A different version of this quite short story has been published on the amazing anthology Userlands edited by Dennis Cooper for Akaschic books, NYC.
Honestly I always hated that version of my story, it came out all wrong because of a series of stupid personal reasons that got in the way, and I always regretted it especially because of all the other amazing Userlands authors that surround it with great pages.
Anyway. What follows here is a version of it I might consider now decent and final, and that I read with defective pronunciation at Bluestockings, NYC on March 22nd 2007.
Some of you reading this might be reminded of an old post on this blog which in fact was the original inspiration both for the first and second version of this very piece.

*

you weird people by corpodibacco

I know that the smile of the grocery girl is because of my mother, her crazy looks, untidy hair, her odd clothes, the strange hat, the jabbering. You all must be weird people, says her smile, putting those useless animals before yourself.
I cave in with my own phony smile. Like I'm not like my mother. Not to be confused with her. Not of the weird people.

Outside the grocery store dogs and people move about in the brown shadows of the trees, and the metal bodies of the parked cars shine dryly, the edges white-hot under the sun.
We move out into the light and I reach for the trunk, squinting, crate of carrots in my hands, warning the old man that the car is a mess, 'cause that's the way my mother keeps it. He says okay and starts to fight his way into it, moving empty bottles around, dried sheets of old newspapers torn to pieces, the snow chain case that will tumble against his feet every time we accelerate, various slabs of dried mud spatter all around the inside, including the seats. As we slam the doors the overloaded ashtray exhales out gray and white particles that flit between our legs.
Dogs share the car, I apologize to him. Would he appreciate it if I started blaming my mother for everything? I wonder. I am willing to. He repeats three times, No problem.

In two minutes we are at the pharmacy, a quiet door gaping out on a narrow lane abandoned in the shade. At the opposite end of the alley the village suddenly disappears, and the curvy hills shine in the distant land before the Italian sea.
The old man and I part ways with a wave and a grumble, but then he calls me from the other side of the road, and he says, the grocery girl, she's my daughter. She's a good girl.
In my paranoia I figure he has a scheme that I should marry her.
The round face of the pharmacist takes its time to scan mine. There's a priest-like morbid aura about it, eyes of repressed sexual desire in the gloomy colors of the store as he hands me back the prescription.

Later I stop by an abandoned lot along the road across the olive groves in the countryside. The landscape is marked by scattered trulli and modern cement angular houses half hidden by the green.
The cats flock over meowing and rubbing themselves against the edges of the low stone walls as I get out of the car. I have detailed instructions about where the cat food has to be dropped. The small bowls and the old aluminum pans, one for each cat, are important. The pecking order is important. My mother is crazy.

Back on the shattered road I think of her, and how it would be if she died. Because she's at the hospital I am entitled to this thought. As the road winds down the hill bordered by more stone walls, further into the land I am not familiar with, I imagine a funeral, words of condolence and affection exchanged, how I wouldn't cry, unable to, maybe later on, and how unsatisfactory the long awaited sense of liberation would be, secret joy for a new life that in the end doesn't come about.
I wonder if the disappointment produced by my imagination makes me a better person or is it that I am just unprepared, that there is no way to be prepared but to imagine, and be disappointed.

As the car jolts against the roots cracking the driveway, the eight dogs rush out of the house barking and howling against the fence to cheer for my approaching smell and figure. The wind is ruffling their fur, scraps of toys and rags are scattered in the yard, their animation is irrational and sweet. All my perceptions are now flattened out to a uniform complacent, absurd lack of criticism, as I mentally go through the returning-home procedures. One bone-shaped biscuit for each of the dogs, in a rigorous hierarchical order. Two biscuits for the biggest one. The oldest barks fiercely and runs across my legs. He knows he comes first.

Hours have gone by when I'm finally done feeding the dogs and the horse and cleaning the stable.
At this point outside it is quiet as inside, only residual puffs of wind are stirring the foliage and shaking the hanging clothes. At moments, there's the crunching noise of the horse chewing on the last bits of carrot scattered in the hay. That's when I feel how after all my mother was right, to come to live this far from everything, here where communities are remote lights out in the dark and being this far and invisible is the safest thing you're left with at the end of the day.

But then some of the dogs are barking from very far out in the field, possibly at a fox. They're too far to be called back. I mentally pray not to find the fox slaughtered in the field the next day, not to have to get the shovel and the black bag and be seen from across the field again, gleaning the fox remains strewn about the meadow, carrying the rolled up formless bag to the dumpster down the hill, carelessly tossing it as if it were no corpse. But the dogs continue to bark, excitedly.

¹ you can't be away from home without having your falling country still falling in the background. Either this tragic truth comes with you wherever you go or its consequences expect you when you come back.

² whoever you talk to will try to discourage you. Whether they are slow-food-organic farmers, hotel-agriturismo-pensione managers, restaurant-bar tenders or plants nursery technicians they'll tell you how escaping to the countryside won't save you from getting strangled by bureaucracy and the stupidity of the apparatus. All the contrary. And everybody will sing the same song, which goes:
we fight everyday against one hundred seventy thousand laws and rules
we succumb to china because our sclerotic state is a sinking ship of fools

me: "It's amazing how, with the corrupted apparatus of the communist system on its shoulders, the Chinese manages to engage in new industrial or commercial activities better than we do. I guess their average bureaucrat is easier to bribe"
the hotel manager: "On the contrary, I bet they are less corrupted. I believe it's all in the seven thousand people a year they send to death. We should learn from them."
me: "..."
the hotel manager: "don't get me wrong, I believe in democracy. But we just shouldn't misuse it."
me: "right. We really must be going now. Nice hotel and everything."

³ sex in foreign beds can be better, if it keeps the imagination going. Especially when you are charged with the unsound Italian prices (cf. "unsound methods", Heart of darkness). This fuels the customer/whore fantasy when you're still climbing the stairs to your room.

Roccaraso in the darkness seems to be about it. There's that air of the villages in the wrong season, empty streets and closed stores by the childish names. I walk in the desert of vacant spaces and abandoned activities, dark before six PM Here the air is clean and cold and the heavens are filled with layers and layers of stars.

The perfumery called "love potion" disguises itself in the void of a prestigious lane disappearing where the lights are off. There's smell of burning wood in the air all around the town, and the fragrance of damp leaves coming down from the forests.
In front of bar del corso few idle and talk against the yellow light of the tall lamps. All the faces in the conic glare appear to be friendly, warm, lonely. All the voices here have the musical sweet sound of Campania and I adore this dialect, especially coming from the throats of women, resounding with sensual consonants and motherly vocals.

I walk up to the first woods where a trail goes deep into the mystery of Abruzzo but my sight is too bad. I'm unlike my cousin who sees perfectly in the dark like a bat.
I get back and slope down to a restaurant on the other side of the town, where I am the sole customer.
Certain of doing me a favor, as I sit at the table the lady in charge raises the volume of the music above my ears. It's the usual southern pop Italian music going, and once again I marvel at how much certain Italian pop songs seem to be really singing the stupidity of love. Without figuring it out though.
At the other occupied table the owner's family is dining too. I must be early. There's a little girl, 5 years old, drawing in her book instead of eating. She asks to her very attractive teenager sister what color should the sea be filled with. She proposes purple, but the attractive teenager replays, "the sea is blue".
Yeah, I remember. That's how it begins, the mortification of imagination imposed by scholarship.

On the walls of the restaurant I watch myself in the mirror. My hair are long to my shoulder, my beard is thick. My shoulders come down like my father's. I make an effort of eating upright, and slowly, because I feel observed. It's always so when I eat alone at the restaurant and suddenly my looks aren't in the local norm.

The moaning pop songs go on above my head protesting love and nothing else. Boy it's so sad to think that it is impossible to find a single restaurant in the whole peninsula where you are allowed to have your meal without any music in the background, and nobody even noticing.
The radio says it will be a lucky year for my sign, and I feel the benevolent ray of Jupiter making people smile in my direction, as I smile back. But it's an illusion. I am old enough and years are short enough and I envision already the day when Jupiter will leave, and all the lost occasions will run after him like happy little dogs left behind.

I try to draw in the notebook the face of the attractive teenager. Luckily I'm no good in rendering the resemblances because she notices.

I think of all those who know me and don't know that I am sitting here, in the village of Abruzzo where none of us ever came. Italy keeps falling and sometimes it seems it cannot be used up, consumed or spent. And I love and hate her just the same.

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)

Wien doesn't want me today. After one night at the mediocre "clima hotel" I am kicked out. All hotels in town are overbooked, for some conference or congress. After the fourth overbooked hotel I walk in, it's time to get to the station. Without regrets I buy the ticket to Budapest and leave the city in the early afternoon, after a brief walk to the center and some resting on the large lawn near the museum of arts and the imperial palace. I am not attracted by Wien.
From the lawn I looked at the carriages for tourists, with horses in pairs, wondering how it comes that a former student of History of Arts can avoid museums and churches entirely.

There is something with rich European cities that is reassuring and disappointing at the same time: you can have no respect for them, because they are in too good a shape, to well-behaved and spoiled and cleaned. This can be relaxing as well as annoying.

The trip to Budapest from Wien takes four hours, during which the Austrian mountain scenery fades into the Hungarian uniform plains. The view from the window reminds me inevitably of the prairies I come from, in northern Italy, although the villages look older and poorer.

A silly music is aired as we pass the border, to welcome us in the Hungarian railways. The Hungarian policeman seems relieved to discover I am neither German, Austrian or American. In fact, there are many Americans on the train as, I will learn later, there are in the city. Almost every tourist you see around is north-American.
I wonder why. Maybe is there a Scientology Congress in Buda?
As we enter the station, I am finally glad I'm here. I only hope the city is not a tourist machine, despite all the Americans.

There are many who suffer for the fate of the animals, but most of the people either do not care, or they think it's something not important compared to the fate of humans (of course, there's also the small minority who hates animals or think they are there only to be hunted and annihilated, but they're just too incomprehensible for me so I'll leave them out of the picture).
Now, among those who do not care that much about animals are those who think that the fate of humans in term of justice, freedom, fights against all sorts of exploitations and so on is the most important thing in the world, in front of which the point of view of animals disappears. They're particularly disappointing to me, because while they pretend to be very caring about the destiny of those who suffers, they just fail completely to see the suffering inflicted to all the animals. What are they sensitive for?

They just don't get the point, if you listen to me. Humans are everywhere, the world is filled with them. It is obviously a successful species. It doesn't need that much help to get to be even more successful. But it has left only the crumbs for the animals. Those animals that are not bred in captivity by humans to be eaten or used for food in different ways, are forced into degrading and shrinking environments without much hope to make it after this century as a species.
I can't help it. When first I read the story of the bear from Trentino few days ago I just hated this world because it is so less and less meant for animals, and I am too sorry for them. I know life is generally meaningless as Nature conceived it, and cruel to everything that is alive, but I feel sorry for the animals because they keep trying to be successful but it's sort of too late for them.

The bear I am talking about is a two years old male bear of a monitored kind, Slovenian origin, who trespassed the Italian border from the Adamello National Park, in the region of Trentino in Italy, to Baviera in Germany, few days ago. Out of his relatively human-less environment, probably looking for a female bear on heat, the bear found himself in a much more developed area, with lots of farms and villages. So he killed chickens, pigs and other animals to support himself. In the region of Baviera it is not allowed to hunt bears, particularly of this protected species. Nonetheless, the authorities decided to allow the hunting of the bear, and the regional minister for the environment, Werner Schnappauf (Csu), said the bear was getting 'too dangerous' and had to be killed.

Today it's on the news, the bear has probably been killed by some poacher encouraged by the authorities, who's probably stuffing his fucking trophy right now.

It's a fact that the bear killed eleven sheep, and plundered many hives. In spite of that, a bear it's not really dangerous in this situation if for one thing: it is economically dangerous. It is not a Grizzly bear we are talking about, but a young brown bear scared by humans who doesn't know fowls are there for humans only. Farmers are pissed off because they lose their living properties, and politicians are scared to lose farmers' support. But let's consider the recent unfortunate extermination of thousands of chickens and other birds because of the avian influenza scare: the region of Baviera compensates financially the losses caused by the bear just like it does with those caused by the avian influenza, so where is the fucking problem? They should have taken their time and captured the bear with soporific bullets or something like that, sending it back to Trentino. Although I admit the whole scheme must be too complicated and expansive for the lazy mind of a politician, when it's so easy to simply suggest to all animal killers at large to just feel free to go on and take the problem away, having some fun.

Poor bastard bear who didn't know shit, of our borders and our crazy attitudes, and our staggering fast way to communicate each other something silly he did, walking into Baviera.

*** update: apparently, the bear has not really been killed. It has been spotted alive again. This post does not make much sense then.

OK here I am, sorry I am late. I have been around, but something else came up just as I was driving back into the city from a 1,000 km trip across chilling Europe.
I am now in Puglia, because my mother (who is 63 years old) had an accident, fell from this horse of hers she pretends she saved from butchery, and badly hit her head. She has to be operated in Bari today, unfortunately on the skull wherein they found two centimeters of blood all around the brain, blood which has to be drained out. Anyway, the blood seems to be coming from some tissue of the inside surfaces of the skull, not from the brain. Right now she is okay, although pretty scared for the operation, also worried for her long hairs she wears like this long since when she was twenty.
But as she called me, the moment I was getting back to Milan, what was freaking her out the most were her dogs and horse, left alone in the countryside without anybody looking after them. So I had to be in the picture, the unemployed animal-lover son eager to travel at will. But I'm so weak for parental affection I end up loathing and craving this sensation of being useful.

Anyway, here I am. I ran all morning around for this creatures unfit to live on their own. The house is so messy and dirty I just sit here and act as if I just don't care. I may ask myself, how do my mother lives, my mother the village idiot according to the narrow minds that populate this side of the earth, but my mother just lives for these animals, that's all, she doesn't care for neatness, or for folks opinions and expectations. In her autobiography we are not included.

Yesterday afternoon, as I stepped out of the plane in Bari, it was snowing. But right now the sun shines outside, the dogs laze around finally calm, small birds chirp and traffic in and out olives' leafy branches in the fields.
Here I am, just waiting for a call, haven't slept much, still feeling slightly drunk from travelling. I only have to substitute her for a while. Just for a while. The dogs bark to the horse again.

***update: the operation went well, although she feels bad for the anesthesia. The draining cotinues. Right now she is all bandages and has two holes at the side of the head as Frankenstein's bride.

-- In picture, above: stop by on the road from Salzburg to the Czech border, few days ago.