The last time some of my Milanese friends savored the taste of Death, her lid half closed over the large bulging eyes and the fork of her bony hands, as the bluish shadows of the evening or a set of bay foliage are routinely reaching from the waterlands at the foot of the cliff right up to the stony ramparts of the Sforza Castle, was when Ernst, whom we called the “Argentine” because of his love for Gabriel Batistuta and his outlandish collection of stamps straightened within the parchment slots of memory, decided to move with his black Newfoundland to Kritzendorf by way of Albrechtstrasse at the upper hand of which there is a gruesome prefab building banged together out of breezeblocks (again and again the giant animal hurled up to gaze at the boarded up windows and the iron bars protruding into the sky), and nothing stirred a crystal chill of terror in his limbs like the thought that Internazionale had made incoherent and confused statements, as though it were a criminal wearing a hiking badge on the lapel of a glencheck suit at the police station, proving, once again, that the body of the team is racked with cramps like an explosion in 1941 or the nerves of an unskilled worker in a munitions factory—or rather, more precisely, like some ownerless shoes tapping the narrow-brimmed floor of the Schwedenbrücke district, the voices of children out of a kosher restaurant, and a white-headed blackbird that shares a jackdaw’s interest in juicy and dark grapes. ♦