the condo

mia lecomte

“And I am not sad. But I am
amazed if I look at the garden….
Amazed at what? I’ve never felt
so much like a child.
Amazed at what? At things.
The flowers seem strange:
though there are still roses
there are still geraniums...”
(G.Gozzano)

Anna sneezed and couldn’t find her handkerchief. Ilario was cleaning his glasses on his raincoat sleeve, visibly unsatisfied with the results. The doorman was using a tissue to dry the eyes of the dog, which was looking bored. The dog was sitting on a rag. Anna managed to open the front door and pushed the button to call the lift. Ilario put on his glasses and tried them by focusing on the dog. Lacking his umbrella and a bit blurred, he crossed the doorway, going in the direction opposite from Anna’s. The doorman threw away the tissue, deeply moved as he contemplated the sleeping dog. Ilario came back in a hurry to look for his umbrella, couldn’t find it and went out again. Anna wasn’t aware of any of this because she was already in the lift. The doorman decided to invite the dog to get something to eat somewhere. This was a surprise that repeated itself every day, and the dog woke up rather unwillingly. It yawned. The doorman ignored it, and walked on in front. They walked silently under Ilario’s umbrella.
Anna shut the door and was in Brazil. After long days spent in preparations, the journey had gone by in a wink: three minutes, to be exact. She took off her shoes, tiptoed into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. Everything had been arranged. Now she wouldn’t have to lie any more: the answering machine was ready to make a false declaration about her real absence. And the door bell would ring in vain. Of course, she would have to move carefully: the doorman, inside his reception booth, was sensitive to noises overhead. “Actually, a few meters from your head,” the dog pointed out to him. But the doorman continued to be sensitive. Anna didn’t have a dog, she had a parrot, which at least was created on purpose to talk nonsense. Before leaving for Brazil she had left it with a friend who loved exotic things. Anna knew she was envious, too. In Brazil you feel at home, especially if you are partly Brazilian. And Anna, who really was in part, hardly ever forgot it. She was to stay away only for a week, but she had organized everything with great care: the part-time cleaning woman had taken a nice, long holiday, the shutters were tightly shut, the fridge was chock full. And Anna, lying in her bed, already felt like another person.
Meanwhile her friends were shut up in their houses in the city. They couldn’t even imagine what it was like to be shut up in your house in Brazil. Of course, they would be talking, and if Anna seemed to hear them, she felt more than ever that she was in Brazil: she ran along the beach, danced the samba, played football – in short, all the things you do in Brazil.
And Anna really did fall asleep under the hot sun. She’d often fell asleep like that when she was younger. Then when she was married. There was always music in Brazil, and you drop off to sleep together, in the heat. You are never alone, so other people aren’t very important. Here they are extremely important, and you had to say something in any case, you had to please them, all by yourself. So every once in a while Anna left for Brazil.
There was time when she had even won a beauty contest. Young and attractive, she really had been married, as the photos on the cluttered little table in the living room testified. And whenever someone asked about her or her husband, Anna showed the pictures. Nothing else. Then Carnival started up on a record, and she smiled happily from Rio. Anna’s marriage hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds: immobile, in pose, a studied smile. And then everything had started to flow again on its own.
Now there was often a friend at Anna’s. He didn’t want to see the photos. He didn’t even want to know about the beauty contest. He observed her tenderly, with her already-dyed hair. But Anna didn’t know what to do with him. She couldn’t introduce him to anyone who would envy her. She couldn’t even take him with her to Brazil. So be it.
Anna slept. It was dark in the house, and outside as well. It wasn’t the first time she heard the doorbell ringing, but she was frightened all the same, and curled up tightly in the bed. The bell didn’t go on for long, and mingled with the rumble of the lift going down. Anna hugged herself to find the heat of Brazil again. When she awoke she was hungry, and in the kitchen took a long time before deciding to bite into an apple. The bell rang again and Anna chewed quietly, for fear she might be heard. Then there was silence once again. It wasn’t safe to turn on the television, nor the radio. And then, she didn’t need them. There was silence, the silence of Brazilian forests. Sometimes she could make out some music, but it soon died down. And if someone spoke, the voice immediately changed, grew sweeter. And there was silence. It was cool in the forests in Brazil, and the silence was sweetly scented.
Anna went back to bed. To be truthful, she was still tired. She fell asleep. In the morning she was awakened by her own voice. The answering machine was rolling out its most convincing tone, and when it had finished Anna made her breakfast. The ties were still insistent, but soon they would grow less frequent, and then there would be nothing left to do but wait.
The biscuit fell into the tea and Anna felt annoyed. She tried to fish it out, but once again her own voice made her jump. How much talking you have to do, and others always asking about the same things. She was annoyed, but her voice didn’t change its tone, it stayed the same. She really was happy to have a rest. She had been running for days from one place to another. She worked hard, but she would have been just as willing to stop, if she knew where. In Brazil it’s so easy: if you are tired there is always the shade, everyone in the shade. Here you lose yourself if you rest. And then it becomes impossible to find yourself again.
Anna received a lot of invitations for cocktail parties. They weren’t addressed to her surname, but to her sister’s. The sister who had made a good marriage. Anna was proud of this, and her face was radiant when she went to the parties. In Brazil they call you by your name and you turn around at once, because you know it really is him.
Anna peeked out of the window. The domestic help from the third floor was passing, singing as usual. She looked up and disappeared into the doorway.
Anna filled a water can and decided to water the plants, carefully and slowly, in the long seasons when the rains never end.
Then the sun came back and she started flipping through a magazine. There were coiffured heads, shoes on feet and hands holding glasses, on one page. Further on there were some skinny models and male models admiring them with sailors’ eyes, half-closed to protect themselves from an artificial wind. The woman manager also wanted to speak, and showed her house, an untidy mix of art books and hunting dogs. The doorman showed everyone the family photos, which Anna found unbearable. Two underwear ads, a Swiss watch with time within time, the horoscope. Anna started reading a prettily-illustrated story. She knew she had to leave urgently, but everything in her was immobile, and suddenly heavy. Even the tears running quickly towards the ground, there’s a law of physics that requires it. But then it was over, and Anna was able to travel and was safe once again. She put on a record, low, because it wasn’t for the others. So nothing survived except for a certain nausea far, far away, as only Brazil knows how to be.
One step after the other, Ilario reached his floor. Two ramps of stairs is no big deal, but it’s enough to keep in shape. Ilario leaned against the door, a bit out of breath. Some Spanish music was coming from the flat opposite. The girl wasn’t Spanish like her music. Maybe that’s why they loved one other, both of them. Next to the window, one of them enjoyed a foreign fog and went on playing distractedly, while the other was free to pass her gypsy night.
The painter came out to pick up the newspaper that the doorman had left on her doormat. One of the two old people came out to pick up the newspaper that the doorman had left on their doormat. A good morning was exchanged. “Who was it?” asked the old woman, and the old man patiently explained. “Who was it?”, and the old man shrugged his shoulders and went into the kitchen to pour his coffee into the wrong cup. The old woman never knew anything. Of course she knew she was married, had two children and three grandchildren. That was it. The old man, instead, managed to know a bit more, but only for an instant, and then he forgot it immediately.
It was the start of an ordinary day, so ordinary that even the most hardened non-conformist would not have dared to call it anything else. But perhaps because he never paid attention to the real world around him, and that morning he felt particularly immune from it, for a split second Ilario felt a bizarre fear. It was after he’d finished getting dressed and before he started to comb his hair. Once he found himself in the street, properly decked out with scarf and coat, he could only remember that he was late. Late for what? It so happened that this was nothing but one of those base questions unworthy of even a glance, and Ilario acted accordingly, and with utmost dignity he stayed on the bus, his face haughty, till the end of the line. Everyone who doesn’t consider himself initiated into the occult world of existential problems and yet all the same thinks he has got beyond the phase when it is easier to exist than to learn to play bridge, knows that you can wonder briefly about both your origin and your destination. Ilario, worthy heir of an entire race of rationalists who had dared to hope optimistically in the superior gifts of future mankind, realized that he could in fact answer with certainty at least one of these two fundamental questions. And he went back home.
As he was trying to open the front door with his car keys and simultaneously was stepping on the hand of the granddaughter of the two old people, who was desperately trying to save her doll’s hand, an impulse made him turn around: just in time to glimpse an angelic figure, wrapped in a heavenly light, who was gradually dissolving to the point of total disappearance. The heartrending cry of the child kept him from catching anything except the last letters of the word ending the sermon held behind his shoulders. “eeze” doesn’t give very much to go on to penetrate the intimate essence of a message, and to Ilario, amateur poet that he was, nothing came to mind except for “sneeze”, “wheeze” and “ease”. He waited for a few seconds, and chose the third. Then he lifted the cruel heel and, somewhat absent-mindedly, managed to force the lock and shut out the madding world. He greeted the doorman politely and, a bit less politely, the dog, which he hated. The dog barked.
Back in the living room, he threw himself into the old, flowered sofa and lay on his back for a long time, observing that particular type of time that every once in a while takes wing. And indeed it was taking off right at that moment and, like a cloud, hugging itself into a waddling goose, and then stretching itself so you could see it was a horse, racing headlong. He played at fooling himself, whiling away the time. “I have to look for the phone and call my mother”. The loss of the telephone also signified the loss of his mother. Ilario was getting ready to think of an alternative to both absences when a violent thunder that made the glasses on the bar tremble preceded a hoarse moan that was just as violent. The voice cleared its voice and then gave a speech lasting only a few seconds, at a decidedly fast pace. A series of stammers followed by a sob made the concept even more obscure. And, despite the request of the public, no repetitions were granted. Resigned, Ilario directed himself towards the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. As he waited for the mocha to heat up, he was again seized by the same fear as that morning, which had by now accumulated enough elements to merit the accusation of being bizarre.
His new girlfriend, a real knockout, known as “the bore” by his few real friends, was consuming her impatience in a nice little restaurant not very far away. In the early afternoon two tickets for an adventure film would, alas, have interrupted the sparkling conversation begun at the table.
The florist was full of aches and pains and moved slowly, while the customers grew impatient. Ilario was last in the queue waiting to be served. He waited politely, his mind in the clouds and a finger up his nose, when someone touched him on the shoulder. He jumped, turned around and saw an old man with a pink face, two big blue eyes expressing rare goodness, and a small flame, at least as rare, dancing on his head. The old man took Ilario over to one side and whispered something mysterious in his ear. Since Ilario was very tall and the mysterious messenger was very short, and considering that the hearing capacity of a shoulder is decidedly less that that of an ear, the message was once again lost. As a consequence, Ilario put his finger back up his nose and went away without buying the flowers. No flowers, no girlfriend, according to the strictures of etiquette. So he went back home.
He was looking out of the living-room window when a dove, white and cooing as is de rigueur, alit on the sill. It was cool, and Ilario closed the window with a bang. The dove, whose wing was saved by a miracle, was left outside, confused and with its message tied dutifully to a leg. As a last resort, it transformed itself into a sunray and vanished, shooting off in the fog.
Ilario began to think about what was happening to him. Then he decided that it would be more useful to invent an excuse to tell his girlfriend, and then he forgot that, too. Having survived the danger of being , the day wore on, proud as a peacock.
From the flat opposite came Spanish music, as always.
The phone rang once, then again and again: no one. “Will you answer?!” shouted Ilario to his mother, who was ensconced in a leather armchair. After her son’s detailed report, this astute woman was intent on hiding a most peaceful sleep behind a thoughtful expression. “I’m sorry, but it’s late,” she interrupted him and, scowling, immediately fell back to sleep. Ilario put on his hat and went out, banging the door behind him. When someone in the street dared to giggle, he remembered that he’d never owned a hat, and dropped a light veil over his purple pride.
A letter was waiting for him at home. It had come from the floor below, they had delivered it to the painter by mistake. She apologized, she hadn’t opened it. Ilario went into the bathroom and put it on the edge of the tub that he began to prepare for a hot dip. The sealed envelope was soon floating in the waves. The golden letters gradually disappeared, and by now it was clearly impossible to make out almost anything of the original beautiful design in Gothic characters. Ilario cleaned the tub and began filling it anew. After his bath, he allowed himself a few hours of sleep before switching on the television. The news had already begun and, without any previous explanation, you could see a madman proclaiming he had received a divine revelation: “I was taken by surprise by a Spirit, or an Angel, I’m not sure, who said to me: - The Lord has chosen you, first among mortals...well, to be honest, you are really the second ….”
The doorman’s dog was a philosopher. The doorman didn’t mention this, because he didn’t know it. No one mentioned it. It is being mentioned for the first time at this very moment. And it will never be repeated. Anna had been breathing for a little while on her landing. She’d come back from Brazil.
The graduate came out of the lift and greeted her politely. Anna thought it was cold, and said so. The graduated agreed, and specified the exact temperatures. And then he specified yesterday’s temperatures, and the temperatures the day before... Anna didn’t dare contradict him, but she stopped him in time.
He asked about her journey. Anna was ready and happy to answer the question. But the graduate also wanted to know the number of flights, and that really was too much. Anna took her leave, and disappeared safely into the lift.
The graduate was surprised, and rem
embered that it had been since the 28th of April in '98 that this hadn’t happened. It was on a Thursday.
The painter’s picture was observed. It was observed by the painter. On the easel, in the living room, she still hadn’t found the time to finish it. This is what she claimed when she wasn’t being sincere. And when she was being sincere. But when she was her real self, she knew she couldn’t change anything, because it already changed, by itself.
The painter looked at it from a different perspective, from which she’d never looked at it before, and felt satisfied. Then she tried to examine it from up close, and from the top of the easel. Then from underneath. It was the only painting of her life. And she was its painter. And her career certainly couldn’t be said to be finished; even her painting wasn’t finished.
Her beautiful fingers brushed the canvas, dry as it always had been. She moved the armchair and sat down facing her work. She realized that it would be more comfortable to move the easel, but she didn’t want to debase herself to that, so she leaned her elbow on the armrest, her chin in the palm of her hand.
It was warm and a bit dark in the room, and only the painter was in command of the situation. She closed her eyes and her painting was there: a winter afternoon, rainy, a dark room, a woman in an armchair, eyes closed. Everything was harmonious, complete. Even the habitual anguish, trembling subtly like a tightly stretched string. Nothing was missing, she took her time and let herself be wooed, her chin in the palm of her hand. Without the banal anxiety of the creation, which she knows will never give anything more than the approximate.
The painter opened her eyes and was happy. She got up and rubbed her hands. No doubt, she was a true artist. Not one of those who are always complaining, suffering as they give birth, who go on talking about things they don’t know. She was a real painter and her simplicity proved it.
She hated the pens of writers, pentagrams and hands – above all, she hated hands, which have no use and yet never seem to be able to disappear.
The picture again: a woman smiled blissfully, without hands, and now she was hungry. She got a packet of biscuits out of the cupboard and went back into the living room. Her picture had a sweet taste, and stuck in the teeth. All of a sudden the lights went on, and the painter started dressing for a reception. They were inaugurating a gallery, and a friend of hers was showing her work. She had to be there. She was certain she would find a suitable turn of phrase, something useful to celebrate the useless. Her painting would be at home, smiling, and its useless smile would redeem her.
She had no need of shows. Anyone could come to her house and be whatever he wanted together with her picture. She hated drawing and she hated paints, the ones used for surfaces. She’d hated them for a long time, since the first stone graffiti. As a child, she’d never lowered herself to drawing, nor ever since, and that’s why she had become a painter and would always be one. That’s why she’d never interrupted any growing thing to fix it in awkward permanence. She had merely let herself be passed through, with her fingers half-open. And it was a boundless self-abandonment in her picture.
She put on her raincoat and went out. She came back in and took off the raincoat. Meanwhile she’d found a way to talk at the show, to talk about the show and to meet a critic.
Now he was with her, helping her take off the raincoat. The painter went into the kitchen right away, and he followed her, following particularly the movement of her hips. Fortunately, they were going in the same direction, so the critic didn’t have to make a choice. It was a large kitchen, and they sat down to cut up vegetables for a risotto. The painter was leaning forward and the critic even further forward, with his expert eye. She was happily talking about what you talk about with a critic, even one whose interest was mainly in her décolletage. Real artists remain on this side of everything and don’t need to express anything. That is how they are entirely at one with things, in their works. And that was true in a different way each time, definitively. The critic understood well, and cut up the vegetables even better than before. Then he found himself stirring the risotto, while she went on talking fervently. In a flash of insight, he understood that his work wouldn’t have any sense, the work of a critic, certainly not stirring the rice. But then he told her so explicitly, and in so doing allowed himself to be dimmed by gastronomic vapours, demotivated. They ate quickly, especially the critic. Now that her hips were still, he looked at her neck, her hair, and everything that dared to waver, even slightly. She wanted to have a drink in the living room and he went with her, holding her by the arm. She had the disturbing scent of a ripe body, and pulsated warmly in the fold of her arm. The critic sat down on the sofa and she brought him his drink. Then he wanted to examine the painting, just to have something to do, and laughed merrily. Of course he hadn’t been listening to her, only watching her carefully, and she understood this and laughed a lot less. So he turned on that light in the corner of the living room in front of the easel and came up close to the canvas, curious and cautious. But he should have been more curious before and more cautious now. There were the two of them, himself and the painter...he’d never have gone so far as to imagine all this, at least not in her presence: headless, crowded masses, and wounds burning, excessive, all-encompassing. The critic turned around – she was smiling calmly. He tripped on his raincoat and left, speechless. Next to the canvas, the painter said goodbye with simplicity.
Luckily no one lived above Ilario. The reason isn’t very clear, but that is what some people chose to claim, maybe one of the old people. They couldn’t say they knew Ilario, but they’d known the former tenant of his flat, an untrustworthy sort of person. What is important in life are first impressions.
In truth there were people living opposite Ilario: a different couple, different from one another, of course, as is nature’s wont. One day they had to go somewhere and had taken the motorway. Then he had to pay the toll and had forgotten his money, and the toll collector had sent them back. They’d left quarrelling and had continued to quarrel, and now they had one more reason to quarrel. They had stopped at a gas station as one does, for the rest room, and outside the door they’d bumped into the small stylized people by mistake and they’d started quarrelling again. They hadn’t found a minute to talk to anyone, and they set off once again without money and with raised voices. They were quarrelling, and the toll collectors didn’t want to let them pass.
This had all taken place a few years before, and it was common opinion that they were still to be found on the motorway. By now, no one expected to see them again. One day, without any controversy, there would simply be no more petrol.
It looked like a magician’s box. And inside it there were the doorman and his dog. And then a desk, a chair, a heater turned on in winter, and a television that was always on.
The doorman’s dog only watched talk shows and a few good films. The doorman had simpler and more romantic tastes, and watched everything with hungry eyes, especially the soaps. And he really found it hard to swallow that his dog didn’t like being called Miranda. The doorman’s dog was a Pomeranian, and if a silly nickname was really necessary, it would have rather it be used only in private. But no, everyone took the liberty.
For that matter, it would really have wanted to be another dog, maybe a hunting dog, at any rate one with a well-defined status. There are no doorman’s dogs. There are dogs for the blind, for example, and maybe that would have been better, se he could be in charge. And at least that stupid television would have stopped persecuting him. What a bore. One day the doorman’s dog thought, “Living is terribly human, that’s why I can’t get used to it.” “Neither can I,” the doorman agreed. He was answering in chorus with Fernando, because it was the fourth replay of the episode.
The doorman’s dog went out of the magician’s box, then out of the front door, and lay down in front of the doorway, next to the doorbells. Meanwhile the doorman was diving into the most passionate kisses, close up to the screen. He had a wardrobe where he kept everything that was given to him. If they didn’t give it, he took it. He had a silk shoe belonging to the painter, Anna’s glove, Ilario’s umbrella, and even the motorway couple’s doormat. He was very fond of these gifts, and every once in a while he opened the wardrobe to contemplate them. The dog thought that he was a good sort of man after all, though suffering from extreme lack of affection. But the dog had no attention of filling the gap, he had more important things to think about, he did, such as figuring out how to exist without living, for one thing, and this took a good deal of concentration. One of the old people, granddaughter in hand, bumped into him. He glimpsed them from behind, one next to the other, and fell asleep. The doorman leaned over to pick up a bow that had slipped out of the little girl’s hair, made a vague gesture of secret thankfulness, and carefully shut it up in the wardrobe. They were all so fond of him in that building, certainly like nowhere else. Happy, he stretched out in the chair, with the sound of the continuous television world in his ears.
Then something unexpected happened. Or better, if the doorman’s dog had taken the trouble to examine all the relations of cause and effect meticulously, perhaps he could have foreseen it. But at that precise moment he was still enjoying the sleep of the righteous.
First there was a bang. Then the doorman began to call Miranda. The dog thought it might be better to pretend he hadn’t heard. But the doorman went on in the same tone, or in the same language, if it called be considered a language. He pronounced highly unusual words, in a vaguely Latin-American accent. The dog began to feel worried, and decided to start barking as hard as he could. Meanwhile the doorman had opened the wardrobe and, without ceasing to talk even for a second, was putting on the painter’s silk shoe and Anna’s glove, tying the granddaughter’s bow on his wrist and, umbrella in hand, laying the doormat outside the magician’s box.
The dog felt it necessary to howl in order to get the lift moving. Ilario was the first to arrive and, taking no notice of his umbrella, suggested to the old man, who was standing behind him, to call Anna to act as interpreter. But Anna couldn’t understand a thing, nor could the flamenco dancer. There were a lot of words finishing in “s”, obviously, as the graduate pointed out, no doubt about that.
The television was turned off and the dog was reflecting. Then it was the painter’s turn, and she noticed Anna’s glove, but didn’t say anything. The old woman tried to mention it but her husband shut her up. Excited at the audience, the doorman continued his exhibition, turning from one person to another. And it was impossible to do anything but smile at him or agree readily, certainly not try to answer, which would involve taking a certain amount of trouble.
Someone took the opportunity to remind the others of the disappearance of the motorway couple, and there were a few seconds of respectful silence. The doorman wanted to start a litany but no one knew how it went, and so it finished there. There was actually very little to do and they all looked around at each other, almost bored by now. But the dog had never stopped reflecting, with the television off.
Finally the old people’s granddaughter, curious, went over to the screen, pushed a button, then another, there was a slight frying sound and slowly the world began to flow brightly.
So the doorman’s dog was able to stop his reflections and go back to the doorbells to sleep. The doorman thanked his audience in a comprehensible manner and then didn’t give them another look. They all recognized their own things, but no one had the courage to protest, while the wardrobe shut itself again as by magic.
They ran to the lift and to the stairs like a class of shouting schoolchildren. Then, with the warm beat of the television, normalcy reigned anew. And Fernando hugged Pedra. No doubt, no better ending than this was possible so as to go on ending, convinced.

Mia Lecomte was born in Milan in 1966 and lives in Rome. She is a critic and editor in the field of comparative literature, particularly as regards the literature of migration. She directs the series Cittadini della poesia for the publisher Zone Editrice (Rome), dedicated to migrant poetry in Italian. She has edited the anthology Ai confini dei verso. Poesia della migrazione in italiano (Florence, 2006) and, with Luigi Bonaffini, A New Map: The Poetry of Migrant Writers in Italy (Los Angeles 2006), and has lectured on this subject in Italian and foreign universities, including the State University of New York, as well as in the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and São Paulo (the Week of Languages, Octobre 2004). She teaches in the intercultural workshop "Cantiere delle storie-Voci dell'Immigrazione" in Rome, which is sponsored by the Solinas Prize and by the Fondazione di Liegro. Poet, writer of children’s books and for the theatre, she has published: the essay Animali parlanti. Le parole degli animali nella letteratura del Cinquecento e del Seicento (Florence, 1995); the children’s books La fiaba infinita and La fiaba impossibile (Turin, 1987), and Tiritiritère (Bergamo, 2001); the book of photographs Luoghi poetici (Florence,1996), with the photografer Sebastian Cortés; and the poetry collections Poesie (Naples, 1991), Geometrie reversibili (Salerno, 1996), Litania del perduto/Litany of the lost (Prato, 2002, with a facing translation in English, as well as a volume with engravings by the Canadian artist, Erica Shuttleworth), Autobiografie non vissute (Lecce, 2004). Her poems have been published in anthologies and magazines in Italy and abroad, including "Poesia", "Pagine", "Semicerchio", "Specchio" of La Stampa, "L'Area di Broca", "La Mosca di Milano", "Journal of Italian Translation" (Usa), "Arquitrave" (Co), "Oroboro" (Br). She is on the editing board of the biannual comparative poetry magazine "Semicerchio" and of the online magazines "Kùmà", "El Ghibli" and "Sagarana". She collaborates with "Le Monde Diplomatique", the monthly insert of the daily newspaper "il manifesto".