When I go to Milan, to fulfill that town's dream of a cultural centre, you should come. An interesting city. It's huge - and full of very ugly, common, repulsive people.
-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

that night I slept at Carlo's, after more talking and boasting and drinking and walking around Venice, meeting people in bars, following girls down the calli, ending up us alone and stoned and bitter sitting on the steps of a deconsecrated church turned into a art gallery or a gym and talking about foolish things now forever sunk into a oblivion thicker than the waters of the canals of Venice. And I had that dream sleeping on a pallet on floor, a portion of a dream I still remember, where girls leaned on a table looking at fashion pictures in a magazine, whispering things in the ancient-looking room by a high ceiling but not large (just like a room of a old palace of Venice) and outside of a window, invisible to me in the corner of the dream was the world of the future that I was anxiously about to see but couldn't and couldn't and couldn't until I woke up.
I was in Carlo's garret. Looking up at the backside of the roof, wood and terracotta, atrocious white light entering from a squared hole through a opaque glass pane. Pigeons walking and talking above and not so far, the early boat acoustic signals said it was a foggy day. My disappointed snort for the bad weather. The rattling of the garbage trolleys going up and down the bridges.
I had slept too little, and felt absurdly awake in the sleeping house, bad taste in dry mouth and dizziness-- eyes hurting.
I got out without saying goodbye walking softly amid the snores, the streets were so cold, I could hear the noise made by my steps against the hard pavement stones. The streets were dark to the openings of the skewed squares, wide in comparison and filled with more white light under the low unfriendly sky, quiet, dirty of a nightly high tide now dissolved in a grainy film of stickiness made of guano and salted sea.
I was looking for a bar, at that time I still had the veneration for the italian bars and their stinking coffees and croissants with no imagination, that what Parise so beautifully wrote about, and I think I found one just down the Ponte de Maravegie. It's the bar with the colorful glass panes, not the osteria nor the pastry shop (that lane down the bridge being the typical italian three-bars-in-a-row) and so little room inside against the counter. A radio was certainly playing, but not loudly. The croissants were warm and good, the coffee probably good. Nice the people. I didn't know any better. It felt reinvigorating and so I extended my walk to the aimless route of the fondamenta along Canale della Giudecca (aka fondamenta degli incurabili) once again fantasizing of being Corto Maltese (before my brother robbed me of that fantasy too) or Brodskij (before my russian friend explained it all to me). Enjoying the procrastination of the coming back home, where more rest and the long awaited solitude were.
The humid sadness of the city in the thin fog, its casual beauty appearing and disappearing and morphing, the large unsteady waters of the canal and their uniform color fading out in nothingness, the few, walking the fondamenta like me with their hands well protected in the big pockets of their dark dark dark cappotti, and my eyes still hurting-- the day had begun but without a move, wanting to be admired in its pointlessness, it was quite beautiful to be there and alive.
It was near the end-- one of the last months in Venice, before coming back to Milan. And I thought I had had enough of Venice back then. I didn't know anything.

-- in picture above: waters, venice, etc.

To live between terms, to live where death
Has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto's catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tyranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.

-- Delmore Schwartz

These are shitty days. Nothing is clear in my mind. My life and Libi's just dab each other and doesn't even seem to be related anymore. I wake up at six or five, have my breakfast, set up hers, open the computer. Invariably I wish I could go out for a walk in a city that still makes me curious, but the city repels me. Its activity, its rudeness. The tragic solitude of the truancy walks in the parks in the morning--
Solitary birds now sing in the empty hour above the terrace, when the sun is still behind clouds and my plants seem to shiver for the cold, the dirt dried and hard stamped by the hungry pigeons. But the young leaves, small on the branches are still bright green and pointing upward, close to the bark, the first flowers are blossoming and ready to receive the visits of unobtainable hymenoptera with wings. Like church bells the birds remind me of the summers on the Lugano Lake, and the heart skips a beat for all the days that are gone by--
I daze myself in a computer stupor, keeping the fears asleep, when I should go 'round and fix a number of things before I leave --the things that everyday I postpone-- passport, fines to pay, travel books to get, presents. I am eroded by absurd sudden worries, triggered by things I should never read --like that I'll have Alzheimer because there's aluminum in the crowns that cover my teeth, and mercury in the fillings-- and I grab my ears and shake my head and moan in the secret of the orange bathroom whining for my Alzheimer years to come--
Later Libi wakes up and we smile to each other but she doesn't come to me to hug me like we used to do. I don't tell her how attractive she is, ruffled like a cat -- then she goes to bed to read and finish her coffee and I only hear the noise of the leafed pages.
"Do you like this book?" I call from one room.
"Quite" she answers from the other. I gave her the book--
Oh, dear friend, dear lover, I know how complicated and lost I am sometimes-- it's like I feel that you can't reach me, and that you don't even want to try anymore because I'm leaving anyway.
I wonder what Libi is talking about with her therapist. And I am never going to have one, I swear to myself once again.
Every house in the city contains habits and words not visible in the picture-- everything that goes on in the shape of the unsharable habits, like everyone turning its back to you--
I wanted to be closer to Libi these last weeks before leaving for three months, or more-- instead we are nervous, irritable, defensive. Libi seems to be tighten up in her world, full of hours at the atelier, going for shops and suppliers, trams to get and the theaters at the end of the day --Every moment is like the negative of the separation, somewhere where the separation hurts but it's not told or visible and this makes it all the more hard and wrong--
She said she was worried that I might not come back-- I don't know if I've done enough to, I don't know, reassure her--
Sometimes, often, Libi goes to the movies alone, sits in the first seats and sinks herself in the marvel of the the loud voices and the gigantic pictures --and I think of her, there, following a story and shedding few tears or laughs. We are never so much apart like in those moments --and not because I'm not there. Sometimes she falls asleep and snores in the theater and someone notices her, but no one wakes her up. I wouldn't wake her up either-- I wish I could give her a similar sense of wonder and protection, or carry her away instead of being the one who's deserting the nest and leaving her alone-- but we are past that moment and perhaps I didn't wish hard enough.

And finally to get out --and let the city beat its drums all around you, the shops to yellow up your face in a sudden glow, the people on the sidewalks to walk past you forever-- to forever mistake everything about you in a glimpse-- it's reciprocal-- let your indelible suicidal thoughts to mix up with all the other feelings and let 'em get lost for a little while, in the annoying feeling of the city, the smell, the babies carried in a rush, the dogs dragged away from the smell of feces and death-- the conversations through the earpieces smaller than a finger, punctuating the solitude of the souls in all the mirrors-- etc.

My fears never really leave me alone. They barely get quiet, when I've banged their heads long enough against all the corners. They fade into the shady background of the rooms behind my back. The silence of the bathrooms where the time is in the dripping. In front is the red table, and the light pointed upward. The white walls, the dark terrace and the cold barren small trees into the pots. Wary or tired and anxious to be good to each other, me and Libi Talk. I get nervous for one or two petty things said, and we raise our voices and struggle to make our points, glares of disappointment and urge to reach and shake the other, and after a while, even after the moment when we get along again, one is left to wonder what all that commotion was about? What was it, if now I enjoy the sound of our voices in the quiet apartment, glad to be here? Delighted at the way we can be closes and still distant. And all the time, this thing in my stomach, beneath the read table, this thing with tentacles and an engine of sort that buzzes and warms up and messes up everything inside. And every fear has its double in the anxious looking forward to the same thing. Expectations for the day I'll get on the plane, dread for that day getting inevitably nearer-- worried of the separation --so much I feel I don't want to be separated at all --and long awaited feeling of liberation from all the bonds and ties and obligatory faces of me. Fear to be a coward and hide behind money, terror of the violent places, where I won't know how to defend myself or where to run, the places where everyone will be more aggressive and ruthless and weaponized than me-- and yearning for the moment when I finally will be out of the nest and far from the security and the fears that thrive in the security.
And also the other fears, always there, of decaying of bodies and waning of time, expecting the parents to be dead, and how the world will be then, lighter, larger, smaller, heavier. Etc.

When I read a book, I am surprised by the number of words that I find into it and I dream to make use of them. I take note. When I work, it's impossible. I am limited to my own vocabulary. I can't get out of it, and it is so short that working turns into a riddle -- Jean Cocteau

As always when I'm about to leave without a destination, I am taken by all sorts of paranoid thoughts about my inadequacy, my psychological or physical weakness, my ignorance of the world. I don't speak German, I barely stammer some French, I can't read Cyrillic. My experience of locations, places, hotels, habits, cultures is minimal. I am not fit as I used to be wish I was, although I get thinner by the day because apparently I don't eat enough. I got pathetically attached to my absurd habits lately. My body is not very adapt to movement as it used to be only one year ago, when traveling was more frequent. Now, after one year of blogging and after having declared the independence from the city that surrounds me -- my body doesn't know the basics of rambling around anymore.

However. Sometimes tomorrow I will head for Milan Central Station with the lighter luggage possible and my sneakers, and I'll get on one train among many without any particular reason nor conviction. I think the train should be going south, down the falling peninsula, but instead I think it shall be going north.
Doesn't matter. What really worries me is that I will be without my Zanichelli and Oxford CDs. What will I do when the remains of my self-taught English vocabulary fail to describe what I want them to? I hate that feeling of impotence... Even though someone says it is the best exercise possible if you want to tell a story, you know, that stingy economy of words and all.

Still laying in bed I browsed the new messages on my bogus, always discharged cell phone. It was Nina and I knew it. Outside it was dark and raining stronger and I was hungry.

Nina: Don't look for me anymore. This is the usual repetition compulsion. You are a big cute fuck-about. I am tired before even beginning. In spite of all I said I am not interested in such a thing. One kiss. PS. the fact remains that whenever you'd wish to have a cosy chat, well this cannot be denied to anybody.

Nina studies psychology, and criminology, and something else I don't remember. Thereby she meant something precise with 'repetition compulsion' I didn't focus on to.
I only thought something like how we all get aggressive in matters of love and such, it's a sort of general rule, we can be bitter and harsh or despicably disloyal and it doesn't matter as long as the discourse goes on. When the dialogue ends, the cold potatoes left on the dish are the starting point from where all the story will be told. So I never fiddle about harsh words. I just keep the dialogue on. As hard as it gets. Facing the guilt and the reproaching, I'm the classic mouthy coward.

ME: All I have done is to give you what I could. Whenever I was avaliable I tried to reach you but no way. I know it's scary, again is someone engaged in your life, but it happened so. I know I am not innocent because I just let it languish there instead of reviving it and keeping it up. After all we've been together only twice, but you know how things get in your way. I still think we can have our time together. Hostility may not lead to that though. More likely to more big fuck you, too.

The hotel corridor was deserted now and dark. I reached for the bathroom striding over the stinky carpet floor, once there I felt how much I was disappointed with my message.
I had had this mad desire for the small thin boyish body of Nina (still have it somewhere), for her cynic pliancy in bed, her witty smiles on it all and the easy humor we had together. But yet I felt I was not completely taken by her or ready to fight for her as she pretended she needed, and that she felt that too. She was right, I was a big fuck-about all right and my message was lousy weak.

I looked at my face and naked body and thought maybe it was all because I was getting old and unable to be driven by emotions. I shivered, "I was never been able of that anyway", I thought.

I felt the vibration of another message running under the showers of rain in the streets, looking for a restaurant, under my soaked green cap in my jeans jacket and corduroy brown soaked pants. At Guido's restaurant later, I skipped Nina's message and wrote to Libi how I was waiting for a bean soup and antipasto, and how it was raining, and was she fine. Then I got to the other message, the waitress came to me with food and she was warmly polite.

Nina: When you once said you felt a crave for life, as it was hunger, well, I died of envy. It's because of it that you don't stay with me, because you sense there's only melancholy and a feeling of death around me... And I don't blame you because as a matter of fact it is so. Still it turns into a vicious circle. And I'm scared of not being able to get out of it. And you? What are you scared of?

Oh, dear Nina, you are so young under your solitary rugged surface ... You envy me? My need for life? Me who spent years running away from life? And, staying with you? Just don't...
I had to eat two entire plates of soup and end the whole dinner and pay for it and say goodnight to everybody and get outside under the continuing rain before I felt I had to actually find the words to reply to her message once back at the hotel.

ME: I don't stay with you because I am with another person. And my fears are just as strong as yours. I don't have any negative feelings staying at your side! Believe me! I only feel the obstacles, because you're withdrawn as I am withdrawn. Just let us see each other a little more, a little better. That's all I can do too. I kiss you.

Was I worth of my dinner, my sleep, my ramblin' now? I knew I was not.

E: Enough, don't look for me, don't ask for me, I don't want to hear from you again. Not because of any cliche of the lover that wants to be a wife, I just cannot endure all this once again. Goodnight.

Once Nina said it was all right with me because I was brusque and outspoken and the truth stayed awake so.
She already knew of Libi! And when we first met the three of us were there together. I recalled how Nina insisted to give us a ride home then, and that I refused, and me and Nina kissing on the cheeks not so far from the lips and how the thing was there when we both turned back for a last glance.
Yet I was not going to play dumb and taunt Nina for this game of ignoring Libi . It was as it was, just not bearable now, because of all the wasted occasions of seeing each other we had had. Wasting occasions does mean wasting it.

Oh, was my experience or my supposed cynicism helping in anything?
What an ass I was, wanting to be loved and admired for my weakness.

Why do we seduce each other when we know we're far from reaching one another? Why all this looking and showing? It is so easy to be suddenly someone else and reach another person and make love and forget having been someone else. Too bad when it all turns into a repetition compulsion, because the game is spoiled from the beginning, and you already know how it ends. Or something like that.