Quel che tu vuoi dire in fine, dillo da principio.
-- proverbio italiano

I don't see very far across london. We roam the streets in a truck which I still have to learn to drive -- on that funny side of everything-- and they're always the same streets. They have plane trees, shaped up small gardens along badly built pretty houses that are all the same. Occasionally there are shops and traffic and buses. Toff's where I had fish three times. Every kind of plant grows around you. No limits. On the job the construction workers deploy an accent I can't break, but I am called a mate. Most of the times we start before dawn. Every day is different days into one, one of them is a rainy day usually in the afternoon. But we work on anyway. Airplanes fly down above our heads occasionally and the blackbirds and the robins and the squirrels and the ravens are somewhere all around in the gardens, gaping at our work of uncovering treasures for them. The flowers fall under my secateurs, as they call it here. The shrubs are still in blossom. I become a better gardener day by day, well except when there's something I detest like moving leaves around with a blower. Or similar. Then I am a bad gardener.

Later I, walking around in east finchley... I, longing for someone to go visit, to call, or a call to wait for. Fall in love, be surprised. I dragged such pointless feelings all the way from Italy in my freitag bag.
I stand in a mirror inside the window of a real estate agency! I’m such a handsome man, so charming when I want, used to be a clever boy and I don’t know anyone lonelier than me.
I lazy, I paranoid, I absent-minded and fool. My true hidden soul is a bum in disarray. Is anyone seeing it? That girl? That the reason of a tender smile possibly? Doubtful. No mothers around. No cereals.

So I came here to london. I sleep in a 6 square meters room and wake up at five thirty... I shop for packed food that doesn't even look like food. But it wasn't about the work, not because I reputed the location special or better, only my efforts not to sink in the obviousness of my little, mediocre sea. I can see how I am tired to look at the others as the giants who can live where I can't exist and be, but even here all I try to do: to lessen them --picking on their possible despair. Such are my ramblings in the megalopolis far from home. I take pride of trifling in my hateful solitude then, saved. Hypocritically sorry for those who take antidepressants, for example-- paraphrasing Kafka who wrote that his peers had found "companionship through means of intoxication" which made them sociable, which was the point. "I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have". So, consolation! I am not social because I don't want to cheat. Lonely because honest and so forth.

It's a city. I know the drill. Like on a parade the dreaded leaves fall from the tallest creatures of the avenue down to the dark bottom of it no matter what the souls're at. Looking for a parking spot, swearing in a whisper and scanning both sides of the road from behind a smudged car glass. Waiting for the dog to take a quick shit in between the garden paths, looking sideways to give it time and privacy. Smoking a cigarette outside a restaurant talking on the thin cell swaying slowly while the smoke dissolves. Walking by the glowing windows of the shops catching glimpses of things to buy, shoes furniture towels more thin cell phones bangladeshi food. Nodding off on a crowded bench on the number something. Nodding off on a empty pew inside the church. Dragging the children, the bike, the shopping bags, the questions, the moments of the day past. In line at the cashiers. Avoiding the looks down the road. Forgetting the legendary fears exchanged between us and the TV, privately, and carried around in disguise. On the surface, it is tuesday night at five post meridiem, dark, people are diverse, I am unable to use the word elegance here or anywhere, I certainly am ~alive. Etc.

I popoli settentrionali meno caldi nelle illusioni,
sono anche meno freddi nel disinganno.
-- Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani

I had that known feeling again this morning, same as yesterday. I woke up and wondered where I was, in which bed I was. I might be wrong but I swear it doesn't look like home I thought. I mean, it's no big deal because if it's not home, it will certainly be something else, equally habitable.
And why am I here again? What have I done? Where is the window? (It's on the opposite side!) On which side of the bed am I? Have I not too much room? Am I not kicking someone out of bed? Where is the loved one? (Not here.) What house is this? What world is outside? (what if it is a world I don't know?)

After which the swinging of the black walnut leaves against the smooth perfect sky of the morning; something in the line of the hills, or the sheer factuality of the hills; possibly the smell of the wall near my face (of all the visible objects, the odd abat-jour, the wooden dark seat, the chandelier, the vaulted ceiling, so full of clues, none seemingly but placeless, not belonging to anywhere): I couldn't say with what feeling I learned where I was. Relief acceptance disappointment wonder. That is right, I thought, I am in the castle. Outside is the province. Fields villages dry rivers gardens petrol stations old folks. All the lines at the horizon are crooked and the long road to Plaisance is the swoosh of that engine running by in the early morning and felt between the thoughts.

Later during the day, I am half naked under the sun and entrenched in the umpteenth boring Toro irrigation plant, I am digging or screwing pipes one to the other, mounting sprinklers etc. I am alone at the endless building site in the remote val d'arda, high up on a hill where a villa is being made. I have no time to enjoy the scenery, the unusual birdsongs, the silence and wisdom of this particular dale. Only I notice how suddenly the sun is not present as it was, the clouds of the second half of August have arrived. Now and then I squint and look up at the dramatic canvas in the making. By the end of the day, the sky is broken into many districts, layers of skies of different intensity, drawings of nothingness and vapors of rare beauty. Some strokes are dark grey, others white against the blue and boringly, all I am able to think, pervaded as I am by a feeling of smallness and wonder is the classic: wow, it is so beautiful it seems fake. And then to laugh at the eternal joke, that if it was fake (a sky of Canaletto as this could be), it is so beautiful it could be real.
What a disappointment, a disillusion: to be in the world and yet not having a grasp on it, only a handful of small tricks and jokes to deal with it day by day. I think I have written these pages already a million times, sign that my feelings are not moving but in circles.

Driving back home, alone in the noisy truck, the sky above the road is of yet another sort, because it is so late. Getting dark, closing up and low, the end of a day's tale. And melancholic I keep on driving, thinking that skies were all there it was worth remembering today and it is all so difficult to keep together.

The smoke finally exhales from the cabin when we halt at the checkpoint. The guard emerges from the white and black shed, unarmed, exchanging salutes with the driver in the mute night, and we pull away, with the bright lights steady on. Our driver seems unresponsive to the pleading flashes of the few cars coming the other way. He passes trucks without hesitation, in bends and straight stretches alike. Unemotional elongated face on a seriosuly long body, very stern and bony, menacing to the superficial observer. Chatting with our boss in the front seats, as always it is difficult to say whether they’ve ever met before, and they probably haven’t.

We cast our rushing light to the backdrop of the night, illuminating instants of pines and acacias, the amorphous red iron rocks of Jebel al-Akdhar, the so called green mountains. We left behind the few still open diners when we left the larger road from Bengazi, eating houses without window panes, gaping onto the road in pools of light and moths and offering a colorful collection of countless scraps hanging from their walls.
I imagined music in those diners, similar to the moaning and beautiful arabic music filling the car cabin as we go. I imagined sitting and smoking the shisha again, which so perfectly slows down the flow of time. Talking in our unpolished english about religion and politics and women and our biographies.

Judging from the dark void punctuated by these few signs, we could be headed everywhere, Chiapas maybe, or Athens, or Sassari.
But we are going to al-Beyda, "the white": the only place in Libya where it snows in winter. My book says that the legend wants al-Beyda to be where the garden of the Hesperides was, and I indulge on this useless thought, that we are going to visit a garden and a farm with apple trees where possibly the most legendary garden, with its golden apples, was.

The book also mysteriously refers to a very sweet kind of berry that grows only here, the shmari; we’ll later discover this to be nothing but our corbezzolo, or Arbustus unedo. The shmari is then an old friend, whose presence is not surprising, but familiar, like so many things can be familiar to us people of the Mediterranean, well, rethorically speaking. To be continued.

"I live of what the others don't know about me."

A crowd of fifteen comes for dinner. They arrive in groups and couples or one by one, smile, bring offers, say how they're glad to be here and later say they enjoy the food and drinks. There's a good dog who ritually needs to drink water. They need louder music and if neglected become silent and eager to go, the conversations skew in blind directions. They never know where to put out the cigarettes. They flirt and talk louder to overcome the din of the music and they change tracks over and over. Someone asks me absurd questions, like what I am doing with my life right now or what am I going to do tomorrow. They're all Libi's friends. Libi keeps saying she wants to hide in the bathroom to fuck. Or suck at least. Some of them conveys subtle hostility or disapproval, because they know things. I feel ridiculously out of place and uninterested and alone. I look at girls' legs. I enjoy the moments of seriousness in face to face talks at the corners of the party, and the apparent friendliness of interested inquiries. When essentially all the dialogs, the arguments, the conversations are completely useless. Solicitous and useless. "Indeed" and "precisely" are used so often precisely when one should use a word of opposite meaning. The unexpected exchange with the other girl by the biblical name who said: "one has to downplay herself to be with the others. In the end I came to accept this." That amazed me. We stay out on the terrace and inside, making groups whose balance constantly shifts. At one a.m. one says she'll go and a moment later everyone goes, judging by the movement near the exit the moment proper. It makes me sad and relieved. They leave behind a mountain of empty bottles, dirty dishes, surprising silence of the turned down volume. I remember how I used to be disappointed by parties that ended early. Now we all have jobs or at least they do. In the morning I will wash the dishes using a table dragged behind the sink as a buffer. I get out to the terrace before it starts raining again and I feel sorry for the plants. Nobody cared for the plants, it was a useless party without caring for the plants sleeping in the dark right before our eyes, standing there in the dark, growing from pots of dirt, the creatures to whom I devote the most attention and who bear in them the most of my pathetic rhetoric disillusions -- nobody asked anything about them even if few had even flowers on them, and others where just sticking out of the turf as if interested in the dyslexic world out there.