"ma un uomo camion vive ancora in me.." (Paolo Conte)

I'm defoliating the young ficus carica that we are explanting because the rocky soil has to be minced again. Above is the unequal sky, gray and azure and always changing --a cold wind comes from downfield -- I lent my windbreaker to Susy but I don't feel cold-- working and running up and down and all. I first met Susy this early morning, we shook hands-- exchanged our reciprocal biographies in three phrases-- later I tried not to look too hard at her sweet smile or to listen too intently to her warm accent. She took tools from my hands once or twice and gently said "I do this now". It is a week of apprenticeship and I came down south. It probably wasn't a good idea. Everyone is very nice to me and knows more than me about everything. But it's not that, maybe just that it was a long road to get here and my first impression was that they don't really need me here-- I grumbled against the school for sending me out to a apprenticeship after just three weeks of school. And letting me pick the one I wanted, too.
Susy tags the vases, I shorten the taproot proboscides that make funny angles or just don't let the plant go and we stick the little creatures into the vases. It's my first really ungrateful doing with plants-- when I go up to the road and line the vases along the stonewall where the rows end "so they don't get stolen" says Very Friendly Bruce (the boss of the 10 hectares foundation) and that's where I cut all the leaves down mercilessly. Some of the varieties have dark buds, pointed and with a hump-- now unprotected-- others are of a bright green almost white-- the leaves fall to the ground and make a bed of silvery green that should be raked away and composted or burned but will remain here-- some of the nano fruits are oblong, they fall too-- It's a conservative foundation and there are more than 170 varieties of ficus carica in the two or three parcels where we are working. I look at the little plants coming up from the rocky soil, shaking slightly and elastic in the gusts of wind and wonder what's the why or sense or the beginning. When I bow and get my nose into the small plant to cut the succulent branches that are hard to get I can smell the sweet obvious smell of the fig-- I wonder if that moment is to be considered part of the notorious idyll of this outdoor life-- because maybe the fact that it doesn't feel idyllic depends on me not being ready for it-- and I wonder whether it should be used as a lever to turn inside out all the painful or squalid thoughts rushing through my mind instead. To be into the light, to stand up to light wrote Max Frisch: not flattering to light itself, only a desirable task like submitting oneself to Time as if it was Eternity-- I want to learn how to do that and many other things but my mind knows other things better: I often get distracted. I think about her again, and again I see her and hear her in my head-- Martina-- so that I wish I could close my eyes and make it go away-- with the obnoxious moaning of why and why and why-- And this morning I felt sorry for myself a lot, foolishly, there in the densely parceled land-- myself extraneous, alien, guilty, ignorant, "getting old", incapable of clearness and peace-- indifferent to the parcels besides, trying with smiles and loud phrases and stupid brown-nosing and aping knowledge to melt with the thing all around me-- the people and a job to do, a role in the job to do-- being useful-- being accepted by the others and all the crap--
But then in the end I felt unreasonably glad that I was doing this job, later glad that the job had ended and I was tired and the sky was definitely now different and that we are were all in a good mood, that the sun kept showing up between one cloud and the other-- and we all got to the storehouse dragging the soles of our shoes to get the bigger pieces of soil out--
Everybody was smiling and raising hands when we said goodbyes and I drove back home and the radio was playing and I made the turns when the road made turns and had no further thoughts or feelings or compassion left.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

-- Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character... People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the "alternatives" go to the pub "revolucion" apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever-- although nothing does, just like it didn't the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone's ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.