The boys are going to play with their friend Filippo after school. His mum’s going to bring them back some time after half six. Brilliant. She’s checked that I can write the note in their diaries for the ‘delega’ so that she can take them away. I didn’t tell her that I would have three people dictating the note to me and arguing about the selection of words. I almost forgot to tell them to behave properly as I took them up to school.
A day of grey-suited work and I head home in plenty of time to pick up Marta and get back to the translation work. I stop off at Esselunga to get the brioches for tomorrow. Valentina’ll be back. There’s the Campestre that she’ll have to take the boys to (because I’ll never finish this translation and because I vowed never to go to one of those farces again last year). So the least she’s due is a croissant. Although they’re not as good as the ones from Waitrose we used to have in bed - they leave that sort of film across the roof of your mouth that she talks about when she describes American food. The supermarket’s been transformed into some scene from a Vietnam film. People are queueing up to redeem their loyalty card points like people tried to get on the last helicopter out of Saigon. Customers are waving their green loyalty cards like threats under the noses of the cashiers, like escape visas.
Please, just let me buy this stuff and get out in time to pick Marta up.
Humanity seems to have gone for a walk lately. I weave my way past a lot of sets of traffic lights during my working day. There seem to be more and more beggars, and fewer and fewer limbs on average, at the lights. The scam of selling the free newspapers appears to have been dropped - shoving the paper through the window and holding on to it til you got a coin back.
‘Squeedgies’. Do they still exist in Britain? They were very aggressive and hard to avoid in London in 1996. They worked out if you were going to pay them in an instant. But now, in Milan in 2007, they don’t care if you’re going to pay or not - they start their work regardless. Then curse your refusal to pay. The only distance Milan drivers ever leave between their cars is when they’re parked at lights and want to get away from beggars. I guess they hear a little whoosh of the air-con as they move on, or a squish of the windscreen wiper. Or a crunch of an artificial limb as they drive over the windscreen washer.
When you’re on a scooter you hear words and you see people. I’m not saying it makes what they do better or more easily understood. It makes it all a bit more vivid though. I see the mutilated limbs, smell the stench of the fat one-legged man who trawls the fifty metres of the lights at the Ford dealer at Sesto, hear the calls from one woman to another from one side of the road to another. But there’s always something worse.
I caught some unusual shape in the corner of my eye as I left a light yesterday. I slowed down, I stopped I think, to check that I had seen what I thought I’d seen. One woman carrying another on her back - piggy-back. Walking somewhere. Head down. Why? No feet. She hasn’t got any feet. Her legs just finish above the ankles. I can’t make out any more.
Carrying someone on your back. What image does that bring back to you? Fun, probably. Not necessity. Your children. Your childhood. Beaches. Hillsides. Laughter. Falling over and feeling an idiot. Getting back up again.
If you’re a bleak Latinist then you might remember Aeneas and Anchises and Troy. Necessity. Your father. Your exile.
Where is she carrying her to? A different set of traffic lights. Why? Family. What would she have been doing at home? Nothing. She would have been a burden, unable to work, an extra mouth to feed. Here, at a traffic light, crippled, she has more value than the healthiest in the village. The cripples become the village wage-earners. Tell me I’ve got it all wrong. Please.
Giacomo had a stiff neck yesterday afternoon. I looked at his face with its discomfort and nearly went into tilt. Marta and Davide excused him table-clearing duties. I rubbed his shoulders. Tonight he’s been to play with Filippo and he says he’s much better. Thank you Paola.