A baby has arrived on our stairs. With that piercing cry that nature gives to human babies, so that we can find them if they get lost in the forest. In my small apartment block we know where this creature is. Its sound presence is so intense that it has subdued some of the current hot topics that were trying to make their way here. The baby's rage rages. Or joy or desolation or whatever those crazy screams are. That fierce little voice that has not yet articulated words. We, the angry neighbors of this staircase, had not heard anything like this in a long time. At most, in recent years we will have heard the meow of a cat in heat that has lost its way.
We are a bad neighborhood. I'm the only one who almost talks to everyone, I don't know how I ended up becoming a blue ladder helmet. Things were very bad. One day, the guy downstairs, despite his old age, hit the young man across the street for slamming the door. It seems like he lunged at her. The attacked young man filed a complaint. Two uniformed police officers came to the stairs. I don't know if I saw this or if it was told to me in detail by another neighbor who doesn't talk to anyone either, due to issues of bicycles or dogs. I don't want to think that we are a portrait of contemporary society. I don't want to remember the day I went to the accused's house, for some mission, and he kicked me out in anger. I've seen you talk to the others, he shouted with red eyes. A few months ago, the attacked neighbor silently had a baby. Now he shouts.
We hear it through the wall, with our hearts bursting again. Some dawn, his screams enter my dreams and bring back vivid memories of my son's sounds when he was a baby. I can hear it. Time runs through my body like an electric spark. Another day, in the middle of sleep, the howls of the neighbor child awaken a strange correspondence with those of the child that was even me. I hear it and I don't know what I notice. Then, during a nap interrupted by the little beast, I pull the thread until I hear the cries or laughter of the baby who was once my mother. Sounds that had inexplicably never crossed my mind. Your baby mother is a bottomless pit. The power of this neighbor's kid is beastly. I don't reach the howling baby that my grandmother was, in the roaring twenties, because you have to know how to stop.
