KIN

CHAPTER SECOND

My building was an ugly building, there was nothing to do, the reddish bricks made you think of a concentration camp, and then it was so high and crooked that it seemed it could collapse on you at any moment.

Some windows were split, those of the lower floors; I lived on the fifth; not too high, not too low, in the middle.

My life was all about being in the middle, my parents worked as clerks in the ministry, a modest job, bringing bread home, in the middle; my grades were fairly good, not to suck, not excellent, in the middle; my friends I had them, not many, not a few, even them in the middle.

The entrance hall of the stairs created a microclimate that I found fascinating, a thrill ran down my back when I entered the door, I walked towards the spiral of stairs that soared into the heart of the building. I ran my palm on the handrail, smooth lacquered wood that soaked my hand with a greyish halo; the steps were dug by time, but only up to the third floor, the next ones had been added just before I was born.

I played to align the pitch with the slots, I imagined what the groove would be like if everyone did as I did. We didn't have an elevator, and walking five floors was the worst thing about that house, I used to do them all in a hurry, I felt like I was competing with a nonexistent spirit who was whizzing by me. I won every time, and the soul in defeat went to take refuge among the garbage bags down at the entrance, waiting impatiently for my return to challenge me one last time.

My home gave me melancholy, not that I was not fond of it, but the walls of a bluish white and the serious and cold furnishings gave me a contrasting dualism of sensations, between feeling claustrophobic, and being lost in a vast glacial world; in which a stern and cruel ruler reigned, sucking the feelings of his subjects everywhere, making the inhabitants of his kingdom a boundless army of attentive, obedient soldiers, with nothing to lose and ready to fight for his kingdom.

My mother had let herself be carried away by the luxury to which she praised the regime and, even if she could not afford it, she incessantly tried to make our house a place similar to those elegant villas she read about in magazines.

It hurt my heart to see her as she had been reduced, an empty woman, her only goal was to please people, society had deprived her of all passion, for sport, for reading, for her husband, and now she was trying to fill that void with this obsession of perfectionism.

Every time she went to work she came back with a new pretext to change the arrangement of the bathroom furniture, buy new ones in the living room, change curtains, various upholstery. It made me crazy, I couldn't look at her when her eyes traced and retracted without respite the same path, whether it was television-lamp-mirror, or sheets-sofa cover-what she herself was wearing. She constantly struggled to find solutions to superficial problems, but that her monotonous life had made vital "something is wrong. Will it be the color of the wood? At the office they changed the curtains, should I? ... Maybe if I moved the bed to the right and the closet in the middle would be so much like the governor's mansion that... Did I look sloppy going to work looking like this? Oh lord, Linda has certainly had something to say, I will fix my hair and iron all my clothes so tomorrow I can be flawless in the eyes of all".

One thing I liked about that house and it was my room, God knows if there were any operators there what they would do to me; for my parents it was some kind of unknown land, a mythological landscape where their child burrowed without leaving free passage to a living soul, the concept of nobody did not include Acto of course, but they never knew of the multiple times in which I made him enter secretly, the fact was not difficult; I was almost always alone.

I liked listening to music, I had a beautiful stereo, really great, and every time Acto and I were at my place we put records on records at full volume.

He liked to dance, he didn't know how to do it, but it was still fascinating to watch, the earrings that danced uncoordinated on his lobes, the wide clothes that fell with every jump he made, his dazzling smile and the tawny hair that covered his eyes.

He dragged me along in his messy steps and we had a great time, it was in those moments that I realized how sad Reth was; in my room everything was possible, revolutionary speeches were held, plans of rebellion against the regime, Unseemly posters peeped on my walls and free music sounded from the stereo.

Outside everything was different, the warmth of the sun became a cold beam of light that makes the asphalt only greyer, the smoke of cigarettes was no longer an aphrodisiac pleasure, but a means to spend the agonizing time of life.

The dictatorship had made everything different from what it was before, it had made me hate my city, I could hardly remember the moments before Olsen came to power and buildings so high to scratch the sky and wide to occupy entire neighborhoods swept away the beautiful terraced houses.

The new government was followed by a new era, economically flourishing, with honest and faithful citizens, censorship of every text ever written or word ever spoken, cancellation, defamation and imprisonment of those who ever disrespected those who ruled.