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anything like that, it’s just that God did a better job with him than with anyone else I know and I think he must give his Creator great satisfaction. Not because he does anything amazing, since Mauro works in a boring office from eight-thirty to five, has a plate of pasta for lunch at the canteen, goes home and spends ages finding a parking spot and it’s already seven in the evening. In the course of the day, I reckon he gives God satisfaction in the following way: he’s told me, for instance, that in the morning he never goes straight to the office, he goes to Calamosca. He parks his car and runs along the avenue that leads to the beach. When he gets there, if it’s winter it’s just growing light, and if it’s summer the sea is already sparkling and there’s always a perfect silence. Then Mauro goes to the bar at the hotel there, has a cappuccino with some pastries straight out of the oven, listens to the news and the weather forecast on the radio, and then after that he starts work; it’s boring, but he considers it useful, like any work that doesn’t involve robbing, or killing, or ruining the environment. Or alternatively, if he decides to skip breakfast, he can run to the end of the coastline down towards the left, beneath the Devil’s Seat. That’s where the fish farm is, and he can enjoy a Ligurian panorama, because agaves flower along the ridges and the sea is clear but bottle green and with big rocks that form an underwater mountain landscape inhabited by big shoals of fish.
    I’ve always thought of people who go running as freaks who wake up two hours early to do something completely pointless, but since I found out that Mauro does it, it doesn’t seem stupid at all and I reckon that before school I might park my Vespa at the start of the avenue too.
    Then on his way home from the office, Mauro stops by the little port to check his sailing boat and do whatever he needs to do so it’ll be ready on Saturday and Sunday, and if there are girlfriends, kids, friends to go with, fine, if not, he’ll happily go alone to Villasimius, or towards Chia, depending what the wind suggests, and he enjoys himself immensely.
    So: I think Mauro’s way of doing things gives God great satisfaction.

13
The world is ugly
    We’ve convinced Mamma to go to hospital. She’s not eating. She jokes that she’s on a hunger strike to protest against all that is ugly in the world. For example, my brother not defending himself, or Zia’s boyfriend, the jogging one, who cheated on her with a really ugly woman and Zia said, ‘Who does he think he is? He deserves a kick up the arse!’
    Mamma says these things with a light tone, not wanting to bring down the mood, but meanwhile, she’s unable to swallow a thing. She says she can feel a stone where she used to feel hunger. Zia’s ex-boyfriend, the South American doctor, was very upset when he phoned to see how we were and I told him about Mamma. He got angry, because he didn’t think we should take her to hospital. We should buy horse meat and get her to drink the juice of it and go for walks, because she spends too much time sitting down looking at the view and painting.
    He’s right because now Mamma’s day goes by like a little girl’s nightmare: in the morning she lines up to wash, then she waits for them to call her up for tests, which unfortunately are very painful, some are a real torture.
    When I go to the hospital I find her sitting on the perfectly made bed. She stretches out her legs, and as she talks she looks at her new shoes, which perfectly match her dress and the little suitcase containing her things. Her bedside table is the most admired by the other women in the hospital, because on theirs they have tissues, a bottle of water and the odd women’s magazine, whereas she has a blue folder where she keeps her sketches of panoramas and the wooden box with her paints in it. For water she has an old-fashioned flagon made of fine glass.
    When he comes to the