I came to Libi's studio to attach to the ceiling a couple of venetian blinds, hang a couple of scaffolding and to screw to an old table the two button-makers Libi uses when she makes cloth buttons. We already put off this thing two or three times since it is not easy to have me doing things. So Libi opens the door, I get into the house and put down the bag with the drill and there's this communication door to her grandma apartment because Libi can't afford to have her own atelier or something, and through the passage I see her grandma sitting stuffed into a small armchair with two or three pillows and a loud TV set in the background. Next to her is her Ukrainian maid, slavonic oblique eyes and large cheekbones, a skin all scribbled by lines of wrinkles. I never met either of the two ladies, so I cross the room to give them the hand. The room is an old used room of an old used apartment that used to be lived in by many people. They say some of them died in the camps during the war and others survived and later died of life. There are the old photos, the faces so dark and smiling and a collection of bad and good pictures hanging from the walls, a large opaquish mirror where I can watch my figure approaching.

We don't chat or anything, I just say "nice to meet you", stand, look around. Smell of artichokes or peas. I shake with grandma first, shriveled in her chair, and her hand is moist, kind of completely damp with a warm sticky liquid, possibly saliva. Her eyes scrutinize me rapidly and shyly, not very present in the moment. Her mind must be thinner than it used to, evaporating in the late age like the words coming from the TV and leaving no trace. I then forget to shake with the Ukrainian lady because of the saliva on the palm of my hand, kind of shocked for a second there, and I step back where there's Libi still in the door and then come back to shake the Ukrainian lady too.
"I'm sorry" I say, I smile of myself and try to make it a little warmer. I still don't give a shit about either of the two ladies or the situation but I'm here. I know how Libi sort of weeps for her family when she's alone, because she's a only child, she says she's going to be the last one to know of her family, of how it was, what all the names and things and places meant, and how even new lives brought into it would be outside of it because it's too late. I guess she's right. She tried few times to get me interested with her family story to no avail-- now I'm sorry she doesn't try anymore, but better that way-- I'm the guy who drives her mad declaring his indifference or enmity for family bonds, she found the wrong guy at that-- but it's the same for me, Libi, the connection is broken and lost --we all waited too long. But I don't care. Why? because the mythology died a long ago I guess--

Libi behind me smiles in the opaquish mirror and says something to he maid. Tries her grandfather sunglasses on and smiles. She has that slightly disturbing householder inflection I never heard on her, insensitive and strangely moving --sign of the distance-- as she gets closer to the mirror to watch at herself from behind the enveloping glasses.
"I'm keeping the glasses" she announces. Almost in synchrony her grandmother declares that she has to go to the bathroom and the two ladies get up, move to the corridor to the bathroom disappearing in the friendly water pipes noises.

I didn't said hello to Libi very warmly before. I am grumpy and bored and disappointed by everything. Why is it so? All so unhappy and tighten up, ridiculous. It is like wanting to see faces without the courage to look for fear to be looked at. I think of a word to describe this feeling but I don't have any-- I think at what is Libi thinking of me when I feel her glancing at my sphinxy face. That I am crazy, that I am a tone deaf music, that my distrust is cruel-- that I am lost to her love or help--
Why is it that I can't-- admit that I am better now than I used to be?

I should have told her how she looked beautiful in those sunglasses and instead I looked away-- there's always something more important in the thoughts and I can't be there. I never learned to be there-- I only managed to, by accident-- I still don't believe to or seriously take all the wounds we're carrying but it must be fear-- lack of desire--

How was the phrase in that movie, "that's what makes me clumsy, the absence of desire."
Peter Handke, of course--

The atelier in her grandfather studio. All around is the endearing Libi's classical mess, piles of clothes and the armless legless dummy I bought her in that little store of used stuff on the navigli.
I start drilling holes making the awful noises go around in the house-- and I picture the noises entering every room of the old used apartment, door after door, carpet and walls and chairs and quavering cups, and it's like if in the noises we all hide how much alone we are.

My neighbour mr. C. is a fifty years old ex-transvestite ex-workman and a pleasant storyteller, who knows all sort of tales about celebrities and underdogs of the old Milan's so called 'transgressive' life.

I bump into him in front of our condo, which is a classic six floors milanese apartment building with two stairs, a glass front door, a foreign underpaid maintenance man and a lot of fights among the residents.

I am entering the building as C. is coming out. He wears a kufia and a black leather jacket, worn out blue jeans. A small cap on his few hair. His lips are a little too inflated and give him a faint constant smile. But maybe it's just his disposition. His eyes are incredibly vivid and always ironic. A typical milanese. He's soundly fighting to close the glass door which is broken. He says: "with all these hookers up here they ended up breaking the door finally!"

Dang! I knew it... Since when I came to live here, six months ago, I happened to notice certain always-closed shutters on the other side of the small courtyard. Only now and then one or the other of the shutters could be spot opened, with a man (always a different one) standing there at the window for a cigarette. Once I glimpsed some weird furniture all in gold in the inside... a couple of girls lounging around it...

I have intuition for certain things. Just give me few details and I'll be our Sherlock.

I used to point at the shutters and say to friends: prostitution is going on in there! but inevitably they were convinced I was making some sort of joke, responding with some other boring joke. Mostly they censor reality or are uninterested by it, so you have to stick to commonplaces when it comes to the outside world. Because of that I don't hang around with them too often, it's too laborious for me. Doesn't matter. Now thanks to mr. C. outspoken off-steaming the truth was finally out.

"Hookers!" I say, "really!"
"Oh sure!" He points at two other lines of always-closed shutters facing the street I never noticed before, "...these apartments are all occupied by girls and transvestites prostituting. They're all foreigners, the girls say they have husbands or fiancees but it's not true, it's just fake marriages for the permit of stay... You have no idea the stories this condo endured in years!"
C. lived here for thirty years.
I laugh, "this makes this condo very much more interesting now."
"Yes but listen,", he replies, "my balls are broken already (italian say: I've had enough). Two years ago they raped a girl on the third floor. Last year a woman collapsed in front of the building and nobody helped her and she died. Last month another case of rape at the expenses of a poor albanian prostitute at the upper floor, with the complicity of other two of these junkie bitches (true: it was on the news). It's all drugs, boozing, bad faces coming and going here. And mr. Baulio, who owns almost any apartment in the building, rents those small rooms to the girls for an absurd €600 a month. They prostitute all night and day long, he makes loads of money, men of all sort always hang outside here and the building is screwed. I'm sick of it."

I sympathize with his indignation and encourage him to write the letters he wants to write to the condo manager. But we both know it's useless. The manager works for mister Baulio and mister Baulio is a big mafioso, who bought all those apartments for nothing after they burned down years ago. Nothing in the condo happens if he doesn't want to.

The rich gets richer these days, says mr. C. ,"the middle class doesn't exist anymore". He's a landlord after all, He must be surprised to learn that his word should but is not that powerful.

It happens so, that suddenly one of the rats in the cage is so much bigger than all the others that law cannot even touch him, and all the other rats are too divided to do anything, and the big one can only get bigger.

C. runs away, we say goodbye cheerfully, and I finally enter the building. I think of all the bad stories he just told, and I know I'll have to say to Libi she must pay attention.

But, you know, I am happier.
That's because my ruling passion is to uncover things that complicity of the folks hide away from me.
It's always been that way.

And, kind of nothing right now makes me look at the future with more confidence and cheerfulness than knowing I live in a phony middle-class building which is in fact a giant brothel in the middle of a phony middle-class city which is in fact a huge ratcage in the middle of a phony conformist catholic nation which is in fact an immense headstrong den for habitual sinners.

-- In picture, above: today's sunset as seen from the condo in object

Guy #1: I call you then. Because there's a girl with a dog for the apartment.
Guy #2: Really, with a dog?
Guy #1: Yes, she got a job though, she teaches children to crap.

-- "...insegna ai bambini a cagare": overheard in via delle stallacce, Urbino, few days ago. Urbino is the city where everyone who is not a student earns his living by renting apartments to students.