The angel Elzevar is unemployed. The only skill that Elzevar has is that of transmitting messages but there are none to transmit so the angel roams around the large municipal rubbish dumps rummaging for stale food and scraps of fruit. An angel has to eat something. At night-time Elzevar tried to hang around the riverside in the role of factotum prostitute. Indeed Elzevar knows how to perform a number of tricks and Elzevar’s angelic condition means exemption from moral scruples of any kind. Nonetheless, more often than not the encounter ends badly when the client, sooner or later, comes to discover that Elzevar is sexless. It appears that in certain trades the sexual organ is particularly required, perhaps even indispensable. In order to placate the disappointed client, Elzevar gives him a demonstration of some flying skills- the angel levitates first to the right and then to the left ruffling the patron’s hair as though coming from a light breeze. But the punters at the riverside require something more concrete than a simple exhibition of Elzevar’s levitational skills- one of them bit the angels ankles during flight: another client – a bald-headed man sporting a wig called Elzevar a sodomite and a third denounced the angel to the police on the basis of the contravention of an article of the Penal Code punishing fictitious procurement of clients and another two articles of the Code of Aerial Navigation regarding urban flights without documents. After this Elzevar had to relocate to another bight of the river previously patronised by families and by fishermen with fishing rods even during the night.
These drawbacks, a natural consequence of short-term unemployment, can not really cause an angel any real anxiety. To begin with angels are immortal and very few are those mortals who can boast anything similar. As for the shortage of messages this must change sooner or later. New transmitters are in the process of being assembled and the potential recipients of messages are by no means scarce. In the past Elzevar had to remain without work for shorter or longer periods with his hands in his pockets. The angel has never gone without scraps of discarded food. It is true that angelic prostitution is not what it used to be but one has, somehow, to remain in contact with human beings while waiting for the next message. In the meantime Elzevar can always find work in a circus in as far as circuses are, just like prostitution, in decline. Unfortunately, many things have changed since television. Nonetheless, other interesting and hardly-beaten paths have opened themselves up recently in case this Great Silence were to last for a long time: for example, underground cinema, the spraying of anti-parasitic chemicals, computer maintenance, cleaning lifts and male fashion parades.
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