Once again I find myself staying in a residence hotel, this time in a small village that we can call Oil Bridge, some ten kilometers south of a city on the river Po we can call Pleasance. I have no evidence that the city is living up to its name, or that the village has anything to do with Oil. Just a long bridge on the shallow river Nure. Truth is I am close to some of the most beautiful hills in Italy. First impression, the little I've seen of the people around here I don't like very much, I wonder what are those mugs, if arrogance or wariness, and the use of the italian word "salve" to greet people, like in Milan, more than in Milan widespread. "Salve" is a good indicator of contempt for the next one. It's like saying I don't want to greet you, you're not welcome, when are you leaving? It cannot be said looking at someone right in the eyes, but only eluding the contact. It is the most unpleasant and the most hypocrite casual greeting conceivable in Italy. I hate it and so should anyone who has a bit of heart. However, it seems to be used a lot around here. I noticed my "good day!" is getting more stentorian.
Of course I don't know the tenth part of it. I've been working. I am a gardener. I was given a baseball hat too small for my big head, I eat in the trattorias in my muddy overalls and I'm coming home for the weekend.

I drive under the gloom sky to Milan and to the rainstorm, some old times blues singer is moaning, I feel tired. Later the lively raindrops against the smudged windshield, while the fuzzy yellow opening to the west goes dark. I enter the city. Numerous parts of my body are sore, my face and arms are cooked and bi-cooked, I got blisters on my fingers, four days of garden building, 9+ hours a day under the sun or rain proved to be quite hard. I felt stupid when I still had to dig into wet soil, unload compost, connect irrigation pipes or some other stuff at the end of the workday, and I just couldn't do it, I had to go someplace instead against a wall or a tree and sit and breathe and let my heartbeat slow-- But it was graceful to work again, and be back to the real treasure of this work, which I venture is to change scenery so often during the week, but always being among plants and outside and into a garden. Besides, from Oil Bridge you get everywhere in half an hour. Back in Milan, I'm stuck in traffic again, I have to park the car somewhere possibly illegal and far from the condo, while the rain pours down. I left my hat in Oil Bridge, and will get wet, so I pretend I got accustomed to it already.

-- in picture, above: coming back to Milan.

"Oh, I know that there is no hope for my country: it is more than a knowledge for me, it is a condition, the condition of being italian -- this funny thing bound to decay and dissolution and without a hint of good future in the zodiac. Not just a spectator of this, mind you. Part of it. It is something that must be experienced to be understood. For this culture and for these people I know there is no hope left: something else will be called "italian" tomorrow and probably nobody will even know the difference. But I know. And I certainly make no exceptions to this gloomy vision because of a demagogic comedian who seems focused on attacking what is already so weak and without respect in people's mind-- trained by ten years of Berlusconi & co. to just despise the "small theater of politics" and everything around it -- so that he gets the easiest satisfaction, the easiest applaud. While the country keeps falling, steady."

-- yep, the discussion down at Blog from Italy continues. My rhetoric touches new peaks, someone should probably stop me.

What I wanted to say: I imagine a politician who would speak only about the greyness and ugliness and unfriendliness of our cities; of the diminishing of our culture, the crumbling of our fantasy and imagination; of the egoism and disruption and sadness brought by giga-malls or parking lots, or by a new soulless skyscraper; of the absence of the children from the streets; of how things are not simple but tragically simplified-- of how hard it is to recognize and keep love: and not talking these things as side issues in order to dramatize the supposed real deal, any football issue like corruption, war on terrorism, heritage of communism, gay marriage, global warming or unemployment or whatever.
No, I dream a comedian-politician that would talk only of such problems, such as they are perceived: problems as phenomena. The trees getting old and isolated. The many cars. The villages emptied out. The oppressive nature of the excessive order, and its contrary. The sweeping of death and decay and shit under too many rugs. The depressed faces of the people going to work and the sadness of the too dark clothes and of the leashed dogs. The triviality of the opinions. The everyday triviality of beauty. The too many things to conserve that are wiped out.
Without rhetoric and without arrogance and without pushing a sense of guilt in the listeners. Without advocating global projects and new authorities and key-words to open all the doors. Without looking directly in a camera and without looking elsewhere. Without making supernatural alliances with remote entities because "we are all in the same boat". 'Cause that would not be within the phenomena. I imagine someone able to speak about all these things without getting into the theoretical or into the partisan, not even by mistake not even once.

In other words, I imagine the weakest most unrealistic most absurd and most useless politician to hear or to support ever.
That one I would support, eagerly.

added at past seven a.m.: I think my political vision is kind of muddy.

"I live of what the others don't know about me."

A crowd of fifteen comes for dinner. They arrive in groups and couples or one by one, smile, bring offers, say how they're glad to be here and later say they enjoy the food and drinks. There's a good dog who ritually needs to drink water. They need louder music and if neglected become silent and eager to go, the conversations skew in blind directions. They never know where to put out the cigarettes. They flirt and talk louder to overcome the din of the music and they change tracks over and over. Someone asks me absurd questions, like what I am doing with my life right now or what am I going to do tomorrow. They're all Libi's friends. Libi keeps saying she wants to hide in the bathroom to fuck. Or suck at least. Some of them conveys subtle hostility or disapproval, because they know things. I feel ridiculously out of place and uninterested and alone. I look at girls' legs. I enjoy the moments of seriousness in face to face talks at the corners of the party, and the apparent friendliness of interested inquiries. When essentially all the dialogs, the arguments, the conversations are completely useless. Solicitous and useless. "Indeed" and "precisely" are used so often precisely when one should use a word of opposite meaning. The unexpected exchange with the other girl by the biblical name who said: "one has to downplay herself to be with the others. In the end I came to accept this." That amazed me. We stay out on the terrace and inside, making groups whose balance constantly shifts. At one a.m. one says she'll go and a moment later everyone goes, judging by the movement near the exit the moment proper. It makes me sad and relieved. They leave behind a mountain of empty bottles, dirty dishes, surprising silence of the turned down volume. I remember how I used to be disappointed by parties that ended early. Now we all have jobs or at least they do. In the morning I will wash the dishes using a table dragged behind the sink as a buffer. I get out to the terrace before it starts raining again and I feel sorry for the plants. Nobody cared for the plants, it was a useless party without caring for the plants sleeping in the dark right before our eyes, standing there in the dark, growing from pots of dirt, the creatures to whom I devote the most attention and who bear in them the most of my pathetic rhetoric disillusions -- nobody asked anything about them even if few had even flowers on them, and others where just sticking out of the turf as if interested in the dyslexic world out there.

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

Todo se hace en silencio. Como
se hace la luz dentro del ojo.

-- Jaime Sabinas

the night falls over oaxaca very slowly. for hours the houses and the trees have been shining with a very sharp light, it has been for hours the light of the end of the day, I don't know how it is possible, probably the help of the old consumed stones of the colonial houses-- a light honest and direct like the appearance of the people walking about in the streets, families, kids, old folks, students, politicians, activists, mariachi bands, nuns and clowns; the mexican flags, big and familiar, have been waving against the blue sky with perfection above the relevant buildings; and the vendors, tireless, have been offering, the musicians have been playing instruments. I have been eating another quesadilla sitting at the comedor inside the market, bored to death by the corny mexican music, admiring the ceaseless animation, and the way the light, hazed by the releases of the kitchens working all around in the market house, entered from the above.
Now I sit in front of the monastery of santo domingo, there's still another guy playing, a bagpipe this time, high and trembling like a bird, and a dog looming down from a flat roof above a bar. There's only one thing I am able to think about now, only one person, two persons; but the eyes, in the silence of the visions, do all the dances. I just stay and observe. With a side of my mind, I repeat some spanish conjugation-- I regret the lack of irony and, the weakness. Then it's night time. Of everything else I am obviously unsure.

...but the village wants to give me something other than products to buy, something that I can't use. So I just sit there, writing postcards that are not sincere and are not funny, trying to make something happen in the mind, something revealing, shivering at the thought of being back soon to the life I had before (isn't travelling life? yes-- and no), in the house that isn't mine and to a job that isn't going to be mine. What a folly, what a waste, to stretch the rope so, and still being attached to it. I kill a small fly with a quick slap. The insect's body is smeared across the palm of my hands, bits of it are trapped between my fingers. I don't feel nothing, no sense of success or relief. If only they stopped to play the music and we could go down to the lake and look at the stars and talk about life and other stronzate without the need of the booze, the radios, the yelling laughs of the lost moments [probably in San Pedro, Atitlan]

Outside goes on the happy and sad music of the band hired by the local association of vendors. In front of the stage, only the drunks dare to dance, while a large platoon of people by the beautiful, colorful clothes stands in silence, looking and listening. Everyone is shy, and also, the mexican music playing is obviously not their music. The town, voided of tourists (us two are the sole representatives of the category) appears finally as a shred of truth after all the set-up stages for gringos, but the truth is nothing special. Not that special places really exist. They should not be considered as such, probably, and the only decent question is always: what I am doing here? For many the answer seems always to be, I am here to drink cheap, to take pictures, to buy stuff. I don't think I am different from anyone else. I am a stranger, and I don't have a good reason to be here, no special keys in my pockets. Because the force of tourism is such that you cannot pretend not to be one.
The town around the music and the market, dirty and old and vexed by cars, ugly restaurants, ice cream place, hardware store, and two white churches on the opposite sides of the square, around the market stretch on the pavement of the square, around the forever dried fountain. Everything is obvious like in any other country of the world, like in Puglia, or in Somalia, what is that, being people? [in Chichicastenago]

When the night falls the faces become confused, the cars in the streets impel the passersby with imperious honking and the little kids disappear behind the corners of the streets. My wet clothes are wavering up on the roof of the hotel in the cold night wind, and I can see my blue pants slapping in the dark night, glowing orange from every side. What I learned from this trip? What questions! nothing, nothing of course [in Copan]

Mexicans remind me of Italians, and of course people from the U.S., in ways that disturb me and make me sad. It is especially about the music, the horrible music imposed on every one's ears, or maybe it's the popularity of cell phones, and fancy cars, and fancy clothes. Maybe it's the stupidity of junk food, of eating meat twice a day, and the stupidity of the fiestas, that are supposed to be noisy because they break everyday's calm, when in reality there is no calm, no quietness to break anymore, because no one is ever left alone by the new powerful noises of modernity.
But just like in other countries of central America I visited, people here have something we don't have, I mean anymore of course, something that they can't teach us and that no one could ever learn anyway. It's something you can only notice and look at, knowing it is out of reach. It is a form of innocence, I guess, and innocence can only be lost, just like we lost ours and just like everyone and every people is bound to lose its own in these times. Just like they have lost or are losing their own and it can't be helped. Nobody knows why this happens. Only to some it is clear how.
(Would I ever write these things if I wasn't here? Innocence? I doubt it.)