(...) as you'd know Milano is under a white gray sky and the streets are Christmas lightened up and wet of peeing rains. The angry faces of the citizens know no repose. Clothes are forgotten hanging out of the windowsills. The radio says that an ATM conductor talking on the phone run over and killed in Via Procaccini a woman crossing the street. The woman was young. I wonder whom the conductor was speaking to? Instantly I think: a woman who was pestering him or whom was pestered by him.
It's all about the living, any thing visible on earth, except maybe certain portions of art. The world disgusts and never satiates. The speaker of Radio 3 rants about soundtracks and says 'indemuddforlovv' and must be turned off. I think about death but it doesn't help me to live more intensely because I can't believe it it's all here even though I repeat it every morning. Etcetera.

Budapest. Third day in the city. The city is actually wonderful.

I come out from the indoor market in Ráckóczi ter, where customers wait their turn in patient lines, vegetables in their hands personally picked from the large crates piled in the market. The clouds seem to be giving room for disbanded sun rays filtering through (it rained all morning). Near the large brownish river the wind comes along cooler and wet, shaking the top end of the small trees. People climb up and down the yellow trams that go across the river. I enter the folk music shop, where the manager gives me to listen a quarter of hour of amazing CDs I'll end up buying. The violin virtuoso, the traditional folk band, the recent folk band, the pop-folk-experimental ensemble of the seventies, the traditional gypsy music & dance ensemble. That sort of things. Folk music must be that kind of thing on which nobody can teach Hungarians a lesson.

( On the other hand, I went to the Buda castle musem yesterday, and it consisted in a gigantic boredom of Hungarian painters of all ages, imitating European schools all the way. There I fell asleep on a soft armchair on the top floor, where the contemporary Hungarian artists are. I closed my eyes, the buzzing of the museum faded away, and I dreamed I did find a word to define the feeling of impotence and shame that takes me when I don't do things, worried to fail. Like approaching the stunning girl I kept seeing around in the museum, for instance, instead of just looking at her like an idiot. Why there isn't a definition for such a precise feeling? )

Outside. I know I said I was not interested in architecture but the streets of Budapest, or at least the old bits of it, are quite superior to anything you can see, say in Prague or in Salzburg or cities like that. The reason is that not everything is renewed here, nor too much rich and well-kept, but it is used, so the streets, despite all the cars and the shops, seem to have a soul, I mean a character. Or at least a age. Renewal of old urban architectures may be good to make money, but it is also quite depressing.

The people here seem to be proud, reserved and yet easygoing. They seem to be smart but also understanding, as if they knew all the weight of the world. I probably am not understanding anything of it all.
I love to make eye contacts with Hungarian women, although the chatting hasn't brought me anywhere so far. I talked for a while with a woman at the folk fair (buying a long silk skirt and shirt with her help. You know, the fucking presents), and for few seconds with a very young girl at the Buda castle, at night, among all the kissing of lovers. That's about all the talking I had here, it was nice and nothing remains of it.

There are actually women for any taste around, the short, the fat, the giraffe, the Diane Keaton type, the Meryl Streep type, the supermodel, the spiritual, the impossible. I don't seem to be able to think at much apart of sex these days.

-- young girls university students of the Veneto-Friuli province, chatting of nonsensical affairs about friends and relatives with the moral inflections and commonplaces of their mothers, dressed casually and modestly, small simple earrings, and bearing the most intense and erotically charged look in their eyes;

-- African women and men, walking in couples, arm under arm, hand in hand, smiling, joking, talking. This may seem normal, but it is actually a very rare sight in Italy;

-- a couple of girls, one African-Italian girl and a blond Italian. I walk toward them along the sidewalk. The blond girl is gently opening the blouse of the black girl, showing up her white shirt. The black girl, lost in her thoughts, is looking away. As I come closer to them, the black girl raises her eyes and looks at me, with a serious expression. The blond girl, now putting her hands down, says: "there, now you look very nice";

-- The girl behind the counter in the bar near the station, no more than 20 years old, wears a fetish-like black leather top, extremely alluring and showing. The bar is just a simple Italian bar, but she doesn't look out of place. It doesn't take much to understand that she is courting the polish waiter, approximately her age, who keeps forgetting what I ordered. They would make a beautiful couple, actually.

Because I am "too hard on myself" -- someone says -- too moaning and self-deprecating probably, today I will start by saying that I am quite happy of the drawing I just did. Well the raised arm is completely wrong and the head too small, but still.

This sort of question-marked statue of liberty fuelled with faces (like the other one), needed a pencil, a large white piece of paper, eraser, camera, a cracked copy of photoshop to "burn" the pencil strokes-- and a couple of hours.
Okay, I don't know or care what it represents. I worked with the headache, awfully tired (20 hours awake today), splay on the floor, eyes sore, following my hand and the two or three tricks it masters and can perform nicely.
No music in the background-- I listen to music rarely 'cause it suck up all my consciousness-- but there was the annoying engine noise from the trucks at work down in the avenue, at full throttle to remind everyone in the city that the city itself is decaying and needs a lot of make up and constantly. It was all below the usual sparrows, below crows and blackbird calls, city birds who are brave enough, impudent, opportunist enough, and all below these European gray clouds, loaded with acid waters, moving about and beautiful. And it was all, I liked my drawing.

Italy had its new government today. Prodi is always so fast to make up his teams, I must give him that. Now in control of schools will be a physician, infrastructures will be ruled by a former magistrate and policeman, a very-important-nobody without ideas will take care of culture heritage while his right-hand man takes care of televisions, the creepy lay nun will have her ministry for the family, an ignorant fat-ass chair-lover will be directing sporting activities, and, most wildly, in charge of justice will be a weak yelling meddler, Mastella, formerly on Berlusconi's side and now powerful only because his senators can undermine Prodi's majority. Mastella, as new Minister of Justice, will enjoy the help of some of the members of his small party, already condemned for corruption, disturbance of property, embezzlement, forgery and etc. Thus, everyone will be competent for something. I am very reassured.

-- in picture: faces of the new government. Courtesy of Repubblica.it

We meet near the bridge of via Cassala, where the shadows bounce and the tables of an Italian bar are cluttered in a small stretch of sidewalk. Around us and everywhere in the city the warm wind is spreading methodically the white furry filaments dropped by the high poplars. Jawa carries her baby boy in a knapsack tight on her belly and smiles radiantly from twenty yards as I approach her, hug her, kiss her on the mouth.
I tried in the past not to kiss her on the mouth when we greet, because although we were lovers it didn't seem natural to do it-- particularly if in front of friends who didn't know we were lovers. Now that we're not lovers anymore I just accept the kiss on the mouth as it comes. I even anticipate it. But in the end I always accepted it, so she doesn't notice the difference.

There's the typical chaos of Milano around us, mopeds screaming and buses yelling and cars trumpeting and trucks barking. I praise her baby whom I'm meeting for the first time, tanned and sulky five months years old, and we go, in the clouds of invisible dusts and noise, talking about the baby and the weather and what he's liking of the world and what not.
( I mentioned anonymously Jawa in this blog before, hers was an afternoon or a morning spent in someone else's house, curled up together in bed listening to blackbirds and pigeons on the other side of Via Savona, Milano of course, which is always the same untellable place. Now those days and those places seem so distant and impossible. And they are not distant at all. )

We stroll up and down the grid of roads around Naviglio Grande, via Savona (coincidentally), Giambellino, Vigevano. The stores and offices are busy and the people busy, and pretty soon the little boy falls asleep in the knapsack regardless the chaos, and everyone, man or woman, passing by look at him tenderly.
"This is a very seductive boy," I say admiringly. "Everyone loves him."
"It's true" says Jawa
It is hard to look at her face walking at her side, 'cause her bulky Sicilian black hair always covers her profile, but I think she looks beautiful and I tell her. She smiles and we don't say anything for a while.

Later we're going on talking about the boy, and her life with Ernesto and their projects.
Twice Jawa asks about me, and both times I manage to change argument. Then we sit down on a bench in a patch of green behind some new houses, because she has to feed the baby. This patch of green, what in Milan is called a garden, is lousy conceived, covered with clover and infested with sand-flies, divided by irrational rotten tracks made of tartan and small ill young trees in bad shape. The bench faces the new housing projects which also are visibly falling to pieces already.

"Think at those who bought into this dump", I say. "How happy they must be now."
"Tell me about you" she says. She has freed the little boy from the knapsack, and now the sulky face is giving place to a bright toothless smile.
"I live with a girl, very sweet and lovely and all. But somehow I feel suffocating, I don't know why."
"I'm sorry to hear that"
"Yeah well" I said. "I learned something about myself recently. I learned that I dedicate less energies to love and relationships and friends, because I am always engaged in this inside battle with myself and my thoughts."
"Yeah, I know" Jawa says, smiling.
"I never really realized it. I need to save energy for the battle and so I neglect my relationships. Actually, any activity is less important than the battle. And what is worse, I favor relationships that need less energies to be moved on. Isn't it horrible?"
"I always thought my life would be different. Now with the baby it's even more unforeseeable and inevitable. Me and Ernesto don't have much time for each other. All is turning into something else. Very out of control. Maybe you want to avoid all this, I don't know, although I'm actually liking it."
"Oh, I envy you." I say not persuasively. "I wish I had a baby with someone and a job I like and all that stuff. Only, not with my head. Anyway, I have no idea of what I once thought my life should turn out to be. If I ever had a plan or a vision, I forgot about it."
"Don't you ever do any progress in the battle with your inside self?" Jawa asks.

Good luck I don't have to answer because the little kid asks for our attentions now. And then it is late, and we say goodbye near the bridge of Via Cassala again. Above our heads the traffic is rumbling and the concrete vibrates against the metal pylons and the smell of diesel engines floats down to us.
It is all, and I go back home on foot again, slowly, thinking about having a kid or a family or nothing. In my head is everything.

Luckily at the dentist's surgery today there's a Louis Armstrong cd spinning, and the volume is low. We are spared the ordinary anguish of loud radio music drilling into our ears in preparation of more useful drills. The guy loves blues, he told me, but mostly it's the assistant to pick the cds or the radio stations, a nice, short sassy girl with terrible musical taste. Libi once told me her second job is to take part to TV reality shows as an "active" member of the public, so I always picture her with a microphone in her hand and the greenish respirator down over her chin.
In my usual drowsiness I sit, my back at the window, among the bystanders. Some browse "Oggi", some browse "Gente", some flicks "Famiglia Cristiana". I strive to remain awake dragging in vain my hand over my face, the scene disappears behind it and nobody knows it. I trawl in my pockets looking for some distractions I can't find. When there's to wait, I always forget to bring something to read or, I don't know, an ice cream.
From the mentioned magazines, glossy figures and block capitals, acts of pedophilia, orgies, rapes, overdoses, scams and grand thefts, Padre Pio all over the place and photo-op kisses, all the stuff nobody among us had the courage or the venture to do in this life is equally suggested, or outlined, as the tragic enviable privilege of a superior society where our-rules-don't-count, good-for-them and what-a-shame.
From behind my back comes the muffled noise of the streets, tires cracking rapidly over the uneven macadam, repeating their rolling with a kind of lulling rhythm, so the inevitable happens and I fall asleep.

I reopen my eyes from beneath my hand. The scene is unchanged but once again all is like from a distance, and the sat-downs profiles, with their dark clothes, calm breathings, frighten me for a moment. Why are they so silent? What are we all doing here together? How can they resist staying among strangers, at the mercy of this close walls, so meek and calm?
"Survived to the flight of Death we leave for the honeymoon trip" recites one of the glossy titles. I fall asleep again, and into an erotic dream, sex in the parking lot, receiving a blowjob by a boy, indecipherable faces. Must be all that visiting Cooper's blog, I argue in the dream. I wake up once again behind my hand, half hard-on possibly not to touch right now, just to let it go away.
When the assistant calls me in, it's a relief the habitual little chat about nothing-or-soccer, even though we support different teams.