cocktail-napkin

What is a natural and healthy interest in other people? To me, if the lady on the third floor is married or not, it does not matter. To others, it does matter. It’s the first thing you would wonder, to then move on to a list of other trivial details that could never reveal her true nature.

Knowing that she is divorced, that her husband, a cheese salesman, went away last summer with a Romanian lady with big breasts; knowing that she has no children because of an illness she had as a child, hardly helps to understand her. And that she likes short skirts and the color orange? Perhaps a little more. That she has a bad memory and calls everyone by the wrong name? That every Tuesday and Thursday she does fifty lengths at the swimming pool without being out of breath; that flowers leave her indifferent, but she loves frogs and lizards; that she is allergic to fava beans; that she has not had an orgasm for twelve years?

Whoever asks such questions sifts data emulating the almost always fruitless work the gold panner does with grains of river sand. In search of a precious element: revelatory, or merely fascinating. But we do not know which details will cast light on who she really is. You just have to remain passive, open. Stick to the facts.

The lady on the third floor is a mathematical genius; this is her nature. No one knows about it. She herself does not even know, having only passed the eighth grade and being almost ashamed of the algebraic fantasies she draws on her napkin every morning, while drinking coffee on the green and white checked plastic cloth on her kitchen table. She does not realize that most people could not follow it, she thinks that everyone in the kitchen scribbles equations.

One morning when she was up early, unable to sleep, she solved Fermat’s theorem. But she never realized it. She does not even know who Fermat is. She asked herself his question and gave her answer. She took the napkin with its wide margins, with the solution, used it to wipe her lips, crumpled it onto her plate and pushed it into the trash bin with the tip of her knife, together with the shell of a boiled egg.