Lontano lontano
oltre Milano
oltre i gasometri
oltre i manometri
oltre i chilometri
e i binari del tram
Lontano lontano
molto lontano
oltre l'acqua corrente
e l'elettricità

-- Paolo Conte

Actually, running water and electricity do exist here. Concrete, and sand and sea and pines and oleanders too. I saw two dromedaries tied to a fence just outside of the airport. We had just landed with all our wrong intelligence, realizing the hot concrete of the airport was not adding that much to the heat, and were being rushed to the city by a laconic driver in a refrigerated car, to a little later be lodged into rooms filled with the smell left into the carpet by generations of smokers. Our contact is passed to me on the phone, we exchange polite and not entirely intelligible english. Nobody speaks italian, that's certainly a significant wrong piece of intelligence we had (my fellow traveler gardener not speaking much foreign himself).
In the hotel lobby, rich arabic business men lounging on the divans and near the reception half emancipated overdressed very sensual wives never looking sideways. I know I shouldn't look for a couple of reasons.
I think about Milan, only yesterday night I was packing in the heat of the night -- not so different a heat from here except for the humidity of the south mediterranean moving across the city -- trying to shove one more book about gardening into the bag... Libi was asleep. She had asked me not to leave for the third time that night, again this morning, obviously I felt like shit. Gisi called and told me that her beloved dog I lived with for a long time, few years ago, died this week, suddenly. I cried over the phone, almost silently and without words, I can't say I left with a light heart, but hey, I wouldn't have a light heart anyway. Never had one. I was so terrified I didn't want to leave anymore, but I left anyway. That's experience, I guess, when you lack recklessness. Little it matters, now it's the time of the great expectations, namely going for a walk, watching the unknown, listening to it, and all the rest.

You know how it is with me baby
You know I just can't stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine darling
for me to pretend that I'm somebody else.

Joliet Jake Blues, Guilty

From the terrace where I am standing I can see the whole beach... you can't tell from here but I know it is a beach of dark smooth stones, opaque and hot but shiny when wet, and the crowd sun bathing on the stones has troubles turning upside down when stretched, or moving without some kind of shoes on, timidly reaching for the cold waters of the mediterranean. (I bathed for one minute this afternoon).

(And other thoughts: They say gardens of presidential villas in North Africa are waiting for me and my too young colleague --waiting for prestigious italian gardeners which we are not. I am leaving in four or five days. My passport is exchanging hands. All I can think of is how much I am unprepared for the job, or if I really am not. The contract is not even here, it is there. Hopefully not in arabic? Unfortunately these consideration are even too much rational. It's unfathomable what the required tasks will be, the embassy does not leak details, the agency does not. Security. Or arrogance. We don't seem to care. Am I really about to be back to Africa after almost eighteen years? (a kid without a clue, in Somalia). Libi resents it all, coming really close to detest me. But not even for a second I had the faculty to say 'no', probably because I had nothing equally sane to oppose this thing to).

I can see Libi's naked legs behind the terrace corner, a girl asleep in the sun. The dark tent above my head flaps in the wind and the cat is still nervously exploring the place not known. Keeping the head low and eyes wide, refusing food.
If I close my eyes I can recognize Liguria as I experienced it many times during the endless afternoons at my father's court, one mile away on the other side of this small mountain, with a slightly different landscape around, not observing, maybe reading a book or trying to sleep.
Someone's working, hammering and sawing on the other side of a rib of trees which gives a close echo; the birds chirp and sing below and above, the turtledoves monotone coo goes on at short intervals. The wind. The hairy bees droning by, very close, far as well. A child yells powerfully from a large distance, probably the beach, and the neighbor's dog barks again. From down below in its garden he sees the seraphic cat moving along the edge of the terrace, the cat's in need to be menaced. Another La Spezia bound intercity runs by without stopping, right in the middle of everything alive, an insane rumble that shakes the village for many seconds, then it is the bellowing dissolving inside the tunnel; then again emerges the skewed engine noise of the occasional moped taking the bend; then it's the turn of a bubble of silence, wide and frail, inside the silence the sea breaking against the shore, and then it is the someone hammering again. (I recall myself hammering in a silent valley up north, realizing I was being the background of the landscape. What a stupid thought).

So is the punctuated activity of this greedy and sober land. Nothing bucolic. I have no particular feeling for it, but we spent these few days with little joys and this is more than we usually get, although everything is also sad, of course, and unjust, sadic, filled with guilt and loath and fear and things not said and disturbing milanese fixation with perfection and happiness.

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.

"Me, Love's servant? I wasn't at all! And suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was sick of myself. I thought that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I wasn't a bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that Mexico from beyond the walls would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the bone dust and twisted, spiky crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and the lizards."

-- The Adventures of Augie March

I am reading this book slowly, partly because I am reading other things and partly just because its language is sometimes difficult for me: and also I was very impressed and got clobbered by the fact that as soon as Augie finds love he goes to Mexico following obviously eagles and snakes. It took me by surprise and had me sliding down memory lane (again).

"And so"

And so we were laying in bed inside the room by the open roof. Our naked bodies etcetera, one against the other dark against the white sheets etcetera. Above our heads the mosquito net which bothered us during sex when one of us stood up on top. Outside, incessantly, the sea-- but I wrote these things already.

We had an argument because Eli had invited us to go with her to the disco in the village nearby, and then Martina said she wanted to go alone. This wasn't the argument because it was me the one who nicely took it out of her that she wanted to go alone -- advantages of being more experienced -- and then, OK, I said, but tomorrow it's our last day here, isn't it kind of stupid? It wasn't. I also took it out of her that she wanted to be alone the following day as well.
She was funny to look at, her profile sulking in the pillow, senses scanning the roof and the noises, at moments making a long face, casually asking, does it bother you?
Now I am forgetting spanish all the way... I don't know if she said '¿te molesta?' or something else.
She was playing the part, let's be real cold and forget all about it, this was but a small amount of the ominous fury she was going to be capable of, stomping on the things she feared she wasn't able to keep from happening, the pain mixed with grace-- but spontaneously I knew better, again the lousy advantages of experience -- and said: of course it bothers me, I want to be with you -- I said it in a gentle way -- and I knew she didn't expect the straight self-exposing dope, a degree of sincerity yet to be known by her-- that's when the argument started, pure obstinacy on her side to make things slump -- I need to be alone, I came alone, I have to go away alone, she said. It's all right, I said, it's a pity, but all right. Just don't be upset now.
But she dressed up in a hurry, in the remaining seconds during which we didn't look at each other. I felt kind of hurt because of the impersonality and the swiftness of this small tragedy -- her behind disappeared in the short jeans skirt, her small lovely breast in the top, her dear mouth disappeared behind a door closed in a rush. I said 'stupid' as the door closed and regretted the sedate casualty of the remark. Then the sea only made noises.
I stayed in bed for a while more. I didn't know of what she was capable of at that time and didn't really worry.

Then I got out, climbed down the stairs, looked down from the terrace to the sea, the empty uneven beach and the foamy round waves under the big clouds -- I went further down, to the beach and to eat. On the way to the restaurants I found abandoned on the sand a bracelet with little colored stones stringed to a leather ribbon and took it.
Later it was still bright, it was bright until late. I got to the internet place, started reading or writing emails, emails that probably contained omissions or lies, and from the monitor I raised my head and there she was, out in the street, licking a white ice cream with her red red tongue and looking at me through the window hole with the same dark serious eyes in abeyance. I smiled, got out. She came close to me and said "I am impulsive". I opened my arms to make her come close and stop her from explaining things, and we hugged and didn't let it go. The girl of the internet place was sitting under the porch with her baby just out of the crib and looking at us. The baby had learned to walk. The dusty road was empty and quiet. I felt Martina's grip and her smell. It was so simple -- and mysterious at the same time. What were her thoughts in that moment? What her feeling? In what area exactly our feelings were meeting? What name or address it had? But we were happy and relieved and no words were needed. Has my heart ever beat that fast? (Yes it has. It doesn't matter.) Eli went alone to the disco that night and Martina told me that when she came back it was four in the morning. We were finally asleep.

"I hate these memories"

I hate these memories. They come to me across the things I read and the music I hear. Funny how I listened to all those songs so keenly the first weeks and now the sheer idea that something like "our" song might exist and might be heard paralyzes me. I thought those things were supposed to go away or not to hurt so much. At the same time I feel like I am pushing the memories to the surface where they should evaporate and dissolve. Because they will. The thing I like most about astrology, whatever kind of astrology including the mayan that Martina liked so much, is the knowledge that the wheel keeps turning, always, although in a complex uneven way. So nothing lasts identical for too long. I feel that I am turning, my hair and posture are already half-way-- I soon am going to look at something else: this is so terrible and unjust-- and these idea of sending her a picture one day of myself from the garden where I will be doing--- whatever, should it be possible, I won't care to send her anything anymore. That's how it goes. Etcetera.

Libi came back from the beach. I was glad to see her. I badly wanted to make love, to say things, to make her do things. She came in with the collection of bags and packs she was bringing with her smile, a reddish tan, splendid eyes, came to me --I grabbed her wrist firmly and put her hands on my dick and started to undress her with the other hand. She complied seriously, the act, our act had started beautifully. We kissed for long, which is something I not so often do... But for a magic moment I was feeling freer or lighter, I don't know. Our hearts were beating fast, we moved from the kitchen to the floor of the room to the couch to the bedroom. It only was bad knowing that this was also welcome as a symbol for making amends for something else, which is the tragic ugliness of familiarity... It took a while to take off me all the urge and the mysterious need. I know that making love can help much. I felt almost non alone. I almost hoped I had done something good, given something good--

Today everything's wrong, Libi again is asking me the wrong questions and I, feeling miserably alone, knowing to be unbearable, not knowing what to say, only thinking I have to go away, no inertia this time please no inertia. So different can be two days one coming next to the other.
Later we were sitting at the table and I wasn't listening anymore. I was recalling similar moments from other years, different table, walls, glasses, voice, face, questions. Recognizing a moment I didn't recognize back then, but that I was now feeling clearly: the moment I came to know I had to go, I had to be away.
As much as I love this woman, I was thinking, whom I can't make happy now (where I wish "I" was written lowercase) And if I don't want to leave her, but make her happy --it doesn't matter because I have to go (where?), however long it is going to take to make it happen because everything is for me and for her so unbearably difficult-- And I went on imagining a reunion later on. Our being finally together because I was coming back finally healed in my spirit and my emotions. I couldn't look at her but I wanted. I felt this grip in my stomach because yesterday it had been so different and now it was shit. Then I thought how life is actually much shorter than that, and how there is never going to be the time to achieve anything else but adaptation to this personal disaster and limitation and emptiness -- and so I drowned into that sea of anguish and premonitions and Libi went to bed, without us looking at each other anymore that night.

Invers come ona pidria
-- Milanese saying

(...) Well, damage oneself, all right. But deliberately that's the knack, thus in a perverted way, so that half of ourself remains asleep during the whole process and can later complain about it. You can do it for too much self-involvement, or too much confidence, or hatred for yourself. Self-damaging behavior is for example when we are loved, and we do everything we can to convince the lover that we do not deserve to be loved. Or it is when we deliberately damage our public face, that still gets credit, because we intimately doubts its integrity or merit, or because we hate that public face for being more popular than the unconfessed face we have. And it is a lot more than that.

Nina to Corpodibacco 05:25 pm
Come with me to Ferrara at the end of August. There's a terrific conference about Baroque Music and Science. I have to go anyway because I present a poster. I understand why you are not answering me. I understand everything. But I am sorry not to hear from you.

Corpodibacco to Nina 5:09 am
Nina, I don't give a shit about conferences and posters, go figure.
Anyway, it is not that I'm not calling for resentment or incomprehension. It's just that I'm left without bridges to connect myself to the others. I'm not getting anywhere... let's leave it at that. Libi soon will go to Paris with a girlfriend, but I don't know what I am going to do.

Nina to Corpodibacco 9:32 am
I haven't asked you to come to Ferrara to look at my poster. I don't give a shit about it either, don't you worry. I was asking you to come to be with me, but considering that you keep looking for the abysses and basically you adore this inertia of yours, stay in the deep shit where you are.

The sense of comparing someone to a upside down funnel is that a funnel cannot stand in any other way but upside down. Someone who is like that is someone integrally wrong, wrong by nature, and not seriously meant for this world, like a funnel is not meant to be piled up with the rest of the dishes and pans. Sometimes this happens because of fear, haste, or because of confusion, or because of the transiting planets. Some other time one is just born like that, invers como una pidira, upside down like a funnel. If you put two or three funnels together the results can be funny but certainly unusable. Or painfully ludicrous.