Numero Zero (8 page)

I returned home along the canals of a benign old Milan. I ought to have been more familiar with the city that held so many surprises.

8

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS
, as we were doing our homework (as we now called it), Simei entertained us with projects that were perhaps not pressing, but still demanded our attention.

“I'm not yet sure whether it will be for issue 0/1 or 0/2, though we still have many blank pages for 0/1, and I'm not saying we have to start off with sixty pages like the
Corriere
, but we need at least twenty-four. For some pages, we can get by with advertising. That no one has yet taken any is neither here nor there: we'll lift it from other newspapers and run it as if—and in the meantime it'll inspire confidence in our proprietor, give him a sense of a decent future income.”

“And a column with death notices,” suggested Maia. “They also bring in cash. Let me make up a few. I love killing off characters with strange names and bereft families, especially the important ones. I like the ones who grieve on the sidelines, those who don't care much about the deceased or the family but use the announcement to name-drop, just so they can say they knew him too.”

Sharp as ever. But after our walk of a few evenings ago, I was keeping some distance from her, and she likewise, both of us feeling vulnerable.

“Death notices are fine,” said Simei, “but first the horoscopes. I was thinking of something else, though. I mean brothels, or rather, the old-fashioned ‘houses of tolerance.' People talk of bordellos even if they have no idea what they are, but I can remember them. I was already an adult in 1958 when they were closed down.”

“I too had come of age by then,” said Braggadocio. “I explored a few myself.”

“I'm not talking about the one in Via Chiaravalle—that was a real bordello, with urinals at the entrance so that troops could relieve themselves before going in—”

“—and shapeless swaggering whores sticking their tongues out at the soldiers and timid provincial lads, and the
maîtresse
shouting, ‘Come on, boys, what are we waiting for?'”

“Please, Braggadocio, there's a young lady here.”

“Perhaps, if you have to write about it,” said Maia, unabashed, “you should say, ‘Ripe in years, they strolled indolently, gestured lasciviously, before clients hot with desire.'”

“Well done, Fresia, not exactly like that, but a more delicate language needs to be found. Not least because I was particularly interested in the more respectable houses, such as the one in San Giovanni sul Muro, all Art Nouveau style, full of intellectuals who went there (so they said) in search not of sex but of art history.”

“Or the one in Via Fiori Chiari, Art Deco with multicolored tiles,” said Braggadocio, his voice full of nostalgia. “Who knows whether our readers recall them.”

“And those not yet old enough would have seen them in Fellini films,” I added, because when you have no recollections of events, you take them from art.

“I leave that to you, Braggadocio,” concluded Simei. “Do me a nice colorful piece saying something along the lines that the good old days weren't so bad after all.”

“But why this renewed interest in brothels?” I asked. “It might excite older men, but it would scandalize older women.”

“I'll tell you something, Colonna,” said Simei. “The old brothel in Via Fiori Chiari closed down in 1958, then someone bought it in the early 1960s and turned it into a restaurant that was very chic with all those multicolored tiles. But they kept one or two cubicles and gilded the bidets. And you've no idea how many women asked their husbands to take them into those cubbyholes to find out what happened in the old days . . . That, of course, only went on until the wives lost interest, or else the food wasn't up to snuff. The restaurant closed, end of story. But listen, I'm thinking of a page with Braggadocio's piece on the left and, on the right, a report on decay in the city's suburbs, with the indecent traffic of young women walking the streets so children can't go out at night. No comment to link the two phenomena, we'll let readers draw their own conclusions. After all, everyone agrees deep down that the houses of tolerance should be brought back—the wives so that husbands will not go around the streets picking up hookers who stink up the car with cheap perfume, the men so they can sneak off into one of those courtyards and, if spotted, they can say they're there to admire the local color. Who will do me the report on hookers?”

Costanza said he would like to do it, and everyone agreed. To spend a few nights driving around the streets was too heavy on gas, and then there was always the risk of bumping into a police patrol.

That evening I was struck by Maia's expression. As if she'd realized she had fallen into a snake pit. And so I waited for her to leave, hung around for a few minutes on the pavement, and then—knowing which route she took—caught up with her halfway home. “I'm leaving, I'm leaving,” she said, almost in tears, trembling. “What kind of newspaper have I ended up in? At least my celebrity romances did no harm to anyone—they even brought some business to ladies' hairdressers.”

“Maia, don't decide anything yet, Simei is still working things out, we can't be sure he really wants to publish all that stuff. We're still at the drawing board, inventing ideas, possible scenarios, that's a good thing, and nobody has asked you to go around the streets dressed as a hooker to interview anyone. This evening you're looking at it all the wrong way, you've got to stop imagining things. How about going to a movie?”

“Over there is a film I've already seen.”

“Over where?”

“Where we just passed on the other side of the street.”

“But I was holding your arm and looking at you, I wasn't looking at the other side of the street. You're a strange one.”

“You never see the things I see,” she said. “Anyway, let's buy a newspaper and see what's playing in the area.”

We saw a film of which I remember nothing. Feeling her still trembling, I eventually took her hand, warm and appreciative once more, and we remained there like two young lovers, except that we were like the lovers from the Round Table who slept with a sword between them.

Taking her home—she now seemed a little more cheerful—I kissed her on the forehead, patting her on the cheek as an elderly friend might do. After all, I thought, I could be her father.

Or almost.

9

W
ORK WENT SLOWLY THAT WEEK
. No one seemed eager to do very much, including Simei. On the other hand, twelve issues in a year isn't the same as one a day. I read the first drafts of the articles, tried to give them a uniformity of style and to discourage overly elaborate expressions. Simei approved: “We're doing journalism here, not literature.”

“By the way,” chipped in Costanza, “this fashion for cell phones is on the increase. Yesterday someone next to me on the train was rambling on about his bank transactions, I learned all about him. People are going crazy. We ought to do a lifestyle piece about it.”

“The whole business of cell phones can't last,” declared Simei. “First, they cost a fortune and only a few can afford them. Second, people will soon discover it isn't so essential to telephone everyone at all times. They'll lose the enjoyment of private, face-to-face conversation, and at the end of the month they'll discover their phone bill is running out of control. It's a fashion that's going to fizzle out in a year, two at most. Cell phones, for now, are useful only to adulterous husbands, and perhaps plumbers. But no one else. So for our readers, most of whom don't have cell phones, a lifestyle piece is of no interest. And those who have them couldn't care less, or rather, they'd just regard us as snobs, as radical chic.”

“Not only that,” I said. “Remember that Rockefeller, Agnelli, and the president of the United States don't need cell phones, they have teams of secretaries to look after them. So people will soon realize that only second-raters use them—those poor folk who have to keep in touch with the bank to make sure they're not overdrawn, or with the boss who's checking up on them. And so cell phones will become a symbol of social inferiority, and no one will want them.”

“I wouldn't be so sure,” said Maia. “It's like prêt-à-porter, or like wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a scarf: they can be worn just as easily by a woman who's high society or working class, except in the latter case she doesn't know how to match them, or she'll only be seen in brand-new jeans and not those worn at the knee, and she will wear them with high heels, and you can see right away there's nothing stylish about her. But she doesn't know it and happily carries on wearing her ill-matched garments.”

“And as she'll be reading
Domani
—we hope—we can tell her she's not a lady. And she has a husband who's second-rate or an adulterer. And there again, perhaps Commendator Vimercate is thinking of checking out cell phone companies, and we'll be doing him a fine service. In short, the question is either irrelevant or too hot to handle. Let's leave it. It's like the business of the computer. Here the Commendatore has given us one each, and they're useful for writing or storing information, though I'm old school and never know what to do with them. Most of our readers are like me and have no use for them because they have no information to store. We'll end up giving our readers inferiority complexes.”

Having abandoned the subject of electronics, we set about rereading an article that had been duly corrected, and Braggadocio said, “‘Moscow's anger'? Isn't it banal to always use such emphatic expressions—the president's anger, pensioners' rage, and so on and on?”

“No,” I said, “these are precisely the expressions readers expect, that's what newspapers have accustomed them to. Readers understand what's going on only if you tell them we're in a no-go situation, the government is forecasting blood and tears, the road is all uphill, the Quirinal Palace is ready for war, Craxi is shooting point-blank, time is pressing, should not be taken for granted, no room for bellyaching, we're in deep water, or better still, we're in the eye of the storm. Politicians don't just say or state emphatically—they roar. And the police act with professionalism.”

“Do we really always have to talk about professionalism?” asked Maia. “Everyone here is a professional. A master builder who puts up a wall that hasn't collapsed is certainly acting professionally, but professionalism ought to be the norm, and we should only be talking about the dodgy builder who puts up a wall that does collapse. When I call the plumber and he unblocks the sink, I'm pleased, of course, and I say well done, thanks, but I don't say he acted professionally. And you don't expect him to behave like Joe Piper in the Mickey Mouse story. This insistence on professionalism, that it's something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy workers.”

“That's the point,” I said. “Readers think that people generally
are
lousy workers, which is why we need examples of professionalism—it's a more technical way of saying that everything's gone well. The police have caught the chicken thief—and they've acted with professionalism.”

“But it's like calling John XXIII the Good Pope. This presupposes the popes before him were bad.”

“Maybe that's what people actually thought, otherwise he wouldn't have been called good. Have you seen a photo of Pius XII? In a James Bond movie he'd have been the head of
SPECTRE
.”

“But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit.”

“That's right. Newspapers teach people how to think,” Simei said.

“But do newspapers follow trends or create trends?”

“They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don't know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let's not get too involved in philosophy—we're professionals. Carry on, Colonna.”

“Good,” I said. “Now let me go on with my list. We need to have our cake and eat it, keep our finger on the pulse, take to the field, be in the spotlight, make the best of a bad job. Once out of the tunnel, once the goose is cooked, nothing gets in our way, we keep our eyes peeled, a needle in a haystack, the tide turns, television takes the lion's share and leaves just the crumbs, we're getting back on track, listening figures have plummeted, give a strong signal, an ear to the ground, emerging in bad shape, at three hundred and sixty degrees, a nasty thorn in the side, the party's over . . . And above all, apologize. The Anglican Church apologizes to Darwin, Virginia apologizes for the ordeal of slavery, the electric company apologizes for the power cuts, the Canadian government officially apologizes to the Inuit people. You mustn't say the Church has revised its original position on the rotation of the Earth but rather that the pope apologizes to Galileo.”

Maia clapped her hands and said, “It's true, I could never understand whether this vogue for apologizing is a sign of humility or of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologize and wash your hands of it. It reminds me of the old joke about a cowboy riding across the prairie who hears a voice from heaven telling him to go to Abilene, then at Abilene the voice tells him to go into the saloon and put all his money on number five. Tempted by the voice, he obeys, number eighteen comes up, and the voice murmurs, Too bad, we've lost.”

We laughed and then moved on. We had to examine and discuss Lucidi's piece on the events concerning the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, and this took a good half hour. Afterward, in a sudden act of generosity, Simei ordered coffee for everyone from the bar downstairs. Maia, who was sitting between me and Braggadocio, said, “I would do the opposite. I mean, if the newspaper were for a more sophisticated readership, I'd like to do a column that says the opposite.”