Victory

That’s it. Enough! I will no longer say hello to the man from the piazza. From now on, I will turn my head, or pretend I haven’t heard him greet me, or I may even glance at him with a disgusted expression. That’s what he deserves. He thinks he can make a fool of me. I met him right there, in front of my building on the corner of a small piazza.

The building where I live is just three floors, with my apartment on the first. If someone is standing in my corner of the piazza, I don’t have to shout to speak to them from my balcony, and they can tell whether or not I’m wearing make-up.

Around this time last year, a feral kitten also took up residence in the piazza. Her fur was silky, milk-white, and her eyes were the same blue as the caps on plastic water bottles. They looked like they’d been traced with eyeliner. Her nose was a pink petal kissing the tip of her muzzle. She was so expressive, so pretty, so elegant, it seemed wrong that she should be feral. She should be curled up on a velvet cushion, not huddled in an alley. Sometimes when I returned home late at night, she would be sitting expectantly beside the entrance to my building, gaze fixed on me. I noticed that no matter how much time passed, her fur remained pure as a freshly poured glass of cold milk, unmarred by the dusty greys and charcoals of the streets. There were never any messy or matted patches in her fur.

One evening as I was returning home there was a man sitting on the stone bench in front of the empty shopfront perpendicular to my building. He had some food in his palm and was feeding the kitten. Her head was so small and delicate that it disappeared into his cupped hand.

All he’d have to do would be to make a fist. I thought, she must really trust the man. He said hello and asked how I was. He pointed to the small balcony jutting out of the building adjacent to us. You live there, don’t you?

Yes, I said.

He had spoken to me like we knew each other. This man was like any of the other middle-aged men who populate the world – portly, balding, an unmemorable face – and so I assumed we’d met at some earlier date. After that encounter, I would often see him on the stone bench, feeding or petting the kitten. We would always say hello to each other, and make one or two observations about the kitten. I would tell him about her waiting by my door when I came home, or comment on her growth or her beauty, and he would tell me about how by now she came when he called and purred when he petted her. I was pleased to know one of my neighbours enough to say hello. I was new to the city, and it made me feel like I had established some sort of existence in it.

The piazza I live on is small, which lends the impression of intimacy. Like any reality, it has its main characters. For example, there is a mother and daughter who live in the building perpendicular to mine, on the first floor directly above the empty shopfront. Both are very old and I cannot distinguish between them. From my apartment I hear their arguing from morning to night. They wail and whine and bicker. Sometimes when I’m on my balcony watering my plants or hanging my washing, the mother or the daughter emerges to hang her own washing or sweep the balcony, and I say hello. Sometimes she says hello with a startled expression and turns away, and sometimes she just stares back at me with a haunted look and shuffles inside. Once when I called the ambulance because a woman was overdosing on the front steps of my apartment building, I saw the mother or the daughter peering down between the blinds. Between the blinds of our respective louvre doors, I can see through to their shabby kitchen, and sometimes I see a young man wearing work clothes visiting them. I assume he is the daughter’s son, trying to convince them to move into an old person’s home. He would probably like to take the apartment for himself.

There is also the signora who runs the café on the opposite edge of the piazza adjacent to the empty shopfront. The café has been there for more than a hundred years, and she has run it since the seventies. When I first moved here, she told me that back then, before it was bought by my landlord and renovated, she lived with her husband and her baby in my apartment, and that in those days it had been infested with rats. She said, the apartment was very different, nothing like what you live in now, and she gave me an assessing sort of look, like: don’t go thinking we’re the same.

Now she lives in the apartment on the first floor directly above the café. Initially I thought she was sweet, and I always said hello to her and listened to her patiently when she listed all the places in her body where she had pain. But it bothered me how she charged me tourist prices for espresso, and once she charged me so much for a hot chocolate that I decided she was an insincere person and vowed never to buy anything from her café again. I didn’t like that she bundled up my presence in the neighbourhood with that of the tourists, who took photos of the locals like they were on safari, and acted as though everyone in the city should speak English and assist them in having a nice holiday. I still greeted her, but I noticed how she looked me up and down when I was on my way to the gym, smirking like she was judging my clothing for being too revealing.

I ran into the man as I was crossing the piazza one morning about a month ago. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I remarked on how the feral kitten was now a full-grown cat. He told me that she had become territorial over the piazza and was always getting into fights with other cats. The other week, he told me, she took on two cats at once. She emerged from the scuffle with a cut on her ear, but nevertheless victorious. She’s a bully, he said proudly. And she still comes when I call her.

For a moment I considered mentioning the new bar that has opened in the empty shopfront. It plays terrible music late into the night. In the morning the ground in front of my building is always littered with broken glass and cigarette butts. On the weekends and often even during the week, the bar will set up a DJ booth out in the piazza, and on these occasions the music is so loud that the walls of my apartment quiver. The morning after their inauguration party, a Thursday, I looked up the bar’s profile on Instagram to find their number. I was furious. I hadn’t slept. I hid my caller ID and dialled the number listed in their bio. A male voice answered. I said I lived on the piazza and asked if they were planning on wreaking such havoc every night. The voice said no, but you see, it had been their inauguration. I asked if he realised that I and, I assumed, no one else in the piazza had slept?

But it had been their inauguration, he sighed.

It was a Wednesday night! I said.

You must understand, he said. Our inauguration.

There were children who lived on this piazza, I hissed.

But their inauguration. His hands had been tied.

I have a child! I shrieked. A son! He didn’t sleep at all last night! This morning he was too tired to go to school!

I felt that having a child would make my complaint more legitimate. Nevertheless, the voice was unmoved by my son. He was also a liar. Over the following months the DJ sets and the terrible music continued.

But now something was stopping me from mentioning the new bar to the man. He hadn’t brought it up after all, and it had become a hot topic of discussion among the people who lived in the piazza. I had never seen him enter one of the apartment buildings, I realised. Maybe he only worked in the area and would have no idea what I was talking about.

A few weeks ago, I was hanging some washing out on my balcony. It was late afternoon, and as I pegged clothing to the line, I observed the owners of the bar – a sweaty-looking guy in his thirties with slicked-back hair, an auburn tan, and the doughy, unfinished body of a twelve-year-old boy, and a trendy girl with a blonde ponytail, her face cruel and pretty in a sharp-edged way, as if using the angles of her face alone she could slice you open – as they photographed a mauve cocktail they had set on one of their outdoor tables for what I assumed would be an Instagram story. They were brother and sister. I knew this because the bar’s Instagram profile followed three people, two of whom were the brother and sister, who shared a last name, and another guy who seemed to be some sort of party island DJ but who I didn’t think I’d ever seen in the piazza. I saw that the brother was also some sort of occasional DJ. I assumed it had been his voice over the phone. There were photos of him wearing reflective aviator sunglasses and headphones behind a DJ booth in a cabana, and photos of him drinking Aperol spritz on the deck of a ski chalet with snow and pine trees in the background. He had a blonde girlfriend who looked near identical to his sister. I only knew she wasn’t his sister because she was tagged under a different name, and in one of the posts the caption mentioned their anniversary. There was also a photo of him leaning over a birthday cake and pecking a blonde girl on the lips, accompanied by a caption declaring his love, but in this post the sister was tagged, and not the blonde girlfriend. The sister’s Instagram was less interesting. It mostly featured selfies and group photos of the sister with friends who looked like they were all mildly related.

On nights when they don’t have DJ sets, the brother and sister often sit at the outdoor tables smoking cigarettes and staring at their iPads or drinking with their friends while their employees run things. My balcony’s louvre door is wooden and old. My landlord says she is not allowed to change it because my building is heritage-listed, but over the decades the wood has expanded so that when I draw it closed, I have to yank at it with all my strength, and it groans loudly against the marble floor of the balcony. Before bed I always shut it to block out the light from the streetlamp directly in front of my apartment. Sometimes when I do this, and the sister is sitting with her friends at a table, she will say something to them and they will all look up and laugh. Once as I was drawing it closed, I saw her imitating me, shaking an imaginary door, throwing her head back and forth, her eyes bulging out and her teeth bared like a monster.

Seeing this I realised that I am as much of a presence in her life as she is in mine, that I occupy her thoughts. My feelings were hurt by the imitation, but there was something satisfying in our dislike of each other being mutual.

I also know that the bar was bought for the brother and sister by their dad, because one of my neighbours, who lives with his girlfriend in the building on the opposite side of the piazza to mine, told me so as we were discussing the problem of the bar. Now no one in the piazza has been sleeping. Even in the absence of a DJ set, the bar’s music is loud and awful, the sort with a relentless bass you might hear at a beach nightclub where all the men have moussed hair and shirts unbuttoned to their stomachs to show off their shaved chests and glinting gold necklaces, or otherwise house remixes of Top 40 hits from the early 2000s. They play their music even when they have no patrons, even at midnight on a Tuesday when they’re dragging their outdoor tables inside and launching glass bottles into the bin. Once when I called, the police officer on the other end of the line asked me whether I’ve tried approaching the owners of the bar myself. In this city? I don’t know who they’re connected to! I said, and she pretended she didn’t know what I was referring to, which I found not just dishonest but insulting to my intelligence and negligent to her supposed responsibility to protect public safety.

I did not follow the police officer’s reckless advice both because I am a sensible person and because I know that various people in the piazza have tried. The signora who runs the café, for example, told me that she had spoken to the brother about the music, but all he did was acquiesce and then go back to doing what he liked. Once, she told me, she filled up a bucket with water and chucked it down into the piazza at the patrons.

Recently I saw her go and speak to the brother and sister. They have fenced off their portion of the piazza using big prison-grey planters filled with waxy ferns, and gradually they have been moving them further and further out to claim more space. One afternoon, the day after a saint day celebration in which the church next to my building had requested they remove their planters, their employees were pushing them back into the piazza. The signora noticed that the brother and sister told some of her patrons to shift their table so that one could be placed there, and from my balcony I saw her approach them. The sister smiled blankly and walked away, and the brother nodded as the signora talked, his eyes wide with mock compassion. He started stroking her cheeks and hugging her to him and kissing the top of her head. I wanted to march down to the piazza and yank his hands off the signora. I remembered seeing him do the same to another signora resident in the piazza who had approached him. I have never seen a man approach him to complain, but I imagine that were it to happen he would not respond with kisses.

There is a small workshop between the bar and the café. It has a rolling garage door that is always kept open, and there are potted plants in front of it on the piazza. In the months since the bar opened, the owner of this workshop has erected a sign in every pot that reads ‘THIS IS A PLANT, NOT A BIN. PLEASE DO NOT THROW CIGARETTE BUTTS OR RUBBISH IN THIS POT!’ Historically I have disliked this man, because he keeps a pit bull chained up inside the workshop. Every morning it stands at the edge of the open workshop and howls from what I presume is despair. Consequently, whenever I crossed paths with this man in the piazza while he was taking the pit bull for a walk, I never said hello. When I noticed the signs though, I felt united with him, as with the owner of the café, against a common enemy. I began to half-smile when we passed each other. Shortly after this, however, the same neighbour who had informed me of the brother and sister’s dad told me that this man also used to own the empty shopfront where the bar now stands, and that he had sold it to whoever is now renting the space to the brother and sister’s dad. After discovering this I rescinded my private camaraderie and hoped that the patrons of the bar would fill those pot plants with cigarette butts until they overflowed.

It has long been obvious to me that speaking to the brother and sister is pointless. The man who installed the soundproof glass in my windows told me that he knew who the owners of the bar were. They were people of a high level, whose ethos was that whoever possessed the most force won. This was all the confirmation I needed. We were dealing with delinquents! My cousin, who owns a restaurant in the same city, guessed that at the very least they had a connection in the municipal police force or on the city council, because normally you would need a special permit to set up a DJ booth in a public piazza, and the permit is expensive and difficult to obtain. I often fantasise about ways of getting revenge on the brother and sister, like calling their business line, which I’m sure diverts to one of their mobile phones, early in the morning, and accusing them of incest.

This afternoon I was watching the brother and the sister from my balcony. The man who had befriended the cat approached on the piazza below. He said hello and then looked from me to them and back again, and then he laughed, so that I would know I had been caught spying. Then he stared pointedly at what I was wearing – a tracksuit and no make-up – and said oh well, we all have lazy days, don’t we?

He said this with a big smile on his face. I had the flu but I just nodded and laughed politely. Growing up, my parents always emphasised the importance of manners. For instance, if we attended a barbecue, at the end I had to go around and kiss every adult on the cheek goodbye. Or on my birthday, after blowing out the candles, I had to cut a slice of cake for everyone at the party before I could have my own. The result is that my first instinctive reaction when something confuses or shocks or angers me, is to smile.

The man said goodbye and then strolled over to the brother and sister. They greeted each other affectionately and sat down at the table together. Imagine my shock at discovering this betrayal. My mind flashed to the past year, when I’d find the man sitting on the bench in front of the empty shopfront, petting the milk-white kitten. All those evenings as I left my apartment and then returned, totally ignorant of what was to come. Every time we had spoken, or I had smiled at him, he had been secretly laughing at me.

I retreated from the balcony to my apartment and continued watching them from the window. The sister got up and went inside. The brother passed a white envelope over to the man, who had his hand on the brother’s shoulder and looked like he was giving him encouragement. Here was my friend, unmasked to reveal a foe!

Today I had my chance. I was walking home from the supermarket, a bag of groceries hanging from each hand. From the corner of my eye, I saw the man sitting on the steps of the church. I steeled myself, fixing my gaze onto the middle distance ahead. He wouldn’t dare greet me, I thought. I had earbuds in, and sunglasses on, and the man knew that he had flagrantly revealed his deviousness. But as I drew nearer, he called out, clear and deliberate, Hello! How’s it going!

How dare he. I slowly turned my head to meet his gaze. He thought he could do whatever he wanted and we’d all just go along with it. I pressed my lips together to stop the corners of my mouth from rising. Remaining mute, I continued on my path without stopping. I registered the surprise on his face. Only when my back was to him did I take a deep breath and allow myself the small, private smile of the victor.