Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

Frank Iodice

the saint and who was the poor idiot who’d landed there by chance—I couldn’t yet know. We parted under the portico of the l ibrary, he had to go back inside, they were cal l ing him from the archive because The Interior Castle of Teresa de Ávi la had just come in, a seventeenth-century copy, Don Vito was a kind of custodian, too. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he cried, “one moment! what a bal l- brea—!” At the entrance there were the usual employees, those who hand out regular books for reading or borrowing. He, instead, took care of the most precious ones, and everyone respected him. When he went by, the si lence became deeper, as though it were made of voices instead of non-voices. How the devi l did Rosario find such a guy? In order to resolve my doubts, I made a couple of phone cal ls. The bracelet Odette had given me was beginning to itch, maybe I was al lergic to memories. ● I went for a walk. I passed again in front of the bar with the old man from Padua who didn’t know how to speak Ital ian. Farther ahead, on the piazza, I discovered the new town layout, inspired by the frenzied enthusiasm for the Mi lan style, interrupted by those canals more typical of the Venetian lagoon, a half-hearted frenzy, which assumes escape routes

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