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By Root 1040 0

earth self-service didn't become commonplace ages ago. But the satisfaction of doing it yourself isn't much greater than that of using an automatic chocolate bar dispenser, or any other money munching device. The only operations that require some attention are those involved in paying. You have to place a thousand-lire note in the right position in a little drawer, so that a photoelectric eye can recognize the effigy of Giuseppe Verdi, or perhaps just the thin metal strip that crosses every banknote. It seems the value of the thousand lire is entirely concentrated in that strip; when the note is swallowed up a light goes on, and I have to hurry to push the nozzle of the pump into the mouth of the tank and send the jet gushing in, compact and trembling in its iridescent transparency, have to hurry to enjoy this gift that is incapable of gratifying my senses but nevertheless avidly craved by that part of me which is my means of locomotion. I have just enough time to think all this when with a sharp click the flow stops, the lights go off. The complicated mechanism set in motion a few seconds ago is already stilled and inert, the stirring of those telluric powers my rituals called to life lasted no more than an instant. In return for a thousand lire reduced to a meagre metal strip the pump will concede only a meagre quantity of petrol. Crude costs eleven dollars a barrel.

I have to start all over again, feed in another note, then others again, a thousand lire a go. Money and the subterranean world are family and they go back a long way; their relationship unfolds in one cataclysm after another, sometimes desperately slow, sometimes quite sudden; as I fill my tank at the self-service station a bubble of gas swells up in a black lake buried beneath the Persian Gulf, an emir silently raises hands hidden in wide white sleeves and folds them on his chest, in a skyscraper an Exxon computer is crunching numbers, far out to sea a cargo fleet gets the order to change course, I rummage in my pockets, the puny power of paper money evaporates.

I look around: I'm the only one left by the deserted pumps. The toing and froing of cars round the only filling station open at this hour has unexpectedly stopped, as if at this very moment the convergence of creeping cataclysms had suddenly produced the ultimate cataclysm, the simultaneous drying up perhaps of oilwells pipelines tanks pumps carburettors oil sumps. Progress does have its risks, what matters is being able to say you foresaw them. For a while now I've been getting used to imagining the future without flinching, I can already see rows of abandoned cobweb-draped cars, the city reduced to a plastic scrap heap, people running with sacks on their backs chased by rats.

All of a sudden I'm seized by a craving to get out of here; but to go where? I don't know, it doesn't matter; perhaps I just want to burn up what little energy is left us and finish off the cycle. I've dug out a last thousand lire to siphon off one more shot of fuel.

A sports car stops at the filling station. The driver, a girl wrapped in the spirals of her flowing hair, scarf and woollen turtle-neck, lifts a small nose from this tangled mass and says: Till her up.’

I'm standing there with the nozzle in the air; I may as well dedicate the last octanes to her, so they at least leave a memory of pleasant colours when they burn, in a world where everything is so unattractive: the operations I perform, the materials I use, the salvation I can hope for. I unscrew the fuel cap on the sports car, slip in the pump's slanted beak, press the button, and as I feel the jet penetrate, I at last experience something like the memory of a distant pleasure, the sort of vital strength that establishes a relationship, a liquid flow is passing between myself and the stranger at the wheel.

She has turned to look at me, she lifts the big frames of her glasses, she has green eyes of iridescent transparency. ‘But you're not a pump attendant… What are you doing… Why…’ I want her to understand that this is an extreme act of love on my part, I