One Turn

by Aules Persius Flaccus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

His body woke him at ten past five. It had done so for nineteen years and it did not ask whether it was needed.

Get up.

It was Thursday. The oath was at eleven. There was nothing at five that could not be done at six.

Get up. The shoes.

He got up.

The room was the old maid's room of the Parodi flat in Castelletto, two metres by three, with a window onto the light well and a crucifix that had come with the flat and that nobody had ever taken down. Dámaso Villacrés put on the light, sat on the bed, and polished the black shoes on a sheet of the Secolo XIX spread over his knees. He had polished them on Sunday. The polish went into the creases across the toes and came out again, white. He was fifty-two, and his knees cracked when he crouched, so he did not crouch. He bent from the waist and did it on his lap.

At half past five the bell rang from the end of the corridor, two short, which meant the bathroom and not the chest.

Signor Gerolamo Parodi was ninety-one. He had been a purser for the Italia line for thirty years, on the Cristoforo Colombo and then the Michelangelo, and he had counted the change of six thousand passengers a voyage, and he still counted. He counted the pills into the saucer, and the steps from the bed to the door, and on Fridays he counted the housekeeping money in the tin on the kitchen table, in front of Dámaso, wetting his thumb. He had never once found it short. He counted anyway. That was the custom of the house, and Dámaso had stopped minding it in the second year, the way you stop hearing a clock.

"Today you become Genoese," Parodi said from the pillow, while Dámaso got his arm under the old man's back. "You'll go mean. You'll start turning the light off behind people when they leave a room."

"I do that already."

"Then they've only to give you the paper."

On the toilet, with his pyjama trousers round his ankles and his hands on the rail, he made Dámaso open the wardrobe and take out a tie. It was dark blue with a small gold anchor repeated across it. The line had given it to him when they retired the Michelangelo. Dámaso had seen it go to two funerals.

"Put it on. No, the knot is a disgrace. Come here."

He tied it with his eyes shut, by feel, at Dámaso's throat, his old knuckles against Dámaso's Adam's apple, smelling of the night. Then he tugged it straight, once, as you tug a mooring line to see if it will hold.

---

At seven the phone buzzed on the kitchen table, where Dámaso was cutting bread for the old man's milk. It was Mariela, his wife's sister, from Durán, where it was midnight. She sent a photograph. The house on the edge of Durán, across the river from Guayaquil, had got its third floor. The walls were up, raw grey block, and from the top of every column the rebar stood out of the concrete in bunches of four, rusting, pointing at the sky, waiting for a fourth.

Felicidades por hoy, she wrote. Then: El maestro dice que si se compra ahora el hierro sale más barato. If they bought the iron now it would come cheaper.

He had sent money to that house since 2008. He had never slept in it. Nobody had slept in it. His wife had gone back to Guayaquil in 2015 and slept at her mother's, three streets away from it, because, she said, it did not have the windows yet. Every year it had a little more of the house and still no windows. He made the sign of the cross with the bread knife still in his hand, put down the phone, and finished the bread.

His mouth was full of water. He swallowed it.

---

The lift starts from a little booth on the Spianata, with a glass roof and iron flowers, goes down through the rock in a shaft, and lets you out at the bottom in Piazza del Portello. Dámaso had ridden it four times a day for nineteen years, with shopping, with prescriptions, with the old man's shoes going to be resoled. He knew the operator's cough. This morning he rode it alone, with his folder held flat against his chest, and the tie, and his good jacket, and the shoes that shone. He watched the rock go by in the glass and the cables run.

At the bottom, three steps from the lift doors, there was a two-euro coin on the paving.

It lay between two stones, silver ring, gold centre, face up. He saw it before he had decided to see it. His back had already begun to bend.

He looked round. There were three boys on the steps of a palazzo across the square, fourteen or so, with a scooter and a bag of focaccia between them. They were not looking at him. They were looking at him so carefully that they were not looking at him.

He bent anyway. He had already started; to stop would have been to admit something to the boys. He put a finger on the edge of the coin and pushed. It did not move. He pushed with his thumbnail. It did not move. It was set in a little bead of something clear and hard, like a drop of honey that has been in the cupboard a year.

On the church steps one boy put his face into his arm. The second hit the first. The third, who had the focaccia, was laughing with his mouth full and his eyes shut and no sound coming out, and crumbs coming out.

Dámaso straightened. His face was hot from the jacket collar to the hair, and his ears were hottest. The folder had bent a little against his knee when he crouched, and he smoothed it with the flat of his hand. He went on toward Via Garibaldi, not quickly, and behind him the laughing got its sound back.

He was angry the length of the street. Not with the boys. In Guayaquil he had done the same, with a one-sucre coin nailed through into the step of the market, when he was eleven, and it had been the best afternoon of the year. He was angry with his back. It had bent before he had been asked.

---

The room on the first floor of the Palazzo Tursi had red damask walls, a flag on a pole in the corner with the gold fringe tied back, and three rows of chairs with ten people on them. There was a Ukrainian woman in a lilac dress with a girl of six who kept turning round to look at the ceiling. There was a couple from Tirana, both in grey, their hands joined on the man's knee. There was a tall Senegalese man in a suit with the sleeves a little short, who had brought his employer, an old woman in a fur hat who sat beside him and patted his wrist every few minutes as if it might go out. Two Peruvian sisters. A Moroccan boy of about twenty, alone, with a backpack between his feet, chewing gum and then remembering and taking the gum out and holding it in his hand.

The officer came in at ten past eleven with a sash of green, white and red over her shoulder and a ring binder. She was perhaps forty and she had a cold. She read their names one at a time, in order, and each of them went up to a little table under the flag, and she read the sentence and they said it after her.

Giuro di essere fedele alla Repubblica e di osservare la Costituzione e le leggi dello Stato.

He had practised it for a month: in the shower, on the lift, on the toilet seat lid while the old man shaved, over the noise of the razor. He had practised it until the words had lost their faces and were only shapes in the mouth.

"Villacrés Mora, Dámaso."

It took eleven seconds. He counted, because the house had taught him to count. He said it after her and it came out whole. He signed twice where she showed him, with her pen, which was warm from her hand. She signed. She pressed a stamp on a pad and then on the paper and rocked it, once, left and right.

"Auguri, signor Villacrés," she said, and blew her nose.

Nineteen years. Nobody in nineteen years had called him anything but Dámaso. Not the pharmacist, not the doctor, not the parish priest, not the man at the Western Union, not Stefano Parodi, who called him Dámaso and lei in the same breath, in the way you might address a door you were rather fond of. Signor Villacrés. In the officer's cold it sounded like a man he did not know very well, a man who perhaps had a car.

When he turned round, the Ukrainian girl was looking at him instead of the ceiling. He was still holding the officer's pen. He went back and gave it to her, and she said thank you without looking up, and called the Moroccan boy, and the boy put his gum into his pocket and went up.

It was done. The flag hung in the corner and did not move. Eight people had become nine Italians: the girl came with her mother, at no extra charge. The man from Senegal kissed his old woman on the forehead, and she cried and rummaged in her bag for a handkerchief and could not find one, and he gave her his.

Out on Via Garibaldi the sun had come over the palazzi and was lying the length of the street, and the tourists were photographing the fronts of the buildings with their heads tipped back. Dámaso stood in the doorway of Tursi with his folder and waited to feel something.

What he felt was that his feet hurt. The shoes were three years old and he only wore them to funerals. His stomach rumbled, because he had eaten nothing since the bread he had cut for the old man. Somewhere under the tie, a long way down, there was a small hard thing like a stone in a shoe, and he did not know what it was, and he went to the bar at the corner and stood at the counter and had a cappuccino and a brioche with cream, and paid, and it was still there.

---

Stefano Parodi's car was in the courtyard when he got back, slewed across two spaces, with the hazard lights going.

Stefano was sixty, a notary's clerk in Chiavari, the old man's only son. He came on the first Sunday of the month and on the old man's birthday and at Easter, and he paid Dámaso by bank transfer for twenty-five hours a week, and in cash, in an envelope, for the rest, which was everything. It had been arranged that way in the first year, when Dámaso was on a permit that could be taken away. It had stayed that way after the permit became one that could not. Nobody had ever said it aloud, in either year.

It was not the first Sunday of the month. It was Thursday.

He was in the kitchen in his coat, standing up, with the tin open in front of him. When Dámaso came in he closed the tin without looking at it, as if it had been open by itself.

"Here he is. The new citizen." He held out his hand. Dámaso took it. Stefano's palm was damp, and after the handshake Stefano's other hand came and covered the back of it, and held on, a moment too long. "Congratulations. Really. Papà rang me last night, he said, Stefano, tomorrow Dámaso becomes Italian. So I said, I'll come over. A thing like this."

"Thank you, dottore."

Stefano was not a doctor of anything. He had a degree in law from 1989. Dámaso had called him dottore since the first week, because the cleaning woman from the third floor had told him to, and Stefano had never told him to stop.

Stefano let go of his hand. Dámaso noticed that he himself was standing. He had been standing since he came in, of course. But he noticed now that he was standing in the particular way, by the door, with his hands joined in front of his jacket over the folder, and his weight slightly forward, and his chin slightly down, as he had stood in that kitchen the first afternoon, in 2007, while Stefano asked him about his references and wrote nothing down. His body had gone back to the doorway without consulting him, as it had gone down to the coin.

"Sit, sit," said Stefano. "Please. What are you standing for? Sit."

Dámaso sat. Stefano did not. He walked to the window, and to the stove, and put his hand on the stove, and took it away because the stove was warm.

"I was thinking in the car," Stefano said. "I was thinking, the situation now, it's different. Isn't it. You're a citizen. You have all the rights. As you should. As you absolutely should. And I was thinking that the hours, on paper, they've never really been — " He made a little shape with his hands, a box that was the wrong size. "That's not right. It was never right. We did it like that for you, at the beginning, you remember, so the contributions were less, so there was more for you in hand. But now. From next month, we put it all on paper. Full-time. Live-in, the proper category. With the thirteenth month and everything." He looked at the stove. "And a little more on top. Two hundred. Because you deserve it."

He was pale. He was a man who went red at table after the second glass, and at the window in his good coat he was the colour of the pasta water before the salt goes in. A drop of sweat stood at his temple though the kitchen was not warm. He wiped it with a knuckle.

Dámaso looked at him for a while.

The hard thing under the tie turned over. For nineteen years he had been afraid of this man, without ever having decided to be; and this morning, in eleven seconds, in a red room with a woman with a cold, this man had begun to be afraid of him. It had happened to Stefano entirely. Dámaso had done nothing. He had said a sentence after an officer and signed with a warm pen. The officer had rocked her stamp, once, left and right, and in Chiavari a notary's clerk had cancelled his afternoon.

He thought: I could go to the union on Monday. Nineteen years of the difference. He did the sum without wanting to; the house had taught him to count. It came out to more than the third floor. It came out to the windows.

His mouth was full of water again.

"Thank you, dottore," he said.

Stefano breathed out.

"Stefano," he said. "Come on. For heaven's sake. We're both Italian now."

"Yes."

"Say Stefano."

Dámaso opened his mouth and the word that came out of it, in his own voice, with his own tongue, was dottore. He heard it go.

Stefano laughed, too loud, and clapped him on the shoulder, and said it would take time, and that was fine, that was fine, everything takes time. He took an envelope out of his coat. It was the ordinary envelope, the monthly one, but it was only the twenty-second, and inside there was a card with a tricolour on it and Auguri printed in gold, and three hundred-euro notes. He put it on the table by the tin. Then he went down the corridor to see his father, and Dámaso heard him say "Papà, it's me," in the loud voice for the deaf, though the old man was not deaf, and the door closed.

Dámaso sat at the table with his hands flat on the oilcloth, one on either side of the envelope.

After a while he got up and took off the shoes.

---

At five the old man woke from his rest and rang, one long, which meant: come and talk. Stefano had gone at three. Dámaso took the coffee in on the tray with the two biscuits.

"He offered you money," said Parodi.

"Yes."

"How much?"

Dámaso told him.

The old man closed his eyes and moved his lips. He was doing the sum, the other sum, the nineteen years. When he opened his eyes again he looked at Dámaso across the cup, and there was something in his face that Dámaso had seen there only once before, on the day in 2011 when the old man found a fifty-euro note in the tin that had no business being there. Dámaso had put it there himself, from his own envelope, to see what would happen. The old man had taken it out and smoothed it on the oilcloth and handed it back to him and said nothing, then or ever.

"Cheap," said Parodi. "My son was always cheap. He gets it from me."

He drank his coffee. A little of it went down his chin and Dámaso wiped it with the napkin.

"Well?" said the old man. "You're free now. Go to the union. Go to Ecuador. Go to the cinema. What's keeping you?"

"The coffee," said Dámaso. "You'll spill it."

The old man snorted and spilled it, a little, on the sheet, and they both looked at the stain spreading, brown on white, and neither of them moved to stop it.

---

At nine, when Parodi was asleep, Dámaso put on his ordinary shoes and took the lift down to buy bread for the morning. The operator was a different one and did not cough. At the bottom the square was blue and empty, lit by the one lamp over the lift doors and the window of the kebab shop on the corner. The boys had gone. The scooter had gone. The palazzo doors were shut.

The coin was still there. In the lamplight the gold centre looked more like gold than it had in the morning.

He stopped a metre from it. He had a key ring in his pocket with the key of the flat, the key of the letterbox, and the little penknife that the old man's late wife had kept for cutting string, with a mother-of-pearl handle. He could feel the shape of the penknife against his leg through the lining. The glue would be brittle by now. One blade under the edge, a twist, and it would jump.

Two euros. Two euros was nothing. The tie round his neck, which he had still not taken off, had cost more than two euros in 1975.

He stood there long enough for the man in the kebab shop to look out of the window at him.

Then he stepped over it. He did it properly, not round: the left foot over, the right foot after, so that for a moment the coin was underneath him, between his feet, and then it was behind.

He walked on toward the bakery, which would be shut, and then to the night shop beyond it, which would not. Halfway along, under the arch, he noticed that he had swallowed, and that his mouth had filled again, and that he was swallowing again, steadily, the way you swallow when you are a child going past the window of a shop with sweets in it, a long way from home, with nothing in your pocket.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ā Persiō Flaccō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Aules Persius Flaccus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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