Quel che tu vuoi dire in fine, dillo da principio.
-- proverbio italiano

I don't see very far across london. We roam the streets in a truck which I still have to learn to drive -- on that funny side of everything-- and they're always the same streets. They have plane trees, shaped up small gardens along badly built pretty houses that are all the same. Occasionally there are shops and traffic and buses. Toff's where I had fish three times. Every kind of plant grows around you. No limits. On the job the construction workers deploy an accent I can't break, but I am called a mate. Most of the times we start before dawn. Every day is different days into one, one of them is a rainy day usually in the afternoon. But we work on anyway. Airplanes fly down above our heads occasionally and the blackbirds and the robins and the squirrels and the ravens are somewhere all around in the gardens, gaping at our work of uncovering treasures for them. The flowers fall under my secateurs, as they call it here. The shrubs are still in blossom. I become a better gardener day by day, well except when there's something I detest like moving leaves around with a blower. Or similar. Then I am a bad gardener.

Later I, walking around in east finchley... I, longing for someone to go visit, to call, or a call to wait for. Fall in love, be surprised. I dragged such pointless feelings all the way from Italy in my freitag bag.
I stand in a mirror inside the window of a real estate agency! I’m such a handsome man, so charming when I want, used to be a clever boy and I don’t know anyone lonelier than me.
I lazy, I paranoid, I absent-minded and fool. My true hidden soul is a bum in disarray. Is anyone seeing it? That girl? That the reason of a tender smile possibly? Doubtful. No mothers around. No cereals.

So I came here to london. I sleep in a 6 square meters room and wake up at five thirty... I shop for packed food that doesn't even look like food. But it wasn't about the work, not because I reputed the location special or better, only my efforts not to sink in the obviousness of my little, mediocre sea. I can see how I am tired to look at the others as the giants who can live where I can't exist and be, but even here all I try to do: to lessen them --picking on their possible despair. Such are my ramblings in the megalopolis far from home. I take pride of trifling in my hateful solitude then, saved. Hypocritically sorry for those who take antidepressants, for example-- paraphrasing Kafka who wrote that his peers had found "companionship through means of intoxication" which made them sociable, which was the point. "I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have". So, consolation! I am not social because I don't want to cheat. Lonely because honest and so forth.

It's a city. I know the drill. Like on a parade the dreaded leaves fall from the tallest creatures of the avenue down to the dark bottom of it no matter what the souls're at. Looking for a parking spot, swearing in a whisper and scanning both sides of the road from behind a smudged car glass. Waiting for the dog to take a quick shit in between the garden paths, looking sideways to give it time and privacy. Smoking a cigarette outside a restaurant talking on the thin cell swaying slowly while the smoke dissolves. Walking by the glowing windows of the shops catching glimpses of things to buy, shoes furniture towels more thin cell phones bangladeshi food. Nodding off on a crowded bench on the number something. Nodding off on a empty pew inside the church. Dragging the children, the bike, the shopping bags, the questions, the moments of the day past. In line at the cashiers. Avoiding the looks down the road. Forgetting the legendary fears exchanged between us and the TV, privately, and carried around in disguise. On the surface, it is tuesday night at five post meridiem, dark, people are diverse, I am unable to use the word elegance here or anywhere, I certainly am ~alive. Etc.

I popoli settentrionali meno caldi nelle illusioni,
sono anche meno freddi nel disinganno.
-- Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani

I had that known feeling again this morning, same as yesterday. I woke up and wondered where I was, in which bed I was. I might be wrong but I swear it doesn't look like home I thought. I mean, it's no big deal because if it's not home, it will certainly be something else, equally habitable.
And why am I here again? What have I done? Where is the window? (It's on the opposite side!) On which side of the bed am I? Have I not too much room? Am I not kicking someone out of bed? Where is the loved one? (Not here.) What house is this? What world is outside? (what if it is a world I don't know?)

After which the swinging of the black walnut leaves against the smooth perfect sky of the morning; something in the line of the hills, or the sheer factuality of the hills; possibly the smell of the wall near my face (of all the visible objects, the odd abat-jour, the wooden dark seat, the chandelier, the vaulted ceiling, so full of clues, none seemingly but placeless, not belonging to anywhere): I couldn't say with what feeling I learned where I was. Relief acceptance disappointment wonder. That is right, I thought, I am in the castle. Outside is the province. Fields villages dry rivers gardens petrol stations old folks. All the lines at the horizon are crooked and the long road to Plaisance is the swoosh of that engine running by in the early morning and felt between the thoughts.

Later during the day, I am half naked under the sun and entrenched in the umpteenth boring Toro irrigation plant, I am digging or screwing pipes one to the other, mounting sprinklers etc. I am alone at the endless building site in the remote val d'arda, high up on a hill where a villa is being made. I have no time to enjoy the scenery, the unusual birdsongs, the silence and wisdom of this particular dale. Only I notice how suddenly the sun is not present as it was, the clouds of the second half of August have arrived. Now and then I squint and look up at the dramatic canvas in the making. By the end of the day, the sky is broken into many districts, layers of skies of different intensity, drawings of nothingness and vapors of rare beauty. Some strokes are dark grey, others white against the blue and boringly, all I am able to think, pervaded as I am by a feeling of smallness and wonder is the classic: wow, it is so beautiful it seems fake. And then to laugh at the eternal joke, that if it was fake (a sky of Canaletto as this could be), it is so beautiful it could be real.
What a disappointment, a disillusion: to be in the world and yet not having a grasp on it, only a handful of small tricks and jokes to deal with it day by day. I think I have written these pages already a million times, sign that my feelings are not moving but in circles.

Driving back home, alone in the noisy truck, the sky above the road is of yet another sort, because it is so late. Getting dark, closing up and low, the end of a day's tale. And melancholic I keep on driving, thinking that skies were all there it was worth remembering today and it is all so difficult to keep together.

La domanda è rosso fuoco e la risposta è blu.
-- Paolo Conte

Without any emotion I get the old Fiat truck out of the garden gates, thru the village and across hills and fields, down the slopes, up the slopes, in line at the stop and behind the tractor and on. The truck is hard to drive, noisy when I try to extort its gears, hard to steer. Pedals are too high. The tumble of tools and machines and vegetation remains of a day's work shifts and rumbles in the dump, I occasionally check on it in the rear view mirror like there was something I could do to prevent a disaster.
The other cars speed off pissed and liberated as they pass us.
My hands let go and grab at the same time. The truck is pulling us away from here tonight.

The sun is about to go down, the clouds are resting on the Apennines, the yellow and warm light comes in somewhere east of the road, then it moves in front and hides again, only for few beats I feel its touch against the dry skin of my face.
Nothing looks like in the big city far away. For one thing, there are hills again and again green in patches, where the corn has been reaped bright and troubled. Striped by the vines. Dark green where are the lines of cypresses. The bales stand scattered and still and like a vision in a courtyard a old watermill is spinning. There is nothing romantic or idyllic about it, everything is equally dying or slipping away as if far from the reach of the hands of those who live it.
Cars are parked out of the occasional bars. Ladies and Men are visible smoking at the tables. What do they talk about in the end? I wish I smoked too to give something to do to my fingers now, take 'em off the wheel. Hooded crows glide down from the hills to the fields. The magpie flies away from the pave. The last cicadas. These know nothing.

I sing in my head trying to remember Tupelo Honey, La busa noeuva, Fuck me pumps (no luck). There is no radio in the truck, but me and the young colleague don't make conversation this evening, we are tired but it's not that it's those stupid disputes about this or that menial bullshit regarding work, when everything pushes against it and we don't have the right things at hand, or the machines go wrong or I make too many questions and the time passes and we both feel left out and frustrated -- and here we are, at the end of this long lost day in the province, and we'll rest on our bitterness until we part. Tomorrow morning it will all be forgotten.

Lord, this trip is endless. Maybe it is all this silence above the engine of this god forsaken truck. These words in my head. I am amazed. The tiredness seem to be getting out of my spine and my hands and get to the wheel and through the wheel to the road and all the landscape with it, enormously tired and incapable of coming to an end. The world vibrates with our bodies and this truck and we roll, forever.
After every bend there is another piece of road, other trees and gravel pathways along our way, farm houses tractors and old men still working the fields. Only old men. Light stops where are the houses. Huge trucks full of sands coming the other way. Fanatics in full cycling gear hard to pass. White signs with places' names on it. All the signs of the province. I feel sad because we don't even comment the two or three pretty girls walking by and fuckable. I feel sad for this day gone, swallowed by the fatigue, I am incredulous because I got out of the house almost thirteen hours ago and I am still here, at the wheel of the truck, trying to bring our ass back home, and I wonder exactly on what I proudly consider myself a free man. Etcetera.

The expanse of stones of the Nure is white under the sun. I squint and the young willows and poplars of the riverbed stretch out in the glow. That's where the valley gets narrower, and all the houses on the hills are there. I think that I am bored and that I should have ignored the message. I think that there's too much Robinia. The waters of the river are visible in pools and shallow and not very inviting. Behind our backs goes the muffled pump of the music from the public swimming pool. I think what am I doing here?
My neighbor's daughter in her swimsuit is splayed on her old deckchair and me, I sit on a larger rock. She talks about her old mother, listing and discussing her diseases which her mother also lists everyday. Then she talks about herself. What she does. Her relations with the world. Her boyfriend. Her "company".
"And there is Martina, who is my cousin, and Susy my girlfriend and her husband and there is Luigi, who is so funny, and my sister, the other sister is married and I never see her although she lives right here in Bridge, and sometimes there is Giovanna, only when we go dancing, and my boyfriend he's rarely there, and there's a lot of people we meet when we go to Tuna, like, the girl that works at the butcher here at the supermarket, you know? And that guy we saw at the parking lot and lots of folks from Plaisance as well."
She has a meticulous tone as if it was essential to be very accurate. I am quelled.
She moves about the deckchair with her half naked body, I can't see her eyes because of the sunglasses which bothers me so I look away and think what am I doing here? I thought I wanted something but I think I don't want anymore. To make sure I interrupt her and ask about sex.
"How's sex around here Ely? Is it easy to have some?"
She looks a bit taken aback. Shrugs. Takes off her glasses. "Not really. I mean. I grew up in Plaisance and even there, when I was twenty or so, it was not something a young person should want easily. Why you ask?"
"Oh, you know. To have an idea of how it is growing up around here", I lie. I feel sorry. I think she is very nice and charming. I am bored and I think, what am I doing here?
I insist to go walking up the river a bit, to look for chances to bathe. But there aren't any, no there aren't we agree, except there is one, one big pool, with transparent deep enough waters and under the shade of prostrated branches of Robinia, but she says, I wouldn't swim here. You can drown easily here she says. I am still looking at the still waters as she walks away. I want to jump in the water, monday is near but she calls me to the car, the car which is roasting under the sun in the empty parking lot.

You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
-- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

So I live in a castle... It is a very old castle, with walls one and a half meter wide. Very cool in summer. I'm staying in a c-shaped apartment with fireplace, chandeliers and a series of rooms that indiscreetly lead from one to the other. There are two bathrooms and two bedrooms, countless pieces of very old furniture I'll never use. Portraits of someone's ancestors. Candelabrums. Remains of a mummified country mouse in the courtyard.
Half-hill and facing the river, the valley and the SP something that is so little used, the castle would be in the sweetest position, at least during the summer (it's on the shadow side of the valley). Too bad it is also facing a huge warehouse right below, where they seem to be building or storing aluminum frames. Because I am at ground level and because of the young ash trees and the apple tree just below my windows, I see little of the warehouse. The mating cicadas cover most of the noise too. Who cares anyway. Nights are filled by cricket limbs and very quiet, except for a mysterious bird that makes a very monotonous whistle around 1 A.M. that seems almost electronic. Out of the window above the hills a million stars shine.

There is no television nor telephone nor internet. What I do is stealing the connection from the residence hotel I stayed in, back to the village, parking outside of it and behind a corner. I still have the password for their WI-FI shit. But it's not like I can do this that often or for that long, so I apologize to those who wrote me emails and got no answer. Be patient because I am trying to come out of a situation here, etc.

Libi and I live apart now, she's in Milan and me here, in general quite far from any interesting form of civilization.
Folks don't seem to be very nice around here. Wary, cantankerous with each other, coward, greedy and flat, they don't make that much impression. Twenty-something years old girls who describe their ideal man beginning from the money he's supposed to have or make. So filled with negative ideas. Proud of their sunglasses, coming out of their brand new cars in superclean sweatsuits. The intrusive rude looks of the locals you pass by, typical of the solitary mammals on the edge of their territory-- For so long I complained about living in the city, dreaming of the countryside, and I suppose I am being punished now, for my lack of sense of reality.

True, here I can go swimming in the Nure river right across the road. Or to be more exact, I can lay down in the waters or else wet my calves, since the Nure is quite dry this time of the year. I can walk around my apartment without going in circles like a fly around a chandelier, or make a fire in the fireplace to roast me something, which I have no intention to do, but still. Yet all this could work better, was I here with someone who wanted to stand by me. But hey. I complain too much.

Thing is, I am not working now. I hurt my back at work, been at the hospital three or four times, still don't know what hit me. Been through quite awful paralyzing pains that are slowly fading away but still lurk around. Because this is Italy, and because I hurt myself while working in "black" -- which is to say, illegally -- I am obviously not being paid a single bit while I am so to speak invalid. It still takes me few minutes to stand up from horizontal position, and I walk around funny and aching. I can't lift weights and stuff. How can I be a gardener now? Am I a gardener now at all?

As the story goes, if I don't get well soon I'll be regularly fired, which nobody could consider a evil or unreasonable thing to do on my boss' part, because, c'mon, that's how it goes right?
Blah... I think he quite enjoyed himself while preaching on the fact that this is a manly job I am possibly unprepared to do, that I should lift weight like this and that, use my energy like this and that, feeling himself probably younger and stronger and manlier as he went on with his bullshit. Me nodding respectfully.
On the other hand, I can't blame him. I have my problems. I wish I was feeling younger and stronger too, instead than broken and not wanted and filled by ominous self-pity like I do feel now.

Funny how everything that seems friendly dissolves so rapidly, so quietly.

I am staying in the castle anyhow. I pay €350 a month for it in case you were wondering, nobody wants to live around here. Without a piece of paper or anything, of course: all "in parola", "in word". Perhaps exactly because of this I preferred it to a brand new satellite-wi-fi-ready apartment in the village, with parking spot and a supermarket at walking distance. It came for the same price, and that had a real contract too, but maybe I need this singularity. Besides no contract is more freedom. No village is more freedom. No "walking distances" is more freedom. I only have one neighbor here, a inaudible family in the apartment above. I know I'll have to stay here even when fired, because, let's face it, I have nowhere else to go for the moment, end of the post.

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 where he tries to look older. I can watch it. 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. The personnel knows us by now, names and room numbers. We exchange manly phrases 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 price tags 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.

-- In picture, above: Tarabulus, Lybia, sometimes yesterday night.

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.

For trite the phrase might seem, I am writing it anyway --tonight in the hotel, last hours of unemployment -- the suq was like a dream, I thought I was imagining it, my fellow gardener in his twenties, never been souther than Bologna, eyes wide felt he was like in a movie. We walked into the mess in awe and silence. Everyone we passed staring at his huge earring, at our different faces, silly smiles, funny clothes. The houses white, and low, the small shops of the bazaar filled with colorful magic, faces of the thousand races of Salambo (a book I brought with me here, and now i see why) walking towards us, and music and smells of camel skin rotting in shapes of bags. And every tree we saw on the avenue worried us. The city all around us, did not worry me. Walking with me, not inhibited by the roaring traffic, in the fading day, etc.

Lontano lontano
oltre Milano
oltre i gasometri
oltre i manometri
oltre i chilometri
e i binari del tram
Lontano lontano
molto lontano
oltre l'acqua corrente
e l'elettricità

-- Paolo Conte

Actually, running water and electricity do exist here. Concrete, and sand and sea and pines and oleanders too. I saw two dromedaries tied to a fence just outside of the airport. We had just landed with all our wrong intelligence, realizing the hot concrete of the airport was not adding that much to the heat, and were being rushed to the city by a laconic driver in a refrigerated car, to a little later be lodged into rooms filled with the smell left into the carpet by generations of smokers. Our contact is passed to me on the phone, we exchange polite and not entirely intelligible english. Nobody speaks italian, that's certainly a significant wrong piece of intelligence we had (my fellow traveler gardener not speaking much foreign himself).
In the hotel lobby, rich arabic business men lounging on the divans and near the reception half emancipated overdressed very sensual wives never looking sideways. I know I shouldn't look for a couple of reasons.
I think about Milan, only yesterday night I was packing in the heat of the night -- not so different a heat from here except for the humidity of the south mediterranean moving across the city -- trying to shove one more book about gardening into the bag... Libi was asleep. She had asked me not to leave for the third time that night, again this morning, obviously I felt like shit. Gisi called and told me that her beloved dog I lived with for a long time, few years ago, died this week, suddenly. I cried over the phone, almost silently and without words, I can't say I left with a light heart, but hey, I wouldn't have a light heart anyway. Never had one. I was so terrified I didn't want to leave anymore, but I left anyway. That's experience, I guess, when you lack recklessness. Little it matters, now it's the time of the great expectations, namely going for a walk, watching the unknown, listening to it, and all the rest.

You know how it is with me baby
You know I just can't stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine darling
for me to pretend that I'm somebody else.

Joliet Jake Blues, Guilty

From the terrace where I am standing I can see the whole beach... you can't tell from here but I know it is a beach of dark smooth stones, opaque and hot but shiny when wet, and the crowd sun bathing on the stones has troubles turning upside down when stretched, or moving without some kind of shoes on, timidly reaching for the cold waters of the mediterranean. (I bathed for one minute this afternoon).

(And other thoughts: They say gardens of presidential villas in North Africa are waiting for me and my too young colleague --waiting for prestigious italian gardeners which we are not. I am leaving in four or five days. My passport is exchanging hands. All I can think of is how much I am unprepared for the job, or if I really am not. The contract is not even here, it is there. Hopefully not in arabic? Unfortunately these consideration are even too much rational. It's unfathomable what the required tasks will be, the embassy does not leak details, the agency does not. Security. Or arrogance. We don't seem to care. Am I really about to be back to Africa after almost eighteen years? (a kid without a clue, in Somalia). Libi resents it all, coming really close to detest me. But not even for a second I had the faculty to say 'no', probably because I had nothing equally sane to oppose this thing to).

I can see Libi's naked legs behind the terrace corner, a girl asleep in the sun. The dark tent above my head flaps in the wind and the cat is still nervously exploring the place not known. Keeping the head low and eyes wide, refusing food.
If I close my eyes I can recognize Liguria as I experienced it many times during the endless afternoons at my father's court, one mile away on the other side of this small mountain, with a slightly different landscape around, not observing, maybe reading a book or trying to sleep.
Someone's working, hammering and sawing on the other side of a rib of trees which gives a close echo; the birds chirp and sing below and above, the turtledoves monotone coo goes on at short intervals. The wind. The hairy bees droning by, very close, far as well. A child yells powerfully from a large distance, probably the beach, and the neighbor's dog barks again. From down below in its garden he sees the seraphic cat moving along the edge of the terrace, the cat's in need to be menaced. Another La Spezia bound intercity runs by without stopping, right in the middle of everything alive, an insane rumble that shakes the village for many seconds, then it is the bellowing dissolving inside the tunnel; then again emerges the skewed engine noise of the occasional moped taking the bend; then it's the turn of a bubble of silence, wide and frail, inside the silence the sea breaking against the shore, and then it is the someone hammering again. (I recall myself hammering in a silent valley up north, realizing I was being the background of the landscape. What a stupid thought).

So is the punctuated activity of this greedy and sober land. Nothing bucolic. I have no particular feeling for it, but we spent these few days with little joys and this is more than we usually get, although everything is also sad, of course, and unjust, sadic, filled with guilt and loath and fear and things not said and disturbing milanese fixation with perfection and happiness.