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   Preludes to Lutin
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Skill
When the first violent shake arrives nobody is ready to face up, it is not sure in schedule with what we are accustomed to face in the normal days, the ones beginning with an escape, continuing in a hurry and run away to the end. They slide away.
Not to lose the extraordinary show of every thing blowing up without limits, in a chain of incredible events, it is necessary to keep himself clear, enough to the cold, so to grasp a link or two. What will now write that child seated in the middle of the fields, at the northern periphery of the city? An euro, 1999 Liras to take a peep.
Three zeros are made, simply three strokes on the most important digit of the world, to enter into contact with Confraternita of Aid, the place where I work, in company of a thick rank of fellow soldiers of every nation, because confraternita has seats anywhere, and this is the seat of my home.
The others are here to help. They all call me Skill and also I grew fond of this name that is not mine. But the true one, clever the one who knows it. Skill is the name now and I had no others.
I was born not long time ago, not distant from here, abandoned here by a lady not convinced that maternity really was handy for her. Skill, genius with fast forefinger, who softly strikes 200 an hour on the keys of the computer with a single finger and with the others he pretends. Unknown pianist who pretends to accompany a great concert.
Sometimes I forget to eat. Some devout soul pays me for my work, but only once in a while, when he remembers and in approximate way regarding the number of hours I spend by day and night uninterruptedly.
I am in a country that cordially dislikes computers and net, as well as much loves refined chats.
When I get my pay-packet I celebrate with the fish of my Aquarius and give beer even to my cat that begins to skid, running in here and there for the house behind its preferred rag dolls: a space duck and a warrior with a black hood.
Not to be a gossip, but before they pay the salary to my fellow soldiers, because they raise their voices, are always threaten to paralyze the computer system of confraternita, if they don’t pay punctually.
It is a continuous strike until the misunderstanding.
I am quiet for my own business. This involves that I find myself little appreciated in my multiple talents; at least sure I possess a talent, being supersonic both to create and to destroy.
My life carries out all around the confraternita. I slump anyhow there, near the light of my computer, till someone of my colleagues does not withdraw me on, clapping hardly his hand on my shoulders.
Then I wince and relight myself, pardon, I restart I do not know if a new day or half of the previous one.
In my room there is an old colonel out of breath, operated at open hearth, assigned to the recording of the work of the others, great shipper of Christmas wishes and coupons for the allocation of economic lodgings and luncheon vouchers.
There is a Syrian who is a kind of encyclopedia and knows all there is to knowing on everyone, an Ethiopian who cares I do not know well of which international public relation and then down, down, coming down towards the lowest, an endless series of poor bastards with pin eyes and ass at the bottom of pants. One of them slightly better paid acts as master, but nobody pays attention to him.
Over us there are the true commanders in chief of Confraternita, in a fine palace just restored, a deconsecrated church of the times when religions still counted.
Anyone desires to visit the high stairs must be fortified of a special permission, wear in jacket and necktie if he is a man or with an onlooker red and white redingote if she is a woman.
Generally to high stairs they go only to protest for thin salaries, hoping in some increase from here to the eternity.
Go to the president his daring assistants, included drivers, cooks, cleaning and personal security staff.
They strongly complain; I forget also of this, always behind my work desk.
The masters sometimes stick their noses for a second into my lair and laugh sarcastic I don’t even know of what. But I don’t take offence and continue with passion, imperturbable to beat on the keyboard.
Outside the seat of the Confraternita there are hotels for sheiks, pubs for their women in burka, who suck everything with a special straw from under the heavy garments.
There is an embassy surrounded by the army, a big fountain to take a bath undisturbed, an enormous staircase from where it is easy to fall with the high heels; then all they pass prudently not to cut a poor figure, either for the altitude, or for the risk to remain under an altitude, as flat loaf.
Parade of beautiful women, defying the force of gravity, the retorts at big feet to be photographed, covered in sores inside and outside, but smiling to the entire world.
This place would not need attendance, enjoying the supreme reputation of place of the beautiful life, but who dies of hunger without money to breathe, comes everyday to us in Indian file, dejected for the shame of the rich Arabs, aboriginal, international. And it is always worse, with incredible rows of dead of hunger taking all the slope of the sweet life under the golden and jewelled windows.
A clear, irreversible decline: someone has written on the walls of the armored embassy “attack the decline”. I am not able to explain what it would say, but beat who is different from himself, thinking him responsible of his own misery. Yes, since people so-called docile act in this way, for fear and reverence of powerful figures. He doesn’t dare to think that they are the only cause of every misery. They always fear it.
Sometimes I come down till the statue of a faun of the antiquity and I watch it envious of its sarcasm, all that vitality that nobody has by now anymore in this cursed place, where someone comes to try his luck and finds the most devastating misery.
There is envy for who works within the Confraternita, because they don’t miss a warm meal to anybody of the employees and those who succeeds to enter here within.
At the crucial moment of many my thoughts always comes Mr. president, we must be silent, pay out respects.
He comes from a foreign country, took office a short time ago, gets not on still well here because before he was a strict manager, authoritarian still well, a kind of dictator.
He was elected by a patched up democracy, disguised somehow, accustomed to speak about religion and humanism, but lazy, eater free of charge, wilted by shady profiteers who invade every place.
The president has a black bow-tie he wears once in a year at the greatest festivity of the Confraternita, the one where the biggest booty is raked up around.
Perhaps my salaries go to help some victim in the world.
The scope of our organization would be to help the needy ones anywhere they can be found, without receiving any benefit, but for the purest pleasure to help fellows.
I do not know who founded this center and not even I care if in origin there were an ingenuous or a turd. At this point I don’t delude more myself on the human being and I bustle about, although I do not believe but to the hunger of my cat.
I take a train that goes every day in places where raping children is a consolidated habit and sanctified by the ones who has authority and hung the portrait of a nude child to the wall of the waiting room.
Every piece of the device was rigorously selected to hurt, to prevent to others to do well or to make anything.
Someone told me that probably president was a hunter of drug addicts and prostitutes, meaning that he eliminated them little by little, locking up them in a nursing home and leaving them there without provisions like targets of a target shooting.
When I am exhausted screwing up my eyes to the computer to broadcast every kind of human misfortune with relative humanitarian interventions, I have for long walks around the statue of a bearded little horseman.
Beyond is written that we are his boys and from him we had our origin, unity and freedom. The statue has the stare and it is not very persuasive, but so history goes and the one of my country seems to be this from when I came into the world.
The roads around the statue are dedicated to a certain glassy little man, embalmed with movie camera to resume a four-star hotel, the fierce beasts of the equestrian circus, the human beasts disguised as clowns.
Near the garrison, the luxury of the days with the aperitif to open mouth, the dinners to the light of candle with street-walkers, at this point is smeared by the stink of excrements of miserable drunks.
It is a carpet of pisses no stop, a tremendous stench little steps from the golden sides of the bitter end shopping of panties and jewels for half naked shapely women within the big fountain.
The occupation grows old quickly the stars of cinema, slams them, smokes them little by little.
Quite soon their maids in bill will call the confraternita with trembling fingers, zero, zero, zero, helped my owner fallen in misfortune.
He will play the siren and my colleagues will enter in one of those palaces of luxury, foreclosed in the time by banks and crowds of suspicious creditors.
The rescuers will be armed with stretcher and syringes of every format, included a discharged shirt of rigid cloth like tents.
And a star of the past will end in the stables of the present, dealt with the care suit to the case. His portrait on the walls of the clinic, as it was carved forever between the great personages.
The office where I work is a sort of warehouse of brand new computers and rather old to scrap ones, those to which the undersigned is usually more fond, much to carry home entire pieces for memory.
Sometimes I let them work, I care of them as they were children for napkin change.
And they miraculously start again suddenly in the darkness, while I soundly sleep in the best half hours.
I have so many computers I could resell them, but those old ones like for the human beings, even if good something, nobody wants anymore on principle.
There is my friend with purple eyeglasses continuously swearing behind a brand new computer that never wants to connect with the misfortunes happening around, things of the other world, immediate aid, organized escape.
While my rather old computers quickly drive me to the heart of every catastrophe, they continuously tell me the statement of every nation of this planet under shock.
The confraternita cares directly of this: it gets money and then it helps when it can and when it wants, the ones it wants and the ones it can.
Besides, help yourself, and God will help you, as they usually say.
In the old photos of the secret archives there are scenes that today you cannot see anymore: children saved in the middle of the bad weather, pull away from hunger, thirst, diseases of poverty. Now photos of sacrificial children arrive to us, stuffed of explosive shirts and we cannot do anything or help those who are hit by the assassin children.
Little ones dying of poverty there are also now, but if they blow up they are simply less mouths to feed.
So it is, but who dies of misery fucks more, so he has more possibility to live. And it is also so.
From my outpost, in this association respected and acclaimed like one of the good pillars of humanity, I see all kind of tricks, but we know that the human encloses inside the opposite and what is good can easily turn into evil, only moving some key, striking the head against something of hard, and then calmly coming back to the good like unbroken.
I simply try to let you know what happens, I concentrate on the information, leaving to the leaders the choice of the aids, the representations.
I would feel myself in guilt choosing in front of the tragedies of my fellows, above all in the days in which I feel well. I inform and stop, I cross my fingers and try to think as little as possible.


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