I think I went fast to the end of my story, because it was so short. Trembling a little and nervous, or probably terrified. But all the amazing people were there. Having heard the others read made me feel better. And Math, she was so calm and so expressive and lively when she hosted and read Dennis' letter she made even me calm and collected.
Everyone was great, and I envied those who moved to laughs the listeners, and everyone else, each one of them being younger than me, closer than me, more connected than me to everything around, the city, the language, the nation, the places.
I came all the way from Milan, Italy and suddenly I wasn't even supposed to be reading anymore and nobody had told me but in the end I read anyway, and I was happy. And all the time I was learning again how everything about this vague dream, this wanting to write in english, wanting to do without my roots and my falling nation is a folly, A FOLLY, but still I can only follow that quivering thing deep in my throat, can't help it, there are still living narrow dreams there, irrational, unmotivated, unplanned, useless, that keep me going and alive.

I rewrote the story for the event just two days before the reading, in bits from different cyber cafes and internet points in the city, foreign computers, and of that rewriting I am happy too. Because of different accidents the story that originally got on the anthology was so wrong, and I always hated it and I still hate it, there in the middle of so many great pages. But just to change it into something else, something I now feel for and can defend, it has been emotionally important, even if it is not important at all.

I read, stumbled on the words a few times, probably pulled a ridiculous accent, and the girl behind the counter started to loudly run the coffee machine as I went on, and in the background the traffic on Allen street steadfastly kept running. But I was focused on the page and just trying not to screw up my pronunciation too much like Dita recommended me, and I felt fine. And the story was short anyway. The bookshop small and cozy, well illuminated. Afterwards I signed copies of the anthology and didn't know what to write and I only wrote stupid things and I rather should have just signed the copies, I was so unprepared at the idea and I always hated the thing where the writers sign books and instead, I suddenly realized how these things can be important, and pleasurable, because they make people closer, in indirect ways I am only starting to understand now. I was impermeable to that in Italy. Barely disturbed by such scenes. And it's like how it is important to remember names when you shake hands with people, and instead I always forget them. Although I never forget the faces, and probably too many other details I keep with me forever, possibly without a reason or a use.

Later the bar was dark and lovely and only my inability to be easygoing and easy at making friends and be interesting or carefree or whatever prevented me to let myself go and fully enjoy all the moments. But none of these anguishes is much important.

This morning right after dawn I descended seventh avenue from uptown, dragging my luggage and homelessness back to the hostel that kicked me out for two days. Black people and Latinos where everywhere around the opening places, off and on trucks, pushing carts, delivering, arranging, preparing, cleaning and setting up the city for the later people, some of them look so tired or sad in the gray early saturday, others all busy in the frenzy anticipation of the rush hours to come.
Few mellow groups, each with its own leader seemed to be coming back from parties, famous actress passed me by too in the very changing light above the city, as the shadows thickened at the base of the tall buildings, and only occasionally the cold wind came pushing from the side, channeled through into the streets.

The coffee places were still closed, my knee still hurting, still limping all the way, but I wanted to walk anyway, lugging the sad wheeled case about to fall apart or explode.
All the emotions at this point were drained out. All my feelings, back to a familiar state of disillusioned hope where nothing is clear except solitude, of myself and so many, the necessary condition to be dragged across the puddles like a broken case on wheels.

As you may have learned from previous posts here, I can't be that crushed by the news. Still, the situation pretty much sucks. My profitable collaboration with the bookstore won't continue. It's ended, actually. Every intimate place has its small Hitler defending it, so I guess this is where I found myself out there. There was this small Hitler, hard-worker, nice woman, and still very positive that the response Italian workers are expected to give is total abnegation to the cause. My response was quite disappointing instead. I mean, I love books and everything, but I wasn't that good, that enthusiasts, as I should have been. I had unrequested opinions, too.
It all must be traced back to the fact that I am spoiled, I don't need to work, I must have plenty of money in the bank, I should try to work in a mine and see what it means, I have no idea what hard work means, etc. All true. Anyway, I can't stand sermons, so when the sermon started, I had to stop it.

"O.K.", I said. "It seems like I'm giving you problems by remaining here. I don't want to leave you on the spot (that's a lie: I wanted to leave on the spot), so tell me when I'm leaving. Just, please, stop the sermon. I don't wanna hear it"
"So you stay until the end of the month. But you are going to listen to the sermon, because--"
"No I'm not, I don't want to hear it, I told you"
"But I want to say it"
"Jesus. Listen," I said, "it's like when they catch you on the bus without a ticket. They can lecture you on the advantages of respecting laws and traveling with a valid ticket, OR they can fine you. They can't do both things."
"What, how does this touch our case--"
"I'm leaving. That's how being fined on the bus. So no sermon, thanks. You could lecture me if I was going to stay. But I'm not gonna stay. Simple as that"

We're having problems exchanging words and glances when we're at the bookstore together. Good ol' hypocrisy rules when a customer is in. And I'm officially looking for a job.

My boss gave up on me, because I am not a "comrade".
Everybody is a communist here along the canal. I mean among the storekeepers and the managers, everybody is recognizably from the left or the extreme left. Even if they don't call themselves "communists", it's the same, Berlusconi-wise. As many communists and former-closet communists do, they all secretly admire the shit-eater thief Berlusconi, and they just think and act like a big clan. I can spot them by a mile. For exaggerated this may sound, it's easy to say in Italy, with little margin of error, when someone who looks or talks in a certain way belongs to a certain political area. Or better, when this someone pretends to belong to a certain political area.
Well, it's incredible, considered how the traditional retailers here in Milan had always been the most bigot ones, the core of conservatism of our local society.
Now, here around in the navigli neighborhood, if you hang about bodegas and stores you just meet these non-conformist, hipsters, apparently cool and never formal shopkeepers and managers and employees who make a show of their political convictions as often as they can. Their customers, mostly making a show of their being hipsters and cool too, are so enthusiast to find "comrades" everywhere they go in the area, they can't believe it how lucky they are.

It's such a general consent of attitudes and looks it makes you sick, in a little while. When two of these fellows meet, the third or the second phrase will undoubtedly be something about Berlusconi, or the good ol' times corrupted by capitalism, or how the food it's not the same (because capitalism corrupted food), or something they both heard on Radio Popolare, and so forth.
If you have the misfortune to talk with them about politics, they will take you on the longest route to draw this big circle where everything fits into place logically: anti-capitalism, business, anarchism, individualism, communism, environmentalism, to avoid paying taxes, to make little or no difference among political parties because they're all criminals, to never pay taxes for the employees, to fire anybody whenever they feel like it because life is a struggle, because capitalism ruined society etc. To work sixteen hours a day and become greedy and crabby and stingy and addicted to work is normal too, it all fits into the big picture of how capitalism ruined everybody's life and so, shit, they are so obliged to this.

It is left to say about the employees. Are they in the same bunch, too? Well, some. But the ones that worked in the area for a little longer, they inevitably turned into disillusioned individualist, luckily only focused to look into the short supply of good-hearted or exceptional people, regardless any creed or color.

I think I already told somewhere in the blog about when Gisa worked at the pub on the other side of the canal, and got pregnant, and her boss first kept her working after late at night until the sixth month and then, when she barely could resist standing in the smoke-filled room for more than half a hour a time, he fired her, later claiming he didn't owed her any payoff money. This guy, an expert of wines, calls himself a "communist guevarist".

Now my boss. She's addicted as everybody else here to her work, since the unlucky day she found out that the more she worked the more money flew in. And she's addicted to the infamous Radio Popolare, obviously, and she makes a face every time I say something negative about someone from the extreme left, or the "real left" as she calls it. But I can't help it. I am from the left, but I also think with my own head.
So she gave up on me. Well, she gave up also because I let her down twice, when she needed me after my shift and I really didn't feel like it.

She made a scene one day.
"I consider your behavior hallucinating"
"Why, what?"
She looked at me like she wanted to send me at the stake. Then she started mocking my voice, making it the voice of someone very spoiled and lazy:
"No I don't feel like working, I can't come"
"Listen, you don't have to mock my vo--"
"I don't feel like working, I don't need it"
"All right. Go on."
"I can't stand you. You are so haughty. You obviously don't have any belief in it"
"Belief in what?"
"The thing, the bookstore. You just don't have any faith in it, it's obvious."
"Wha- You can't expect me to have faith in your own assets, do you?"
"Oh! You're so haughty!"

Everybody is a communist here along the canal, but I can't take it anymore.
I had my share of milanese communism all my childhood and adolescence, I had plenty of it, I could write entire books about this very crafted way they have to turn everything into a moral problem, in order to force you to be just like they want.
I am not like them, and I want to be as much different as I can.
I reckon this bookstore thing is really not going anywhere. I kind of have no faith into it.

On the brink of falling asleep, even if only for a few seconds sat in a segment of sun against the ugly squared pillar in Diaz square, passersby's voices undergo a sort of sublimation in my head, becoming a deeper, neater, very focused thing against a more uniform background. Could be they skidded on a plane slightly aside reality, in axis with my inside, or they just got purified, for few secs before entering the realm of sleep, of the thoughts forever evaluating and judging, the watching that always downsizes and displaces.
It's like they turn, seconds after I close my eyes, more alien and more beautiful at the same time: like from the world of the sleeper, next to its clumsy nightmares, the world of real things would appear. A world of resonant, passing things without anything of the fuzzy confusion alert senses give us either in dreams or reality.

Voices of conversations slide beneath the plastic chair I sit on sprawled, sounding so definitive and objective, like this woman saying "I've been running all day and cell phone was off", it's like her voice is perfectly floating it in the void, for the first time in the world. Then she goes, and her voice fades out, and a man approaches the bubble of my perception, the deep tone of his phrase fading in, so clear, "I knew he was gonna accept that".

Alert. I'm awake. I wasn't sleeping. I open my eyes and run them swiftly to the XVII century books set on their side edges over the stall. They're all there, thank God. I know I should stand up now to look busy and conscious to the folks on the other side of the stall, and I should also stand up to avoid falling asleep like an ass again. I try to recount how many hours I have been staying awake now, I come to the quite impressive result of thirty hours, so I recount again, I decide it's twentyfivehours and I have to last at least four more. I wish I was allowed to sleep here for a while. The sun is warm and pleasurable and keeps my eyes half-closed.

I stand up. I move in the shaded area near the stall, where the air is cold and wind-flapped, the books are all opened at wrong pages. I move around arranging leafs, I look busy. Then I move back behind the stall and start the restless dance of the chilly seller, who pushes his feet against the ground one by one, sways his hips, bobs his head, looks into vacancy. I don't have the prescribed woolcap and the half-gloves, but I enrich the dance by singing in my head, and few words of the song I'm singing slip out and get heard. Someone looks at me. I grab a book and get back to the seat in our moving segment of sun. Fuck you customers who never buy no shit.

(in picture, above: gettin' back home, later, riding the lousy brand new green tram)

I am at home, standing in front of the bedroom window. My mother's voice comes hasty from the phone, I just answered and we're already into the story of her occasional paresthesia to the left hand and arm again, the difficulty to swallow and stuff, and I am once again worried not only by what she is saying, for how much adornment of irony she might be rapidly seasoning it with, but by the fact that she already told me this story, about the cortisone and the physician who doesn't understand or thinks she's an aggressive hypochondriac, and her depression undergoing it all, and even thought she's always been quite absent-minded, I know it's not the first time after the operation she just seems to have no recollection at all of entire pieces of our telephone conversations.

Now she's talking in a rush and it feels like she's worried of being interrupted. She has her mother's story in mind, as I do. This doesn't help neither of us to be rational. But I already said that somewhere else.

I sit on the bed and close my eyes against the sun blazing. I let it heat the skin of my face and I watch this moment developing, when I figure that something bad is already happening, and maybe I am already into it, and then I become suddenly stiff and calm, as all the tension invisibly swirls in and out my stomach, and I wonder if this preparation to events is in fact desire for events to come, any event: to make life more substantial.
Outside the window, at the bottom of the horizon around the big ball of fire the usual blocks of flats piled up to harbor human beings dissolve upward in the mighty light. The city continuosly plays in the background its instruments, mostly engines, and few calls of the living, birds included, bounce between the walls. I think about masturbating for a sec, I don't know why.

"I know you're having this new job now", she's saying, "and that it's probably too soon to get a vacation or something."

It's not that kind of job, I probably should say, but I don't say anything. It would be pointless now to explain her how not only there's no such thing as a vacation to "take" at the bookstore anyway, but also that days off work because of flu or shit like that are not even paid, and then you have to recuperate the lost hours anyway.
So I think, yeah, the boss wouldn't be very understanding if I ask her for 'a vacation'.

"... I am going to do more exams this week, but most likely I will have to be operated again", she says. "I'm asking you first. I'd need your help for a week or so with the dogs and the horse just like you did the other time. I'll pay you of course. "
"Mom", I say. Or better, I call her by her first name, since I never called my parents 'mom' and 'dad', given the fact that they just didn't allowed us to, 'cause it was 'bourgeois'. "Mom, what kind of operation? Why?"
"The same operation."
"Oh, no, shit. Not that."
"Yes honey. The first physician is not listening to me, he thinks I am a crazy old witch, he says the post-intervention situation is fine but I went to this other one who is supposed to be a big name of neurology in Bari and he just told me that the situation instead is possibly bad, and that all the stuff I am experiencing right now it's because of this fluid that is still in my skull, osmosing blood from the meninx and all. I've got to do something. I might as well end half-paralyzed and then I'd be way much more idiot or crazy"
"What, wait, why the second doctor should be more reliable than the first"
"Because that one is just not considering how I feel now. This one instead seems to be actually interested in my condition."
"The other is defensive because he made the intervention, that's all. Still it's one to one..."
"No it's not, because it's not only the exams, it's how I feel. What should I do? You tell me."
"Let's hear someone else, send me all the papers and I'll find a neurologist here in Milan..."
I say this because in terms of public services like hospitals and stuff, I'm unreasonably intolerant toward the southern italian medical world. I can't help it. No offense, but inflation of hypochondriacs really can ruin it for everybody. I'm one of them, so I should know it.

"Listen, if you can't come here I perfectly understand..."
"I think I can make it if necessary" I hear my voice saying. "Don't worry".

When later I hang up I wonder why I said that. Being away for an entire week after only a month working at the bookstore. That can't be easy.
Since I have problems thinking I'm a good or generous or caring fellow, I just wonder if I said that because subconsciously I might already hoping to be fired from the bookstore. I picture it, under the heat of the sun behind my eyelids, and I see I wouldn't mind very much being fired. After all my father was right when he said I had no tangible idea of how 'the rest of regular people' was making it in the world.

It's about twilight outside, so the globe lights in the room, always on, are slowly getting visible now. Forced at the bookshop all day, only three customers bought something in seven hours -- for € 56 -- and I wonder how this place run its errands... After all I am expecting to be paid sometimes next week. I still think about it as I line up the titles in the scaffolds climbing up and down the aluminum ladders, while KJAZ is playing again. Some of these books have been here on the shelfs for months or years or forever probably. My hands are covered in a brown, micro, tacky dust.

Too bad the boss is soon going to make the window all hidden with new shelvings of books, because it really is beautiful to watch outside, sitting at the desk to archive volumes, the lucky side of the canal always in the sun, just about now warmed by the orange sun light setting between the roofs.
Our unlucky side is always in the shade instead , and all the entrances to the courtyards give you that dank feeling when you walk in and out of the condos.

I foresee the moment I will walk out of the place, sweeping corianders with the bottom of my shoes, it is going be cold and pleasurable to walk out finally, and just this thought, of the feelings about to come, fills out my mind to the point I almost do not notice the nth customer stepping in the bookstore who is in fact, again, a seller of his own old books to be courteously dismissed.

© some rights reserved

The first two hours at the bookstore just passed. KJAZ music is playing in the background as the sporadic life outside rolls by along the dried canal, in the white opening, over the late morning, inside the fading noises of the infinite working sites opened everywhere.
I submitted almost twenty books to the database, mostly seventy or ninety years old books with old writings on the front page from the past owners, ex-libris, postcards, once-transparent creaky yellowish covers, sometimes old blurred illustrations. Not very interesting books, the only remarkable thing was that collection of 1974 international poetry, the only less-than-forty-years-old book I did today. Numbered limited edition though. Too bad we want €200 just for that.

I am taking my break, and I am trying to write using the only small uncluttered part of the desk left, while I register with the corner of my eye the occasional presences of back lighted figures leaning over the shop window for a second, lurking over the 10€ titles and rushing away. I am thinking about my mother, whether her mind could be fading away or not, the thing she feared the most and the only one nobody can be possibly prepared to. I certainly am not prepared to that, so early, I think. But it's not going to happen.

Then summoned by this sideway visions of passing shadows in the ovattato world out there, Gisa appears, with her new long black coat by the large, sophisticated furry collar.
Her look is bright and beautiful, her smile luminous and warm, the little baby girl in the leopard-skin coat is whining for her teeth, but smiles recognizing me.
Finally you look great, I say. You rested. I did, she says. Then we talk about the fight her man got in and his broken arm. We talk about books. About baby teeth. Anything we talk about, it's dear today.
Light entered in the bookstore together with those two, I sense, it reached any scaffolds and into the music and into the things-to-do and I know it will leave me afterwards, strangely moved, embarrassed, just silent with myself for a while.
I manage not to talk about our days in Venice before they leave, and that's good, after all it's the kind of ten-years-old stuff you are not supposed to talk about that much.