Magdalena Tulli - Flaw

The apprentice with his bag of tools, a half-smoked cigarette in the corner of his mouth, sent precisely where there is strictly no unauthorized admission, will say nothing because he knows nothing. He pressed all the buttons in the crane as he was told to, in the correct sequence; when the impact came, all he did was blink. And look around in surprise, because he’d done exactly what his boss asked him to, nothing more and nothing less. In the cloud of dust that had instantly risen into the air, he could not have seen anything anyway. He merely wiped his watering eyes. And in that cloud of dust he himself also vanished. Even if someone had managed to take a photograph at the time, it would have recorded nothing but an impenetrable gray haze. The shock moved in a wave from the epicenter to the peripheries. The alleged accident shifted the layers of loose sand beneath the distant foundations. This circumstance, from one perspective most unpropitious, from another had many advantages. The more dramatic the events that the men in overalls managed to unleash, the more unquestioned would be the mass writing-off of every possible item from the inventories of one or another story. Having achieved their end, because once again they have succeeded, the masters and apprentices lock themselves in the storeroom and break out the bottles of untaxed spirit. Harmonica music accompanies them, plaintive and out of tune. They drink and sing, sing and weep. In the depths of their isolation, each of them separately becomes helpless. It is then that the greatest pain strikes them. They ask in a slurred voice why they are condemned to a life without women — them alone? In their despair they smash the empty bottles till the sound echoes away in the void into which they have been cast. Up on the heights they would at least have been something in the nature of angels with a golden touch. Yet what have they actually become, what? — they repeat, their furious gaze passing across the ceiling. One can only imagine the pandemonium they would create if on top of everything else they were given women. They’d probably suffer less, coming to terms with the shortcomings of their existence. The matter of their life without women is to remain closed for good. When they have emptied all the bottles, the balance sheet of their profits will be back at its point of departure. But business will continue to flourish, filling the same storeroom with new cases of bottles.

How agonizing it is to know about it all — about the illicit flow of goods, the mocking laughter in the back rooms — yet never to possess irrefutable proof. Helpless suspicions drift over the deserted marshaling yards like trembling balloons filled with hot air. In the meantime, deceitfulness oozes from every calculation, invoice, and specification list, and also from the bills that arrive in advance for urgent repairs not yet even commenced and paid for at twice the normal rate, for express service. There was no way to economize on repairs to the backdrops, since the plywood boards bearing the necessary painted images had been knocked down and smashed — they looked as if they had been through an earthquake. Indolent apprentices in overalls, suffering from the hiccups and convinced that nothing in this world was of any significance, were already at the warehouses pulling out other backdrops, whatever came to hand first. They were in a hurry and were not picking and choosing, since they had been instructed to act as quickly as possible to cover up the holes gaping on every side. It is the backdrops that determine the look of the world; they give it a trustworthy face and bolster faith in its substantiality, in the belief that everything the eye sees actually exists. There will be no other perspective than the one drawn on plywood boards at a deceptive angle, depicting the continuation of the street from the point where the wall and the pavement come to an end. Closing the space, the boards open it up at the same time, offering an illusory distance that seems to stretch into the unseen suburbs.

On the other side of the boards are all the hidden lighting installations and heating and cooling ducts; work is in full swing around the red-brick workshops, forklifts crisscrossing the whole time, though never cutting across the field of vision painted on the backdrops in the appropriate colors, with a predominance of yellow ochre imitating the hue of plasterwork. Thus, the workshops themselves are not seen either, nor the workmen in overalls, nor the huge gantry cranes, even though these are in constant use. Standing on the square as the first character at hand and gazing down the street, one is unable to imagine the real topography of the terrain. Besides, such surplus knowledge would be of no use to the characters. It’s better to live tranquilly, though in the dark, and have no notion of what one is participating in. And if the order of things has already been disturbed, ignorance absolves one of inquiring into the reason, of wondering what led to the collapse. Whose calculations lay behind it, and which layers of sand were disturbed. Why those and not others. Here and there cracks had appeared; foundations had begun to settle dangerously, and a number of walls had collapsed on the spot. To avoid an unexpected and tragic end in one of the stories resembling this one, some hurried evacuations had to be arranged.

The apprentices fashion poles into a new construction to prop up the backdrop. They work quickly but unwillingly. After the last nail is knocked in, they move away at last to light up a longed-for cigarette. As chance would have it, the painted back-drops they took from the warehouses had been used once before in a story about the difficulties of life under an oppressive regimen, and bore evident signs of censorship. To be precise, they were missing sizable fragments of pavement and wall, which had been removed along with the matching parts of the plywood base. It was not hard to guess why they had been cut out: to get rid of certain unsettling details that would have stirred recollections and emotions. It may have been, for example, that in this place there were bullet holes in a row, along with disturbing red smears. Repugnant circumstances, the memory of which some character harnessed to his own paltry drama of power had at one time attempted to erase, were written permanently into the background in this indirect way, through the removal of the traces they had left behind. Who reached for a saw to carry out such an order, when, and what did they get for it? Hardly anything, that much is certain. It was probably done by inexperienced apprentices, because only they — without the knowledge of the masters, and perhaps deceived by the trappings of majesty — could have violated the principle of paying no attention to the desires of the characters, and the practice of avoiding all contact with them. The largest holes were patched with pieces of thick cardboard, without even taking the trouble to color them ochre to conceal the repair. No eye will linger over them anyway. The gaze will rather be drawn towards the gaudy pennants jutting from the rows of windows painted on the plywood. This distant view was not without influence on the course of events; it reminded the concierges that in their apartment buildings too there were flags in the same national colors, stowed away in dusty closets and dark storage spaces beneath some flight of stairs or another, waiting for their time, which, so it seemed, had now come. Before long they flowered on the façades of the buildings round the square, restoring the equilibrium of bright accents between foreground and background. A wind blew up, opening the flags and setting them aflutter. This was the most emphatic sign that something had changed. The flags multiplied in windows; there were more and more of them by the minute. No one had known previously just how many had been lying about in various corners, but nor was anyone surprised. For of all the things one can think of, flags are the easiest to sew; no kind of faith or hope is required for the job.