Casa NN

A History (even if partially imagined)
There is always something that sounds familiar in an old house:
sometimes it is the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor upstairs, the bicycles that passes fast on the street, the noise of women with heels walking on the paving, the French window on the balcony and the cloud in front of it, the scent of wood and of the linseed oil, the greetings of passers-by, the light of the morning, the memory of that little piece of yellow wall ("petit pan de mur jaune").

Everything seems already lived, or already desired, and may be it’s like that, it may be all that one hopes to find in an old house.

The beginning of the story is always unknown, and this can’t be that much interesting , certainly the place is peculiar: a cross between two streets that almost turns in a square. The block is the same where the Church is, even if beyond the streets there was a maze of courtyards, hallways, and alleys.

A century ago that house on the ground floor could be a shop, or rather a butcher's shop. For this kind of work are not necessary shop windows on the street, you only need the marble desk, the floor made of red cement tiles, then you need the slaughterhouse in the courtyard and the hooks that come down from the ceiling.

The butcher was not the type who needed large spaces; he needed the shop, the slaughterhouse, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. He left the garret to pigeons and memories. Certainly he must have been an original person with no lack of financial resources, so much as to want that scalesed yellow wall, gilded like a fish in the center of the village.

The money, is known, to end sooner or later and you can not take them to the afterlife. When I entered for the first time in the buildig, of the butchery it seemed  to be nothing about it.  In recent years it had become a take-away pizzeria, there was a poster of a Coptic Madonna hanging on the kitchen wall, in the upper rooms there were three beds and in the garret there were generations of pigeons. The gold of the façade had long since faded, leaving a dull and dark color.

All of them are accumulated by the desire to be able to write a part, even if small, of the story, of a story. In the end we recognize the value of the other authors, even when we have never known them, we write to celebrate the affection for daily life, the affection for small things.

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