Saturday
Arriving at Saturday, the traveller encounters a myriad of fairs and markets, where men and women, with origins impossible to trace but surely distant, call out to sell products from the distant lands made near by globalisation, boasting the exotic biological origins of their wares. These products arrive at Saturday from places like Nanjing, Hanoi, Colombo, Jakarta, and Vivenciana, yet no news of the people who craft them ever accompanies it. It is as though those who create these goods are seen merely as beings resembling people. Should they, for any reason, find themselves in Saturday, mingling through the fairs and markets, selling their survival, they are met with disdain or ignored by the locals. With their different eyes and unfamiliar scents, these people are invisible to the traveller who cheerfully purchases useless trinkets in Saturday, unnoticed and soon forgotten.
Those who sell, not to live but to earn, speak in harsh tones and offer little variety, peddling goods for a few euros a dozen or five for three, because in Saturday everything’s worth less than its true value, or as though the effort of those who crafted them, in distant lands, were meaningless.
The traveller’s pauses in Saturday can happen at any hour of the day or night, indulging the most extraordinary requests imaginable. These are delivered by unseen couriers on two wheels, in a frantic flurry that cuts through sidewalks, ignores traffic lights, and parks briefly at the traveller’s temporary accommodation, exchanging no more than a few mechanical monosyllables. Nothing happens in Saturday that couldn’t occur on any other city or in any other place, yet in Saturday, everything is done in Saturday’s peculiar way.
Friday
The first thing people say after visiting Friday is that there’s an anticipation in the air, making it unusually poor in oxygen due to the locals’ excessive breathing. From early morning, they exhibit a heightened energy, destined for a place they know they’ll never reach, but to which they continually, profusely, and desperately aspire.
The streets are packed with cars, and their boots are loaded with travel trolleys, overflowing with childish morning hope, afternoon frustration, and nocturnal excitement, as if the initial destination of hope in Friday were excitement fueled by insecurity. Of those who live there, only the young realise they live in Friday, an intangible city to other ages and to those who no longer have, or never had, a purpose.
Thursday
In Thursday, the traveller who passes through or stays a little longer finds it hard to navigate the streets, historical sites, tourist attractions, or even the local hangouts, as everything is desolate, remote, and arduous. This is due to Thursday’s immense mass, exerting a gravitational force upon the bodies of both locals and travellers, far greater than that of other cities, causing extreme fatigue, leg and knee pain, headaches, circulatory diseases, general exhaustion, and constant irritation.
Even the exceptional fact that the walls of Thursday’s houses and buildings are coated in lunar regolith, brought back in the unfathomable pockets of a thousand astronauts—known also as astro-suicides, so desperate they were to gaze at the moon from the prison Thursday had become—doesn’t make it a particularly pleasant place. Instead, with all its greyness, it is a gloomy and desperate location.
Wednesday
In Wednesday, the traveller, wandering through the city lined with mirrors and other reflective surfaces, quickly loses track of time, unsure whether they have been there for long or short, whether they’ve seen much or little of the streets, squares, and monuments, or, having lingered for days, whether they are at the beginning, middle, or end of their visit. The same happens to the locals, but regarding their lives. The inhabitants of Wednesday live in constant fear of not knowing their age, whether they are young or old, whether they’ve finished what they started or even started what they think they’ve finished.
Everything in Wednesday is somewhere in between. There are no women in skirts on the mirrored streets, and in the roundabouts, like praxinoscopes, cars enter but never leave. The shops, where the traveller struggles to find the exit, and the cafés, where locals break their fingers trying to grasp the reflections of coffee cups, give Wednesday an intermediate dimension, somewhere between a before and an after that only a few, very special individuals, able to see beyond their own reflection, can identify. These quickly leave Wednesday, never to return. Those who stay, do not know if those who left will come back or if they are yet to arrive.
Tuesday
In Tuesday, the traveller feels a mature energy in the air, a sentiment noted by the locals, who, perched atop their alabaster towers—where they never descend, sullied by the droppings of the cormorants’ nests, yet still imposing and resplendent—declare that anyone can share in this sentiment, this energy, this capability. However, the observant traveller realises that only those who live in the towers partake in this energy. The traveller wonders how these locals, so free and devoted to everything that freedom entails—freedom to have and freedom to do—can live their lives when they never leave their lofty towers. They are fascinated by how, from up there, amidst the shrill cries of the cormorants, during long and lavish meals that regulate their lives, the locals explain, that Tuesday is a unique city where all who are capable are free to act and shape their destiny, based on the quality of their work and the strength of their will.
Only later, when the traveller’s eyes adjust to the brilliance of the alabaster towers and the locals’ voices blend with the sound of the cormorant chicks’ droppings falling, from above, onto the pavements or anyone passing by, does the traveller discover another Tuesday. The Tuesday of the meandering shadows cast by the towers, where anonymous, sad people with worn nails from scraping the crumbs that fall from above live their lives in a routine of micro-conquests, entertained by decadent shows and worn down by the day-to-day life of Tuesday’s others who do not feel the energy.
Monday
In Monday, the traveller must immediately, at the risk of dying alone and far from home, take their place among the hopeful or the weary. For this is the nature of Monday and its irreconcilably divided people. There are two types of locals in Monday; those who see their city as the promising beginning of everything, and, in stark opposition, those for whom Monday is exhaustion, frustration, and regret.
The battlefield, continuously fought over in Monday, is literally everywhere. In schools, cafes, streets, clubs, and especially in businesses. It is there, in the companies, offices and shops, that the hopeful and the disenchanted clash the most. Neither side accepts the other’s point of view, whether it be a zest for life or a shapeless surrender to existence.
Not even the freshly paved streets every week, the hanging gardens between buildings, or the always available parking spaces at the shops, hotels, monuments, or cafes make the hatred wane or cause one faction to submit to the other. Monday is the most beautiful battlefield, and there is nothing anyone can do.
Sunday
In Sunday, the traveller’s life is at risk. For Sunday is a land of creeds and cults, sects and churches. Harassed by monks, clerics, sorcerers, priests, shamans, healers, and pastors, the traveller struggles to move through streets covered in neon glow, amidst hymns, spells, curses, prayers, commandments, reflections, and cryptic messages, all loudly proclaimed by energetic characters, some announcing the end of the world, others its salvation. There are giant screens, colourful neon signs, traditional posters, recorded voices shouting from speakers at street corners, and flyers and leaflets rain down from the skies, dropped by planes and drones.
There are religious and/or spiritual spectacles in grand stadiums that once hosted football matches or in secluded rooms of decrepit shopping centres. Everything in Sunday is geared towards the ultimate fantasy. If, exhausted as if having spent hours in a shopping mall, the traveller asks someone in the street, trying to pull them into their truth, “Why should I listen to this message and not any of the other four thousand?”—asking it as one asks why it rains, or why thunder follows lightning—that traveller is never seen again.
