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

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.

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.

there was this beautiful sky. I was staying in bed, I had cried, not hardly or for long or anything. Just a result of scattered thoughts of people far, the inability to summon them up, the clumsiness or weight of the world that couldn't be moved or pulled, the bitter promises of the future. I couldn't see very well, because of the wet paste in the eyes. I unhooked the mosquito net, it rolled on itself with a slam! after which the radio was playing quietly. I cleaned my eyes with my fingers curled. a unsteady coolish breeze came to my face with diverted noises from the avenue behind the condos. all words were mixed up in my head, all thoughts still as if queuing up on a bench against the wall to be called forth. it was all so familiar and this familiarity what I could stand less, less than any other form of pain or boredom. the things a ghost of once intense things I hardly could connect to now. the hatred for the city was one thing with hatred for myself, the weak--

no, not exactly that. i took the pictures of the sky automatically thinking 'this will go for the blog'. I knew it hardly mattered because I still lacked the courage to take out for a walk the things I wanted to say. the sunsetting sky was seriously beautiful. if only I had the ability to see into things like I used to. i closed the left nostril with a finger pushing air out. the right one still half-closed since then, not creaking anymore. I think it will stay this way, I thought satisfied-- so since nearly about the time my last intense emotions were, some is still trapped-- and the most shitty thing is to be uncertain of the accuracy of your own memories and the details that are fading out and, you know, this unwillingness to explain.

The days drag by.

I'm choked by food,
by the shit I expel, the words I say.
The daylight that shouts at me
every morning to get up.

The sleep which is only
dreams that chase me.

-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

The following scene is more calm. There is no trace of slapping oneself in the face and cursing out loud in the empty apartment. Kicking chairs, shaking random obstacles, people, relatives, bloggers, the heat. Counting on the absence of witnesses. On the pages everything I know is written about each vegetable form living out on the terrace. Soil, chemistry, prune and multiply. Something I am mediocre at like most of everything. Flor suggested me a new source and now I can look for more details on the internet for each of them and feeling I know more --the phrases that are useful appear to me as if highlighted on the page. But I don't really know more I am only informed.

Life is minor now. It doesn't matter the rage for the apparent phoniness of everything and the hypocrisy and the malfunction. I think I never had so little respect for myself as I am having now. Although there's no bottom end to that.
From behind comes classical music, probably Bach. The first feeling when trying to focus on the effect of the music on myself is that the music sounds so modern. The superficial consideration leaves me unhappy.

Flor found me on the internet, with little investigation recognized me out here and found the blog and asked me out. The global village. What sense can have a thing like this, we have been briefly together so many years ago and so much has happened since then and now she comes. We were very young and almost totally ignorant of love but this doesn't make that experience more relevant to me. All the contrary. I seem to remember that the sex was especially good. Or that we had fun because we both tended to be outsiders (although I was a professional outsider). But beside such vague feelings it is something dear I can barely relate to now. Life changed me anyway even if I still am an outsider. Folks don't seem to know I want Time to pass and changes to be even when I state that I don't want to get older (because of the failures). Walking around in the bookshop she said, you still matter to me, you always mattered. I didn't know what to say. I felt moved and detached and embarrassed. She seemed uncomfortable and we let the topic fade away. Myself, I stopped thinking about you when masturbating years ago, I thought, which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Our conversation flew easily. We always could talk of everything, and apparently we still do. At moments it even appears interesting. I am out of the world anyway.
Out of the bookshop the city was wet, the dark asphalt glimmering in the late afternoon light and the sopping walls drawing mysterious bodies of smudged films of water, the trees of the park a obscure still mass encircling the left side of Piazza Cavour, trapped behind the tall green fence, nobody around. The last days of quietness of the busy middle class city, skies moving from gray to darker gray, the light coming from the isolated open bar where the men stand against the counter and don't talk nor move.

It was days ago and now it is the past and it doesn't exist anymore. It is still raining above the city, and the sun light is white, the corners are damp and clothes are withdrawn from the balconies--

I understood something recently, that as much as my life can come to be a failure, as much as I keep dropping out, and as all the material means to be and fight for keep passing me by or making me fail or go mad or flee, still nothing really would interest me -- enriching my present moment -- simulacrum of reality -- as much as love life. And I am not strictly talking about my own love life, and the satisfaction of my own desires and longings -- with time my own desires and longings, my suffering and struggling and groping for love seem to become less relevant or less interesting than the general human constant reaching for love and the general wasting or losing love all around.
And as I read a honest book, or hear a true story I notice how my interest doubles or triples as soon as the element of emotion and desire, sex and good willing and wrongdoing for love appears. As soon as "I met a person" is said, "I keep thinking of him" is said. "I miss the bitch" is said. As soon as "I dreamed of you again" is said to oneself. Everything about it matters to me, provided the manifestation of love is stronger than -- I don't know, the other important things suddenly ceasing to be important. It must be that I am not capable of feeling fine in any other realm. Everything matters when it is genuine, the trivial things that keep repeating renovating and consuming themselves through the centuries through the bodies through the rooms and the drawers, and the more unpredictable, scandalous ones-- Morbid affection, violence, betrayal, servitude, mysterious bonds, inverted poles, manias and eclecticisms-- all coming down to my witnessing and participating, my own mixed feeling of stupor and acknowledgment: so this is love too.

And yet I am so incapable to love, in a proper reasonable way. I get so easily impatient as well as inert, bored, inept, false, lazy-- because my crave is for the variety, possibly-- is this why I could so little relate to the barely disclosed ambitions of Flor to go to bed with me for old time sake-- like she wanted to come up (Libi being away) and I said just park here and didn't invited her in-- she had her own reasons that had nothing to do with me, and my heart isn't prepared to bend yet. Every morning, every afternoon, every night I have someone in my mind who is far and away-- my heart isn't capable to bend yet--

Across the sleeping city we had passed near the house where I lived back then, with my father's wife and my step-brother. Every time I walk by that place in the bourgeois hell of via Plinio, something that I systematically avoid to do, a mess of bad memories and the bare square weight of past life attacks me, and I can't avoid to lash out my distaste and my disgust for those past days. The huge wooden door, always closed, and the precious shops, the brand new cars parked under the tall old plane milanese trees -- the dog turds and cockroaches in the deli and the still loners waiting at the stop of the 60-- when everything was wrong and all days were wrong and it was wrong my not being able to break out of there. My ridiculous communist so called parents so eager to settle themselves in the bourgeois neighborhoods -- and the fights, my father's yells, the humiliations and the disgust and the unbearable dishonesty of myself and who I was -- And then Flor next to me said, every time I pass in front of this place I have all these nice memories of when we were together, and I came here to visit you in your room-- it was so nice to be with you there, do you know? It was the sex but all the rest too-- With all your rudeness you were pretty welcoming, you know?

It took me so long to come up with a post and I don't know how to end it.

another day begins. the sky already in full blue, and the sun making its entrance from the left, where I can't see it but for the warm neat light reflected by the buildings in front of the window. Then so rapidly the shadows slide down and the colors get colder, flatter and more intense. The change goes with slamming of doors, dragging of doors and windows, the ringing of alarm clocks and the early noise of a muffled drill that seems a call of a cicada. This noises make the waking up of the condo and beyond that, of the big city. Libi is asleep in the other room. Or maybe waking up too. I have prepared her coffee, and I sit here listening to my heart and the world-- I think of how it is maybe not so incredible that we are being so close now, like never before -- and so I know we are different in our special way, because we can move towards each other as we part-- because it's to see each other more clearly, more naked if it's possible to say this, that makes us closer-- nobody knowing if it is temporary or not. Never we talked so much, so openly, so directly. I am surprised of how many things surprise me. Never we declared our love for each other so seriously like during these days-- something I always have problems to do-- both feeling that we are going in the wrong direction, and that there is not much else to do. Every day is learning, I said that-- and I know this is "to experience": like when you knew something existed and it was possible (for example odd ways to be with someone or to part from someone) but until it happens to you, your own odd special thing, it remains just a empty notion of something that exists like the bottom of the pond you cannot see.
We make love a lot, I think we both need it, and I guess it's one of those moments of a "story" when it really becomes clear that making love works, for all the things that cannot be told or done, things that cannot be declared and affirmed in any other way. Sounds rhetorical, but it's true that we both look now at this story with tears and tenderness and regret -- hoping to see it revive under more ideal conditions, preparing our hearts to the possibility that it might fade away and not come back anymore. I know we can't see beyond the smallest hill now.
The days are made of misery and moments of despair, generic, edgeless fear, but also of a strange excitement, at hearing ourselves saying things we only thought of saying for so long, declaration of independence and dependence, statements of possibility, claims of individuality or freedom or desire. There are no words more intense of the words of the goodbyes, because goodbyes are crossroads of different worlds that are untangling-- the world at our back opening, the world in front of us closing--
That's what the days are about, too. I wonder if it's the words we used, the courage we had to say things, to talk, that made it possible: I asked Libi if it was because we were grown-ups now. I can't express my frustration or my anger in any other way, she said, but no, I said, I mean, one could express it by closing herself up and not wanting to understand anymore, even without expressing anger, not wanting to to see or to listen. But we're not doing so. No, she said, we're not doing so. And we were amazed.