My neighbour mr. C. is a fifty years old ex-transvestite ex-workman and a pleasant storyteller, who knows all sort of tales about celebrities and underdogs of the old Milan's so called 'transgressive' life.
I bump into him in front of our condo, which is a classic six floors milanese apartment building with two stairs, a glass front door, a foreign underpaid maintenance man and a lot of fights among the residents.
I am entering the building as C. is coming out. He wears a kufia and a black leather jacket, worn out blue jeans. A small cap on his few hair. His lips are a little too inflated and give him a faint constant smile. But maybe it's just his disposition. His eyes are incredibly vivid and always ironic. A typical milanese. He's soundly fighting to close the glass door which is broken. He says: "with all these hookers up here they ended up breaking the door finally!"
Dang! I knew it... Since when I came to live here, six months ago, I happened to notice certain always-closed shutters on the other side of the small courtyard. Only now and then one or the other of the shutters could be spot opened, with a man (always a different one) standing there at the window for a cigarette. Once I glimpsed some weird furniture all in gold in the inside... a couple of girls lounging around it...
I have intuition for certain things. Just give me few details and I'll be our Sherlock.
I used to point at the shutters and say to friends: prostitution is going on in there! but inevitably they were convinced I was making some sort of joke, responding with some other boring joke. Mostly they censor reality or are uninterested by it, so you have to stick to commonplaces when it comes to the outside world. Because of that I don't hang around with them too often, it's too laborious for me. Doesn't matter. Now thanks to mr. C. outspoken off-steaming the truth was finally out.
"Hookers!" I say, "really!"
"Oh sure!" He points at two other lines of always-closed shutters facing the street I never noticed before, "...these apartments are all occupied by girls and transvestites prostituting. They're all foreigners, the girls say they have husbands or fiancees but it's not true, it's just fake marriages for the permit of stay... You have no idea the stories this condo endured in years!"
C. lived here for thirty years.
I laugh, "this makes this condo very much more interesting now."
"Yes but listen,", he replies, "my balls are broken already (italian say: I've had enough). Two years ago they raped a girl on the third floor. Last year a woman collapsed in front of the building and nobody helped her and she died. Last month another case of rape at the expenses of a poor albanian prostitute at the upper floor, with the complicity of other two of these junkie bitches (true: it was on the news). It's all drugs, boozing, bad faces coming and going here. And mr. Baulio, who owns almost any apartment in the building, rents those small rooms to the girls for an absurd €600 a month. They prostitute all night and day long, he makes loads of money, men of all sort always hang outside here and the building is screwed. I'm sick of it."
I sympathize with his indignation and encourage him to write the letters he wants to write to the condo manager. But we both know it's useless. The manager works for mister Baulio and mister Baulio is a big mafioso, who bought all those apartments for nothing after they burned down years ago. Nothing in the condo happens if he doesn't want to.
The rich gets richer these days, says mr. C. ,"the middle class doesn't exist anymore". He's a landlord after all, He must be surprised to learn that his word should but is not that powerful.
It happens so, that suddenly one of the rats in the cage is so much bigger than all the others that law cannot even touch him, and all the other rats are too divided to do anything, and the big one can only get bigger.
C. runs away, we say goodbye cheerfully, and I finally enter the building. I think of all the bad stories he just told, and I know I'll have to say to Libi she must pay attention.
But, you know, I am happier.
That's because my ruling passion is to uncover things that complicity of the folks hide away from me.
It's always been that way.
And, kind of nothing right now makes me look at the future with more confidence and cheerfulness than knowing I live in a phony middle-class building which is in fact a giant brothel in the middle of a phony middle-class city which is in fact a huge ratcage in the middle of a phony conformist catholic nation which is in fact an immense headstrong den for habitual sinners.
-- In picture, above: today's sunset as seen from the condo in object
