I am at home, standing in front of the bedroom window. My mother's voice comes hasty from the phone, I just answered and we're already into the story of her occasional paresthesia to the left hand and arm again, the difficulty to swallow and stuff, and I am once again worried not only by what she is saying, for how much adornment of irony she might be rapidly seasoning it with, but by the fact that she already told me this story, about the cortisone and the physician who doesn't understand or thinks she's an aggressive hypochondriac, and her depression undergoing it all, and even thought she's always been quite absent-minded, I know it's not the first time after the operation she just seems to have no recollection at all of entire pieces of our telephone conversations.

Now she's talking in a rush and it feels like she's worried of being interrupted. She has her mother's story in mind, as I do. This doesn't help neither of us to be rational. But I already said that somewhere else.

I sit on the bed and close my eyes against the sun blazing. I let it heat the skin of my face and I watch this moment developing, when I figure that something bad is already happening, and maybe I am already into it, and then I become suddenly stiff and calm, as all the tension invisibly swirls in and out my stomach, and I wonder if this preparation to events is in fact desire for events to come, any event: to make life more substantial.
Outside the window, at the bottom of the horizon around the big ball of fire the usual blocks of flats piled up to harbor human beings dissolve upward in the mighty light. The city continuosly plays in the background its instruments, mostly engines, and few calls of the living, birds included, bounce between the walls. I think about masturbating for a sec, I don't know why.

"I know you're having this new job now", she's saying, "and that it's probably too soon to get a vacation or something."

It's not that kind of job, I probably should say, but I don't say anything. It would be pointless now to explain her how not only there's no such thing as a vacation to "take" at the bookstore anyway, but also that days off work because of flu or shit like that are not even paid, and then you have to recuperate the lost hours anyway.
So I think, yeah, the boss wouldn't be very understanding if I ask her for 'a vacation'.

"... I am going to do more exams this week, but most likely I will have to be operated again", she says. "I'm asking you first. I'd need your help for a week or so with the dogs and the horse just like you did the other time. I'll pay you of course. "
"Mom", I say. Or better, I call her by her first name, since I never called my parents 'mom' and 'dad', given the fact that they just didn't allowed us to, 'cause it was 'bourgeois'. "Mom, what kind of operation? Why?"
"The same operation."
"Oh, no, shit. Not that."
"Yes honey. The first physician is not listening to me, he thinks I am a crazy old witch, he says the post-intervention situation is fine but I went to this other one who is supposed to be a big name of neurology in Bari and he just told me that the situation instead is possibly bad, and that all the stuff I am experiencing right now it's because of this fluid that is still in my skull, osmosing blood from the meninx and all. I've got to do something. I might as well end half-paralyzed and then I'd be way much more idiot or crazy"
"What, wait, why the second doctor should be more reliable than the first"
"Because that one is just not considering how I feel now. This one instead seems to be actually interested in my condition."
"The other is defensive because he made the intervention, that's all. Still it's one to one..."
"No it's not, because it's not only the exams, it's how I feel. What should I do? You tell me."
"Let's hear someone else, send me all the papers and I'll find a neurologist here in Milan..."
I say this because in terms of public services like hospitals and stuff, I'm unreasonably intolerant toward the southern italian medical world. I can't help it. No offense, but inflation of hypochondriacs really can ruin it for everybody. I'm one of them, so I should know it.

"Listen, if you can't come here I perfectly understand..."
"I think I can make it if necessary" I hear my voice saying. "Don't worry".

When later I hang up I wonder why I said that. Being away for an entire week after only a month working at the bookstore. That can't be easy.
Since I have problems thinking I'm a good or generous or caring fellow, I just wonder if I said that because subconsciously I might already hoping to be fired from the bookstore. I picture it, under the heat of the sun behind my eyelids, and I see I wouldn't mind very much being fired. After all my father was right when he said I had no tangible idea of how 'the rest of regular people' was making it in the world.