Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

A Perfect Idiot

overlooking the val ley. “From the l iving room,” Mel i said, “you could see al l the way to the sea, but our rooms looked over the courtyard, they were at street level , an isolated l ittle street, the town had forced the residence to move as far as possible from the populated center. Me and my friends, we escaped whenever we could, but to get to the closest bus stop you had to walk for a quarter of an hour, and it was very cold up there in the winter. . . and at night . . . the custodians were charged with monitoring the state of the rooms every hour, checking that none of us had sl ipped out of her bed and into someone else’s. In order to do this they would pass through the corridors with an infrared devic e th at made a metal l ic sound, a constant and regular beep every time it was pointed at our doors, at the center of which was another device, a kind of button, it was green, colored with green spray. For years I’d wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, crying, under the i l lusion I’d heard that beep again. . . “ With the miserable al lowance the State gave her— since in this period, unti l her majority, she remained a chi ld of the French state—Mel i would go to Quick with her friends. She ate everything they ’d forbidden them to eat. The more they told her no, the more that meant yes to her. Since chi ldhood, Mel i had confused the meaning of those two words, as though not being able to tel l the difference between vani l la and chocolate ice cream. The fast-food joint where

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