We climbed slowly, in silence. We looked up at the sky, moving through an air that seemed clean, felt crisp. We went up very high, and then stepped down. First Giorgio went, then I did, and finally Gianni. A roof is a world. We came like a tempest, like three horsemen of the Apocalypse, like the Black Death and cholera, like a hurricane, like a flood; we shook like an earthquake and tore off like a cyclone, we rushed and thundered like a stampede. Our gloved hands lifted tile after tile, Giorgio on the north, Gianni on the south, me on the east. So many nests, we thought, and in each one at least three baby sparrows, their eyes still closed, beaks parted, skin translucent. As we found the nests, we set them aside. After uncovering what we needed to, we asked Gianni about the sparrows: what should we do with them? He smiled and said, what do you want to do with them, they’re already dead. He took a nest and tossed it down. It’s the best thing, he said. We knew immediately that he was right. One by one, we took all the nests and tossed them into the void. The sweetest death is swift. Finished with the sparrows, we swept, removed the old gutters, put down the waterproof sheathing, installed the new gutters, put the tiles back in place, and climbed back down.
They pay us for this.
(1997)
Author and Translator Bios
Vitaliano Trevisan was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, actor, and writer of several books, including the novels I quindicimila passi (2002), Works (2016), Black Tulips (2022), and story collections Shorts (2004) and Grotteschi e arabeschi (2009). His work often depicted the province of Vicenza, where he was born in 1960 and died by suicide in 2022.
Jamie Richards is a translator of Italian literature currently based in Los Angeles.
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