Mis pies son como de cartón
que voy arrastrando por cada rincón.
Mi cama se hace fría y gigante y en ella me pierdo yo.
Mi casa se vuelve a caer,
mis flores se mueren de pena,
mis lágrimas son charquitos que caen a mis pies.
Te mando besos de agua que hagan un hueco en tu calma.

Bebe, Razones

At five the half moon moved above the roofs in the watery air, visibly spherical. I laid on the floor listening to an american voice talking on the PC radio into the earpiece, conscious of my back in the neat silence among the familiar walls. Talks of war and politics and people went on and I partially followed, gliding above details, motivations, tones, only minding the flowing of the voice in the stream. This inadvertence is what makes entertainment, I thought, that's why everything can be entertaining.

Later in the morning sun, helping Gisa moving a table into a elevator, I was gifted a couple of gratis not liberating laughs during the efforts. Also just before the cat had chased a fly against the window panes and effortlessly won it, as the moka blurbed its smell of coffee in the whiter space.
The story went that Gisa had lent the table to us two years earlier, and now we were returning it, and we were without a table. As me and Gisa took the table away the cat mourned the loss by looking up from where the comfortable shades between the legs of the table had just been, in the room in Libi's house. As we went across the terrace I wanted Gisa to admire the plants, to ask me which was what, she did it but only a little bit (where one quietly should squat next to the planters).

Down in the street, to the rackless roof of Gisa's long car we strapped the table with hooked elastics running through the back seat windows, the radio singing desaparecido out loud causing reproving glances of the sidewalkers, while passengers waiting at the tram stop looked upon us benevolently, mistaking us for a informative diversion.

I disengaged although previously meant to chaperon Gisa to her new house outside the city, we said goodbye, always inadequately, and she went alone and I walked away down the street, table orphan, under the tall trees fluttering up above in bright green and dark green against unequal patches of clear brown and white where the sun reached the bark. The black roofs, upper edges of the canyon, seemed to wave as well behind the waving trees. I longed for unconscious sex, for open smiles, for solidarity, for friends, for undefined merit.

I thought of Libi who was not there at the moment, at myself and my collections of guilt, I saw how she must have gotten sick of me in the end and how I-- I got frustrated with the world she wanted me to join, chosen for me, unfit for me, and I though at how we kept loving or wanting each other nonetheless, secretly, unreasonably, not able to give anymore that little much. Egoism is what makes love beside other things.
I hated all the rights and all the wrongs now, my rights and her wrongs more than everything. I walked by the windows and the beggars, entered the Panificio for a supply of focaccia, got out and felt so tired, I wanted it to be night, the peaceful night, with us separated one from the other, living off each other different rhythms of sleep, the moments I most likely loved her the most. More freely. Most sincerely. But it was too sad and I couldn't think about it anymore. The street appeared all crowded now, hurrying me against the stone walls of the condos.

-- In picture above: Lince, quarter to one.

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.

Biba goes across a corner of lawn following something. It's the noise of the dry leaves below the frayed wall, and the blur of white flowers against the green lawn. We chat as we follow her, me and Gisa, until Biba turns around to check on our presence, smiles and goes a bit further. Gisa wants to steer her away from things dirty and rotten, but Biba knows better. There are things she sees in the way little stones are trapped by the brown dirt, and the way flowers crumble between her fingers when she pulls them hard from the ground. There's a mystery in the way green musk layering the bark of the trees pulverizes under her thumb, and the dogs behind the fence are thrilling as they come closer to smell and lick her fingers and she backs away, excited. They are very big and strangely attractive and incontrollable.
There are gray hard stairs in a corner of the garden, that Biba wants to climb up and down over and over again, it might be for the satisfaction of doing it or for the way the landscape changes as she moves. She doesn't really know. They're very high steps for her, she's is so small, it's an adventure. Gisa wants to hold her hand but she doesn't. So she stumbles and hits her forehead against the base of the railing but just like her father, she almost never feels physical pain. The bump doesn't bother her. Cries a little for the shock, gets back on her feet and up and down the stairs again. We follow. Talking out our fears and hopes and the distance in the sunny milanese spring day.

music: Maurice Ravel, Trio for Piano in A-minor-- as far as I can hear it while keeping my ability to concentrate on what I'm writing. noise: drills and bangs coming from yet another apartment renovation in the complex; muffled rumble of the city; rattling of trams in the avenue: (the usual)

Yesterday I tried to get in touch with Jawa again-- apparently they're away for the entire week. I steered to Gisa's and managed to talk with her about the situation, and it was useful, I guess. She was so surprised to hear the story. After all it all happened in her apartment, when she lend it to me for few months and I had that affair.
See? I said to myself. You lead a interesting life.
Then we agreed that every possible outcome was going to be either unsatisfactory or unjust, or painful. Whether Jawa happens to "know" that their son is actually "our" son, and she deliberately is hiding it from me; or she doesn't want to know and gets evasive; or Ernesto knows too and it's the way they decided to live this thing (the fact that they're both quite rational and science-minded individuals can be a factor); or it is all a fantasy of mine; or she realizes the possibility as soon as I tell her: in all cases what happens next is the same thing, which is, nothing.
I list to Gisa all my fears and obsessions. I say that maybe they both know, and are hiding it from me because they're scared that I might want to barge in, if only on a given hypothetical day far in the future. This can be disappointing --people not trusting me and all-- but understandable: and the consequence could only be not to see them anymore, for ever, for life: To reassure them that I am willing to spare the child a shock tomorrow that only a misunderstood idea of science or nature (what being a "biological" parent means) may consider necessary.
"Talk to her" says Gisa.
"I want to, believe me. But she seems to be sneaking away from it all the time. Why is she avoiding me anyway?"
"Oh, she probably thinks that you want to fuck her again-- and with the baby and all she doesn't want to have to tell you that it is not going to happen" Gisa answers.
"What?" See, I haven't thought of that.
"Why do you want to know it so much? What can you really do with it?" she asks.
Nothing, I know she's right. "Maybe Jawa knows for sure that this is not the case. Blood types, DNA, whatever. She can reassure me. Or maybe I just want to know what happens next with the story, you know. Describe it to myself as it happens. I can't keep that part frozen."
Skeptical look from Gisa.
"I know I have lied many times in my life" I say. Hell I have been lying to Gisa too, she knows me."Still, I hate to hide things when it's not my choice: I hate to know that there's this sort of terrain I cannot walk on. At least I would like to know that Jawa knows that I am willing to do whatever it takes to make her or them more happy with the situation."
"I bet they're happy with the situation."

Gisa is tidying up the apartment. I follow her around as she piles up stuff and takes toys out of the way, throws away stuff. Little Biba is taking a nap in the other room, Loris (the rockstar) is about to come back from a sound check. There's white light pouring in from the high windows, smell of budino and hanging clothes.
"Funny" Gisa says then.
"What?"
"You telling me about this, and I reading Dostoevsky's the eternal husband these days. It just is a very similar story. Have you read it?"
"No".
"Well is about this guy who receives a visit from a friend who recently became a widower. The guy and this friend's wife were lovers until 9 years before, when she abruptly put an end to their relationship without an explanation. Later he meets the daughter of the widower and from the moment he lays his eyes on her he is convinced that she is his own daughter. The little girl is 9 years old, and the age makes it possible if not probable for her to be his daughter. More importantly, there is something with her that makes it even more obvious, some affinity and special bond that they have."
"So how it ends?"
"I don't know, I haven't finished it yet. But you said you felt some connection with Jawa's son."
"Well, I thought. But probably the boy is too little to say." I know you can't cling to something so irrational, you're not supposed to.
"Man, I really would like to know how the story ends." I mumble. "Please let me know." Like anything depended on that.