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.

so many times songs are there for those who want to look into their own feelings, sadness for example. so happens to me as I listen to "Bene" by Francesco de Gregori, I watch my buried sadness with affection and sympathy-- while the tears accumulate at a higher rate inside, effortlessly -- and so once again, the absent melody enthralls me, words that go around and around things explaining nothing, only scraps for grabs, besides who can tell a whole story? It's a beautiful song. I think song writing is in the making these things generic and general-- everything becomes mine, the mood, the poetry in the bathroom, even the "vietnames face". Especially the vietnamese face. I won't get into that.

"That guy is a dick!" yells Roger in the car. "You was a great man Max cuz you didn't flip out or anything. Way to go man."
"I was ready to kick his ass, porcodio" says Max driving. I can see him smiling from the back of his head.
"I was laughing, laughing all the time, trying not to laugh at his face" says Sheila to me, barely audible in the exchanging loud cussing of Roger and Max. They are talking about the Restaurant manager, who had the nerve to get into the kitchen and grill some meat himself like if the chefs weren't able to cope.
"He's a fucking piece of shit", says Roger to me, "this place is fucking garbage, man. Fucking garbage!"
I don't say anything, I can't think of anything funny to say.
"I never liked him from day one" says Max with his thick italian accent.
"Me neither, man, me neither." Roger growls leaning back on the seat. His face is still sweating. There's a acid smell of food in the car emanating from the bodies.
As if to himself, the eyes sparkling, Roger starts telling the story of when he and a mexican got to each other's face in the kitchen. "I was spitting all over his face man" he says. "Get the fuck out of my kitchen! I told him!"

I look outside. Fruitville boulevard, Sarasota, going by in the dark. The distant red of the stop lights doesn't slow down Max, our faces appearing and disappearing in the occasional glare of the car lights coming in the other direction.
A tan Chevy approaches our car on the left lane. There are two old ladies inside, and one of them, the passenger, is cleaning the inside of the windshield with a rotating methodical movement, the way she probably does with her windows at home.
Between the two ladies there's a dangling chain hanging from the rear view mirror, with a plastic stone at its end. In a trance I look at the piece of plastic dangling by, sparkling blue, while the lady goes on with the circular movement of her hand.
The two car cover some road next to each other, and the stone keeps dangling, the lady cleaning the windshield, I watching. There's something abstract and absurd about the scene and I suddenly feel uplifted by it, as if I didn't belong there anymore. Eventually Max slows down and the two ladies glide away along the lane. We're almost home. It's my last night here.

I am happy that I sent back to Milan a second box of clothes and stuff, that my luggage is even lighter now. That I choose a destination, entirely by chance only because a ticket was available for some two hundred dollars. That I am leaving soon. Sarasota has been a blank in this trip, as I waited there for a call from my brother in Venezuela that never came, waiting to find the courage to do things I couldn't do, listening to Sheila and Max fighting, envious of everyone's experiences only because they seemed to belong to a world where things kept happening, surrounded by people who were rarely moving or intense, and where many words got lost forever in the untidy box of the memories picked on the go.

The first post I ever wrote on this blog was about me trying to go across the city to cut my hair. The theme is interesting, isn't it. This time I'm going to this place on the other side of the avenue, which is just a regular hair cutter like thousands in the city. I don't go very often for hair cutters. In the falling nation, hair cutting is the sole branch of commercial business to never go under some crisis, and this tells a lot about the shallowness and manipulability of italians.

It's funny how there usually are one or more ladies having their hair done while I'm there, and I think that never once in my uneven career as a hair cutting customer I was able to witness one of those ladies to actually have her hair done, pay and leave. I always have my hair done while they're there, and I leave before anyone of them ever leaves. They sit there with tinfoil hats and gossip magazines, are moved from area to area, are washed and blew dried and they always have different persons attending to them and there's always another thing they have to undergo after the last one and they never leave.
I look at them sideways in the mirror and they seem victims to me. Probably I transfer on them my own victimized feeling, but they usually they have such morose and alert faces, hate to be looked at while they're there, browse magazines with aggressive turning of pages, and they never seem to be wanting to get out of it. No nostalgia for the outsides. They always give me this mixed feeling of sympathy and actual sadness, trapped as they are for so long under the hands of hair cutters pushing on them new styles and ridiculously overpriced products, and they're bored to death, besotted. And they also give me a bitter feeling of distaste and hate for their laziness and passivity and active participation in the general lie, that so effectual negation of death and crappiness of things, and for the selfishness of all those caring energies devoted to them. Makes me want to slap them in the face, slap them again. Drag them out to the sidewalk, kick them in the ass.

The radio at the hair cutting place is often as loud and silly as a silly radio can be, and conversations beneath it, outside of 'how do you want your hair done' rarely mean anything. Or they never mean anything. But they have to be yelled out anyway to win over the loud voices of the radio and the blow driers. I look out the window like a child kept in the house for his homework on a sunny day, and all around is the chaotic horn of stupidity having its moment, and having its moment again.

At one point today the girl wanted to ask to the young foreign guy if what she was doing with the razor was hurting him, but she couldn't speak english, so she turned to her colleagues. Nobody could help her. Nobody could speak english. My hair cutter guy said he could manage it if it was french. But nobody knew how or wanted to ask the guy if he spoke french anyway. Others said, 'I can manage to speak english but I don't know how to ask that question'. Soon the issue, probably just for the fun of it resembling life, was extended to all the customers in the room, ladies glued to their chairs and hanging to their gossip magazines included. No one knew how to ask that question, so I finally came out of my cocoon and asked it myself. Oh, it was fun. Following my exploit I joined for a while the animated nonsensical exchange of words going about as a disordered wave in the room and it's true, I felt less lonely and trapped and desperate and old.
And it was ludicrously tragic too. I mean, at least fifteen italian random people in a room, and only one of them is able to ask does it hurt? in english? Pretty amazing. To his credit, the store manager tried a "is bua?" a couple of times, seriously convinced that "bua", the slang word used in italian with children for pain, could be some international kind of word. It really was momentous the look on the face of the foreign guy when I asked him the dreaded question. "Does it hurt when she does that with the razor?" The guy hastily denied he was caused any sort of pain. By that time he probably was expecting some serious italian question and was getting worried. Afterwards was only incredulous.

At the end of it, or at the beginning sometimes, hair cutters want my name. I don't give my name to stores. I never do. I think nobody should, but it's too late for that. Hair cutters pester you for your name more than anyone else, because they're the more powerful and they know it. But I am not caving in. "If you want, I'll give you a fake name" I say to the store manager. He looks at me uneasy. Repeatedly he points his finger to the computer monitor, mutters, "I have to put your name into this." "I don't want to be filed, I'm sorry." This being Italy, there's always a way around rules, and this store manager is a nice guy. He fills the form for a guy called Uomo Di Passaggio and writes the same name on the card he has to give me. "So you get a discount after ten cuts" he explains. I am thinking I won't come back probably. But the card registered to Uomo di Passaggio is actually memorable. "I love this card, I'll keep it dear", I say to him. There, he's uneasy again.

Oh, I hate italian hair cutters. Which are the only hair cutters I know by the way. It's just that you always have to cut your hair before you leave, it's the rule.

It is kind of lazy to just grab someone else's quote and re-use it like that, but I found this one so poetic and unusual that we can make an exception. Today, on Ceronetti's "Altrove" (his collection of almost daily quotes selected by him for the newspaper La Stampa), Anna Maria Ortese (note: I mean this quote to be "unusual" compared to what is usually quoted by Ceronetti himself and others on the italian media. It is quite straightforward in itself):

Sometimes I find myself looking into the pages of this or that history of a nation, or of all the nations, or just forgotten chronicles, and I watch emerging and passing by like lights faces of joyless women, yet more resistant than the others, faces of women braver than men, in the act of saying goodbye to someone or looking towards a aurora impossible for them. Women who left orders, flags, testaments, without whom each one of us wouldn't be a thing. Us, without these women, wouldn't even be. They are the woman, that is, humanity. Here is what I mean for being a woman: to be a part -- surfaced today -- of such obscure groups, of their bravery, to recall forever their ensigns of fire and light.

In Piazza del Duomo the bars are open, and under the arcades to Corso V.E. people crowd the street performers and the stands. There's the silver cowboy on a podium who produces odd whistles and mimic stuff, and the couple of mustached accordion players playing Bach (one of the two accordions has only buttons on both sides).
There's the fortune teller, who reads the hand, the tarots and the horoscope for singles and couples (but there's only the table, two chairs and no sign of him) and there's a bunch of portraitists some very good and some lousy, who all look like solemn Afghan goatherds: some of them copy pictures pinned to the drawing sheets, scrupulously and unfaithfully repeating in big the unaware stupefied faces of the portrayed.
There's a young fellow who makes the circus thing with the pins and nobody considers him, and the little stand of the Lottery where from until a while ago an half blind old man used to yell "lotteriadilmerano" with thundery voice.
There are the Chinese, who paint names on grains of rice or sell scarfs and plastic toys with all the lights and the sounds, and there's a long line of phony stands of supposed authentic stuff. There the Milanese disorderly wait their turn to grab free samples of authentic phony cheese and salami, or poke among the authentic phony Latino-American craft work. I wonder what is with us that we can't wait in line, but we are only capable to throw ourselves at the counters hoping to be the first ones addressed by salesmen.
Everywhere flashes go off and tonight I am one of the notable fellows in the back of at least five snapshots. Corso V.E. in fact is a long stout parade of modern prisoners enslaved by their new Xmas mobile phones who command them to stop and picture their friends and relatives every few steps. There's a father photographing his daughter across the window of a bar (she smiles directly at the camera) and a bunch of women posing in front of the enlightened symbolic plastic trees.
Few steps forward there's a TV troupe waiting for the link to broadcast directly from the Corso. At the center of a circle of smiling witnesses a young man by the melancholy look faces a camera under the aggressive floodlight, microphone in a hand. He wears a long blue dress and a blue hat covered with golden stars. Nobody is saying anything.

This central Corso, now called V.E., was formerly known as Corsia dei Servi, "Lane of the Slaves" after the captive Slavonic people who lived and worked in the city, just like in Venice there's a "Shore of the Slaves".
But it's sad to think that nobody will ever name a street after us modern slaves because we don't even have the time to know what we are.

It's the first day of the year (actually I am writing in the second day already, and superstition wants that because of that I will be writing less this year, which is just as well) and the square with the cathedral and its surroundings seem to be the only area alive in the city.
As soon as I walk away the streets are so quiet and dark, and the perpetual city-garage of parked vehicles is interrupted by many vacant spaces, and sidewalks and streets are littered with the remains of fireworks launchers and bottles of spumante and beer.
I cut through the Polyclinic, which day and night is opened on both sides almost completely without surveillance. Directed to Via Orti on the other side, I pass by the "Guardia II" pavilion, where the mental patients are held and where from they often yell to the passersby, or spit on them, or throw cigarette butts at them.
But tonight also the "Guardia II" is quiet.

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific "modern" projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no "fascist authority" was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

-- in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy's hat is in fact the very fascist military d'annunziano alpine hat of his father.