The man, wearing an empire-style t-shirt and shorts, pushes the wheelchair with a look of half embarrassment, half annoyance. Willingly and unwillingly, he makes a sudden movement to get it onto the sidewalk. The woman sitting in it, in a summer dress, with a baguette (one of those from a bakery with no workshop) on her lap, is startled, like a fish in a pan, by the jolt. Her gesture is deliberately exaggerated. Her hands are twisted. She can't use them. She holds them in front of her chest, symmetrically, like a cartoon dog. Her eyes are so sad that no one can meet her gaze without pressing their mouth like a turtle.
"Hey, Joan!" says another man, from the terrace of the bar they are passing. He stops. From behind the chair, he makes a grimace, which means: "Look, man, how I have to be seen." The woman doesn't greet, she just looks at her hands. "Sit down and have a coffee!" the other man suggests. "I can't!" he says. And without breathing, he adds: "If now... As we are, I have to go make lunch, give it to her, wash the dishes...!" The other nods, he understands. Apparently, the woman fell from a ladder, while pruning a rose bush (that hobby of retired people of climbing everywhere), and she'll be unable to move her hands and will be in a wheelchair for three months. "I do everything, I wash... And more. But she's never satisfied and watches me while I do it!" he exclaims, as if the woman weren't there. "Today, this one..." - and with his head, he points to her - "tells me if I can water her plants." She, upon hearing this, fixes her eyes, half-tearful, on the horizon. "And when I told her no, she started crying, damn it! I've already washed the stairs, I've already put food in her mouth, I've already wiped her butt, eh? I don't understand plants! That's all I need! Watering!" And he hits the back of the chair. She strokes the branch of a photinia, in a pot by the sidewalk, as best she can, with her hands. She looks at the man from the bar. "If no one helps me, they'll die of thirst, poor things," she says. "Some are already wilted." And she looks at the man, in case the man would say that he'll accompany them, that he'll water them, that it's just a moment. But the man drains his coffee in one gulp and says nothing.
