In the long, twisted shadow of a city whose very name seemed to have been lost in the smoke of factories and the clamour of human ambition, lived a man whose fate, though initially shaped by the calloused hands of simplicity, would become an emblem of those moral falls that afflict spirits deluded by the fleeting glitter of progress. Corrado, he was called, lived in an alley where the walls, steeped in centuries of damp, whispered stories of forgotten generations, and where sunlight, filtering through cracked shutters, drew dust hieroglyphs that only a contemplative soul could decipher. His existence, until the age of thirty-five, had been an idyll of noble renunciations: waking at dawn when the streets still slept, wrapped in the pearly mist of the sewers; solitary walks along the riverbanks, where water lilies floated like silver coins thrown by a penitent king; evenings spent in the small civic library, among volumes whose musty scent spoke more eloquently than the printed words. He owned nothing except a tweed jacket worn at the elbows and a collection of water-smoothed pebbles, each a silent witness to a quiet epiphany.
His philosophy, cultivated like a secret garden in a concrete desert, thrived on a simple and revolutionary assertion: that true greatness lay in the art of non-desire. Until, on a cursed day whose heat made even the statues of saints sweat, his friend Marco, already then a hybrid being, half man-half financial prospect, dragged him into a drawing room where Persian rugs were so thick that heels sank into them like velvet swamps, and where Bohemian crystal glasses clinked in a symphony of self-celebration.
“Look,” hissed Marco, pointing at a pocket watch whose dial was studded with diamonds that sparkled like the eyes of sleeping demons, “this does not mark time, Corrado, it owns it.” And in that moment, like a hailstone in the heart of a pearl, the first seed of corruption insinuated itself into our hero’s chest. What was his collection of stones, after all, compared to these jewels that trapped light? His solitary walks, were they not the excuse of someone afraid to compete? And that night, as he rode home in a taxi whose upholstery smelled of repressed ambition, Corrado began to hate silence.
The transformation that followed was slow, imperceptible, and terrible, like the blooming of a poisonous mushroom. First came the accessories: a silk tie so fine it seemed cut from the wings of a cherub, bought on credit; then a Swiss watch whose metallic ticking replaced the heartbeat as an existential metronome. His home, once a sanctuary of books and chipped teacups, filled with objects that shouted their price: Art Déco figurines with vacant stares, Anatolian rugs demanding attention with aggressive geometric patterns, a red leather Chesterfield sofa that seemed skinned from some mythological beast. Every purchase was a stab at his old identity, yet Corrado, intoxicated by the smell of new leather and the rustle of banknotes, mistook bleeding for a kind of purification.
At work, a simple accountant job at a maritime shipping company, he began to see it no longer as a means of subsistence, but as a gym to sharpen claws he didn’t know he possessed. He arrived first, left last, volunteered for tasks others refused, accumulating favours like a miser accumulates coins. His promotion to financial director (a title printed on business cards in such raised type it could be read in the dark) coincided with the purchase of a car whose body gleamed like a freshly sharpened knife.
It was during this period that he began to classify human beings in categories borrowed from economics manuals: “assets” or “liabilities”, “investments” or “sunk costs”. The grocer’s wife, who once gave him butter cookies wrapped in wax paper, became a “net loss”; the old librarian who had taught him to love the cursed poets was downgraded to “obsolete capital”. Even his dreams, once populated with bucolic landscapes, transformed into flowcharts where human figures danced, bound by arrows all pointing upward toward an indefinite but absolute “success”.
But like Icarus, Corrado had a foot of clay: the higher he rose, the more the world below lost its colour.
Lunches in starred restaurants, where food was arranged in abstract geometries denying its earthly nature, left him hungry for the lentil soup his mother made on rainy evenings. Conversations about the stock market, conducted in ciphered jargon that turned emotions into decimals, made him long for discussions on the best way to graft an apple tree. One night, after a cocktail party where he laughed on cue at jokes that didn’t touch him, he found himself crying in front of the bathroom mirror, tears streaking a face rendered unrecognizable by too much artificial sunlight.
The climax of the arc, because it was indeed an arc, with its inevitable descent, came with the purchase of a neoclassical villa whose fluted columns resembled the bones of buried giants. Furnished by a Milanese interior designer who spoke in architectural metaphors (“This living room must be a Petrarchan sonnet in travertine marble!“), the house was a museum of coldness: floors so polished they reflected the void of vaulted ceilings, fireplaces that had never known real fire, bookshelves holding leather-bound volumes but no pages, mere gilded boxes to deceive equally empty visitors.
It was here, on a November night when the moon seemed a dead eye, that Corrado took inventory of his life. Bank accounts swollen like drowned corpses; bespoke clothing constricting him like a second alien skin; influential acquaintances, names without faces in an ivory Rolodex: all revealed themselves for what they were, a house of cards built over an abyss. He tried to read a book, but the words slipped away like frightened insects; he tried to walk in his zen garden, but the precisely arranged stones reminded him of his ex-vows to money.
True punishment, however, came at dawn. As he watched from the thermal window a homeless man sleeping blissfully on a bench, wrapped in newspapers like a royal cloak, Corrado shivered with the realization that this man, though possessing nothing, had exactly what he had lost: the ability to enjoy a sunbeam, the smell of fresh bread, the supreme luxury of having to prove nothing to anyone. At that moment, his heart became a rag, and the tears that followed were not of sadness, but of shame: shame for having been deceived by the most banal of deceptions, the one that mistakes having for being.
In the years that followed, years he spent as a ghost in the corridors of power, Corrado became a living warning. Colleagues who envied him did not know that his corner office was a cell, that his cashmere suits were shrouds, that every handshake concealed a desperate prayer for authentic recognition. He died young, struck not by a physical ailment, but by that perpetual melancholy born when the soul, reduced to an accountant of its own failings, ceases to believe in resurrection.
His tomb, a black granite mausoleum he had commissioned in a fit of posthumous self-celebration, soon became a destination for school trips. “See,” teachers said, pointing to the ostentatious headstones, “this is what happens when the price of things is mistaken for their value.” And as the students walked away giggling, an autumn breeze lifted dead leaves across the grave slab, erasing once more the figures engraved in block letters.
Figures that, in their numerical arrogance, could not buy even a gram of true memory.
This article was originally written in Italian. If you want to read the original: L’illusione del velo dorato.