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.

Once again I find myself staying in a residence hotel, this time in a small village that we can call Oil Bridge, some ten kilometers south of a city on the river Po we can call Pleasance. I have no evidence that the city is living up to its name, or that the village has anything to do with Oil. Just a long bridge on the shallow river Nure. Truth is I am close to some of the most beautiful hills in Italy. First impression, the little I've seen of the people around here I don't like very much, I wonder what are those mugs, if arrogance or wariness, and the use of the italian word "salve" to greet people, like in Milan, more than in Milan widespread. "Salve" is a good indicator of contempt for the next one. It's like saying I don't want to greet you, you're not welcome, when are you leaving? It cannot be said looking at someone right in the eyes, but only eluding the contact. It is the most unpleasant and the most hypocrite casual greeting conceivable in Italy. I hate it and so should anyone who has a bit of heart. However, it seems to be used a lot around here. I noticed my "good day!" is getting more stentorian.
Of course I don't know the tenth part of it. I've been working. I am a gardener. I was given a baseball hat too small for my big head, I eat in the trattorias in my muddy overalls and I'm coming home for the weekend.

I drive under the gloom sky to Milan and to the rainstorm, some old times blues singer is moaning, I feel tired. Later the lively raindrops against the smudged windshield, while the fuzzy yellow opening to the west goes dark. I enter the city. Numerous parts of my body are sore, my face and arms are cooked and bi-cooked, I got blisters on my fingers, four days of garden building, 9+ hours a day under the sun or rain proved to be quite hard. I felt stupid when I still had to dig into wet soil, unload compost, connect irrigation pipes or some other stuff at the end of the workday, and I just couldn't do it, I had to go someplace instead against a wall or a tree and sit and breathe and let my heartbeat slow-- But it was graceful to work again, and be back to the real treasure of this work, which I venture is to change scenery so often during the week, but always being among plants and outside and into a garden. Besides, from Oil Bridge you get everywhere in half an hour. Back in Milan, I'm stuck in traffic again, I have to park the car somewhere possibly illegal and far from the condo, while the rain pours down. I left my hat in Oil Bridge, and will get wet, so I pretend I got accustomed to it already.

-- in picture, above: coming back to Milan.

It's raining. At moments very hard and thundering. I look out on the terrace, all the creatures look healthy but they could do without the rain. Fallen flower petals draw light shapes on the terracotta tiles. Spraying sulfur yesterday was really useless I reckon. My new employer does not want me to relocate and start with the new job because it's raining. We call each other everyday and we discuss the weather like old lovers. "There is nothing to do", he says. It's true. No grass to mow, no treatments to do, no planting to do, no nothing. Why should he start to pay me, right? "The Azores anticyclonic thing is not showing up" he reports. I venture, "Because of the gulf stream slowing down?" I read that Europe is facing a little new ice age and all that. Temperatures having not been above average since 1998.
"May, it rains for twenty days in a row. June, same thing", he regrets.
Hail the next sucker who believes in man-made global warming. I am here with nothing obvious to do, luggage half-packed, half unpacked (the mess' on the floor, always in between), relation half-broken. The usual. I can't put this on the plate with the man, right?
I rewrote the about page 'cause I felt I am becoming something new, and yet, frustration, I am not. (Although on a funnier note, Libya called today asking for my bank account details. For the third time they did that, oh morons, but at least they are going to pay, who would have thought. With the people's money, of course: it's horrible to work for the government, any government, if you ask me. End of the post.)

-- In picture, above: petunia never looks wet.

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.

You can live your life in a crowded city,
You can walk along a crowded street.
But the city really ain’t no bigger than the friendly
People, friendly people that you meet.

-- Bill Withers, Lonely town, lonely street

So let's keep the big brothers updated on my whereabouts then. So this part of learning is over, so I am looking for a job. I reckon I probably am not pushing as hard as I could, officiously because of my love life falling apart once again (sent Gisa to be on the lookout for a new home for me, down in the outerlands where she lives now, where the men burn their wages at the Bar Tabacchi slots in front of the school or consume the afternoons fishing the Naviglio dry), mother writing me letters again to nail me down to her post-mortem future (basically to attend to her animals, in the letters she always refers to herself as dead, unconscious overhanging to snatch away frail forms of love never given), father ignoring me as always (fuck that), the waste-land of friendship (Elsa would say it's Pluto in the eleventh), school betraying me with its favoritisms --and few other alibis I pass finger to finger as the little dusty clay stones at the bottom of the planters, who cares, I attend to the vegetation on the terrace just to keep the feeling alive, the shit is blossoming, the new green is bright and little, moving, simple, courageous, all which the cat vandalizes, and Libi, I am feeling sorry for Libi, when she's out with friends and I eat alone, when we don't make love, when I come back to the old habits of staying awake at night, when we stay silent at the table and she asks the questions, that sound too much like a interrogation, and the answers are all curled up under my tongue in a word-ball, untangled strip of syllables, untellable, like the d in the keyboars that oesn't work anymore. So I dropped few papers, self-printed free-lance gardener cards, the curricula I sent or brought were ludicrous I admit, there was this page with the "green" experiences (the school, gardener, organic farm, all that) followed by the non-green experiences not having nothing to do with anything, real pretentiousness and out-of-placeness, what a gardener has to do with your fucking buried-in-the-past job as assistant to the professor of contemporary art shit at the faculty so-and-so and all that-- what an asshole I am, including the shit to the curriculum lest to be spotted as the loafer, the good-for-nothing that I am-- I mean that (my father) considered me to be or whatever-- So nobody answered (I mean not even "NO"), typical italian arrogance, but basically I didn't give a shit except for what others want to think of me, y except maybe for that one vacant spot, the job I really sought for, sure that they were going to call for me, but didn't, see I always believe I am going to be lucky, funny like that.

-- in picture above, three from the terrace. which reminds me, it's equinox tonight, time of the year to plant few of certain seeds I have left.

The school is at the end of a narrow gray road across a field, hidden in a bunch of ornamental trees of different sizes and colors. A smell of wet grass and soil pervades the air when I walk to it in the morning. I take a tram, the subway, and a bus to get there and it takes an hour and a half. I bring a book to read (these days is "The Deception" by Nicolas Born) during the three hours of commute everyday. The school itself is eight hours and boy I can be tired when I get home. Definitely not accustomed to it.
There was this quote on this blog since its first day, more than two years ago, a quote by Mark Twain that went: "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for."
It seems funny how in the end I got to sawing wood. I am taught how to use brushcutters, hedgetrimmers, pruners, lawn mowers... luckily there are other major things to study --such as identification of plants, phytopathology, botany, design of gardens etcetera.
They say it is a famous gardening school. I still don't know if it makes any sense this me being there but I think I'm okay with the learning thing. (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.