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.)

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.

The shape of the city is unfathomable, all around are hills covered by trees and houses, streets going up or down, old colonial buildings and low colorful squared houses... It's still the same lazy suspicious dirtiness everywhere, just like along the road to the border, in the middle of nothing, piles of trash threw from the cars into the bushes of the beautiful plateau, for miles on end of narrow winding road.
From one of the undescript low bridges of the city me and the Swiss guy assist to an improbable match between Milan and Genoa (so the shirts seem to say), while black birds fly high over our head, because next to the soccer field is a garbage landfill. We just had a coffee at a dunkin' donouts, which was basically the only thing open early on a Sunday, and I don't complain. Even earlier I got into the main church, the local baroque colonial white Duomo, where the bishop himself was conducting the rites. His voice sounded just like that of all the catholic priests in Italy, mellow and phony, and his words equally empty to me... but I was moved because there were so many people in the church, and like I saw happening in Costarica and Nicaragua, they sang a lot during the mass, all together, with strong participation... and I am always moved at the thought of not being part of a group, of being cast aside, by myself, where I only can be.
I fled the church when the bishop started walking down the aisle sprinkling holy water on the herd. Not that I had anything against the holy water.
I think I'll have a meet up with the Irish couple later, or tomorrow, when we'll go together to the Copan Ruinas, at the other end of the country. Travelling at stages with other tourists is good and bad, plus nobody seem to want to actually let the things around touch us. But the loneliness can be unbearable too, sometimes.
From Copan on, it will be Guatemala, which should be grand, as the Irish would say, although my slow homecoming seems to be going so fast now.

In Nicaragua there's a island in the middle of a big lake, and there are two volcanoes on the island, the island is actually made by the two volcanoes dabbing each other. One of the volcanes is sleeping and the other, named Concepcion, is awake. The tip of the two volcanoes is almost always hidden by a dense blanket of clouds, and both are covered by a thick rain forest populated by mysterious and dangerous animals and insects. All around the coasts are the villages, and long long beaches made of brown and black sand. The water of the lake is of a light brown color and you can't see the other side of it. The spanish who first came here called it Dulce Mar. The Nicaraguan cowboys ride along the beaches, taking the cattle down to the lake to drink, and to move it from one part to the other of the island. Sick and thin dogs by the ghostly appearance follow them, without hopes. People is very good looking and shy and prideful and authentic and all the other too much used trite words, they rarely smile, they jump in the waters of the lake with all their clothes on, they love bicycles, they always wave back if you wave first, the girls have black eyes shiny like pearls and white teeth, all the pupils at school wear blue and white uniforms, and the men are almost always serious and focused on something, but not always. Sometimes, walking across the villages far from the coasts, you can hear music being played in the small houses by two or three instruments, and people singing and dancing in the inside of the houses in the dark. Almost all the houses have pavements of dirt and pallets on the floor and kitchens made of piled stones or pieces of wood on the outside. Sometimes there's a hammock, often a radio. All the radios play the same station.
The food is either bad or very bad and makes you worry, like the water or the insects, especially if you don't have any vaccination like I do. There is always rice and beans to eat and chicken and few other things but soon you get accustomed to it. Not so much fruits, and some mediocre fish from the lake. But food doesn't matter anyway.
There are acacia trees by the red flowers and the long blisters of seeds, looks like africa, and sick banana trees growing on fields covered with trash, and blue birds by the long wide tails and the loud strange songs. A strong wind is always, incessantly, blowing hard across the island coming from the east. They say that the wind ceases only when there are hurricanes sweeping the gulf far away, but I wouldn't know. The wind never ceases.
This island is one of the most beautiful places I ever visited in my life. I wish I could stay here forever, lounging on the hammock, walking across the villages, getting to know the people and building my own house and stop waiting for something or searching for something. I don't know in how many years this place will be turned into a miserable fake resort for north american tourists (sorry, but it's true, Costarica is the perfect example), probably not so many. Everything is for sale in central america.
And it's always that strange mixed feeling, to be finding and losing things at the same time, following the tourist everywhere he or she goes.

As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential -- the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor.

-- Peter Handke, as quoted in this article (thanks to Greg for pointing it out)

-- in movie, above: just the nothingness recorded by my little camera from inside a coffee place.

I sit into another coffee place of that silly chain, just next to Korean town, on 32nd. I stretch my right leg under the table close to the window. The knee still bothers me, and at moments it seems like it is never going to stop hurting. But I decided not to let it ruin my trip, so I stick to the plan. I just leave it there, eat a sandwich, take the drugs. My leg smells of hospital, it's the bengay cream. My pants look a little like hospital pants, all pastel blue as they are. Girls check me out because I look like a doctor on a break. I try to accustom to the part, looking heroic and bored and undisclosedly fit. It's not hard, that's a little how I feel, together with lost and displaced and good for nothing of course.
People are using laptops on the few tables around me. Everyone went to typing school and writes real fast. So fast and aggressively it distracts me from my thoughts. Not that my thoughts are so relevant at this moment of the day. A table of Korean youngsters produces collective burst of laughs at given intervals, and two incredibly attractive young Indian girls talk animately and with a lot of mannerisms at a table behind them.

I just ended the worse conversation on the phone with Libi. I called her from a public phone on the street, it was chaotic. She was sleeping, I woke her up, had her telling me about her day. As soon as I started talking about how I felt she used her long pauses and was all defensive and then I told her about my dreams, the bare bones of projects I would love to have, it was as if everything emanating from me was there to threaten her. She said "I knew this was going to happen" and I had no idea what "this" was, and then the voice said "thirty seconds" ridiculously soon, damn polish prepaid cards.

A middle age guy from the next table gives me his videocamera to film him and his ten year old son eating pizza together. They actually took pizza from Sbarro and brought it here. I don't know why he wants me to film that. The proposal is so unexpected and the man so nice I can't think of anything, any rudeness, to avoid the thing. So I film them, the dad acts like he's making a toast with his son with the pizzas, and I even wave into the camera to convince the little kid to wave back. He does, with a beautiful smile, and asks me what's my name. I tell him. Must repeat it a couple of times 'cause it is unusual. His dad is convinced that I must be Russian. I am italian, I tell him, and he says, really, me too. Born here, though, he says. i fail to manifest pleasure and surprise. He gives me his card. Frank Positano, there's written on it. Photographer, New York. He looks expectant but I don't know what to say. "You're a photographer", I say. "Interesting."
I give him back the camera. Our moment is over. I put my own little camera on the table and start filming the outside, just out of nothingness, I hope he doesn't notice.
People walking by. Neons flickering. Girl with stilettos getting off the cab. Korean people converging to 32nd. Cars and bikes passing by. Music suggesting arbitrary feelings unasked for. I just sit there in a daze and let it flow in and out until it's time to go.

One thing about beauty is that it can't be planned. Or at least it shouldn't. What I believe happens, is that beauty comes about despite planning, and more often than not, beauty is in the unplanned accumulation of elements that are not meant to be essentially beautiful as much as they are meant to be useful and used. So is for elegance, and for writing (words about things and not the other way around), and so is for architecture.
Venice is the perfect example, the product of a sort of irrational individualistic development, never planned, where structures like the houses for the Arsenale's workers, the churches of the monastic orders, the street markets, the palaces for the aristocracy all stand next to each other, in a sort of awesome conversation that nobody saw coming or wanted to happen in the first place.
And so obviously is for New York, whose beauty is really in the palimpsest of growing and decaying and renovating and reusing and reinventing that made the colors and the solid forms of this incredible urban island. And I know that every word about the city is trivial and has been said already so many times.

I am into its changing light today, the confused feelings of a guilty morning in my steps getting back to the hostel, thoughts of wrong doing and unrelated worries, the day of the reading closer and closer, not prepared, not deserving, not prepared. I am amazed by all the roofs and the tanks against the moving clouds, and by the faces and bodies of the people walking with me. We drive the trucks and we wash the windows and we sing into the iPods and we bite the bagels and we drag the dogs away and we swear, we are humanity, and we don't have a clue, that's what we are. Beauty isn't there for a reason and into this unasked answer is all I ever wanted anyway.

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.