The Polpetton Hash - chapter 6

Mauro Suttora was sweating and had to interrupt the reading of Granzotto’s journal. He rummaged in his pockets for the other letter, the one now fading. He put on his spectacles in order to observe it closely and found out to his astonishment that all the double consonants had disappeared… He had to find out the meaning of what was on: the hidden, diabolic meaning of the “double”. For this he had bought in the village bookshop a book that, perhaps, could help him.

That night, while reading that book, he had the unwelcomed idea to ask room service for a scented tisane, and the maid who carried it looked at him in such an eloquent way that Sauro didn’t think twice, loaded as he was by the reading of the great lover Granzotto’s journal. He took her with force and anger, with the subtle and perverse pleasure to shag one more, and she didn’t mind. The morning after, when an oblique sun beam entered in the room, Mauro woke up and saw what he would have never intended to see.

She was calmly dressing up with a satisfied smile on her wrinkled face. “Cazzo! She could be my mother” – thought Sauro watching her incredulously, and his glare paused on her flabby, cellulitis-blooming most abundant bottom - “She cannot be the same as yesterday night” he told himself while indulging his gaze on her legs and those flaccid and inner thighs which he had kissed, as far as he can recall… “It’s impossible!” he soundlessly screamed aghast while watching her slipping her empty and wrlinkled breast into a push up bra, and in order to cover his eyes from that incredible show he searched the bedside table for the book, but his hand met with something wet, solid and cold, which turned out to be a denture. “My God, have I become gerontophile?!” he mentally screamed, hiding his head under the bedsheets.

That had finished dressing up and in order to goodbye him she uncovered his face and looked at him, grateful and happy, in his eyes. It was then when Mauro found himself balancing on the edge of her eyelash, looking within the apple of her eye, down in the bottom, and he saw. He saw what every woman has, from Eve to Mary, from Emma to any radical activist, that most powerful and hidden arsenal full of freedom, buried under an education mountain, drowned in a sea of conventions, hidden under the bloody invisibile burka that society imposes on us: the new idols… a solid wealth, sex and beauty.

It would have wanted to say that to Granzotto, the tombeur de femmes, the playboy, womaniser, to be careful, because women possessed, for gift of God or natural transmission, the power to jump with a leap, with grace and agility, any river, and the ability to invade the happy island, if only thay had wanted to. Therefore it was better to keep on tricking them, with the complicity of the media, jewels and money, or kicks and punches, and to convince them all, that the invisibile millenarian burka they wore did not exist, a feminists’ fantasy, and that their part in the life was to appeal to men, all tits and buttocks, or all house and church, so that they couldn’t find out what Mauro had seen in the bottom of their eyes: that hidden, remote and clandestine gift that was transmitted from mother to daughter in their DNA.

But perhaps many women, touched by a foreboding, had begun to buy a ticket of the radical party’s bus, as if an unexpected far-sighted wisdom had suggested them to do. A small investment for the future. They bought plenty of them, entrepreneurs and store clerks, bigots and showgirls, lesbians and housewives, the jobless, the Communists and the Fascists, all bought those membership cards as they were tickets for a ferry, for their mothers, their daughters and their friends, and hid them under their millenarian bloody invisibile burka, for the patrimony of the happy island not to be lost.

When she closed the door behind her, Mauro had a gesture of irritatio and threw her back the book on the bedside table, E. A. Poe’s tales, and the words, always the words persecuting him, bounced on the wall as silent butterflies around the room, and the last by W. Wilson, recompacted before his eyes, and Mauro could read it clearly: “I’m ready”.

Mauro was exhausted. He laid back on the bed and covered his face with the pillow: “Enough, enough” he said in a prophecy delirium. As a matter of he didn’t know yet that two years and four months of analysis worth 16,000 euros would be needed in order to experience again the pride and satisfaction of a novel erection. Mauro watched overwhelmed the ring-a-ring-o’-roses dancing of the words and desperatly searched the meaning of the “double” when his computer informed him that he had got mail. “You will go to Geneva?” said the message…