I always take the stairs, three stories aren’t a big deal. Plus, the elevator is slow and tiny and cluttering, the type you find in old city buildings. It has this annoying double-door closure system where if you don’t close the inner doors after shutting the outer ones it won't start. Not only that, if you get off and inadvertently leave the inner doors open (or not properly shut), the elevator gets blocked and cannot be called from a different floor, the display showing the same red signal as when it’s being used. Until someone really needs to use it, and they first shout Elevator! (with an elongated ‘o’), hoping to get the attention of those on the floor it’s blocked at. Then, if nothing happens, they unenthusiastically take the stairs to go re-establish normality themselves (while muttering all sorts of curses along the way), if the elevator is blocked at a floor below the one they have to go to. Or they just take the stairs and forget about it (still muttering all sorts of curses along the way), if it’s blocked at a higher floor. In the latter circumstance, normality is usually not re-established until enough complaints have flocked in and the concierge finally takes action by asking someone inhabiting the incriminated floor to go out on the landing and unblock the elevator. In rare cases, when no one answers the concierge’s calls, he goes all the way up himself to resolve the situation once and for all, his demeanor resembling that of a superhero summoned to save humanity.
So, I take the stairs. And when I do, I climb the steps slowly, as I’m always doing something else, be it opening the mail or a package I just collected downstairs, or checking my phone, or reading a book. Yes, I read while walking. There’s a mysterious connection between concentration and controlled, repetitive motion.
One day, I had started Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams and found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. I walked with the book to and from the gym; a total of forty-five minutes and twenty pages. Back at my building, book in left hand, keys in right hand, and eyes on the page, I slowly took the stairs to continue savoring every word of Gregor’s story. But when I got to my front door and tried to insert the key into the lock, it wouldn’t go in. I turned the key upside down and swiveled it to change its inclination, but to no avail. Taking my eyes off the page, reluctantly, I started to pay attention to what up to that point I’d been doing automatically while my entire being was absorbed by the book.
It was then that a young woman opened the door from the inside, asking if I was trying to break in. She asked with a half smile, her black hair gathered in a chignon, and wore beige. She had ears that stuck out, maybe because her hair was pulled up. That’s what I noticed right away of her facial features. The rest, I didn’t see. It was as if her face was blank to my eyes, although her half smile I could somehow sense. What struck me the most, however, were her calm and composure: she didn’t raise her voice, maintained what appeared to be a normal posture, and didn’t seem to be worried in the least that a stranger was outside her front door, allegedly trying to break into her apartment. Her looks even betrayed a vague sense of amusement, possibly relaxation, certainly ease.
But this is my apartment, I said. Who are you?, we asked in unison. It turned out it wasn’t my apartment, but the one exactly above mine. All landings on all floors look the same, and all doors are made of the same dark brown wood, with vertical grooves about a couple of inches apart. Immersed as I was in my reading, I didn’t realize I went up an extra floor. Once I was done with my explanation, during which she always kept eye contact, she stretched out her hand. I’m Margherita, she said, her eyes a deep blue that I could now clearly see, together with the rest of her face.
My building isn’t well insulated. I can hear noises from the apartment above and from the one below as if they were made in mine. For years, I had one family with two small children above me, and it was hell. I went knock on their door once, exasperated, but nothing changed. They’ll move out soon, the concierge confided to me once, when I casually complained about how loud they were, as if letting me in on a wild secret. And sure enough, one day in late November, they did move out. This was two full years prior to my fortuitous encounter with Margherita. I’ve lived here for a little less than a year, she said the day of the incident, as we later decided to rebaptize the event of me unconsciously trying to break into her place while reading Kafka. That’s weird, I thought, I would have heard noises from a new tenant. She must live a quiet life, alone.
We became friends. We cooked and went to the movies and sat on the grass and walked long distances. There was a strange connection between us. We spent time together without ever asking a question, as if we already knew everything there was to know about each other. Even at the beginning of our hanging out, our conversations were driven by what was there, in the moment, before us. Once, while seated on my couch, she said that you can tell a lot about a person's character by their choice of couch. “There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate couches in their homes. I don’t trust these people. An expensive car may well be worth its price, but it’s only an expensive car. If you have money, you can buy it, anyone can. Choosing a good couch, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior couch.” There’s a novel by Murakami where he writes about this exact same thing about couches, using your exact same words; I bet you read it there, I said to her. No I didn’t, she said. Who’s this Murakami guy?
Margherita’s weirdness wasn’t confined to quasi-perfect citations of book passages without knowing the books or their authors, as peculiar as this already was. She could talk with plants. Sure, you might say, everyone could say things to plants. Yes, but plants said things back to her. And this is not something she said she heard, something you would have to trust her on, and believe. Plants have voices that I heard myself. She would hit record on her phone and ask a question or start a conversation, during which the only audible voice was hers. When she played these recordings back, there were two voices in the conversation: hers and the plant’s. She did this with trees too; they told the most intriguing and mysterious stories. They won’t talk to you, she said, when I objected that it didn’t seem like a superpower to me, as all one would have to do is sit in front of a plant or a tree and tape a conversation that will reveal itself later, on playback.
But the most amazing thing is that I never asked her or investigated myself how in the world she was able to do that. I figured I wouldn’t want to know, and just accepted it. I’ve always been a curious person, but with her there was this unexplainable, subtle force that made me keep curiosity at bay and accept things as they were. Do you realize that you may be sitting on a gold mine, I said to her once. No, I don’t, she responded. But even if I did, I don’t need any money: my bank account refills itself every 17th of the month with exactly the amount I need for the next thirty days. My mouth dropped open -- and stayed open for hours -- when I heard her say this. Again, though, I didn’t feel any urge to ask. That’s the way it was.
A few days later, however, she spontaneously revealed to me that she didn’t have any job, nor any family or rich uncle or patron who supported her, and that money just appeared on her bank account in a variable amount, depending on what her expenses would be over the course of the next month. And how does the bank account know how much I will spend the next month, you might ask? It just knows. It’s been like this for the last two hundred and forty-one years.
This is when my head started spinning and I passed out.
I was awakened by someone shouting Elevator! in the stairwell, insistently, while heavy raindrops were hitting my window panes. And I thought that my couch was indeed perfect for sleeping: not too soft, not too hard, the cushions pillowing my head just right. My dreams are getting weirder by the day, I thought. The elevator must be blocked at my floor, nobody answers that poor guy’s shouting, and today’s Sunday and no one’s around -- no concierge on Sundays. Determined to go out on the landing and take a look, I got up.
The elevator was indeed blocked on my floor, its inner doors wide open. As I opened the outer door, I saw a white envelope inside, my name written on it in neat cursive. I unblocked the elevator, got back in, sat on the couch, and opened the envelope.
[To be continued]
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"Who’s this Murakami guy?" I chuckled.
We had such an elevator in Vienna. Wonderfully humorous. Love it.
I just love your style of writing, Silvio. What a great pondering voice.
I had to read that first line about 5 times because I was thinking it is a metafictional allusion ("stories" as well, fiction stories). I don't know if you intended it, but I liked where it took my mind!