The first two hours at the bookstore just passed. KJAZ music is playing in the background as the sporadic life outside rolls by along the dried canal, in the white opening, over the late morning, inside the fading noises of the infinite working sites opened everywhere.
I submitted almost twenty books to the database, mostly seventy or ninety years old books with old writings on the front page from the past owners, ex-libris, postcards, once-transparent creaky yellowish covers, sometimes old blurred illustrations. Not very interesting books, the only remarkable thing was that collection of 1974 international poetry, the only less-than-forty-years-old book I did today. Numbered limited edition though. Too bad we want €200 just for that.

I am taking my break, and I am trying to write using the only small uncluttered part of the desk left, while I register with the corner of my eye the occasional presences of back lighted figures leaning over the shop window for a second, lurking over the 10€ titles and rushing away. I am thinking about my mother, whether her mind could be fading away or not, the thing she feared the most and the only one nobody can be possibly prepared to. I certainly am not prepared to that, so early, I think. But it's not going to happen.

Then summoned by this sideway visions of passing shadows in the ovattato world out there, Gisa appears, with her new long black coat by the large, sophisticated furry collar.
Her look is bright and beautiful, her smile luminous and warm, the little baby girl in the leopard-skin coat is whining for her teeth, but smiles recognizing me.
Finally you look great, I say. You rested. I did, she says. Then we talk about the fight her man got in and his broken arm. We talk about books. About baby teeth. Anything we talk about, it's dear today.
Light entered in the bookstore together with those two, I sense, it reached any scaffolds and into the music and into the things-to-do and I know it will leave me afterwards, strangely moved, embarrassed, just silent with myself for a while.
I manage not to talk about our days in Venice before they leave, and that's good, after all it's the kind of ten-years-old stuff you are not supposed to talk about that much.