Chapter 61
We jumped on one of the orange streetcars I had noticed while riding in the cab to the hotel, which brought up close to the square dominated by the Duomo – the Dome, the symbol of the city as the girl at the hotel told us, is an ornate cathedral, with a foamy façade protruding towards the sky, its white pinnacles tending themselves towards white clouds with playful lightness.
We walked around till we found a pizzeria in a side street, close to Duomo’s square and yet concealed, strangely quiet compared to the porticos running along the streets irradiating from the square, where flows of people slowly dragged from one fashion shop to the next, going in and out, bags, ice-creams and granitas in their hands, indolent in the intensity of the summer heat.
We ate our pizzas voraciously, not so much because we were hungry, but because the crust was thin and the mozzarella had a soft creamy taste and the tomato sauce was mouth-watering, and the whole restaurant had a marvellous smell of stone-oven baked pizzas that made one long for food. It was only when we had swiped our dishes clean that we realized we had too much and too fast, and when we stepped outside on a full belly the hot day seemed hotter and the tiredness from the trip plunged in heavily, making us dizzy with drowsiness. We had a coffee, creamy and fragrant, served by a barrister in a white uniform, a tie around his neck.
“Prego”, he said, placing two small chocolates on the dishes holding our small porcelain espresso cups.
The price was 80 eurocents per coffee, something like a dollar, and I couldn’t believe it. La dolce vita…life was good here, or at least so it seemed to my American tourist eyes.
The hours flowed mellifluously as we unhurriedly lingered in the streets around Duomo’s square, and 4 pm came too early. I had plunged into a timeless dimension, and the realization we had to get on a streetcar again to reach Mori’s research institute impinged on me like needle inexplicably hidden in the soft folds of clean bed linens.
“But really? Is it 4 pm already?”, I asked plaintively when Jack looked at his watch and said it was time for us to get going
“If you ask me I have no drive to meet Mori now, but what can we do?”, said Jack pinching my cheek the way adults do with kids
And so we headed to the streetcar, hands laced, romantically heading to discuss the potentially lethal effects of a compound I synthesized as a game, gambling with chemistry in the mint-whiteness of certified corporate labs.