La domanda è rosso fuoco e la risposta è blu.
-- Paolo Conte

Without any emotion I get the old Fiat truck out of the garden gates, thru the village and across hills and fields, down the slopes, up the slopes, in line at the stop and behind the tractor and on. The truck is hard to drive, noisy when I try to extort its gears, hard to steer. Pedals are too high. The tumble of tools and machines and vegetation remains of a day's work shifts and rumbles in the dump, I occasionally check on it in the rear view mirror like there was something I could do to prevent a disaster.
The other cars speed off pissed and liberated as they pass us.
My hands let go and grab at the same time. The truck is pulling us away from here tonight.

The sun is about to go down, the clouds are resting on the Apennines, the yellow and warm light comes in somewhere east of the road, then it moves in front and hides again, only for few beats I feel its touch against the dry skin of my face.
Nothing looks like in the big city far away. For one thing, there are hills again and again green in patches, where the corn has been reaped bright and troubled. Striped by the vines. Dark green where are the lines of cypresses. The bales stand scattered and still and like a vision in a courtyard a old watermill is spinning. There is nothing romantic or idyllic about it, everything is equally dying or slipping away as if far from the reach of the hands of those who live it.
Cars are parked out of the occasional bars. Ladies and Men are visible smoking at the tables. What do they talk about in the end? I wish I smoked too to give something to do to my fingers now, take 'em off the wheel. Hooded crows glide down from the hills to the fields. The magpie flies away from the pave. The last cicadas. These know nothing.

I sing in my head trying to remember Tupelo Honey, La busa noeuva, Fuck me pumps (no luck). There is no radio in the truck, but me and the young colleague don't make conversation this evening, we are tired but it's not that it's those stupid disputes about this or that menial bullshit regarding work, when everything pushes against it and we don't have the right things at hand, or the machines go wrong or I make too many questions and the time passes and we both feel left out and frustrated -- and here we are, at the end of this long lost day in the province, and we'll rest on our bitterness until we part. Tomorrow morning it will all be forgotten.

Lord, this trip is endless. Maybe it is all this silence above the engine of this god forsaken truck. These words in my head. I am amazed. The tiredness seem to be getting out of my spine and my hands and get to the wheel and through the wheel to the road and all the landscape with it, enormously tired and incapable of coming to an end. The world vibrates with our bodies and this truck and we roll, forever.
After every bend there is another piece of road, other trees and gravel pathways along our way, farm houses tractors and old men still working the fields. Only old men. Light stops where are the houses. Huge trucks full of sands coming the other way. Fanatics in full cycling gear hard to pass. White signs with places' names on it. All the signs of the province. I feel sad because we don't even comment the two or three pretty girls walking by and fuckable. I feel sad for this day gone, swallowed by the fatigue, I am incredulous because I got out of the house almost thirteen hours ago and I am still here, at the wheel of the truck, trying to bring our ass back home, and I wonder exactly on what I proudly consider myself a free man. Etcetera.

the mind is a city like London,
smoky and populous: it is a capital
like Rome, ruined and eternal.
-- Delmore Schwartz

past the ledges of the orchards and the vines the car slopes up through the quiet naked woods, downy oaks robinia and salix (especially robinia) (still the bright beige leaves of the oaks hang from the ascending branches obstinately) standing above the underwood of brambles and hazels with joyously unrolled yellow male flowers, at first the shattered gravel road whose bends seem to disappear out of the slant and into the trees, then fading into concrete, sudden civilization of garages and magnolia trees across montevecchia alta hills down, to the inevitable lowlands, the consistent street lights, the wide round abouts, the trucks one after the other, the honks, the cedars, bar tabacchi, farmacia, casalinghi, the incongruous architectures of Brianza, the blue and white and brown signs of towns and cities to reach, the giant malls offshore into the parking lots, and going rolling and hanging into the traffic, rapidly squeezed into highway east and very fast, passing many cars, going south, the low enraged sun blazing white hot on the concrete and into the eyes, hazardous moving from lane to lane to the exit few miles ahead and finally at the streetlight of viale forlanini, in front of me the low canyons of the city, sky fading to white, rumble of the restless souls, people rushing down the sidewalks, in and out of the many shops, gatherings of more waiting for the tram 12, haze of gases and dust all and above, mothers crossing the streets with probably folded up babies in strollers, VIP cars pushing into the reserved lane, white trunks of the plane trees going up and in the sun, I look for a parking spot, hot in the face, lowered windows, in my green gardener suit and the whole car dung-smelling dust crackling, today I stole from work batches of preserves and jams now scattered on the passenger seat, I am coming back from the absurd organic farm up in the hills where I work this week again. I find the parking spot. From the warm valley where the only sounds are chirping of birds and far away hammering in the orchards I am here bumping the car up above the curb and civilization is everywhere and immediately completely all around and rightfully irreversible and ¿just how absurdly it is to forget all about it for a underpaid brief day of hard-working dung-shoveling illusions?
Moh'. Who cares? For the failures? I drove a 1978 Lamborghini tractor with a trailer today up and down those ledges and thought I would overturn it any moment, and hated it. I can walk home with a fair walk and joyful.

--In picture, above: the aforementioned tractor. Music: "because of this", mark lanegan