10.14 a.m.

Outside the plate-glass windows, there they are, the aeroplanes. He’s moved, getting comfortable on a seat in the first row to be able to see everything conveniently. If the Egyptair flight is on time, he has an hour to wait, but his aeroplane hasn’t appeared on the landing field yet, it hasn’t been announced on the display yet, the gate is still deserted.

Why are aeroplanes so beautiful?

It’s a question that’s been occupying his mind for many years, ever since his class in aesthetics, when Professor Cremaschi made the distinction between form and conformation, between aesthetic intentionality and dis-intentionality. Faded notions, of which nothing now remains but some sediment that’s settled to the bottom of his earlier mind, once ancient and philosophical, by now almost entirely overwritten by the subsequent, not always victorious, engineering mind. In all this time—the years he’s devoted to becoming at all costs a structural engineer, a maker of bridges, only to find himself now, at his career’s end, working as a construction-site consultant for a major developer in the North of the Peninsula—he’s toyed incessantly with the concept of technical form. It doesn’t strike him as complicated, it’s been clear to him from the very start, that is from the day he heard it set forth by Cremaschi: ‘Have you ever opened the rear-engine compartment of a Fiat 500? You have? Good. Well, that’s technical form. You may like what you see or you may not, but it wasn’t built for you to like it, that is, with an aesthetic outcome in mind, as is the case with the bodywork. Under the lid of that rear-engine compartment, what you’re looking at is something designed and built only for its technical function, which is to give power to the engine, with no aesthetic intention whatsoever. Or almost none.’ Of course, what counted was that almost.

Almost, Professor? Why didn’t I stick with my studies of philosophy? Why did I think I needed to be an engineer? What were you thinking? Have you forgotten about the Firth of Forth Bridge? Have you forgotten that afternoon? The only clear-minded afternoon in your whole life, Brando . . . Clara asleep in the car, the cold, that gigantic structure, way up high, above your head . . .

‘I said “almost” because, if you carefully observe the individual components of the Fiat 500’s engine, here and there you’ll glimpse intentions of form and not merely technical conformation: the carburettor casing, the Bakelite distributor cap and so forth. Whoever designed these components had a certain margin for manoeuvre—limited, admittedly, but nonetheless—and made certain arbitrary choices, which we can only describe as aesthetic. Careful, now, this is important: here, by “arbitrary choices”, we mean choices that are of no interest as far as the principal function, which remains technical, is concerned.’

Well, Cremaschi was right. But in that case, how should I think about an aeroplane’s beauty? Ours, in fact, has just arrived. It’s one of those Boeings made of a composite material, a 787, built in a single piece, or almost. They weigh less, they have better fuel economy, but there were problems with the prototypes . . . Seven-eight-seven stands for ‘July 8, 2007’, the date set for the first flight, but those poor suckers weren’t done in time, as usual the schedule was too tight: the first flight was delayed practically two years, that is, until late 2009 . . . Who can say how many heads rolled in that situation, too? The wings are too long and thin for my liking, actually, but by now that’s the way things are being done: it seems to save fuel . . . It’s not stopping here, that isn’t my plane after all . . . This one isn’t heading for the City of God, and in fact it looked too big . . . Blue tail unit, blue engines . . . A handsome blue . . . But the picture of the god Horus, I’m not sure that would have been my first choice . . . Is that Horus? I think it is . . . I’ve always thought that the Egyptian gods are unlucky, that all of ancient Egypt is bad luck, starting with Him, the Unnameable One.

Depressingly, he touches his balls through the sweat-soaked linen. It’s an involuntary gesture, something he does whenever Tutankhamen’s name is mentioned, or say the city of Samarkand. Just the thought of such things prompts the act. He claims he doesn’t even believe in such things, but he does it, all the same. It’s an infection he caught from an old friend, a classmate back in university. He too said he didn’t believe in it, he’d grab his balls and laugh: but you can never be too safe. As a little boy, Ivo had listened to a radio drama based on the discovery of the Unnameable One’s tomb, and what later happened to the discoverers. He still remembers the archaeologists’ whispers of astonishment, and the way they echoed in the grotto of that accursed tomb. And then there was the movie about the mummy, the curse of the mummy that awakens and roams through the night, dragging after it its train of tattered bandages. There’s nothing he was more scared of as a child than mummies, and they left him with a deeply impressed phobia when it comes to ancient Egypt.

Grabbing his balls is an idiotic thing to do, but no dumber than lots of other things, including the Restoration of the Coral Seabed of the Red Sea . . . So, that’s not my plane after all . . .

What about that Egyptair flight that went down because one of the two pilots was determined to commit suicide? When did that happen? In the ’90s? A huge dispute between the American civil-aviation authorities and the Egyptian ministry of transportation. Where had he read that story? Or had he seen a show about it on TV? Step by step, as the truth emerged, the Egyptians that were on the investigating panel curled up like hedgehogs, refusing to admit even to the possibility that things might have gone that way, the national airline would have been too badly damaged by those findings. Then they’d found the black box, they’d reconstructed the entire sequence of events, there were no lingering doubts, but the Egyptians had received orders from the top and they rejected, denied, boycotted, set up stumbling blocks.

Nice story, but only for all the people who weren’t on that flight . . . One of the pilots had decided to throw the plane into a nosedive with all the passengers, there’d been a fight with the co-pilot. Beyond belief. Then it had happened another time, but in Morocco, I think, not with the same airlines . . . I wonder if my pilot today is happy with the life he’s leading . . . I always think that a pilot needs to do things right, first and foremost to make sure that he isn’t killed . . . But what if the pilot doesn’t care if he goes on living?

Brandani hums softly under his breath to chase away that sudden fear that always sweeps over him right before he boards a plane. Over the last thirty years, he’s taken hundreds of flights, but every time the uncomfortable realization descends upon him that he is about to entrust his life entirely to someone else’s care, someone about whom he knows nothing. A flush of heat rises to his cheeks. He begins to sweat. He tries to focus on the large flying machines that he sees outside, on the traffic, on the take-offs and landings, he attempts to decipher the technical operations, the personnel busying themselves around the aircraft, he wonders what their responsibilities might be, whether they’re doing their job well. He’s taken a Hyper-Aleve, it dissolves under his tongue, and twenty minutes later the strange headache is better. He doesn’t know how to put up with it, because he gets headaches only very rarely . . . And after all, it’s strange, first thing in the morning like this.

I can’t take it, and why should I? There’s time for suffering. The final suffering is almost certain, so why should I put up with a headache if I can avoid it without any real consequences? What the fuck does it mean to say ‘medicine is bad for you’? You’re saying an analgesic is bad for you?

The burst of sweat and the surge of fear start to fade. Once again, Ivo has returned to watching the aeroplanes raptly. He’s spent a lifetime in admiration of all flying machines: aeroplanes, helicopters, missiles. He’s even been interested in hot-air balloons, dirigibles and hang gliders. When he was a boy he built plastic model planes, the kind you could buy in clear cellophane bags from the news vendor, complete with decals. At first he’d worked on a P-40 and it had captured his imagination, then one by one he’d made nearly all the model planes of the War, especially the planes flown by the RAF, the Hurricane and the Spitfire leading the pack. He’d also assembled a Stuka, Boeing B-17 and B-29 bombers, the de Havilland Mosquito and the Mustang P-51 fighter. Then came the aircraft that were destined to become his two idols, his guiding lights, one American and the other Russian, destined for places as the Dioscuri flanking the Sacred and Unequalled Spitfire: the F-86 Sabre and the MiG-15.

No one knows their names now, no one knows anything about them. They clashed in the skies over Korea, the Americans had made a couple of movies, one was with Mitchum, I think. Who remembers Mitchum any more? They always won, but later I found out that it wasn’t true, not entirely true, anyway. The MiG was a good-looking plane, with that gaping maw, like a manta ray, its towering tailfin, which looked like the dorsal fin of a killer whale. The F-86, on the other hand, had that snout, a less murderous appearance than the MiG, less wicked looking, it was on our side, it protected us from the Communists. The Americans added pictures to the gleaming metal fuselages, women in bikinis, decorations, they gave a name to every plane, and then there were stars and stripes everywhere, red and blue, numbers . . . The Russian fighter jets, much more understated, a sandy beige, a red star, the CCCP logo, the aircraft identification number. The pilots’ helmets, at least to judge from the snippets of documentary that they spliced into the movie, were still made of leather, while the helmets worn by the Americans were already rigid and colourful. Still, the MiG was a dangerous foe: better armed, easier to handle, tighter turns, faster, higher ceilings . . . Deadly dogfights, they shot to kill, fearlessly . . . Father said that in war you’re just scared, everybody experiences it . . . I’m afraid just thinking about it: fights to the death . . . I’m afraid even just to board an Egyptair Boeing 787 for the flight home . . . I’ve been flying all my life, and always with the same fear . . . Those were magnificent, expensive pieces of machinery . . . They’d explode in the sky, wings sheared off clean by the ammunition from the on-board cannon . . . Grainy black-and-white footage, you could see the trajectories of the tracer bullets, trajectories that slewed off-kilter, sinuous like handfuls of incandescent rocks, instead of running perfectly straight the way you’d expect, they way they looked in the comic books. Whaam! The enemy fighter jet would start spewing smoke, losing parts, tilting off to the side, or else it turned belly-up, or the tail might be shot to bits . . . Just a split second before, it had been a glistening thing, intact, and an instant later, it had turned into a swarm of wreckage. Men who died like that . . . Who could say what it must be like to disintegrate in mid-air in a MiG, to die torn to shreds in the chill of the high thin air, before the eyes of a practically black sky . . . All right, but why were they so beautiful?

That’s the question that he always asks himself again when he’s at the airport, the question Brandani toys with whenever he has time to kill. He’s jotted down lots of notes on the subject, but never come up with anything solid in reply. A long-standing philosophical predisposition that’s always there, lurking in ambush, a mind that continually harks back to those two years in the department of philosophy, studies that remained impressed in his mind, or perhaps he should say, carved, deeply etched: the course in aesthetics under Cremaschi, the few lessons in theoretical philosophy under Molteni, before the Movement put an end to all teaching. Most of all, his books. Molteni, who had left an indelible imprint on his mind, still lay concealed in the words he used, as a man and as a technician, in the way he organized the materials he needed to think. ‘Don’t ever be too intelligent, all that’s good for is to make matters more complicated . . . If you are intelligent in the first place,’ he’d muttered once during a seminar. ‘The truly intelligent know how to rise or fall to the mental level of the others, they immediately understand whether or not they’re going to be understood, they don’t strut, they hide, they learn how to handle themselves. It’s pointless to deploy great forces if there’s only a short distance to go, and especially if it’s counterproductive, if it irritates the person you’re talking to . . . Intelligence, when shown off, can be intimidating, irritating, in other words, stupid.’ Molteni had grown inside him over the years, he’d become flesh in the flesh of his cranium, electric impulses along the networks of his exhausted neurons, which struggled to remember everything, much as might have happened to his teacher more than forty years ago: ‘What’s the name of the author of that textbo-o-ok . . . Ahem, let me see, the one who wrote that textbo-o-ok . . .’ His teaching assistants hastened to offer suggestions but he kept answering ‘no-no-no . . .’ which sounded like an exhortation, like a ‘come on, put some effort into it, let’s see who can be the first to guess.’ It was a kind of game, Molteni found it amusing to pit them against each other, perhaps he was only pretending not to remember. It seemed as if he felt contempt for them, not one of them was anywhere close to his level, there were those who said that he selected them carefully to make sure that he had teaching assistants who were absolutely mediocre, dull and servile. Franco said that Molteni ensured that no one around him could grow, ‘he’s a horrible man, an academic power-monger of the very worst kind, and yet he’s a maestro . . .’ Ivo had only spoken to him once, when he’d dropped by the institute to ask him a question about an issue discussed in his book. Actually, he was there to bask in the spotlight, he wanted to get noticed. Molteni’s answer had been very simple, straightforward, disappointing. Ivo had had a retort, arguing with the quick-witted intelligence he possessed at the time. A brief discussion, then Molteni had fallen silent for a short while, looking at him with those blue eyes of his, bright and lively behind the lenses. At last, slowly, and as if he were reflecting aloud, he’d said to him: ‘You might be one of those pseudo-intelligent guys . . . what’s your name again? Ah, that’s right, Brandani. There are people like that, you know? The ones who always lay it out as if it’s super-complicated, who seem interesting because they formulate problems in a way that looks original, learned, but that’s as far as they go . . .’ For Ivo it was a deep cut, and a gratuitous one, which still smarted more than forty years later.

Maybe he was right, I’m pseudo-intelligent. He must have wound up in Hell, together with Schoolteacher Proia . . . Why are aeroplanes so beautiful? Perhaps that’s a poorly formulated question, or else it’s a pseudo-problem, typical of someone who’s pseudo-intelligent. Franco used to say no, that it struck him as a genuine problem, but he also used to say that he didn’t know anything about aesthetics. He suggested books to read, things that turned out to have nothing to do with it, or that were too difficult. My head still hurts . . . The double dose of Aleve ought to be working already . . . And I’m going to have to take a dump soon . . .

Ivo Brandani emits one of his deep sighs. The woman sitting next to him turns to look at him for a second, her curiosity piqued. Then she goes back to her tablet.

Why are aeroplanes so beautiful? The narrow cockpit clung to the pilot like a flying jumpsuit . . . It was as if somebody had constructed around a human being a compact silhouette capable of flight . . . Behind the three-bladed propeller, the V-12 Rolls-Royce engine, 500 horsepower . . . Behind the engine, the fuel tanks: if they caught on fire, the pilot would go up in smoke in a single puff . . . Behind the fuel tanks, the cockpit with the teardrop canopy: looking down into it the aeroplane’s structure was instantly unveiled to your eye, that naked framework, as bare as the rear of a stage set, aluminium beams, chilly to the touch when they came in contact with the pilot’s body. The Spitfire was a piece of flying skin, a costume worn by a superhero. The thing I liked most was the elliptical shape of the wings, the way they joined with the fuselage, with a sort of membrane that tapered back towards the tail, until it disappeared, absorbed into the curvature of the side panels. I liked these fluid forms that were, however, made up of lots of riveted pieces . . . You could clearly see underneath the wings the exit holes of the burst of machine-gun bullets that the Spitfire in the City by the Sea had caught before bellying down onto the water, the shreds of sheet metal splayed open in a corolla due to the force of the impact . . . From the gaping wounds in the fuselage and the wings, but especially from the tail rudder, almost completely stripped bare by the machine-gun bursts, you could make out the aeroplane’s structure, the dense framework made up of ribbing and spars serving as an underframe, giving shape to the aircraft’s skin . . . I adored the smooth, neatly joined curvature of the flying surface, or perhaps I should say, of the flying form . . . Machines, any machines, we always tend to build them in our own image: a structure that holds everything together, the way the bones do, then the internal organs sort of arranged here and there, and on the exterior a thin wrapping, which works more or less like the skin, that is, it summarizes, protects and, like the skin, can break at a given point without the entirety being decisively compromised by that break, in contrast with what happens if you damage a major organ or the structure as a whole gives way . . . If we were crustaceans, we’d build with a crustacean mentality, no internal structure, just organs and muscles and tendons, the protective function would coincide with the tough structure and it would all be entrusted to the outer shell, like a lobster. But if we were crustaceans, it would never occur to us to build aeroplanes, only tanks . . . Then there was the Mustang, and I really loved lots of other fighter planes, but the Spitfire was . . . Well, it was perfect. And it was perfect in the most perfect way imaginable. Handsome, noble and fast like a large pelagic fish built for the air. It practically didn’t have a top or a bottom, if you leave aside the cockpit, the tail fin . . . The Sacred Spitfire just sits there, guarding the first half of the twentieth century, testifying to the involuntary attainment of beauty and strength, tapered and joined and shapely as a boomerang, an exceedingly modern and ancestral product of the War, a total and unequalled synthesis of the art of attack and flight . . . I know that the Messerschmitt 109 and the Focke-Wulf 190 might have been faster, more heavily armed, more powerful, but they had this basic shortcoming, this unforgivable defect: they-weren’t-Spitfires.

That’s it right there, all of the Well Made of the twentieth century, the perfect form that sprang from the necessity of overcoming the enemy. I read that the engineers wanted to achieve ‘the smallest, simplest fighter plane that could be built around the Rolls-Royce PV-12 engine’. Well, they certainly did it: they created that one-of-a-kind object, right there before me, reassembled on its pedestal, I could go to look at it every single day . . . It was the preterintentional beauty of the Well Made, achieved not in order to stir feelings and awe but to attack and defend, to destroy and get away, using atmospheric gas as the load-bearing structure, high-explosive gunpowder as the offensive weapon and fossil fuel as the energy source. I’m a pacifist, my secret sin is that I worship war machines, I envy those who have experienced combat, I admire those who have lived in the space between the two alternatives of Life/Death . . . To me that old hulk of an aeroplane was sacred, a holy totem looming against the horizon of the Western Sea . . . Certainly that beauty, evident but devoid of intention, derived from an evolutionary process that has endured over many generations of aircraft, one attempt after another, the path of adaptation to flight, towards the greatest possible aerodynamic efficiency in relation to the power of the engines . . . Every technical innovation on the enemy’s part had to be met with an even more daring and advantageous invention: it was a matter of life and death for the pilots, a question of survival for the nation . . . The competition among fighter planes resembles that between gazelles and cheetahs, which wind up resembling one another . . . The Sabre F-86s and the MiG-15s, which to my mind are still pursuing each other and fighting in the skies over Korea, have actually been doing it for millions of years: each generation survives if it’s a little more efficient than the one that went before it, faster, able to dodge and fishtail suddenly and rapidly, faster and faster . . . The beauty of aeroplanes is a natural beauty . . . The lines of the aircraft used in civil aviation are more abrupt, less integrated, less fluid than the lines of the aircraft I loved. As if in the meantime the air had become lighter, easier to penetrate. And perhaps that’s the case, considering the altitudes they fly at . . . Yes, that’s it, it’s because of the cruising altitude, practically stratospheric. They climb rapidly through layers of air that are progressively less and less dense, until the sky turns almost black—nowadays, that is the habitat of passenger planes, bombers, fighter planes. Then there are the spy planes that go even higher, much much higher, where there is no air, where there is nothing left but infrequent molecules of air that must be captured one by one with enormous wings . . . I’d like to build a model Spitfire just one more time . . . They could lower it with me into the grave, resting on my chest, like a cross . . . ‘Hey, look at what we have here. It’s a tomb with objects from the twentieth century. This must have been a British fighter pilot . . . That was a fighter plane, wasn’t it? Maybe he died in combat. When did they use this kind of plane? I’m not really sure. First World War?’ Just think how many glaring mistakes of chronology, of dating we make of objects found in graves. That novel I cracked open years ago in a bookstore . . . Right in plain sight on the first page of the book was a tremendous mistake that I was probably the only one to notice: a bombing raid in 1944 was being carried out by B-52s, a historical obscenity, the B-52 was an aircraft from the Cold War, it dates back at the very earliest to 1955 . . . You were furious, as usual, you wanted to write a letter to the publishing house, make a phone call to lodge your objection, demand that the editor be fired . . . By now you know what your disease is called, IMS, Irritable Male Syndrome, it hits men around your age. Your anger is typical, there are books on the subject, the legacy of Father, the Wrathful One, has nothing to do with it. Perhaps he suffered from IMS too, maybe a case of early onset—the way I remember him, he was always like that, always every bit as much of an asshole . . . I told a number of people about this glaring error, B-52s in 1944, but nobody gave a damn . . . It didn’t strike them as important . . . ‘This aeroplane or that one, what’s the difference?’ What do you mean, what’s the difference? People aren’t as interested in aeroplanes as they ought to be, if the author had put, say, a kind of car that didn’t exist in 1944, everyone would have noticed it, I think . . . The past is being lost, the Spitfire in my grave would completely derail the archaeologists of the early 5000s, that model might be the only surviving evidence of the existence of that fighter plane . . . But you’re going to have yourself cremated, it’s not going to be a problem, you’re going to wind up fertilizing basil plants. In some distance future your atoms might wind up in some girl’s tits, right there, at the tip of a nipple: it’s the carbon cycle . . . There was a time when the rudder, the wings, were joined to the fuselage, slabs of aluminium with beautiful curvatures . . . Now planes aren’t built that way any more. They don’t have to fasten things together any more. The wings are inserted into the fuselage in a hard, decisive way. Look at that rudder—what is it, a 777? The rudder is a precise trapezoid, inserted into the back of the fuselage, without invitation . . . The shape of the tail isn’t affected, it doesn’t accommodate it . . . But it’s all beautiful just the same: they make them the way they make them, I still like them all. Why? The MiG-15 had this huge tail rudder, with the horizontal stabilizers situated quite high up, it looked like the dorsal fin of a shark. It could reach the speed of sound and at that velocity it could hold its own or nearly against the F-86 . . . No one really knows who won, the Americans and Russians still fire off numbers picked from a hat, but in the final analysis, most likely it was the US that won. The Sabre was less interesting than the MiG, it was a little too American, a little too full of itself, but maybe I liked the shape of its wings a little more than I did that of the Russian fighter jet . . . The F-86 had the snout of a basking shark over the gaping maw of the air intake, the tail rudder was much more traditional than the MiG’s. The MiG was simpler, more severe, more spare and essential, newer, better looking. More dangerous & more Soviet. It had forms dating back to subsonic technologies, rounded wing tips, perhaps the only part of the MiG I didn’t like . . . The tail angle was as pure as could be, I liked the large air intake and the circular cross-section of the fuselage, very Soviet, Suprematist . . . Perhaps there really did exist a margin of stylistic freedom, maybe that aeroplane wasn’t pure technical form . . . It gulped in air through two large symmetrical gills, and the flow was channelled down two conduits split in two to make room for the cockpit, so that the pilot sat right in the middle of a ferociously violent torrent of wind, which was compressed behind him, thrust into the engine, set aflame, and transformed into a controlled delirium of fire: more than two metric tons of thrust, I can still remember the figures . . . It was an engine disguised as an aeroplane, with just enough extra material to let it fly with the agility of a bat, pure power with a man serving as its brain . . . Having one of those things under your ass, sitting there, at the tip of the snout, in a space with just the bare essentials for survival . . . In American movies the Asian pilots wore black helmets, had cruel yellow faces: they always got shot down in the end . . . Often the footage was authentic, with real people inside the cockpits, people really dying in the skies over Korea . . . You were just small, Brandani . . . The instant in which those men died was inserted into the realm of cinematic fiction and remained in there for all time . . . Like in footage of big-game hunting, the instant in which the bullet strikes the elephant’s cranium, the tiny burst of dust that it kicks up as it tears through the flesh, shattering the cranium . . . Now you see combat aircraft that can be very ugly, angular planes that fly badly, built not so much to travel through the air, but to elude radar. The Spitfire is the most beautiful aeroplane ever built, the most elegant and aristocratic. There was a compact, consistent idea behind it . . . I’d ride my bicycle out to it, always in the early afternoon, when the sea turned dazzling and the west wind blew hard . . . It was hot, the wind would chill the sweat under my T-shirt, there was a clearing overlooking the shoals, where someone had planted a few scrawny trees, withered flowerbeds, benches, a small fountain . . . And then there was the Spitfire . . . I’d sit down to look at it, I’d walk around it, there was never anyone there, the sacred Idol of War stood there, angled on its pedestal, they’d installed it in a dynamic pose . . . It had one broken wing, the blades of the propeller curved backwards from the impact, the tail rudder, destroyed by cannon fire, was reduced to an aluminium framework. The cockpit canopy was missing, maybe that was a sign that the pilot had bailed out, but as a whole the aeroplane was intact. Intact but wounded, humiliated, the belated false trophy of a lost war, in a Country that had been unable to build anything like it . . . Then they took it away from there, restored it, and now it’s in that museum on the lake . . . With that warplane, the English couldn’t lose and they didn’t lose. We were the ones who lost. ‘We’re the ones who lost the war, whatever they tell you,’ Father used to say. Then, enunciating his words clearly: ‘This is how things went—we joined the war as allies of the Germans against the Anglo-Americans and we left the war as allies of the Anglo-Americans against the Germans. What do you think we should call that? If someone calls it treason they’re not far wrong . . .’ ‘My father, when he heard that I was dating one of you Peninsulars, told me that you’re all traitors.’ That’s what Lotte told me: ‘He fought in the war, try to understand him . . .’ I now believe that she must think the same thing, all these years after I simply disappeared . . . I left her to get an abortion, all alone, in Germany, I didn’t even have the money for the ticket . . . The Sacred Spitfire, I went to the museum just to see it again, it was hyper-new, it looked like a fishing trophy, a taxidermically preserved fish, shiny, stiff as glossy cardboard . . . They’d emptied it of its technological viscera, no engine, nothing at all, exactly the same as a taxidermist does with an animal, leaving nothing but the skin, every trace of the drama of warfare had been deleted, the aircraft was brand new again . . . I wonder if the pilot got out alive? And if so, who knows if he ever found out that his one-time fighter plane is now sitting in a museum on the shores of a lake, buffed and polished so that it looks like a model aeroplane? The Messerschmitt 109 was to the Spitfire as the Sabre F-86 was to the MiG-15: it was a specific adversary, that is, suited to the clash with an exact counterpart, with known velocity, ceiling, manoeuvrability, armament, everything . . . The Me-109 was a handsome aeroplane, but so German . . . No one outside of Germany would have agreed to let it fly with those struts under the tailplanes, the way it was in the first version, anyone would have come up with another solution. The Sabre and the MiG were still planes, and then there was the F-104, which in contrast was a stone, even though it was streamlined, powerful. Inside it was the ideology of the rocket, which in those days was pushing to replace the ideology of the aeroplane. Every now and then some machine will become too purposeful and specific, exclusively dedicated to a single characteristic, one function, to an excessive degree . . . For the F-104 it was velocity—it was a beautiful monster but it was practically without wings. The Americans understood immediately that it was a mistake of an aeroplane, a giant lung that was all-engine, and they foisted it off on us . . . These jets fell out of the sky like pellets of hail, the people who lived in towns near the airbases went everywhere with their heads scrunched down into their shoulders for fear that one of those gadgets might come crashing down on top of them. And sure enough down they would come. This one outside here is made of carbon fibre, a few big pieces assembled together. They’re light & flexible, planes breathe, under stress they deform, they twist, they’re elastic, and yet they punched straight into the Towers like knives into hot butter. You could see that Boeing impact with the facade, immersing itself into it, the material of the tower no longer existed as a solid thing, under the blow it behaved as if it had become some sort of foam, instantaneously. At work we discussed it for days and days: Why had the Towers fallen? The jets sailed in from one side nice and smooth and emerged on the opposite side having turned into pyroclastic conglomerates, plasma, except for the engine which in the videos you can see falling into the plaza below like a ball of fire—it penetrated the tower and plummeted like a rock out the other side. The stairway-lift bank core was very solid, if it had just been a matter of steel against aluminium it would have been an uneven match, but the decisive factor was fire . . . I turned on the TV around 3.30 in the afternoon, I’d come home early that day . . .

Brandani hadn’t felt well and had left the office about 2.15 p.m. A stomach ache, he doesn’t remember now, maybe an attack of colitis. At home, afterwards, he felt a little better, he sat down at his PC and was involved in a chat session, when someone typed in: ‘Something’s happening in New York. Turn on the TV. Maybe it’s a movie, I can’t really tell.’ It did seem like a movie, in every way, but it was showing on the news broadcasts on every network. At first he was stumped, and then he was breathless. Even the television news reporters on the line from New York were confused, they didn’t know exactly what to say, they couldn’t believe what had happened, they were talking about a plane crash. No one understood what was happening, but in the instant that followed the impact of the crash into the second Tower, the reality of the terrorist attack became blindingly obvious to everyone.

I thought that the core of the Twin Towers was cement, that it was a very rigid structure, but that’s not right, they were too tall, the weight would have been excessive . . . So the core was built of steel, a forest of pillars clustered close together, supestrong; well, many of them were sheared clean in half and the ones that survived melted after not even an hour of exposure to the flames . . . All that dust was the floors disintegrating: a hundred floors pancaking, pulverizing, and all that paper that started flying in all directions, the streets were full of sheets of letter-size paper, for blocks and blocks: words . . . Along with the lives of three thousand people, the first things to be lost were words . . . Written words, contracts, confidential reports, correspondence, financial prospectuses, business plans, memos, bound summaries, carefully drafted, dossiers with pie charts, pages to be laid on the boss’s desk that very morning . . . Words already read and filed away, archived. Words still waiting to be read, edited, proofread. Spreadsheets, calculations, the same things that we produce, the mountain of paper that overwhelms us every day, there it flew free in the sky . . . The WTC was full of paper, printer ribbons fluttered in the wind like snakes, ghosts in the sky over Manhattan. They looked so solid, gleaming, Cartesian, the Twin Towers . . . But it was a temporary order: inside, like in all buildings—it took me years to understand it—lay nested a chaos of forces reconciled in spite of themselves, contained under restraint, channelled along precise lines and frameworks . . . Modern collapses are different from those in the ancient world, in those piles of rubble you can recognize the components that made up those buildings . . . The Greek temple is an array of independent elements, you can consider them as parts, but also as wholes, that is, with a dignity and a formal completeness all their own and which persists even after a collapse: plinths, capitals, shafts of columns, architraves . . . Instead, when a modern building collapses, it is the utmost form that plunges into the utmost formlessness, into chaos, into the saddest and most unmitigated of wreckage. Nothing is recognizable, nothing can be recovered. Nothing, or practically nothing, remains of the Towers—just a couple of fragments of the facade in an expressionist pose, immediately hyper-photographed and used as icons . . . As Franco says: ‘The Americans are the best at funnelling mass emotion into visual synthesis . . .’ I can’t bring myself to think about it: twenty thousand . . . Twenty thousand human fragments mixed with steel, shards of glass, tons of paper, pulverized cement, electric cables, scorched plastic . . . They tried to identify them with DNA, the victims’ relatives provided clothing, dirty laundry. Months of searching, but in the end they brought it to an abrupt halt, many shreds concealed in the mass of detritus were purchased as scrap along with all the rest, and went into the crucible to be melted down, I imagine. They must have found lots of others later, in the dump, they must have tossed them into the garbage . . . That was the most awe-inspiring event of my life, even though I watched it on TV . . . The fate of the unfortunates caught in that trap, those resigned souls who settled their accounts with the world, people bleeding, in their dying agony. I imagine that for those who jumped, time simply stood still. That’s how it was for me in my motorcycle crash and, even before that, during my fall into Bomb Crater . . . Since September 11th, fourteen years have passed for us, but they’re still falling . . . They’re probably still there, suspended in mid-air, asking themselves: ‘Is this really me? Is this really my human body falling down off the World Trade Centre?’ . . . What can their death have been like? I imagine a sudden, crushing sledgehammer blow. Yes, the Boeings penetrated the Towers as if they were butter . . . Fully loaded, these aeroplanes weigh at most 150 metric tons: take a Boeing 767 and hurl it in one piece against something at 500 mph, and it’s possible to calculate the kinetic energy that is thus liberated . . . It’s, let’s see, the half the product of the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity, that’s right . . . Now then.

He pulls his tablet out of his bag.

Let’s see . . . 150 metric tons equals 150,000 kilos, 500 mph is . . . let’s see . . . 730 feet a second . . . which, squared, 532,900 feet squared per second squared . . . OK . . .

He pulls his notebook out of his jacket pocket and jots down a note.

OK . . . 150,000 multiplied by 532,900, divided by 2, gives me something on the order of 3,675,000,000 joules, which is a little less than the energy released by a metric ton of TNT . . . Then you need to take into consideration the thermal energy from the burning fuel . . . According to the reconstructions of the 9/11 Commission, there were many columns sheared at the moment of impact . . . There’s an official reconstruction on YouTube . . . What must it have been like for the terrorists to die in the cockpit? And for the passengers? A split-second, true, but how long does consciousness endure, for instance, in a brain flying into fire? The heads of people who’d been guillotined still rolled their eyes for a few more seconds . . . Affirmative, it was fire that made it all collapse, it wasn’t the impact, terrible though it was, but the fire . . . Flying is counterintuitive, we ought to stop doing it. I ought to stop this idiotic work I’m doing, here in Sharm . . . Stop it all, plop down in front of the TV for all the time left to me . . . Travel only by boat, along the cliffs, and never fly again . . . And after all, what is energy? I mean to say: What is energy really? You say ‘the quantity of energy . . .’ Or you say ‘the quantity of motion . . .’ And it seems like everything’s taken care of, it seems that everything adds up: quantity, motion, energy, these all seem like clear, intuitive concepts, unquestionable, unobjectionable, like force, pressure, molecule, etc. . . . We’ve let science pull the wool over our eyes, they’ve given us words that have an exclusively mathematical meaning, concepts that can be expressed only through equations and an equation is a tautology, it’s saying that something is commensurate with something else: the mystery remains, at least for me . . . E equals M times C squared means only that the energy contained in a body is equal to the mass of that body multiplied by the square of the speed of light . . . the Speed of Light . . . What really is energy, what is mass, what is speed, what is light? What does it really mean to multiply a number by itself? Nothing can be expressed per se, everything, even the simplest things, can only be stated in reference to something else . . . And this is a curse, there is no handle, no nail driven somewhere that serves as an absolute point of reference, that can begin the process of reasoning: the fluidity of knowledge, or rather of non-knowledge, in fact, of science . . . But still the most incredible thing is that it works: the planes out there fly thanks to a series of equations. That is, it’s not the equations that make them fly, Brandani, the equations only tell us how to build them so that they’ll fly, they tell us the necessary conditions for flight, the relationship among the parts, the curvatures, the air foils, the power of the engines, they tell us how to build the engines to keep the heat from melting them. It is from them, from the equations, that we draw the principles, some of which can be stated in words, though most can’t . . . Once you’ve formulated the principle, you rely on it, until another can be formulated, a ‘truer’ one, but it’s just a process of bringing the unknowable back to the perceptual and mental means that we’ve evolved, over several million years, on the African savannahs . . . The strange thing is that organisms aren’t mathematizable, that is, not quite yet: we still don’t have an equation that will tell us how to make a cat, there is no theory of a cat, just as there is no theory of a human being . . . Perhaps we really are mathematizable but no one’s been able to do it yet . . . They say that the mathematics of life is chemistry, all right, but why? That is, why is mathematics stumped by life? Why is it capable of representing only a few, a very few, of the phenomena of non-life? We the living are too chaotic, Brandani, we are configuration, not form, we have a-geometric outlines, as shifting and indeterminate as the outlines of clouds, like the borders of nations on maps, like the leafy sails of trees . . . This is chaos . . . The configuration, that is, the non-form of things derives directly from the Big Bang . . . How can we expect there to be order if we live, or actually, if we are what’s left over after an explosion? Or better yet, no, we’re not the residue of the Big Bang, we are the Big Bang, because the explosion is still going on, the All is still blasting apart, we are exploding matter inhabited by some exceedingly rare episode of aspiration to order, to geometry—an orbit, the imperfect sphericality of a planet, the structure of a crystal, the line of the horizon, an aeroplane—that is, with a few initial fragments of regularity in the overall irregularity, a few seeds of purity of which perhaps Matter, sooner or later, will take notice, from which it could take an example to regulate itself and allow itself to be expressed in simple equations . . . And so we too can aspire to the Reflective Sphere, to absolute cleanliness, the flavourless, odourless, colourless: purity . . . Purity cannot be other than mathematical: the aircraft outside of here are the purest, blindest and most innocent objects we know. They are mathematical objects and are among the most beautiful there are . . . Certainly, inside them is human intent, and in some cases it’s an aggressive intent, as was the case with the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109, but it is precisely the intent that drew them out of the chaotic post–Big Bang state in which we are immersed, it is intent that reconfigured a portion of disorderly matter into matter with a purpose, crystallized in the beauty of adaptation to flight . . . And it was all done through the grace of the mystery of mathematical measurement, the manipulation of numbers and concepts without there being any real need to understand them . . . That is, most of us, even those of us who work in the field, have never managed to understand them and those who have succeeded were unable to explain it to us in words, only in equations . . . And equations work, Brandani, they work and how . . . Even if you wouldn’t remember how to formulate one by now, any of the equations that long ago you were taught to formulate during your course in the Science of Construction . . . You don’t remember anything, you never built a bridge, or maybe I should make that: you never built anything at all . . . You did other things, you’ve only ever organized construction sites for other people, a builder of conditio sine qua non–s, an explorer of possibilities . . . You’re a technical hustler, Brandani, and that’s not what you wanted . . .