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.

there was this check from the car's insurance company abandoned in the drawer and I knew I had to wait before to cash it-- with its three damn zeros. Now, wow, it entirely disappeared inside the subscription to what will be my task for the next six months -- going to school. And it didn't even covered the whole crap.
Awake all night... and my mind is fluctuating and dizzy -- my face as if pushing forward around the nose and distracting me-- ideas are made up in an approximate rational state -- occasional terror due to the shape of things to come-- but it is a cool sunny morning out, and one day soon I'll cut my hair again-- and nothing is all right, reasons, methods, conditions, covered portions of the truth in my life-- but che cazzo ci posso fare.

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.

I wake up before 7 A.M. because of the party of young dutch students that took over the hostel yesterday. Overgrown by cattle hormones, absurdly tall and loud even when they barely move around on the old wooden floor, dutch guys and girls seem to be in every room of the hostel and in every bathroom and under every shower and into every room at this floor and at every floor of this part of the hostel. The hostel extends itself over several street numbers so I don't know if they took over there too. Anyway the turn-over for the bathrooms and showers has started slowly, and noisily, and as I lay in bed in my room I try to identify the moment when the bathroom on my floor will finally be accessible. I curse the dutch people of the world and try to sleep or at least masturbate but without success, 'cause they have now decided to hang just outside my door waiting for their turn, horsing around, calling down from the top of the stairwell, talking and laughing.

It's not before 9 that I can eventually use the bathroom and take a shower. By then the dutch world is gathering its people across the street, and is being noisy down there in the sun. From the window of my room they now look less noisy and less tall and are instead quite good looking, with their blond and red heads glowing under the bright sun light scouring 20th street out of the frozen snow.

I love this Hostel. I have my own double bed room, all run-down and sloppy, luckily no television. There are common bathrooms all right, but it's not a problem for me. Well, as long as the dutch leave something for me.
There is no curfew, it is all very clean, and it's in Chelsea, Manhattan. It is ridiculously pricey, but only compared to similar places outside New York or in Europe. It is actually cheap for the standards here.

From the Hostel I walk down towards the village, have breakfast somewhere (I wish there were alternatives to the fucking starbucks of my boots) and then I probably head towards a cyber cafe' in Bleecker street that seem to be run by a very nice middle-aged chinese lady who doesn't speak english except for two essential words, and who sweeps and mops the floor under your feet while you're there writing.

Afterwards it's the city, it's my being useless into its belly, it's bars I never dared to enter (thanks, Dita) and my feelings come and go, and at moments all the beauty of it, all its lively magic, all the moving accumulation of sorrows in the shaded maze of the subways hits me with a smell and a push, like the banal solitudes, the young couples kissing on the trains at night, the displays of fish and algae in Chinatown, the fabric stores I enter imagining what Libi would think or say of the colors and the materials, where the old jewish store manager tells me, "if you think you can pick the fabrics for your friend you must think you're very good."
And he's right, I mean. I could never pick the right fabrics.

in picture, above: you know what. It has nothing to do with the hostel though.

To live between terms, to live where death
Has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto's catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tyranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.

-- Delmore Schwartz

These are shitty days. Nothing is clear in my mind. My life and Libi's just dab each other and doesn't even seem to be related anymore. I wake up at six or five, have my breakfast, set up hers, open the computer. Invariably I wish I could go out for a walk in a city that still makes me curious, but the city repels me. Its activity, its rudeness. The tragic solitude of the truancy walks in the parks in the morning--
Solitary birds now sing in the empty hour above the terrace, when the sun is still behind clouds and my plants seem to shiver for the cold, the dirt dried and hard stamped by the hungry pigeons. But the young leaves, small on the branches are still bright green and pointing upward, close to the bark, the first flowers are blossoming and ready to receive the visits of unobtainable hymenoptera with wings. Like church bells the birds remind me of the summers on the Lugano Lake, and the heart skips a beat for all the days that are gone by--
I daze myself in a computer stupor, keeping the fears asleep, when I should go 'round and fix a number of things before I leave --the things that everyday I postpone-- passport, fines to pay, travel books to get, presents. I am eroded by absurd sudden worries, triggered by things I should never read --like that I'll have Alzheimer because there's aluminum in the crowns that cover my teeth, and mercury in the fillings-- and I grab my ears and shake my head and moan in the secret of the orange bathroom whining for my Alzheimer years to come--
Later Libi wakes up and we smile to each other but she doesn't come to me to hug me like we used to do. I don't tell her how attractive she is, ruffled like a cat -- then she goes to bed to read and finish her coffee and I only hear the noise of the leafed pages.
"Do you like this book?" I call from one room.
"Quite" she answers from the other. I gave her the book--
Oh, dear friend, dear lover, I know how complicated and lost I am sometimes-- it's like I feel that you can't reach me, and that you don't even want to try anymore because I'm leaving anyway.
I wonder what Libi is talking about with her therapist. And I am never going to have one, I swear to myself once again.
Every house in the city contains habits and words not visible in the picture-- everything that goes on in the shape of the unsharable habits, like everyone turning its back to you--
I wanted to be closer to Libi these last weeks before leaving for three months, or more-- instead we are nervous, irritable, defensive. Libi seems to be tighten up in her world, full of hours at the atelier, going for shops and suppliers, trams to get and the theaters at the end of the day --Every moment is like the negative of the separation, somewhere where the separation hurts but it's not told or visible and this makes it all the more hard and wrong--
She said she was worried that I might not come back-- I don't know if I've done enough to, I don't know, reassure her--
Sometimes, often, Libi goes to the movies alone, sits in the first seats and sinks herself in the marvel of the the loud voices and the gigantic pictures --and I think of her, there, following a story and shedding few tears or laughs. We are never so much apart like in those moments --and not because I'm not there. Sometimes she falls asleep and snores in the theater and someone notices her, but no one wakes her up. I wouldn't wake her up either-- I wish I could give her a similar sense of wonder and protection, or carry her away instead of being the one who's deserting the nest and leaving her alone-- but we are past that moment and perhaps I didn't wish hard enough.

And finally to get out --and let the city beat its drums all around you, the shops to yellow up your face in a sudden glow, the people on the sidewalks to walk past you forever-- to forever mistake everything about you in a glimpse-- it's reciprocal-- let your indelible suicidal thoughts to mix up with all the other feelings and let 'em get lost for a little while, in the annoying feeling of the city, the smell, the babies carried in a rush, the dogs dragged away from the smell of feces and death-- the conversations through the earpieces smaller than a finger, punctuating the solitude of the souls in all the mirrors-- etc.

There's a kind of elongated violet indigo clouds that is typical of the sky at dawn in the half-beautiful days, at least here over the roofs of Milan. I must have looked at them dozens of times, isolated as they are against the fading-to-yellow blu sky. They all look alike, from day to day and season to season, strechted and small, pointed at the ends and frayed and very very distant but low in the sky. And I am pretty sure they announce bigger clouds to come.
How long they last? They last from the moment you notice them, in the quiet house where everything still has to happen, and your thoughts don't fight with sensations but just toy with them, to the moment you have forgotten everything about them, in the house where the world pushes in, and your idea of the sky is just the repository of everything that heats, burns, turns into ashes and smoke. Suddendly, the strongest wind rattles the window panes and announces rain. The clouds are gigantic already.

The most beautiful fog enfolds Milan this morning, mixed with the deadly steamy unloads of the chimneys over the roofs.

Thousands of hot showers are running in the apartments, countless coffee machines muttering, piles of computers booting, of pigeons cooing, of dogs crapping in the barren isles, the grassed one in the middle of the tram's tracks, aside of walkers and runners complaining for something, or the shop tenants who scrupulously are sweeping their own few meters of sidewalk, the municipal policemen giving tickets around, the bus drivers lazily muttering their answers to the ladies clinging to the driver's booth, and in the houses again, smeared cups are left in the sinks, eyeglasses are wiped and worn, teeth brushed, children commanded, unsatisfied glances are given outside the window, Shit look at the fog now, you can see nothing, But isn't it nice, It will last until noon maybe, No it won't, too bad.

This morning I have a feeling towards this city, but I am not able to tell you how the city herself this morning is restive to be told.