No matter whether I really ever said I had no desire to surround myself with nerds, hoarders, bon vivants, and pizza eaters, I can empathize with a good man who one day pays a visit to his old buddy Giovanni and orders a tuna and onion pizza. Not ten minutes later, the circular delight is presented to him, emitting faint, pleasant sounds. Its appearance, too, appeals to the man so much that he believes he has never before seen such a perfect pizza: the onions distributed evenly across the surface in accurate rings, and the chunks of tuna likewise arranged with the artistic panache of a Meissen porcelain painter! So as never to forget this masterful creation, the man climbs on his chair and takes a kind of aerial photograph of his meal with his camera. These days, such behaviour is no longer unusual. Since the triumph of the digital camera, extreme quantities of food have been photographed in restaurants. Waiters at tourist eateries where groups of Asian visitors are entertained will concur and possibly add that some women, particularly in the younger age bracket, do nothing but photograph their food, not even eating it afterwards. Take a snapshot, take a sniff, leave it on the plate, that’s how the modern-day Japanese woman keeps her figure on a trip to Europe. The tuna pizza man, however, devours the food presented to him with gusto, goes home happy and admires the photo of his pizza on his computer screen. He’s thrilled at the picture’s high resolution: it shows cheese strings so thin they’d make a spider envious, and imagine, the man says to himself, you can almost make out the cell structure of the onions! At this point he recalls that he has a wedding anniversary coming up, his fifteenth, referred to as the ‘crystal anniversary’ – fifteen years aren’t sensational enough for gifts of gold jewellery, yet the number is a tad too round for the usual potted azaleas. As his wife loves devoting her time to eccentric trials of her patience, he emails the pizza photo to a toy manufacturer and places an order to have it made into the largest jigsaw puzzle technically possible. 

The crystal anniversary and the jigsaw arrive, and the man’s wife is happy. Three days later, she calls him into the living room. The picture of the pizza, perfectly assembled, covers the large Persian rug. ‘Can you see that?’ the woman asks, unexpectedly agitated. 
‘See what?’ 
‘The black mark to the right of the onion ring?’
‘Which onion ring? I can see dozens of them!’ 
The woman is in the throes of a minor dilemma. In order to elucidate to her husband which particular onion ring she is referring to, she’d have to step on the jigsaw puzzle, which, however, would cause it to slip out of place. She looks around the room in search of a blackboard pointer, but a living room is not an elementary school. The handle of her ‘Vileda DriMop System’ would serve her well, were it not in the bathroom, which has been occupied for the past half hour by their daughter in preparation for an evening of standing around in the local pedestrian zone. 
And then the woman’s glance alights on the now wilted bouquet of roses her husband gave her for their anniversary along with the jigsaw. She extricates a flower from the arrangement, rips off its head with a strong hand – so that the dry petals don’t scatter around the room – and points the stem at the onion ring in the central area of the cheese-topped circle. ‘You’re dripping all over the jigsaw with your old rose stem!’ the man admonishes. 
To which the woman replies, ‘When you’ve seen what I’m trying to show you, you won’t care about a soggy jigsaw. Here, look! This bit, black at the front, white at the back! A bug moulting out of its larva. You know what I mean, metamorphosis – the imago, the finished insect, crawling out of the maggot. Look at it – did you eat that?’
The man, who spent a great deal of his youth in the great outdoors and has never related to the abhorrence of nature displayed by alienated city-dwellers, doesn’t actually care whether he ate the maturing insect or not. And yet he feels a calm, warm, mundane love linking him to his wife, one comparable to a dusty old cable between a television set and a video recorder that hasn’t been used for years. Anyone in possession of such a solid love, polished into shape by a constant stream of peaceful living and letting live, should avoid distressing their partner. ‘If it bothers my wife so terribly that I have apparently consumed a small creature without noticing, it would be better not to appear indifferent to the fact,’ thinks the man, and he promises her he’ll haul ‘that unhygienic old rascal Giovanni’ over the coals at the next opportunity.
‘You’d better go right now! And take the offending piece of the jigsaw with you. As proof!’ 
‘But then you’ll have a hole in your lovely jigsaw! No, it’ll be fine if I just explain the situation to Giovanni.’

Soon enough, the two men are sitting at the table by the counter over a glass of grappa and laughing at their dear wives’ woes, the Sisyphean struggle against creepy crawlies in the kitchen (admittedly waged in a rather lax manner at times), and the short-sightedness of the imbecile from the municipal food safety office. For good measure, Giovanni remembers a story he read years ago in an Italian newspaper: 
A newly widowed German man was given a jigsaw depicting Rome’s Coliseum by his daughter. This lonely man began to piece the puzzle together immediately. Suddenly, he emitted a scream and fell dead from his chair. Why so, one might ask. As the daughter later found out, her father had discovered a jigsaw piece showing his deceased wife, who happened to have been passing the Coliseum at the very moment the photo was taken, albeit arm in arm with an attractive younger man. On establishing this fact, the daughter then sued the jigsaw manufacturer. She told the court, ‘My father had no idea my mother had ever been to Rome!’ 
The court replied hm, hm, well, well: it was terribly sorry, but anyone giving a jigsaw puzzle as a gift had a duty to ensure in advance of the gifting procedure that there was nothing in the picture that might put the recipient’s health at risk. 
‘I’d better go and see what my wife is getting up to,’ the man says to Giovanni, and goes home. He finds his wife kneeling on the rug in distress, right in the middle of the totally disassembled pizza puzzle. She had intended, she explains, to dry the jigsaw pieces the rose stem had dripped on with a hair dryer, but had accidentally set the appliance to the highest level, and now he could see what a mess she’d made.
‘We’ll get it sorted out together!’ replies the man, and while they spend the rest of the evening kneeling on the rug side by side and putting the jigsaw together piece by piece, he keeps sneaking covert glances at his wife, which makes him feel warm and happy and aware of how good it is that the old cable still hasn’t burnt out.