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.