Against Time

Translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romano

It’d gone like this:

The man had boarded at an Italian airport, because everything began in Italy, and whether it was Milan or Rome was secondary, what matters is that it was an Italian airport where you could take a direct flight to Athens, and from there, after a brief stopover, a connecting flight to Crete on Aegean Airlines, because this he was sure of, that the man had travelled on Aegean Airlines, so in Italy he’d taken a flight that let him connect in Athens for Crete at around two in the afternoon, he’d seen it on the Greek company’s schedule, which meant this man had arrived in Crete at around three, three-thirty in the afternoon. The airport of departure is not so important, though, in the story of the person who’d lived that story, it’s the morning of any day at the end of April of 2008, a splendid day, almost like summer. Which is not an insignificant detail, because the man taking the flight, meticulous as he was, gave considerable importance to the weather and would watch a satellite channel dedicated to meteorology around the world, and the weather in Crete, he’d seen, was really splendid: 29 degrees Celsius during the day, clear sky, humidity within normal limits, good seaside weather, ideal for lying on one of those white beaches described in his guide, for bathing in the blue sea and enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Because this was also the reason for the journey of that man who was going to live that story: a vacation. And in fact that’s what he thought, sitting in the waiting lounge for international flights at Rome-Fiumicino, waiting for the boarding call for Athens.

And here he is finally on the plane, comfortably installed in business class – it’s a paid trip, as will be seen later – reassured by the courtesies of the flight attendants. His age is difficult to determine, even for the person who knew the story that the man was living: let’s say he was between fifty and sixty years old, lean, robust, healthy-looking, salt-and-pepper hair, fine blond moustache, plastic glasses for far-sightedness hung from his neck. His work. On this point too the person who knew his story was somewhat uncertain. He could be a manager of a multinational, one of those anonymous businessmen who spend their lives in an office and whose merit is one day acknowledged by headquarters. But he could also be a marine biologist, one of those researchers who observe seaweed and micro-organisms under a microscope, without leaving their laboratory, and so can assert that the Mediterranean will become a tropical sea, as perhaps it was millions of years ago. Yet this hypothesis also struck him as not very satisfying, biologists who study the sea don’t always remain shut up in their laboratory, they wander beaches and rocks, perhaps they dive, they perform their own surveys, and that passenger dozing in his business-class seat on a flight to Athens didn’t actually look like a marine biologist; maybe on weekends he went to the gym to keep fit, nothing else. But if he really did go to the gym, then why did he go? To what end did he maintain his body, stay so young-looking? There really was no reason: it’d been over for quite a while with the woman he’d considered his life companion, he didn’t have another companion or lover, he lived alone, stayed away from serious commitments, apart from some rare adventures that can happen to everybody. Perhaps the most credible hypothesis was that he was a naturalist, a modern follower of Linnaeus, and he was going to a convention in Crete along with other experts on medicinal herbs and plants, abundant in Crete. Because one thing was certain, he was going to a convention of fellow researchers, his was a journey that rewarded a lifetime of work and commitment, the convention was taking place in the city of Retimno, he’d be in a hotel made of bungalows a few kilometres from Retimno, and a car service would shuttle him in the afternoons, but he’d have mornings to himself.