(I read this story on Friday, May 8th, as part of the Festivalino and the evening event The Worst Book Presentations of Our Lives, staged at the Zelig theater in Milan.)
As in the most classic of horror stories, you have to imagine an almost idyllic starting point, a narrative opening where everything is already going perfectly: picture a beautiful April afternoon, warm with a blue sky; a novel that is enjoying good success, published by a major Italian house, containing many elements we know work well today: the twentieth century, war, women, emancipation, tragedy, a contrite reflection on our dark times; but above all, imagine Milan, an official invitation from the City of Milan, and the Fabbrica del Vapore as the venue for the presentation: coolness oozing from every pore, the holy trinity, the apotheosis of the cultural bubble.
I'm even feeling a bit cocky. I managed to pack the room for a congregation of sprightly old ladies in the middle of nowhere in the Cremona countryside—who actually just wanted to pop open bottles of wine using the books they'd read as an excuse—and I packed rooms in remote towns of the industrious Veneto region with fierce, warrior-like names, such as San Donà di Piave and Concordia Sagittaria, without being Venetian and without ever talking about the Po river or the lagoon. In short: I have absolutely no reason to doubt that today—holy trinity, Milan, City of Milan, Fabbrica del Vapore—will go swimmingly.
The presentation is scheduled for 6:00 PM. I loiter around the area until 5:50 PM because, as we all know, showing up too early risks making you look a bit desperate and, above all, giving the organizers terrible anxiety. I peek into the room when it seems like a respectable time: 5:55 PM. There is a table with copies of the novel and a smiling bookseller who greets me enthusiastically. I ask her about the organizers. "No one has shown up yet," she whispers. Five minutes to go. Meanwhile, I peek out to study the audience: about twenty plastic chairs, motionless and empty. Finally, the creators of the event arrive, a woman and a man, whom for convenience we will call the Lady from the Institutions and the Culturally Committed Man. Handshakes and compliments follow.
6:00 PM arrives: the neat rows of empty chairs stare back at me, but the Lady from the Institutions and the Culturally Committed Man seem unbothered: oh come on, it's no big deal, let's wait for the classic academic fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes pass.
The Lady from the Institutions glues herself to her phone, staring at the screen with mystical intensity, perhaps hoping there is an app for "Instant Audience Generation".
Twenty-five minutes pass.
The cosmic void persists, and an embarrassed silence grows.
By 6:35 PM, I am in the relatively peaceful mindset of clearing out. Thanks anyway, these things happen, I'm going to grab a Negroni Sbagliato to the health of Milanese coolness. The bookseller begins packing up the boxes.
But right at that moment, while the Culturally Committed Man mutters something about how people used to read more and how this all used to be fields, he appears. A human being. Alive, moving.
By now, we are just outside the room, in the courtyard, and he greets us with a timid: "Excuse me, is the presentation here?"
The Lady from the Institutions opens her eyes wide and looks at me triumphantly, as if to remind me of the sheer power of the City's promotional tools. I want to tell her, What the fuck are we talking about? and yet I hold back, because in this shady business of book presentations, there is perhaps only one moral rule for us writers, an almost chivalric code: even with just one person in the room, the event goes on. If this gentleman braved Milanese traffic, criminal parking on ruined sidewalks, and the Area C congestion charge just to hear me, I owe him something. This gentleman, moreover, is in a wheelchair.
Splendid. Come on in, don't worry about it, we’ll do something informal, but we’ll do it. The Lady from the Institutions and the Culturally Committed Man are officially resurrected and embrace the cause. The bookseller frantically sets up the table again. An employee of the venue appears, ready to handle the logistics: the room, you see, is slightly elevated compared to the courtyard. There are five, maybe six steps. The employee invites the gentleman to get onto the wheelchair lift that will take him up to the level of the room, straight to me—who until five minutes ago already had my mind on a Sbagliato and now have to pull myself together and talk about people getting blown up in 1918.
So, the gentleman gets onto the platform. The organizers smile, he smiles, I smile. It’s a beautiful moment of inclusion. We press the button. The lift goes up. One meter. One and a half meters. And then, it happens: the lift stops. Not a jolt, not a kickback. The hydraulic motor lets out a soft sigh and dies.
The gentleman is there, in his wheelchair, suspended halfway between the floor and literature. He can't get down, he can't go up.
"Don't panic!" shouts the Culturally Committed Man, as he begins frantically pressing every button on the panel.
Nothing. Dead.
"No problem, we'll call maintenance, it'll be sorted out in a flash," the employee announces. The Lady from the Institutions, the Culturally Committed Man, and the bookseller fall in line with her optimism; the air fills with a positivity bordering on hysteria.
The gentleman displays a moving level of dignity: he smiles down at us from his one-and-a-half-meter isolation and reassures us, spreading his arms: "These things happen."
Meanwhile, I just want the floor to swallow me whole. The only audience member to materialize has ended up trapped in a metal cage, and obviously, the presentation cannot start without him. Maintenance lets us know that nobody will move for at least half an hour. The half-hour passes. Then forty-five minutes pass. After an hour of a Mexican standoff, maintenance calls back: they can't make it, too many call-outs in the queue. The employee is about to faint. The bookseller would probably like to change careers. The gentleman on the lift is likely wondering if a novel is really worth all this trouble. The Lady from the Institutions regrets entering politics. The Culturally Committed Man regrets being culturally committed. I regret writing.
Then comes the drastic decision: "Let's call the Fire Department." The employee glues herself to the phone.
Now, picture the scene. The Fabbrica del Vapore, a ghostly midweek happy-hour silence, and suddenly, the piercing blare of sirens. The firefighters arrive. They stomp into the room, their heavy boots thudding on the floor, wearing thick uniforms and shiny helmets. Ready to tame the fire of the century or pull survivors from the rubble, they find themselves face-to-face with a depressed author and a reader held hostage by a hydraulic piston.
The firefighters study the situation. They tinker, they push, they manually release the valves. After fifteen minutes of straining and muttered curses, they manage to free the gentleman. They carry him by hand up to the floor of the room. The lift, however, is officially deceased. The crew chief takes off his helmet, wipes his brow, and looks at me. Then he looks at the book on the table. Then he looks back at me: "So? What were you supposed to do here?" "A... book presentation," I whisper in a tiny voice. He shrugs: "Well, then do it. We're already here, we’re not leaving. That way, when you're finished, we can carry the gentleman back down."
And that is exactly what happens. I present my novel in front of a single civilian spectator and an entire squad of firefighters in full disaster-response gear. The Lady from the Institutions and the Culturally Committed Man mutter to each other, perhaps mutually swearing to take this story to their graves. I talk about plot, character arcs, historical research. The firefighters listen seriously, nodding from time to time with an air of approval. One of them walks over to the table to peek at the cover, then gives me a thumbs-up.
In the end, the gentleman happily buys a copy. The firefighters don't, but they take their leave with an encouraging round of applause that makes me feel like a rookie on her first day of training. Then, the four of them lift my single reader and carry him back down into the world.
Before leaving, the crew chief slaps me on the back in encouragement, nearly dislocating my shoulder blade. Finally, he leans in toward me, as if to murmur a secret, and I listen anxiously, because we all know that firefighters exude a superior kind of wisdom: "Next time, write it a bit shorter, so we can get out of here sooner."
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