The Museum of Things Left Behind by Seni Glaister

Author:Seni Glaister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

In Which the Visitor Gets Down to Business

Lizzie had arranged for a meeting with Signor Rolando Posti, the minister for the interior. It would take place in his offices and she had been allocated a ten-minute slot. This had been bewilderingly difficult to organize, even though she had been given carte blanche by the most senior officer in the country and an access-all-areas pass. It had taken considerably more time to arrange her short meeting with Signor Posti than the amount an under-secretary had allocated to her.

Carlo was a young man with great ambition. His youth was a source of great frustration to him. Although he found himself in a very favourable position, with great career prospects ahead, the dogged determination of the senior minister, whose job he hoped one day to inherit, meant there was no end in sight to the period – most likely decades – during which he would serve in this junior role. To ease the endlessness, he enacted every task allotted him with mind-numbing precision. By stretching a job that might ordinarily take just a few minutes into something that took days, or even weeks, he hoped to trick time and to make it work at a pace more sympathetic to his requirements. In this way, he believed, he might be able to manipulate and warp time so that he would soon find himself a middle-aged man with a desk in the centre of the room. His current desk, made of metal and tucked tightly against a pale beige wall, filled him with shame. Above it hung a watercolour of the Piazza Rosa, executed in the 1950s (you could tell this by the absence of any white plastic chairs outside the bar). He could help dissipate some of the humiliation by the knowledge that one day he would commission and hang an oil rendition of Signor Rolando Posti, his mentor and role model. ‘This man,’ he imagined announcing, as he invited an important visitor to pull up a chair to his desk in the centre of the room, ‘this is the man who taught me everything I know. Sadly he passed away a very long time ago.’ At the moment, however, Signor Rolando Posti was a belligerent though healthy seventy-something, and Carlo had to content himself with the punctilious filling in of forms.

Before Lizzie could have her allocated time with Signor Posti, she had been instructed to visit Carlo in order to make an appointment to see Carlo in an official capacity at which time they could discuss scheduling a time that might be convenient for her to see the minister. Naturally she tried charm and impatience to consolidate the first two meetings into one.

‘But, Carlo, I’m here now, and you have Posti’s diary in front of you. Could we please just make an appointment?’

He shook his head. ‘You must understand, that is simply not possible. There is a protocol to follow, and protocol dictates that I must get the meeting cleared in advance of making it.

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