He played the piano in an enormous department store, on the main floor, under the ‘up’ escalator. There was a piece of red carpet on the floor and a white piano, and he wore a tuxedo and played for six hours a day–Chopin, Cole Porter, stuff like that, all from memory. He had been given a printed card that said, in fancy lettering, ‘Our pianist will return immediately’: when he had to go to the bathroom he brought it out and set it on the piano. Then he came back and started up again. He wasn’t bad like the other fathers, I mean, not bad the way… he didn’t beat anyone, he didn’t drink, he didn’t screw the secretary, nothing like that. Even when it came to the car… he didn’t buy one for himself, he was always careful not to have a car that was too… too new, or fancy, he could have, but he didn’t, he was careful, it came naturally, I don’t think he had a specific plan, he just didn’t do–he didn’t do any of those things, and that was the problem, you see? Right there, that was the origin of the problem… that he didn’t do those things, or a thousand others; he worked and that was all, he did it, as if life had insulted him, and so he had withdrawn into that job that was a defeat, without any desire to get himself out of it; it was like a black hole, an abyss of unhappiness, and the tragedy, the real tragedy, the heart of all that tragedy was that he had dragged us down, totally, me and my mother, into that hole along with him, all he did was drag us down, every moment of his life, every instant, with a miraculous constancy, devoting every gesture to the insane demonstration of a lethal theory, which was: that if he was like that it was for us two, for me and my mother, this was the theory, for us two, because we existed, because of us, for our protection, the two of us, for for for, and the whole damn time he was reminding us of this idiotic theory, his whole life with us was this one long, uninterrupted, exhausting action, which, on top of everything else, he purposely carried out in the cruelest and cleverest way possible; that is, without ever saying a word. No, he never said a word about it, never said anything, he could have spoken to us, clearly, but he never did, not a word, and that was terrible, that was cruel, never to say a thing, and then to be saying it the whole damn time, in the way he sat at the table, and what he watched on television, and even how he had his hair cut, and all the goddam things he didn’t do, and his expression when he looked at you… it was cruel, it’s the sort of thing that can make you turn out crazy, and I was turning out crazy. I was a child, a child can’t defend itself.
—Alessandro Baricco : “City”
