my relationship with her, something is happening-- suddenly I find boring what she says and I drop out of conversations without a warning-- suddenly I don't want to touch her or hug her for too long and I'd rather hug someone on the tram-- then i take it back, but then the thought is solid for a moment and I look at it as if it isn't mine--
She says something to me and I look at her for a second too long, because something slips into my mind in between, the thou-- the thought, why are we together? why do I live here? Then I lean my forehead against the cold pane over the low courtyard by the round roofs, astonished to see how I am just letting this love go, when I know love it's so precious and rare, I would find hard to forgive me afterwards, I think, for having let this rare and precious love go, and where-- and her pain and frustration--
It's like if my hands were just to weak to cling at it-- "shitty hands" my father used to call me when stuff dropped from my hands, then he would slap me hard in the face, so I learned-- Christmas ball, breakfast cup, keys, brand new issue of "Topolino" down the manhole, gas lamp at camping, Aguilas Spain, 19** -- but this has nothing to do with the thing--
I push my forehead against the pane and I think at my mug behind the window from the other side-- is it mysterious? I wish--
Behind my back she is still at the table where we ate and nobody has anything left to say, dirty dishes left to take to the sink, efforts to break through the sphinx my soul is becoming day by day-- whatever a soul is, why-- (curtains)

It was heavy raining upon Milan, bucketing down from the orange jellyfish dark sky to the gloomy streets, dressing up trees and dog turds, pharmacies and potholes, the whole city shebang. The rain made this hypnotizing rushing sound coming in from everywhere, and all the remaining music of the city's early night was removed by it, swamped into it.
Computer display kept showing to us its bad internet news as we stood there, in silence, in front of the window. The weather was closing in against the panes, all dotted with drops dribbling down, and I was thinking about how to finish what I had started, when first I decided to change my life, more than a year ago. The one job I had to do and that i left unfinished.

Libi said, "I can't believe it. Whoever win this, they will gonna fight about it forever".
Well, the country was obviously bounded for chaos or eternal falling into rotten boredom, I knew that. But sure thing was weird now to read statements of these political ballots experts saying how "we are facing the worst elections in the world". Even worse than the Florida rigged game apparently, although in a smaller and more insignificant league.
And when one part proclaimed to have won, and the other contested, it all seemed a bad deja vu.
Sure thing Italy was going to remain Berlusconi's, just like he bought it from us. After all, it doesn't really matter whether you actually manage a run-down store or not, as long as you can be there blackmailing who will be managing it. The best way to get out of the lead is when the things in front line get really crappy.
I said, "We will never get rid of Berlusconi". Then I said, "we deserve it probably".
All you have are these bitter little jokes to say in the end.

But it was not about that. What was Italy after all? It was just this old boot in the sea, admired and envied by many in the world without any real clue about it, or about the mental insanity of its hypnotized citizens.
Maybe it was all about the fact that the country was not going to do any good to me, because I never did any good to it. It never even crossed my mind you could do something good for this country.

Outside it was still raining. We worried for the wisteria young blooms, if hard rain was going to be too hard for them.
Part of the houses we could spot from across the courtyard looked all blacked out, windows invisible and lifeless behind the rain. In my paranoia I thought, see, lights off, the starting signal of a putsch.
In fact a little later in the house lights went off and on for a while, dimming the bulbs in slowed down hiccups. But then it all remained on.
Libi went to bed, and I stayed awake, as always.
I wasn't frustrated, because I had never been very concerned in changing Italy's destiny or any country's. It was just what the rain was saying. How that's the country of cheating and strafottenza and all, careless, indifferent, slow, and how rain was washing it all out to leave it like it was before, just like anything else.
All right, may be it was a little frustrating after all.

p.s. The title of this post at first was "Well, I too always cheat at videogames, so I can understand". But then I decided it was pointless to suggest someone cheated on the elections. Hey, even if that was, that's modern democracy. Videogames ship out with cheats bundled into them, as opposite of what I assumed few years ago, when first I played one.
So, be it.

So we are four at Gisa place again tonight. I came with Libi, and this guy Paolo has just arrived, who was Libi boyfriend a while ago, more or less at the same time I was Gisa boyfriend. Actually, this Paolo must have been the love of her life back then so it should be interesting to look at him, which I haven't done yet, except when we shook hands before but I had the baby in my arms then, luckily, and was busy already with the meal thing that I always offer myself to do in order to avoid greetings, so that I can yell them from the kitchen where I am safe.
This isn't supposed to feel weird or anything, because a lot of time has passed, and also because there's the little girl among us, almost seven months years old, restlessly babbling and screeching claiming attention from everybody, so we're not even four, we're five. The title of this post is wrong.
These were the initials anyway.

We are four and waiting the fifth to fall asleep, the lights are too low, I am at the stoves preparing what Gisa told me to, although I am trying to be a vegetarian, still not a dogmatic one. I know Gisa is glad of this night only because she is really devastated by being a mother, and feels easily left alone, and irrational. She needs company to keep it up with reality every single day, and I know I have been neglecting her instead, I fear only because I am not so exceptional at her eyes as I used to be.
Weeks and months has passed, but things doesn't seem to change into something less tiring for her and the baby while Loris is almost always away, with his rock star life, and she is constantly jealous, mostly without reason, but, who knows.
To the point, so I go on blending the stuff in the pan, and listening to them talking in the background, and I'm thinking that she is glad of us being here, but not so glad because this is not what she wants after all.

At the edge of the picture there's the city rolling outside the windows, car lights reflecting into the canal and a dog barking from a balcony against the traffic. Wind bends and shakes the branches of the shrubs out there in the courtyard, very strongly. It's late and shops lights are going off not one by one, but all together, or in groups, and when it happens the streets are left alone, barren of trees and visible life, just drawn over and over by cars. The intermitting lamps from Gisa Christmas tree appear and disappear on the window pane, glowing their strange patterns three months late.

I know she'd rather mingle into a drugged night, an endless party of sorts, with lots of cocaine or kinky stuff, the backstage situation at a one of Loris's concerts, some of the other things I don't do or I wouldn't do right, so it gives me a little pain to be here just as a faint friendly substitute of something more brave and meaningful which is not here. She just got back from Berlin and she's even more depressed than when she left.
I see this as Time which is passed and has made us different.

Not that we're here to do orgies or anything like that, just this boring dinner we're about to have, where nothing really is going to be told. I feel it so, as I hear Libi and Paolo talking, he talks about his job in a low, resolved slightly bored way, arm folded, making faces at the baby in the walker. At every phrase I think about the time when those two were together for life, and I can't decide if it feels reasonably possible only because Libi is so malleable by her men's attitudes, or if it doesn't feel reasonable at all.
I turn and see Gisa in a daze in her chair. She's above the conversation and her eyes looks dreamy and desperate and too tired already. No talking could be more distant from her than the one going on right now, and I may call her attention over the stoves, or try to change the subject, or ask her some stuff I might need, but I don't. I get my eyes back to the pan. I feel like I'm not so different or so interesting tonight. I fade out in the background again.

Later we're all a little drunk, and finally the baby is asleep, Libi fills her glass again and glances in my direction as if to ask permission to drink another glass. I don't know why this always happens with the girls I'm with, that they end up asking me permission to drink when we're out. She fills our glasses too, smiling around as if to excuse her. Her smile is beautiful and tender, shining in back light when she tuns back to me.
Now I can look at him across the table, but I don't seem to be interested anymore. The conversation falls into pools of silence now and then, and when it's late enough into one of the pools we can hear a freight train whistling across town. I think it's the sound of Middleland sleeping. Gisa needs cigarettes, so we all go out. We separate down at the corner, I hug Gisa rubbing her skinny back, thinking how much this girl can get skinnier before she disappears. In my hands I have a transparent sealed box with the remnants of the meal she didn't even wanted to have around in the house.

I am driving back to the house. Libi is leaning against my shoulder as I drive. The streets are empty, and everything is tainted with the orange cheap light of Middleland's street lamps.
"You know I wouldn't exchange you with anybody" Libi says.
"Mh." I say.
"I want to have sex" she mumbles.
I don't say anything, she touches me and I just touch her back. I wonder whether our relationship is going higher or lower or sideways (I am still a little drunk), and I decide i don't want to think about it, because I learned that if you don't think about it, and you try not to define it, however it goes it's healthier for everyone.
Then I am struggling to find a parking spot near the place. I drive a couple of times around before settling for an half-illegal one, for that's how much illegal this city allows us to be.
"It's just that I really didn't looked at the guy", I say before we walk out of the car.
"Yeah, you probably didn't want to." she says. She must be really drunk to be so outspoken, yet it feels OK.

"How's going?" I ask to Libi few minutes after the sex. She nods her head in sign of approval. I was wondering if she finally had an orgasm or not, but I prefer not to ask since she's so nice not to fake it. The issue is one of the many reasons I envy homosexuals for.
Sometimes during sex, if I'm coming too early I think about football players playing, or about ugly TV faces, to cool me off. If I'm coming late, I think about my ex-girlfriends, usually two of them who were the most masochistic ones. And all these thoughts jumbles in my mind as I have sex, so I rarely have any hints of what is passing in the other's mind.
"I 'm feeling like trying the headstands again", she says, just a moment before falling asleep, snatching me a smile. But it's nothing about sex. It's just this thing we tried to do one sunday afternoon, to get to stand on our heads, because I had just read about it an a Saul bellow's book. And that's a pretty stupid way to end this post, but it's the way it ends.

Looks like many in the dentist waiting room have been waiting for their turn too long. It' a bit discouraging, also the fact that nobody greets you as you enter the small room. Everyone is pissed, and bored, and grows impatient at seeing yet another fellow putting himself in line. I hang my jacket above the pile stuffed on the clotheshorse, regretting I haven't brought anything to read, as usual.

The most bored of all seems to be a seven years old little girl who is lounging on the small couch. I sit in front of her. She's abandoned against her grandmother's chest, legs sprawled, feet bouncing, complaining.
"But in that place where there were those two fighting with the umbrella you said we had to hurry", she's reproaching her grandma.
"You have to be in time"
"We could have bought the little turtle by this time"
"Or the bird" says grandma.
The little girl idles for few seconds thinking at the possibility of the bird. "Only if we don't keep it in the cage", she says then. "Let's go get them both now!"
"You kidding? We have been waiting for almost an hour now. We're not going now. Besides you ought to wait."
"I am bored!"

Time passes. Droning drills can be heard whirling in the background, but nobody comes out of surgery. In the room, we keep waiting. Everybody is reading in silence, except the little girl and her grandma. And me, recording them inconspicuously. The little girl knows I am there, and every now and then peeps sideways to see if I am still looking at her, suppressing a smile.
Hidden speakers shed "The Sound of Silence" above our heads. The little girl puffs and moves about. Her grandma patiently tries to calm her, talking to her with the mellower tones of her hoarse lowed voice, indecipherable from the other side of the room.

"I would never make someone wait like this. I am reliable" says the little girl at a certain moment. Grandma smiles, I smile. The girl is glad of the attention, and loudly starts acting even more indignant. "How can they do this to me", she says, arms folded.
"You also sometimes do not find the time to do things", grandma remarks. "Your room is always untidy, your things scattered everywhere".
"Oh!" she says, stricken for a second. "But I get by into that!"

The looks of this sweet little girl, with grandma at her service, remind me a little of Mussolini. Her round eyes, the partially squared shape of her head, the mug which sticks so much out when she sulks. So it happens that I am imaging Mussolini now, sitting in this dentist's waiting room with his grandmother, sulking and complaining for the wait and bored and looking out of the window with daydreaming eyes.
This vision strikes me. I wonder where, why, how do we end up so different, us whiny pleasant sweet little kids we have been? We were so inoffensive, and yet some of us ended up a dictator. But it's not only that. We all ended up into offices, in the armies, into cars stuck in traffic, into grown up dresses and into hotels and into dentist waiting rooms, so far from the places we seemed to be ready for as kids. And we are no more allowed to be whiny so much, neither we are so much inoffensive anymore. Everything we do we pretend it is going to happen only once.
Or at least it seems so to me, adult me, uneasy with life, sitting in this waiting room today.
Well, these are not very original thoughts, I know. Still they hit me as singular, and strange.
I am surprised, because in this dentist waiting room I always have the most strange and detached thoughts (See this post).

"I don't like Milano", the little girl is saying now. "It's ugly".
"What! Don't you like it here?" asks grandma. "You have your friends, and your things here"
"I like it if someone listens to me"
"But the city has nothing to do with this!"
"Yes it does!"

I don't want to unsettle the little girl, or maybe I don't want to be laughed at by her for some obscure but peremptory reason. Still I stand up. I have to stretch my legs a little. The good girl seems not to mind me. We are all waiting for incredibly long spans of time. I stroll around the small entrance, rereading for the nth time the hanged diplomas. I think of the zodiacal signs of the doctors. I wonder if they coincide with the picture of them I have in mind. Gemini. Leo. My dentist is a Gemini.

"What a bore!" Boredom is actually torturing her, like a bodily enemy. All the available issues of Topolino she could read are scattered off their pile and discarded around the couch. "I don't want to grow old here!" she says. "Otherwise wrinkles will start to come to my face. I will end up as a granny!"
"Granny? Granny is nice," says her grandmother.
"Sure! So I grow old and die, so I don't have to be here waiting anymore."
At this words, sarcastic and coarse as they are, her grandma covers her own face with a hand for a second, saying nothing. The little girl doesn't notice, occupied as she is to cross her eyes at my benefit.
I look away. Outside it has started to rain. After a thunder, we all look in between the curtains for a few moments, the greenish sky against the shaded walls across the street, the rain violently coming down. The little girl complains for it. They aren't going to buy the turtle now. Colors are changing rapidly outside, and the thunderstorm seems very beautiful.
I break into the surgery room where my doctor is alone, only occupied with trying to open his locked window.

"I had you waiting because I can't be locked inside like this" he says.
"I see."
"But no way. I'll have to call the repairman tomorrow."
At our backs, the little girl and her grandmother are entering too, into the other doctor's surgery.
"I was not bored to wait because of the little girl" I say.
"That one?" says my dentist. "She's crazy."

When I get out of the building everything around is a little darker, but macadam pieces are shining with the film of water pouring down. Cars screech their brakes and honk their horns. I go home, on foot, under my green sun hat trying to imagine what the grandma was feeling behind her hand, before. I remember my father crying in the other room, on Christmas, because his son wasn't close to him. I remember I thought it was death approaching to make him cry. I was sure of it because I think of death everyday, too, trying to picture and to draw that feeling of imminence that seems just so unbearable and inconceivable. Yet I know the little girl was right, it actually will come to be, one day, the end of the wait.

There's a kind of elongated violet indigo clouds that is typical of the sky at dawn in the half-beautiful days, at least here over the roofs of Milan. I must have looked at them dozens of times, isolated as they are against the fading-to-yellow blu sky. They all look alike, from day to day and season to season, strechted and small, pointed at the ends and frayed and very very distant but low in the sky. And I am pretty sure they announce bigger clouds to come.
How long they last? They last from the moment you notice them, in the quiet house where everything still has to happen, and your thoughts don't fight with sensations but just toy with them, to the moment you have forgotten everything about them, in the house where the world pushes in, and your idea of the sky is just the repository of everything that heats, burns, turns into ashes and smoke. Suddendly, the strongest wind rattles the window panes and announces rain. The clouds are gigantic already.

I am at home, standing in front of the bedroom window. My mother's voice comes hasty from the phone, I just answered and we're already into the story of her occasional paresthesia to the left hand and arm again, the difficulty to swallow and stuff, and I am once again worried not only by what she is saying, for how much adornment of irony she might be rapidly seasoning it with, but by the fact that she already told me this story, about the cortisone and the physician who doesn't understand or thinks she's an aggressive hypochondriac, and her depression undergoing it all, and even thought she's always been quite absent-minded, I know it's not the first time after the operation she just seems to have no recollection at all of entire pieces of our telephone conversations.

Now she's talking in a rush and it feels like she's worried of being interrupted. She has her mother's story in mind, as I do. This doesn't help neither of us to be rational. But I already said that somewhere else.

I sit on the bed and close my eyes against the sun blazing. I let it heat the skin of my face and I watch this moment developing, when I figure that something bad is already happening, and maybe I am already into it, and then I become suddenly stiff and calm, as all the tension invisibly swirls in and out my stomach, and I wonder if this preparation to events is in fact desire for events to come, any event: to make life more substantial.
Outside the window, at the bottom of the horizon around the big ball of fire the usual blocks of flats piled up to harbor human beings dissolve upward in the mighty light. The city continuosly plays in the background its instruments, mostly engines, and few calls of the living, birds included, bounce between the walls. I think about masturbating for a sec, I don't know why.

"I know you're having this new job now", she's saying, "and that it's probably too soon to get a vacation or something."

It's not that kind of job, I probably should say, but I don't say anything. It would be pointless now to explain her how not only there's no such thing as a vacation to "take" at the bookstore anyway, but also that days off work because of flu or shit like that are not even paid, and then you have to recuperate the lost hours anyway.
So I think, yeah, the boss wouldn't be very understanding if I ask her for 'a vacation'.

"... I am going to do more exams this week, but most likely I will have to be operated again", she says. "I'm asking you first. I'd need your help for a week or so with the dogs and the horse just like you did the other time. I'll pay you of course. "
"Mom", I say. Or better, I call her by her first name, since I never called my parents 'mom' and 'dad', given the fact that they just didn't allowed us to, 'cause it was 'bourgeois'. "Mom, what kind of operation? Why?"
"The same operation."
"Oh, no, shit. Not that."
"Yes honey. The first physician is not listening to me, he thinks I am a crazy old witch, he says the post-intervention situation is fine but I went to this other one who is supposed to be a big name of neurology in Bari and he just told me that the situation instead is possibly bad, and that all the stuff I am experiencing right now it's because of this fluid that is still in my skull, osmosing blood from the meninx and all. I've got to do something. I might as well end half-paralyzed and then I'd be way much more idiot or crazy"
"What, wait, why the second doctor should be more reliable than the first"
"Because that one is just not considering how I feel now. This one instead seems to be actually interested in my condition."
"The other is defensive because he made the intervention, that's all. Still it's one to one..."
"No it's not, because it's not only the exams, it's how I feel. What should I do? You tell me."
"Let's hear someone else, send me all the papers and I'll find a neurologist here in Milan..."
I say this because in terms of public services like hospitals and stuff, I'm unreasonably intolerant toward the southern italian medical world. I can't help it. No offense, but inflation of hypochondriacs really can ruin it for everybody. I'm one of them, so I should know it.

"Listen, if you can't come here I perfectly understand..."
"I think I can make it if necessary" I hear my voice saying. "Don't worry".

When later I hang up I wonder why I said that. Being away for an entire week after only a month working at the bookstore. That can't be easy.
Since I have problems thinking I'm a good or generous or caring fellow, I just wonder if I said that because subconsciously I might already hoping to be fired from the bookstore. I picture it, under the heat of the sun behind my eyelids, and I see I wouldn't mind very much being fired. After all my father was right when he said I had no tangible idea of how 'the rest of regular people' was making it in the world.

It is raining steady outside. The pouring water makes a faint noise against the bricks of the terrace, the plastics vases and the rigid jasmine leaves. Light is strangely dimmer all around, also because of the wet surfaces of the buildings and the roofs darken everything, and the grayish yellow walls of the condos drawn upon by the rain with wide wet brush-like stains, dragon-shaped, or shaped like clouds piled up to the horizon.
My thoughts do not enthuse me, miserable plans of cheating, hypocrite worries for relatives I never call, absurd fears of precocious illnesses, strategies to work even less or caring less, the doubtful meaning of this blogging, like a 'I put myself at the window here and report back' kind of thing, only because I can do it, just like cheating.
They don't enthuse me, but these are my thoughts, and I cannot find a way to pilot them to a better destination, so I just look out of the window, sunday raining, let them roll. I am lucky enough, I think, I have this window to look out from, this good things, like a yogurt or a computer or the music or such, and a person I can have sex with right now, sunday morning, just if I feel like having it, high-handed. And as I start wondering why is that, that I need to brutalize the women I love, or they wish to be brutalized by me, a whole chain of images, fantasies and scenes come to me. Finally are the thoughts that don't need to be hijacked or pushed forward.

Outside the light's changing again, someone down in the road is bitterly impelling her old dog to move faster, the lid of clouds seems more thick and consistent and the dark crows and pigeons stand out against it as they fly from one roof to the other.