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.

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.

I wonder if this defeat will finally make the idiotic arrogance of the leaders of the center-left (grinning face in tiny picture) go away. You would think that losing with almost the 10% to Berlusconi again should do it. But I have a hunch that not few of them are actually happy of the outcome.
First of all, with their moronic single party they racked the 33%, which within the italian left is quite enough power in few hands. But most importantly, with this election they managed to erase from the political scene the "extreme" left, the green party and communists (serious face in tiny picture), which for the first time in thirty years or so are going to be out of the parliament.
I think back at the Democratic Party they couldn't dream anything better than being left as the only left, even if they have nothing of the left except the desire to be in control and the arrogance of those who think they have a exemplary, romantic past.

Well, Italy is screwed anyway, economically but more importantly spiritually and morally. The majority hates to be italian, others who love to be italian do so for the worst reasons. Everyone seems ready to sell everything only to get out of debt and buy a new car, a new political season, a favor. The political oligarchy is disgusting from the first to the last man not only because they are so corrupted, because they are always the same faces, because they are not capable of doing anything good that lasts, because they are a burden to this country, dragging it backwards against happier forces of conservation and change (both badly needed by this country).
They are disgusting because they are a mirror inside which our worst face reflects itself. I am sick of looking at that mirror, actually.

And yet were there still more pictures?
Yesterday, March 30, 1988, in the La coruña wineshop in Galicia, Spain, the children sitting between the casks at the back of the room kept looking at the television while conscientiously doing their homework. Or the day before yesterday, in Vigo, on the Atlantic Ocean, there was a kind of marriage of river and ocean waves: one did not incorporate the other, but rather, there in the estuary, incredibly gently with a light snapping sound, one was dissolved into and extinguished by the other. The river's murmur met the tide's rush and, with a stronger murmur, the river and ocean waves crept first to the edge of the river's mouth and then, with the ebb and flow, stole into the land's interior (...)

-- Peter Handke

So, Peter Handke wrote the above twenty years ago today. It is the beginning of a three-pages long micro-epic later collected in the splendid little treasure Once Again for Thucydides. This epic is entitled "Last Pictures?", and I think it could fare as the germinal manifestation of Handke's 2002's masterpiece novel Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, also set in Spain, whose original title is "Bildverlust": I think "Longing for the Picture".

Well, nothing, only it is funny I bumped into this today, having found Once Again for Thucydides laying around in the house and having browsed it while putting it back on the shelf.
In case you were wondering, the book has nothing to do with Thucydides except that Thucydides stays as a early model of the art of telling a story of something experienced first hand, and not heard of-- nor completely invented.
And what about the last, longed for pictures? It's about the same thing, I think, because nothing is harder to recover and easier to lose than a portrait of what we see, what we experience. The greatest loss in everyday's life, is the day itself, our ability to describe it and save it: not what we made of that day, with our careers and loves and cries and tasks and ideas, but what unrelatedly made that day around us, the little slice visible to us and put together by the accident of us being there then, I mean here now. End of the post.

Mis pies son como de cartón
que voy arrastrando por cada rincón.
Mi cama se hace fría y gigante y en ella me pierdo yo.
Mi casa se vuelve a caer,
mis flores se mueren de pena,
mis lágrimas son charquitos que caen a mis pies.
Te mando besos de agua que hagan un hueco en tu calma.

Bebe, Razones

At five the half moon moved above the roofs in the watery air, visibly spherical. I laid on the floor listening to an american voice talking on the PC radio into the earpiece, conscious of my back in the neat silence among the familiar walls. Talks of war and politics and people went on and I partially followed, gliding above details, motivations, tones, only minding the flowing of the voice in the stream. This inadvertence is what makes entertainment, I thought, that's why everything can be entertaining.

Later in the morning sun, helping Gisa moving a table into a elevator, I was gifted a couple of gratis not liberating laughs during the efforts. Also just before the cat had chased a fly against the window panes and effortlessly won it, as the moka blurbed its smell of coffee in the whiter space.
The story went that Gisa had lent the table to us two years earlier, and now we were returning it, and we were without a table. As me and Gisa took the table away the cat mourned the loss by looking up from where the comfortable shades between the legs of the table had just been, in the room in Libi's house. As we went across the terrace I wanted Gisa to admire the plants, to ask me which was what, she did it but only a little bit (where one quietly should squat next to the planters).

Down in the street, to the rackless roof of Gisa's long car we strapped the table with hooked elastics running through the back seat windows, the radio singing desaparecido out loud causing reproving glances of the sidewalkers, while passengers waiting at the tram stop looked upon us benevolently, mistaking us for a informative diversion.

I disengaged although previously meant to chaperon Gisa to her new house outside the city, we said goodbye, always inadequately, and she went alone and I walked away down the street, table orphan, under the tall trees fluttering up above in bright green and dark green against unequal patches of clear brown and white where the sun reached the bark. The black roofs, upper edges of the canyon, seemed to wave as well behind the waving trees. I longed for unconscious sex, for open smiles, for solidarity, for friends, for undefined merit.

I thought of Libi who was not there at the moment, at myself and my collections of guilt, I saw how she must have gotten sick of me in the end and how I-- I got frustrated with the world she wanted me to join, chosen for me, unfit for me, and I though at how we kept loving or wanting each other nonetheless, secretly, unreasonably, not able to give anymore that little much. Egoism is what makes love beside other things.
I hated all the rights and all the wrongs now, my rights and her wrongs more than everything. I walked by the windows and the beggars, entered the Panificio for a supply of focaccia, got out and felt so tired, I wanted it to be night, the peaceful night, with us separated one from the other, living off each other different rhythms of sleep, the moments I most likely loved her the most. More freely. Most sincerely. But it was too sad and I couldn't think about it anymore. The street appeared all crowded now, hurrying me against the stone walls of the condos.

-- In picture above: Lince, quarter to one.

 
I look at you and am
sort of discouraged at the thought of describing
this matter of becoming experienced
the incredulous taste of the many involuntary steps
  the shades of iello tangerine blue

I look at you and sense
my imagination that made itself
thinner over the years and worn,
to skew be yearned and altered, industrial variation of a
  vegetable never otherwise tasted

I look at you and shame
little child alive I have inside, fingers dirty
looking away and shy
  unhealed
who never yields but
   knows nada'll be the same.

-- in picture, above: carrots.

You can live your life in a crowded city,
You can walk along a crowded street.
But the city really ain’t no bigger than the friendly
People, friendly people that you meet.

-- Bill Withers, Lonely town, lonely street

So let's keep the big brothers updated on my whereabouts then. So this part of learning is over, so I am looking for a job. I reckon I probably am not pushing as hard as I could, officiously because of my love life falling apart once again (sent Gisa to be on the lookout for a new home for me, down in the outerlands where she lives now, where the men burn their wages at the Bar Tabacchi slots in front of the school or consume the afternoons fishing the Naviglio dry), mother writing me letters again to nail me down to her post-mortem future (basically to attend to her animals, in the letters she always refers to herself as dead, unconscious overhanging to snatch away frail forms of love never given), father ignoring me as always (fuck that), the waste-land of friendship (Elsa would say it's Pluto in the eleventh), school betraying me with its favoritisms --and few other alibis I pass finger to finger as the little dusty clay stones at the bottom of the planters, who cares, I attend to the vegetation on the terrace just to keep the feeling alive, the shit is blossoming, the new green is bright and little, moving, simple, courageous, all which the cat vandalizes, and Libi, I am feeling sorry for Libi, when she's out with friends and I eat alone, when we don't make love, when I come back to the old habits of staying awake at night, when we stay silent at the table and she asks the questions, that sound too much like a interrogation, and the answers are all curled up under my tongue in a word-ball, untangled strip of syllables, untellable, like the d in the keyboars that oesn't work anymore. So I dropped few papers, self-printed free-lance gardener cards, the curricula I sent or brought were ludicrous I admit, there was this page with the "green" experiences (the school, gardener, organic farm, all that) followed by the non-green experiences not having nothing to do with anything, real pretentiousness and out-of-placeness, what a gardener has to do with your fucking buried-in-the-past job as assistant to the professor of contemporary art shit at the faculty so-and-so and all that-- what an asshole I am, including the shit to the curriculum lest to be spotted as the loafer, the good-for-nothing that I am-- I mean that (my father) considered me to be or whatever-- So nobody answered (I mean not even "NO"), typical italian arrogance, but basically I didn't give a shit except for what others want to think of me, y except maybe for that one vacant spot, the job I really sought for, sure that they were going to call for me, but didn't, see I always believe I am going to be lucky, funny like that.

-- in picture above, three from the terrace. which reminds me, it's equinox tonight, time of the year to plant few of certain seeds I have left.