Un lavoro da sogno

That morning he should have thanked the dustmen who, in good spirits as they passed rubbish bags to each other, had shouted so loudly that they could be heard up to the fourth floor, so much so that they had managed to wake him up and allow him to arrive at class on time.

Everyone would be surprised, he already imagined, to see him enter even a few minutes before the lesson began.

The academic quarter of an hour's delay, tolerated everywhere in the university environment, had become an outdated habit for him, since he had even tripled it, causing inevitable controversy among colleagues and fierce criticism from uncharitable students on social media.

The delay seemed to be congenital to him as if it represented the back of his business card, a way to make his person somehow mysterious.

In the bathroom, tiled for over twenty years with unfashionable tiles, every object was ready to wait for Professor Felice Fortunato to use it for his daily grooming.

He didn't need much care, just a toothbrush to quickly refresh his teeth – few would notice the thinned enamel, since he almost never smiled and, in the rare cases where a minimum hint of merriment was required, he was careful to restrain it by keeping his lips semi-closed – an electric razor that he ran back and forth over his somewhat bony face, leaving imperfections and shadows, a bit of gel on his almost white and thinning hair, which nevertheless contributed to giving him an overall tidy image.

His mother, as she did every evening for thirty years, left a ironed shirt on the usual worn armchair for him, making sure that the small buttons were always well attached.

Since he was a boy, she had never seen him in his underwear again, consistent and satisfied that what she had taught him about decorum and a sense of modesty, that prodigy of a son had absorbed so deeply as to make it his lifestyle. Yet, his father, sometimes, especially in summer and before his illness forced him to bed, walked around the house half-dressed; but not him, already in his first years of holding the physics chair, he refused to show himself to his parents in homewear, as if he never wanted to lose that role of respectability with which he seemed immortalized in the faculty group album.