-- Boy I so wish they let us work tomorrow.
-- Yeah, me too. I don’t think they will though.
-- Why not? I mean. C’mon.
-- They finally realized they needed our proposal yesterday. Now they have it. Who knows how long it can take before they fuck know what to do with it.
-- Man. Don’t they know we’ve been here doing nothing for almost fifteen days?
-- Maybe they think they’re doing us a favour. Keeping us here for free doing nothing.
-- Doing nothing is fun when you’re at home with your girl. Not fucking here. Aren’t they worried for the money?
-- I know.

(They chew on. Rice and lamb. Kish of nondescript vegetables. All is silent except the elevator music. Jamel has stopped horsing around. Disappeared from behind the buffet.)

-- Thing is it’s the government money, you know? Fuck, it’s not their money. It’s the little girl’s money, her grandpa’s money, the tall waiter’s money, that other ugly guy’s money, that fat woman’s money. It’s people’s. It’s not theirs. Let them flow, they don’t care.
-- I think I’m having a beer.
-- Ha-ha.
-- Boy, is that woman fat.
-- Like a ball. Cause she can’t have sex with me, that’s why.

(Noise of forks and knives. The plates are almost empty. They try not looking at them.)

-- I wish we were starting to work tomorrow.
-- Yeah. Me too.
-- We could have been in the desert.
-- Yeah! Or back home.
-- Yeah! Uh, it’s the other tape now.

(They bob their head. Laugh. Suddenly they stand up. The guy at the counter tries the “Inter!” thumb up but goes unnoticed. They leave the restaurant floor without a word).

this is set at a outside table of a bar in Rome, in a empty square under the sun somewhere near trastevere at the end of spring probably. we are finishing our wine or coffee. this could be a comment on things like this happening to my country. but not necessarily.

-- So Cipriana, are you really a fascist?
-- You bet I am! always had, always will. I have nothing against the non-fascists but this is what I am. Hail the Duce and all the rest.
-- Nothing against the non-fascists! Listen to her. Are we supposed to believe this crap?
-- And you, Elda, are you fascist too?
-- Sure I am... well, no I am not. Sorry Cip but you know. I was fascist but I am not anymore. They told me I have to go with the left because they are running everything and pulling all the threads, you know. They say that in my field it is important. So I reformed. I am with the left now. God save D'Alema and all the rest.
-- Yeah but you do are a fascist Elda, you know that. Until yesterday you had Fini's picture in your room.
-- I saw it, it was next Capossela's.
-- No Cip, I'm telling you, I don't give a shit anymore.

(Cip finishes her cigarette with a hard drag. Puts it out in the glassy ashtray. We admire the gesture in silence, the smoke dissolving in the sun light)

-- So what about you, Corpodibacco, are you a communist or what?
-- No girls I am not. Not a communist.
-- He's an anarchist.
-- No I am not.
-- He's pretending to be superior.
-- I am no nothing, I don't want to define myself like that anymore.
-- uh-uh.
-- So what are you for, Corpo, the comedians?

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.

How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
"She killed her husband with a knife!" said one.
"And her sons!" said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn't joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c'mon. It's years that a week doesn't go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. "It took a chinese woman to do it!" It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
"Aren't italian men usually killing italian women?" I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. "With guns, no?" I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn't mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: "If there's a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn't it funny?"
"I'll never give my husband a gun then", the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was "What I can't believe is that someone married you." I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don't expect them to be. But I didn't said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

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.

"Mi sono fatto distrarre da ogni cosa possibile, nel tentativo di non focalizzare su il nodo che dovevo sciogliere: minchiate malfunzionanti nel computer, puttanate da scaricare illegalmente, sfondi per il desktop, la caccia dei bruchi attaccati alla pagine inferiore delle foglie delle piante sul terrazzo (è più facile trovarli alla sera tardi), le litigate dei vicini, le notizie merdosissime dei merdossissimi siti di notizie (tanto ormai non credo più a un cazzo di quello che dicono, e se mi dicono di avere paura, ecco che, come magicamente, la paura si solleva dal mio petto e vola via in una risata), ricontrollare la posta, ancora una volta... There are no messages on the server. E sì che mi è costata tanta fatica scriverle. Poi ho capito che il mio problema era così banale, provenire da una vita prevedibile e volere tuffarsi in un mondo oscuro dove almeno qualcosa di inaspettato potesse succedere, ogni giorno, almeno ogni giorno. La prevedibilità non essendo imputabile alla vita tuttavia, come se la vita mi suonasse la musica sbagliata. La prevedibilità l'ho vista galleggiare a mezza via fra la familiarità e la noia, in una area appena al di fuori e appena al di dentro della mia mente bacata." (da uno dei post che cercavano di spiegare, smarritosi poi a spiegare perché non sapevo spiegare.)

I am learning that Libi is a resourceful person, more than I thought. That her soul is larger and stronger than I thought. That her sexual life, her sexual fantasies matter more for her than I thought (well, Mars moved). How stupid of me to notice these things now. Learning that she can say the strongest things without faltering a bit, like she was talking about going out to buy some milk, only lowering her eyes ("I'd jump into the fire to keep our relationship alive, but it wouldn't do no good, would it") then raising them them up and looking straight at me. Because I told Libi about Martina, and Libi learned about her and my confused feelings, I myself learned of Libi's shades of pain, and how she never looses her bravery and her sense of humor. At first comes at you as a form of denial, but then it becomes a complex and unforeseen expression of sorrow and salvation. I hadn't noticed how strong she was before (I said that already, did I. These are the things you go on saying on and on like in a remix when you know you are causing a lot of pain to someone.)
I listened and answered and explained, this I did. I must be really growing up. I learned that my words aren't good until they are honest. Aren't good until they are straight, I mean. I knew about honesty, which doesn't mean I was willing to use it all the time (this is the kind of joke I learned to use in a conversation with Libi, because to no one like Libi a joke, even the meanest joke, in a dramatic moment does good). We talked about Nina, too, and for the first time Libi told me explicitly how she discovered about Nina and how much she suffered for it. So I learned that too (this was today).
"Why you didn't say anything back then", I asked. Only much later we had talked about it, only in bits. "I felt like an ass and humiliated. Just like now", she said. "That was worse than now, though" she added. "Why is so?" "Because I thought that Nina was disgusting -- as a person, you know. And I hated the idea of you two together. This one I don't know, instead, so my feeling is less precise". She really said so, 'disgusting', and only as she said that I learned how much she had suffered from it, while I didn't know, while I was sleeping or reading or thinking about myself in those stupid days of mine, probably: because she wanted to erase that person away with her stronger words.
I am learning how to bite my lips to keep from coming out words like "more than everything I wish you could wait for me", "don't stop loving me". I am learning (again) that falling in love, struggling in love, makes my heart beat harder everyday, my stomach to jump around and to give that warm weird feeling, everyday. Sounds rhetorical, the classical automatic rhetorical description of love, but it is actually true. My heart does beat harder most of the time these days. Every time I think I might be losing what I so badly wanted; that I might be a step closer to it; that I am causing tears and confusion; that I am distancing someone I love so much from me; that I might be find myself very high and fall down very hard; that I really don't know what I'm wanting --but it's oh so strong. The two dominating body parts of my love life: my heart, my stomach. They express it all, not exhaustively, but clearly. I am not surprised the heart is the metaphor of love, I am surprised I forgot I knew why.
I am learning that prejudices really prevent you from crucial experiences. Now I see people with prejudices as unlucky people, and feel sorry for them, even when I understand their prejudices so well (Nina is not 'disgusting' like Libi said. I know it. But I can't tell her why.) I learned that I want a different life, I want more things to happen around me. I learned that sometimes you are being called egoist and there's nothing you can do about it, but face it, face your egoism. I always hated the indulgence by which most of the people declare their own egoism as affordable, like if the world could cope with it, when in reality with their indulgence and self-spoiling they are making the world a worse place. I think egoism is an hazard and should not be used but in case of emergency... It is a tool that can be used and then disposed of, and because you will need it at a given moment, that moment is the time to use it and face it and accept it, which means accepting to be a smaller person. I know I am.
I am learning that knowing I will regret every single thing I am turning my back to doesn't prevent me to do it anyway. Like if I kept saying to myself, I need this mistake, this crucial mistake, like a inoculation. I am sure I need many other things that are out of reach (...). And I learned many other things, about the surprises of my sexual life, about the pleasure I feel at hearing the word "entonces", about my changing looks (no the nose still creaks but it's all right) and that maybe wanting to live it's all about fearing to die, and maybe that soon all my books will be back into a self-storage box, where they were only two years ago. Two years ago when this blog was born, happy birthday to it.

-- In picture, above, the absurd tangle of cables attached to every light pole in Tegucigalpa. No idea why I am posting this right now.

Miami says to me the same things places like Las Vegas or Saint Tropez say. Solitude, unhappiness, dominance of the appearance, weakness, boredom, excessive loud music everywhere, hard drinks, everything under a blanket of lies and money that keeps it all together. There's nothing into it and nothing I can do here.
There's many many very sexy women around on sunday night, and their unapproachability or even their easy reachability it's not something I am able to use. I long for the sex but everything that surrounds the sex keeps me away.
Walking down the streets at night I am solicited by prostitutes posing as tourists or students, and all their professional questions and attitudes make me depressed and withdrawn into myself. Soliciting is illegal, which means, like with all the illegal things, that just a little more lies and precautions are needed to access certain pleasures.
Ishtar, or whatever invented name she is using, approaches me in front of some big hotel on Ocean drive and we walk together the some twelve blocks down to the Mango club. I haven't invited or asked her anything, I only smiled at her the way I got accustomed to do here. But she wants to ask all her uninterested questions and tell her story and I let her. She's cute, but it is not a real conversation.
From Lithuania, studies in New York, all of a sudden has to pay the term to the school and hasn't the money, she is also a professional masseuse, 21, etc. I try to tell her that I am not the right target for her, that she is wasting her time. I feel more and more naive and stupid talking to her like that. I tell her that I never paid for sex and I am not going to start now. She pretends it is different if I just give her money for the school. I kind of laugh at this. Say no again. I try not to sound judgmental or anything, it's just the way it is. She doesn't seem to want to listen. Finally we part in front of the club, she goes in. She'll probably find one of the many lonesome men in there, those standing there watching at the half-naked bar girls dancing on the counter of the bar, their phallic bottles of beer in hand.
As I walk away, I think of the things I would have wanted to tell her. Those occur to me always when it's too late.
"Ishtar", I would have said, "did it ever happened to you to feel so lonesome and apart from everyone else and impossible to reach and trapped in your solitude, exactly when someone, maybe many, were desperately trying to have you, or have something from you?"
Ishtar would jump into the window opened by the word 'solitude' and say something like, "I can take care of your solitude, you know", but I wouldn't mind the interruption. "What you're doing to me right now, Ishtar, it's exactly that. You are making me feel lonesome and unreachable and trapped in my solitude. You are showing me how wrong it is for me to be here, or how wrong I seem to be for this world. I know that this enhanced feeling of solitude in some weird way is supposed to work in your favor... but I am not like that. I want the real thing, even for one night I need to know that someone is there actually desiring me or finding me attractive or interesting."
"I am just offering you some fun, if you don't want that..." she would say at that point, giving her hopes away. "I am sure the sex would be 'fun' as you say", I would answer. "But I dread the moment when the money is given, the sex is done, and nothing at all is left, not even a bit of regret. I am scared of that moment and of its consequences on my mood." Because I don't want to use the world 'spirit' or similar imprecise tools.

I walk away wondering what Ishtar would have said then. If at my words she would have wandered outside of all the prepared speeches full of details and the well known answers and the well known careful questions. I don't know. It's pretty frustrating and idiot to invent conversations like that anyway. I slowly go back to the hostel, walking under the palms and the neon lights, carefully trying not to smile at the pretty girls again, but there will be more prostitutes to dodge before I am safe in bed, horny and in a bad, bad mood.