The marker is moving

The elevator’s doors were about to close when an hand, whose wrist was cover by a white cuff ironed well, stopped the doors and he entered with me in the cabin. He was a distinguished type, dressed in an elegant way, well cared skin and shaved face, opposed to mine, full of bristly beard, increased for my chronic laziness.

I had never seen him in the building,  but because I was there since a little time, I  asked nothing more than which floor was his destination, to establish who would have left the elevator first. He was going to the top floor, I had to stop in the middle of the building, that was enough high for the standard of the districts, so I chose, with no hesitation, my floor.

The old elevator, after a little jump, started its ascent and inside the cabin, set down that tense silence who likes to be formed where two people, unknown, are forced to stay close, without a possibility of exit.

I listened to the passing of the floors, one after one, because it was possible to hear a particular iron clatter when the elevator left a floor.

I and the man, no one else.

I and the man remained shoulder to shoulder, standing on our legs, in the silence, with the gaze straight and fixed.

I was going to resign myself to the idea of the silence, when a voice broke the quiet just broken by the flowing of the old cables of the elevator.

«The market is moving.»

I felt the instinct to turn around, but an instinct of protection, much more older than the human curiosity, broke my movement, and my confused and thoughtful eyes stopped on one of the low corners of the cabin.

 «The market is moving.»

I repeated in my mind trying to make sense of those words, pronounced with tranquility and cruel coldness.

When the doubt was so big to defeat my fears, I turned a little bit my eyes  to him, taller than me, closed in his light grey dress and in his white shirt at whose neck hung the noose of professionalism that reassures and trick at the same time.

He smiled, his thin lips were closed but extended on both sides and his face satisfied nodding, but it was an imperceptible movement, while all the rest of his body remained static, immobile, secure. I, curved, small, trembling, with an uncertain eye, but eager to discover what I should not have discovered, I suggested to him, to this unknown, this professional of market with a fatidic and stupid question.

«What does it mean?»

He stretched his smile, he looked me in a confident way, prepared, he knew that once conquered my attention, his hands on my brain could stimulate me and lead me to any place that he had chosen for me.

He was extremely confident! Confident and satisfied! Like, when during an exam at university, the first question is a royal flush for a sure and safety interrogation. Here! In the same way he looked at me: with no tension, dominant on my open curiosity, such as those of  Dante’s Ulysses.

He took a breath, he was going to answer, but the elevator, god of that microscopic universe, decided to deprive me of the answer stopping at my floor.

Then the man withdrew his will to speak in his typical ironic smile and I turned around disrupted, curved down my backpack full of books of university that would not have given me any answer, towards the exit.

First that both my feet were out, on the landing of my floor, the man stretched in my hand, dangling and half shut, a little leaflet where it was imprinted the solution to decode.

I turned around for seeing  him but I only saw half of his smiling face while the doors of the elevator, implacably shut, while his lips, without  adding any sound to his words, continued to say to me:

«The market is moving.»

Come home, touching and observing my usual life, I realized how much illusion was stuffed that sentence.