"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.

When I go to Milan, to fulfill that town's dream of a cultural centre, you should come. An interesting city. It's huge - and full of very ugly, common, repulsive people.
-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

that night I slept at Carlo's, after more talking and boasting and drinking and walking around Venice, meeting people in bars, following girls down the calli, ending up us alone and stoned and bitter sitting on the steps of a deconsecrated church turned into a art gallery or a gym and talking about foolish things now forever sunk into a oblivion thicker than the waters of the canals of Venice. And I had that dream sleeping on a pallet on floor, a portion of a dream I still remember, where girls leaned on a table looking at fashion pictures in a magazine, whispering things in the ancient-looking room by a high ceiling but not large (just like a room of a old palace of Venice) and outside of a window, invisible to me in the corner of the dream was the world of the future that I was anxiously about to see but couldn't and couldn't and couldn't until I woke up.
I was in Carlo's garret. Looking up at the backside of the roof, wood and terracotta, atrocious white light entering from a squared hole through a opaque glass pane. Pigeons walking and talking above and not so far, the early boat acoustic signals said it was a foggy day. My disappointed snort for the bad weather. The rattling of the garbage trolleys going up and down the bridges.
I had slept too little, and felt absurdly awake in the sleeping house, bad taste in dry mouth and dizziness-- eyes hurting.
I got out without saying goodbye walking softly amid the snores, the streets were so cold, I could hear the noise made by my steps against the hard pavement stones. The streets were dark to the openings of the skewed squares, wide in comparison and filled with more white light under the low unfriendly sky, quiet, dirty of a nightly high tide now dissolved in a grainy film of stickiness made of guano and salted sea.
I was looking for a bar, at that time I still had the veneration for the italian bars and their stinking coffees and croissants with no imagination, that what Parise so beautifully wrote about, and I think I found one just down the Ponte de Maravegie. It's the bar with the colorful glass panes, not the osteria nor the pastry shop (that lane down the bridge being the typical italian three-bars-in-a-row) and so little room inside against the counter. A radio was certainly playing, but not loudly. The croissants were warm and good, the coffee probably good. Nice the people. I didn't know any better. It felt reinvigorating and so I extended my walk to the aimless route of the fondamenta along Canale della Giudecca (aka fondamenta degli incurabili) once again fantasizing of being Corto Maltese (before my brother robbed me of that fantasy too) or Brodskij (before my russian friend explained it all to me). Enjoying the procrastination of the coming back home, where more rest and the long awaited solitude were.
The humid sadness of the city in the thin fog, its casual beauty appearing and disappearing and morphing, the large unsteady waters of the canal and their uniform color fading out in nothingness, the few, walking the fondamenta like me with their hands well protected in the big pockets of their dark dark dark cappotti, and my eyes still hurting-- the day had begun but without a move, wanting to be admired in its pointlessness, it was quite beautiful to be there and alive.
It was near the end-- one of the last months in Venice, before coming back to Milan. And I thought I had had enough of Venice back then. I didn't know anything.

-- in picture above: waters, venice, etc.

The days drag by.

I'm choked by food,
by the shit I expel, the words I say.
The daylight that shouts at me
every morning to get up.

The sleep which is only
dreams that chase me.

-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

The following scene is more calm. There is no trace of slapping oneself in the face and cursing out loud in the empty apartment. Kicking chairs, shaking random obstacles, people, relatives, bloggers, the heat. Counting on the absence of witnesses. On the pages everything I know is written about each vegetable form living out on the terrace. Soil, chemistry, prune and multiply. Something I am mediocre at like most of everything. Flor suggested me a new source and now I can look for more details on the internet for each of them and feeling I know more --the phrases that are useful appear to me as if highlighted on the page. But I don't really know more I am only informed.

Life is minor now. It doesn't matter the rage for the apparent phoniness of everything and the hypocrisy and the malfunction. I think I never had so little respect for myself as I am having now. Although there's no bottom end to that.
From behind comes classical music, probably Bach. The first feeling when trying to focus on the effect of the music on myself is that the music sounds so modern. The superficial consideration leaves me unhappy.

Flor found me on the internet, with little investigation recognized me out here and found the blog and asked me out. The global village. What sense can have a thing like this, we have been briefly together so many years ago and so much has happened since then and now she comes. We were very young and almost totally ignorant of love but this doesn't make that experience more relevant to me. All the contrary. I seem to remember that the sex was especially good. Or that we had fun because we both tended to be outsiders (although I was a professional outsider). But beside such vague feelings it is something dear I can barely relate to now. Life changed me anyway even if I still am an outsider. Folks don't seem to know I want Time to pass and changes to be even when I state that I don't want to get older (because of the failures). Walking around in the bookshop she said, you still matter to me, you always mattered. I didn't know what to say. I felt moved and detached and embarrassed. She seemed uncomfortable and we let the topic fade away. Myself, I stopped thinking about you when masturbating years ago, I thought, which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Our conversation flew easily. We always could talk of everything, and apparently we still do. At moments it even appears interesting. I am out of the world anyway.
Out of the bookshop the city was wet, the dark asphalt glimmering in the late afternoon light and the sopping walls drawing mysterious bodies of smudged films of water, the trees of the park a obscure still mass encircling the left side of Piazza Cavour, trapped behind the tall green fence, nobody around. The last days of quietness of the busy middle class city, skies moving from gray to darker gray, the light coming from the isolated open bar where the men stand against the counter and don't talk nor move.

It was days ago and now it is the past and it doesn't exist anymore. It is still raining above the city, and the sun light is white, the corners are damp and clothes are withdrawn from the balconies--

I understood something recently, that as much as my life can come to be a failure, as much as I keep dropping out, and as all the material means to be and fight for keep passing me by or making me fail or go mad or flee, still nothing really would interest me -- enriching my present moment -- simulacrum of reality -- as much as love life. And I am not strictly talking about my own love life, and the satisfaction of my own desires and longings -- with time my own desires and longings, my suffering and struggling and groping for love seem to become less relevant or less interesting than the general human constant reaching for love and the general wasting or losing love all around.
And as I read a honest book, or hear a true story I notice how my interest doubles or triples as soon as the element of emotion and desire, sex and good willing and wrongdoing for love appears. As soon as "I met a person" is said, "I keep thinking of him" is said. "I miss the bitch" is said. As soon as "I dreamed of you again" is said to oneself. Everything about it matters to me, provided the manifestation of love is stronger than -- I don't know, the other important things suddenly ceasing to be important. It must be that I am not capable of feeling fine in any other realm. Everything matters when it is genuine, the trivial things that keep repeating renovating and consuming themselves through the centuries through the bodies through the rooms and the drawers, and the more unpredictable, scandalous ones-- Morbid affection, violence, betrayal, servitude, mysterious bonds, inverted poles, manias and eclecticisms-- all coming down to my witnessing and participating, my own mixed feeling of stupor and acknowledgment: so this is love too.

And yet I am so incapable to love, in a proper reasonable way. I get so easily impatient as well as inert, bored, inept, false, lazy-- because my crave is for the variety, possibly-- is this why I could so little relate to the barely disclosed ambitions of Flor to go to bed with me for old time sake-- like she wanted to come up (Libi being away) and I said just park here and didn't invited her in-- she had her own reasons that had nothing to do with me, and my heart isn't prepared to bend yet. Every morning, every afternoon, every night I have someone in my mind who is far and away-- my heart isn't capable to bend yet--

Across the sleeping city we had passed near the house where I lived back then, with my father's wife and my step-brother. Every time I walk by that place in the bourgeois hell of via Plinio, something that I systematically avoid to do, a mess of bad memories and the bare square weight of past life attacks me, and I can't avoid to lash out my distaste and my disgust for those past days. The huge wooden door, always closed, and the precious shops, the brand new cars parked under the tall old plane milanese trees -- the dog turds and cockroaches in the deli and the still loners waiting at the stop of the 60-- when everything was wrong and all days were wrong and it was wrong my not being able to break out of there. My ridiculous communist so called parents so eager to settle themselves in the bourgeois neighborhoods -- and the fights, my father's yells, the humiliations and the disgust and the unbearable dishonesty of myself and who I was -- And then Flor next to me said, every time I pass in front of this place I have all these nice memories of when we were together, and I came here to visit you in your room-- it was so nice to be with you there, do you know? It was the sex but all the rest too-- With all your rudeness you were pretty welcoming, you know?

It took me so long to come up with a post and I don't know how to end it.

I don't get phased out by none of that, none of that
helicopters, the TV screens, the newscasters, the..
satellite dishes.. they just, wishin'
They can't really never do that
-- Mos Def

I tried to cry this morning in front of the mirror in the bathroom. I felt this thing down in my throat and the corners of the mouth turning downwards. I put my face in my hands but obviously I couldn't cry. Except for the movies, I can't cry. My own expression scared me when I looked up. I was ashamed. I am not gonna do it again. I am not a winner, I never was. Martina is lost for me, I will be lost for Libi. So much solitude is passing in my hands now, rivers of it -- "True love leaves no traces". I wish I knew what is true and what is not. Everything seems true to me. Like this alarms going off, I hear, like the restaurant we pick, we enter, compared to the other where we are not.

When in Mexico city sometimes we went to eat at the "Stupa", in the Avenida 5 de Mayo. Despite the name, the "Stupa" was just another Mexican diner open around the clock, somehow always full of people, which other than being somewhere in the center had the advantage of a great choice of food and popular prices. It was fun to stay in line waiting for our table, in the busy early Saturday afternoon, doing what lovers do in these cases, wooing and causing envy or sympathy and wondering what we were soon going to order with our micheladas. Martina used to say that me and her looked exotic together, she shorter and darker, sparky, me a tall "guero" absent minded and aloof. I nodded at the description. But I thought of us as normal. I didn't see anything exotic. Maybe except the fact that we talked so much about love and books and movies. We would sit at a white table in the larger smoking area and order and drink the bitter salted acid micheladas and have our difficult conversation, me always checking for words on the dictionary, both trying not to be distracted by the TV screens and failing. She smoked very greedily and her hands trembled as she held the cigarette.
That said my memories of the place aren't very nice, because of the last night we went back there, as we were running out of ideas. The weather was quite bad that night, rainy season and all, but was even worse between us two. Who knows what doomed on our story then. It ended with Martina slapping a 100 pesos note on the counter (there were no table seats available and we weren't in the mood of waiting) and running away, and me, after stupidly asking for the check and paying, running in the night after her in the wrong direction, and missing the last train. I guess we were so mad at each other for having misunderstood so many things. Coming back walking under the rain I kept promising to myself I was directly going to the hostel and to sleep. The following morning I had to catch a cab at five in the morning; I still had to pack; it was already very late. But then at parque de españa I turned left. Below the fancy hotel at the corner of the Avenida two guys were playing the spring of the sculpture-car and laughing. The car only sung "Veracruz", which was ridiculously sad but not enough to be ironic as expected. I got to the condo where she was temporarily staying and the doorman smiled at me and opened the front door. But there was no such a good reason for me to be there and be smiled at, I knew it. Upstairs... I remember her opening the door, she had changed her clothes, ready for the night. But she wasn't sleeping. The small apartment was full of smoke of cigarette. She asked if I was coming to continue a fight. All it was so glazed but I said I just needed to know that she was all right. We barely looked at each other and didn't touched each other. So I said I was coming to say goodbye and she corrected the verb I used and that's how we said goodbye. I was very careful not to slam the door as I got out. There had been moments so intense between us they were painful to even describe or think. Now any effort was lost. I was punished for leaving Mexico and going back to the other life, or maybe for something else it will took me a long time to understand. Back to the hostel I couldn't sleep until much later, mainly thanks to the idiot in the bunk above mine that expected to fall asleep without a sheet 'cause he didn't know how to make his own bed, and slept only with a wool blanket over a bare mattress in a room full of mosquitoes, and couldn't close his eyes, and me with him. The morning after I got to the airport and entered into the safer mechanism of traveling, which certainly is a big illusion, but a good one though, it keeps the bad thoughts away somehow, like a good job.

There's a chance I might be go back to work at the university. This time relocating no less than Sardegna. Which on one hand I would welcome as a god from the machine. Yet it is only a small chance and I am scared to explore it. I have to return a call and I keep postponing. Why? Maybe because so much time has passed -- since when I was a normal person in the world. Will I be able to return to civilization and accept all the downside of it? But it is more important to break out, says the voice. Over and over. Why? From where? Being out is really finally being different, imagining differently, walking about differently? Is it really possible only because/if no one is there expecting you to be what you always were? Libi shakes her head in disapproval. Wish I was back in March walking with Dita down the avenues of Manhattan and knowing what I know now. It was only three months ago. I wish I could start that journey over -- it's not over.

-- In picture, above: climbing the pyramid of the Sun with herds of tourists, in theotihuacan

Every time I drag myself down to the navigli beyond the bridge of Via Cassala to see Jawa, I bring with me questions for her, and bits of a discourse I would like to make. Then regularly there's the baby, and her worries and her enthusiasm for the baby, and I give up and put away all my anxiety to speak more seriously or passionately with her. I reckon that everything is different when you face a mother.
Then coming back there's the rumble of traffic and the heavy air to breathe and everything is more confused and lonesome-- I wonder whether this is a sign that I'm finally growing up, and that I am beginning to develop some form of mature resistance to my constant craving for real connections (if so the thought disappoints me).
I walk, the dusk descend on the city and the people and me. I go over the two hours spent in her kitchen. I reenact the three windows on the roofs of Milan and the balconies and the far mall sign that seem to be resting under a coat of clouds. Occasional pigeons and the intense silky violet of cyclamen sticking out beyond the window panes. Lifegate radio playing and preaching.
I am stretched on the pavement with her, we speak of the winter that didn't come this year. Of the gorses blossoming in January. I watch her long legs in the corduroy jeans as we crawl on the pavement around the baby. We accidentally touch each other but there is no hesitation. I watch her hands and realize I never saw how long they were. She turns, is her ass always so beautiful and inviting? Quite-- I wish she didn't kiss me on the mouth when she welcomes me or when she says goodbye. She closes her eyes too.
I listen to her telling about her residual fears after the little boy's accident. I listen to her plans to stay home without a salary for six months more. She says that she would love to give a little sister to the boy, and that they're trying but so far no luck. This could be the moment to ask her-- does he knows that there's a remote possibility that the little boy is mine? Of course not, right? But I don't know about the menage you two guys have. Sometimes I wonder --
Although maybe the little boy doesn't look like me? Or maybe he does?
I look at him. I never saw such a charming smile in a one year old little thing like this. Is his mouth similar to mine? Do I smile like this?
I would like to ask her, aside of the baby, you know-- How much does he knows really?
I would like to ask-- Do you have the same memories I do of those days, kind of wrong and right at the same time? Do you know that I made a mistake, I told him I used to live in Via Savona at that time? So close to your house. A mistake. Nobody knew. I wish the baby wasn't here for a while and I could ask you to undress like you used to do, shyly looking away or down and then suddenly looking straight at me--
Listen Jawa, I'm going-- I says. They escort me to the door. There's the light kiss on the mouth and the eyes briefly closed. The charming smile of the little boy as the door closes and then a corridor-- steel pipes running along the roof of it.

Now all the trams of Milan have canned voices reciting the stops. The city glides away, all the cars are rolling. We sit and we stand in the tram and nobody speaks. The canned voice goes on calling the stops, sort of evil aristocratic tone. A girl touches my hand as we reach for the same support. No hesitation. I look at her and she looks away. The canned voice calls Alzaia Naviglio Grande and at these words I feel like a strange emotion in my stomach, for all the things not told, the things not done, the lives not lived. It is like a punch or an embrace and for a brief moment I am suddenly surprised of being here, now, and everything seems right and enviable, even the city I always hated.
I climb down the tram in a state of marvel, and there's a large sign that says "absolute zero" --and when I turn southward this incredible sunset is tearing the sky apart. The air is warm and dense. The winter didn't really come this year.

I pass the italian border in the early evening, surprised to see how Italy looks good and well-kept after all the eastern urban landscapes, even the richest ones. The first railways stations look old and burdened with a rich, intriguing past. When I get off the train in Mestre, though, in the hope to find a connection that isn't there, the inexplicable dirtiness of everything, pavements, seats, windows, wastebaskets, lines; the loud noise of the city traffic; the triviality and violent indifference of the people: it all suggests me what I was missing from the train window. Italy is always a bluff.

So, anyway, no good connection at this hour, I jump on the first train to Venice from Mestre, to do once again that good ol' 10 minutes ride. I'll have to find an accommodation in Venice, something I obviously never did during the years I lived there, and it feels weird and wrong. A sad sign of my having lost contact with the city.
But it's incredibly easy, I must say, to just step into a two stars decent hotel near the station of Venice and get me a cheap room with bathroom, with a window on a narrow calle from where venetian voices come. It's the cheapest hotel of the entire trip, actually, which is kind of stunning.

How much I love this town, I can't say. Tonight the sky is all starry, as very often happens here, the streets are filled with tourists, the air is windy and pleasurable. Clusters of italians outside the bars are watching the championship match, and later I will find them partying in the streets, where improvised musical ensembles play loudly. Venetians, sometimes so boring or rude, seem magnificent tonight, in their being always the same, a little greedy, a little absent minded, full of life and pride. Doing business, making jokes, wandering about, alluring tourists into restaurants, they always have that air of knowing better and caring less. I never actually liked them, with their sing-song accent, a little childish, their women always angry at something and disappointed. But it's good to respect them, tolerate them and being accepted by them. This is a small city, it's one of the most beautiful and incredible city in the world, it's a rotting-down museum, and people still live in it, collecting garbage and selling fruits from the boats as they did for centuries.
I feel at home in this city. Maybe it's because of all the tourists, because they don't know. I wish this was a homecoming and the rambling was ending here tonight.

I take all the shortcuts to St. Marco square. I want to see the basin and hear once again the foolish orchestras playing. I take an actual round of the city, passing the Accademia, Santa Margherita square and some of the other places where students meet at night. I drink glasses of wine here and there, eating the so tasty venetian tramezzini. I look at the girls, all of them. I sit on one of the benches in San Polo square, near where I lived once. I lay down on it because of the starry night and I remember many things I don't want to remember tonight, not in detail. They just show their faces in my mind for a while, their old smell and that air of having irreparably happened.

I just lay there for a while, looking at all the endless variety of human figures strolling the streets of this city, glowing in the yellow light of the shop windows. I think at some of the people I've looked at around during this trip.

The fifty years old woman who picked flowers from the beds in front of Budapest Keleti station, making a bundle with them in a piece of colored paper she had with her; Always at Keleti station, the guy endlessly singing his song with a guitar and a powerful, moving voice, unconcerned of all the drunks fighting and arguing around him, as the swallows flew by over people's heads crying their high calls, above the open grave of the metro station; The old crazy lady dragging two armchairs down the streets in Budapest, stuck against the obstacle of a high curb, whom I helped out, without a word, while she kept thanking me, with the word I couldn't recognize yet; The bookshop in the center of Budapest where a hungarian writer was presenting his latest book, and as I stopped to look at his back on the other side of the shop window, everyone among his group of listeners looked at me until he turned to see who it was; The young B. whom I met on the train from Trieste, and who relieved me out of my dark thoughts like a random, casual angel, and with whom I talked of loves, delusions, dreams and accidents (I lost your email, B.! Write me!).

And together with the people, during the trip were the birds, the many trees, and all the memorable smells that won the smell of cars and cement, like heavenly gifts, like the smell of fishes and vegetables at that indoor market in Budapest.
I haven't taken a single picture or a single sample from all of this, and as I lay on the bench in St. Polo square I know that all the souvenirs in my mind will be fading soon as if sunk in a big sea, or in the Venice lagoon, and that I will be able to get hold of just bits of it, as it must be. But that's the way I like it. I think the rambling really ended tonight, after all.

While hundreds of residents flee Somali capital, it is clear now that Talibans are taking over in Somalia. It's kind of sad to think that Somalia will turn into one of those islamic fascist states. Good luck to talibans to impose to Somali to grow their beards, anyway. Not that I think it's nobody's business but of Somali people.

When I was a kid (from ten years old, for years I used to periodically spend months in Somalia), I walked the streets of Mogadishu many times, by myself or with my brother and sister, even at night, maybe to go to buy sambusi (a tasty variation of indian's samosa) at a shop near the Arabian neighborhood, or with my family to the Casa d'Italia, or to watch a movie at the French consulate.
Mogadishu was a reasonably peaceful and tolerant city back in the eighties, even if evidently split among rich people and awfully poor people. Somali people was the most welcoming, and among the most generous and united people you could happen to deal with, although their lack of organization in public affairs was legendary. Corruption was everywhere, not only because Italians had brought it, and Siad Barre, the president/dictator of Somalia, was in charge thanks to it.

We used to take the toyotas to move around in the city back then, white pick-up trucks used as collective taxis, with the back load area covered by white or blue or green sheets tied to a metal arched frame colorfully cut-worked, and usually filled with people beyond any imagination. Once aboard the toyota, I would usually watch the young boy, approximately my age, hanging outside the back of the truck to make sure everyone was safe aboard, then banging his fist against the side of the truck to signal the driver to pull away. Now (as in picture above) the same vehicles are used to bring soldiers around in the city. Last year my father worked in Somalia, 1990, we had to go around escorted and only by car, and it was - righlty or wrongly - clearly the end of an era.