Читать книгу The Ball - Erik Pethersen - Страница 21

I take the keys out of my bag and put the long one in the lock, placed under the writing Sbandofin in gold lettering. Four turns of the key and I open the door.

The office is still empty: the foggy light that filters through the windows makes it even more sleepy than it appears at this time.

It is only the second day that, after so many years, I see the office in this new light, after so many years. With the clock gone back, everything is postponed: I no longer arrive at nine, but an hour earlier, so I can leave the office at 1:00 pm instead of 2:00 pm. I always work five hours, but I have the whole afternoon to do what I want. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before: all it took was asking Teresa to change the timetable, and so it’s much handier.

I have got here early because there is no traffic at this time, so a cup of coffee, drunk in peace and quiet, can help me kill the twenty minutes left till the official start of my working day.

I sip the squeezed espresso and look out the windows, staring at the fog and the slow setting in of the sun. The landscape looks rather bleak to me.

Amedeo also made me nervous last night: he is increasingly jealous and pictures ridiculous stories in his mind, he accuses me of having flings and of betraying him, even just on a mental level. It will be the fault of work, indeed, of his non-work, but he is more and more unbearable.

We’ve been together for just over seven years now. The first few years went by quite smoothly and happily. We were in love and I always thought of him as my only serious relationship. There had obviously been other previous individuals, but nothing significant, just a few short-lived acquaintances, randomly scattered over my thirty-five years of life. Then, I began to long for a lasting relationship, I felt mature enough to handle it.

I have been thinking about it for some time, but I cannot be sure if it was just my will or whether it was influenced by my parents, especially my mother: all the stories about getting older, about the need to settle down, to give your life some sort of stability...

In any case, a hidden force, an invisible hand, the flow of events or whatever else, brought me closer to Amedeo. We met at a friends’ party, and I found him nice, funny and quite attractive. It was 2010 and I had already been working here at Sbandofin for a few years; he was a real estate agent: he was still with the Borgosatollo agency. Later, when we decided to move in together in the house we now live in, he continued to work as an independent agent, getting business straight from building companies and specializing in the sale and rental of large compounds.

The first few years of our life together were not bad, thinking about them now or, perhaps, they surface like this in my memories only because I make an inevitable comparison with the current situation: heavy, stressful life together with an ill-tempered, sad, depressed, detached and certainly not loving person. Sometimes almost violent. Verbally abusive.

Amedeo has always been jealous and controlling, but never like the way he has been lately. If he had any real evidence, I could actually think that he is not going crazy; his scenes would make sense if I behaved like so many acquaintances of mine who regard themselves as being happily married, despite the fact that they constantly go out with other men. But since we’ve been together I’ve only ever been with him. And not so much because I wanted to but as a matter of principle: if I wanted a different situation, I would break up with him. Four months ago, we have in fact legally registered at the Town Hall as a couple living together: we are a real couple, but we could just say it and we would no longer be.

Yes. So, at the moment, I’m stoned: stoned in a relationship.

But it is a momentary situation, that is, not a temporary one, but not even an indissoluble one. This is a recent event and I can’t remember welcoming so much Amedeo’s idea of registering our relationship, but, I agreed to avoid a scene on his part. After all, we had already lived together for quite some time, as an actual fact, nothing would have changed.

It is now 7:53 am and I have to start working. I have to settle the issue regarding consumer credit that I was looking into yesterday, that is sending customers’ documents relating to loans already approved and granted to the various institutions.

We work as mediators: we look into people’s requests, evaluate all the various offers and suggest the best solution to the customer. The lowest rate loan or the financing suitable for specific needs and, for these low amounts and concerning consumer credit, the choice almost always ends up on the blue puppet: everyone likes it and it is the most advantageous.

I head to the bathroom, rinse the plastic cup of coffee and throw it into the waste bin. I go back to the cupboard at the back of the room, near my desk, in the last row, I take the stack of folders from the consumer credit binder and go back to my desk. One, two, three... there are eleven: ten from the puppet and one from Telefin. I take all the documents and move to the middle of the room, towards the multifunction printer set against the glass that separates the room from the corridor. I place the folders on the nearby table. The device is still in standby, I hit the green button to turn it back on. After a few seconds, I read the familiar ready-to scan-text on the small liquid crystal display. I open the first folder, starting to take the staples off and scan the documents.

As I perform these operations, I think about how many things I have discovered in the last few days. An hour was enough to discover a world that stays the same and it is all different at the same time: changes in the traffic flow, different light, different smells and equipment in standby. And it is darker, much darker. The people I meet are also different. Apart from Mauro, who reads the Giornale di Brescia already at around 7:30.

I take out all the contracts from the folders, realizing that in this way the whole process can be faster, I remove the staples from all the signed papers and put in the copies of the documents after each contract. I go through all the documents, making sure that each of them follows the pertaining contract: several photographs run before my eyes and I smile instantly when I get to the last one which portrays the plump version of Tom Sellek that I saw yesterday. On the identity card, the similarity is almost more evident. I realize now that himself and his friend were born in Poland, they wanted a quick cash loan to set up an online dating company.

The appointment with them was not fully relaxing. My feeling of discomfort begun with the description of the business, had gradually increased, until it reached its peak talking about the many cute girls that you can meet online and with the following vague comments, always polite though, about my clothing. I don’t know what the point was, as my appearance wasn’t too flashy. At least, not like the cyber-whores that I am sure pack up sites like theirs.

I make a single stack of a hundred pages and put it all on the automatic scanning unit. I look at the sheets that are swallowed one after the other and appear again after a few moments. I realize that I haven’t bumped into the girls from the fifth floor in the lift that, for several years, I used to meet almost every morning.

Times: it is a matter of times. Maybe he has always been here too, but he would go to the common areas of the building at different times from mine.

Himself: the surprising one. But all this, however, cannot interest me.