Giorgio Falco
L'ubicazione del bene

"I have recounted some stories around the location of the property at Via Carlo Borromeo 10/E in Cortesforza, Milan. I will live in this place only for a little while longer, but for now I am here, without a twist, a farewell at the airport check-in, without a sex scene, a hospital bed, the feeling of impending doom, a happy moment during the appetizer, without a naked woman on the scale, a legendary character who always has the smart remark, three lines from the start and immediately an enlightening dialogue."

_{(G. Falco, "L'ubicazione del bene", Einaudi 2009, p. 49)}

As a child, I lived in a suburb of a northern city built around the mid-'70s and subsequently changed, altered, transformed, without losing its original characteristics, constituted and at the same time represented by the buildings that stood, identical, on the sides of streets traced, with orthogonal precision, by a surveyor who might have been young then and today, if alive, might be in his seventies, closed in some apartment to escape the last summer heat, or on vacation at the spa near some lake.

So many other people: the '70s suburbs were made up of buildings, people, children playing outside until their parents returned from work, and then they went back inside to eat and, if possible, to sleep. The luckier ones, like my cousin, could walk a few hundred meters from home and find themselves in a 19th-century historic center, then further meters, and crossing the river, the crown of mountains, even that of Paramount Pictures; those who live in the foothills of the north see nothing but "paramount pictures," after all.

At a certain point, at least in my area, the '80s arrived, and the surveyors—and the architects: according to Afterhours, those who "hold the city in their hand"—  followed other paths, tracing other roads, designing other buildings, other construction interventions, for people who wanted to leave the old houses to justify a career promotion and a salary increase, to find "the good air," or simply to start a family and break away from the house they lived in with their parents, taking out a mortgage as certain bureaucrats say, or those who want to give themselves the indifferent air of bureaucrats to tell you they got into debt.

And it was then the era of terraced houses, ground-floor apartments, leading to renovations, demolitions, and rebuilds, to the recovery of historic centers, in an attempt to make more flexible, if not more serene, the lives of everyone within the geometric cells of the interior designers' drawings, children of those young surveyors of the '70s, were the '80s and '90s.

It was a time when everyone, at least in my area, including workers or common wage earners, could somehow attempt to have a house of their own, in a neighborhood served by primary or secondary urbanization works: from "hands on the city" to "hands on the house," variously reaching out in search of possible happiness and jobs that allowed justifying and replicating, over the years, the idea of happiness that flashed through imagining, on paper, the places where they would live, with surveyors, architects, interior designers, furniture makers, who like modern-day Disneys, drew, for those who as children were deluded with "Snow White," "Bambi," "Fantasia," that what is drawn is true and plausible.

Sometimes I still wander those suburbs, by car or on foot, walking more or less absentmindedly, and I wonder if inside those houses, which in winter have the lights on in the kitchen already around four in the afternoon, people are happy, really "happy" with their house and themselves: and, if they were unhappy, in their isolation, I wonder at what precise moment their unhappiness may have been born, what was the point of no return in their life and the moment when they took the road that led them there, closed in the kitchen, or on the Sunday afternoon bike ride, more frequent during late spring, when the soccer season is over, and certain dads have no Sunday commitments.

I also wonder if I would be happy in one house, or another, in one city or the one I previously lived in, returning to my old house or looking for a new one in a residential neighborhood a few minutes from downtown.

In this surprising collection of short stories, fragments of life traced with the realism of a painter more than with the dry pencil of a planner, Giorgio Falco describes this world and gives voice, life, to thoughts like mine, narrating lives so normal and common that they become, if not exactly ours, those of our neighbor or some acquaintance or known person, describing the entire life of various people all united—as every individual, in our settled world—by being owners, or holders, of a property.

And the location of the property is nothing more, in cadastral jargon, than the place where the property is located, the place transformed by construction, by human settlement, the place destined to remain, for years, centuries, decades, millennia, inhabited by the human being, taken away from the indifferent dimension of wild nature, still in itself.

The location of the property hints at something concrete, and not at that abstract and emotional "good" that every individual seeks for themselves and others, probably even when buying a house or moving from one place to another.

In Falco's stories, there seems to be no trace of this good, and its pursuit seems in vain, in the lives of the inhabitants of Cortesforza, their relatives, acquaintances, colleagues, more or less true and occasional friends, even in their pets. The good perhaps remains something irreducible to a place, to the immobility of the spaces transformed, defined by the cold and ever-same geometry of the walls, windows, roofs, streets, squares, dishes, antennas.

I finished this book at a station while waiting for a connection: work in progress, the new underpass for high-speed rail, the geometries of tracks and projects, even there. Above me, the route of airplanes taking off from the nearby airport.

As I left, I noticed that the railway almost touches the runway, realizing that, perhaps, the good is mobile, volatile, fleeting, destined to go away. It is found nowhere, like anywhere. Its location, it is evident, does not exist.