One day I had to do some controls in an apartment in a narrow street of the old town.
I go, ring the bell, but no one answers. I wait patiently on the doorstep; sooner or later someone will open. The wait gets long. Every now and then I look up and try again, but in the meantime I notice that the rare passers-by, people from the neighborhood, give me inquisitive and somewhat severe looks. At least that’s what it seems to me.
What is it, what’s wrong? I look at myself, but I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Then, when they finally open the door and I can go upstairs, I understand. It should not have been a novelty for that lady to have men waiting to come up to her.
In another case, however, the wait was longer.
One day, in an old apartment house in the city center, the water from the septic tanks leaked and flooded the cellars. It was emptied and the problem seemed to be solved, but shortly afterwards the leaks reappeared. Other investigations, and finally a mason finds the cause: the drain is blocked by a solid conglomerate of … spaghetti.
General dismay: who flushes so many spaghetti down the toilet?
The administrator arranges for inspections; in one apartment, however, owned by a wealthy professional, no one opens. A couple of other flops, phone calls, then finally someone opens: it’s a middle-aged man, in a tank top, stocky, balding beard, belly…. But as soon as we can glimpse the inside, a surveyor, stepping back on the landing, whispers:
– I’m not going in, I don’t want to get AIDS (these were not Covid times yet).
Then everyone heroically enters the apartment. Or rather in the apartments, because each room was set as independent: bed, closet, table, stove, sink, toilet, bidet, TV, and here and there fancy clothes, high heels shoes, wigs, marks of a squalid existence scattered everywhere.
The type of activity of the tenants is evident: each one – male or female? – works in one of the rooms that the respectable owner has adapted as a mini-apartment.
Certainly with profitable rents.
