JК
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 241 из 286I folded it up and put it in my pocket, like a person does with a paper-even if you haven’t read it, it’s still good the next day for wrapping something. I go see Carloni, he greets me all friendly, he opens the letter, but I can see him eyeing me over the page. Then he sends me on my way with a few words, says we won’t be hiring anytime soon. As I’m leaving I realize that the paper I’ve got in my pocket is L ’ U n i t à. Now Duilio, you know I agree with the government, I always do, I just asked for any old paper, I didn’t even realize what I was getting. But that man saw a communist paper in my pocket and sent me on my way. If I had folded the paper the other way, at this very moment I might… When you’re born unlucky… It’s fate."
The city has a new dance hall, and its star is my Cousin Nuccio, finally free of boarding school: he is a young man now, or, how should I say, a dandy (he already seemed terribly adult to me back when he was flogging Angelo Bear). To the great pride of his relatives, a local weekly even runs a caricature of him that shows him bent into a thousand contortions (like an Uncle Gaetano, only less disjointed), doing that dance craze, the boogie-woogie. I am still too young, would not dare, and could not enter that hall, whose rituals feel to me like an affront to Gragnola’s cut throat.
We have come back at the very beginning of summer, and I am bored. I ride my bike at two in the afternoon through the nearly deserted city. I wear myself out with open spaces in order to bear the tedium of those muggy days. Or perhaps it is not the mugginess, but rather a great melancholy I carry inside me, the one passion of my fevered, lonely adolescence.
I ride my bike, without a break, between two and five in the afternoon. In three hours you can circumnavigate the city several times, you need only vary your route: speed through the city center toward the river, then take the ring road, head back in where it crosses the provincial road that goes south, pick it up again with the cemetery road, veer left before the train station, go through the city center again but this time on secondary roads, straight and empty, enter the big market piazza, too wide, surrounded by arcades that are always sunny, no matter where the sun is, and that at two in the afternoon are more deserted than the Sahara. The piazza is empty, you can bike across it without worrying about anyone watching you or waving to you from afar. Because even if someone you knew were walking over in that far corner, he would look too small, as would you to him, just shapes haloed by sunlight. Then you wind around the piazza in wide concentric circles, like a vulture with no carrion in sight.
The city has a new dance hall, and its star is my Cousin Nuccio, finally free of boarding school: he is a young man now, or, how should I say, a dandy (he already seemed terribly adult to me back when he was flogging Angelo Bear). To the great pride of his relatives, a local weekly even runs a caricature of him that shows him bent into a thousand contortions (like an Uncle Gaetano, only less disjointed), doing that dance craze, the boogie-woogie. I am still too young, would not dare, and could not enter that hall, whose rituals feel to me like an affront to Gragnola’s cut throat.
We have come back at the very beginning of summer, and I am bored. I ride my bike at two in the afternoon through the nearly deserted city. I wear myself out with open spaces in order to bear the tedium of those muggy days. Or perhaps it is not the mugginess, but rather a great melancholy I carry inside me, the one passion of my fevered, lonely adolescence.
I ride my bike, without a break, between two and five in the afternoon. In three hours you can circumnavigate the city several times, you need only vary your route: speed through the city center toward the river, then take the ring road, head back in where it crosses the provincial road that goes south, pick it up again with the cemetery road, veer left before the train station, go through the city center again but this time on secondary roads, straight and empty, enter the big market piazza, too wide, surrounded by arcades that are always sunny, no matter where the sun is, and that at two in the afternoon are more deserted than the Sahara. The piazza is empty, you can bike across it without worrying about anyone watching you or waving to you from afar. Because even if someone you knew were walking over in that far corner, he would look too small, as would you to him, just shapes haloed by sunlight. Then you wind around the piazza in wide concentric circles, like a vulture with no carrion in sight.