NyLon! - chapter 5

Shortly before 3pm on the previous Thursday Raffa startled reading to the name of the passenger on the boarding card and Mauro startled in reading the name on her uniform. The bewilderment overcame, after embarassed greetings she made him seat and tried to focus on the taxi procedure

- Passengers please connect the emergency shoes and remove belts with high heels in case of emergency. Under the seat there is an inflatable mask and over your head the oxygen life jacket. The emergency exits are located on your right if you vote Tory and on your left if you vote Labour. After take-off a halal snack will be served for the terrorist gentlemen

Careless of the passengers’ grumblings, for the entire flight duration she left the other 17 in the first class in Cristina’s hands and thoughtfully devoted herself to the old friend whom she hadn’t seen in twenty years. They recalled their infancy games in the Gorgonzola green, the tender adolescence when he came to her catholic school to pick her up on a scooter borrowed from the spectacled swot de Severgnin, and the saddest moment of separation when they took different roads in life: him with the military service as fireman in Pordenone, she to try her luck in the exciting and controversial London of Lady Thatcher and the Sex Pistols. Since then they lost sight of each other. Some short letter, less and less frequent, and a twenty years of silence broken today by the noise of the four reactors carrying them up thirty thousand feet. Descending a few hours later though the turbulences they held their hands, intimately imagining them as masturbolences, and they agreed to meet three hours later for dinner at his place.

Red or black? Raffa had little time to choose her shoes. Red, sexier! Ethiopian or Chinese? Mauro had no time to cook. Ethiopian, hotter. The evening elapsed most pleasantly on the balcony of his small but cosy den in Roosevelt Island, and the informed journalist, correspondent of the authoritative weekly of political futurology “Tomorrow” amiably entertained updating her on their old acquaintances in the Milanese alternative aristocracy

- And what about Daria Veronesi?

- She married a whealty businessman, Iuri Maria Prada, the one making sexy shoes

- But wasn’t it Litta Modignani, that one of the shoes?

- Yes, but orthopaedic

The complicity atmosphere was pervaded by a stimulating erotic tension, but time was running out fast for the last aerial tramway. Mauro wanted to show himself as a gentleman by offering her to take her home

- Where do you live in Manhattan?

- Sixty-nine

- East or West?

- Here on the sofa