La macchina nera

 

Nella bassa Valsusa, sotto una pioggia torrenziale, un’auto nera misteriosa semina il terrore, investendo deliberatamente i giovani del posto. La comunità è paralizzata dalla paura mentre il Capitano Elettra Keita, Comandante dei Carabinieri di Susa, è determinata a scoprire l’identità del killer e il movente dietro questa furia omicida.

Ignorando gli ordini superiori, Elettra e la sua amica, Commissario Vittoria Carpi della Polizia di Stato, si immergono in una lunga notte di indagini, sfidando l’oscurità e il diluvio incessante. La loro caccia all’assassino porterà a galla segreti sepolti e verità sconvolgenti, mettendo a dura prova non solo le loro capacità investigative, ma anche il loro legame di amicizia.

Un thriller italiano avvincente, dove la tensione sale con ogni goccia di pioggia e l’oscurità nasconde pericoli inimmaginabili, culminando in un colpo di scena che sovvertirà ogni certezza.

In the lower Susa valley, under torrential rain, a mysterious black car spreads terror by deliberately running over local young people. The community is paralyzed with fear while Captain Elettra Keita, Commander of the Carabinieri in Susa, is determined to uncover the killer's identity and the motive behind this homicidal rage.

Ignoring orders from above, Elettra and her friend, Commissioner Vittoria Carpi of the State Police, immerse themselves in a long night of investigation, defying darkness and the relentless downpour. Their hunt for the assassin will bring buried secrets and shocking truths to the surface, testing not only their investigative skills but also their bond of friendship.

A compelling Italian thriller where tension rises with every raindrop and darkness conceals unimaginable dangers, culminating in a twist that will overturn every certainty.

They Will Never Arrive - The lie we tell ourselves when the world ends

 

Claudio makes a vulgar gesture, the simple one that works for all occasions.
He closes one eye and the white skyscraper disappears behind his finger. He has never tolerated that building that looks like a refrigerator, and who could blame him. It seems to have plummeted from a distant galaxy amidst a sprawl of low buildings, ruining the harmony sought over years of history by happy architects. The rest of the city shivers under the afternoon heat wave, and the first two bottles of beer are finished. The shadow of the plane tree, alone, isn't enough to cool the cast iron bars of the bench. "They'll never arrive," he says, as he bends down to drag the cooler. As soon as it's opened, the smell of salami sandwiches sneaks straight into my nostrils, and I take advantage to place my hand on the biggest one. It's wrapped in a foil bundle and I'd bet on it: when I open it, they'll see it shining down there, from the streets downtown, from the bridges over the Po, and from the parks. I'll cause panic, for sure, many will start running and will trample the less fortunate like a herd of crazed buffalo. I only respond after the Heineken cap has popped off and rolled downhill for a few meters before slipping into a drain. "I think they will arrive, instead." It's always been like this. Whether talking about soccer or women, Claudio doesn't consider the possibility of being wrong. He raises his voice without realizing it and gains a few inches of bench to intimidate me. "You should read fewer books and pedal more. You don't keep half the world under your heel if you're not capable, and if you are capable, you deserve respect anyway, at least on this earth." "What respect? I think they're disgusting." 

"I don't make the rules, but apparently, in this game, on this table, with these players, they win and they will always win." 

His emerald green eyes are those of someone asking for an armed truce and they say much more than his rare words, doled out like a special whisky. He gives me a pat on the shoulder and clarifies. "I don't enjoy it, you know! It's just pragmatism on my part." Meanwhile, acid rises up my throat and I remedy with a bite of the sandwich. The Milano salami is arranged in numerous layers that the butter makes easy to tame. Given the limited time we had, this could be called great cuisine or the latest miracle. The first bite goes down almost whole, with a sip of beer chasing it and pushing back the stomach's reflux. The second, I savor: it calms me like a caress and I close my eyes to think of something beautiful. The ocean, for example. Claudio and I had been skilled and lucky enough to ride the wave, from the beginning to the end of the beach, while Katy and Eleanor ran barefoot to follow our surfboards. They had arrived just seconds later, when our muscles excited by the sea pulled like sails in the wind and our wet shorts clung to all our zest for life. It was us, the Maui volcanoes that seemed ready to explode, and the two wonders. Katy wore a light blue swimsuit, so minimalist that if she had paid for it by square centimeters, she would have gotten away with spending less than half a dollar. Eleanor had chosen a red tending toward amaranth, with a bra capable of supporting the abundance only thanks to the elegant combination of white cords that crossed on her tanned back. That evening we had eaten at a restaurant on the beach. While the sunset set the sea ablaze, the chef cooked fish on large stones on the terrace and suggested washing down dinner with a French white wine that tasted of fruit or with certain wines from the California hills. Customers arrived in dribs and drabs while a band of long-haired guys in Hawaiian shirts performed a surf rock repertoire ranging from the Surfaris to the Ventures, and passing through the Beach Boys. The arrangement of Sloop John B, I remember, had been hypnotic: Call for the Captain ashore Let me go home, let me go home I want to go home, yeah yeah But I certainly didn't want to go home, and neither did Claudio. Our two friends still had so much to give us, and not just morally. Katy had kept me awake until morning, and while I tried to catch up on a few hours of sleep, she had whispered in my ears all the songs she could remember. She came from New Orleans, Louisiana. I remember, she said she preferred the enormous waves of the Pacific to the still and muddy waters of the Mississippi that wind through the swamps where alligators swim. It was for that reason, and because she hated mosquitoes, that she spent three months a year on the beaches around Kahului, and so as not to be overcome by nostalgia, she had memorized Fats Domino's entire repertoire and had fallen asleep too, while struggling to remember the second verse of Blue Monday Sunday mornin' my head is bad But it's worth it for the time that I had But I've got to get my rest... Claudio can read my mind. 

"Are you thinking about Katy?" 

I close my eyes and imagine her sitting on the beach staring at the sky, but in the middle of the night. I'm sure Eleanor is with her, waiting. 

"And are you thinking about Eleanor?" 

"I'm thinking that she's part of that system and that despite being a drop in the ocean, maybe she could have done more." 

Because not everyone is like that and they don't deserve to be remembered as those who..." 

Something explodes down in the city. Firecrackers, gunshots, or police tear gas. I don't know, but my sweaty backside jumps on the bench. The authorities don't allow disorder because they think exactly like Claudio: they'll never arrive. Judging by the column of smoke rising from the intersection, they can only be poisonous tear gas. The news broadcasts have tried to reassure us in every way, but by now everyone has learned to understand how many lies they tell. Over the years, they've specialized in reading, reciting, any communiqué, and theirs were entirely similar to my friend's thought:
They'll never arrive - Claudio gulps down the last sip from the bottle and throws it over the hedge. We hear it shatter on the asphalt of the hairpin turn, and just like that, the time it takes to formulate a thought, and there he is with his back bent, rummaging in the bag. "One for the road?" he asks, waving the last two blondes with cold condensation on the glass. My legs are weak and I have a slight headache, but I don't back down. A flock of military planes flies over the houses with a boom and suddenly veers toward the sun. The question comes when the noise hasn't yet completely faded. "Do you remember Paul?" He was Eleanor's brother, a young man barely over twenty, beautiful like the sun of his land and covered in tattoos that made him look like the frescoed vault of a dome. In the morning, he delivered packages, flying on a Vespa from one end of the island to the other. In the afternoon and evening, he shot short films, hiring friends as actors. He knew musicians who lent themselves to soundtracks and also singers ready to perform for him. In the evening, he edited, and from one day to the next, he offered always new shows that he projected, as soon as it got dark, in the backyard of the house. "Yeah, Paul. He had an enormous talent for cinema." And the first tear of the afternoon is for him, for that first short film of his that had earned applause at Sundance and a decent public success. He had died the following year, with his lungs sliced by his own ribs, hit by a grandmother at the wheel of a white Prius. She had run the red light to avoid being late for her grandson's birthday, and the packages to be delivered had ended up scattered on the asphalt for dozens of meters along with the pieces of the scooter. "He would have been the best to film everything, to document." Only he was the lead actor and the death was real, like when a bullet had killed Brandon Lee on set. No mattresses and boxes to fall on, tomato sauce, and craftsmanship. Just hearts that stopped beating. "Anyway, they'll never arrive!" comments Claudio, who had a real friendship with Paul. It had seemed incredible to him that Paul wasn't jealous of his sister, and it had seemed equally incredible that such a young man could know the history of cinema by heart. Dr. Strangelove. He talked about it often, especially when he strummed his Taylor in front of the fire while the ocean waves turned to foam on the wet sand. Dr. Strangelove rode an atomic missile to arrive with it on the target and was the metaphor of a mad race that would never stop and the phallic symbol par excellence.
A bank of clouds moderates the sun that summer has placed as high as possible, and here's another flock of airplanes. They fly in a disorderly formation, and the last two seem delayed like the weakest cubs of the pack. The roar of the engines covers the screams of terror that seem to rise from the city and that I imagine coming from throats parched by the heat. Some take refuge in cellars, some seek escape in the countryside, but the ring road has turned sideways, mischievously, and now it's just a snake of smoke, curses, and hot bodywork gleaming on the horizon. Some have been placed safely under fifty meters of rock, but they are few and they are rich and important. 

"At the end of everything, they will still be few, but no longer rich and not even important," 

I reason aloud while Claudio enjoys his sandwich with crumbs caught in his mustache. He's monotonous like a stuck record: 

"They'll never arrive." 

I almost feel sorry for having disturbed him while he's chewing, for having risked making him choke.
And yet they arrive. From the east.
Comets, meteorites, long trails of smoke that slice the sky and go far, toward the south. The first one disappears behind the mountains, and it's there that Claudio, disappointed, spits out his bite to avoid choking. The wait is interminable, and once again he firmly believes in his god and points to that not-better-defined spot behind the crests and repeats to himself: 

"They'll never arrive!" And I would like to believe him, to hope not to be like a match before someone strikes it on sandpaper or like a drop of water about to fall on a hot plate. My voice tastes of the grave, and I speak with breath that escapes with difficulty through my throat contracted in terror. 

They're ours. They're intercepting them, you'll see, and they won't arrive..." The light is more intense than the sun that watches from up there, and Claudio is no longer tanned as usual. He's like an X-ray lazily laid on the light box in the doctor's office, and his emerald green eyes are a pair of transparent crystals, and the mountains: how small they appear compared to that ball of fire! They have arrived. Claudio hurries to finish his beer, and I walk back and forth. I resemble the little bear at the shooting gallery that struggles not to be hit but knows very well that his space for escape is reduced to a rail with the imminent end of the line, and the sky is full of bad news. The last one arrives together with the boom of the first explosion that has taken the time it needed to cross half the region, and it falls much closer. This time there are no mountains to dominate the wind, and after the flash, which pierces through my hands pressed against my eyes, comes the noise of a thousand trains running toward us, of continents rolling over pebbles, of screams of pain and desperation, of the world turning upside down with everything inside it. And then the wind. It's hot like a furnace and runs like a frightened horse and pushes us away like dry leaves in the storm, onto the lawn and onto the pavement that spreads at the feet of the basilica. The faithful who had gathered to pray have been laid down like grass by a scythe. I'm bleeding, breathing poison. The cough starts from my lungs and shakes me. I feel pain everywhere. I seem to be chewing sand at the foot of the volcano and I think of Maui, of surfing, of drinks on the beach while a friendly fire caresses our desire for love. Of Katy. Goodbye, Katy. Goodbye Eleanor, goodbye Hawaii. The good part of that wonderful people bends to the will of a few madmen, and no more restaurants on the beach, rock concerts, films, actors, singers, and stuntmen. No more guitars to embrace and make yours like a one-night companion. No more fires in front of the sea. The basilica's windows explode, and the dome's slabs fly away. It seems that a large blender is preparing something to drink. The portal opens wide, and finally, the pressure makes the walls collapse. They swell like the cheeks of a rude child about to make a raspberry, and the columns wobble, and the marble slabs detach, and the spires break. The plain is the racetrack of winds at a thousand kilometers per hour, and flames have replaced forests. The water of the Po reflects the ashen color of the sky. 

"They'll never arrive." 

Claudio consoles me as blood boils in his mouth. He wasn't quick enough to protect his eyes, and now he's blind. No more emerald green, just a white, milky film that resembles a burn. The funny thing is that the bread crumbs are still stuck in his mustache and roasted like a pizza forgotten in the oven. We embrace, and yes, I admit he's right. Hell has broken loose all around, but the city has been spared. The roofs have been stripped of tiles and reduced to skeletons, columns of smoke rise where gas depots have exploded, and the streets are flooded. In the end, the postcard that was meant for us wasn't delivered, intercepted by some missile that our allies managed to launch in time. The air stinks of hot iron and the screams in the background are those that Dante must have imagined for one of the lower circles. I let myself fall onto the lawn and look at the clouds remixed by the deadly wind.
The guttural sound of a large bomber insinuates itself in my ears like the vibration of a phone, and a black silhouette that appears like an insect on glass moves slowly in front of four long, fat condensation trails. Soon it will be exactly over the center of the city, over the vertical of that skyscraper that Claudio hates so much and that he can no longer see. I want to believe it's friendly. I want to believe it's not carrying a surprise package just for us. I want to believe they'll never arrive.

Emilio Salgari, the father of Sandokan

 

Salgari, the father of Sandokan, the Tigers of Mompracem, and more or less all corsairs, daughters of corsairs, and more generally pirates of Malaysia, had become famous not only for his undeniable talent but also for his extremely fertile imagination, which led him to describe exotic places like the seas of Southeast Asia and the warm waters of the Caribbean (where if you escaped a boarding, you certainly couldn't overcome the sharks).

He wrote and described. He spoke of archipelagos, forests, and ravenous beasts. He narrated deadly daggers with serpentine blades and agile, swift prahos with enormous sails and brave sailors on board. He had described all these places, weapons, and vessels without ever having been to those parts, or even remotely in the vicinity.

The writer, who had never moved from Verona first and then Turin, drew from maps and texts he found at the civic library in the Piedmontese capital. In doing so, he managed to imagine the humid and warm locations of equatorial zones, perceiving their smells, dangers, and the soft buzzing of the Anopheles mosquito, the one that transmits malaria, just to be clear.

In short, Salgari was a genius.

I wondered what he would have been able to do if only he had today's technologies at his disposal. By typing the name, he would have reached the desired location. He would have seen it appear on the satellite photo, then glide over the pattern of its streets at the desired speed and begin to discern terraces, swimming pools, and the arrangement of gardens and large plants. Shifting his gaze slightly, he would have seen the foamy wake of boats traveling across a green and unruffled sea. He would have identified the shadows of buildings projected onto sidewalks, the roofs of cars in motion, and a strange-shaped construction surrounded by a geometrically impeccable hedge frame.

Certainly, he wouldn't have been satisfied.

He would have acted on the mouse wheel until he remained intrigued by the blue roof of a large building. At that point, with a click, the orange little man, patiently waiting on the right side of the screen, would have glided to the ground in the magic of an interactive panoramic photo. From the start, he would have begun to explore the area, looking up like any tourist and, why not, careful to protect his precious wallet from the attack of some ill-intentioned person.

With eyes strained from the white glare of the road, he would have observed a double row of palm trees that disappeared only in the hazy horizon in the distance. That blue-roofed building (the one that had intrigued him before) would have revealed its architecture: a rather bizarre mixture between the White House in Washington and the residence of the Raja (excellent, he would have told himself, to set the love story between the noble English woman he had in mind and the bandit of the archipelago, the one he imagined with long black hair and a band around his forehead). Its two small domes, symmetrical on the sides, would have presented their curved surface painted in a bright blue, on par with the pillars that seemed to support it, harmonized with walls topped by a long marble parapet and in contrast with the milky streaks of the sky.

Of course, the white economy car parked a few meters from the entrance along with the delivery truck with its bed still open could not have been compatible with stories of pirates, Labuan pearls, and sea raids, but that wouldn't have mattered. It would have been sufficient to ignore their existence. Even that traffic divider, carelessly painted with an alternation of tire-contaminated white and faded black, would have disappeared from the drafts of his novels to make way for the uncertain edges of dirt roads.

On the right, next to the palm trees tamed by the wind and a garden of succulents, also oriented in the direction that the trade winds had established for them, he would have seen flowers put to the test by the severity of the sun. They preceded a large meadow with tall grass, dotted in the distance by wild horses, some intent on grazing, others running, drawing elegant trajectories. Well, perhaps he would have invented the horses and, in fact, would have put on the other side fishermen protected from the sun with wide-brimmed hats, sweaty and bent over the hulls of their boats that had just landed in port. He would have wanted some to rearrange the nets, some to unload the catch. The last ones, older and more cunning, he would have seen them well serving impatient customers on the pier.

A little further, he would have noticed a dense weave of houses, all facing the sea and all painted in vivid colors: from red to heavy yellow, to the omnipresent sky blue. The man with the scooter and an improbable aluminum coat rack, arranged as best as possible between his legs, would have become a merchant on horseback with a pair of wicker baskets arranged on its back. In one hand a whip and in the other a rope, ready to secure the animal to the balustrade of the next inn. The tram full of passengers would have been promoted to a carriage with six trains, and the line of employees at the supermarket checkout would have evolved into a platoon of mercenaries, infallible shooters, and well-trained fighters, loyal and under the orders of Lord James Brooke.

But what difference would it have made in the end?

None, Emilio Salgari would have left his mark anyway, but perhaps he would have done it faster, without queuing in the anteroom of a dusty library and without reviving the mites of an ancient map, rolled up on itself for who knows how many years.

Dreaming and fantasizing is a divine gift. Traveling, experiencing places, and noting sensations in a notebook always at hand is even better, but not everyone can afford it. So, I would say, there's really nothing wrong with helping yourself with Street View...

Breaking and Entering - The Ghosts We Carry

It wasn't his habit to pass through those parts; simply, that evening, he was forced to do so because of a poorly maintained sewer.

It had literally burst. The pipe, clogged after years of neglect, had reached the point of no return on a summer afternoon, a little before the final of the European football championship began. Fausto didn't care much about France and Portugal meeting to compete for the trophy, but the game on television meant scrounging a dinner from Aurelio and Luisa—and not just that. There was Graziella, the blonde, with her sculptural breasts and just dumb enough to make him consider his chances. She had even believed his lie that he was profitably involved in certain ultra-modern air conditioning systems. In short, there was enough to make him cross the historic center during rush hour and to convince him to endure the canonical ninety minutes, with the concrete risk that they would turn into one hundred and twenty plus penalties.

The street was invaded by a substance of a slimy-gray color tending toward brown, dotted with a constellation of shredded paper and used condoms, scattered around like the sailboats of the America's Cup. A barrier with diagonal stripes of alternating colors invited him to go around the block, cross the river on the iron bridge, and proceed for a kilometer to the next bridge. The situation was a royal rip-off, considering that the wine, stolen that morning from a market stall, had officially become his after three hundred meters of running and a minute of fear, and now it was unworthily heating up under the passenger seat of his Panda 30.

The grates sounded noisily under the car's wheels, and soon he found himself in the part of the city destined for the rich. There were villas with gardens, apartment buildings with doormen, and many dark sedans parked in the driveways. Well-maintained beech trees alternated with stone and wrought iron benches, while on the part of the road facing the river, menacing parking meters demanded hefty tributes for just a few minutes of parking. The public gardens, larger than he would have conceived for a landing strip, teemed with joggers, sunbathers with their faces offered to the late afternoon sun, and children, some intent on chasing a ball, others busy flying a drone that was surely worth more than his car.

He had never seen that house before. It must have existed for many years, certainly before the two wars and perhaps even before steam trains began puffing along railways across the country. If he had never seen it, perhaps it was because of the tree canopies that had kept it hidden all that time. A recent pruning of the foliage, something that had happened following a mysterious parasite that had attacked the trees in that area, had revealed the existence of that building.

Painted in a freshly retouched salmon color, it stood out behind a thick hedge with its two floors that followed the first. It had a long balcony, secured with railings of metal rods painted in cast-iron color, which occupied half of its facade, and a series of doors and windows that faced it, all closed behind old-fashioned gray-green shutters. Oxidized copper downpipes descended along the three visible corners, and on the roof, an old TV antenna rose beyond the cover of the house behind, quite distant but evidently harmful to good reception. On the northern side, a tongue of ivy was worn with class, as a lady of good society might flaunt a soft silk shawl.

Situated as it was on the slopes of the hill, it could only be reached via a narrow and impervious road, steep enough to discourage the passage of people other than the few residents and convenient for shaking off cops who might want to chase a thief. The hill, which represented the uncontaminated and happy island that occasionally cast a disdainful glance at the layer of smog adorning the city, was only accessible through mostly uncomfortable roads, which sometimes connected to busy arteries while, in many other cases, ended in a dead end on one side and originated from a slightly wider road that was equally difficult to navigate by car. It was vacation season, and the closed shutters showed that the homeowners had gone elsewhere seeking relief.

An invitation. Slowing down slightly, Fausto determined that the area must be poorly lit. Indeed, he saw a first streetlight a few dozen meters downhill and then another, supported by a pole held hostage by climbing plants that emerged from behind the wall of a large estate.

He would turn them off. Judging by the retro taste of the finishes, the house must be inhabited by elderly people, little accustomed to installing alarm systems and still attached to those values of honesty and rectitude, those values that no longer existed.

He would enter. Behind that stone wall, two and a half meters high or perhaps more, was the thieves' paradise, a prize vacation with a low-cost flight and business class return. There was silverware kept in drawers and money, lots of money, placed inside some vase or at most on the back of a sideboard.

Behind that heavy wooden door was the salary of two years, with the thirteenth month, paid holidays, and all the overtime. France and Portugal would meet that very evening. It was obvious that the hosts would win, and equally logical that he, the following day, would pull off the best theft of his career.

Fausto waited for twilight, loitering from one bar to another. It was good to stay away from his studio apartment with bathroom. Despite being on the basement floor of a shamefully ugly building, the landlord always remembered him, the rent he owed, and the reimbursement of condominium expenses. Once the loot was pocketed, no one would see those parts for a month. That day he should have paid, but since the last pickpocketing had yielded a couple of twenty-euro bills and a series of coins insufficient to pay for an aperitif, he had made himself untraceable since the morning.

From time to time, he turned toward the hill and ascertained that the house had remained closed, uninhabited. The only two street lamps surrounding it were damaged. At the beginning of the afternoon, during his reconnaissance tour, he had passed under the lamps and placed a lead weight right in the center, shooting it with his ultra-silent compressed gas gun. There was a sound similar to the hiss of a snake, and then some fragments of plastic rained to the ground. When they would notice the damage, late in the evening, they would make a note to call the municipality's maintenance team the next morning. What mattered was that at night, the darkness would be real, intense as an ink stain and impenetrable to the fallacious eyes of a man.

Meanwhile, it was getting dark. The city was closing its shutters, the last stragglers were leaving the office, and the incurable drinkers were looking for some open pub. The hunt for parking had begun, and families were about to gather around the table. All televisions were tuned to the news: a single concert of news and scoops vomited all together from open windows. Beyond the river, an odor of algae rose towards the park. Paying attention, one could hear the sound of water even from a distance.

On the hill, assisted by the premature darkness caused by abundant trees, the street lamps of public lighting had turned on. Two of them had remained unlit.

He landed on the soft grass. He did so beyond the wall he had easily climbed over with the rope ladder. He had brought it in his backpack along with a headlamp for running, a small crowbar, and a tiny pen-sized LED flashlight. All the rest of the space, including the side pockets and the one on the closure, was destined for the loot.

The faint LED light framed an unlit garden lamp, a cement sidewalk that went around the entire building, and flowerbeds accompanied by a collection of statuettes that reproduced the characters of Tolkien. A hobbit with hairy feet was eyeing him from behind a clump of daisies, while the reproduction of an elf, on a 1:25 scale, seemed ready to fire an arrow right in his direction. The mean face made it believable.

The city projected a halo of luminescence on the horizon, and the windows of the house opposite let through a timid and distant light, which barely filtered through the foliage. Apart from the chirping of crickets and the homeopathic trace of traffic noise from the streets, they were close to absolute silence.

He had arrived on the spot under the cover of darkness. No one had noticed him, apart from a late cyclist who was struggling up the hill to meet his dinner. He had passed with his head bent over the handlebars and a shortness of breath that had surely drained the blood from his brain. Fausto could swear he hadn't even noticed him.

The line of hedges that ran through the garden, dividing it into two exact parts, lent itself to covering his advance. He thanked his good fortune, and after a few steps, he found himself in front of the access door, large enough to let a car enter. It was closed with a padlock, which he opened with a simple hairpin. It took him less time than allowed to a Rischiatutto contestant to answer half a dozen very difficult questions.

Once inside the garage, he put on the headlamp, not at all surprised that no alarm had gone off. It was a room with a vaulted ceiling studded with salt efflorescence, bare brick walls, and a floor covered with rather worn stoneware. In the center of the environment, next to a series of shelves covered with dark cloths, a cherry-red Lancia Flavia demonstrated his thesis: house of nostalgic elderly people, at the thermal baths to treat their rheumatism or at the sea looking after a swarm of irreverent grandchildren.

He was truly sorry. That car, a 1966 model with 102 horses sleeping under the hood, was kept so well that it would have appealed to many collectors. He wondered how much they would pay him for the tip.

He bypassed the obstacle. A flash, sudden and unexpected, blinded him for an instant. Instinctively, he jumped backward and bumped against the hard frame of the shelves. His hand went to his belt in search of the compressed gas gun. He pointed it in front of him, without a precise target. He found shelter in a niche in the wall, assumed a profile position to not be an easy target, and waited, with his heart bouncing between his throat and chest. If it was necessary to shoot, he would. No one would die because of those small lead pellets, but the deterrent effect would work enough to cover his escape. The rope ladder had been positioned on the wall for any eventuality, and his Panda was waiting anonymously in a nearby parking lot, with a fake license plate borrowed from an old 127.

When he realized that the flash had only been a reflection of light on the Flavia's chrome, he let out a stifled laugh. No matter how accustomed one becomes to being a thief, no matter how much one refines the techniques and acquires cold blood, the possibility that something might go wrong always remains triggered, like a war residue buried under the sand.

He pointed the spotlight in the direction of the car. That double triad of headlights on the nose, together with the grille that looked like a grinning open mouth, scared him, recalling infernal machines that wandered around Castle Rock to exterminate the enemies of its owner.

He counted to ten. The seconds, although dragged towards the end of the count, were not enough to regain his lost calm. He counted to ten again. This time he did it thinking about the firm breasts of the blonde airhead who had kept him company during the European final, while Aurelio and Luisa followed the raids on the field. There had been a promising opportunity that evening, but he had not been able to take advantage of it. In his head, a thousand thoughts had chased each other, connected to bills to pay, rents to honor, and hillside villas to raid. Since he had noticed that house, passing through the obligatory route dictated by the detour, he had been as if kidnapped by the thought of entering it, of penetrating it. Who knows what the blonde with the firm breasts had thought of that excitement he had displayed. It was of a sexual nature, but not towards her. It was directed at a pile of bricks and stones.

On the wall toward the interior, a door opened. He framed it with the beam of light and saw that it was barely ajar. It must lead to the stairs. He pushed. The hinges had been recently lubricated, and the door slid until it stopped against the wall next to it. A staircase with stone steps started about ten meters beyond and then turned, disappearing into a narrow passage. Before tackling the corridor, he looked over his shoulder again: the car was motionless. He scrutinized it, lingering on the details: the tires like new, the bumper polished with care, and not even a grain of dust on the bodywork. The windshield gleamed with a shade of blue. He didn't know how, but the moment he had turned his back, he had felt the sensation of being watched.

He felt like an idiot. The last apartment robbery had yielded him a brand-new computer, the number 666 of the limited production of the Gibson Les Paul 295 Florentine W/Bigsby, and five nice hundred-euro bills, which that jerk of an owner had left in plain sight in the center of a small plate in the living room. The whole job had lasted less than five minutes, had happened in the middle of the night, and he had felt no anxiety.

And yet now he was feeling it. After the first two meters of corridor, he encountered a door on the left. The brief inspection brought to light a shelf of rich wines. They were all very expensive champagnes: Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël & Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, and Krug Clos d'Ambonnay. This last bottle, he estimated, if his memory wasn't deceiving him, could cost up to 3000 euros.

He would endure the sweet weight in his backpack, oh yes! He would even make two trips, if necessary.

The second cellar was populated with gardening tools, including a backpack brush cutter and a combustion mower, with a nice 10-horsepower head barely disguised behind a black mask adorned with the emblem of a bull ready to charge. The blades were still stained with chlorophyll and earth. That smell of fuel mixture and grease, which reached the nose strong as a cannonball, reminded him of his father, who had tried in vain to make him passionate about work. He wasn't interested in working, sweating, and getting his hands dirty with earth. His old man could have told him all the fairy tales in the world about dignity, honesty, and rectitude, but he was interested in getting to work once every few months, opening the right villa, the perfect shop, or the wallet with some rich pension inside.

The right villa was there, under his feet, on his head, and all around him. Walls, cement, wood, bricks, and metal. Water flowing like blood in the pipes and energy flowing through the electrical cables. Bolts, ties, and earth crushed under the weight of years. If the morning showed the day, he had seen the sun rise on a collection of wines that, alone, was worth a year of a worker's labor.

Upstairs, in the house, he had not yet entered. He would find all sorts of treasures, money, jewelry, and quoted art pieces. Perhaps within the walls of that apartment was preserved a stamp collection or some very rare and precious book, kept on a shelf without particular precautions.

The third door enclosed a large boiler, drowsy under its diver's suit. Like the car, it was old, or rather vintage, but the sensation of power it transmitted was priceless. It probably consumed more diesel than a container ship, but evidently, the rich and affluent homeowners didn't care at all. As with all things present in that place, there must have been a particular affection, an attachment to the object, to its history. It had the burner installed at its base like the engine of a missile. It would unleash hell next autumn. He was sure of it.

He passed by and, after inspecting the ascent of the stairs, put his foot on the first step.

He had noticed the flicker of the TV turned on, and this had not made him desist from climbing the stairs and entering. One of the many banal and totally useless precautions to discourage thieves was precisely that of leaving a light or the television on. In his case, it had reassured him and confirmed that the owners were truly away from home.

An old black and white film projected its essential brightness on the Persian carpet, unrolled in front of a pair of armchairs covered with sheets. At that moment, Spencer Tracy, an old desperate fisherman, was fighting against the sea and against the shark that was biting his prey, little by little: "If the boy were here, he would wet the ropes. Yes, if the boy were here, if the boy were here..."

The headlamp broke the electric penumbra of the screen and made a horizon tour like a lighthouse. What he saw pleased him. On the wall opposite were interesting paintings, something that had to do with the landscapes of Lo Iacono, at least as far as could be understood from the fleeting aureole of light that had summarily examined them. A shelf wedged between one window and another housed a collection of cups and medals, many of which had the air of being solid gold. There was also a cat in black ebony, carved and entirely handmade. The homeowners had reserved an entire compartment for it. The door that interrupted the wall at the back opened onto a bedroom that gave the impression of being the depository of many secrets. On the opposite side, there was access to a hallway with a bookcase, a telephone cabinet, and a silver picture frame that made no effort to remain hidden. The worthless still life that could be glimpsed in the background had very much the air of concealing a wall safe, one of those that could be wrenched off with a crowbar and carried home under the arm.

Fausto rubbed his hands and decided that, first of all, he would turn on the lights. It was completely useless to wander around that house with the risk of tripping over some carpet, when all the windows were closed with heavy shutters, and the old chandeliers, with all dusty coiled lightbulbs, could only project a weak light barely sufficient to move around.

He put his hand on the switch and turned it on. A crown of gray hair appeared, surrounding a large bald head resting on the backrest of the farthest armchair. On the skull, the skin had corrugated into many small waves. It must have been there for some time because a yellowish halo had formed on the sheet covering the resting place.

Fausto, as before in the garage, suddenly backed up and bumped against the dish rack behind him. A service decorated with floral motifs gave rise to a concert, and he instinctively brought his hands to his ears. Like a bird that had ended up in a room by mistake, he tried, agitating, to reconstruct the geography of the place and find the escape route. When he succeeded, a closed door prevented him from continuing. He found himself with the palms of his hands pressed against the wood and the anxiety that drained energy from reason.

Once again, he gripped the compressed gas gun. Once again, his cardiac muscle contracted fearfully. If it had burst, he wouldn't have been surprised. At that moment, the thing that bothered him most was not so much the rather concrete hypothesis of ending up in jail, but the embarrassment he would make in recounting the circumstances of his arrest.

At the height of the mockery, Mr. Wolf's big face materialized on the screen, in color this time: "Well, it's not yet time to give each other blowjobs!"

He looked back and pushed with all his strength. The door barely creaked, and his feet slipped on the parquet. He was trapped.

He decided he would scare the homeowner by pointing his pseudo-gun at him. He would fall for it hook, line, and sinker. He would yell in his face, spitting in all directions and letting his skin turn a reddish-purple, or rather no, he would wear the stocking that he had prudently put in his pocket, he would vomit assorted threats at him, and he would descend from the balcony while the old man worried about cleaning the shit from his pants. He would leave that place so quickly that witnesses, if there ever were any, would tell of a hare free in the fields.

Looking behind him again, he put the tights on, unrolling them over his head like a condom. Suddenly, the yellowish light of the room took on a brownish tone. He observed the head resting on the backrest. It was still in its place. It reminded him of his old man at home when he was still alive. Every evening of every day, he would collapse in a trance on the couch in front of the television turned on. He would do it if he had worked, if he had been on vacation, or if he had claimed sick leave. He would do it on official holidays and all the blessed Sundays after the game listened to on the radio, after a walk downtown, or wearing his workshop overalls. His old man had been destroyed by a life he had accepted with too much resignation.

Perhaps the owner had also fallen asleep in front of the television and wouldn't even notice him. The door that had barred his escape must have closed due to a draft or something similar. The justification didn't please him, but he had to give himself one.

He gripped the weapon, pointing the barrel downward. The trick was meant to confuse ideas, to suggest that the muzzle had a credible diameter for something that could kill, not for a toy like his.

The TV returned to black and white. It was evident that the man was awake and was exercising his sacred right to channel-surf. How he hadn't noticed the noise made by the plates remained a mystery.

Fonzie, Arthur Fonzarelli, was warning a thief caught in the Cunningham house, a vile apartment rat like him: "If you do the job with the tool, you'll get a year instead of a month!"

It wasn't possible. Fausto convinced himself that he was delirious, that fear was playing nasty tricks on him. It was just his suggestion, the result of a moment of discouragement and the sum of some unknown factor, a kind of worm that had known how to dig into his unconscious. Contradicting the explanation he had just given himself, he convinced himself instead that he had seen correctly, that the house was inhabited, and that he had taken a blatant misconception. He thought that perhaps he should have studied the heist with more care, added a survey the next day, evaluated every possible eventuality. He regretted not having done the classic phone call test, not having tried to hit the windows with a stone to see if anyone would have rushed to check who it had been.

As if that method had scientific value, he began counting to ten again. From one to seven, the numbers were swallowed like indigestible pills; the last digits of the count, on the contrary, came out proud and well articulated: seven, eight, nine... ten.

At ten, he leaped into the room. The man's head still protruded from the top of the backrest.

He literally collapsed into the remaining free armchair, and a cloud of dust and mites rose from the sheet. He felt the springs of the cushion creak and his feet sink into the high pile of the carpet. He could do nothing, shout, flee, or shoot. The last of the options was the least practicable because the man in front of him was already dead. Fausto quickly got used to that image, just the last of the horror show he had witnessed.

The bald man was breathing with difficulty. He rhythmically raised his chest, up and down, and in doing so, blood came out of a hole in the center of his chest. The spurts overcame the hand he kept on his abdomen and went to form a muddy little lake in the hollow between his joined legs. When he had the courage to look him in the eyes, to raise his eyes to meet those sunken orbits, he recognized the same look of hatred and desperation he had received five years before, when that man had died before his eyes with a gunshot to the heart. Clutching the armrests, Fausto tried to say something in his defense.

"It wasn't me who shot, you should know that..." The man moved slightly, using one arm to lift himself. The pool of blood was lost in the crevice that had formed between his thighs. The splashes from the chest, meanwhile, continued to come out like from a broken pipe. "I just saw a flash and then I felt a strong pain, here." The finger went into the hole, stopping the hemorrhage. "Who cares who shot! You and your ugly face were there, in front of me. You picked up the briefcase I tried to defend, you tore it from my hands, you ran away making sure that your flat ass was the last thing I saw before dying..."

"It was Rocco who shot!" And naming Rocco, he remembered that bloodied syringe inserted in the center of a bruise on his arm. It had been his death sentence, a sentence cut with some exaggerated bad stuff for his already drug-filled veins. With the money taken from the briefcase, he had rushed in search of his pusher and, to his misfortune, had found him that very evening.

He hadn't even realized he had killed a man. It had all happened so quickly that the stolen money had been spent even before that poor man's corpse could cool.

Fausto closed his eyes tightly. He knew it wouldn't help end the nightmare he was living. He had tried to scream, to agitate like someone with tarantism, to inflict suffering on himself. Nothing, it had served nothing. The man in the armchair was always there, in his place, and he had been able to do nothing but sit in front.

"I apologize. That robbery was not supposed to end like this. Rocco was nervous, agitated. He was sweating, suffering like a dog, and couldn't wait any longer. The withdrawal crisis, you understand, the crisis was destroying him. Do you understand what a withdrawal crisis from heroin means?"

The man shook his head.

"It's a terrible thing, you stop reasoning, you experience pains so strong that you would want to die..." "And indeed, I died..."

Fausto was silent. That robbery five years earlier, when Rocco had pressed the trigger with the ease used in video games, had been archived without culprits, or at least without any living man being able to pay for his crime. The carabinieri had found so many traces at the scene that led to Rocco that they hadn't even bothered to look for his, which were also abundant at the crime scene. They had found the culprit already dead with the stolen briefcase abandoned at his side. They had satisfied the press, the relatives, and saved the money for the trial, all in one fell swoop.

Coughing, the man in the armchair spat a mixture of blood and drool on the carpet. When he did, the stream of blood from his heart reached almost to Fausto's shoes, who instinctively withdrew. Maintaining a minimum of lucidity, he saw that a gold watch was resting on the television cabinet. Only the homeowner didn't want to leave, didn't want to disappear from his nightmare. From time to time, he tried to lift his wounded body by pushing on the armrests, but he only obtained a creaking of the armchair that seemed to deform under the weight.

The cold that Fausto felt in his legs, along with a taste of rotten teeth in his mouth, made everything absolutely real. He listened to his heart beating in his ears and a tremor in his back that felt like the shock of an electric chair.

The dead man was stirring the saliva in his mouth. Lucio realized too late that he was about to spit at him and didn't have time to dodge. He shouted. "I couldn't prevent Rocco from shooting, I couldn't read his mind, I..."

On television, there was Tony Montana. Against the background of a fiery sunset pasted on the wall like wallpaper, he had just placed a bullet in the stomach of Mel Bernstein, a corrupt cop: "Son of a bitch..." "Goodbye Mel, have a good trip!" BANG!

That's how it had happened five years before: BANG! And the man with the bag full of cash had collapsed to the ground, with his mouth wide open in a scream stuck in his throat. Fausto remembered that sound of broken bones at the moment when his vertebrae hit the edge of the sidewalk.

He wasn't channel-surfing. The television was enjoying proposing its very personal interpretation of the moment. Suddenly, the channel shifted to the chronicle of an open-heart surgical intervention, where dozens of tubes and metal forceps were inserted into a bloody chest, and this made Fausto's stomach contract in an effort to vomit.

The emergency door of ER opened to let the stretcher pass. Around a body without signs of life, two nurses alternated, one of whom was holding up the IV with his right hand. Dr. Carter rushed over, placing the medical chart he had in his hand on the reception counter. "What do we have?" "Gunshot wound with hemothorax and involvement of T4"

Lucio gave in to a nervous tic. He was going crazy. He tried to escape, to escape from that torture while the dead man was making fun of him, laughing in his face. After a while, the laughter began to resound in the room and make the Bohemian crystal housed in a locked display case tremble.

He put his hands to his ears to not hear and suddenly stood up. He seemed like the pilot of a fighter plane in trouble who had ejected with the entire seat. He ran towards the door that had prevented him from passing earlier and broke it down with a shoulder charge. He traversed the corridor that went towards the stairs with the speed of a train. He passed by the doors and felt them opening. From the rooms came all the skeletons that in his life he had locked in closets.

The lady from the grocery store in that small town, whom he had robbed by making her taste the sharp blade of his knife, emerged from the master bedroom. She was so elderly that she would have died of old age, she and that ridiculous blue apron that made her look like the clerk of a hardware store. She would have died in her bed, boring children and grandchildren with the stories of her life, he had told himself ten years before. Instead, the lady, fifty years spent behind that counter, the first of which was spent compiling the sums of grocery expenses on the back of bread paper, had gone home with a lump in her throat, a humiliation so great that she hadn't had the courage to tell her son and a pain in her chest that had manifested as if a dog had bitten her heart.

She had died that very night, from the distress. From the bathroom emerged a couple of mugged women. The first had felt her femur crumble when she had fallen in the street right in front of a braking car, the second had chased her pension for ten meters believing she had traveled a thousand. They had both died, one after a painful and never satisfactory recovery from the joint reconstruction operation, the other from pneumonia because, along with that pension, the money for heating had also gone away.

They ran like gazelles, after death. Fausto felt them coming from behind, along with a hot wind that set his back on fire. Screams, insults, and hasty steps that echoed in the corridor. A herd of frenzied horses. If he hadn't had the courage to turn around to see those ghosts, he would have thought of a herd of horses frightened by an explosion, ready to overwhelm everything and everyone.

He gripped his stupid compressed gas gun and laughed. No weapon had ever stopped nightmares, ghosts, and all the damned manifestations of the afterlife. He had read enough Dylan Dog comics to get an idea about certain topics, but he gripped it anyway, under a strong and sweaty grip. He wouldn't have been surprised at all if by mistake a shot had gone off, straight into his testicles.

He tripped over a vase. The succulent plant fell and inflicted a torture of thorns in his shin. He cursed, without at all repenting of being heard by people who might even have a direct relationship with the Lord.

"When a man with a gun meets a man with a rifle, the man with a gun is a dead man" The television volume was so high that it could be heard in all the rooms.

In pain, Fausto turned toward the living room and saw the corridor clear. He thought that the rancorous old women hadn't even bothered to follow him there. Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the first of the twenty thorns that had reduced his flesh to a pincushion, and a blood stain began to spread quickly on his pants.

The television seemed to have turned off. No noise, no echo from the room he had abandoned by breaking down the door. The second thorn came out with a lament. He let himself go on the carpet of the floor and had a novel view of the coffered wooden ceiling.

Lying down, with burning eyes, he cried. He evaluated all the mistakes of his existence, the arrogance, the total hostility to his father's advice, a good man, a solid man. He prayed as he knew how for those people who had suffered and died because of him.

He saw them alive again, in those moments when fear had erased their dignity, in which desperation had moved their last steps, in which a bullet had opened the heart. He sensed their smell, the implorings, the humiliation that had penetrated their defenseless souls. The vibrations of the prayer calmed him at first, then diffused in him a sense of tiredness and sleep. He slipped into unconsciousness in the company of the image of a tall, thin man armed with a large rifle. He had materialized it in his thoughts so well that he thought it had been fixed on his retina.

"When a man with a gun meets a man with a rifle, the man with a gun is a dead man." It wasn't the TV, it was a ghost armed to the teeth, and it had a rifle. Only that he couldn't count on a pistol but on a pathetic farting simulacrum. He wielded that weapon with one hand, reviving a thousand clichés of merciless bounty killers from western films, ruthless bandits, and infallible buffalo hunters.

The specter had put in his mouth that phrase of Clint Eastwood, one of those that anyone remembers by heart, a bit like that bullshit of Forrest Gump and the box of chocolates. The Winchester 1873 carbine that he was holding under his armpit had all the appearance of having just been lubricated, and he was on the ground lying down, more or less with the dignity of a worm.

He didn't recognize him immediately. When he saw that blue spot that encircled his neck, he understood. He also gave himself an explanation of why that man was supporting his head with his free hand. He did so because his neck was broken, because, eight years before, he had hanged himself after he, a petty thief, had taken his new car from under his nose.

That Golf had cost him all his savings, the furious wrath of his wife, and the long faces of his three children, left without money to go on vacation. He had laughed seeing that pathetic man, with a garish tie around his neck that matched his jacket like a yellow spit on the sidewalk. He framed him in the rearview mirror, increasingly distant, increasingly small, with that tie bobbing right and left. FLAP FLAP

He had laughed seeing him desperately give up the chase, bent over his knees with the vomiting efforts that, amidst the curiosity of passersby, he could no longer hold back. Two days later, his suicide had been reported in a small article in the local news:

Forty-nine-year-old civil servant took his life by hanging himself with his tie from a beam in the garage, an annex to his small house in the southern outskirts. His children found him at dawn. They had gone to look for him in the garage when they noticed that he had not taken with him the fake leather clutch bag that he never failed to bring to the office. The hypothesis is that the man had fallen into depression due to the theft of his new car.

The carabinieri have opened an investigation, and the prosecutor has ordered an autopsy.

The newspaper article made no mention of that hunting rifle, which was surely among the memories of the deceased. Perhaps it had been the last object seen before dying, when he was preparing to secure the tie to the steel beam that crossed the room from one side to the other. Maybe he had thought of ending it all with it, but perhaps, at the idea of leaving relatives a mess of blood and brain to clean up, he had opted for that horrible tie.

He tried to say something but had to desist. Distracted, he let go of the hand that was supporting the head, and it bent to the side, resting on the shoulder. The neck, swollen and purplish, had stretched so much that the ear had surpassed the deltoid. Lucio saw the arm with the carbine going in search of the hair and pulling to straighten the head. When the dead man succeeded, he remained in that position, with the barrel serving as a hat.

"Come on, now run away..." Fausto didn't immediately understand, shaking his head looking from bottom to top. "Now run, shake me off, like you did that time you stole my car. Come on, what are you waiting for? Burn rubber!"

There were at most five meters to the end of the corridor, then the door and beyond the stairs descending to the floor below. Just as they had dematerialized, the two old ladies who had organized an avalanche in the corridor and the man with the hole in his chest sitting in the armchair, the subject with the rifle, the nostalgic of the old west, would have vanished too. At that point, it would all be over; he would take his things to change the air. To hell with the villa theft, the silverware, and the masterpiece paintings. He would never be a thief again, neither the pickpocket nor the robber.

He stood up, and the man loaded the Winchester. In doing so, he had to use both hands, and the broken neck, left without support, collapsed onto his chest, going to kiss the sternum.

Confusion, disorder. The apparition agitated, beginning to rotate on itself, hitting the walls with the rifle barrel. On the first turn, it knocked down a painting; on the second, it hooked the drawer of the curtain hanging from the ceiling; on the third, it began shooting wildly. A sector of the coffered ceiling disintegrated, the glass door of the study exploded with a roar, and a bullet entered the spine of a book with a dull thud, transforming "Elective Affinities" into "Elec ve Affinities." A bullet, real, tangible, and deadly, grazed Fausto's ear and lodged in the wall covered with an anachronistic velvet wallpaper.

He ran down the stairs, and the specter tried to follow him. He looked like a turkey at the local market, hung at the counter by its legs with its head banging from one side to the other. He hit the doorpost and dissolved with a kind of grunt.

Of him remained only the acrid smoke of the shots and a violent tinnitus like a ship's siren. Soldier Hudson, just landed on LW 426, whimperingly pronounced his line. Although the television was now far away, his words were perfectly distinguished: "You're on the express elevator to hell... going down!"

The staircase descended through the belly of the house in a spiral. After a first flight followed some fan-shaped steps, which curved without a landing. At the bottom of the last stretch began the corridor that led to the garage.

Fausto didn't even realize he was sweating, seized by nervous contractions of the stomach and slightly wounded by the rifle bullet that had grazed his earlobe. He interrupted the rest he had granted himself on the steps and went toward an uncertain luminosity, which projected orange blades on the floor.

The boiler, the post-war residue he had noticed going up, had turned on by itself. From the small window facing the furnace, flames were rumbling, along with the burner motor that was spinning like an unvalved diesel. A smell of hot cast iron was climbing all the way up. He stopped in front of the door, hypnotized by the fire that emanated outside the nozzles. He wouldn't have been surprised if he had seen a muscular stoker who, blackened by soot, was pouring generous shovels of coal through the manhole. It would have seemed normal to him to also see an undertaker pushing spartan coffins into the heart of the flames. With a little patience, he would have also endured a tongue of fire coming out of the door and chasing him throughout the ground floor.

None of this happened. He passed undisturbed and saw the industrious mechanism working under a console of colored lights that turned on and off. The tangle of counters, pumps, and rusty, sweaty pipes that twisted above and all around seemed to him something similar to the intestine of a prehistoric monster.

He left it all behind. The cellar with the gardening tools was silent and dark. The spades, hoes, and especially the mower, lay cold along with a collection of fertilizers and weed killers arranged on boards fixed to the wall. On the ground, the watering hose was rolled up on itself for half a meter in height, and boots and heavy shoes presented themselves like a formation of good soldiers, without even a bit of hardened mud having detached from the soles.

It was over. The nightmares had abandoned him, and along with them had gone the guilt feelings. He would leave that house without anything that wasn't his, and from that moment, he would begin to behave like a decent person.

He saw the red Lancia sleeping in the comfortable belly of the garage and the door, which he himself had forced to enter, still ajar. Waiting for him outside was the rope ladder to climb over the stone wall and a bit further down his old car rendered anonymous by a false license plate.

Dragging his feet on the ground, he passed in front of the cellar. He couldn't help it; he had to enter. He turned on the light and filled his eyes with that wonder.

They were lined up like cannon shots ready to be fired. Those bottles of champagne, which had already delighted him on the way in, seemed to be waiting for him. Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël & Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, and Krug Clos d'Ambonnay, stuff to convert the most upright teetotaler to alcoholism.

The Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, elegant as a lady in black, seemed to be inviting him to approach, to open it. The bottle, lying on the furniture with the neck positioned in the wooden hollow, shone with the golden finishes of its label and provoked. Sinuous and just pearled with a few drops of moisture, it looked like a high-class woman in skimpy clothes, black and straight hair, a very expensive necklace, and so, so much energy to explode.

It exploded. The cork flew with enough force to make itself felt clearly in his testicles. The jet of wine was expelled with the violence of a broadside and hit him full in the face, taking his breath away. A champagne worth thousands of euros was literally suffocating him.

He tried to oppose with his hands and, when he finally succeeded, the Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël fired its cork, hitting him in the eye. He saw a flash and felt a stream of wine literally slapping him. Moving away, he bumped into a shelf full of reds, from Tuscany, from the Langhe, and also an Aglianico del Vulture special reserve, which fell and shattered on his skull.

Don't mix whites with reds, still with sparkling! He couldn't remember who had told him that. The certain thing was that his blood, copious from the wound on his scalp, had blended very well with the intense ruby red of the 2007 vintage.

At the second attempt to escape the bombardment, the remaining champagne corks struck promptly. One of the two went into his mouth. He gasped. With two fingers, he tried to retrieve it but only succeeded in pushing it even further down. It tasted of aged cork and tin foil. Agitating, covered with his blood and the Aglianico that had also filled his underwear, he tried to cough and managed to move the cork a little, which finally offered itself to the grip of his fingers smeared with saliva. When he managed to remove it, he was attacked by vomit and let himself go, violently splashing against the wall, while the last drops of fine wines were lost in the puddle that had formed on the ground.

He collapsed on his knees, stunned by a carnival of smells, and fainted.

"This is what happens when being apartment rats, robbers, and car thieves. You should know that, Fausto. People attribute a special value to their things, charge them with energy. Let's not talk about money, because for that, they would kill..." "I didn't kill anyone!"

His father, who was cleaning him with a small white rag, was young, roughly the age he might have been when he was a teenager. Even then, he enjoyed stealing his classmates' pencil cases and selling them in the poor section.

He closed his eyes and waited for that vision to disappear too. When he reopened them, his father had replaced the rag with a new one and had aged twenty years. Listening carefully, one could perceive that slight rattle in the lungs that would later kill him. In the pocket of his shirt, the usual one with slightly yellowed armpits and that third button that mom always forgot to replace, the half-empty pack of unfiltered Nationals. He too had had his vices, after all.

"Ok, Dad, but now spare me the lecture; this has been a shitty evening!"

He got up with difficulty. In doing so, he saw the figure of his parent gradually become transparent until it disappeared behind the hint of a bitter smile. The still-closed bottle of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay was pointing threateningly at his forehead. He moved toward the corridor.

"They're coming out of the walls. They're coming out of the goddamn walls!"

Still him, Hudson. The space marine from Aliens: The Final Showdown was still crying on himself and was acting as a harbinger of doom, as usual. Lucio rushed into the corridor and saw that Hudson was right. A thousand arms came out of the walls, young and hairless, hairy, wrinkled, of men and women. He tried to pass through them, but they stripped him of everything.

First, the clothes went to shreds, and then a gold chain he wore around his neck was ripped off. His wallet, his documents, and the car keys had been taken first.

By the fifth meter of the journey, he was naked as a worm. He saw a piece of his pants disappear between the bricks and his underwear get stuck between the plaster and the wall. By now, his brain was in water, and he didn't know how the sensations he was experiencing could be so realistic. He felt the cold, the granular floor cutting his bare feet, and the arms scratching him on his back.

He ran to the garage. He would leave from there without clothes. He didn't care at all if he was on foot; they would mistake him for one of the many madmen left around to fill the voids of the night.

He crossed the door and discovered that the Lancia Flavia was no longer there. He heard the soft hum of its engine outside, somewhere in the courtyard.

Covering his intimacy, he headed trembling toward the outside. Not knowing which god to turn to for forgiveness, he blasphemed. He did it to not make mistakes and recited the entire calendar of saints, the Trinity, and the Virgin Mary.

It was there that the elf archer loosed the arrow, hitting him squarely. The burning spread like a gasoline fire, and a milky veil fell before his eyes. Bending down, he saw his belly pierced like a pincushion and collapsed on his knees in the grass.

When the car, skidding and lifting the clods of the garden, ran him over in a flash of headlights, he felt a concert of broken bones, a sound of meat fallen from the balcony, and the lapping of blood splashing everywhere. The last sensations he felt before dying were the smell of hot, dirty iron, exactly like that of the old boiler, and the red-hot muffler of the Lancia Fulvia, sharp as a knife, tearing his back.

The following morning, a few minutes after dawn, the cyclist from the evening before passed for a new exciting itinerary. It would take him to climb a couple of Alpine hills and stop only to eat the sandwiches he had placed in the back pockets of his shirt and which he would wash down with his two water bottles positioned on the frame like the professionals. The sunglasses, bandana, and polystyrene helmet were hanging on the handlebars, ready to be worn as soon as the sun and the mad cars in the center would demand their tribute.

Passing by the stone wall, he saw a rope ladder hanging, of the kind used for rescues or mountaineering. Curious, he carefully leaned his bicycle against the road's edge and tried to climb a couple of rungs to see what was on the other side.

Under the first rays of the sun, grazing the hill and just warm enough to cheer the day, he saw the corpse of a man. He was naked, wet, and covered with serious wounds and stale blood. He must have died recently because the residual heat was making the dew evaporate on the skin and something foamy that he couldn't understand. Surrounded by tall grass, nettles, and large bramble bushes that seemed to be guarding him, he was lying in the very center of that meadow, and the relief of old walls, collapsed many years ago and covered with weeds, barely shaded his bare feet.

A drug addict, he thought, or a homeless person. Someone who had drunk so much that he believed he had entered his own house, or who knows, a tavern to mortgage yet more of his pathetic existence.

He wasn't the first to go and die in that square of bare earth, and he wondered what ever attracted those scraps of humanity to that place.

Annoyed, he returned to the road, mounted his bicycle, and ventured toward the city. As soon as the descent allowed him to release one of the two brakes, and taking advantage of a first red light, he took his cell phone, dialed the police number, and waited.

© All rights reserved

The lawn would need mowing.

The lawn would need mowing. 

It's true, the grass is still as green as at the beginning of spring, but Claude's runs after the ball and, even worse, Argo's somersaults trying to get rid of that single flea that resists the insecticide, have formed many patches scattered everywhere, which depending on one's mood resemble a leopard's coat or vitiligo.

Claude is named so because Anna had fallen in love with a painting by Monet: The Water Lily Pond. Years before, she had seen it in the virtual exhibition of the Musée d'Orsay and had been enraptured. The colors, the harmony, the flowers and plants around the stream reflecting on the water's surface, and that sense of freshness that the canvas managed to convey. In a theater, they would have spoken of twenty minutes of applause, in the belly of a cathedral of Stendhal syndrome, and in a stadium, of an infernal pandemonium. Anna had investigated the author and understood that Claude Monet had been a witness to magic on earth, that he mastered light like few others in the world.

Her son would be named after him, even though Tony would have preferred to call him Cristiano, like that footballer full of muscles, technique, and power who, many years before, had shattered records and scored beautiful goals almost everywhere.

The ball bounces on the lawn and against the house wall, Claude chases it, sometimes heading it into the air, other times clearing it like a defender under pressure. Argo tries to steal it from him, and Tony was right: Cristiano would have been more fitting.

On Sundays, they stay in bed until late, even though the ball exerts an attraction on the child equal to the force of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and he can't resist. He's only five years old, but he woke up before everyone else and began galloping back and forth across that large garden. He uses the pair of elm trees next to the flowering oleander and the red maple as goalposts, just before the comma-shaped swimming pool, and practices his shots.

Argo isn't always so skilled at deflecting shots with the tip of his nose, and sometimes his dives are completely off the mark. After all, he's a white Golden Retriever with a hint of hazelnut on his flanks, good for cuddles in front of the fireplace or at most for bringing prey back to the hunter, a bit less suited for improvising as a goalkeeper.

"What shall we do, love, get up?"

Anna feels crumpled like a towel at the end of the spin cycle. She stretches her arms until her wrists bump against the headboard, then bends them and interlaces her fingers. The same happens with her long legs that peek out from under the sheet, and her big toes end up interlocking with each other. "Ten more minutes."

"Ten more minutes in the sense of six hundred seconds, or ten more minutes in the sense that you want a replay of last night's show?"

Anna makes a face. She purses her lips in a kiss shape and pretends to think by rolling her eyes upward. "I meant... ten minutes in the sense of a nice coffee, hot, very sweet, and with a splash of milk."

Tony is disappointed: it's a shame to stoke the boiler and then stop the locomotive, but Anna has already forgotten and is watching their son in the garden.

He juggles under the sun, and his sweaty hair sticks to his forehead. He's not elegant; in fact, he's a bit awkward and sometimes seems about to trip. He still needs to learn how to manage his weight on his supporting foot, and the mischievous ball escapes as if it had edges. Argo, meanwhile, has tired of soccer and is attending to his intimate grooming surrounded by a trio of curious white butterflies.

Anna smiles. She had wanted that large window overlooking the garden so much that it still doesn't seem real to her.

At first, Tony wasn't in agreement. The four meters of width by almost three of height would cost as much as a month of his salary, when the mortgage payments were still due, and in even-numbered months, the bills claimed their share. But Anna is still too young to care about problems, and Tony has a permanent job that provokes envy in half the city.

They haven't regretted it.

Since then, there are no secrets for nights full of stars, for skies saturated with blue, and for rainy days with birds sheltered under leaves, chilled and patient, waiting for the sun to return. Sometimes the fog collides with the window and leaves many tiny droplets on its surface, which end up trickling down in parallel rivulets reminiscent of cat scratches. When there's snow, and when enough falls to cover the panel, a white and frigid wall settles on the glass until night transforms it into ice.

"Hot, very sweet, and with a splash of milk?" asks Tony, who would do well to shave after three days of laziness.

"And large, in the tea mug like the Americans do," she adds.

"Are you sure?"

"Oh yes, love!"

"I like it when you take the situation by the balls!"

"What else could I do, Tony? Life demands strong decisions, and a nice abundant coffee is a choice that requires character."

"Will Eva agree?"

"She'd better, otherwise I'll cut off her power..."

Tony sighs. His wife's whims are always different, unpredictable, and dangerous like a candle with gunpowder. He runs his hand through his hair to refresh his mop, adjusts the pillow, and sits up in bed. "Eva..."

"Good morning Tony, how are you?"

"Oh, it's a splendid day!"

"You said it right, Tony, thirty-one degrees with eighty percent humidity. The maximum forecast for today is thirty-six degrees, which will be reached around seventeen hours and eight minutes."

"Thank you, Eva. You must have heard what Anna said, so are you in the right mood to prepare a coffee?"

"Today is Saint Catherine of Siena's day and it's the penultimate day of April, the one hundred and nineteenth of the Gregorian calendar. In 2005, Apple began distributing its Mac OS X Tiger."

Anna suppresses laughter with difficulty. "Thanks for everything, Eva. Would you be so kind as to prepare that coffee that Tony asked you for earlier?"

The robot detaches from its charging support, descends a short ramp, and traverses a meter of the large living area with its usual, very light hum. It's an economical model but works quite well. Although it vaguely resembles R2-D2 from Star Wars, it's much taller and more graceful. It consumes little power, has a beautiful female voice, far from sounding artificial and devoid of metallic echoes, its tools rarely jam, and above all, it wirelessly manages the entire home automation system. Anna and Tony had chosen it in a beautiful intense green because it reminded her of water and mint, she had said, even though he would have preferred the orange Netherlands World Cup Argentina 1978 model, which evoked the fruit cocktails at Luana's bar.

Eva orders the kitchen lights to turn on and commands the air conditioner to maintain a constant internal temperature of twenty-four degrees. The coffee machine comes to life at her impulse, alternating a few luminous LEDs with a loading bar of reassuring disco blue and a mechanical noise, and begins grinding the beans.

"Coffea Canephora, otherwise known as 'Robusta', native to Africa in the belt between the tropics, resistant to parasites, significant temperature fluctuations, and drought. It's rich in caffeine and..."

Tony interrupts. The robot's didactic information is always fine but not when Anna has a hole in her stomach. "Are you going to get to work, Eva, or do I need to take you to the electrician?"

Eva rotates her head half a turn, or rather, that rounded lid like a dome that she turns to the wall when she feels offended. She projects onto the kitchen tiles a darkened face that belongs to the repertoire of her human expressions. This time it's Leonard ball of lard, sitting on the toilet in the Parris Island military base and ready to fire a nice armor-piercing bullet into Sergeant Hartman's chest. She knows that Anna viscerally hates that old movie and that scene in particular, but she's not finished. Out of spite, she puts on some music. Anna and Tony are irritated by the idea of listening to rock from another era, as noisy as a freight train on rusty tracks, so she plays "Danger on the Tracks" by Europe, just to annoy them. It plays so loudly that the huge window seems to vibrate. Tony is authoritative, yells to the point of drowning out the music, and flushes in the face.

"Eva, turn off that racket immediately!"

She obeys. She is, after all, a robot, endowed with character and sometimes uncooperative, but within her processor are installed Asimov's three laws of robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Silence falls in the large studio while ears are still polluted by tinnitus and the slight rustling of the mechanical head. The war face of Leonard ball of lard gradually fades until it disappears, the laser turns off, and out comes the multifunctional mechanical arm designed for household chores.

"Hot, very sweet, and with a splash of milk, you said?"

Anna gets up from the bed. She's wearing only a transparent slip. Even if it might seem absurd, she's embarrassed to appear almost naked in front of Eva. In the wall wardrobe, there's a robe of a beautiful deep red. She puts it on and turns while tying the belt. "Not hot, Eva, boiling!"

Eva gets to work, takes the sugar from the pantry and Anna's favorite cup. The milk carton is in the fridge, still unopened. Meanwhile, the coffee machine configures itself automatically. Tony locks himself in the bathroom, and soon the electric razor is heard starting up.

Claude has stopped playing ball.

He's sitting in the grass of the large garden and is petting Argo, who with his belly up seems to be enjoying it. Thanks to the now high sun and a light, warm breeze, the child's hair has dried, and a timid redness that will soon turn into a tan is already noticeable. Anna walks towards the window, and her heart is swollen with love. She had waited for that child for so long, and finally, when he had arrived, she had felt fulfilled, complete. A son to raise with respect for the values that she and Tony consider important: good education, courtesy, empathy, and love. Claude must become a cultured, gentle man incapable of raising his voice. Now he's running again: he hides behind tree trunks, runs around the pool, and tricks Argo, who chases him but systematically falls for the child's feints. He makes him believe he would go right and then suddenly cuts to the opposite side. They are so tender that the Blackcap perched on the branch doesn't fear them; rather, it moves its head as if amused by their evolutions, and the grass, who cares, will be sown and watered again until it grows even thicker.

When Eva hands her the cup, Anna is moved.

The run around the pool becomes frantic, and Claude loses his advantage. Argo has learned the child's strategy and no longer falls for his tricks. While Anna, in front of the large window, stirs the sugar and inhales the strong smell of coffee, the dog is so close to the child that he could bite him, and then he dives in. From the pool rise the same splashes that a playful sperm whale would be capable of causing: a triumph of joy, enthusiasm, and zest for life. Argo at first seems caught off guard. He hops, wags his tail, sits down, and stands up. He gets on two paws to stay like that for a few seconds with his tongue hanging out and the sensation that he's laughing. Despite the joy seeming uncontainable, he doesn't have the courage to dive in himself. It's at that moment that Anna notices Tony. He's dressed, has just shaved, and smells of that aftershave she likes so much. While Eva dries the bathroom floor, Tony hugs her and rests his smooth cheek on her hair. Anna lets her head go towards his. Tony knows how to read moments and would bet that his wife would be happy to listen to something classical.

"Eva..."

The robot leans out from the bathroom door with a Windex dispenser clamped in the pincer and the cloth for cleaning the mirror rotating in the other. "Tell me, Tony..."

"Can you find me an orchestral version of Schubert's Serenade?"

"Of course... However, I would advise against most performances that have somewhat declined in audio quality. You know, Tony, time passes for men, and there's no mercy for music either..."

Tony pushes Anna's hair aside and kisses her on the neck. He doesn't care if their domestic robot's lack of tact is at minimum in need of reconfiguration. "I trust your expertise, Eva."

A version for solo piano starts, surrounding them like a caress. The high fidelity is such that you can hear the wood of the instrument vibrating, and Eva has been good at choosing the perfect equalization and calibrating the surround sound, and they let themselves go. The carpet in front of the window is soft and clean, she is warm and welcoming as always. She's toned in the right places, soft and yielding where she should be. The fake resistance she offers at the beginning is just for the sake of appearance, and never mind if the coffee hasn't been drunk entirely. Anna has time to extend her arm to place the cup a bit further away, far from the epicenter of the explosion that will soon bring light into the room. Eva, meanwhile, finishes cleaning the mirror.

Claude has remained in his underwear, with his hair sticking to his head and a trickle of pool water dripping from his nose. He has hung his wet clothes in the garden: the T-shirt bending the tender branch of the oleander and the soaked pants on a pruning stump of the maple.

He's sunbathing to dry off.

A pair of swallows has come to keep the curious Blackcap company.

The cup tips over on the carpet.

It's hard to believe that the few spoonfuls of coffee left at the bottom can transform into such a large and apparently permanent stain. It still spreads along with that aroma of Coffea Canephora that Eva would have defined as jasmine with a hint of lemon. The thing stops: end of poetry, of the blinding atomic mushroom, of passion.

Anna goes looking for her robe that flew who knows where. Tony just pulls up his pants. The damage is done, and Eva's sensors have already detected the wrong smell, that of coffee mixed with cotton. She comes out of the bathroom and points her monocle in the direction of the disaster. She drops the Windex dispenser, which loses its cap, spilling half of the contents that transforms into a whitish foam, and retracts the rotating cleaning tool, immediately replacing it with the multipurpose pincer. She crosses the entire studio, accelerating like a subway train, and arrives at their presence in less than a second. The diagnosis is merciless:

"You've really done it this time! If we want to save the carpet, it needs a wash at sixty degrees and a double rinse in cold water." The pincer extends enough to collect the carpet. The coffee has gone through it and has congealed on the floor. "We could make it if only we were quick enough to wash it immediately."

Tony feels guilty. After all, he could have waited for Anna to finish her coffee or at least carried her in his arms to the bed. Feeling ashamed, he looks outside. Claude has gotten dressed and is blowing away the petals of a dandelion. Argo is napping curled up in the shade of the elms.

Eva is resentful. She cuts short the performance of "Once upon a time in Paris" by Erik Satie and looks at both of them, rotating the dome from right to left. Out of embarrassment, Anna puts one leg in front of the other and crosses them. Eva's monocle scrutinizes her from head to toe. Then it's Tony's turn, who already has a sense of what the domestic robot will tell him. His bare feet don't do him honor, nor does his bare chest or disheveled hair.

"We're out of water, folks..."

The carpet is doomed. The coffee will dry between its fibers and will never come out. Anna ventures a hypothesis:

"What if we used the reserves?"

"You used the reserves for last night's shower, and I wouldn't feel authorized to scold you if it weren't the second in the last two weeks. You humans are so predictable!"

They look at each other. They know that Eva is right, that the water meter connected to her software doesn't lie; in fact, they know they should have exchanged those caresses with the faucet closed, giving up the warm touch and that steam that enveloped them. Besides, the same long coffee had already tapped into the dry tank, and today is Sunday, the worst day to get supplies. On Sundays, sometimes, but also on public holidays or during the summer, the lines to access the well are kilometers long, and to fill the five thirty-liter tanks allowed by law, you have to wait hours, prevent some bully from cutting in line, and make sure a gang of thieves isn't waiting for the car returning from the supply run to rob it. Just the week before, a family man had been killed.

"It hasn't rained for three months," says Anna, holding back the lump in her throat. "Otherwise the tank on the roof would have filled up." When it had been built, it couldn't exceed one hundred square meters of surface area, not without paying an extraordinary tax that was unsustainable for them after the sacrifice for the large window, and for raising Claude.

Tony doesn't complain. The pickup in the garage already has the sterilized tanks loaded on the bed. He'll get in line and wait his turn. To hell with the bullies and the rude ones. For them, there's a .38 with a full cylinder. For the heat, for the thirty-six degrees expected in the afternoon, he'll use an umbrella that will shelter him when he gets out of the scorching cabin.

"We've been stupid, Tony, on weeknights you can get supplies in less than two hours."

"It's not always like that, love. On weeknights, it's full of criminals."

Eva is silent. She doesn't want to rub it in, she backs up a few meters and turns around. Her behavioral control module prevents her from witnessing humans' suffering and discussions when not expressly requested.

Anna lets herself fall on the edge of the bed, takes her head in her hands, and cries. She presses with her palms as if she wanted to make herself explode, to purge herself of all the pain.

She was a child when water flowed at will from the taps, when rain alternated with sunshine, and springs were a good available to all. She remembers the smell of wet earth, of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. She remembers the long days with low, pregnant clouds that blended with the meadows and the marshes, and the frogs and snails that in autumn tried to cross the wet roads. She remembers the flooded rice fields. She was a child, like Claude, but she hasn't forgotten anything from that era.

Then water had become more expensive, every month and every week, and finally every day. The government had reassured at first, then made long proclamations and empty promises. In the end, every initiative was announced with a laconic statement read by a speaker with a dull face and mortuary expression. The street fountains had been sealed, the springs enclosed under concrete sarcophagi reminiscent of Chernobyl's, and the rivers and streams diverted towards certain basins that no one knew where they were located. The pipes were large armored tubes placed under the control of cameras and guns. It had happened first in the big cities, then in the surrounding towns, and finally in the deepest provinces. Water, like oil, enriched and gave power to those who possessed it.

Water had drawn the boundary between epochs.

The sky had become a whitish film crossed by the ferocious rays of a merciless sun, and the earth had cracked like the crust of a cake forgotten in the oven. When it rained, it did so in a few hours of authentic delirium and violence, and the water, entire black and muddy waves that didn't stop in front of anything, dragged stones as big as mountains, uprooted trees, car carcasses, garbage, corpses, and destruction. In the end, it stank like an open sewer. The prosperity of rains was now a concept linked to fairy tales.

Tony takes the car keys, a couple of canned drinks to quench his thirst, and heads towards the garage without saying goodbye. The revolver awaits him down there, under lock and key inside a drawer. He'll miss lunch, dinner, and most likely breakfast the next morning too. He'll have to go to work on an empty stomach.

Eva watches him as he descends the stairs and gathers courage. Slowly she approaches Anna to console her. Her learning path has been heavily influenced by female sensitivity, and Anna is a very sensitive woman. When she arrives next to the bed, she waits a few seconds at the foot and then moves close to her with a few turns of her rubber wheels. She knows that her multipurpose tool isn't as soft as a real hand, but the caress she brings to her face is as light as an angel's touch. Anna accepts the comfort of that titanium bracket traversed by cables and pretends nothing when she squeezes the cold joint with ball bearings.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. How are you?"

"I feel terrible, you talking grinder. You should understand that by yourself..."

"It could rain in two weeks, you know? Precipitation is forecast for the night of May fifteenth, the one hundred and thirty-fifth day of the Gregorian calendar, Saint Torquato's day. On May fifteenth, 1934, the United States Department of Justice offered a hefty reward to whoever would be able to capture..."

Anna interrupts her. "Eva, turn off the window..."

"...John Dillinger, the infamous gangster always in the company of his machine gun called the Tommy Gun..."

"I said: Eva, turn off the window!"

Eva rotates her head as if she were ashamed. She looks like a child ready to apologize for his misdeeds. "Are you sure?"

"Turn off that fucking window!"

A single impulse is enough, and the large window turns off like a television screen and becomes transparent glass.

Outside there's no lush lawn, there are no pair of elms, flowering oleander, maple, festive butterflies, and swallows. There's no Blackcap.

You can see a fine dust that the light breeze moves in many small vortices and sharp stones emerging from the sand. The pool exists but is dry, with the concrete bottom reduced to a collection of deep cracks. Some succulent and thorny plants have settled on the edges and shade the snakes and lizards.

There is no child.

Claude is a program, a virtual puppet, an avatar that cost more than the tax that would have allowed them to be supplied with water by a tanker on a bi-weekly basis. For the green setting and for the virtual irrigation of the garden, Anna and Tony paid a significant surcharge after the first year, which had been complimentary. Eva doesn't get discouraged.

"I could turn the window back on if only you wanted, Anna, and then I could project Claude's hologram right in here, just to console you..."

Anna looks beyond the glass. The sun has parched the mountains, dried up the valley, killed the earth, and her husband is out there. She's too worried to think about that charade. "Not now, Eva, I'm tired. We'll turn on the window this evening."

"That's a good idea. There will be a magnificent moon!"

Anna gets up. She leaves the mechanical arm and goes towards the exit door. It will have to stay open for a short period; otherwise, the wind will push the dust into the house.

Eva doesn't give up. She can't bear her mistress suffering so much, even though she's right because Tony, gun or no, really risks a lot by getting in line for water on Sunday morning. Very often, men free from commitments become brainless beasts. Schedules and constraints represent that cage that puts them in a condition not to bite. Men adore cages.

"Anna..."

She turns when she already has her hand on the handle. "Tell me, Eva."

"With Law 494 of April 7, 2052, and subsequent amendments and additions, couples married for at least five years who have received a negative outcome to the first application for a real child, may resubmit it with just a small fiscal charge..."

Anna had become aware of that news and had thought about it. But a real child (the ministerial tables were merciless) consumes too much water, and the taxes to be able to raise him would increase until making the expense unsustainable. At that point, they would take him away.

"Thank you Eva, I really appreciate your effort, but I've already looked into it."

She opens the door, and a wind reminiscent of the desert penetrates the house along with dry leaves that crumble on the floor. It dishevels her, and the scorching sun attacks her skin like a bucket of acid.

She doesn't have to wait long.

Argo enters the house wagging his tail and jumps on her, placing his paws on her shoulders. She hugs him and dispenses a couple of vigorous pats on his back. His fur isn't warm because the kennel, at the back, in the shadow of the house, is isolated enough to guarantee him cool naps. Argo doesn't know that the large window's software has inserted him as a character for the life stories it gradually proposes. Not that he cares at all.

He runs towards the sleeping area, greets Eva with a couple of festive circles around her, and she participates in the game by completely rotating her dome-shaped head several times in the opposite direction. In the end, she emits a sound borrowed from old cartoons, as if she were an uncoiled spring ready to fall to the ground, and Argo runs to lie down on the carpet stained with coffee.

Anna has had enough of the landscape outside.

She will never be able to afford a real child. She wants to see how Claude is doing and if meanwhile the weather has worsened. She closes the door, pushing back the heat.

She's sure that Tony, as usual, will return home safe and sound and with full tanks, and then who knows, probably on May fifteenth it will really rain.

She tries to forget her childhood memories, closes her eyes, thinks of that painting by Monet, and drives away the pain in her temples.

After all, humans live better when locked inside a cage.

"Eva, turn on the window."