La casa di fronte

At two minutes past eleven, behind the glass of the house across the street, there is a face. It lasts three seconds. Then the curtain.

Irene lives alone on the first floor of via Beltrame. An illness has taken the street from her, the stairs, the shopping: it has left her a window and seven metres of distance. So she watches. For a lifetime she recorded other people’s words for the record — the exact hour, the place, the sentences as they were said. Now she does it in a kitchen notebook, and nobody believes her.

At number 7 lives a kind man. He says hello. He keeps the path clean. A woman entered that house whom nobody saw arrive and who never comes out.

Irene tells her daughter, who sees a lonely mother. She tells the doctor, who knows the illness better than she does. She tells the carabinieri, who listen, take it down and go to check: they find a tidy house and a cooperative man. Everyone has their reasons. Nobody is lying. Irene is right.

Sixty-eight short chapters, written in short sentences with not one explanation too many. The reader is not asked to doubt Irene: the reader is asked to stand at the window with her, with the same seven metres ahead and no way across.