decadence . . . There was a time, say, thirty years ago, when this cafe was newly built. It was doing well back then, certainly not now. That is, I doubt it. And anyway, a sign saying Watch Your Head right there wouldn’t have hurt. Unless they’re doing it on purpose: You’re going to bust my balls about how you need to pee? You’re going to force me to hand over the keys to the restroom? Then go ahead on down and split your skull open.’

In the meantime, it continued to rain cats and dogs.

There it was, at Number 87, an oversized late-nineteenth-century palazzo, dirty and dark. ‘Palpable decadence. Of course, what else would you expect?’

His small collapsible umbrella hadn’t done much to protect him, so when he walked through the front door of the Eighth District, it was with his shoes full of water and the hems of his trousers thoroughly drenched. He was in the throes of a sort of perceptual redoubling: he saw himself from within and without at the same time, it happened whenever he was under extreme stress.

Just inside the large ground-floor door, the atrium floor was scattered with wet sawdust, and a little further on there was a twin-panelled glass door, spring-loaded, with push handles, which led to a staircase covered with a thin layer of well-trodden, smeared mud.

‘Human feet, humanoid feet, primate feet, dirt-bringing feet, the modified hands of quadrumans that became bipeds, millions of years to get to this atrium . . .’; when Brandani split in two, part of his mind went on spinning, freewheeling.

At the centre of the staircase a large tubular handrail separated the flow of those who were transiting through there, until the lift. The walls were covered with dusty bulletin boards full of notices on legal- and letter-sized paper, but there were other notices attached directly to the wall with pieces of scotch tape. Some were handwritten, others were half torn off, others were old and yellowed, while others still were enormous, with various academic and civil-service competitions announced in large black letters. The lift was as wide as a single person, it reeked of wet wool. A fairly young woman had entered the lift ahead of him, carrying a file box bursting with documents contained in small pink and yellow folders.

The minute Brandani got in, the woman pushed a button. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor and said to him: ‘Everything all right? The harvest later. Do you know Mamma? How are the manners?’

She was wearing a very dirty windbreaker. On her feet were a pair of high-heeled sandals, the heel of the foot left bare at the back, and she looked strangely tan. The lift stopped at the fourth floor. The woman pushed him aside with a good hard shove, then opened the doors, exited the car, and left without shutting them behind her.

On the fifth floor, immediately outside the lift, there was a glass booth and inside it was a counter piled high with forms. From a clear plastic skylight came a loud noise of falling rain. Next to the glass booth, in front of a large dirty, dinged-up air conditioner on wheels, was what he assumed to be an usher. He was an old man in bad shape, in a rumbled baby-blue grisaille tweed suit under a safety yellow emergency vest, and a baseball hat with the emblem of the Rolling Stones. He was sitting in a partially reclining position, his legs sticking out into the hallway, his feet in two silvery rubber shoes that sat in the dampness of a marbled tile floor.

The usher saw him and shouted: ‘Ye-e-es, what is i-i-it?’ Brandani replied that he was the new Man in Charge.

‘Aah!! Buongiorno, Dottó. Aah! I’m the usher, here!’

He talked in a blasting loud voice, laughing and displaying a strange choir of teeth, each separated from its neighbour by a wide space. There were deep dark circles under his eyes. As he looked Engineer Brandani up and down, one of his eyes seemed to be going off on some trajectory all its own, in a strange involuntary winking sequence. He went on shrilling: ‘Dottó! I’m done here, I’m retiring at the end of June!’

A woman went past, an office worker with an armful of files and the usher yawped: ‘Hey go-o-orgeous . . . I’m done here! I’m retiring at the end of Ju-u-u-une!’

The woman didn’t even look in his direction, just went on walking as she said: ‘Yes, Carmelo, I know. You’re leaving, that’s what you’ve been saying for ten years now. Stop shouting . . . it’s early, it’s nine in the morning, it’s been raining all week, and I’ve already got a splitting headache . . .’

‘Engineer, the situation here is complicated, you’ll have a chance to realize that for yourself . . . We don’t have much staff, they’re relatively unqualified, very few resources, very little cash. I’m giving you a rapid update because this morning I have to leave, I have some personal time off . . . And with these resources we have to do everything. This year in our budget, they’ve given us practically half of the money we got last year. What’s more, we don’t have the contract for the maintenance of the school buildings . . . I don’t have time now, if you need to know more you should be able to talk to the surveyor Marcotulli . . . Ah, no, he asked me for the day off today . . . Oh well, we’ll talk to over tomorrow, if that’s all right with you . . . The Man in Charge is you now, you’ll need to know the way things are around here . . . But I can’t report to you on that myself, like I told you, I have some time off . . .’

Technician First Class Proietti stood up and left, leaving Ivo, baffled, to look out at the rain pelting down outside the window panes, propped up at his executive desk, with a faux-printed wood-veneer finish (quite a good imitation), perched on an executive office chair in fake leather (quite a good imitation), a chair whose only defect was the back rest, which tilted backwards at the slightest pressure, each time making him feel as if he were fainting. The mental doubling continued, Brandani was stunned, he felt suddenly sleepy, he kept yawning. His forehead, after the smack it had taken on the basement steps of that little cafe, was aching.

‘Can I come in? What did you do to your forehead, Engineer?’

It was Cinzia, the secretary of the outgoing director. That one time they’d met, his predecessor had spoken highly of her, had recommended he keep her on, and had even left in his office a couple of large cartons sealed with packing tape.

‘Oh, right. I banged my head on the ceiling . . . I was going down a staircase . . . It’s nothing . . . Does it really show?’

‘No, it’s just a little red . . . Now then, you’re expected at noon in the Ar Bee . . . RB means restricted board . . . The technician Basile is in the waiting room, he says it’s urgent . . . There are a great many things I need to bring you up to speed on, Engineer, but we’ll have time . . . Now it seems that there’s an emergency . . .’

She didn’t have time to finish the sentence before three people entered the room, practically at a dead run.

‘Ah, here we are, Technician Basile . . . Basile, don’t we knock first?’

‘Forget about that, Cinzia . . . Forgive me, Engineer, but there are a few problems . . .’

He was a powerfully built stout little man, energetic, ramrod straight, who moved quickly and spoke in a raucous, determined voice, as if he were pissed off at someone. Of the other two men, one was tall and strapping, in his early fifties, while the other was short and skinny, with a salt-and-pepper beard. They introduced themselves: they belonged to the Maintenance Unit. Then Technician Basile went on.

‘We’re in bad shape, Engineer, the world’s going to hell out there, everything’s underwater, we’re being overwhelmed with phone calls, the streets are turning into ponds at the points where the storm drains are backing up . . . We have three schools that are leaking like sieves. There are problems with the downpipes and the outlet drains. They’re either blocked up or they’re broken. At the Di Ruscio school there’s an even more serious problem—the waterproofing on the roof has failed at several points, there’s too much water coming down and it’s starting to leak. We’ve had to take two classrooms out of use . . . Piazza of the Intercession looks like a lake, there’s actually water coming up out of the drains, it’s mixed with sewer water, somehow, by some miracle, the traffic police have managed to reroute traffic, there are traffic jams miles long. This morning, we even had a death: a young man on a motorcycle who skidded out of control in a puddle over near the Station . . . From downstairs we’re starting to get the usual pressure . . . Marcotulli and Proietti aren’t in today. We need directives, we need to establish priorities. Engineer, now the man in charge—the one who’s responsible now—is you, understood?’

‘What kind of pressure?’

‘Well, when there are problems concerning the larger territory, the Delegates get complaints from the citizens and they dump them on us first thing, as if it was the easiest thing to solve all the different emergencies in one clean sweep . . . The weather’s been like this for ten days now. It was obvious we were going to wind up underwater . . . All the other districts are in the same shape as we are, with the difference that we . . .’ He broke off and pointed out the window: ‘Just look at that, Engineer.’

Brandani looked out and saw a blank wall of water coming down unbroken from a sky that was a uniform lightless dark grey.

‘You were saying? What difference?’

‘The difference is that this year we haven’t subcontracted the maintenance of the buildings and we’re running out of money for the maintenance of public spaces . . .’

‘Which means?’

‘Which means, Engineer . . . that we can’t do anything about the schools . . . And out in the streets we can only deal with the very worst cases . . .’

Brandani couldn’t seem to concentrate, he kept getting distracted, the strangest things kept popping into his head, more than listening he was studying his interlocutors: ‘Technician Basile’s breath reeks of soup from 6 feet away,’ he thought. Then he said: ‘You’re telling me that there are schools being flooded and we can’t do anything about it?’

‘Exactly, Engineer. We can’t do anything by standard procedure. We’d need to assign projects on a special urgent basis, without any prior spending budget . . . Are you ready to do that?’

‘Which school is in worst shape?’

‘The Di Ruscio school, no doubt about it. But if it goes on like this, the others are going to be in the same shape before long. The alternative is to shut them down. Now you’re in charge, you’re responsible, are you ready for this?’

Brandani raised his eyes to the ceiling. He didn’t know what to answer. He remembered almost nothing about emergency procedures. He noticed a vast stain of yellowish dampness, and noticed that right at the centre of the stain a few drops were glistening.

Following the engineer’s glance, Technician Basile turned around, saw the patch of dampness on the ceiling, and said that there were leaks everywhere in that building too. The other two technicians both nodded their heads yes.

The engineer said nothing, then looked over at Cinzia sitting beside him. He must have had a quizzical expression on his face because she jutted her chin defiantly and said coldly: ‘Engineer, you’re responsible.’

‘She isn’t pretty and she isn’t ugly, neither tall nor short, likable nor unlikable, not a slob and not especially well groomed, her tits aren’t big or small . . .’ thought Brandani, distracted, still completely bewildered and beside himself, as if he’d just smoked a joint minutes ago. The last one actually dated back a good thirty years, roughly. He yawned and said: ‘All right, Basile . . . thanks. But at least in the streets there’s something we can do, or not?’

‘Fuck, we’re doing it,’ said the tall strapping man while the skinny one nodded. ‘The company is doing what it can, but we only have the resources we have. Fuck, there’s only a few workers we can rely on, the situation is what it is: we’re doing everything we can . . . The company is complaining about delays in payment. Fuck, Engineer, it’s been months since the Accounting Office has issued an authorization . . . It’s not our fault but it’s got these guys’ balls tied in a knot, they’re pissed off, they’re working on expenses, which is to say, they’re not doing much of a job . . . If you could talk to them, that would be better. You’re the Man in Charge, now, they’re surely going to take you more seriously than they do us. You should also talk to those fucking dickheads in Central Accounting, light a fire under their . . .’

At that point, Cinzia put in: ‘Forgive him, Engineer, he only knows how to talk like a sailor . . .’

The out-of-body half of Brandani thought: ‘If you want to see who knows more curse words, fatso, you’ve come to the right place.’ The half that was still there in the room said nothing.

The only thing that had stuck with him out of that whole conversation was that outdoors there was one huge mess and he was now responsible. He said they’d return to the discussion in the early afternoon. As the technicians were leaving, Cinzia reminded him that in a few minutes he was expected downstairs for the RC of the Delegates.

‘What does it mean to be responsible?’ he wondered. ‘Does it mean you have to give a response? No, it means someone who has to respond for his actions concerning something. In fact, he’s answerable. He’s someone who is asked a number of questions, and is required to respond. He’s the one who takes the blame for everyone else, even if he doesn’t know anything about it, has nothing to do with it, just showed up . . . He’s the one whose ass they kick because it’s the only ass they have to kick. There’s someone responsible for everything, Brandani, it’s tough shit now, you’ve entered the chain of public responsibilities. The golden age of private enterprise is over. In private enterprise you talk to other people like you, technicians who can understand you, here you’re dealing with politicians . . . They’ll skin you alive and hang out your hide, over the front entrance, Brandani . . .’

Outside it was pouring down, the traffic had come to a complete halt, the horns were blaring, the sirens of ambulances caught in the traffic jam were wailing continuously. He got up, looked out of the window, saw two pigeons on the cornice of the building across the street, their feathers puffed up in the cold, huddling close together. ‘Lucky them, no one expects anything of them. They’re free to live and die as they please . . .’

Just then, Cinzia rushed in and said, breathlessly: ‘The River’s overflowed, Engineer, down by the Ancestral Bridge . . . That’s what I hear . . .’

‘So this is it,’ thought the out-of-body half of Brandani.

‘Is there a television set?’

‘Yes, in that cabinet. The keys are in the desk drawer.’

It wasn’t true. The local TV news, which had been broadcasting without interruption since that morning, was reporting on overflows into the floodplains of the Little River, areas covered with shanties and shacks: the gypsy camps along the gravel riverbeds had been swept away by the high water. The correspondents were standing on bridges, their backs to a river swollen beyond belief, you could see people clustering along the parapets gazing incredulously down at all that water rushing headlong towards the sea, its surface dense, mud-coloured, shuddering and twisting with ripples and regurgitations and whirlpools, like a mollusc shell. The television correspondents were talking about ‘apprehension’, ‘constant monitoring of the water level’, saying that the flood wave, the real one, hadn’t even gone past yet, they were saying it was expected around two in the afternoon, they were broadcasting a crane at work to unjam a boat that had got caught under the already normally narrow arches of the Ancestral Bridge, they were also saying that the situation had been ‘taken in hand’ by the National Emergency Protection Agency, which by this point had claimed jurisdiction over both the municipal authorities and the river-basin authority. They showed maps of flood risk in the city, experts were deciphering the meaning of those graphics for the home audience, doing their best not to spread alarm, but it was abundantly clear that the whole area around the Pagan Temple, if the river did overflow its banks, would wind up under 10 feet of water, if not more.

‘Cinzia, are we responsible for the overflow areas of the Little River?’ Brandani asked, aghast.

‘No, Engineer, not you—as far as I know the River Basin Authority has always been in charge of that, but if you like I can inquire. Now it’s time to head down to the RB. I found you a notepad to write on.’ Then she added: ‘You should look into getting insurance to take care of potential legal advice and defence. I made an appointment for you tomorrow morning with the company set up for these things, I’ll go with you. Probably best to start an insurance policy immediately, don’t you think? All the District technical directors do it. Trust me, it’s the best thing . . . While you’re downstairs, I’ll put together a file with all the pieces of paper . . .’

Brandani still needed to fully process all the water that he had drunk that morning the minute he woke up, while still lying flat in his bed, until his belly was full. It was a way to placate the anxiety of the day that awaited him. The restrooms on that floor greeted him with marbled beige porcelain. He set his foot down on a round drain cover meant to catch spillage from the sinks and it skipped across the floor, leveraged out of its collar because it had been poorly seated. Brandani, still using his foot, did his best to put it back in place, but there it remained, off-kilter. The restroom was lit by a dim fluorescent light. Not only was there no toilet paper but there wasn’t even a toilet-paper holder. ‘Whoever built this restroom doesn’t clean their ass,’ thought Brandani before noticing the newspaper wedged between the drainpipe and the wall. Black spurts of dried shit embroidered the inner lip of the toilet, while the outer rim was covered with footprints and a little cigarette ash. ‘They stand on it and use it as a latrine, one of these days they’re going to shatter the porcelain.’

But once he stepped out of the stall to wash his hands, he was forced to admit that the liquid soap dispenser was full, even if the paper-towel dispenser was empty. Cigarette ash in the sink: the bathroom was a secret hideaway for people sneaking a smoke, as was the case in any office anywhere.

‘At least put an ashtray in here,’ the engineer made a mental note to himself, ‘these disgusting conditions need to change, I want clean, fully equipped restrooms, by God . . .’ He felt once again a strange sensation of strength, he was thrilled by the idea that it was within his power to order the improvement of those places and the material things that occupied them, and therefore both the streets of the District and the restrooms of its offices: physical deterioration had always stirred a state of impotent fury in him. For years, he had been reciting an old axiom of his: ‘The only duty we have as men is to combat against chaos with the rationality of form, defy the deterioration and desuetude of time.’

The main stairs were inundated with the water that was leaking in great abundance from above, where there was a roof in transparent Plexiglas, and which resonated like a drum under the raindrops. The intermediate landing between the fifth and fourth floors was drenched. ‘We ought to do something about that, too . . . But for now, better take the lift, even if it’s only for one floor.’

In the hallway, a skinny young man, wearing glasses, was walking towards them. As he walked, he wobbled strangely, as if he was having difficulties with his motor skills, his neck kept twisting continuously to one side, making him bend his head and lift his chin, forcing him to look at things sideways. ‘Here’s Collotorto, a born traitor . . .’ Brandani thought to himself, though he’d never seen him or met him before in his life. The name Collotorto meant ‘twisted neck’, and it was perhaps the Italian equivalent of Uriah Heep, falsehood personified.

The young man went through a glass door with push handles, reached the stairs, looked down and went back to the lift, which they then took together. Collotorto looked to him like any of the many handicapped people—or ‘disabled’, or ‘differently abled’, according to the politically correct terminology, or, as Mother would once have called them, ‘unfortunates’—who populated the offices of the Governorship. Instead, Collotorto, for the ten seconds of time in which they coexisted in that all-too-confined space, uttered several observations that were perfectly sensible, reasonable and well informed, concerning the massive downpour, and then said goodbye with courtesy and a sort of chilly and treacherous nonchalance, as he was leaving that cubicle of glass and anodized black aluminium, all scratched up with graffiti of tiny cocks and balls, out of which you could see the filthy wet stairs.

The dwarf in charge of the fourth-floor lobby sat sunk deep in an armchair in a room filled with furniture—old armchairs in a diarrhoea-brown Naugahyde. There was also a large black table with carved lion-pawed legs, the kind you used to see in lawyers’ and notaries’ offices many decades earlier. The dwarf’s eyes were strange, shiny and violently blue. His puffy face had a smile plastered onto it.

Ivo inquired about the RB, and the dwarf pointed him to a pebbled glass door, on a spring. He entered, walked down a hallway and reached the RB secretariat, where a young woman with very long, smooth, shiny hair was staring at a television with the sound turned low, which was broadcasting a news report on the flooding river. She looked away from the set for a second, greeted him with a smile and cordially invited him to enter the adjacent room.

Brandani opened the door, stepped across the threshold and immediately shook hands with five people sitting at a round table, though he was unable to actually see their faces. Still, before sitting down, he did have time to notice that not far from the window there was a puddle of water mixed with sawdust, a bucket and a rag: the walls of the room were a bright salmon pink.

They introduced themselves: there was the Chairman of the Delegates, the Delegate for Culture and Schools, and the Delegate for Transportation and the Environment—these last two were women—and the Delegate for Public Works and the Territory. There was also a Delegate for Social Welfare.

While the chairman was reading the agenda for that day’s meeting, everyone carefully scrutinized the new arrival, like fisher-men who’d found a strange fish in their net and were wondering, So what are you exactly? Are you good to eat?

‘I’m under a scanner,’ thought the half of Brandani that was present in the meeting, while the other half worried about the origin of the water on the floor.

Outside, the splattering noise of that downpour straight out of the Pleistocene continued, constant and intense.

The chairman, who was a large, imposing man, smiled cordially, owning the room, dominating in particular the delegates, male and female, all of average height or less, and a woman who sat to one side, taking minutes on a notepad in her hands.

‘The first order of business today is the mismanagement and inefficiencies of the Technical Unit, both in the face of the emergency and in ordinary administration,’ the chairman began, ‘but in the meantime allow me to greet the new director, Engineer Brandani. On this point, the Delegate for Public Works and the Territory will report to us.’

‘Yes, now then. Let me begin by saying that I expected that as soon as the engineer arrived, he would have made a round of introductions, so that the delegates could get to know him. But that’s not something he did. Oh, well, better luck next time . . .’

Brandani started to reply but the delegate, a small, smartly dressed man with a piping nasal voice, waved him off with one hand.

‘Please, let me continue, afterwards you’ll have all the time . . . Having said this, I should add that we’re very dissatisfied with the work done by the Technical Unit, at least the work done in the past year. Flooded roads, potholes, accidents, defective maintenance, new work poorly done, early deterioration, complaints from the citizenry, storm drains backing up, pedestrian safety railings knocked down, flooded basements . . . We’re facing various lawsuits that we’re bound to lose, we’re going to have to indemnify, those are funds we could have used in other ways . . . And till now I’ve only talked about the streets. The problem of the school buildings is even more serious. For days we’ve been getting reports on flooding in various schools, at the Di Ruscio school there are two classrooms that they’ve had to stop using for lessons, they just teach those classes in the hallways now. The parents call us up and they’re furious. Broken windows, defects in the electric wiring, the heating, even the phone systems, the intercoms . . .’

The delegate went on methodically listing shortcomings, in a whiny, punctilious voice. He was doing his job and every now and then would look over at the chairman as if expecting a gesture of appreciation, but it wasn’t to be. In fact, before long the chairman’s cell phone rang; he answered, stood up and quickly left the room.

Brandani, who had already been having trouble following what the man was saying for the past several minutes, suddenly felt a surge of panic rising inside him; he was flooded with a profound and ancestral sense of guilt. It was like a regurgitation of Original Sin that produced a flush of heat and then a cold sweat that started dripping down into the middle of his chest, into the hollow of his sternum between what had once been his pectorals: ‘These people have it in for me, because I’m now the Man in Charge!’

As he was reaching into his inner jacket pocket for his wallet, where he kept a blister pack of anti-anxiety pills, he told himself it was time to fight back: ‘Keep calm, Brando, don’t forget that you’ve been here for two and a half hours, all this stuff, all these shortcomings, negligence etc., can’t be blamed on you, you realize that, right? Not even the flooding, nothing—but nothing, I say.’

He continued this thought process aloud, saying: ‘Yes, Delegate, we’ll try to take care of matters as soon as possible, but for that matter, as you’ll surely understand, I can’t really be up to speed on the situation yet . . .’

‘Engineer, let me finish . . . Excuse me, but haven’t your technicians briefed you yet?’

‘Yes and no. Proietti, I believe is his name, is on leave. The other one, who’s in charge of schools . . . Marcotulli? Right, Marcotulli is on holiday. Technician Basile did tell me a few things, but on the run . . .’

‘What? With the mess we have on our hands, you let them go on holiday, on leave? We aren’t beginning at all well, Engineer . . .’

‘It’s not as if I let them go on holiday, Delegate. Let me remind you . . .’ His voice quavered slightly, bitterly, betraying the panic that was starting to flood through him. ‘I-got-here-today . . . If someone signed holiday requests and days off for today, that someone wasn’t and cannot possibly have been me . . .’

‘If that makes you happy . . . Let me be crystal clear, Engineer. Starting today you are the Man in Charge in this agency, and so you’re answerable for it. I don’t want to seem brutal to you, but if things aren’t going well, you are the one who can expect to be held to account for it. Any member of this organization, inside or outside of the office, reports to you. To be even clearer, if something grave happens, you can expect to be hauled into court . . .’

Brandani was struggling to contain his panic, his armpits dripping with sweat. He was frightened, tense, irritated. The others sat silently and gazed at him with a very effective expression that conveyed many things and all at the same time: ‘Who even knows you?’, ‘Sure, we were laying an ambush for you, and now you’ve walked into that ambush, what the fuck do you want to do about it?’, ‘What kind of fish are you?’, ‘We don’t trust you, don’t deceive yourself, you won’t be getting any special treatment’, ‘You’re in our hands now, you’ll answer for every act you take.’

But all in all, what Brandani—mute, by now completely overwhelmed by the surge of panic, hoping against hope for the anxiety pills to kick in—saw in all those gazes was something that struck him as unmistakably evident: ‘We are mediocre & nasty. To us, you’re no better than anyone else. Don’t trust anyone in here.’

The summation and diatribe against the Technical Unit—called for on the agenda as intimidation, pure and simple, for the incoming director (since the outgoing director had left several days ago and was now living the high life in some central office equipped with clean bathrooms complete with toilet paper and powerful electric hand dryers)—continued with the various speeches of the individual delegates.

The Delegate for Schools, a woman who was endowed with a blond and savagely curly head of hair, reiterated point by point what had already been said, adding that this was a simply unacceptable state of affairs. Brandani’s objection that no one had made a proper request for bids on the school maintenance work at the appropriate time fell on deaf ears: the potshots continued. The Delegate for the Environment and Transportation, a dark-haired woman wearing a grunge sweater, complained about the fact that the streets were literally underwater and that no one had done anything. She also turned a deaf ear to Brandani’s objection concerning the entirely exceptional nature of the weather event currently underway, a downpour that was abundantly outstripping the capacity calculated for the existing storm drain system. It served no purpose to offer the example of a faucet left all the way open and a sink that, even with the drain open, would eventually inevitably overflow: the delegates were politicians, each of them had to play their role as a politician. There was a certain logic to that. Beside himself and irritated though he might be, Brandani understood that. They were telling him: technical explanations and administrative considerations are of no interest to us, we don’t understand them, they don’t fall within our jurisdiction, all we care about are results and results are what we want to see immediately. The Delegate for Safety was strangely gentler than the others, saying that he didn’t want to give the new arrival the impression that they were heaping blame on him for things that hadn’t been his responsibility, even though in the end he reiterated the concept: Brandani was the new Man in Charge, and therefore . . . (he needed to get things under control).

At last, the anti-anxiety pill he’d dissolved under his tongue took effect and the two divergent Brandanis, who had each been following separate trajectories since early that morning, began to chemically converge, until they were once again one Brandani.

That one Brandani began to wriggle out of the death grip, defending himself with words and glances, but to no discernible effect because, in the meantime, the thing he had feared was happening, his panic was being replaced by a drop in blood sugar. For that matter, it was already 2.35 in the afternoon and none of those present were giving any sign of wanting anything to eat.

For Brandani the first low-blood-sugar sweats were already beginning but the delegates seemed unfazed, they weren’t hungry.

‘They must have had a late breakfast, that’s why they aren’t hungry . . .’ the engineer was just thinking when the secretary with the shiny smooth hair threw the door open and cried: ‘She’s gone!’

‘Certainly, the chairman left, he had an appointment,’ the Delegate for Interventions said promptly.

The secretary replied in something approaching a scream: ‘No, no . . . the River! She came over her banks at Ancestral Bridge!’

In the adjoining room someone had turned up the sound on the television set. Everyone leapt to their feet, hurried out of the salmon-pink room and clustered in front of the set.

Brandani started to get to his feet, but he felt weak, his hands were shaking.

He pulled out a box of liquorice and tossed a handful into his mouth: that would help him to get over his low blood sugar. He sat there listening through the open door to the special edition of the television news broadcast. The throttled voice of the correspondent was betraying great emotion.

‘. . . the River overflowed its banks at twelve minutes after two this afternoon on a line with the Ancestral Bridge, spilling over the parapets with a sudden rise in water level that may perhaps have been attributable to the damming effect produced by the bridge itself once the water rose above the tops of the arches . . . Ten or so minutes ago, when the water level began to look threatening, there was a general rush to get away from the banks . . . The people clustering along the parapets began to run, in haste and hurry we moved our broadcasting location to the terrace of a school not far from the Bridge, which is where this footage now reaches you from . . . It is an apocalyptic sight . . . A horrifying mass of water is spilling over into the narrow lanes of the ancient city, devastating and overwhelming everything in its path . . . We now repeat, for anyone who may have just tuned in: the River has overflowed its banks only on the side of the left parapet—looking downstream—and it’s flooding the City . . . Such a thing hasn’t happened in a hundred and forty years, that is, since the construction of the stone embankments . . . The City of God, which has experienced devastating flooding in the past, felt certain it could never again be hit so brutally, but instead . . . We saw cars literally swept along by the rush of water and slammed one into the other . . . Down there is a heap of cars, forming a sort of dam and worsening the situation in this street, where the water level has risen almost to the second floor . . . The vans with our technical equipment are also about to be submerged, we don’t know how much longer we will be able to continue broadcasting . . . We’ve watched as people were swept away by this murderous mixture of mud and water, the whirlpools are powerful and violent . . . There are people clinging desperately to street lamps, traffic lights, they’re shouting in terror . . . You can still hear people crying for help, shouts from the street below, from the ground floor rooms, from the basements . . . Unfortunately, right now no one can do anything . . . We have seen many vanish beneath the surface of the water in just seconds, flailing without being able to find anything to hold onto . . . No one, I repeat no one, can do anything for the . . . scrr . . . Our line has been cut off, we now resume broadcasting from our studios located to the north of the City, quite close to the banks of the River . . . There does not appear to be any immediate danger here, but we are moving to our upper floors all of the most important equipment that will allow us to go on broadcasting in case the embankments give way . . .’

Brandani felt his blood sugar starting to regain altitude, but he still stayed sitting where he was, amid those bright salmon-pink walls, as he detected a muffled agitation coming from the room next door.

‘The City’s going underwater, Brandani. Do you care? Can you say that you really care? No, eh? As for you all, You’ll never take me alive.’

He decided to pop another 1-millimetre Xanax under his tongue.