The voice of the lady on the phone is shy and polite. A typical homely voice of the Veneto region, with that religious, modest, housewifely tone you can smell by a mile. From the voice I assume she must be forty or fifty years old. Maybe younger. Traces of closet enthusiasm sparkle over one or two of her words as she speaks.

-- Good morning. I saw on your website you have The Vampires of Bellatrix.
-- Oh! ...sure. I mean, I probably have to verify with that. Call me back in five minutes, all right?

To be true, newbie to the business, I said 'I call you back', I took her number, and then I actually called her back. It's all because I am alone in the bookstore. Only on a second thought I realized you're not supposed to waste a phone call for an order you're not even sure is gonna pay off. Anyway, as I was just saying, I call her back in a jiffy, only the time for a walk up to the Sci-Fi 'Urania' shelf and back.

-- Madame H.? Hi. We actually have The Vampires of Bellatrix. It's 6€. So, when are you going to come to pick it up? I'll save it for you.

I look at the cover of the book as we speak. It's a very old book, and the cover, slighlty marked, bears this absurd psychedelic picture which is supposed to be scary, although it's not very clear what this big siren has to do with vampires. The original price for this book was a popular one, 150 Lire. Wow.

-- Oh. No. I'm calling from Pordenone. I can't come to pick it up!
-- Pordenone! Right. We can ship it to you then. It's going to cost you 5€ for shipping if you pay countersign. Shipping it's cheaper if you pay with the credit card...
-- Yeah... But, I can't use the credit card.
-- Countersign then. I reckon it's a little expansive for a single book. If you have other books you're looking for--
-- ...you have other 'Urania' books, do you?
-- Sure, lots of them. Only the few older ones are on the internet--

She interrupts me again, now she's like rushing in a trance, but always with her sweet homely wifey voice:

-- I want The War of the Vampires, The Ghosts of the Glade, The Fortress by Paul Wilson --
-- wait, madam, I'm writing it down --
--... I saw you also have A spectre is haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber, is that true?
-- Yeah, well, I'll have to check on all these titles... Can you use the email? OK, so send me an email and I'll write you back all the details!

We say goodbye. I hung up and wonder, why was I always so sure that every reasonable woman hated Science Fiction? It was a given fact for me, you know. Like the fact that the most beautiful girl-slaves that put ads on BDSM websites are always looking for a mistress. Certainties.

Later I am slipping the books into the package preparing the order. I am kind of disappointed I found only two of the books she wanted. I've been a chain-smoker for ten years around my puberty, and I do can understand cravings.
I put particular care in slipping the Vampires of Bellatrix into the package. It is actually a very old book.

© some rights reserved

So after the looong time spent without a job, I am again someone who has one. Someone who gets out in the morning, or one day a week in the afternoon, and heads to this antique books store to file move and sell piles of yellowish scorched books for four hours as a part time job. Someone who will probably count the months left to the day he will be free again to go away, around and ramble and bum.

Someone who must learn the glossary of old books sellers, the elaborate ways they have to describe the conditions of books, the superficial ways they have to judge when a book is worth something or not (not by what's written on it). Someone who'll gradually reckon the small tribe of obsessed collectors from whom the store earns its errands, as they crave for certain books and disdain others, with the only criteria of whether an old book is a first edition or not.

So, what. I'll always be someone who will take the longest route from work on foot, even if that means immerse himself in the thick scared noises of the hellish city living all around, stinky, dusty, deadly. To see a car burning as all the trams wait in line, and people run by, and many of them are scared and many smiles, because, who doesn't hate cars deep inside, and because it is an event, finally. To see the flames get very brighter as the front body of the car melt down over the macadam angular pieces of broken stone.

I had the most negative feelings toward this step back into their real world. Their expectations of me being presentable and regular and fit to be seen around or mentioned about as a piece of those macadam stones that are supposed to fit into place.
Oh, don't talk about me, you creep me out, I should have said, careless or nonchalant. I was just supposed to be consuming my left money and then become a real bum as I promised myself years ago.
But then I thought it would be too melodramatic, you know. Like a big complaint against the world, and for much I like to complain, that is something which can really hollow you in the end.
I'll let them think what they want of me. I finished trying to be like they want me to be anyway, even though my father would not be happy to hear this I guess.

Still I have the most negative feelings. I sleep even less, snap awake at four in the morning in the desperate effort to have more time to waste as I always loved to do, just sitting there, reading, thinking, drawing... I took a proposition a month ago, to only think about writing and do creative stuff this year and I already blew it, how good am I?

As Monica Geller said back then, welcome to the real world, it sucks, you're gonna love it. But seriously, I'm not gonna. And with this, I ended with myself for today. How about you? Damn comments are open you know.

The scene is, any subterranean bookshop in the center of Milan (there's a bunch of them, they're all sad and stinking). The main character is corpodibacco, me.

I approach the scaffolds of poetry. I try to focus the titles quickly.
I don't like the first authors I read of, nor the titles. My mind struggles to convince me not to indulge in any time-consuming irrational negative feeling towards these poets. Just pass, corpodib, please.

Then, in a sudden rush of sympathy and enthusiasm, among books with titles such as "Plural word" "Air of the memory" "Inspections", I spot one little colorful book, entitled "Il fanculo mistico" (The mystical Fuck Off).

Oh! pleasant congenial brave author, who are you?

I read: Giovanni Pascoli. This can't be. One of the most trite moral authors of the many trite ones they teach you at school. That's impossible. He comes from the Italian XIX° Century Literature where Fucking Off was definitely out of the question.

And so it is, as the actual title recites "Il fanciullo musico" (The musical infant).

Oh boredom! swallow me in your cavernous gloomy mouth! Step on my crumbled bones and sink me in your voracious mud!

I leave the scene frowning. End of story; then comes the moral.

Dyslexia is a brief blessing. It betters the world, but it comes and goes as a wild animal in the woods.

Customer #1: I got asked to ask you whenever the new Ammanniti's book comes out.
Bookseller: You want to know when the new Ammaniti's book is out?
Customer #2 (unrelated to the first one, passing by the counter): So that we can hide at home that day.