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evenings at the Ascot, the occasional dispenser of devastating lightning-bolt wisecracks, usually absolutely pitiless. One time, when he was in the control booth watching a truly dreadful impersonator doing an audition, he issued a verdict in his nonchalant voice that branded that aspiring artist for the rest of his days.
    “This guy is just like La Settimana Enigmistica . He boasts no fewer than 206 unsuccessful attempted imitations.”
    I open the little pulp stock magazine and I’m presented with the Page of the Sphinx and a cryptic clue.
    Outlaw leader managing money (7)
    I give myself a second to think. Maybe more than a second. Word puzzles excite me and relax me. Sometimes the solution comes immediately, sometimes it never does. Like everything else in life. Life has made the enigma, the puzzle, the mystery, its underlying concept. In this case, intuition flashes into the darkness after a few seconds.
    To outlaw is to ban. A leader could be a king. Managing money, I suppose, could be described as banking. Ban + king = Banking.
    I put down the magazine and stand up. This insignificant achievement has put me in a good mood. In the mirror over the bathroom sink, there’s my face, punctual as ever. A dark man, with long wavy hair and black eyes. Handsome, they say. Once, in a rumpled bed, a woman with soft breasts and fragrant skin told me: “With eyes like that, you can get into hot water every day. There’ll always be a woman to get you out of trouble.”
    I was so young and hungry for certainty that I accepted the fact that that unimaginative woman had recycled a phrase from a Brigitte Bardot movie to pay me a compliment. No question, she achieved her objective: I don’t even remember her name, but I remember what she said to me. Too bad that when I did get into hot water, she wasn’t around. None of the women were.
    I wet my face and start soaping my cheeks with the shaving brush. The faint scent of menthol wafts over me in waves of cool freshness, reddening my eyes. Without warning, like all memories, a character comes to mind, a character I invented when I was a little boy watching the town barber lathering a client’s face with his shaving brush until he was half covered by that foamy white stuff that reminded me of whipped cream. I wonder what ever happened to my poor Foam Man. I wonder whether in all these years he ever discovered whether under that mound of insubstantial whiteness there really was such a thing as a face.
    I, on the other hand, know that I have one. I found that out far too young. That’s always been my problem.
    I start to shave.
    The razor blade slices swaths of reality through my childhood games and I find myself smooth-cheeked, gazing at myself with eyes made adult by the passage of time, by my own personal choices and by choices that were forced upon me. The kind of choices that age you fastest, deep inside.
    I turn on the shower, and while I wait for the flow of water to heat up, I try to think of a new cryptic clue for Lucio. As I step into the spray, the stable-like enclosure of the shower stall gives me a Eureka moment.
    Here it is, the new enigma.
    Forms of luck: horses that come in first, gold mines, or where a losing team is sent after the game (7, 7, 3, 7)
    That means that the solution is composed of four words. Two seven-letter words; then one three-letter word, followed by another seven-letter word. It isn’t hard, and I imagine he’ll solve it right away, even though apparently easy challenges often conceal tangled welters of complication.
    I take a sponge off the counter, squeeze some body wash onto it, and start to soap up. I prefer to wash myself through the mediation of this inanimate object, as if avoiding the contact of human hands on the body could change something. Sometimes a minor mania can forestall a major problem.
    If it was you, I’d do it for free …
    The girl reappears in a flash before my mind’s eye. Her words never really went away. I imagine her