My fears never really leave me alone. They barely get quiet, when I've banged their heads long enough against all the corners. They fade into the shady background of the rooms behind my back. The silence of the bathrooms where the time is in the dripping. In front is the red table, and the light pointed upward. The white walls, the dark terrace and the cold barren small trees into the pots. Wary or tired and anxious to be good to each other, me and Libi Talk. I get nervous for one or two petty things said, and we raise our voices and struggle to make our points, glares of disappointment and urge to reach and shake the other, and after a while, even after the moment when we get along again, one is left to wonder what all that commotion was about? What was it, if now I enjoy the sound of our voices in the quiet apartment, glad to be here? Delighted at the way we can be closes and still distant. And all the time, this thing in my stomach, beneath the read table, this thing with tentacles and an engine of sort that buzzes and warms up and messes up everything inside. And every fear has its double in the anxious looking forward to the same thing. Expectations for the day I'll get on the plane, dread for that day getting inevitably nearer-- worried of the separation --so much I feel I don't want to be separated at all --and long awaited feeling of liberation from all the bonds and ties and obligatory faces of me. Fear to be a coward and hide behind money, terror of the violent places, where I won't know how to defend myself or where to run, the places where everyone will be more aggressive and ruthless and weaponized than me-- and yearning for the moment when I finally will be out of the nest and far from the security and the fears that thrive in the security.
And also the other fears, always there, of decaying of bodies and waning of time, expecting the parents to be dead, and how the world will be then, lighter, larger, smaller, heavier. Etc.

I came to Libi's studio to attach to the ceiling a couple of venetian blinds, hang a couple of scaffolding and to screw to an old table the two button-makers Libi uses when she makes cloth buttons. We already put off this thing two or three times since it is not easy to have me doing things. So Libi opens the door, I get into the house and put down the bag with the drill and there's this communication door to her grandma apartment because Libi can't afford to have her own atelier or something, and through the passage I see her grandma sitting stuffed into a small armchair with two or three pillows and a loud TV set in the background. Next to her is her Ukrainian maid, slavonic oblique eyes and large cheekbones, a skin all scribbled by lines of wrinkles. I never met either of the two ladies, so I cross the room to give them the hand. The room is an old used room of an old used apartment that used to be lived in by many people. They say some of them died in the camps during the war and others survived and later died of life. There are the old photos, the faces so dark and smiling and a collection of bad and good pictures hanging from the walls, a large opaquish mirror where I can watch my figure approaching.

We don't chat or anything, I just say "nice to meet you", stand, look around. Smell of artichokes or peas. I shake with grandma first, shriveled in her chair, and her hand is moist, kind of completely damp with a warm sticky liquid, possibly saliva. Her eyes scrutinize me rapidly and shyly, not very present in the moment. Her mind must be thinner than it used to, evaporating in the late age like the words coming from the TV and leaving no trace. I then forget to shake with the Ukrainian lady because of the saliva on the palm of my hand, kind of shocked for a second there, and I step back where there's Libi still in the door and then come back to shake the Ukrainian lady too.
"I'm sorry" I say, I smile of myself and try to make it a little warmer. I still don't give a shit about either of the two ladies or the situation but I'm here. I know how Libi sort of weeps for her family when she's alone, because she's a only child, she says she's going to be the last one to know of her family, of how it was, what all the names and things and places meant, and how even new lives brought into it would be outside of it because it's too late. I guess she's right. She tried few times to get me interested with her family story to no avail-- now I'm sorry she doesn't try anymore, but better that way-- I'm the guy who drives her mad declaring his indifference or enmity for family bonds, she found the wrong guy at that-- but it's the same for me, Libi, the connection is broken and lost --we all waited too long. But I don't care. Why? because the mythology died a long ago I guess--

Libi behind me smiles in the opaquish mirror and says something to he maid. Tries her grandfather sunglasses on and smiles. She has that slightly disturbing householder inflection I never heard on her, insensitive and strangely moving --sign of the distance-- as she gets closer to the mirror to watch at herself from behind the enveloping glasses.
"I'm keeping the glasses" she announces. Almost in synchrony her grandmother declares that she has to go to the bathroom and the two ladies get up, move to the corridor to the bathroom disappearing in the friendly water pipes noises.

I didn't said hello to Libi very warmly before. I am grumpy and bored and disappointed by everything. Why is it so? All so unhappy and tighten up, ridiculous. It is like wanting to see faces without the courage to look for fear to be looked at. I think of a word to describe this feeling but I don't have any-- I think at what is Libi thinking of me when I feel her glancing at my sphinxy face. That I am crazy, that I am a tone deaf music, that my distrust is cruel-- that I am lost to her love or help--
Why is it that I can't-- admit that I am better now than I used to be?

I should have told her how she looked beautiful in those sunglasses and instead I looked away-- there's always something more important in the thoughts and I can't be there. I never learned to be there-- I only managed to, by accident-- I still don't believe to or seriously take all the wounds we're carrying but it must be fear-- lack of desire--

How was the phrase in that movie, "that's what makes me clumsy, the absence of desire."
Peter Handke, of course--

The atelier in her grandfather studio. All around is the endearing Libi's classical mess, piles of clothes and the armless legless dummy I bought her in that little store of used stuff on the navigli.
I start drilling holes making the awful noises go around in the house-- and I picture the noises entering every room of the old used apartment, door after door, carpet and walls and chairs and quavering cups, and it's like if in the noises we all hide how much alone we are.

Libi does everything... Sometimes I look at her and get excited only to think that I can order her to do anything that comes to my mind-- the only obstacle being my mind itself, so often hazy of bad thoughts and worries and obsessions--

It was shortly after we met that I learned how Libi's heroines were maids and waitress and servants. Back then she was preparing her last exam writing a dissertation about an old italian movie... the movie revolved around the self-immolation of a maid of all-work, and her descending path from dignity to subjection. She thought she had picked that subject out of her feminist sympathies.
I remember one afternoon, she was reading and writing in bed and telling me about the movie and how the story tragically went and I said, "that's obviously your sexual fantasy."
She looked away for a second. Outside was a clear day, the white clouds upon the roofs--at that time we used to get out in the city quite often and we probably had to get together with someone else that day. She was asking for help to normalcy and friends, out of the window and in the city where her self was at bay from anything so obviously deep in and pushing-- I don't know what she was thinking--

"No, what do you mean", she said. Blushed. We swallowed (or maybe that was later). I said You Know What I Mean, and she said No I don't.
"I mean that's your fantasy, to be a servant and to be humiliated and obey and all the rest."
Libi looked at me, I said, "hey, you know that's fine by me. That's actually what i want, so-- there's no problem."

Libi does what I want. Sometimes I complain that she isn't horny enough, that she doesn't throw herself at me.
"That's not my role", she says. I'm an object. She's right I guess. I am probably the one who's not entirely up to his role.

I always envied sexual victims and preys (consensual, doh) because I always felt that their vision and their bravery were clearer and stronger than mine-- They knew what they wanted and how and possibly even why. I always turned to them with the hope to find in that certainty, in that vocation a hint of what possessed me but I could never find it. I can understand someone else's craving for humiliation or punishment but what about me? Do I really want to hurt or humiliate these persons? I love them-- I don't despise women at all-- why I get so excited at the sheer idea of having no limits or respect -- no interactions outside the one of the voice that gives the order?

all I could think of was that the disposition to master or humiliate was due to some feeling of insecurity toward sex that I had. That kind of ruined it for a while (still does, off and on). I also thought about the loads of S/M porno magazines I used to find in my mother's room when I was a kid --and how that conditioned my fantasies-- but the truth is that I discarded those that i didn't like. Already then I immediately went for where my fantasies were--
So I don't know. I guess I am still searching.