The fan stopped working on one of the hottest days of the year, though that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It has been trying to tell us for weeks, stopping unexpectedly, then starting again after a push; unable to stick to its settings and spinning too fast or too slow, and moaning slightly. I was chopping tomatoes when the ribbon tied to the guard cage of the pedestal fan suddenly flopped flat, and the air in the kitchen stopped moving. I hoped it was a power cut, until I saw the wifi light. I tried nudging it, then turning it off and on several times in the hope of jolting it back to life, but nothing. It was gone, broken, dead.
In his short story Scherzi del Caldo (Hot Weather Jokes), Alberto Moravia describes a small apartment in Rome on a hot day: “It seems that everything – furniture, clothes, utensils – has swollen and is falling on you”, and how “Everyone wears shirtsleeves, but the shirts are sweaty and smelly”, and that families “become quarrelsome”. I felt as if I was in Moravia’s story.
