The furnished room where he lives is grey, even the landlady’s appearance is grey. His whole day unfolds in a looming, uniform greyness, from office hours to evenings in a Tuscan restaurant or a beer hall. The only interruption in this suffocating metropolitan routine is a visit from his girlfriend: it is during a walk with her in the hills that the protagonist sees for the first time, clearly, the smog cloud weighing on the city.
Smog! – I shouted to Claudia. – See that? It’s a smog cloud! But she, not listening to me, was absorbed by something she had seen flying, a flock of birds, and I stayed there leaning out, looking for the first time from outside at the cloud that surrounded me at every hour, the cloud I lived in and that lived in me, and I knew that of the whole varied world around me only that mattered to me.
It will not take long to understand that the origin of that smog cloud is the cast-iron factory run by Engineer Cordà, who is also the director of the magazine “La Purificazione”.
In the foggy evening few shadows emerged; in the foreground stood out the outline of a chain elevator carrying up large buckets – I believe – of cast-iron dust. You could see the row of iron cups rising with continuous jerks and a slight swaying that seemed to break up the outline of the heap of ore a little, and it seemed to me that a thick veil rose from it into the air and came to settle on the glass wall of the engineer’s study as well.
At that moment he gave the order to switch on the light; suddenly, against the darkness outside, the glass wall appeared covered with a fine emery, surely made of cast-iron dust, glittering like the dust of a galaxy. The pattern of shadows out there broke up; the outlines of the chimneys stood out more sharply in the distance, each hooded by a red puff, and above these flames, by contrast, the wing, black as ink, that invaded the whole sky was accentuated, and incandescent points could be seen rising and whirling in it.
And I, who so many times in front of him, in the offices of the Body, had vented my natural antagonism as an employee by declaring myself in my mind on the side of smog, a secret agent of smog infiltrated into the enemy general staff, now understood how senseless my game was, because Engineer Cordà was the master of smog, he was the one who blew it ceaselessly over the city, and the EPAUCI was a creature of smog, born of the need to give those who worked for smog the hope of a life that was not only smog, but at the same time to celebrate its power.
The logic of the system is thus evident, as is the role of purification of a guilty conscience (today we would say “greenwashing”) played by the body the protagonist works for.
The meeting with a trade-unionist worker seems to clarify the intellectual’s ideas, and he sketches a gesture of dissent:
I published in “La Purificazione” a news item taken from a foreign newspaper about air pollution caused by atomic radiation. It was in small type and Engineer Cordà did not notice it on the proofs, but he read it in the printed paper and sent for me.
– For heaven’s sake, one has to keep an eye on everything, a hundred eyes are needed! – he said. – What came into your head to publish that item? That is not what our Body deals with. Heaven forbid! And without telling me, too! Such a delicate matter! Now they will say we are starting to do propaganda!
But he soon realises that press alarms have no effect on readers, and that everything seems to be wrapped in the smog cloud of indifference and habituation.
I put out an issue of “La Purificazione” in which there was not an article that did not talk about radioactivity. This time too I had no trouble. It was not true that it went unread; they did read it, but by now a sort of habituation had arisen for these things, and even if it said that the end of the human race was near, nobody paid any attention.
Current-affairs weeklies too carried news to make you shudder, but people seemed to believe only the colour photographs of beautiful smiling girls on the cover. One of these weeklies came out with a cover photo of Claudia in a swimsuit performing a stunt on water skis. I pinned it up with four drawing pins on a wall of my rented room.
A habituation that, deep down, has taken hold of the protagonist too. All that remains, as a last powerless defence, is the neurotic gesture of constantly cleaning his hands, dirty with dust. And perhaps the conscious acceptance of his own condition: a deliberate immersion in that very smog cloud that allows him – paradoxically – not to be definitively overwhelmed by the pain of living and to glimpse the beginnings of liberation.
I began to write one of the usual long-winded sermons, but little by little, from one word to the next, I found myself describing the smog cloud as I had seen it rubbing against the city, and life as it unfolded inside this cloud, and the façades of old houses, full of projections and hollows, where a black deposit gathered, and the façades of modern houses, smooth, monochrome, squared, over which blurred dark shadows gradually spread, like on the white collars of the office staff’s shirts, which did not stay clean for half a day.
And I wrote that yes, there were still those who lived outside the smog cloud, and perhaps there always would be, those who could cross the cloud and linger right in the middle of it and come out, without the slightest puff of smoke or grain of coal touching their person, disturbing their different rhythm, their otherworldly beauty, but what mattered was everything that was inside the smog, not what was outside: only by plunging into the heart of the cloud, breathing the foggy air of these mornings (winter was already erasing the streets in an indistinct haze), could one touch the bottom of the truth and perhaps free oneself.
