Page 42 of Two Chances With You

“What a nice surprise! You came by to pick me up at school,” Babi said.

“Yes, I want you to run away with me.”

“Mamma would deserve it. She’s never on time to pick me up.”

Babi climbed up behind me on my motorcycle. She immediately held on tight.

“Wait, now, let me get this straight. You’re not running away with me because you even want to be with me. It’s just to punish your mother for being chronically late. You really are a piece of work.”

“Okay, but excuse me very much, if I can kill two birds with one stone, isn’t that better?”

We went by her sister, who was out front waiting too.

“Dani, tell Mamma I’ll be home later. Don’t run now, okay?”

A short while later on Via Cola di Rienzo, at the Gastronomia Franchi, we walked out of the delicatessen with one of those vegetable fritters they only make there, and which Babi was in love with. They’re fried perfectly, still hot, with a handful of napkins, a bottle of mineral water to split between us, and ravenous appetites. We just gobbled them down. She was sitting on the motorcycle, and I was standing facing her. We weren’t talking, just gazing into each other’s eyes.

Then, without warning, it started to sleet. It came down heavy, an incredible downpour of frozen slush. So we ran, we ran like crazy, and we managed to find shelter in a doorway, locked but still offering a modicum of space, practically slipping and falling just to get out from under that sleet. There we stood, chilled to the bone, in the shadow of the terrace above. Then the sleet gradually softened into snow. It was snowing in Rome.But practically before touching the ground, that snow melted.

We smiled at each other again for a moment, she took another bite of her fritter, and I tried to kiss her…

And thenpoof, as quick as that sleet, this memory melts away too. There’s never a good reason for a memory. It just arrives like that, without warning, without asking permission. And you never know when it will disappear. The only thing that youdoknow, alas, is that it will come back. Usually only for split seconds at a time.

But by now I know how to handle it. The minute the memory arrives, you need to turn and run from it as fast as you can go. Do it immediately, without regrets or second thoughts, make no concessions, don’t even focus on it, don’t stop to play with it. Don’t let it hurt you.

There, that’s better. Now it’s over. That snow has melted away entirely.

Chapter 15

It’s morning, and as Marcantonio and I walk past Da Vanni, it is teeming with people. All of them busy, some well-dressed, or fantastically dressed, or poorly dressed, or even deplorably dressed. A broad range of styles, heterogeneous to the brink of insanity. The useful and useless of the great and sequin-spangled world of television. Inevitably present. One way or another. Always.

“Hi, there, Signor Director,” a man says.

“Buongiorno, Dottore,” another man says.

“Do you remember me? I didn’t want to disturb you, but what ever became of that show?” a woman asks.

“In any case, we absolutely have to make sure that we cast this young woman.”

“Why? What’s she like? Is she pretty?” another woman asks.

“What does that matter? We just need her on the show,” a man answers.

And so on and so forth. Creating, manipulating, earning, greasing, negotiating, extorting, building, generating excitement, producing, and harvesting hours and hours of television. However it goes, with new ideas, old formats, copied and plagiarized here and there, but always, inevitably, broadcasting. In a thousand different ways, through that little household electric appliance we’ve all known as long as we’ve been alive. The TV set, our big brother, our multiple sisters, our second mother.

Or really, perhaps, our first and only. It’s kept us company, it’s loved us dearly, and it’s nursed us from generation to generation, with the same milk from the same cathode udder, long-life, high protein, curdled and stale.

“You understand?” Marcantonio asks.

“So that’s what you think. And you came here all the way from Verona to create television,” I say. “To create images and logos in noble fashion.”

Marcantonio looks at me. He smiles. “Good work, you’re improving. Aggressive and a bit of a son of a bitch, that’s the way I like you.”

“I recognize it:Platoon.”

“You’re really starting to amaze me. Come with me. Let’s go see how work is progressing on the TdV.”

“What’s the TdV?” I ask.

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