I will choose those plausible passages that give reality to Ari's stories, because if I were to transcribe entire sections of the gathered materials verbatim, you wouldn't understand anything from this whole story. I am here as an interpreter who has managed, little by little, to unravel the madness. And in which, I admit, for the umpteenth time, I have believed. I’m telling you this, my dear, so you know: If by chance you come across him in Athens or Rome, beware. As you mentioned that you plan to visit these two capitals this summer, I can only tell you that you'll recognize him from behind and by the crusted and scarred marks on his flesh. There are five of them, like a rune drawn into his skin, and they reveal themselves only to those he wants to show them to. Here’s what I found in Nicolae’s Travel Journal, a sign that in recent times he had completely lost touch with reality:
I had a good friend with whom I was a student at the Institute of Numinous Sciences Research, an Order created by a Troubadour around the year 1601. We were in a class on magical doctrines, and as we had reached the last chapter of our study, my friend and desk mate flipped through the White Magic Book. And I don’t know how it happened, but two pages were stuck together. In my attempt to separate the two sheets, I accidentally peeled off part of the writing from a verse written in red. I blamed myself for my carelessness, but my friend, whose name was Aristotel, yes, just like the Greek philosopher, smiled at me calmly.
— It’ll be fine! he reassured me and pulled the Magic Book from my hand, which happened to be open to the damaged verse. He passed his palm over the writing. Another passage disappeared. He passed it again, this time more slowly, to touch all the letters and feel them with his fingertips. The writing was barely distinguishable on the page. He passed his hand over it a third time, and all the verses on the two pages vanished. He turned page after page, and I saw how all the chapters erased themselves, word by word, letter by letter, as if you were deleting a text on a computer… He quickly closed the Holy Book and told me with the same confidence in his voice:
"It must remain closed. Only when it’s closed do the stories written inside it appear. When you open it, they disappear. Because in this book is written the future and the past of the one who carries it with them." Then he took two tickets out of his pocket and waved them around his mouth with a ridiculous gesture, like an upstart. Sometimes he could be so annoying with that lollipop in his mouth, as if he always needed to suck on something, like an infant with a pacifier.
"Stop with that lollipop already! What’s with these?"
"I quit smoking! Our tickets for the EuroTrip, they're in the first carriage of the Inter-Regio, first class. The Master suggested this trip. We took the night train, in a sleeper car, and to our surprise, each compartment had one or two passengers guarded by a Gendarme who based his thinking on Artificial Intelligence."
"I'm curious to see if the verses I erased with my hand, with my spell, have reappeared, now that no one is bothering us," Aristotel said to me.
"Don’t you dare touch the Magic Book again!" I warned him, scared he’d make another mistake. After all, it was entirely because of him that we were on this trip. For our safety, entire letters and passages from the written stories were censored. I didn’t understand by what miracle a book could protect us from dangers, as long as we always carried it with us.
"We must not be separated from the White Magic Book for even a moment, or we risk being identified by the Altgorithm. Everything we do and all the routes we write here must be erased."
"What could be so tragic?" Ari asked me with a careless tone in his voice and a hyena-like grin.
"Don’t you dare..." I lunged at him, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him, but I was interrupted by the Conductor, who came to validate our tickets and check the access codes written on our hands and foreheads, as well as to check our temperature and the color of our tongues. The mad cow disease had mutated and spread to humans, causing a pandemic of blue tongues. Since Ari was always sucking on a Chupa Chups lollipop, his tongue was blue. We were immediately isolated in our compartment. The Gendarme, whose thinking was based on Artificial Intelligence, now guarded our door and escorted us like prisoners whenever we needed to use the bathroom at the end of the carriage."
"It is forbidden," the Gendarme reminded us, "to carry items such as: white books, silver fangs, choco-biscuits, lollipops, bird’s milk, kestrel claws, forget-me-not petals, warts of wild plums, axe handles, bay leaves, fish scales, ox eyes, cuckoo beaks, duck bills, elderflowers, walnut shells, etc." For an hour, he listed all those forbidden items, because the Gendarme is very strict about protocol. If you miss a letter, he corrects you. If you make a mistake, he fixes it. Everything we do must be written down, planned in advance. So there’s no room for interpretation.
"Where are you going? For what purpose? What is the route? Who are you meeting?" This Gendarme was so annoying that we made a plan to distract him and deactivate him, from the key implanted in the back of his neck, so he would stop hovering over us, and we could finally be free from all these protocols, laws, and norms!
Ari opened the book to check the travel journal, as we didn’t know where to go—whether the Gendarme was part of the itinerary or just a system error. To our surprise, we were exactly in the time and place we were meant to be. We were in the last carriage, in the year of grace 2023, at 11:23 PM. We were heading to Rome with the Inter-Regio, first class, in the sleeper car, first carriage. The Gendarme? Missing… We closed the White Magic Book and opened it again, just to make sure, maybe the Gendarme would appear. But no sign of him...
"Sorry," he replied after finishing his entire protocol, in a lifeless voice, devoid of any inflection or intonation, "I will upgrade myself, please wait a few moments! Mi aggiornerò, per favore aspetta qualche istante! Nitajipandisha daraja, tafadhali subiri dakika chache!"
"This one's lost it!" we laughed, because he wouldn't stop, mixing all possible dialects and languages. I noticed a radiator made of malleable aluminum sheet. I broke off three pieces and handed them to Ari, who, in the meantime, was distracting the Gendarme, acting as a shield. The Conductor came to check once more if everything was in order before the last stop. He noticed our odd behavior. I fumbled, and a piece of aluminum slipped from my hand. Ari placed his foot over it and raised his hands without saying a word, without resisting. The Conductor also raised his hands, mimicking Aristotel’s gestures as if in a pantomime, like a mirror.
"What a joke!" I thought, without understanding what he wanted from us. After a moment, he clapped his right hand against Ari’s left, then they crossed their hands diagonally, clapping both hands. Just like when we were kids, playing in the schoolyard, an-tan-tichi-tan-se-var-capi-tan. Their palms hit perfectly, never missing, and the pace became faster, guided by an unconscious memory of the game, which was now coming back. They clapped in a complex rhythm, like a tango on a wooden floor, where you stomp faster and faster, synchronizing your steps with your partner without missing a beat. At some point, all that remained was the cadence of the train and their increasingly frenetic clapping, like a drumming sound. In the end, they recognized each other! The Conductor was part of the same order. This encounter made us so happy that we hugged, then laughed at the absurdity of the tense situation.
We got off the train, trying to slip past the gate. Another Gendarme, the twin brother of the one on the train, stopped us and checked our luggage.
"Sir, you have corn cobs, which, as you know, is against the law."
Aristotel quickly pulled the corn cobs from his bag and shelled all the kernels into my hands.
"See, now we only have the cobs left!" And we all smiled at the surreal absurdity of the gesture! We crossed the street, happy, like in the good old days, when no one asked us about corn cobs.
"I like these laws," Ari remarked. "They're fun."
"This trip wouldn’t have been as interesting without the rules." Jovanotti, who was waiting for us at the exit, waved. But we were stopped once again by the Gendarme.
"Tongue!" We each stuck out our tongues, and the Gendarme measured them with a ruler, signaling that we could pass. To my surprise, as I was a bit nervous, Ari's tongue was perfectly pink.
"Over here, boys!" Jovanotti signaled us, putting two fingers to his mouth and whistling so loud it echoed throughout the Central Station. He smiled at us like a tall, mischievous accomplice.
"La Grande Bellezza awaits us, my comrades! We're going to make a lot of money! The city is full of gullible tourists and corporate types." Ari threw an arm around Jovanotti’s neck in a brotherly way, pulling him close and rubbing his knuckles over his scalp. Jovanotti struggled to escape, but Ari tightened the grip around his ribs and forearm, trapping him like in a vise. He gave Jovanotti a friendly slap on the back, a signal of submission. Then he grabbed me too, knocking off my straw hat, kissed my bald head with satisfaction, wishing me good sunny days, and pulled out three pieces of choco-biscuit to make peace.
"You had choco-biscuits on you the whole time? And bird’s milk? And Chupa-Chups lollipops? You could've gotten us locked up!" I snapped at him, but he seemed too proud of his bravado to care about the risks.
"It’s strawberry-flavored! How else do you think I got past the Gendarme at the gate? Did you forget I have mad cow disease?" He stuck his tongue out at me and mooed, pretending he was about to lick my face like a cow. I shoved him hard in the chest to push him away.
"Well... I’ve gotta admit, it’s a clever trick! But seriously, you act like you’re nine years old! I was tired of babysitting him, like I was his mom! Why does no one take me seriously? Damn it! I’m always the one thinking about what we’re eating, where we’re sleeping, what budget we have…"
"We need a bigger hat," Jovanotti said, rubbing his hands together.
"Nicolas’ hat!" I barely had time to fix my hat on my head before they’d snatched it off. I tried to grab it back, but they tossed it between them like a flying saucer, passing it around and keeping it out of reach. That would end up causing me a lot of trouble. I got sunstroke from standing in the sun all day like a yogi, while sneaky Ari stayed protected under his royal hood. Damn him!
But there was still a long way to go until the next day, and our stomachs were growling for food, pressed against our spines from hunger. Our guts were rumbling, and we felt all kinds of jabs as if we had chewed on barbed wire. We stopped in front of a pastry shop right outside the station and gazed longingly at the warm pies with cheese, pumpkin, and apples. A few slices of pizza, glistening as if brushed with oil. We only had one euro. Jovanotti pulled the coin from his pocket and held it up like a trophy, raising his hand.
"What can we buy for one euro?" he asked the pastry lady.
"Well, let's see," the pastry lady said, making a quick inventory: "Apple pies? NO, pumpkin pies? NO, sweet cheese and raisin pies? NO, sesame pretzels? NO. Puff pastry cakes with vanilla cream... maybe, but I can't give them without the cream... So, NO."
"Please, stop!" I shouted. "We get it! You didn’t have to torture us like that."
"But I do have some leftover poppy seeds from the pretzels. If you promise not to snort it..."
"It’s enough," said Ari, swiping the coin from Jonny’s hand. We looked at each other, not understanding how we could buy food for three hungry giants with just one euro. Ari headed back towards the Central Station, and we stopped him, thinking he had lost his way, disoriented by hunger.
"Follow me!" he commanded. Inside the station, there was a coin pusher machine filled with coins of different colors and sizes from all over the world, teetering on the edge, close to falling, but not quite, just enough to tease you. Passersby would dump their loose change in, but I suspect some scammer came with a key before the machine got too full and cleaned it out. I had no idea what kind of commercial value such a gambling machine could have.
“You’re not really going to waste our last penny, are you?”
“Nothing is lost; everything is transformed!” Ari replied, quoting Heraclitus.
“Actually, that’s Antoine Lavoisier. Heraclitus was about the river.”
“You can’t step into the same river twice.”
“Why not?” Jovanotti asked, as naïve as ever.
“Good question! Why not?” Ari encouraged Jonny in his ignorance.
“Because you’re always someone else!” I answered, though I was sure they just wanted to confuse me with their questions.
“Are you the one who’s different, or is it the river?” Ari asked.
“I’m the same. I, Jovanotti, solemnly declare that I can bathe a thousand times in the same river. But not in the Arno, because it’s always murky and cold.” We laughed at his innocence.
Ari took the coin and, without any strategy, tossed it into the machine that pushed the coins toward the edge of the abyss.
“Haha!” I laughed at him. “You’re even more naïve than Jovanotti. It seems like you could try the same thing a thousand times and get the same result.”
“A thousand euros? Sure! But who’s going to exchange that many coins for you?”
“Yeah, and you’ll probably end up with 899 euros in the end.” We laughed heartily at his entrepreneurial spirit. He had no grasp on reality. “Looks like we’ll be going hungry tonight, mon ami,” I told them, resigned to the idea.
But we hadn’t taken more than five steps when we heard a cascade of metallic sounds, coins pouring out in waves that wouldn’t stop. Everyone in the station froze to see what was happening, as the machine lit up like a fire truck siren, announcing the winner and drawing attention: “See, it’s real!” We turned back and filled our pockets with loose change, coins, and other objects spilling from the machine. We went back to the pastry shop and ordered three hot pies.
“What did you do, rob a bank?” the pastry lady asked as we dumped a fistful of coins onto her tray.
“No, ma’am! We didn’t rob a bank. We invested! One euro may be a small sum, but it can topple a big cart.”
“You’ve mixed up your proverbs again,” I pointed out to Jovanotti.
After we were full, the three of us headed toward the heights of Palatine Hill and picked a spot near a busy fountain where we planned to practice our troubadour skills the next day.
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