Speaker 1: Walking the boulevard in April feels ritualistic to me, as
Speaker 1: familiar as tying a scarf or winding a watch. The
Speaker 1: morning air carries the trance like vibrancy of spring light,
Speaker 1: sharp from the east, mottled by broad leaved plane trees,
Speaker 1: the shadows of ornate balconies stenciled across flagstones. I savor
Speaker 1: this hour before the city fully wakes, when even the
Speaker 1: shop shutters rattle in a secret rhythm of brushes and bolts,
Speaker 1: and the only traffic is the crisp sweep of a
Speaker 1: caretaker's brew. I have walked this particular stretch of the
Speaker 1: city's Grand Arterial more times than anyone, but a crow
Speaker 1: might count thirty four years, stitching routine from doorstep to doorstep,
Speaker 1: polyester mail bags slung across my back, mind mapping both
Speaker 1: the logical and the illogical, because even postal roots, for
Speaker 1: all their mathematics, are shaped by human hands. I know
Speaker 1: just how the house numbers swell unevenly with each block
Speaker 1: zigzag here, then rest close there, often dictated by egos
Speaker 1: of long ago builders. That kitchen sent from number eighty
Speaker 1: nine is warm rosemary bread, and at number one hundred
Speaker 1: two an elderly couple water a single camellia in a
Speaker 1: cracked green pot, their windows always fogged by midday. Yet today,
Speaker 1: as I stride past the climbing roses tangled along the
Speaker 1: post railings of number one hundred seventeen, a fine salmon
Speaker 1: pink town house with a bright red door and a
Speaker 1: mosaic tiled entry, I pause longer than usual. The tile
Speaker 1: work is unusual, blue green tesserie forming a looping vine
Speaker 1: nibbled at one edge by age, and just above it
Speaker 1: a brass knocker shaped like a swan with one wing
Speaker 1: forever a skew. I nod a private greeting to the house,
Speaker 1: and move on, already plotting a coffee stop. Several blocks,
Speaker 1: perhaps a kilometer further along the street grows wider, as
Speaker 1: if the city is taking a deliberate breath. The architecture
Speaker 1: here leans slightly more archaic, dental moldings, carved corbels, shut
Speaker 1: as the pale olive of dusted sage. But then there
Speaker 1: it is again, Number one hundred seventeen, bold and unblinking
Speaker 1: on the painted porcelain plate, same robust door, same mosaic,
Speaker 1: though I notice a hairline crack in the tile work,
Speaker 1: serpentining in a manner that looks familiar. The roses, too,
Speaker 1: though bushier, climb the same way. The only difference is
Speaker 1: the swan knocker. Here it gleams freshly polished. I find
Speaker 1: myself blinking, doubting briefly if I've circled the block without noticing,
Speaker 1: or if I've slipped into one of those labyrinth dreams
Speaker 1: where every turn returns you to the start. It is
Speaker 1: not alarming, only gently disconcerting, as if a city planner
Speaker 1: slipped twice in identical fashion and the world shrugged and
Speaker 1: moved on. I can imagine a half forgotten bureaucratic error,
Speaker 1: or some grand post war renumbering left lazily to endure.
Speaker 1: Cities accumulate these quirks still. I lean against the wrought
Speaker 1: iron fence for several moments, watching an orange cat wind
Speaker 1: between the roses, wondering which one hundred seventeen it calls home.
Speaker 1: I assure myself that this is a quirk, nothing more
Speaker 1: dangerous than misremembering a friend's birthday. A smile prize itself loose,
Speaker 1: and I continue on my route, familiar but now edged
Speaker 1: with something quietly provocative. What happens When the ordinary blinks,
Speaker 1: the rest of the morning unfurls as it always has.
Speaker 1: The city invites no further disorder, at least not the
Speaker 1: sort you can put your finger on. My steps follow
Speaker 1: the patterns etched by decades of delivering bills, post cards, catalogs,
Speaker 1: and those rare, fragrant letters still pennied by hand. I
Speaker 1: am no longer required by uniform or duty. Retirement, with
Speaker 1: all its ponderous leisure, has made my walks optional. Yet
Speaker 1: the instinct to browse the city, to scan details is
Speaker 1: not so easily retired. Routines, like well worn shoes, keep
Speaker 1: their shape long after the solis have thinned. I nod
Speaker 1: to a trio of crows perched above the roof of
Speaker 1: a bakery, remembering how their presence once meant a slew
Speaker 1: of delivery slips flapping loose from my satchel. The bakery
Speaker 1: itself is tiled in blue and white, hand painted decades ago. Celia,
Speaker 1: the proprietress, waves a flowery hand, hollering through the window.
Speaker 1: Coffee Augusto. My scarf striped a relic of my root,
Speaker 1: has become something of a signature, drawing greetings from shopkeepers
Speaker 1: and afternoon idlers alike. The boulevard, for all its elegance,
Speaker 1: wears its age unapologetically. The paving stones are uneven, gray
Speaker 1: as old wool, but in the morning sun everything shimmers,
Speaker 1: nostalgia caught in the angles. The city's reverence for routine
Speaker 1: is visible not just in its streets, but in its people.
Speaker 1: Mid morning, the bells from Santa Rafila's chime softer than
Speaker 1: one would expect for such a grand facade, but the
Speaker 1: sound threads through apartments, rousing windows and kitchens. To me
Speaker 1: few pleasures compared to watching life draft itself anew. Every
Speaker 1: day at bar La Palloma, the same three chess players
Speaker 1: cluster over a chipped marble table, moving pieces and arguing
Speaker 1: strategy in dialects that split generations apart. The pharmacist Don
Speaker 1: Carlo hails me from his doorway, unfamiliar pink tablets lined
Speaker 1: up in the window. Lucia, my former route partner, now,
Speaker 1: the dignified owner of a sunlit bookshop, sits by her
Speaker 1: front window, piles of unsorted books like canted skyscrapers. Beside her.
Speaker 1: I stop in. She is reorganizing the display themes of
Speaker 1: longing and return. This week, Augusto or is that too much?
Speaker 1: We spend several minutes trading the latest city gossip, who
Speaker 1: has reprinted, who is moving, whether the new mayre's plan
Speaker 1: to replant the border hedges will survive the parade of
Speaker 1: spring festivals. She brings out a battered volume of city
Speaker 1: plans and lets me thumb through a decade of speculative architecture.
Speaker 1: The post still feels alive in my pocket. Occasionally I
Speaker 1: will accidentally take misdirected mail back to my own route,
Speaker 1: a harmless indulgence. The others playing dominoes in the piazza
Speaker 1: nod not altogether surprised when I slip a letter under
Speaker 1: a familiar door before circling back for my customary seat.
Speaker 1: From this position, the boulevard seems utterly grounded. The address
Speaker 1: repetitions from earlier nestle in my memory, a curiosity worth
Speaker 1: no more than an evening's chuckle. Perhaps to day, I think,
Speaker 1: is just a day for noticing patterns that have always
Speaker 1: been there. Yet I find myself glancing up from the
Speaker 1: bench gaze, seeking the nearest numbered plaque, remembering were there
Speaker 1: always two one hundred seventeens, or just never reason to care?
Speaker 1: The next morning, a sense of unfinished business compels me
Speaker 1: back to the start of the boulevard, as if retracing
Speaker 1: footfalls might smooth over whatever distance remained. I start earlier
Speaker 1: than usual, carried by the anticipation of discovery, flavor of
Speaker 1: curiosity that feels younger than I am. With notebook in hand,
Speaker 1: I pace the initial blocks, matching memory to the neatness
Speaker 1: of the brass numbers. The carved window frames. The sequence
Speaker 1: of doorways so deeply overlaid in my mental map that
Speaker 1: to walk them is to recite for the first dozen addresses.
Speaker 1: All is in order, the gaps between numbers not just regular,
Speaker 1: but perfectly predictable, odd even odd even, like the pattern
Speaker 1: drilled into every postal carrier's subconscious. But then, at the
Speaker 1: intersection with vire Azora, a nondescript crossing, blessed only with
Speaker 1: a magnolia tree and a wine shop, a subtle misstep.
Speaker 1: Number one hundred fifteen, number one hundred seventeen, number one
Speaker 1: hundred nineteen. Here nothing is out of place. I keep going,
Speaker 1: turning with the boulevard's gentle bend. Perhaps half a kilometer later,
Speaker 1: the numbering should proceed to number one hundred thirty seven.
Speaker 1: If memory serves, But instead I find number one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: again identical in surface, but not in all particulars. The
Speaker 1: door's paint is less faded. The garden gnome beneath the
Speaker 1: roses points left, not right. I rub at my eyes,
Speaker 1: certain for a moment that I've doubled back. I retrace,
Speaker 1: detering through a small lane and returning to the spot. No,
Speaker 1: there is no loop of path, only this uncannily duplicated landmark.
Speaker 1: A delivery cyclist whizzes by, tall headphones clamped over his ears,
Speaker 1: insulated bags swinging behind. Excuse me, Can I ask? Have
Speaker 1: you ever noticed two number one hundred seventeens on the boulevard?
Speaker 1: I wave with my notebook for emphasis. He slows, grins. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's just the weird numbering after the eighties, My uncle says,
Speaker 1: it's because the neighborhood's merged and nobody wanted newerd dresses.
Speaker 1: Happens all over, nothing spooky, just city stuff. He pushes off,
Speaker 1: leaving tire lines slanting across the gutter. It's the sort
Speaker 1: of answer that would have convinced me in my early days.
Speaker 1: Pockets full of circulars, protocol my highest authority, But now
Speaker 1: the small details nag. I decide I need to check
Speaker 1: something less mutable than memory. After lunch, I drop into
Speaker 1: Lucia's shop. She is balancing a ledger atop a stack
Speaker 1: of poetry collections. Her eyes narrow as I unfold my
Speaker 1: faded note book and explain the oddity. My father always said,
Speaker 1: nothing in this city is ever truly unique, except the weather.
Speaker 1: She shrugs, digging through a cardboard box marked v C
Speaker 1: C H I M A P P E old m
Speaker 1: A P S. We pour over diagrams from several decades,
Speaker 1: scan street indexes, Lucia's own marked uplists from our shared
Speaker 1: years on the route. Each map from every year shows
Speaker 1: an uninterrupted progression, one number one hundred seventeen per boulevard,
Speaker 1: every number established and behaving. I suggest a stroll, humor me.
Speaker 1: I'll buy you coffee if you find the loop first.
Speaker 1: Lucia is game, her sense of curiosity a match for mine,
Speaker 1: honed by years of tracking cryptic addresses and decoding scrawled handwriting.
Speaker 1: We walk the boulevard, her step lively, scanning doorways. At
Speaker 1: each official map point, she checks off numbers in her
Speaker 1: own note book, occasionally muttering odd this one's garden is
Speaker 1: the same as one three blocks up. I swear it.
Speaker 1: When we reach the second one hundred seventeen, she whistles low.
Speaker 1: Either the records are wrong, or we're seeing something the
Speaker 1: maps can't show. There is no edge of alarm in
Speaker 1: her voice, just a thawed, amused puzzlement. I walk home,
Speaker 1: thinking not of ghosts or conspiracies, but of the elasticity
Speaker 1: of cities, how memory and reality interlace, sometimes snagging on
Speaker 1: a stitch made askewed generations ago. But the more I think,
Speaker 1: the more it seems the error is not on paper,
Speaker 1: but in the walk itself. That evening, after dinner, chickpeas lemon,
Speaker 1: the radio muddling old melodies, I resolve to probe further.
Speaker 1: Memory is unreliable, but lived experience is not so easily
Speaker 1: argued with. I shelve away the idea of a mere
Speaker 1: clerical fluke. Reality, I sense is asking to be noticed.
Speaker 1: The next days bring rain, a march chill lingering into April,
Speaker 1: but I keep my notebook tucked in my coat, setting
Speaker 1: out at different hours, eyes and mind freshly watchful. I
Speaker 1: decide to do what forty years of postal work have
Speaker 1: trained me precisely not to do. I look for the irregular,
Speaker 1: inviting ambiguity onto my route on a drizzly Wednesday. I
Speaker 1: start at the first number, one hundred seventeen. The roses
Speaker 1: are slick, thorns, gleaming. I ring the bell. The intercom crackles. Sigh,
Speaker 1: forgive the intrusion, Senora de Luca. It's Augusto. I used
Speaker 1: to bring you the mail. You remember her laugh curves
Speaker 1: through the speaker, always the postman, even with no bag,
Speaker 1: come in the coffer ready inside the entry is unchanged,
Speaker 1: coats hung with nautical precision, a smudge of letters resting
Speaker 1: on the table. We talk about her granddaughter's upcoming wedding,
Speaker 1: her cat Nina curled at her ankles, the way Wednesdays
Speaker 1: mean market errands and dusting the old piano. Later, I
Speaker 1: continue down the boulevard, crossing that threshold where the oddity arises.
Speaker 1: Here again, the roses the same mosaic, though today the
Speaker 1: tiles bear a residue of pollen, as if sun has
Speaker 1: coaxed a subtle difference. At this number one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: I ring. The woman who answers is Senora de Luca too,
Speaker 1: and greets me with almost the same warmth, but there's
Speaker 1: a slant in her vowels, a certain red to her
Speaker 1: lipstick that wasn't there before she ushers me in. The
Speaker 1: hallway is neat, but the coats are hung in a
Speaker 1: different order. There is a piano, but the cat winding
Speaker 1: around the legs is Milo, not Nina, and he's solid black,
Speaker 1: not Tabby. When I mention her granddaughter's engagement, she beams
Speaker 1: but corrects me gently. Ah, No, Laura is much too young.
Speaker 1: Perhaps next year. Under any other circumstances, I would chalk
Speaker 1: this up to the senior tendency for neighborly confusion. Except
Speaker 1: I am sure of names, stories, even the precise scent
Speaker 1: of boiled coffee in each kitchen. Here the Wednesday market
Speaker 1: includes a stop at the fishmonger, which the first de
Speaker 1: Lucre omitted. The routines match, yet slide apart in subtle,
Speaker 1: insistent ways. I leave with a fresh sense of unease,
Speaker 1: one that curls tantalizingly between the plausible and the fantastic.
Speaker 1: Was I slipped a joke hallucinating, or has the street
Speaker 1: pulled some trick of re arrangement unnoticed by all but me?
Speaker 1: I take these findings to Lucia over coffee, recounting every
Speaker 1: difference down to the color of the cat's collar. She
Speaker 1: listens unsmiling, fingers tapping the rim of her mug. Let's
Speaker 1: make a list. You know how we used to before
Speaker 1: exam season spot the seven differences. The corners of her
Speaker 1: mouth twitch together. That Saturday, we retrace both stretches at
Speaker 1: the bakery. The glass case gleams with brioches and cyan bell,
Speaker 1: the arrangement matching the memory from the first one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: but the chalkboard above now promises apricot cristata instead of apple.
Speaker 1: The proprietor offers her friendly greeting in identical cadence, yet admits,
Speaker 1: when pressed she's never heard of crostata. Demila, we buy
Speaker 1: a loaf anyway, more for the experiment than the hunger.
Speaker 1: At Lucia's suggestion, we separate, she walking the original stretch
Speaker 1: while I continue into the repeat. We agree to collect
Speaker 1: small details, faces, special offers, bits of street conversation, minor events,
Speaker 1: unspooling simultaneously comparing notes over pastries, our own little symposium
Speaker 1: greasy with butter. We find that on both stretches the
Speaker 1: timings of delay. Very trucks match, but the license plates don't.
Speaker 1: A window washer swings a brush below an apartment on both,
Speaker 1: but their radio is tuned to different stations. The corner
Speaker 1: florist's accent is thicker in one, their handshake firmer in
Speaker 1: the other. More curious still, the pedestrians on each length
Speaker 1: appear to behave as if their segment is solitary, their
Speaker 1: universe dense and unbroken. The woman closing her umbrella at
Speaker 1: the corner of Via Lario greets us as if she's
Speaker 1: always done so. Further down, her counterpart is gone, replaced
Speaker 1: by a man walking a dog I've spotted only on
Speaker 1: distant side streets before. Later, with our notebooks splayed open,
Speaker 1: Lucia sums it up. There's overlap, yes, echoes, but not perfection.
Speaker 1: Are we walking a copy or two halves of some mirror?
Speaker 1: The loop as we draw it on the back of
Speaker 1: a leftover bakery bag forms not a ring but a
Speaker 1: doubled arc, each trail shadowed by its companion deviations, clustering
Speaker 1: randomly yet inevitably as we map them. I test something
Speaker 1: not in my postal carrier's manual. I enter from the
Speaker 1: main square at different times of day, varying my pace
Speaker 1: and even closing my eyes briefly at the transition. Regardless,
Speaker 1: the repeat always falls after the same number of steps
Speaker 1: and street crossings, as if governed by a hidden metronome,
Speaker 1: no bell tower ever installed. Over lunch, Lucia voices what
Speaker 1: I have not yet dared. How could a place fold
Speaker 1: like this write under our feet without any one noticing?
Speaker 1: Her voice is quiet, urgent, but shaded in something close
Speaker 1: to wonder, the flavor of fascination that comes only when
Speaker 1: the world winks. I find myself possessed by the desire
Speaker 1: to make the city yield, or at the very least,
Speaker 1: to confess. In pursuit of answers, I probe the boundaries
Speaker 1: of this looping. What happens? I wonder if I leave
Speaker 1: the boulevard at the moment of repetition, or half way between,
Speaker 1: Armed with set and which is thermos a notebook? I
Speaker 1: plot a course at the transition point, faintly marked in
Speaker 1: my note book by two lamp posts and a particularly
Speaker 1: assertive chestnut tree. I step off into Via del Pero,
Speaker 1: a lane I know should take me sharply northwest. Yet
Speaker 1: after a few blocks worth of winding alleys, past a
Speaker 1: yellow door and a shoe repair shop. I find myself
Speaker 1: re emerging, not where I expect, but at the boulevard again,
Speaker 1: now some addresses farther from where I detached. Spatial logic
Speaker 1: slips sideways, side streets bleed into the main artery. Exits
Speaker 1: are never quite where they should be. Repeated attempts only
Speaker 1: amplify the strangeness. Sometimes I reappear behind where I started,
Speaker 1: sometimes ahead, never predictably, never at the correct intersection. Curious,
Speaker 1: I switch to a modern digital map on my phone.
Speaker 1: The blue dot tracks me as usual until the supposed repeat,
Speaker 1: at which point the signal flickers, blips, then reconstructs my
Speaker 1: path as a straight line, as if nothing untoward has happened.
Speaker 1: When I consult the paper city plan, it too marks
Speaker 1: the boulevard as straight and stubbornly unique. No matter my
Speaker 1: attempt at Dietoa to further complicate matters, the city outside
Speaker 1: the boulevard feels reliable. Each pizza parlor, market stall, and
Speaker 1: playground lines up where decades of crisscross deliveries say they should.
Speaker 1: Only within the bounds of the boulevard itself, and only
Speaker 1: along its length does the sequence warp. On a hunch,
Speaker 1: I contact the district's youngest postman, Henry, all nerves and
Speaker 1: neon bicycle helmet. Over coffee, I ply him with questions
Speaker 1: about his route. There's only ever been one sequence, one
Speaker 1: set of numbers, He insists. It matches the city records.
Speaker 1: C He produces a tattered copy of the official postal register,
Speaker 1: every number present and accounted for in order, no repeats,
Speaker 1: and between the first and the second and one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: I prod. He squints, there's no second. Then, after a pause,
Speaker 1: but now that you mention it, I always cross the
Speaker 1: boulevard at the piazza, and there's a bakery on both sides.
Speaker 1: Couldn't say where the numbers restart exactly, He frowns, tapping
Speaker 1: the table as if an answer might be coaxed by drumming.
Speaker 1: I hatch a test. I address a postcard at the
Speaker 1: first one hundred seventeen to Senora de Luca, number one
Speaker 1: hundred seventeen the boulevard. In the note, I mention her
Speaker 1: red door and say I'll visit at ten. At the
Speaker 1: second one hundred seventeen further along, I compose another to
Speaker 1: Senora de Luca, number one hundred seventeen the boulevard. This
Speaker 1: time I mention the blue curtains, and Milo the cat,
Speaker 1: promising a ten fifteen visit. A week later, both de
Speaker 1: Lucas greet me with the same gentle confusion, waving identical cards,
Speaker 1: each stamped with the postmark from their respective neighborhood post offices,
Speaker 1: different by precisely thirteen minutes, though the route should take
Speaker 1: at least twenty by foot. I puzzle over whether the
Speaker 1: duplication is paperwork or perception. Could we all have decided
Speaker 1: somehow not to see the doubling. I ask Lucia one evening,
Speaker 1: standing beneath a street lamp, the light flickering through plane
Speaker 1: tree leaves like a Morse code addressed to nobody. She
Speaker 1: shakes her head a wry smile, kindling if we did,
Speaker 1: the post would be chaos. Someone would notice the city bends,
Speaker 1: but not like that. Her skepticism racks my certainty, but
Speaker 1: only strengthens my resolve. If memory, routine, city design, and
Speaker 1: even the males themselves yield these subtle bifurcations, perhaps the
Speaker 1: street is less a blank surface than a palimpsest memories
Speaker 1: and routines overlaying merging the city remembering itself in two
Speaker 1: imperfect voices. I adopt a more systematic approach, carrying an
Speaker 1: old tape recorder, one of those chunk key black rectangles
Speaker 1: left over from the nineteen nineties, still sharp enough for voices,
Speaker 1: and passing bicycles. My goal is to anchor observations with
Speaker 1: dates and tones, to piece together a tactile report where
Speaker 1: memory might fray. Each morning. For a week, I stop
Speaker 1: in at shops, record short interviews. At the first futeria,
Speaker 1: the grocer remembers the nineteen eighty seven blackout, falling in
Speaker 1: the heart of winter, right when mandarins were at their sweetest.
Speaker 1: When I cross into the next stretch and stop at
Speaker 1: the mirrored grocer, she swears the blackout arrived with the
Speaker 1: first spring heat, ruining a shipment of asparagus. Both reminisce
Speaker 1: about the same neighborhood parade, though in divergent weather, one
Speaker 1: beneath umbrellas, one under bunting and relentless sun. In the afternoons,
Speaker 1: Lucia and I linger at cafes. On one stretch, the
Speaker 1: waiter serves as lemon tarts. On the other, the tarts
Speaker 1: sports sliced strawberries in both. The price is the same,
Speaker 1: the proprietor's mustache equally extravagant, but each sports are plaid
Speaker 1: shirt in a different color. These are not errors nor
Speaker 1: convenient illusions. The people themselves, when asked about the same event,
Speaker 1: offer similar stories, each with a twist, as if their
Speaker 1: memories are tuning forks struck by the same hand, but
Speaker 1: wringing in slightly altered keys. One rainy Thursday, we walk
Speaker 1: to the city archives, vaulted, cool, thick with the scent
Speaker 1: of paper and dust and ambition. Lucia, with her clout
Speaker 1: as a business owner, is granted access to the oldest
Speaker 1: municipal records, wide sheets annotated with neat spidery script. We
Speaker 1: scan the planning ledgers for any sign of split registration,
Speaker 1: duplicate addresses, renumberings. All is as the city claims, the
Speaker 1: boulevard runs straight, all addresses unique. No error persists in
Speaker 1: the official eye, But in the faded margin of a
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty's plan, I spot a note in seas in
Speaker 1: the constraint remains. But symmetry cannot be perfect. No map
Speaker 1: will ever suffice. One side must always reflect the other.
Speaker 1: There are no initials, just this cryptic aside, Lucia, reading
Speaker 1: over my shoulder frowns, sounds more like philosophy than surveying.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, Inspired by the idea of uncontrolled reflections, I
Speaker 1: conduct one further test. I place a fat, distinctive letter
Speaker 1: in the mail box at the first one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: a holiday card featuring a bright yellow duck in a
Speaker 1: scarf with my sprawling signature. Lucia, hiding her laughter, does
Speaker 1: likewise at the second one hundred seventeen. Her letter is blue,
Speaker 1: signed in block capitals, and references a family story about
Speaker 1: lost keys. We wait next day. Each recipient receives both envelopes,
Speaker 1: but details have slipped. The yellow duck is now a
Speaker 1: blue one, my signature still mine, but reversed, as if
Speaker 1: seen through a mirror. Lucia's blocky writing appears in familiar hand,
Speaker 1: but the ink is green, and the story is now
Speaker 1: set in summer, not winter. Encouraged, we announce a secret
Speaker 1: password to the barista at the cafe. On the original stretch,
Speaker 1: the roses lean west, I whisper when ordering coffee. An
Speaker 1: hour later, on the repeat, Lucia tries the phrase on
Speaker 1: the matching barista, expecting either blanking comprehension, or perhaps a
Speaker 1: wrye recognition. The man frowns, taps his pen against the register,
Speaker 1: and murmurs, perhaps when the sun sets, before asking what
Speaker 1: sort of cake we'd like. No firm recognition, only a
Speaker 1: ripple of confusion, as if an echo had nearly reached,
Speaker 1: then slipped aside. That evening, with our notes in riotous disorder,
Speaker 1: I sketch the full set of duplicate addresses and shops,
Speaker 1: overlaying observations. The irregularities build up in peculiar knots, minor
Speaker 1: in the houses, slightly larger in shops, more distinct in
Speaker 1: memories and casual conversations. The result looks more like ripples
Speaker 1: across water after a stone ess been thrown, than a
Speaker 1: systematic doubling. Lucia sits back, blowing out her cheeks. Maybe
Speaker 1: what makes a place real isn't its numbers or plans,
Speaker 1: or even our memories. Maybe it's the act of living
Speaker 1: a thing over and over, even if it comes back
Speaker 1: slightly off key. By now I am less concerned with
Speaker 1: proving what is true than with understanding what sort of
Speaker 1: logic or city spirit allows such a phenomenon to persist.
Speaker 1: Is this a property of routine, of memory, or of
Speaker 1: some design woven into the very bones of this avenue.
Speaker 1: Whatever the answer, it isn't as simple as paperwork or
Speaker 1: a mistake. I begin to sense that what started as
Speaker 1: an error of addresses is only the most visible ripple
Speaker 1: atop something much older, deeper, a boulevard and a city
Speaker 1: that reflect entire patterns of life, not perfectly, but with
Speaker 1: the gentlest, most persistent variations, as if rem remembering itself anew.
Speaker 1: Each morning we grew methodical, Lucia and I. As spring
Speaker 1: unspooled toward its more deliberate sun, our evenings became planning sessions,
Speaker 1: which stretched to walk which shop front to photograph, were
Speaker 1: to pause, whom to ask. Armed with battered note books,
Speaker 1: a digital camera, and her husband's old dictaphone scavenged from
Speaker 1: a shoe box, we set out to examine the boulevard's
Speaker 1: duplications as if it were an intricate, maddening clockwork. The
Speaker 1: routine brought a quiet exhilaration, the kind I remembered from
Speaker 1: my earliest days on the route, chasing the patterns hidden
Speaker 1: in the city's back streets. We would pick a starting point,
Speaker 1: sometimes near the market, stalls shaded by awnings the color
Speaker 1: of old wine, sometimes where the stone lions presided. At
Speaker 1: Piazza del Corso. We walked at different hours, logging differences,
Speaker 1: hunting for new alignments or misalignments in our lists. The
Speaker 1: first thing we noticed, after shifting from playful guessing to
Speaker 1: systematic recording was the rhythm. Early in the week, both
Speaker 1: stretches of the boulevard mirrored each other's market stalls with
Speaker 1: uncanny accuracy. The spice dealer with her rows of bright tins,
Speaker 1: the cobbler displaying insults next to a pyramid of lavender sashes,
Speaker 1: even the violinist poised by the lamplight, all reappeared out
Speaker 1: of order, but uncannily present. Lucia insisted on counting out loud, carefully,
Speaker 1: noting not just the people and their wares, but the
Speaker 1: details that diverged. A price scrawled one euro higher. Here,
Speaker 1: a necklace display swapped for bracelets there. It's like two
Speaker 1: actors with the same script, but a different director for
Speaker 1: each scene. She murmured, not quite to herself. On a Wednesday,
Speaker 1: we lingered by the window of the salon, its wide
Speaker 1: paned glass sporting an elaborate white decal In the first loop,
Speaker 1: the window featured a stack of blue towels crimped with precision.
Speaker 1: In the second, green towels replaced them. Though the arrangement
Speaker 1: was identically careful, we exchanged a glance. The staff greeted
Speaker 1: us with the same courtesy, though one stylist wore silver
Speaker 1: hoops in her ears and the other pearls. The sense
Speaker 1: that the bulevard doubled back on itself, not in space
Speaker 1: but in pattern became ever more compelling the further we traveled.
Speaker 1: At the edge the point of repetition, where the second
Speaker 1: one hundred seventeen housed its alternate De Luca, the divergences
Speaker 1: deepened benches. For example, in one instance, a new wooden
Speaker 1: bench carried a dedication plaque to giucep Rinaldi City Gardener,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred and twenty three nineteen hundred and eighty four.
Speaker 1: In another, the bench sat empty, scrawled only with the
Speaker 1: ghosts of decades old graffiti. Statues sprouted or vanished depending
Speaker 1: on the loop. Once, we found a bronze dove perched
Speaker 1: atop a pillar in the first sequence, while on the
Speaker 1: next the pillar bore only a chalked heart and some initials.
Speaker 1: Even attempts to break the loop, to outmaneuver its logic
Speaker 1: by stratagic turns, landed us in places that felt both
Speaker 1: strange and intimate. If we diverged purposefully, say by ducking
Speaker 1: into the old tea house at Via Carrara or pivoting
Speaker 1: through the antique arcade, we often found ourselves popping out
Speaker 1: blocks away from where we intended, sometimes skipping whole address sequences. Once,
Speaker 1: after following such a looping route, we stumbled onto our
Speaker 1: own reflections in a cafe window, as if the city
Speaker 1: itself was watching our experiment and weighing its response. The people, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: remained serenely unaware, or at least they chose serene unawareness
Speaker 1: a consensus of gentle dismissal. I asked the florist the
Speaker 1: third time I found her arranging nunculous in identical white
Speaker 1: buckets whether she sometimes felt she'd lived this morning before.
Speaker 1: Always caro, she replied, with a laugh. These old streets
Speaker 1: play tricks. We live lives thick with patterns. The e
Speaker 1: with which residents explained away oddities. That plaque has always
Speaker 1: been there, or this end of the street holds echoes,
Speaker 1: not secrets, felt more like self preservation than genuine obliviousness.
Speaker 1: It struck me that perhaps the fabric of city life depended,
Speaker 1: at least in part, on a collective refusal to question
Speaker 1: the impossible beyond a certain depth. Lucia and I became
Speaker 1: braver in our tests. We took to documenting the entire
Speaker 1: boulevard address by a dress over consecutive mornings and evenings.
Speaker 1: We purchased coffee from each bar, taking note of receipts.
Speaker 1: We photographed bakery displays, chatted up butcher's, watched as the
Speaker 1: same gray haired man leaned from his balcony on both stretches,
Speaker 1: whistling to the same shaggy dog below. One afternoon, we
Speaker 1: ran into a deliveryman carrying a crate of lemons. Ever
Speaker 1: feel like you've delivered these boxes to the same shop
Speaker 1: twice in one morning, Lucia asked lightly. He considered, brow furrowed. Sometimes, yes,
Speaker 1: but the work's the work I go where the manifest says,
Speaker 1: Maybe that's just tired feet talking. He tipped the crate
Speaker 1: to keep a lemon from rolling, and shrugged. Twice. We
Speaker 1: tried to escape the repetition by taking wildly different routes
Speaker 1: away from the boulevard after the reset, but the results
Speaker 1: were always a disorienting leap. The city's splice stitched us
Speaker 1: unexpectedly ahead or behind, as if some spatial elasticity collapsed
Speaker 1: all detours back into the ribbon of the main road. Once,
Speaker 1: to my shock, I found myself having bypassed several shops
Speaker 1: without noticing, aware only because my notations in the note
Speaker 1: book skipped from number one hundred forty one directly to
Speaker 1: number one hundred fifty three, with nothing in between but
Speaker 1: the echo of an unanswered question. We decided we needed
Speaker 1: an outside authority, a perspective unburdened by years of living
Speaker 1: within the city's folds. I persuaded Lucia to accompany me
Speaker 1: to the municipal planning office on a sun struck Thursday.
Speaker 1: The planner, a pleasant man named Francini, had the distracted
Speaker 1: gaze of someone whose mind lives mostly in code compliant
Speaker 1: setbacks and drainage calculations. We presented our findings carefully, couching
Speaker 1: them in the language of hypothetical address confusion. He shook
Speaker 1: his head, then located a crisply bound set of street records. Impossible.
Speaker 1: The boulevard is the oldest straight stretch in the city
Speaker 1: never renumbered after its founding. There are no duplicate addresses
Speaker 1: in any registry. See here. He spun his monitor to
Speaker 1: show me. Go to the field if you want, but
Speaker 1: our office is clear. If you're seeing a double perhaps
Speaker 1: one of your numbers wore off, or the street plates
Speaker 1: are old. He was polite, patient, and absolutely uninterested in
Speaker 1: pursuing the matter further. We went next to Professor Sacchetti,
Speaker 1: lately retired from the university, rumored to know every secret
Speaker 1: of the city's architectural history. Sacchetti's desk was a wash
Speaker 1: in manuscripts and coffee cups. He listened with interest, then chuckled.
Speaker 1: You know, there were architects a century ago who played
Speaker 1: at making the city's lines fold, tricks of perception, odd
Speaker 1: facades built for symmetry, little puzzles in the eaves and moldings.
Speaker 1: Rumor has it one even tried to use mathematical forms,
Speaker 1: the myrbius, the Kleine bottle, pure metaphor, surely the form
Speaker 1: not the geometry design as philosophy A Lucia pressed, do
Speaker 1: you think anyone could have built a street that literally
Speaker 1: loops itself? He shook his head, not physically, but cities
Speaker 1: love stories that slip from blueprints into legend. Sometimes, if
Speaker 1: enough people think a thing is possible, it grows a shadow.
Speaker 1: Architects are dramatists as much as builders. At the City Archive,
Speaker 1: we found no evidence, no overlays on blueprints, no duplicate ledgers.
Speaker 1: Yet in a packet of the back of a neglected file,
Speaker 1: I discovered an old page with a hand drawn loop
Speaker 1: resembling a sideways eight fired de rifless oh read the
Speaker 1: faded ink reflection way. It was unsigned dated in an
Speaker 1: unsteady hand nineteen twenty four. We took our puzzle to
Speaker 1: the university cartography department, where a young woman named Elena
Speaker 1: offered to help us run a GPS mapping of our walk.
Speaker 1: You can record your exact path, she said, and I'll
Speaker 1: export the data. We walked carefully, linearly along the boulevard,
Speaker 1: dictaphone running. Elena processed the results on her laptop. Strange,
Speaker 1: you're walking in what the GPS records as a straight line,
Speaker 1: but right after you reached the second one hundred seventeen,
Speaker 1: the device does this. She showed us the map trace,
Speaker 1: a perfect single curve suddenly spooling out in a spiral
Speaker 1: like ribbon cascading onto a tiled floor. It shouldn't be possible,
Speaker 1: but it's just numbers devices. Glitch may be a magnetic anomaly.
Speaker 1: She seemed more amused than perplexed, a spirit of curiosity
Speaker 1: without the burden of local connection. As we left her office,
Speaker 1: Lucia mused, sometimes only strangers notice what a place can become.
Speaker 1: The testing escalated. We began leaving more distinctive markers, mail
Speaker 1: with secret codes, graffiti only we could decipher conversations purposely
Speaker 1: embedded with sly references. Always the outcome morphed objects, misplaced messages,
Speaker 1: slightly altered, secrets distorted. We watched a woman set out
Speaker 1: her flower pots in careful order at the original stretch.
Speaker 1: In the repeated segment, the pattern was off by one,
Speaker 1: daffodils swapped for tulips. We set up correspondences with acquaintances
Speaker 1: friends at the university. An old student of Lucia as
Speaker 1: who now ran a new stand. We mailed him a
Speaker 1: postcard from the first loop, stamped dated, signed with a
Speaker 1: phrase only he and Lucia would know. On receiving it
Speaker 1: from the second loop, he called, certain, it's your handwriting, Senora.
Speaker 1: But these aren't the right words. Am I supposed to understand?
Speaker 1: Not just places, but the content of events, Their emotional colorings,
Speaker 1: their secret handshakes, reverberated, never quite replicating, always shifting in
Speaker 1: the reflection. Even street performers whose acts we'd long thought
Speaker 1: as unvarying as time, swapped lyrics for riddles or reversed
Speaker 1: choruses without pause. When pressed, they insisted, this is how
Speaker 1: I've always sung it. I began to sense that the
Speaker 1: boulevard was not merely playing tricks with address plates and
Speaker 1: delivery roots, but mediating all lived experience within it, as
Speaker 1: a sequence of echoes, bold then softer, then quieter, again,
Speaker 1: never entirely identical. At Lucia's suggestion, we started thinking bigger,
Speaker 1: less about unmasking the mechanism, more about understanding its meaning. Maybe,
Speaker 1: she said, looping her scarf as we stood by the
Speaker 1: river on a blue gold evening, the boulevard isn't repeating
Speaker 1: at all. Maybe its rewriting, with each walk, a version
Speaker 1: of itself, all our lives braided together, just out of
Speaker 1: perfect sink. The notion grew on me. We devised more
Speaker 1: elaborate tests. Lucia, Ever, the teacher launched an experiment could
Speaker 1: introducing something wholly new. On one stretch, say a poem
Speaker 1: she'd written and posted outside her bookshop, seed an altered
Speaker 1: version of that event in the next loop, we watched
Speaker 1: and waited. On the second loop, a child had scrawled
Speaker 1: a phrase on the wall beneath the poem, echoing Lucia's lines,
Speaker 1: but re arranged, as if memory and mischief had blurred
Speaker 1: creation and imitation. The poem was reflected, but like all echoes,
Speaker 1: slightly out of phase, recited in a different voice. Armed
Speaker 1: with our observations and a tightening sense that this hallway
Speaker 1: of reality ran deeper than error or coincidence, we returned
Speaker 1: to the archives. The staff, long resistant to our persistent requests,
Speaker 1: finally led us to a back room lined with unindexed materials,
Speaker 1: yellowed folders, rolled blueprints, planners, diaries. It was here, in
Speaker 1: a battered booklet with the city's seal and the year
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five pressed in gold on its cover, that
Speaker 1: I found something genuinely peculiar, A set of architectural sketches
Speaker 1: unlike any eyed seen at first glance. They illustrated the
Speaker 1: boulevard much as we knew it. Long grand fringed with
Speaker 1: predictable town houses, the avenue crowned by plane trees. But
Speaker 1: among the diagrams was something stranger, a draft with the
Speaker 1: street drawn not as a simple line, but doubled, folded,
Speaker 1: twisted in on itself, forming what could only be described
Speaker 1: as a myrbious strip, not quite a loop, not quite
Speaker 1: two sides, one continuous surface, turning in the air before
Speaker 1: landing impossibly onto itself. Beside these sketches, a smaller, separate
Speaker 1: page held annotations meticulously pennied in Italian and French, occasionally
Speaker 1: veering into mathematical symbols. Arcane but decipherable thanks to Lucia's
Speaker 1: school teacher Latin. A street with only one side, forever
Speaker 1: uniting end and beginning. The notes read, memory folds back
Speaker 1: upon itself, but always changes form. What is repeated is
Speaker 1: transformed in return. To walk is not to return, but
Speaker 1: to become. There were more notations, references to geometric forms,
Speaker 1: statements of intent that mingled architectural philosophy with poetry. Let
Speaker 1: all beginnings reflect in their endings, and each path wandered
Speaker 1: become the seed for a new way home. Another line,
Speaker 1: symmetry is an invitation to imperfection only through difference can
Speaker 1: meaning emerge. The architect who signed the notes was known
Speaker 1: to me Georgio Vettore, a minor but eccentric designer responsible
Speaker 1: for some of the cities more imaginative cornices and wall reliefs.
Speaker 1: His contemporaries considered him brilliant but obscure, prone to puzzles
Speaker 1: and esoteric symbolism. Next to Vettore's name, someone had scrawled
Speaker 1: in a less careful hand. Was this built as drawn
Speaker 1: or merely dreamt? We poured over the records. Some documents
Speaker 1: suggested that the city council approved only a simplified portion
Speaker 1: of Vettore's proposal, but there were ambiguous entries, hints lost
Speaker 1: in the shuffle of post war reconstructions and the shuffling
Speaker 1: of planners, that certain spatial anomalies persisted, that the project's
Speaker 1: philosophical elements remain, if not strictly its geometry. Lucia said, quietly,
Speaker 1: what if the notion itself the myth of the loop?
Speaker 1: The expectation of echo was enough to infuse the place.
Speaker 1: Architectural intention is powerful, but so our story and tradition.
Speaker 1: I felt my understanding not and loosen at once. Perhaps
Speaker 1: our findings are tests and detours were less an exposure
Speaker 1: of physical fault and more a dialogue with the city's spirit,
Speaker 1: a convergence of design, memory, tradition, and lived repetition, slipping
Speaker 1: ever further from linear logic into the realm, where reality
Speaker 1: and expectation commingle. As we left the archives that evening,
Speaker 1: the city felt changed, not in its shape, but in
Speaker 1: the depth of its invitation. The boulevard's quiet stretches, luminous
Speaker 1: now with the last light, seemed layered with significance. Roots charted,
Speaker 1: routines rehearsed, all turning endlessly back toward the same beginning,
Speaker 1: but never quite the same. Several days later, determined to
Speaker 1: see if others held pieces of the answer, I walked
Speaker 1: the loop again, pausing at a bench where denizens of
Speaker 1: both stretches had described sitting. An old man who'd lived
Speaker 1: in the city for more than eighty years, leaned on
Speaker 1: his cane beside me. I described in gentle terms what
Speaker 1: Lucia and I had noticed. Our dresses and shop front
Speaker 1: seemed to repeat, how routines rippled, but never replicated. He smiled,
Speaker 1: eyes twinkling, and said, this street has always been strange,
Speaker 1: but in old tales the road itself was a teacher
Speaker 1: showing you yourself as you walk. Maybe that's all the
Speaker 1: city does in its way. You walk, you see your
Speaker 1: memory echo back, new but familiar. You find yourself in
Speaker 1: the difference. His words settled over me with weight and warmth.
Speaker 1: When I rose Lucia waiting across the plaza, it was
Speaker 1: with the sense that our city's peculiarity was not to
Speaker 1: be solved, but embraced. The repetition was purpose not flaw.
Speaker 1: On a late afternoon, tinged with gold, Lucia and I
Speaker 1: met by the chess players marble table, my bench at
Speaker 1: their edge, reserved as if by mutual agreement. She brought
Speaker 1: fresh bread. I brought the old notebook with its double
Speaker 1: helixed sketches. We sat unhurried in the shade between day
Speaker 1: and dinner. I think the boulevard is less about the
Speaker 1: imp possibility, she said, than the invitation. It's a place
Speaker 1: that calls attention to seeing, not just once, but again
Speaker 1: and again, each time a little differently. I looked down
Speaker 1: the length of the avenue, hypoware of lamplight glinting on
Speaker 1: the edges of door plaques, the familiar rise and fall
Speaker 1: of voices, the interwoven to and fro of shoppers and friends.
Speaker 1: For the first time, I understood not just the puzzle,
Speaker 1: but the pleasure. The city, looping back to itself, was
Speaker 1: suggesting that all our routines, each morning walk and evening bench,
Speaker 1: are stories told in overlapping voices, echoing yet distinct. We
Speaker 1: walked the loop again that evening, no longer searching for
Speaker 1: evidence or contradiction, but reading the boulevard as a living text.
Speaker 1: Every difference, a shifted cafe sign, a child's laughter, two
Speaker 1: doorways earlier than expected, a violin phrase inverted became a
Speaker 1: verse retold. It was, in its way, comforting a city's
Speaker 1: wry assurance that even repetition is elsewhere, unsteady, evolving. Lucia
Speaker 1: and I spoke less content in shared understanding. The boulevard
Speaker 1: was our companion, cradling all its secrets in the slow
Speaker 1: whirl of lamplight and late spring air. Its loops were
Speaker 1: lesser trap than a release, each passer chance to recognize
Speaker 1: ourselves in another's pattern, to learn the city's tender lesson
Speaker 1: about memory, imperfection, and newness. I learned walking there that
Speaker 1: the most unlikely repetitions hold a generosity, a space where
Speaker 1: the familiar grows strange, and the strange returns you to yourself,
Speaker 1: altered just enough to feel a part of the world's gentle,
Speaker 1: endless invention. At twilight, I settled on to my favorite bench, notebook,
Speaker 1: stowed hands, resting easy in my lap. Down the length
Speaker 1: of the boulevard, evening lamps blinked to life, one by one,
Speaker 1: each a pinprick marking the boundaries of memory and possibility.
Speaker 1: Out past the second one hundred seventeen. Somewhere near the
Speaker 1: looping air, I imagined the city folding softly in on itself,
Speaker 1: as if the world smiled whenever someone cared to notice
Speaker 1: its playful distortions. How many other loops exist, I wondered,
Speaker 1: scattered through cities shaped by routine and tradition. Or are
Speaker 1: all streets in some sense invitations to find your own reflection?
Speaker 1: Walking out to meet you, the boulevard remained as it
Speaker 1: always had, quietly, impossibly, endlessly familiar. Its mystery not an error,
Speaker 1: but a kind and enduring secret. And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.