The man placed his glasses on the desk, passed his hand across his tired eyes, gathered the various papers that were in front of him and put them into a leather folder. For that evening he had finished work. He looked at the clock. It was 10 o’clock in the evening. He was alone in the office. He had had to stay to look over the accounts of “S&B Co”, a non- alcoholic drinks’ company on the brink of bankruptcy. His was an important job: to examine the balance sheets and financial statements of industrial and commercial companies in view of possible sales and to arrange the relative reports to present to the board of directors of the merchant bank for whom he worked. They had asked him for an urgent report on “S&B Co”, whose rather complex balance sheet required an in-depth analysis and only now, at 10 o’clock in the evening, had he managed to finish the job. He got up and had a quick look at the large glass window situated right in front of his desk. He was on the fortieth floor and from that height he could see a great deal of the illuminated city. Right at that moment a violent storm was breaking out. The rain was pushed violently by the wind against the window pane. In the sky lightning drew strange arabesques illuminating the obscure outlines of the skyscrapers, while the hollow rumbling of the thunder made the glass vibrate. He took his raincoat from the metallic coat stand, turned off the desk light, closed the office door and went into the neon-lit corridor. There was a huge silence, only broken from time to time by the thunder. The cleaning staff had already finished work and at that time there were only the security guards on the ground floor.
He went towards the first lift he met and pressed the button to send up the lift. He waited for less than a minute. The door of the lift opened, he went in and pressed the button to go down.
The doors had just closed, when the man heard a strange noise, rather loud, as if something metal was suddenly breaking, followed by a sharp movement by the lift.
He tried to get out, but the lift set into motion with an increasing speed. The man paled. He understood that if he didn’t block the lift it would fall to the ground. He pressed all the buttons on the control panel with an anguish mixed with anger. But without any result. And while the lift fell towards the ground, the man felt himself unconsciously immersed in a sort of limbo in which time passed slowly and allowed him to live some of the most important events of his life again through sudden flashbacks. In that unreal atmosphere fear of imminent death diminished, filtering through memories that crowded into the man’s mind.
“I give you my compliments. You are our greatest accounts’ analysis expert. I’ll put you forward for a promotion. – one of the company’s managing directors had said to him a week before – I’ll speak at the next board of directors’ meeting. Your wife will be proud of you. I’m sure.”
Betty, his wife, wouldn’t have been proud of him. They had got divorced six months earlier after a marriage that had lasted ten years. And the cause had been adultery. Betty’s adultery, to be exact.
He had met her on a summer cruise in the Caribbean. Betty was a journalist and was travelling with a friend. They had boarded at Trinidad, he remembered it perfectly. What had struck him about the woman was her voice, hot and sensual. Betty wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she had a particular fascination that attracted men. It was she who took the initiative. One evening she went up to him on the bridge. The sea was calm and the moon shone in the starry sky. A banal and romantic meeting. They exchanged impressions about the cruise, they spoke about various subjects and then she made him clearly understand that she would have liked to end the evening in his bed. They made love and it was very pleasant for both. After the cruise they saw each other several times, she moved to the city in which he was working, she found a job as a journalist for a TV company and after some time they got married. Betty very soon showed herself to be a woman with a strong and aggressive character, eager to have her freedom of action. There were highs and lows in their marriage. In the last two years the man realised that his wife was cheating on him with a fellow journalist. He had her followed by a private investigator that provided him with the proof of adultery. Betty tried to minimise the significance of the affair, she shed several tears and went off with her lover.
Then the memory of Ann, his first woman, suddenly seized him. They attended the same university and the same faculty of economics. Ann was a very beautiful girl. She had splendid green eyes and the body of a model. She too, like Betty, had a strong and independent character. She admired him because he was a distinguished athlete and had won numerous races (his speciality was the 100 metres.) Theirs was above all an irresistible physical attraction. She got pregnant. When he heard the news, the man told her that he was willing to marry her. But Ann refused. ”I don’t want to get married just because I’m pregnant – she replied to him coldly – I’ll only get married for love. And, unfortunately, I don’t love you. I like to make love with you, it’s true , but it all finishes there… I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Then Ann left university and he didn’t get any more news about the girl. More than once he asked, distressed, whether Ann had completed the pregnancy or if she had aborted. Maybe he was a father and he didn’t know. By now he had been carrying this anguishing doubt with him for too long. He hadn’t had any children with Betty. She had always refused to have any, because, she said, she was lacking in the maternal instinct. But the truth was that a child would have prevented her from living freely and from having a career. Now the man went further back in time in search of his childhood memories. He was ten when his father, an insurance broker, died from lung cancer. He remembered again with anguish the last weeks of his life. He saw him again laid out on the bed, reduced to a living skeleton, while his mother gave him morphine injections to calm the pain, a pain that revealed itself within a type of continuous cries when the effects of the drug ceased.
The lift was finishing its course.
By now the man had once and for all left that unreal dimension of time, that extraordinary atmosphere made up of memories and sensations that, for moments as long as hours, had permitted him to keep away the terror of death. Now that he was quickly nearing the terminus of his existence, the image of his inert body, bloody, disjointed by the tremendous impact against the lift’s metal walls, appeared before his eyes. Just like the puppet he had played with when he was four or five years old. A puppet that represented a little man with a top hat and tails.
Only now did he realise that he was about to undertake a journey as long as eternity, a journey towards…
The crash of the lift was distinctly heard by the security guards who called the firemen. They had to resort to oxyhydrogen flame to make their way into the contorted wreckage. They found the man’s body curled up onto itself as if he had wanted to protect himself from death.
