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.