A Threshold, 5 Lives

A real estate agent's mistake. A clumsy secretary. A duplicate appointment-actually, quintuple appointment-to view the same empty apartment at Via Manzoni 25, extension 42. Wednesday, March 15, 11:00 a.m.: five strangers find themselves in the same empty apartment. The real estate agent, embarrassed, doesn't show up. In his place, he sends the cleaning lady, who speaks little Italian and knows even less about the property.
No chairs, no furniture: just scratched parquet floors, high ceilings, and the embarrassment of those who don't know what to do. They are Livio Felli, Maria Chiara Bini, Matteo Storti, Manlio Corsini, and Dr. Stefano De Sanctis. No one will buy that apartment. No one will return home the same way they entered it. Dr. De Sanctis-a seventy-year-old neurologist, a respected head physician, a man accustomed to command-loses patience.
And then, almost by chance, he begins to speak. He talks about his wife, his son who can't graduate without his help, his daughters who have already inventoried the furniture. And finally, he reveals a secret no one expects: the old man with Alzheimer's is perfectly healthy. He's been acting for months. To hide. To avoid being replaced. De Sanctis's confession breaks the ice. Matteo Storti, a forty-year-old with a perfect nose for the wrong moment, recounts how he lost his job, was scammed by the love of his life, and attempted a bank robbery with his own resume on the wrong side of the page.
Maria Chiara Bini spent twenty years writing scathing letters she never sent-until she sent them all, unintentionally, thanks to an overzealous volunteer. Livio Felli is a solitary archivist who devotes his evenings to three bottles of cheap wine, with the same devotion with which others go to the gym. Manlio Corsini is a husband, a father, and a professional who, in a single evening-thanks to the drops secretly poured into his cup by his exasperated wife-snored in his underwear on the couch of an important client, losing his reputation and his marital bed in one fell swoop.
A Threshold, 5 Lives is a short and precise novel, constructed like a comedy of errors that transforms-without us realizing it-into something more intimate. Five characters who would have ignored each other on the street find themselves confessing in an empty apartment, sitting on the floor like old friends. They don't judge each other. They don't console each other. They listen. With a direct and ironic style, Leo Duca explains how shame sometimes becomes the gateway to honesty.
And how a mistake can bring together, on a March afternoon, exactly the right people in the wrong place.