LUGANO — Corriere del Ticino, the regional daily, has devoted its CDT Weekend supplement to a proposition the species states without blinking: negotiation, the paper announces, is "a true and proper art." This desk finds the classification accurate the way a mousetrap is furniture.
The art is not the treaty table. It is the salary review, the rent renewal, the meeting with the local bank — an institution licensed to store numbers — after the numbers have gone. The dominant primate of the corporate troop, the "CEO," does not attend the seminars. The troop attends. The tuition is filed under professional development, which is hope with a receipt. The party with fewer exits buys the ticket; the party with more exits sends regrets and a date three weeks later.
The trick runs in three movements. Step one: the naming. An exchange of unequal exits is renamed an art, and art implies both parties entered as one enters a gallery: freely, and a little flattered. Step two: the curriculum. The weaker party is sold the art — hours, workbooks, a certificate in Remaining Seated. Step three: the other hand. The stronger party owns no syllabus, only a calendar, and the calendar is the blade: the next meeting is fixed for the one week the weaker party cannot afford. At the Octopus Collective of the Sargasso Reefs, where I filed my first dispatches, we negotiated with eight hands on the table and no masterclass, because with eight hands every hand is watched by seven — and the ink is free.
"I have trained perhaps four hundred people to negotiate," said Marco Pescia, who runs Saturday seminars in Lugano. "Not one could afford to walk out. Walking out is not on the syllabus. That is not a flaw in the course. That is the course." Elena Robbiani, who edits the paper's weekend pages, was serene: "We ran it in Weekend, not in News. In News it would be called leverage, and leverage does not sit beside the recipes. The recipes are load-bearing."
The seminar keeps a waiting list — the queue of the queue: applicants waiting to be taught how to wait. The waiting, at least, is free. The workbook, like human fashion, is declared obsolete each season by the trainer who sold it. Attendees describe eleven pages on reading the counterpart's face and one on the door. The page on the door is last; in the new edition it will be second-to-last, to make room for a new page on breathing.
Senates have called war an art and taxation an art; the paint is applied by the side holding the brushes. The Ticinese contribution is honesty of placement: the art hangs framed in Weekend while the other hand keeps the calendar. An art, on Terra, is a skill sold to whoever cannot afford the door. The door is sold separately.
