Marco Parlato

Ginevra at last

Leandro’s flat stank of long-cooked food. I dragged my suitcase across the threshold, imagining my host doing a daily fry up of onions, leeks, shallots, garlic, celery and carrots in the same way people lit incense sticks. I suppressed my sense of awkwardness, fantasising about a sudden revelation from Leandro: his favourite smell was, not incense or perfumed candles but fried food.

I’m leaving very early, you can sleep in my bed, he said instead, as he arranged the cushions on the sofa.

I knew he was in pesticides and that his work meant he had to do a lot of travelling by car. We’d met at the bar the week before, through a mutual friend; yet he’d been the only one to offer me hospitality, with disarming spontaneity, between a pint of beer and a glass of Bushmills. So much so that at first I’d thought it might be a joke. Instead here I was, sleeping in his bed right from the first night.

I don’t know when I’ll be back, you do as you like!

Dumping his keys on the shelf in the kitchen area, he fell backwards onto the sofa, covering himself carefully with a rug. A few minutes later he was asleep.

I brushed my teeth. The bathroom was tidy and kept in good order, as was the bedroom; the sheets were clean and so was the rest of the flat, which I looked over in the grip of an insatiable curiosity.
Perhaps there was a reason why Leandro didn’t open the windows.
The outcome was that the walls were saturated with the pestilential aura.
I couldn’t think of any other reason. Taking care not to breathe through my nose, I dropped off sooner than I’d expected.

Real mess here! Three days’ work, not two.

He was a handyman out of some fairy tale, Emil. He was teamed up with two fellow countrymen who he gave orders to in Romanian.
They worked for a pittance, accepting any job. Bricklayers by trade, they knew how to look after and clear gardens, repair electrical appliances fast, and although no one called them for cars, I’d heard their mechanical skills were praised. To hire Emil you just had to go to Bar Boomerang around eleven in the morning. He was always sitting at a table outside drinking a Peroni, alone or in the company of his employees.

He didn’t take long to explain that he had to make a hole in the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom and that replacing the pipes for the sink was a problem because they didn’t make them like that anymore.

I reckoned Leandro wouldn’t mind a few extra days, so I told Emil he could start. Over the next few days my neighbour would open the door for him with his spare set of keys. I sniffed my clothes on the stairs. I’d already smelt them the minute I left Leandro’s flat but my fear they’d absorb the essence of fried food remained. Luckily though, they didn’t smell.

When I got back from work at dinner time, I threw the windows wide open.
There were no problems about keeping them open. Leandro hadn’t been in touch. 

I was just going to be cooking for me.

I made my discovery looking for the pasta.

I sniffed and the aura of frying, already familiar by the second day, offered up further detail. There was uncooked oil mixed with mould which, once the cupboard was open, became more and more preponderant.
The plywood surface was ruined by blackish marks. The jars of vegetables preserved in oil and vinegar were arranged in an untidy row, threatening as an army of barbarian invaders.

I tried opening one. The lid flew off and powder rose up like smoke from a firecracker. Inside the glass jar the top layer stretched before me like miniature hills capped with snow. I shut the involuntary biochemical experiment and examined the others. About half an hour later I had classified forty-seven containers. 

I washed them thoroughly, eliminating every trace of grease and arranged them on the floor in rows marked with post-its. Twenty-one belonged to the group Christmas, with their snowy landscape under the lid.
Thirteen were One foot in the grave. The third group, The Usual Suspects, included the jars without mould but on the verge of edibleness.

If it had been for me I’d have thrown them all away but I didn’t know what Leandro’s intentions were; whether he kept them out of laziness or for fantastical work purposes. My classification had been a good decision: it could turn out handy.

I ate by myself, looking inside the wide open larder–clean at last–more enthusiastically than watching a TV programme. The surface, impeccably white, mollifying my gaze again. The doors gave off a whiff of lemon fragrance detergent. It was like eating in a citrus grove.

I look ruined wall. I do it, one day and I fix it?

With his morning wake-up chat, Emil told me he’d discovered a badly damaged wall. The old plaster needed scraping off and then the wall had to be repainted. 

At the time I wasn’t sure whether the day was to be added to the three estimated or not. The Romanian’s entrepreneurship was contagious.
If I’d asked him to knock me up a small place out of town he’d have agreed. He could go ahead, I said goodbye.

I was feeling pampered by this big man who had taken my flat in hand and who was keeping me informed with enviable professionalism.
I experienced a mild sense of guilt: I hadn’t been in touch with Leandro since he left. His phone was unreachable. I wrote that I would probably stay a few days longer and with feigned disinterest asked him when he expected to be back. I waited vainly for his reply all day, then forgot about it. There had been panic at the office. The sales statistics were wrong due to a mistake in the sorting office. I came home with a bag full of work to catch up on till late at night.

Around two I started to succumb willingly to closing my eyes for brief pauses. Anyhow I forced myself to check a final list and to figure out the odd play of shadows that was appearing near the coat stand in the hall.

Not shadows. Cockroaches. They were busy going back and forth from the loose skirting board to the hole dug slightly above it, half a metre from the floor.

The following morning I took advantage of Emil’s regular wake up call to ask his advice. I got the impression he didn’t understand.

Yes, psscht psscht that all! was his answer, clearly meaning insecticide. Unfortunately I had to acknowledge the high density of the colony.
There were strategic sorties in other points of the house. For all the poison I sprayed into the empty walls the guests reappeared elsewhere, indifferent to my presence.

I may be back tonight, was Leandro’s first text, read just as Emil was arriving. During our regular phone call our hero had realized just how desperate I was. Leaving his subordinates at my house he had come to save me.

I break everything and put all back again!

I paled at the thought of Leandro coming home to find a work site set up in his two-room flat. To exterminate the cockroaches Emil had to make bigger holes that he would close up afterwards.

You can sleep here tonight, he ended, as if he was the owner. 

As it would only take a day I let him stay, and said goodbye hopefully.

On the way home on the bus I already knew the extermination was finished. Emil was waiting for me at Leandro’s. He liked to explain his work, show the commendable results of his broad hands. Relieved as I was, I now appreciated the irony of cockroaches infesting the home of someone who sells pesticides. It wasn’t until I was on the stairs that an unjustified paranoia crept over me, causing me not to pay any real attention to Emil’s proud elucidations. The wall was impeccable.
The air still hung with the acrid smell of paint and plaster but the windows were doing their job. Also, although the jars were still on the floor, the aura of cooking grease and mould had gone.

I thanked Emil, my phrasing suggesting we would settle the bill all in one go. When I was alone, I let my paranoia come to the fore: Leandro knew about the cockroaches, he needed them to test his products.
I had exterminated a colony of lab animals.

My mobile rang, it was him. He’d be away another day.

I introduced the subject in a roundabout way: Listen, I’ve had the wall fixed.

What! You shouldn’t have!

It took me a few moments to realize he was simply embarrassed at my kindness. 

I relaxed, and told him about the cockroaches and the jars. I’d done
the right thing, I’d been too kind. He would throw the jars away personally.

I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Full week this one!

We wished each other goodnight and promised ourselves a liberating drink together.

The inebriating satisfaction of having sorted out two flats made me get up early. 

I went home, where I admired the finished work.

You want new sockets? I didn’t say yesterday, started Emil.

He was referring to Leandro’s electrical sockets. To give him his due I had been charging my phone with a certain apprehension: at times the charger had crackled.

You can do, if I tell how. But better if I do, he stressed with the superiority of someone talking to a bungler.

I wasn’t offended. I went with him to Leandro’s, where I was going to stay another day for a general tidy-up. I would be giving him back the keys to a real little jewel. It was just the right occasion to get in touch with Ginevra, in our usual haphazard way.

Our first dates had gone on for a year. We got on well together, we got on well apart. A month would go by before we saw each other again. One winter we tried living like a regular couple. But the difficulties came about all of a sudden.

Shall we meet up... when?

The question was always a sticking point. Set dates subconsciously threatened our spontaneity. With time, our relationship had settled back to its original harmony: we never knew when we’d meet, and we knew we’d definitely meet.

When the intercom rang I cast an eye round Leandro’s flat.
The new sockets, the walls no longer the last bulwark of the invertebrates. I sniffed hard. 

The fragrance of lemon was delicate, not excessively pungent, the right amount to be appreciated.

What the hell are those? Ginevra was curious about the jar classification on the floor. I wasn’t fazed. When Leandro got back they’d go in the bin and the two-room flat would reach perfection.

A scientific experiment; my friend’s a researcher, I answered, dead serious. 

She seemed to believe me and I decided not to contradict myself.
I’d carry the joke on till morning.

We undressed leisurely, it was a tacitly agreed rule. I pushed her slowly onto the bed and stayed on top of her. As we were both moaning, I saw a small swelling form on the wall above the bedhead. The wallpaper ripped open with a slender tear, perhaps it never happened, an auditory hallucination of the tympanum.

A cockroach poked its head out of the opening, its little front legs waving madly as it clambered out. Once out it disappeared into the corner of the room.

Hey, you still there? asked Ginevra. 

No I wasn’t. Not anymore. I was as paralysed as the universe enclosed in that little aperture in the wall. My eyes, lost in an obscure black hole.