I discovered by chance that A hose was leaking under the sink. At the time of throwing away some plastic, I saw it. He was terrifying. But truly terrifying. I snorted and immediately made the signal, a maneuver with which a useless person is identified at first sight. That the hose is serious one begins to discover late. While it works, you don’t even know what it’s for, or why it is the way it is, or where its name comes from. Carry a sad, vulgar existence, of a small object, behind a thick pipe and a lot of cleaning products. Life “back there”.
I was losing a lot of water, but the puddle was still small. Maybe it had just broken. So I had bad luck and good luck at the same time. I started yelling and running down the hall, asking where the damn water stopcock was. I even looked in the bedroom, and nothing. A new house is not known at all in nine months, I thought in my favor. If I had located that key at the beginning shortly after making the move, on the other hand, I would have already forgotten it, which would be the same.
No one reacted to my screams. There was no “why do you ask?” a “I have no idea”, a “what’s up” or a “don’t yell, we can hear you anyway”. It could have been because I was home alone, I don’t deny it. I received a second and simultaneous hit of bad luck and good luck when Marta and Helena came in from the street at that moment. They went straight to the patio and turned the stopcock.
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In a few seconds I took stock of the future: we could not wash ourselves, nor put the washing machine, nor connecting the dishwasher, nor washing a cup, nor brushing our teeth, nor giving the dog a drink, nor hundreds of other things that one never thought worked with water. “We’re practically dead,” I warned without hot cloths. Of course, in my schedule I didn’t have a plumber’s phone number. I wondered, devastated, what friends and acquaintances he had been surrounding me with in the last these years. Journalists, poets, writers, waiters, doctors, lawyers, bank employees, booksellers, editors, physiotherapists, politicians, commercial, business, pharmaceutical, teachers, producers, musicians, artists… What use was your phone, your ‘mail’, your appreciation, when a hose failed?
I lay down on the sofa for a while, to collect myself, while remembering how a couple of years before my father described me to a television camera: “He’s practically useless.” How much realism. Meanwhile, Marta called a plumber, turned a tiny valve under the sink, and turned on the main faucet, returning the water to all the faucets except the one in the kitchen. That could have been done by anyone, I thought. for me. I was reaffirmed when a day later the plumber arrived, replaced the hose with a wrench, charged and left in five minutes. Sometimes I think that between being useless and not being useless there is a very narrow difference, a crack, a very small crack through which the useless knows how to rush and give himself a blow, until almost feeling like he killed himself.