That November morning, in the blue-aired apartment on Lottumstrasse where condensation streams down the windows, Mauro sticks an arm out of his duvet and plunges his hand into his duffel bag, waving it about inside as if testing the temperature of bathwater. This exploration, intended to bring him a few euros in change, leads his fingers to brush against the cold cover of one of those books on cooking, forgotten there, never opened. He takes it out and stares at it in surprise, as if he has just carried it up from the depths of time to the surface of the present. Then he gets up and walks to the Bibliothek am Wasserturm, on Prenzlauer Allee. At what moment, at what precise moment, does the course of one’s life narrow, solidifying this particular path as a possible or desirable future, this path and not that one or any other? I often think that it was during this stay in Berlin—of which he retains only an impression of cold and of long distances—that Mauro began to emerge from latency, that kingdom of youth. And so it is that he finds a seat in the reading room and opens the book. The library is a modern, clear, calm place. It’s warm in there.

2

Aulnay

CAKES, CARBONARA, HOMEMADE PIZZA

He had never considered cooking as a possible profession. Nowadays, everyone talks about the little boy who used to hang around in front of the saucepans at mealtimes, standing on tiptoes, nose in the casserole dish, eyes riveted to the oven window, finger dipping into the cream—What are we eating? What’s that? They like to remember the skinny, studious kid who, having been given a book of cake recipes while still in elementary school, spent the next few months making one every day when he got home from school, the way other kids might go to their bedroom to construct worlds out of Lego, or organize cosmic robot battles, or play PlayStation, or draw soccer players, or read a comic book. These are the anecdotes that build a legend, that help to create a logic along the lines of “Even when he was very young…” Because, in truth, all that stuff about a calling, a voice whispering in the ear, a passion drawing the body forward in a firm straight line … there was none of that back then. I searched for some trace of it in his notebooks, his drawings, the letters he wrote to his grandmother at Christmas, but I didn’t find any at all. At seven years old he wanted to be a circus clown. At fifteen he wanted to be rich, dreamed of bundles of cash, a classy international-playboy lifestyle—though he probably said this mostly to annoy his parents, a talented bohemian couple for whom this money obsession was just a phase, an awkward adolescent stage: they reacted with shrugs and wry smiles.