Once again I find myself staying in a residence hotel, this time in a small village that we can call Oil Bridge, some ten kilometers south of a city on the river Po we can call Pleasance. I have no evidence that the city is living up to its name, or that the village has anything to do with Oil. Just a long bridge on the shallow river Nure. Truth is I am close to some of the most beautiful hills in Italy. First impression, the little I've seen of the people around here I don't like very much, I wonder what are those mugs, if arrogance or wariness, and the use of the italian word "salve" to greet people, like in Milan, more than in Milan widespread. "Salve" is a good indicator of contempt for the next one. It's like saying I don't want to greet you, you're not welcome, when are you leaving? It cannot be said looking at someone right in the eyes, but only eluding the contact. It is the most unpleasant and the most hypocrite casual greeting conceivable in Italy. I hate it and so should anyone who has a bit of heart. However, it seems to be used a lot around here. I noticed my "good day!" is getting more stentorian.
Of course I don't know the tenth part of it. I've been working. I am a gardener. I was given a baseball hat too small for my big head, I eat in the trattorias in my muddy overalls and I'm coming home for the weekend.

I drive under the gloom sky to Milan and to the rainstorm, some old times blues singer is moaning, I feel tired. Later the lively raindrops against the smudged windshield, while the fuzzy yellow opening to the west goes dark. I enter the city. Numerous parts of my body are sore, my face and arms are cooked and bi-cooked, I got blisters on my fingers, four days of garden building, 9+ hours a day under the sun or rain proved to be quite hard. I felt stupid when I still had to dig into wet soil, unload compost, connect irrigation pipes or some other stuff at the end of the workday, and I just couldn't do it, I had to go someplace instead against a wall or a tree and sit and breathe and let my heartbeat slow-- But it was graceful to work again, and be back to the real treasure of this work, which I venture is to change scenery so often during the week, but always being among plants and outside and into a garden. Besides, from Oil Bridge you get everywhere in half an hour. Back in Milan, I'm stuck in traffic again, I have to park the car somewhere possibly illegal and far from the condo, while the rain pours down. I left my hat in Oil Bridge, and will get wet, so I pretend I got accustomed to it already.

-- in picture, above: coming back to Milan.

It's raining. At moments very hard and thundering. I look out on the terrace, all the creatures look healthy but they could do without the rain. Fallen flower petals draw light shapes on the terracotta tiles. Spraying sulfur yesterday was really useless I reckon. My new employer does not want me to relocate and start with the new job because it's raining. We call each other everyday and we discuss the weather like old lovers. "There is nothing to do", he says. It's true. No grass to mow, no treatments to do, no planting to do, no nothing. Why should he start to pay me, right? "The Azores anticyclonic thing is not showing up" he reports. I venture, "Because of the gulf stream slowing down?" I read that Europe is facing a little new ice age and all that. Temperatures having not been above average since 1998.
"May, it rains for twenty days in a row. June, same thing", he regrets.
Hail the next sucker who believes in man-made global warming. I am here with nothing obvious to do, luggage half-packed, half unpacked (the mess' on the floor, always in between), relation half-broken. The usual. I can't put this on the plate with the man, right?
I rewrote the about page 'cause I felt I am becoming something new, and yet, frustration, I am not. (Although on a funnier note, Libya called today asking for my bank account details. For the third time they did that, oh morons, but at least they are going to pay, who would have thought. With the people's money, of course: it's horrible to work for the government, any government, if you ask me. End of the post.)

-- In picture, above: petunia never looks wet.

I have a feeling my heart is beating too fast or too hard. When I stop and take notice, I feel it right there pounding in my chest and I wait for the feeling to go away. I can't sleep very well. Too much imagination I guess. Like many italians I am cursed by guilty feelings every time I want to check on my health. I know doctors wouldn't be sympathetic or competent. They never are.

Everything goes to hell anyway. This whole mission went to hell awfully easily, awfully fast. After eighteen days of imprisonment in a five stars joke hotel we were given our passports back. Next stop, Italy. The falling country didn't notice.
Humiliation. Scorn. Fatigue. Relief.

I had to call Hammar for the last time 'cause the son of a bitch had failed to do so, as promised, the night before. Nobody ever kept a promise to us in Libya, which doesn't mean you get accustomed to it. The other son of a bitch who still wasn't able to talk to us ("he's ill" (Rhyad) "he's out of town" (Hammar)) still invisible, Hammar said he met him, but somehow failed to report back. I knew I was ready to go to the Italian embassy to break the siege, and he knew too.
"So mr Hammar, what news? What happens?"
And so in that crucial moment, fixed forever in our reciprocal personal histories, fucking mr Hammar mumbled, cowardly: "Milan... or Rome?"

I can't say I will have a nice memory of Tripoli, too much heavy negative feelings stacked up there. I brought back the narghile and the tunics and the tuareg wristband but in the end, so little close to nothing. The oppressive afternoons, the oppressive waiting and waiting and speculating on the little I was told; the superficiality of it all, the frustration weighting the pruning-shears in my hand in room 608, never once used on Libyan soil.
No explanations. No apologies. No further promises. End of the story.

Everything goes to hell anyway. Coming back, unexpected, your chair is not there anymore; your stuff moved around or given away; she acts as if she does not get what the problem should be. Two days later, incredulous and unaffected, you have found a job 100 kilometers out of the big city and bitterly are preparing for yet another move out. Another story begins, and you don't have room left for expectations.

Maybe "promises unkept" was not a honest title. I think of Tripoli, of the kids I had promised the picture to; the cities in the desert never visited; were those really promises to be kept? Words to live by? Even the almost total indifference of all the parties to our destiny is something I come back with, and the garden of the Hesperides, and the view of the desert to the sea from the abandoned rose bushes up the green mountains; the ugly smell of laundry; the fish bought and cooked and eaten inside the fish market at the port; the trashed and abandoned ruins of Cyrene; the friendship with Akram; Juda's eyes; the ugly cafes; Flora, the libyan maid who, incredibly, magically, gave me a rose petal with her name written on it as a goodbye; the hotel rooms; the faking-it waiters and cooks, the omnipresent italian football, and the clerks at the tripoli airport who forged our boarding passes in the back of the closed travel agency 'cause they had forgot to print them at the desk; finally the meaningful, polite taste of the cheap red wine served in a plastic cup aboard the Alitalia flight back. That was something.

Akram takes us once again to his favourite places. We follow. What else there is to do? We are desperate for things to happen. I like it when we go to the café where Juda works. Juda’s a beautiful person to look at. I decided that her eyes are uncommonly sweet, possibly it is bashfulness, because only twice I managed to have them be directed at me. She seems always to be thinking at something more important than the here and now, which mysteriously goes with her gentle manners, casting a light around her in the old tacky café. Her graceful body is not amorphed by the usual unshaped gown but instead present in the room, from under her colourful clothes. She’s from Algeri.

Akram, he’s from Casablanca. He says he has a crush on Juda. This is despite the fact that once outside of the café all he gives you on the subject is a comment on “her nice tits”.
We met Akram on the streets few days ago, he called to us of course, most likely he was trying to hustle random foreigners because he knows where to find booze and girls on the black market, which we don’t really care for anyway, but we feigned interest when he talked about it because we were actually interested in the story. After the first day Akram kept on looking for us every afternoon, and now we don’t know whether he’s still hoping to hook us on something, or he’s getting a cut from the cafes he takes us to, or if we are rather becoming friends. All I know is we need diversions and he is a nice enough guy. He works in a Pizzeria by night, the pizzeria has decent pizza. Him and I converse in Spanish, which my fellow gardener does not speak, but understands more compared to english; the rest I translate to him; it all adds to the idiomatic confusion I am falling into.

Somehow Akram can take us to three or four different cafes in a single afternoon, which in the end are really too many. The nicest one today is probably this old passenger boat tinted in blue tied to an abandoned pier along the waterfront near the centre of the city. I wish I could remember its name since I asked for it. Akram says everybody is from Morocco here, and the music too.
Nagged by police and by the Sahara, Akram likes to stay closed inside cafes; I like to stay outside and look at people passing by. Young african couples in love are especially uplifting to look at in this city, at least for me. The hour of the swallows is also very important to be witnessed. So few moments are typically spent debating whether staying outside or inside, this time we stay under deck in the belly of the blue boat, at a table next to the window, but on the wrong side. There’s only the sea out of the smeared pane, and rusty boats far away in the port. I hope the slight rocking won’t make me sick as I smoke the shisha again, which I know I really shouldn’t do. I smoke and think that Akram is probably getting a cut from all these cafes. Which for him is probably a losing deal compared to the cut he’d have if we were willing to ask him for booze or direction to houses with prostitutes; in my mind, this question matters only because every time he tells his story, of failed worker and emigrant kicked out of Spain after one year of jail, I vaguely want to help him, in other words I hope for the chance to turn the vagueness into real help. A selfish hope, that can be ruined, albeit not entirely, if Akram's interest in us is a machination. This explains why it can be so easy to fool travelers, I guess. Of course I also want to fight the cliché of the untrusting fat wallet bearer abroad: even more so because I am falling into it myself. I feel inferiority the moment I seem to perceive deception behind Akram’s sincere eyes, and so who knows why I later change my mind? and at the end of the day, back at the hotel, I have a annoying gut feeling, as if I am trapped in a judgment maze.

Unilaterally, lost in the mess of my room, I decide that tomorrow we are going to do without Akram for a change. That’s also because for the third night I am unable to fall asleep. I lay in bed -- all lights on -- reading in vain waiting for drowsiness. I know it is because of the shai and the apple tobacco and the so called espressos. So very useless in the end. I think that all the waiting can make us very vulnerable.

I get out of the room, walk around the corridor, sit back on the bed, turn the TV on and off. Trap a cockroach under the glass. At four something the call of the muezzins begins. God is great. I get out to the balcony, the air rushes behind my back from the inside of the hotel (the door's ajar). It is very late and the city outline is punctuated by lights of different sizes keeping watch. The world is half awake at least car wise. I let the little I can grasp of reality to sink in, the humming loudspeakers, the wind, the droning of the air conditioners, the distant comment of the waves. I think that nothing will stay with me the way I am sensing it now. Memories are a joke.
The share of sea I can see from here is a pitch black void against which all the human refuges and the restless palms seem to be floating: the stage of a theatre, a million untold stories. This land needs writers.

-- In picture above: running across the street at the waterfront

-- Boy I so wish they let us work tomorrow.
-- Yeah, me too. I don’t think they will though.
-- Why not? I mean. C’mon.
-- They finally realized they needed our proposal yesterday. Now they have it. Who knows how long it can take before they fuck know what to do with it.
-- Man. Don’t they know we’ve been here doing nothing for almost fifteen days?
-- Maybe they think they’re doing us a favour. Keeping us here for free doing nothing.
-- Doing nothing is fun when you’re at home with your girl. Not fucking here. Aren’t they worried for the money?
-- I know.

(They chew on. Rice and lamb. Kish of nondescript vegetables. All is silent except the elevator music. Jamel has stopped horsing around. Disappeared from behind the buffet.)

-- Thing is it’s the government money, you know? Fuck, it’s not their money. It’s the little girl’s money, her grandpa’s money, the tall waiter’s money, that other ugly guy’s money, that fat woman’s money. It’s people’s. It’s not theirs. Let them flow, they don’t care.
-- I think I’m having a beer.
-- Ha-ha.
-- Boy, is that woman fat.
-- Like a ball. Cause she can’t have sex with me, that’s why.

(Noise of forks and knives. The plates are almost empty. They try not looking at them.)

-- I wish we were starting to work tomorrow.
-- Yeah. Me too.
-- We could have been in the desert.
-- Yeah! Or back home.
-- Yeah! Uh, it’s the other tape now.

(They bob their head. Laugh. Suddenly they stand up. The guy at the counter tries the “Inter!” thumb up but goes unnoticed. They leave the restaurant floor without a word).

Every so often in the scorching night fireworks go off. It’s the third night this is happening. Faraway parties in the outskirts of the vast capital, where the big farms and the gardens of the elite are. Birthdays of daughters born in May. Celebrations of business deals.
We’ve been in one of those gardens; we’ve seen lions and tigers in cages below the violet shadows of majestic jacarandas efflorescence; next to one hectare of peach trees growing in the sand there was a old villa tinted magenta. But maybe that’s another story.

There’s not really much to see on the little white TV in my hotel room, I mostly have animal planet on, tonight I’m watching the wounded dogs, rescued dogs, uncared for dogs with their irresistible caring mugs, generous, good-willing, needy. I do it until I can’t stand it anymore, tired of the burning eyes. There’s a Tom Cruise movie on the only other channel I can understand and it’s OK. I actually like him on film. The fireworks go on but I can’t see them from the window. Nights got really hot these last days, they say it’s nothing compared to what the next months will be, when the Sahara will actually turn its blow this way.

The occasional cockroach runs out from behind the mirror. The carpet is annoyingly warm beneath my feet as I rush for the kill and fail.

Days pass in the hotel as the nothing happens. Stuck in the Arabian labyrinth, or should we call it To Nowhere road, we are forgotten again, still without a contract, still not working. Fed and forgotten. I value the pointless energy of my resistance to it as I try to exercise in my room in the morning. Day after day we have identical lunches and dinners in the hotel restaurant, always rice and meat with something. Waiting for calls. All the personnel knows us by now, names and room numbers. We have manly exchanges about italian football teams. See if I care. With the young workers from Tunisia or Morocco it’s a little better, you can talk about women and booze. Personal biographies are left out pretty soon. Who should want to talk about its immigration disgrace in this pond called Mediterranean? Everyone comes from somewhere else and that’s all there is to it.
Just as well, I got tired to repeat that I am a gardener while I am not being one.

Sometimes we come down dressed with the tunics we bought at the suq just for kicks. We laugh at the elevator music that goes on and on and on while we eat, but does not actually plays inside the elevators where it belongs. My fellow gardener fights with the computer trying to get messenger to work. I have lengthy telephone conversations with Libi about how long I am supposed to stay put before fucking off and coming back home, but I don’t really want to come back. I want this to work.
Libi does not condone anymore.

Sometimes I wake up exasperated, sweaty, victim of the erotic dreams of the morning and feeling unjustified hatred for the place and the people. For our differences. For their disregard of women. For the different prices for foreigners. For spending their time always among men, for their ludicrous non alcoholic Becks, or for the hard to get prostitute option they leave the weak and the lonely with.
Then I am out in the traffic and the market and the language and I know nothing of this landscape. I feel envy and tenderness for the innocence and shyness of young people here. Curiosity. A glimpse of the world we have consumed, maybe. Where is love hiding for them? Hisham says it takes too much time, I’d say to scoop it out the pan of tradition. Nobody has that kind of time.

Some other times I wake up and it’s the good old hatred for myself, my late incompleteness, my foggy mind, my wasted years, my green eyes looking at me from the mirror trying to understand fuck knows what. I will never know where I am going. Never.

The smoke finally exhales from the cabin when we halt at the checkpoint. The guard emerges from the white and black shed, unarmed, exchanging salutes with the driver in the mute night, and we pull away, with the bright lights steady on. Our driver seems unresponsive to the pleading flashes of the few cars coming the other way. He passes trucks without hesitation, in bends and straight stretches alike. Unemotional elongated face on a seriosuly long body, very stern and bony, menacing to the superficial observer. Chatting with our boss in the front seats, as always it is difficult to say whether they’ve ever met before, and they probably haven’t.

We cast our rushing light to the backdrop of the night, illuminating instants of pines and acacias, the amorphous red iron rocks of Jebel al-Akdhar, the so called green mountains. We left behind the few still open diners when we left the larger road from Bengazi, eating houses without window panes, gaping onto the road in pools of light and moths and offering a colorful collection of countless scraps hanging from their walls.
I imagined music in those diners, similar to the moaning and beautiful arabic music filling the car cabin as we go. I imagined sitting and smoking the shisha again, which so perfectly slows down the flow of time. Talking in our unpolished english about religion and politics and women and our biographies.

Judging from the dark void punctuated by these few signs, we could be headed everywhere, Chiapas maybe, or Athens, or Sassari.
But we are going to al-Beyda, "the white": the only place in Libya where it snows in winter. My book says that the legend wants al-Beyda to be where the garden of the Hesperides was, and I indulge on this useless thought, that we are going to visit a garden and a farm with apple trees where possibly the most legendary garden, with its golden apples, was.

The book also mysteriously refers to a very sweet kind of berry that grows only here, the shmari; we’ll later discover this to be nothing but our corbezzolo, or Arbustus unedo. The shmari is then an old friend, whose presence is not surprising, but familiar, like so many things can be familiar to us people of the Mediterranean, well, rethorically speaking. To be continued.