It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

-- Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character... People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the "alternatives" go to the pub "revolucion" apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever-- although nothing does, just like it didn't the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone's ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.

Could this, Mr. Tagomi wondered, be the answer? Mystery of body organism, its own knowledge. Time to quit. Or time partially to quit. A purpose, which I must acquiesce to. What had the oracle last said? To his query in the office as those two lay dying or dead. Sixty-one. Inner Truth. Pigsand fishes are least intelligent of all; hard to convince. It is I. The book means me. I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me?

-- Philip Dick, The Man in the High castle

Early night over the city, wet and rained over, folks from the apartment below yelling in front of the TV for the Milan soccer team to score. Sometimes softly warbles through the floor the chant Milan Milan, and someone else, further away beyond the projects blows a canned horn. But everyone who feels like cheering cheers apart and the community exists only across the TV sets. The land all around is cooling and drying, quieting up. The world of the spectators watches the spectacles.
I went to see Jawa today, tried to talk. Things never go like you imagined them if you have imagined them too much or too hard, because your mind can warp reality and compromise it. I mean, we talked, even laughed over it, because the baby has her own same blood type so "this doesn't help us, does it?". But it seemed so far-fetched to her I just dropped it right away in our laughs. It would have been better to drop it anyway. I left soon, she smiled from the threshold and the little kid was crying his short sob in the commotion of the door opened and closed and the distractions going away. I went for shops looking for a new bag not too big, not too small, but in the bourgeois city all the luggage is sinister and well mannered and is a bunch of boxes on wheels. I looked at the travel books and they all seemed useless. I wanted to buy the I Ching since when I read The Man in the High Castle, I had a couple of questions in mind, but I couldn't find the Adelphi copy I wanted. I met with Libi at home in the afternoon and we went to bed and after a while I managed to let my thoughts crawl away and let the sex work. We lay in bed for a while afterwards, the light from the gray sky gone dimmer and the room cold and under a blanket we stayed against the darkening orange wall. Whenever I looked down at her Libi smiled at me and then she said, you should never forget I'm the one who likes what you do to her. She came closer and against my chest and mentioned all the things she liked and we pictured them and I kept feeling inadequate but I didn't tell her. Then Libi left for the sewing school and the door remained open and I could hear the buzz of the city, the fainted honking and the throb of motorbikes and the tires accelerating on the wet surfaces of the street. Nothing else. Birds were silent or unintelligible below the afternoon onslaught of the city noise.
But that was before the night came, and then late at night, when Libi was sleeping alone in the other room with her head resting on a slim pillow near the orange wall, and the soccer match had been over for a long while, and I was writing at the green table and posting on the blog this post and all around had a duration and it felt familiar and distant at the same time. But that wasn't too original a feeling, and it stayed on the surface and I don't know what to do with it.

I hadn't seen coming such an amount of humor and wit and cleverness from George Orwell, whom I imagined more bleak and sorrowful and depressed than this. I'm almost done reading instead a (quite huge) book filled with precious reasoning and useful thinking and historical material, and some of the essays contained in it are small masterpieces of the genre. Many of the political ones are -simply put- still very useful tools today, when the authoritarian "New world order" and a "totalitarian world" are in my view nearer than ever.

One essay, dated 11th december 1945, is instead about the decadence of the english language, as Orwell saw it happening chiefly by the spreading of political and technical jargon. The funny and wittier part of the article is when Orwell picks or makes up pieces of bad writing and puts them aside with simpler and clear-cut pieces of literature (such as the Ecclesiastes, for instance). Quotes from communist pamphlets and psychology and history essays are put together to prove the ineffectiveness and the "slovenliness" of modern english, whose obvious faults are: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words.
Then Orwell puts down six simple rules to keep your written language at bay from contemporary decadence, and I thought I could share them with you. I personally saw in them all the potential and actual defects of my own writing.

1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used in seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word were a short one would do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

In another part of the essay Orwell writes:

...political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck.. this is called elimination of undesirable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

I mean, everyone can see how the examples Orwell gives (and of the bad use of the language that defends them) could not at all still be used in our world today, could they.

Coming down I entered a tavern. The green air, reflected by the sun-wrought forests, invaded the bare little room; precious was the wine on the bar, precious the basket of bread on the floor wherein the eggs glittered. In a corner a little girl, with a red dress, had a greenish-pink maybug on her shoulder. I warned her; the little girl raised her arm, showed me a white thread disguised between her fingers. Tied with one leg to that thread, the bug was her toy. She took it from her garment, and dangled it like the pendulum of a dowser. This little country woman, character of a picture more than a human being, playing with a gem-colored bug, remains in my memory. On the beginning of our journey to Umbria, I see her as a sign of its alarming grace.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by italyisfalling.com)

My father told me once, in a rare moment of intimacy, that when he was a kid he used to tie threads to the legs of green maybugs to play with them. They flown and walked tied to the thread, for days. It was in the fifties, in Naples.)

If you lived in Naples, you'd discover that here it is impossible to have something copied. The appointee, workman or craftsman, will always make for you a different object; he considers himself under the actual spell of his own geniality, mysterious and uncontrollable. If you go to the gallery, and give a look at the copyists, you'll realize that they all change at least one detail; everyone betters the masterpiece with some of his own. Luckily there are the women, who are more practical: In no other city of the world they are equally needed to keep life in balance.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

So much for the industrial world of reproduction.

The milk of buffaloes (Italian buffaloes: see picture above). With the milk of buffaloes in Campania they make the "real" mozzarella (not the glossy white plastic you can find on most pizzas nowadays). But buffaloes are wild animals, not easy to tame and milk. Here is a bit of a story Guido Piovene run into, at the breedings in Paestum, Campania (y. 1953). Makes you think at the very beginnings, the mysterious moment when men began to tame wild animals with wise respecful tricks. I doubt things are still made that way though.

This primitive animal is strange and intelligent. She refuses to be milked if her calf is not attached at her nipple; only then, to feed him, she releases her precious milk, which otherwise she can hold back. And so, for each milking, the calf is shown to the mother; this ceremony, though, requires a sort of rite. At the moment of birth delivery, the only man the buffalo recognizes, the keeper, yells her name into her ear. The name does not consist of one word, but of a sung phrase. The buffalo does not forget the phrase anymore; it becomes her proper name forever, and at the same time the plea of the calf asking for milk. Even among two hundred buffaloes, each one of them knows her own distinguished phrase. The keeper told me some of them, which I transcribe from the local dialect: "She meddles in everything; you're never happy; the song is nice to hear; I like her because she's good looking and young; Donna Rosa controls them all; you are being presumptuous; I am truly beautiful". Other phrases, according to the moods of the keeper, reflect political ideas or sport passions; with some the keeper take advantage of his master, and even insults him, since the master cannot interfere between the buffalo and the keeper. As I said the phrases must be sung; it is an oriental chant, certainly of remote origins, similar to the one the muezzin sings from the minaret, and that the keeper sings at dawn before the cattle. After the song the buffaloes get out of the cattle and docilely give themselves to the milkers; without the magic phrase they wouldn't come out and they would use all their wild fury to rebel against any attempt to milk them.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

On this blog I often quote passages from journeys in Italy recorded by travelers. From now on I want to call these quotes "once upon a land", since they mostly revolve on what the falling country was, and isn't anymore. (I know it's a little too conservative as approach, but I do believe conservatives are needed in a society as much as liberals are.)

For example, I will quote from the monumental Viaggio in Italia ("Journey in Italy") written by Guido Piovene in 1953, at the time of the other transformation of Italy which was in the end the same transformation still happening today (the erasure of the Italian rural culture).
Piovene was a conservative christian, and not entirely happy with the deeds of Italian modernity. At the time as a writer he was laughed at by all the liberals and the communists, but today I believe it is more clear what was it all about.

In his book Piovene details everything from landscape, folk culture, urban life, activities and crises between modernity and that thing you had right before modernity back then. It's the perfect vademecum of what cannot be found in Italy today.
It makes a moving read because everything he describes is lost, and also because the regional characters he identifies so thoroughly, and the passions and the faults, are still visible as ghosts in the background of the Italian regions today.
Hedonist Veneto, reserved Umbria, practical Lombardia, imaginative Campania, passionate Emilia and so forth. Regardless TVs and freeways, the Italian regions could still be like those small states, each with its superficial or profound differences in the culture, the attitudes and habits of the people.

If only we weren't aware that this is the left-over of the past, and not at all an indication of what tomorrow will be, given that tomorrow will probably simply and justly be half Muslim and half superficial soulless western culture and nothing more.