Seven Steps to Heaven

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Dante’s 7th circle of Hell, Quasimodo was squinting over me with faint commiseration. Staircases? He knew them all better than anybody else. I was haunting then, as a paying guest, an Airbnb compound composed of levels, spaces, staircases, and handrails—either iron or wood—in Floriana, a smart suburb of La Valletta, the tiny capital of the minuscule island of Malta.

Level One: The Schrödinger Box
Level one, starting slightly above the street, is just a dark, narrow, slippery staircase. Squashed between two high, straight-up walls, it suggests an oblique, parallelepiped space located in the middle of nowhere—a kind of tilted Schrödinger box. The cat is sitting on its bottom and thinks: to be or not to be. Scientifically, it should be dead. Don’t panic. Try to be a man here, to hell with the servile feline; climb steady and control your breathing rhythm. If you slip, just call for God or a funeral home. The funeral parlor is by far more reliable.

Level Two: The Sophisticated Commonwealth
This depressing staircase leads, after a nervous ascension, to level two, which is a spacious, functional combination of kitchen, dining room, and excretory area. I have never, ever hovered over such a sophisticated commonwealth of tools and opportunities. The overall perfection compels me to avoid touching anything, and I eat standing up. Alas, I am quite certain that I will cause damage—break a gorgeous, long-legged wine glass, much finer than the liquid I pour into it, or spread minuscule, sticky, difficult-to-recollect breadcrumbs on the floor. It is no wonder that I do not feel cool.

Also, this food-engorging posture—during which I consume the famous local pastizzi made of transcendental dough—severely impinges on my gastric system, already badly deteriorated by scores of life-preserving medicines. The results of this dictatorial zeitgeist, which imposes a “keep going” at any age and at any price, have altered my otherwise benevolent soul. I may suddenly change into a monster, a zombie-to-be, and challenge the fairly young, ideologically disturbed imbeciles and manic devotees committing crimes in schools and other sites of agglomeration.
If someone from authority, or from the politically correct cloud, were to pump a most secret configuration out of my muddled brain (I am still on space-level two), it would reveal that it has nothing to do with an acute desire for a voluptuous, eventually friendly intercourse. Like millions of other frustrated dudes, I am dreaming of an extended, wide, deep, and terminal apocalypse. I am so tired. PAX IN TERRA. Alas, it isn’t for tomorrow, despite the fact that loaves of enriched uranium become cheaper every day.

Level Three: The Furniture Garage
From the dining area, one may climb to a semi-intellectual level three, which has the look of a corridor and the air of a furniture garage. A narrow strait—Ormuz style—surges from a pretty large excretory-cum-washing contraption between a sofa-bed and a wide television screen, placed atop two low shelves filled with modern thriller books written by unknown scribes. Luminaries like Agatha Christie are no less forgotten than a Balzac or a Dickens. Panta rhei. At least, being able to look at the TV from the bed has a value of its own. A computer desk of even higher value, for those who care about stocks and weather, marks the end of the corridor.

Level Four: The Eyrie
Let’s leave! The next flights of stairs—tough ones in spite of their increased width; please check your steps, for the higher you climb, the harder you fall—lead to level four, my eyrie. I have always thought that I am a kind of vulture, committed to meat, so “eyrie” sounds right. And if someone claims that vegans who live on compost have some vulture mentality, I will not protest. They are human after all.

Here, I had to face a king-size bed, which is just another bad joke wrapped in an insult, given that I have been a lonely single for centuries. The huge bed, the wide hygienic area and the shower commodity would enthrall an elephant bull. What good does that do me? I am already a shrinking skeleton who shuns encounters with anyone, starting with myself. Let’s break the mirrors. There isn’t a better solution against senescence. Have you seen recent photos of De Niro and Al Pacino holding hands while falling to pieces on the way to the toilet? To cry. The air conditioner, after some minutes of genuine work, begins to exhibit scaring Mayan hieroglyphs, making me turn it off hastily. The actual educated f**k that I produce doesn’t even mean the same thing as the once very evocative, polyvalent expletive.

Level Five: The Launching Pad
The next staircase, mine-shaft style, leads straight into the sky and lands on the roof terrace. The mesmerizing quality of this level five encourages even the most bland dude to undertake meditation, enrapture himself in landscape contemplation, execute a magistral suicide, or host a memorial barbecue. The barbecue should fit me, but I wasn’t in condition.

Bottom Line
I had to tackle a set of discontinuous stair flights totaling sixty high, cruel steps, dished out coldly to a confused oldie fancying clanking knees, melted legs, and slight dizziness, with nobody to care or to protest.
Enough old man. Stop whining. You should be grateful that you got a precious tight verticality, five levels to your free will, from soil to sky, to roam carefully for a decent fee. Yeah! I liked the joint. It was no less eerie than Howl’s Moving Castle. I may even hurl a mighty howl myself to fill the void. Never had a better location all my life long. Hear! Hear!

 

 

The Wanderer