Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.

And among those people – who never changed, who were content to hang out in the same sets they belonged to at school – Anna and Tom weren’t free to be themselves, or rather, they weren’t free to reinvent themselves.

The job required patience and precision, and a particular kind of concentration compatible with the bustle and background music of cafés. It also demanded creativity, mostly in the form of making tiny tweaks to existing frameworks. Did they like the job? Yes, but they would reformulate the question. They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. This was a deduction.

The time that did not disappear through work was taken up by the city. Berlin was, to all intents and purposes, their main pastime – exploring it, understanding it, feeling part of it. In a way it defined them much more than their profession did. They liked their work but not enough to give more to it than was absolutely necessary. They had fallen into the job. Berlin, on the other hand, they had chosen.

The longer they lived in Germany, the more mindboggling southern European inefficiency seemed to them. It wasn’t like that in Berlin, they would tell their friends, not out of snobbery, but in a genuine attempt to get them to move there too. And those friends would fantasize about going to visit them or following in their footsteps. They, too, longed for something else, a difference they couldn’t find at home; they, too, felt that need for abundance.

In the end Anna and Tom would convince themselves that they were the ones really building towards something – something as yet hypothetical but that became more and more tangible as the months passed. After a few days of overeating and underworking, they would always be relieved to return to Berlin. They loved their families and were nostalgic for the streets they had grown up on, but that fondness would quickly give way to a feeling of stasis and estrangement. Entering the departures terminal, each time they would glance at themselves in the glass doors and think back to the picture they had taken when they left. The comparison never failed to move them. They were so different now.

Their friendships were surprisingly easy, but there was also something precarious and brittle about them. Anna and Tom had been welcomed with an almost suspicious level of interest and openness, proof of a loneliness everyone was trying to exorcise.

It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people. But really it wasn’t like anything else, because it was new.

In their world, Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.

What was happening to the city – the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity – was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.

They realized they had contributed to the problem that was starting to affect them, but they knew it in an unacknowledged, almost imperceptible way, like smokers when they think about cancer.

It did occur to them that, had they arrived now, they probably wouldn’t have found an apartment as good as theirs, or not one they could afford. Sometimes this realization prompted a flicker of anxiety, as if the solid life they had built was merely an accident of timing. There were moments when they felt their identity was anchored not in their thoughts or deeds, but in something fickle and brittle, a roll of the dice.

They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher. They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

Their idea of a revolutionary future didn’t go beyond gender balance on corporate boards, electric cars, vegetarianism. Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world, but they couldn’t even imagine it.

But each time, after a while, they would remember those trips more generously, as if the act of remembering could alter the experience itself.

After an hour at the wheel and two spent traipsing up and down identical streets – slippery cobbles, dark ground-floor apartments, overpriced minimarkets, modern buildings with peeling plaster, cars parked on the pavements or at the foot of some church steps – they would stop at a bar to drink a Campari at a plastic table, reminding themselves that they were in Sicily, they were near the sea, they were branching out.

Through all of this they continued to document their remote working life on social media. The pictures were always stunning, enticing – prickly pear groves, Camparis on red plastic beach tables, sunsets over vineyards, carved tufa limestone facades, stray cats, their laptops usually somewhere in the frame to prove they weren’t on holiday – evidence of a life of freedom and adventure, one full of beauty and hard work, and with occasional surprises. Yet something in their spirits had changed.

They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in Berlin and then tried and failed to find again that winter. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs.