As he turned the handle of the door, he felt that, against his will, he had become part of a band. A legion of individuals who no longer had any choice. They were dressed as slaves, and bore a sign around their neck: ATTENTION: A PERSON DEPRIVED OF DIGNITY. THE MOST BASIC LAWS OF COURTESY ARE SUSPENDED TOWARDS THIS PERSON UNTIL FURTHER ORDER. Reflected in the glass pane of the door, he saw himself, together with many other slaves, lining up to reach a table where a clerk distributed a gray sheet of paper to each of them. When his turn came, he was given a carbon pencil: he had to make an "x" in one of the two boxes shown on the gray sheet of paper. In the first was written: HUMILIATION; in the second: SUPERIORITY. Massimo hesitated. He could choose between accepting all that had happened with submissiveness, or reacting to it with superiority, concluding: "I don't give a damn about the well-being of those two boors!" He understood that whichever choice he made, he would enter into a alien logic, according to which men are not equal: either one feels superior to the other and the other accepts it, or else they both feel superior and show contempt for one another. To make an "x" in either one of the boxes on that gray sheet of paper meant, in some way, performing a crime against humanity and against the one, incontrovertible truth, religious and secular, that exists on this earth: that men are all equal.

"He is strange. So strange. First he was an ever-cheerful little boy, jovial, full of fancy. He sang and recited poems for everybody. He invented stories. Clever. Smart. And now, instead, look at him […] Here he is. Always sulky. He has become bad-tempered and off-putting, he who was sunny, open and unconventional also with strangers. Just think that when I took him to work with me, till some time ago, he was the attraction of the whole office. They all adored him. Now they treat him as if he had some illness. He keeps silent there, aloof, hardly answers to the greeting of the colleagues, not even smiles out of kindness. And then, at home, he has become spiteful. And treacherous. He seems to be always brooding over something. He never speaks, but then, as soon as you reproach him, he is at once ready to be argumentative. Then he speaks surely. He stops only with blows. He makes clear and is pedantic on everything. I assure you that at this point to try to bend him is an effort. We have even thought of granting him to some… institute of religious people who can speak to him, guide him. But I really don’t feel like it. I’d prefer that doctor Maggi gave him a cure, advised me of some therapy, some meeting with a psychologist, I don’t know, I don’t know…"

The mouth which had perhaps too much spoken; too much expressed, and which now was blocked in the bloodless fixedness of an everlasting half-closed crack. The indistinct nose, in its growth, between a ball-shaped outcome, which would have freed him to the eternal childish and finally to the ridiculous, and a prolonged one, which would have marked before time his countenance with the allusion at his being already too adult. The lengthened face. His head, which ought to have been rounded and well proportioned till a few months before, now was stretching out a little too sharpened towards the sky in search of an answer, of an angel-like voice which could help him to understand a very difficult reason for his childish soul. The ears quite a bit shifted from the head, as if to want to eavesdrop at the door of a life that had made him promises of extraordinary melodies and that now had excluded him from the delight of its beautiful song. And at last the eyes, misted over like two stars twinkling far away right in the background of a mass of chimneys insensitive to the sky, and only able to smoke him with their heavy dross.

I thought of my father, who was closed in the dark of his 1100 Belvedere, and it wrung my heart. He was a good man, who like all of us knows but doesn’t know, and asks himself unanswerable questions only because they assure him the possibility to cling to the doubt; and he knows well that if he stopped for a while asking himself those blind questions he ought to meet with the answers that had always been there, simply there. But I also thought of the "family problems", of the mum that could not take it any longer, of Maggi, of how "worldly-wise" and "trustworthy" he was, and of the cures and therapies that were going to be organized to immerse into the font of oblivion that little boy, who one day had been happy, but now knew too much to be able to aspire to be still as such. I entered headlong and slammed the door, like an American cop disposing to chase a criminal. I fastened Chicca to the child’s chair, closed decisively my seat belt and blocked the doors. Then I looked at him in the rear-view mirror: his big eyes were sparkling and had the same excited and enraptured face of when dad had not met Maggi yet, and made him dream because he was a great hero. I shifted to first gear and took off.

Angelo was stressed and frustrated as he had never been in his life. His world had been shattered after Ivan's arrival. He was still the idol, the myth, the captain and undisputed leader of the team and of the neighborhood, but that dandy who only knew how to drive home air-borne balls that were already destined to end up there, had entered his life like a curse. He actually hated him. He hated him for his false humility, for his false altruism, because he always passed the ball right under his feet, never a few meters ahead as he wanted him to, and he did it on purpose, to make him stumble. He hated him because he was attending university instead of earning a living by toiling, as he did. Because he never said a word of praise to him, nor a word of consideration, but only smiled at him with that idiotic face, as though he wanted to make him understand that for him the great Angelo was a nobody. He hated him because he had ridiculous luck. He took a shot at the goal and the ball went in, sometimes rolling in sometimes bouncing, sometimes avoiding the goalkeeper sometimes straight in, but always poorly kicked, with that foot that seemed like a hoe. He hated him because Ivan was one of the privileged ones, a hypocrite, a chichi...

Ivan was continually challenged, hissed at and given the raspberry during the games; once, when they were yelling at him "pia-zza-le-lo-re-to pia-zza-le-lo-re-to", he stopped to argue with the fans and tried to explain that it wasn't clear who was the most proletarian, he or his rival, because he was the son of a union member of CGIL, the Italian Trade Union Organization, and Angelo the son of a businessman; but an empty bottle of orange drink landed on his head and he ended up in the emergency room. His Seicento had its body scratched, its tires slashed, the windshield cracked and the windshield wipers broken.