“Do we really always have to talk about professionalism?” asked Maia. “Everyone here is a professional. A master builder who puts up a wall that hasn’t collapsed is certainly acting professionally, but professionalism ought to be the norm, and we should only be talking about the dodgy builder who puts up a wall that does collapse. When I call the plumber and he unblocks the sink, I’m pleased, of course, and I say well done, thanks, but I don’t say he acted professionally. And you don’t expect him to behave like Joe Piper in the Mickey Mouse story. This insistence on professionalism, that it’s something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy workers.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “Readers think that people generally are lousy workers, which is why we need examples of professionalism — it’s a more technical way of saying that everything’s gone well. The police have caught the chicken thief — and they’ve acted with professionalism.”
“But it’s like calling John XXIII the Good Pope. This presupposes the popes before him were bad.”
“Maybe that’s what people actually thought, otherwise he wouldn’t have been called good. Have you seen a photo of Pius XII? In a James Bond movie he’d have been the head of SPECTRE.”
“But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit.”
“That’s right. Newspapers teach people how to think,” Simei said.
“But do newspapers follow trends or create trends?”
“They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don’t know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let’s not get too involved in philosophy — we’re professionals. Carry on, Colonna.”
“Good,” I said. “Now let me go on with my list. We need to have our cake and eat it, keep our finger on the pulse, take to the field, be in the spotlight, make the best of a bad job. Once out of the tunnel, once the goose is cooked, nothing gets in our way, we keep our eyes peeled, a needle in a haystack, the tide turns, television takes the lion’s share and leaves just the crumbs, we’re getting back on track, listening figures have plummeted, give a strong signal, an ear to the ground, emerging in bad shape, at three hundred and sixty degrees, a nasty thorn in the side, the party’s over... And above all, apologize. The Anglican Church apologizes to Darwin, Virginia apologizes for the ordeal of slavery, the electric company apologizes for the power cuts, the Canadian government officially apologizes to the Inuit people. You mustn’t say the Church has revised its original position on the rotation of the Earth but rather that the pope apologizes to Galileo.”
Maia clapped her hands and said, “It’s true, I could never understand whether this vogue for apologizing is a sign of humility or of impudence: you do something you shouldn’t have done, then you apologize and wash your hands of it. It reminds me of the old joke about a cowboy riding across the prairie who hears a voice from heaven telling him to go to Abilene, then at Abilene the voice tells him to go into the saloon and put all his money on number five. Tempted by the voice, he obeys, number eighteen comes up, and the voice murmurs, Too bad, we’ve lost.”
We laughed and then moved on. We had to examine and discuss Lucidi’s piece on the events concerning the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, and this took a good half hour. Afterward, in a sudden act of generosity, Simei ordered coffee for everyone from the bar downstairs. Maia, who was sitting between me and Braggadocio, said, “I would do the opposite. I mean, if the newspaper were for a more sophisticated readership, I’d like to do a column that says the opposite.”
“That says the opposite of Lucidi?” asked Braggadocio.
“No, no, what are you talking about? I mean the opposite of commonplaces.”
“We were talking about that more than half an hour ago,” said Braggadocio.
“All right, but I was still thinking about it.”
“We weren’t,” said Braggadocio.
Maia didn’t appear to be too upset by the objection and shrugged us off: “I mean the opposite of the eye of the storm or the minister who thunders. For example, Venice is the Amsterdam of the South, sometimes imagination exceeds reality, given that I’m a racist, hard drugs are the first step toward smoking joints, don’t make yourself at home, let’s stand on ceremony, those who pursue pleasure are always happy, I may be senile but I’m not old, Greek is all math to me, success has gone to my head, Mussolini did a lot of bad after all, Paris is horrid though Parisians are nice, in Rimini everyone stays on the beach and never sets foot in the clubs.”
“Yes, and a whole mushroom was poisoned by one family. Where do you get all this garbage?” asked Braggadocio.
“From a book that came out a few months ago,” said Maia. “Excuse me, they’re no good for Domani. No one would ever guess them. Perhaps it’s time to go home.”
“Listen,” Braggadocio muttered to me afterward, “let’s go, I’m dying to tell you something.”
Half an hour later we were on our way to Taverna Moriggi, though as we walked there Braggadocio mentioned nothing about his revelations. Instead, he said, “You must have noticed that something’s wrong with Maia. She’s autistic.”
“Autistic? But autistic people keep closed up in themselves, don’t they? Why do you say she’s autistic?”
“I read about an experiment on the early symptoms of autism. Suppose you’re in a room with me and Pierino, a child who is autistic. You tell me to hide a small ball and then to leave. I put it into a bowl. Once I’ve left, you take the ball from the bowl and put it into a drawer. Then you ask Pierino: When Signor Braggadocio returns, where will he look for the ball? And Pierino will say: In the drawer, no? In other words, Pierino won’t think that in my mind the ball is still in the bowl, because in his mind it’s already in the drawer. Pierino can’t put himself in someone else’s position, he thinks that everyone is thinking what he’s thinking.”
“But that’s not autism.”
“I don’t know, perhaps it’s a mild form of autism, like touchiness being the first stage of paranoia. But that’s how Maia is — she can’t see the other person’s point of view, she thinks everyone’s thinking like her. Didn’t you notice the other day, at a certain point she said that he had nothing to do with it, and this ‘he’ was someone we’d been talking about an hour earlier. She was still thinking about him, or he’d returned to her thoughts at that moment, but it didn’t occur to her that we might have stopped thinking about him. She’s mad, I tell you. And watch her as she talks, like an oracle—”
This sounded like nonsense and I cut him short: “Those who play oracles are always mad. Maybe she’s descended from the Cumaean Sibyl.”
We had reached the tavern. Braggadocio got to the point.
“I’ve got my hands on a scoop that would sell a hundred thousand copies of Domani, if only it was already on sale. In fact, I want some advice. Should I give what I’m investigating to Simei or try to sell it to another newspaper, to a real one? It’s dynamite, involves Mussolini.”
“It doesn’t sound like a story of great topical interest.”
“The topical interest is the discovery that someone has been deceiving us, in fact lots of people. In fact, they’ve all been deceiving us.”
“In what sense?”
“A long story. All I have for now is a theory, and with no car I can’t get where I have to go to interview the surviving witnesses. Let’s start with the facts as we all know them, then I’ll tell you why my theory is reasonable.”
Braggadocio did no more than summarize what he described as the commonly accepted story, which, according to him, was just too simple to be true.