History is all a big, fat lie
All lives are — first and foremost my own
Litfiba, “El Diablo”
In the alchemical journey represented by the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the Angel of Temperance is followed by the Devil — a proximity I have always found intriguing.
In this episode, I recount how the story unfolded when I believed I had won the Golden Ticket to the Decolonial Chocolate Factory, only to find myself once again clinging to the tram, headed toward a destination that remains unknown.
The story is fictionalized and rich in poetic license, but the quotations are exact.
Previous episode –> Episode 15: Family Affairs
The morning after, the air is thick with fog and a grey silence that seems to have poured down from the hills.
Casanova and Caterina have not yet returned — perhaps they lost their way along the stream, or perhaps they simply stopped to laugh together, pretending not to feel the cold. I, instead, wake up late, with the metallic taste of exhaustion still on my tongue.
On the table, the computer has been left on. On the wall, the TV screen suspends a scene from a film paused halfway through — The Day After Tomorrow.
Sam Hall / Jake Gyllenhaal is arguing in the car with his scientist father about a bad grade in science:
Jack Hall: I’m not angry. I’m disappointed.
Sam Hall: Do you wanna hear my side of it?
Jack Hall: Sam, how can there be two sides?
It’s strange.
I remember falling asleep at the end of a different film — Stalag 17. With my mouth still thick with sleep, I wonder what mysterious force left that question hanging there, open also for me: can there really be another version of the facts?
That’s when I hear the knocking. Not a single knock, but three — precise and firm, from someone accustomed to being right without haste.
I open the door, and there he is: a man neither tall nor short, neither young nor old.
He wears a ministerial overcoat — that grey which is not a color but a premise — and holds in his hands a thin leather folder, at once polished and cracked.
“Dr. Picchi?” he says, and it seems to me that he pronounces my name with a slight hesitation, as if reading it from a sheet of paper.
“It’s about the Marie Curie. A matter of administrative details.”
There is a smile on his lips that never reaches his eyes, and the tone of someone who knows he cannot be turned away, because he represents something larger, more inevitable.
The badge pinned to his jacket bears only a single letter: K.
Behind my shoulders, the fog no longer moves.
K. does not ask to come in: he simply settles into the house.
He places the folder on the table, barely shifting the glass and the Temperance card. He looks around with methodical curiosity, like someone inspecting an office after an earthquake.
“Excuse the disturbance,” he says in a steady but courteous voice. “There are a few procedural inconsistencies that need to be clarified. Nothing serious, for the moment.”
He sits down.
From my laptop comes a sudden sound: a synthetic voice that begins to read aloud the final lines of my contentious email.
Each word is articulated like a formal charge:
Yes, my dearest, researchers who struggle to survive tend to be angry all the time, although we express our anger differently.
Maybe tenured academics like you could start trying to actually pay money for our labour, or at least understand our occasional expressions of frustration, instead of squeezing us like lemons and expecting gratitude for the honour of giving you our free labour…
K. does not move. Only a slightly raised eyebrow, as if everything had already been duly noted.
And there, one by one, my Lares arrive.
Not as ghosts, but as reflections in the glass of the cabinet, in the frame of a picture, in the shadow on the wall.
The first to speak is Grandma Margherita, her blue eyes darkened:
“Margheritina, one doesn’t write things like this. You lose any negotiating advantage.”
Grandpa Guido comes to my defense, wearing his diplomat’s jacket, speaking as if in a ministerial meeting:
“And yet, if one doesn’t speak plainly, abuses end up being normalized. Do you remember the fiery letter I sent to dear Bormioli and Soldati on June 14, 1965, when the Ministry tried to impose on me the fifth transfer in eight years?”
Grandma Margherita sighs. Grandpa Guido immediately resumes, his tone passionate.
“I complained that they were turning me into ‘a travelling salesman of cultural propaganda,’ and— not even too subtly — that they were letting a well-connected man jump the queue ahead of me. Uncomfortable or not, the Italian ambassador to Ireland, my direct superior, supported my case. I don’t think our Margheritina has done anything worse, and yet her direct superior has attempted to destroy her project and therefore her career.”
“I remember it well,” Grandma Margherita replies, her voice sweet as poison. “I also remember that after that letter they transferred you anyway, and that the small measure of stability we were granted came at the price of any position of real prestige. From then on, they always kept you on the margins.”
Grandpa Giuseppe strikes the table sharply with his fist.
“I say the girl is right. But anger doesn’t pay. You keep your head down, you wait for the right train.”
Grandma Grazia laughs softly:
“Head down? I prayed against hunger and I won. She’s right to speak, even if no one listens. Whoever has a tongue should use it while it’s alive.”
K. looks at them as if he were listening to an otherworldly board of directors.
Then he opens the folder.
Inside there is only a printed copy of my email and of the message in which my supervisor withdraws from the project, formatted like an official document: letterhead, stamps, perfect margins.
“You have expressed your position clearly,” he says. “And whether or not you spoke the truth is not in question. The problem, Doctor, is that the language of truth does not fall within the guidelines of the Framework Programme.”
I raise my gaze.
“So that is the sin? Telling the truth?”
K. smiles, but with studied pity.
“Not exactly. The sin is believing that there exists a place where truth is sufficient.”
Behind him, my great-great-grandmother Margherita — the one from the San Giacomo asylum — murmurs calmly:
“Listen to him, but don’t believe his papers. He is the angel of paperwork, not of salvation.”
K. closes the folder.
The fog outside the window thickens, as if it had understood that justice is being debated in that room.
“So,” he says, standing up, “the issue is that technically your honorary affiliation contract was not an employment contract, and therefore, technically, you are not subject to any of the rights that employess enjoy.”
I interrupt him.
“I am well aware of that, technically. Please do not treat me condescendingly.”
He raises an eyebrow, but lets me continue.
“The fact that research fellowships are — in practice — forms of academic affiliation lacking the fundamental protections of employment, in which the supervisor has the authority to terminate the relationship at any time, at their sole discretion, is unfortunately well known to me.”
Fragments of memory from my previous clashes with supervisors flash before my eyes in rapid succession.
“I am not a fool.
My mistake was one of calculation, not ignorance: I trusted that my South African supervisor — and her entire department — were guided by progressive and liberationist principles that place the protection and dignity of the human person above institutions. I also trusted that they were at the forefront of putting principles of restorative justice into practice.”
Grandma Grazia hands me a glass of water, and I pause briefly to take a sip.
“I expected that, in the worst-case scenario, I would have to issue public apologies, attend some training sessions, or see a psychologist. Instead, the South African university initiated no justice process at all to resolve the conflict — restorative or otherwise — it simply dumped me.”
In K.’s eyes passes a glimmer of something that I might mistake for compassion.
K. takes his seat with the calm of someone accustomed to delivering bad news.
He finally removes his coat with a measured gesture, hangs it over the back of the chair, and opens the leather folder once again.
“So then, Dr. Picchi,” he begins, “I see that your situation is… complex.”
“Only if one chooses to make it so,” I reply. “I followed all the rules. I obtained a European grant, complied with the procedures, communicated every step. It was the others who withdrew, citing as a pretext a conflict that had nothing to do with the substance of the project.”
K. nods, but with the kind of politeness that serves precisely to avoid taking a position.
“You have correctly outlined the sequence of events. However…”
He runs his fingers across a sheet of paper.
“…institutions love order more than people.”
Grandpa Guido straightens his tie, as if about to intervene in a committee meeting:
“Order is a fiction, K. My granddaughter did not create disorder — she merely asked for transparency and respect.”
K. ignores him, the way one ignores radio interference.
“Do you wish to continue with the project, Dr. Picchi?”
“Yes. I have already proposed three names for new supervisors. People who take their commitments seriously, I hope — not people who disappear. I am not asking for privileges: I only want the work for which I was selected to be allowed to begin.”
K. nods and rummages briefly through his folder.
Outside, a ray of light cuts through the fog like a knife.
Grandma Margherita sighs, smoking the shadow of an imaginary cigarette:
“There you see? Our girl isn’t running away. She moves to the tune she’s been given, but with her own rhythm.”
K. looks at her for a moment, almost admiringly, then turns back to me.
“And after the three years?”
“After the three years,” I say, “I will no longer be in their system. I don’t want tenure, I don’t want a career. I want to deliver the completed project, sign where required, and then… disappear. Let the work remain, not me.”
Great-grandmother Mina smiles:
“That’s the right choice. You harvest, you sow, and then you leave. That’s how the earth works; that’s how God works.”
K. rises slowly.
“Then I would say everything is clear. I will submit the report. You remain within the limits of the regulations, but you shift their boundary. That is something only the living know how to do.”
He takes his folder and heads toward the door. Before leaving, he adds in a lower voice:
“And don’t worry, Dr. Picchi. When you vanish, the memory of the documents will remain. That is the most the administration can grant eternity.”
Then he disappears into the fog.
I remain alone, with the Lares moving quietly around me, like lights beneath the floor.
Grandpa Guido murmurs:
“You spoke well, Margherita. Perhaps too well. But sometimes the truth, when spoken softly, is the highest form of diplomacy.”
I pour myself a glass of water.
The Devil card trembles on the table, as if the Angel of Temperance had finally agreed to yield its place.
Postscript — On the Devil and Bureaucracy
K. is not an invented character.
He is the long shadow of every system that claims the right to regulate human life until it is drained of meaning.
He bears the name Kafka had already given him, and the face of anyone who hides behind formulas, circulars, and protocols in order to stop listening to people.
There is no malice in him — only a perfect mechanism, and for that very reason, an inhuman one.
When he knocks — always three times — he does not come to condemn you, but to ask whether you are still capable of choosing your own voice.
In my story, K. represents the inevitable encounter with the administrative banality of evil.
The only way to defeat it is to speak with one’s dead, to remember where one comes from, and then to move forward — to write, to advise, to care.
Because, as my grandfather Guido used to say, “truth, when spoken softly, is the highest form of diplomacy.”
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