Once upon a time, there was a guy who had a huge antenna on the roof of his house. People thought he used it to speak with ham radio operators around the world, but that wasn’t the case. The reality was quite different.
The guy in question was named Alfredo and came from a well-to-do local family that had, however, fallen from grace. He had enough money left not to have to work, but not enough to live well. In fact, he lived an idle and reserved life, always shut up in his house doing heaven knows what.
The neighbors thought he was a Russian KGB spy. The greengrocer on the corner swore he had seen him with a well-known left-wing politician at a local restaurant. In short, nobody knew anything, except for the fact that he was a ham radio operator; a fact on which everyone agreed.
And they were wrong. Alfredo’s antenna served another purpose. It was, in fact, a very expensive military-grade device that he had purchased at the end of the Cold War, spending years learning how to operate it.
A Romanian Gypsy had even translated the manual from Russian for him, although the translation often turned out incomprehensible. “Insert the spindle-shank into the magnetic coil until the unrolling of the plume.” Imagine a 1,538-page Ikea manual translated from Russian by a Romanian Gypsy…
But he had persevered and, in the end, he made it. Finally, everything worked. Alfredo could hear the telephone conversations of all the town’s inhabitants. And not only that. He also saw all the messages and could intervene in conversations. He could send text messages that appeared to come from a specific user.
In short, he completely controlled the flow of information.
However, there was a volume problem: too many things to listen to. Filters were needed. First, eliminate all conversations by teenagers. Who cares what they say? Second, record only the interesting discussions. But how to define ‘interesting’?
Alfredo relied on an Icelandic ‘hacker’ who created a voice recognition program that listened to everything, but recorded only conversations containing certain keywords, with appropriate variations. For example, he would insert ‘Eat’ and the program recorded all conversations with ‘ate’, ‘eaten’, etc…
It took a while to perfect the system, but eventually, everything worked. At the end of the day, he received an email with all the interesting conversations and messages, which he would then listen to at his leisure. Alfredo had become omniscient.
But what to do with this treasure trove? Surely there was a reason. Providence hadn’t given him all this power for nothing. He couldn’t waste this gift by passively listening. He had to act; influence the course of events. But how to do it? And with what intent?
Alfredo decided to start with something simple: Pasquale. Pasqù, as he was called in town, was a big, uncouth peasant. He had only finished the first grade and didn’t have a very vast vocabulary. He made do with a dozen words, which he used in various situations, relying on intonation and gestures to vary their meaning. In practice, he was incomprehensible.
You could find him at the village bar every Friday evening drinking wine and raving, stringing these few words together in unlikely configurations.
Alfredo decided to pair him with Professor Milani, a long-time spinster and international expert on Ariosto’s alternate rhyme sonnets, of which three exist, including the enigmatic: “I, like the hawk, abstain.” This last one was the cause of the professor’s fame, as she had proposed a bold interpretation. The Milani Hypothesis, as it is called, can be summarized, albeit incompletely, with the observation: “When he wrote it, he was drunk.”
Thus arrived the first message from the fake Pasqù: “Oh my sweet maiden, gazing upon you fills my heart with ardor.”
The professor replied: “Pasquale, I think you’ve caught a virus.”
Pasqù: “My only ailment is the distress of not being able to have you.”
Milani: “Pasquale, what are you saying, have you been drinking?”
Pasqù: “I await you, burning as always, at the third table of the amorous tavern.”
Milani: “Amorous tavern?? You mean Bar Sport?”
Pasqù: “The sweet place of our love.”
Milani: “But it’s disgusting. It’s full of drunks!”
Pasqù: “Bacchus will be our chaperone. If you desire me too, pronounce the code words ‘I am your eel’.”
Milani: “What eel! Pasqù, have you gone crazy?” Milani (after a while): “Come on Pasqù, answer me, are you angry?”
Pasqù arrived at Bar Sport like every Friday evening. He sat at his usual table. He was in great shape that night. He had discovered a new expletive that he now used, in adjectival form, attaching it to every word. The adjective was ‘bitching’. A shepherd friend of his had used it to describe a rooster that refused to crow at the appointed hour. To Pasqù, it had seemed a most refined term.
The hour had grown late. Darkness fell upon Bar Sport. Pasqù, by now good and drunk, was beginning to doze off with his head on the small table. Sappy music filled the air, covering the blasphemies of the bartender who wanted to send everyone home. Cigarette smoke enveloped the tables, creating a primordial Borneo-style fog.
Into this rarefied tropical dream environment, she arrived. Beautiful as a sugared almond. Shinier than a car exiting an automatic car wash. She emerged from the fog like a Hollywood star: oversized sunglasses, English-style hat, and a very tight dress.
One of the patrons, braver than the rest, attempted a whistle of appreciation. The prof struck him down with a glare such that the air went back into his lungs, as if he had eaten it back. The sound that came out seemed more like a sigh than a whistle. “Forgive him, Professor, he’s an imbecile,” said the solicitous bartender.
Milani headed with a determined stride toward Pasquale’s table, who, in his stupefied state, hadn’t noticed a thing. Staring at him intensely, she whispered, in a conspiratorial tone: “I am your eel.”
“I didn’t understand,” replied Pasqù innocently.
“I am your eel,” she reiterated in a peremptory tone.
“Oh really?”
“Pasquale, please don’t talk bullshit. If I say I am your eel, it means I am!”
“If you say so… I mean you… or she… maybe.”
“You haven’t grown cold toward me, have you?” she insisted, annoyed.
“No… No… cold? I’m always hot… but in what sense?” he replied, by now in total confusion.
Seeing that the situation wasn’t progressing, the prof began to lose patience: “Pasqù, please, don’t try to be funny. Let’s get out of here.”
“And where are we going?” he asked.
“Certainly not to your farmhouse, it smells of goat. Let’s go to my place.”
Pasquale, laughing like an idiot, threw out a random phrase composed of the few words known to him: “Home is where the goat sleeps.”
The prof’s eyes went wide, as if struck by lightning: “Pasqù, is this verse yours?”
“What verse?” he replied, fearing he had farted.
“You don’t even know you’re a poet, do you!”
“No,” he replied sincerely.
“Do you have another verse for me?”
Pasqù timidly improvised: “The goat is where the rooster sleeps.”
The prof looked at him doubtfully: “That one is bullshit, though.”
“I was joking,” he threw out, sensing he had failed some kind of test.
“Oh well, let’s go home, come on. One cannot expect too much from he who is unaware of his own gifts.”
“Oh yes…” he replied uncertainly.
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