When I was a child, my mother made the ten-minute journey from home to the supermarket in two and a half hours. I'll be fair: on one occasion he did it in half an hour, but on others, in three, already on the verge of organizing a neighborhood search raid. Nor was there much mystery in his conduct. Simply, there were people. And people, at that time, when they met each other, exchanged phrases and questions, fake news and more or less secret information.
The majority were women who, in addition to mothers, wives, nurses, cleaners, carers of the elderly and children and food providers, had the function of chronicling the past and structuring the present of the neighborhood based on seemingly innocuous conversation, with facts and secrets, libels and rumours, illnesses, salary increases and buying new cars from neighbors and next of kin.
Meeting someone and not chatting with them was an attack on courtesy and politeness. It was what was called being ugly. A convention that allowed you to keep the channels open to know who you were sharing time and place with. And even, when the case comes, to help you, to be consoled, understood or with whom you can fight at the top of your lungs. Everything was within the rules of the community. This created a familiarity that could be intimate or distant cousin, which, like everything, had advantages and disadvantages. People, all of them, knew about you and participated in your life, which could be suffocating. But it also allowed you to feel that you belonged to something, that yours wasn't much different from everyone else's because everyone had similar miseries and aspirations.
Today, I go up, time and time again, in the elevator, with strangers to whom I say nothing or feel nothing because no one thinks to talk for the sake of talking. Say something worthless. Something for free. Something because yes. With the head held high, a goodbye with relief: at last, one of the two has reached his floor.
