S1 E22

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER FROM ANDREA BATILLA

JUST A BRIEF MOMENT OF POETRY

GIORGIO ARMANI

You’re sitting alone at a small table in a bar in a tiny village just outside the world. It's a small round table with rusty legs, and a chipped formica top in an undefinable color. When the girl from the bar brings you your iced tea, the table wobbles as if to tell you that many stories have passed over it—so many that they've crushed it and left it limping.
The air is cooling, but the fierce afternoon heat refuses to leave, circling around you like the coils of an Indian snake—the kind you only see in documentaries.
In front of you, there’s a small square surrounded by buildings that were never beautiful but have now lost even the strength of their ugliness from being so neglected. Even the church looks like it’s there by accident—lonely, closed, welcoming no one.
You feel the sudden pleasure of tea rushing down your dry throat and close your eyes. You think about the long journey that brought you here—how pointless, long and painful it was. You think about the heavy door of the hospital and the soft sound it made when you opened it. And you think about when it closed behind you, forever.
You open your eyes again to keep from sinking and gulp down the iced tea in long swigs that leave you breathless, until the glass is empty. You shiver.
The empty square sticks to your gaze, and it seems like an exact description of your life—how it’s been, and how it will be.
You don’t want to go back to Milan. You don’t want to get in the car. You don’t want to eat or sleep. You don’t want to breathe. You stare at the stone pavement and try to stop breathing, but you can’t.

A pair of brown leather shoes—lace-ups, slightly worn—suddenly enter your line of vision fixed on the ground. No socks. You notice this detail, so out of place, this note of eccentricity you can’t quite make sense of.
Your eyes move up to gray linen pants, loose, light, wrinkled, up to a white shirt unbuttoned to the chest and a gray linen jacket, like the pants, draped casually over the chair.
You can’t see the face, backlit. You squint, trying to make out the features, but you can’t. The sun is right behind him, blinding you.
“You dropped your glasses,” someone says—maybe to you, maybe not. The voice seems to come from nowhere, but its depth touches you. You look away from the sun and glance around. You’re forced to land back in reality, to move your neck, then your torso, then your legs.
“Look, they’re right there,” the voice says, and the arm hidden beneath the white shirt raises to point.
You see your glasses and bend down to pick them up, but just before you can get back up, you feel yourself stagger. Your right leg gives out and you fall to one side. You try to break the fall with a hand that slips on the still-warm stones. A wave of confusion and pain crashes through you, and for a long moment, you stay on the ground.
Then everything happens fast. He comes closer, takes your hand, wraps an arm around your waist, and helps you up. You’re standing in front of him, finally able to see his face. It’s lined with deep wrinkles like cuts, a strangely curved nose, and long, dark, watchful eyes.
“Are you hurt?”
You don’t know what to say, because your hand is still in his, his arm still around your waist. You smell white flowers, masculine sweat, and dust, all mixed together. You don’t want to speak, because you don’t want the moment to end.
You do something you’ve never done in your life—something you've always denied yourself. You rest your hand on his shoulder, lower your head, take a long breath. Then you look at him and simply say, “Yes. I’ve been hurt. For a long time. I’d like to stop.”
The man looks at you, curious, loosens his grip. His face breaks into an embarrassed but sweet smile. He takes the hand you’ve left on his shoulder.
“That sounds like a great idea.”
He sits at your table. You sit too.
His white shirt is made of the lightest cotton, and a faint breeze moves it—puffing it out slightly, then rushing away.

MAGLIANO

Everything breaks down. Water pours in under the door, through the windows, from the roof—in floods. Giovanni climbs onto a chair, then the table. He hears the sound of the pounding, blind rain, and the rush of water that has no place to go and keeps rising.
The door bursts open—it resists the current for a moment, then is ripped from its hinges and shoots into the room, dragged by a wave of mud that scrapes the walls and covers everything.
There’s only chaos. Nothing else. Whirlpools of dirty clothes in the muck, shattered cups banging against pieces of mixed garbage. A pungent smell of wetness mixed with gasoline, dirt and concrete.
Giovanni isn’t thinking—he’s reacting. He leaps onto the kitchen counter, still dry. He hits his head on the light fixture, stops, wavers. He’s about to fall but grabs a cabinet door that, oddly, holds his weight. He opens the window in front of him. All he sees is water—moving, endless. Fast, slow, foamy—it forms eddies, speeds up, slows down, crashes into itself. The water from the sky meets the water on the ground; they seem to recognize each other and grow stronger by the minute.
Giovanni sticks his head out the window. To the right is a metal trellis where there used to be Etoile de Hollande climbing roses—blood red. Torn away. The metal bars lead up to the second floor, then the roof.
A hand, then a foot, then another hand, another foot. It’s a senseless climb driven by terror—fear of falling and being eaten by the overflowing river, the one that was a friend just yesterday.
The electricity firing from his brain to his eyes, to the muscles in his arms and legs, to his skin, keeps him from thinking about Cristina, his mother Maura, or his brother Cosimo. He’s in survival mode. No one else exists. Nothing else.
He slips. A moment where his foot loses grip, his leg pulls away from the wall, dragging his body with it. His weight yanks at his wrists—they let go. Giovanni falls into the water, screaming.
You can’t control your body in a raging river. Giovanni is swept away from the house in an instant. He’s submerged for long moments, debris slamming into his head, his back, his calves. He thinks he’s going to die. Then he surfaces, forcing his arms to move. He’s swimming hard—he doesn’t know in what direction.
He clearly sees a tree. Bare, standing in the middle of the flood, unmoving. He spreads his arms and swims. Just seconds—he misses. He’s swept away again.
He slams into something. Screams in pain. It’s another tree. He tries to grab it, but his left hand won’t move and a sharp pain from his ribs stops him from breathing. He uses the other hand to grab a branch, then his legs to pull himself above the water and save himself. He’s wedged between two large branches, teetering. It keeps raining, and the water below is black.

The room is bright, clean, a creamy, faintly shiny color. The sheets are fresh, and it’s quiet. In Giovanni’s head, a pneumatic drill pounds; his nostrils burn, his ribs feel like they might shatter, his left hand is bandaged and aching. He knows he’s alive, then his eyes close and he sleeps.

He opens them again—who knows how long later. It’s night. A dim light illuminates the room. From his left arm runs a plastic tube into a clear bag filled with liquid.
Right by the bed is a wardrobe with a half-open door. Hanging inside, neatly arranged, are his clothes. Someone washed them, ironed them, and put them away. His cotton pants have a long tear that’s been carefully mended—almost invisible. Nearby is the cotton t-shirt, and then the silk shirt—stained beyond repair, but clean.
The pain is softer now, and his dry nostrils pick up the faint smell of Marseille soap and starch.

PRADA

He felt there was some deeper need still to be explored. Something profound—maybe even new.
People invent everything these days, and he couldn’t invent anything anymore.
He had tried with that contortionist who could twist herself into a perfect circle. Then there was the Tyrolean singing troupe he met in a town at the border between Italy and Austria. They sang well, but after a while, they started boring the audience.
Even the magician had, for a time, drawn unexpected crowds—but then ran off with one of the cooks from the Werheimen castle.
So many artists had come through his small tent, set just outside Reggstein, in the Hoffmansthal district. Some had been very lucky. Others—he had no idea what had become of them.
Between 1864 and 1867, he made good money—but never managed to save much. Martha wanted new clothes every season, and once he had to spend two thousand francs on a dress design straight from Paris, sewn and embroidered by seamstresses from Geneva.
But most of the money went to the production of the shows—he wanted them perfect, magical, unforgettable.
He felt alone, with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Entertaining people was getting harder and harder. The Ternois couple had resorted to dwarfs and bearded ladies, but he had never liked those things. Too vulgar, stupid, pitiful.
He liked to create impossible shows—using shadows cast by oil lamps on big linen backdrops, the music of four violins and a barrel organ, even perfumes he distilled himself from lilies of the valley and jasmine, and sprayed over the adoring, astonished spectators.
But suddenly it was all over. It seemed people wanted stronger emotions now.
A Spaniard nearby had made a fortune with cockfights. Another one with a weekly lottery where people won miracle ointments. Then there were fortune-tellers, tumblers shouting dirty jokes about Swiss politicians, and a bunch of half-rate actors and musicians.
Each one of them, every day, stole some of his audience.
In his old wooden wagon house, he sat at a small desk lit by two candles. He looked out the open window toward the tent and thought.
No sound came from the surrounding woods—only his wife’s labored breathing from the bed behind the door.

When he stepped outside, dawn was breaking. The milky sky turned a pale pink, and objects began to reclaim their color—still half-asleep, unsure whether to open their eyes to face the day.
Everything had hope. Everything could still avoid sinking into another day of nothingness.
He picked up the oil lamps he had filled the night before. One by one, he threw them at the tent, made of heavy cotton cloth.
Then he took one of the torches he used to light the entrance at night shows and tossed it among the broken glass.
Everything caught fire quickly. The dry, worn cotton lit up like it was alive, the wooden poles collapsed on themselves, the ropes frayed and gave way, and the structure crumbled without much noise.
All around, orange reflections danced, exploded, faded, then blazed again. The heat wrapped around his hands and face, and for a moment, he thought about throwing himself into the flames. But he didn’t.
As the fire rose higher, he had to back away, and he saw what he had done. He closed his eyes, opened them again, breathed in the hot air mixed with soot. He coughed.

The fire had woken his wife and two sons. It had drawn a crowd. People stared, murmured, panicked—but did nothing.
Soon, there was only blackened wood, charred by the flames, and a sharp smell of smoke in the air.
Nothing else.
The sun had risen into a clear, glassy sky.
He stood there, still, watching.
At last, everything had taken on its true color.