Looks like many in the dentist waiting room have been waiting for their turn too long. It' a bit discouraging, also the fact that nobody greets you as you enter the small room. Everyone is pissed, and bored, and grows impatient at seeing yet another fellow putting himself in line. I hang my jacket above the pile stuffed on the clotheshorse, regretting I haven't brought anything to read, as usual.

The most bored of all seems to be a seven years old little girl who is lounging on the small couch. I sit in front of her. She's abandoned against her grandmother's chest, legs sprawled, feet bouncing, complaining.
"But in that place where there were those two fighting with the umbrella you said we had to hurry", she's reproaching her grandma.
"You have to be in time"
"We could have bought the little turtle by this time"
"Or the bird" says grandma.
The little girl idles for few seconds thinking at the possibility of the bird. "Only if we don't keep it in the cage", she says then. "Let's go get them both now!"
"You kidding? We have been waiting for almost an hour now. We're not going now. Besides you ought to wait."
"I am bored!"

Time passes. Droning drills can be heard whirling in the background, but nobody comes out of surgery. In the room, we keep waiting. Everybody is reading in silence, except the little girl and her grandma. And me, recording them inconspicuously. The little girl knows I am there, and every now and then peeps sideways to see if I am still looking at her, suppressing a smile.
Hidden speakers shed "The Sound of Silence" above our heads. The little girl puffs and moves about. Her grandma patiently tries to calm her, talking to her with the mellower tones of her hoarse lowed voice, indecipherable from the other side of the room.

"I would never make someone wait like this. I am reliable" says the little girl at a certain moment. Grandma smiles, I smile. The girl is glad of the attention, and loudly starts acting even more indignant. "How can they do this to me", she says, arms folded.
"You also sometimes do not find the time to do things", grandma remarks. "Your room is always untidy, your things scattered everywhere".
"Oh!" she says, stricken for a second. "But I get by into that!"

The looks of this sweet little girl, with grandma at her service, remind me a little of Mussolini. Her round eyes, the partially squared shape of her head, the mug which sticks so much out when she sulks. So it happens that I am imaging Mussolini now, sitting in this dentist's waiting room with his grandmother, sulking and complaining for the wait and bored and looking out of the window with daydreaming eyes.
This vision strikes me. I wonder where, why, how do we end up so different, us whiny pleasant sweet little kids we have been? We were so inoffensive, and yet some of us ended up a dictator. But it's not only that. We all ended up into offices, in the armies, into cars stuck in traffic, into grown up dresses and into hotels and into dentist waiting rooms, so far from the places we seemed to be ready for as kids. And we are no more allowed to be whiny so much, neither we are so much inoffensive anymore. Everything we do we pretend it is going to happen only once.
Or at least it seems so to me, adult me, uneasy with life, sitting in this waiting room today.
Well, these are not very original thoughts, I know. Still they hit me as singular, and strange.
I am surprised, because in this dentist waiting room I always have the most strange and detached thoughts (See this post).

"I don't like Milano", the little girl is saying now. "It's ugly".
"What! Don't you like it here?" asks grandma. "You have your friends, and your things here"
"I like it if someone listens to me"
"But the city has nothing to do with this!"
"Yes it does!"

I don't want to unsettle the little girl, or maybe I don't want to be laughed at by her for some obscure but peremptory reason. Still I stand up. I have to stretch my legs a little. The good girl seems not to mind me. We are all waiting for incredibly long spans of time. I stroll around the small entrance, rereading for the nth time the hanged diplomas. I think of the zodiacal signs of the doctors. I wonder if they coincide with the picture of them I have in mind. Gemini. Leo. My dentist is a Gemini.

"What a bore!" Boredom is actually torturing her, like a bodily enemy. All the available issues of Topolino she could read are scattered off their pile and discarded around the couch. "I don't want to grow old here!" she says. "Otherwise wrinkles will start to come to my face. I will end up as a granny!"
"Granny? Granny is nice," says her grandmother.
"Sure! So I grow old and die, so I don't have to be here waiting anymore."
At this words, sarcastic and coarse as they are, her grandma covers her own face with a hand for a second, saying nothing. The little girl doesn't notice, occupied as she is to cross her eyes at my benefit.
I look away. Outside it has started to rain. After a thunder, we all look in between the curtains for a few moments, the greenish sky against the shaded walls across the street, the rain violently coming down. The little girl complains for it. They aren't going to buy the turtle now. Colors are changing rapidly outside, and the thunderstorm seems very beautiful.
I break into the surgery room where my doctor is alone, only occupied with trying to open his locked window.

"I had you waiting because I can't be locked inside like this" he says.
"I see."
"But no way. I'll have to call the repairman tomorrow."
At our backs, the little girl and her grandmother are entering too, into the other doctor's surgery.
"I was not bored to wait because of the little girl" I say.
"That one?" says my dentist. "She's crazy."

When I get out of the building everything around is a little darker, but macadam pieces are shining with the film of water pouring down. Cars screech their brakes and honk their horns. I go home, on foot, under my green sun hat trying to imagine what the grandma was feeling behind her hand, before. I remember my father crying in the other room, on Christmas, because his son wasn't close to him. I remember I thought it was death approaching to make him cry. I was sure of it because I think of death everyday, too, trying to picture and to draw that feeling of imminence that seems just so unbearable and inconceivable. Yet I know the little girl was right, it actually will come to be, one day, the end of the wait.