Our existence is perpetuated only thanks to the contamination of lives

Mark Balzano in Café Royal (Einaudi, 2023) writes an epistemology of the encounter, through an anthology of stories of individuals who have one thing in common: a place. It is a bar, in Milan, in Via Marghera, the one that gives the book its title, and all the protagonists of the stories that the writer chooses to show us pass by there, have breakfast or have a spritz, live nearby and, for more or less recondite reasons, they are linked to each other, and certainly not (only) because they frequent the same bar, but because this is the intrinsic structure of society. “You know what I think? That things out of their places are just things. They are stuff”, writes Carlotta Valsecchi to her brother Giorgio, in one of her last stories, as if in the world there existed a sort of invisible geometric shape with innumerable sides of which each human being covers one vertex, and as if, despite being deformed, this figure maintained but always an intrinsic congruence, which is guaranteed by our humanity as individuals.