The mountain awakens each morning with the uneven pulse of two hearts beating meters apart, separated only by a concrete wall that divides two worlds.

In the first of these heartbeats lives a man, in the penthouse that crowns the summit like a jewel of glass and steel. His panoramic windows devour the entire valley while he opens his universe-closet, where shirts hang arranged like constellations. Many still preserve their tags, whispering prices he has already forgotten. He chooses one at random, the Italian one, perhaps, or maybe the silk one, while the air conditioning maintains perfect temperature and hot water never runs out. Later, from his private terrace, he will buy a weekend by the sea with three clicks on his phone, without getting up from his leather sofa, without looking at the price, without making calculations that bind him to reality.

In the second heartbeat, barely fifty meters down the slope, the other man threads his needle under the light that seeps through the cracks in the zinc roof. His house is one of the first that managed to cling to the mountain when the invasion began, fifteen years ago. Each brick was a battle won against time and authorities, each square meter a victory torn from the rocky slope. His fingers, rough from work and precise from necessity, mend the only pair of pants that must guard his entire week, while water arrives every third day and electricity goes out when it rains hard. In front of him, a glass jar slowly fattens with coins that shine like small hopes. It is his particular clock, the one that measures the years left until his children know the foam of the relentless sea.

Both, unknowingly, lift their gaze at the same time toward a cloud that crosses the sky like a lost ship above their heads. For the first man, who observes it from his jacuzzi on the terrace, it is merely a decorative stroke on the infinite canvas he pays to contemplate. For the second, who watches it while hanging clothes in his small dirt patio, it is a reminder that the sky, at least, has no owner.

In the afternoons, when the sun sets behind the mountain, the difference becomes more cruel. The first man turns on the lights of his automatic vertical garden and plays music that floats softly through integrated speakers. The second, instead, lights a candle when the power goes out and sings quietly so his children won't be afraid of the darkness. The two melodies meet in the mountain air like echoes of parallel lives.

When complete night falls, the slope seems to pretend it is one community, the lights of the penthouse and those of the invasion houses twinkle together like terrestrial stars. But each window beats to a different rhythm. In some, designer lamps remain unlit because there is already too much light; in others, electricity is lacking but life overflows in the laughter of children who have made the danger of the slope their playground.

And irony, the world's old comedienne, sits on the edge of the slope. She laughs quietly, with that laugh that scrapes like wind through rocks, at how the same nocturnal breeze can caress both the cheeks of those who sleep in silk sheets and those who cover themselves with patched blankets, and how the same moon can illuminate both tempered glass windows and holes covered with plastic.

The mountain keeps beating, while its two hearts continue never to meet, even when they are so close they can almost touch.