Not to have masters, nor servants, not to have the nightmare of time, not having worries of money and letting the mind and the senses live between dream and action, free and foolish, following a spur almost determined by astral texture. This life, though for short spans, miraculously came true at my house in the country.

-- Giovanni Comisso, My house in the country

After a new day of winds that swerved the bicycles and exasperated the antennas came another sudden hailstorm at sunset. The catering place went on unloading food inside the store. The speakers played George Harrison. A car rushed by. I came back from the local pro loco with a fancy for writing. At home my smell of kitchen and dishwasher, of rice and sausage and butter and pie (I am a small-paid help there).
The ride on the bike in the dark -- the air of water and lime trees -- to the lights of my little village of Cadilù shook away tiredness, boredom -- and the houses and trees and the faces and everything that looked so tired.
I live in Cadilù now. Alone and yes glad to be. Milano, which sits somewhere north of us, a giant that never sleeps, seem so distant or non-existent. Only on saturdays and sunday its presence become clear because of all the excursionists who come here to work out (their commitment leaves a trail of melancholy and pity.)
I have a lover in Cadilù. An affair. Someone's wife. She comes to my place certain afternoons walking across the village under the sun. Her eyes are grey, her skin is fair, her hair is long. She is emotional. Strangely innocent. When we meet somewhere else... she blushes so hard you'd think she just came back from a race. I am cherishing this affair and keeping it out at the same time.
The other day I found in a box a drawing of a huge and utterly intricate maze I had done when I was sixteen years old. My Affair looked at it dismayed-- she said she wasn't surprised that I was giving so much importance to sex and emotional life, because I was so complicated and lost in my head, which was flattering. End of the post.

-- In picture, above: banana on the road to Cadilù.

Because I am not in command of my face. My face is in command of me.
--Totò

For us italians, Totò never really had an age. He was our Chaplin... It was of little matter how old was the man behind the mask. Well these things have been written a thousand times, I won't indulge myself. For some today, italians or not, such a mask has probably the age of the world itself. It is stone dead and undecipherable. All we have are faces now, we don't have enough imagination or innocence or I don't know what for masks (I should think about it). The closest thing to an italian mask today is Berlusconi, which probably accounts for the fortunes of our current local emperor in a larger way.
Anyway-- it is hard to believe that here (picture above), in L'Imperatore di Capri, 1949, one of his early movies, Totò was fifty years old. He still enjoyed 60 cigarettes and 15 espressos a day, sang, improvised and jumped around the scene restlessly. I am thinking some about Totò these days. It started after one of my neighbors referred to our landlord as "The Count" Il signor Conte, and she meant it with no irony. Moving in and fixing the hole "The Count" was letting me (being The Count one of the cheapest good for nothing counts I ever met), it was natural to think of cheap nobility and of Totò and the characters that surrounded him. So I watched some of his movies and when left alone by the plumber in the apartment still inhabitable I humored myself speaking in my best neapolitan accent, which is still very good (yes I talk by myself all the time and no, it is not a syndrome that has to be cured.) And yes this post, which is already over, was for you non-italians out there. It probably would be very hard for you to learn about Totò without some coaching, I mean to understand him the way he's meant to-- but let it be reminded to you who care, that Italy used to be in that direction too.

What a contradiction! I worked myself at a deed that undertaken by anyone else would have caused my hatred.
-- Giacomo Casanova

Everything in the little studio is worn-out and cheap. It is strange, after the large wooden elevator, the doorman/mastiff down at the portal. The furniture is old but also worthless. Calendars of the Carabinieri hang from the walls and Comment naissent les bateaux? frames "bougth at the Senigallia fair" he says.
I know it is only out of this cheapness that I am admitted here, other landlords of equal social standing let the agencies deal with the likes of me, here to rent a two rooms apartment well out of the city.

He has the blue eyes of his northern ancestors, the finest noblemen who ruled this city, shaped this city, readily gave this city away to any invader who kindly requested. The first time I met him he mentioned his family castle, and how his uncle designed and built the most famous modern tower in Milan, in the first five minutes of conversation. His manners, extra polite on the surface, leave you with this feeling of bad taste. It must be because he does not even listen to the answers to his questions. How he just seems to be curbing you. It feels like the attitude I dislike the most in the world.

But it is just a front. The back door leads to the flat which cannot be anything but gigantic. I can tell by how the lights are cast through the glass door by all sides. We are at the upper floor of a palace of bugnato facing the castle of Milan. I think this fronting stands for the same lack of sincerity. For some pretend modesty and lack of imagination. But all these are appearances, my feeling of the appearances and not knowledge. I don't know this place. I am not understanding this place, I am not even sitting here. I am outside.
With a finger I move the curtain and look out, at the chasm of the courtyard, the majestic columns, the symmetric chimneys on the roof. But I don't really see anything except how the sun high in the sky cannot reach the bottom of the court. How the pigeons congregate on the rain gutters made of stone.

I try to be amused by the jar of biros he keeps on the desk because one has his name written on a piece of paper attached to the ink straw. But it does not amuse me after all. I find it threatening. I sign the sheets he hands me -- after the first two he says "make the signature readable." I try but I can't and feel incredibly tired-- I could sleep right now, right here on the floor. It is how I would do after a fight with Libi.

He does all he has to do with the papers. I can't help but thinking that this piece of work, this few hours he consecrates to it, will earn him my money for years.

I try to keep myself up by pushing some talking forward... which is probably why he does not listen, thus losing all my respect in the few minutes left we spend together. I try to comment the heavy rain we had yesterday. He disagrees, it wasn't good at all. He complains about rain as if God wasn't respecting a deal with his family. I think, how annoying you are. Then I am given back to the city, I am quite poorer and a tenant of yet another place somewhere else.

The cercis trees in front of the castle are in blossom, tall and pink in the sun. I walk by them, hands in my pocket --shaking the narcolepsy away. Crowds of tourists and professionals on a break roam around me. I feel my stepping down, down the figurative ladder of my life --but it's fine. I don't see my being unfit to this world as something to be proud of anymore, nor something to regret. It is only something to worry about now. How odd.

Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.
-- Benjamin Franklin

I came down to the small church at the edge of the woods, strangely cars were moving out the dead hamlet onto the gravel road-- it was god day. I walked across the church front yard-- they held olive branches and had big smiles-- I had a cane of locust tree found in the woods --the alpha male gave me the looks but I felt aloof. I had been out early in the morning in the chestnut grove a bit higher in the valley-- big patches of mud on my pants --heard the call of a wild boar down the trail. It was a close lowing of a creature invisible in the undergrowth that sloped down to the creeks. It drizzled, I felt in shape and lonely and had talked by myself most of the way except when I needed to breathe. It was my almost daily walk --every time I reached a bit further into the woods until something unknown didn't discourage me and made me come back. This time it was the mud, the boar call-- I went down proudly, skidding on the bottom of putrid leaves, enfolded in moist layers of air, I slipped where the creek crossed the path, hurt my ankle-- never had that much balance-- sat there listening for the boar again. Picked up the locust branch, I went uphill and found these freshly sowed fields and as I went across them, small clouds were sitting on the hat of the valley, and I heard a rifle shot, imagined it was a warning to me -- kept my poise and slowly got across another field and to the concrete road. The cell phone rang in my pocket, struggled to take it out-- I had a not pleasant conversation as I descended the winding road -- it was reassuring to be on the concrete now-- no traffic-- and then across another field that fell down to the gravel drive that I knew took to the church high above my place, almost at the bottom of the valley where the river Nure, turbid and azure, ran amid polished white stones and divided me from the side of the valley in the sun. It was annoying to be alone.

I got off the couch... The first light of the morning, cold, was entering from the window. The embers, crackled still. Hamza el Din sung softly near the fainting glow of the abat-jour. The parus major whistled from the windowsill, and I thought of you, our last phone call fading out with its load of detachment and sadness and disgust, I took a shower. I made conversation with you under waters, in english, during which I declared I would survive through the pain, and the solitude, and I explained to the best of my abilities how this alloy of love and hate was going to fatally decay into indifference or easy to use well-wishing. So I was about to "move on", like it is said, like I was encouraged to do (not by you). It was macabre. I was reluctant to welcome this future of unloving a once beloved, a future of indifference that unfailingly awaited me, and you. The fact that this, in turn, would make me feel better was irrelevant. I didn't want the love-hate to go. What was going to replace it was not meant to do justice to you and me and I felt bad at the idea of feeling that for us. So this was also why I will never forgive you I said, because you accepted this order of the disorder of the things, and with wisdom you welcomed these simple scars on our hearts.
So I made conversation to you, I was not eloquent, all the contrary, and later, preparing for my empty day and the walk to the boar woods, you were a collection of memories, the tumble of your shoes, the color of your toenails, the tools laid out for your breakfast, the contempt for the past and the corners of your mouth when, unconscious of your beauty, you were sad, or tired but smiled. Everything was collected into living quarters where I did not live.