How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
"She killed her husband with a knife!" said one.
"And her sons!" said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn't joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c'mon. It's years that a week doesn't go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. "It took a chinese woman to do it!" It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
"Aren't italian men usually killing italian women?" I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. "With guns, no?" I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn't mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: "If there's a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn't it funny?"
"I'll never give my husband a gun then", the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was "What I can't believe is that someone married you." I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don't expect them to be. But I didn't said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

I think I went fast to the end of my story, because it was so short. Trembling a little and nervous, or probably terrified. But all the amazing people were there. Having heard the others read made me feel better. And Math, she was so calm and so expressive and lively when she hosted and read Dennis' letter she made even me calm and collected.
Everyone was great, and I envied those who moved to laughs the listeners, and everyone else, each one of them being younger than me, closer than me, more connected than me to everything around, the city, the language, the nation, the places.
I came all the way from Milan, Italy and suddenly I wasn't even supposed to be reading anymore and nobody had told me but in the end I read anyway, and I was happy. And all the time I was learning again how everything about this vague dream, this wanting to write in english, wanting to do without my roots and my falling nation is a folly, A FOLLY, but still I can only follow that quivering thing deep in my throat, can't help it, there are still living narrow dreams there, irrational, unmotivated, unplanned, useless, that keep me going and alive.

I rewrote the story for the event just two days before the reading, in bits from different cyber cafes and internet points in the city, foreign computers, and of that rewriting I am happy too. Because of different accidents the story that originally got on the anthology was so wrong, and I always hated it and I still hate it, there in the middle of so many great pages. But just to change it into something else, something I now feel for and can defend, it has been emotionally important, even if it is not important at all.

I read, stumbled on the words a few times, probably pulled a ridiculous accent, and the girl behind the counter started to loudly run the coffee machine as I went on, and in the background the traffic on Allen street steadfastly kept running. But I was focused on the page and just trying not to screw up my pronunciation too much like Dita recommended me, and I felt fine. And the story was short anyway. The bookshop small and cozy, well illuminated. Afterwards I signed copies of the anthology and didn't know what to write and I only wrote stupid things and I rather should have just signed the copies, I was so unprepared at the idea and I always hated the thing where the writers sign books and instead, I suddenly realized how these things can be important, and pleasurable, because they make people closer, in indirect ways I am only starting to understand now. I was impermeable to that in Italy. Barely disturbed by such scenes. And it's like how it is important to remember names when you shake hands with people, and instead I always forget them. Although I never forget the faces, and probably too many other details I keep with me forever, possibly without a reason or a use.

Later the bar was dark and lovely and only my inability to be easygoing and easy at making friends and be interesting or carefree or whatever prevented me to let myself go and fully enjoy all the moments. But none of these anguishes is much important.

This morning right after dawn I descended seventh avenue from uptown, dragging my luggage and homelessness back to the hostel that kicked me out for two days. Black people and Latinos where everywhere around the opening places, off and on trucks, pushing carts, delivering, arranging, preparing, cleaning and setting up the city for the later people, some of them look so tired or sad in the gray early saturday, others all busy in the frenzy anticipation of the rush hours to come.
Few mellow groups, each with its own leader seemed to be coming back from parties, famous actress passed me by too in the very changing light above the city, as the shadows thickened at the base of the tall buildings, and only occasionally the cold wind came pushing from the side, channeled through into the streets.

The coffee places were still closed, my knee still hurting, still limping all the way, but I wanted to walk anyway, lugging the sad wheeled case about to fall apart or explode.
All the emotions at this point were drained out. All my feelings, back to a familiar state of disillusioned hope where nothing is clear except solitude, of myself and so many, the necessary condition to be dragged across the puddles like a broken case on wheels.

A different version of this quite short story has been published on the amazing anthology Userlands edited by Dennis Cooper for Akaschic books, NYC.
Honestly I always hated that version of my story, it came out all wrong because of a series of stupid personal reasons that got in the way, and I always regretted it especially because of all the other amazing Userlands authors that surround it with great pages.
Anyway. What follows here is a version of it I might consider now decent and final, and that I read with defective pronunciation at Bluestockings, NYC on March 22nd 2007.
Some of you reading this might be reminded of an old post on this blog which in fact was the original inspiration both for the first and second version of this very piece.

*

you weird people by corpodibacco

I know that the smile of the grocery girl is because of my mother, her crazy looks, untidy hair, her odd clothes, the strange hat, the jabbering. You all must be weird people, says her smile, putting those useless animals before yourself.
I cave in with my own phony smile. Like I'm not like my mother. Not to be confused with her. Not of the weird people.

Outside the grocery store dogs and people move about in the brown shadows of the trees, and the metal bodies of the parked cars shine dryly, the edges white-hot under the sun.
We move out into the light and I reach for the trunk, squinting, crate of carrots in my hands, warning the old man that the car is a mess, 'cause that's the way my mother keeps it. He says okay and starts to fight his way into it, moving empty bottles around, dried sheets of old newspapers torn to pieces, the snow chain case that will tumble against his feet every time we accelerate, various slabs of dried mud spatter all around the inside, including the seats. As we slam the doors the overloaded ashtray exhales out gray and white particles that flit between our legs.
Dogs share the car, I apologize to him. Would he appreciate it if I started blaming my mother for everything? I wonder. I am willing to. He repeats three times, No problem.

In two minutes we are at the pharmacy, a quiet door gaping out on a narrow lane abandoned in the shade. At the opposite end of the alley the village suddenly disappears, and the curvy hills shine in the distant land before the Italian sea.
The old man and I part ways with a wave and a grumble, but then he calls me from the other side of the road, and he says, the grocery girl, she's my daughter. She's a good girl.
In my paranoia I figure he has a scheme that I should marry her.
The round face of the pharmacist takes its time to scan mine. There's a priest-like morbid aura about it, eyes of repressed sexual desire in the gloomy colors of the store as he hands me back the prescription.

Later I stop by an abandoned lot along the road across the olive groves in the countryside. The landscape is marked by scattered trulli and modern cement angular houses half hidden by the green.
The cats flock over meowing and rubbing themselves against the edges of the low stone walls as I get out of the car. I have detailed instructions about where the cat food has to be dropped. The small bowls and the old aluminum pans, one for each cat, are important. The pecking order is important. My mother is crazy.

Back on the shattered road I think of her, and how it would be if she died. Because she's at the hospital I am entitled to this thought. As the road winds down the hill bordered by more stone walls, further into the land I am not familiar with, I imagine a funeral, words of condolence and affection exchanged, how I wouldn't cry, unable to, maybe later on, and how unsatisfactory the long awaited sense of liberation would be, secret joy for a new life that in the end doesn't come about.
I wonder if the disappointment produced by my imagination makes me a better person or is it that I am just unprepared, that there is no way to be prepared but to imagine, and be disappointed.

As the car jolts against the roots cracking the driveway, the eight dogs rush out of the house barking and howling against the fence to cheer for my approaching smell and figure. The wind is ruffling their fur, scraps of toys and rags are scattered in the yard, their animation is irrational and sweet. All my perceptions are now flattened out to a uniform complacent, absurd lack of criticism, as I mentally go through the returning-home procedures. One bone-shaped biscuit for each of the dogs, in a rigorous hierarchical order. Two biscuits for the biggest one. The oldest barks fiercely and runs across my legs. He knows he comes first.

Hours have gone by when I'm finally done feeding the dogs and the horse and cleaning the stable.
At this point outside it is quiet as inside, only residual puffs of wind are stirring the foliage and shaking the hanging clothes. At moments, there's the crunching noise of the horse chewing on the last bits of carrot scattered in the hay. That's when I feel how after all my mother was right, to come to live this far from everything, here where communities are remote lights out in the dark and being this far and invisible is the safest thing you're left with at the end of the day.

But then some of the dogs are barking from very far out in the field, possibly at a fox. They're too far to be called back. I mentally pray not to find the fox slaughtered in the field the next day, not to have to get the shovel and the black bag and be seen from across the field again, gleaning the fox remains strewn about the meadow, carrying the rolled up formless bag to the dumpster down the hill, carelessly tossing it as if it were no corpse. But the dogs continue to bark, excitedly.

My father says that I am always sleeping. My father says that I believe in everything. He says that I have too much imagination, and that I believe in everything I fantasize upon.

I think he's right. I am a victim of my own imaginative talents: I know it might sound cool but in fact it is a tragic weakness.
For one thing, I can't really rationalize to the point of discerning improbable from probable, because everything is equally probable too me. Be them news from the TV or stories of relatives and friends, I tend to participate with my imagination without any reasonable limit.
I can even feel physical pain --or the most intense emotions-- to the simple thought (I'd rather say 'vision') of what can happen to someone else, somewhere else, by the simple evocations of the surrounding details.

So it happens that my envy or empathy can turn out to be gigantic, of course: because I feel the relative difference of experience between me and the people involved in the story in the most intense way.
I don't limit myself to hear a story about someone and consider it as a story: I transform it in my mind in a collection of very solid (and mostly invented) experiences, just like a betrayed lover does thinking at the beloved with someone else: I see dust on the windowsill, sweat, faces, I hear voices and smell smells, rub a stain on the glass, and all the secondary stuff which is usually omitted from a story when we hear one (Saddam Hussein's double defecating on the WC in the cell, reading a book of poems while from the outside come fainted voices of the city; the dust and flies and weird bird songs on the streets of the village where my stepbrother kills a cow with an axe; small incidents and gross jokes at the conspiracy reunions for the latest terrorist scam, things like that).

Sometimes I can go on for hours or days consumed by visions like this, especially if I somehow feel robbed or cheated by them. Although I sometimes argue the basic credibility of many things created by my imagination, they remain too real to be fought with simple rationalization. My father, who is a crazy and dangerous person persuaded to be rational, warns me: I am being irrational, I am morbid about the stories I hear because I need or want to prove similar experiences myself. We talk about this because he cannot talk of anything else regarding myself, the sum of it being too negative to be told.
My excited imagination, he implies, becomes so excited because my experience isn't excited at all. I think that that's what my father is trying to tell me. Because I have organized my immoral life trying to have more and more time to think and imagine, it is fatal to become cretin for too much brain activity. He's probably right.

And he doesn't know that with all these ill talents in your pocket you notice a lot of things that usually go unnoticed, including beauty and drama where few see it. I don't know how to be without that (the preceding phrase is not ungrammatical).

-- in picture, above: snoopy's imagination (1951, I think)

We're in bed together, under the azure sheets in the dark room. Sex hasn't gone very well until now. First my erection vanished, then it came back, then she started to ache and we had to stop again. Of course it's seems a little disappointing because we haven't been together for a lot, and it's rare we have a whole afternoon for us. But obviously things aren't smooth. There's nothing to be disappointed for, I tell her. It doesn't feel hypocritical, although it should.

We're in bed and we just go on talking for a while. I tell my story. She tells her story.
"It's not your fault. I have someone else in mind" she says.
"You told me something about someone else. Wasn't he your boss or something? I thought it was over."
"Of course it is over. Did I mentioned he has a wife and a baby? But I still have him in mind."
Then she adds, "probably I care for him less now, but illogically he's still there."
"Oh. That's too bad," I moan, rolling back to the pillow. "But what, do you see his face while we're doing it? Do you make comparisons?"
"Yeah... no! I mean, sex wasn't perfect at all with him. It's just that I am this very monogamous person."
"Is there any way you two can meet again? See how it feels? I guess it's been a while you two haven't been together. You should be with him again and see how..."
"I don't believe so. I scared him away."
"You scared him? This doesn't sound like you. What did you...?"
"I did a stupid thing. One year ago, exactly. I... took some pills, I staged this thing. I don't think I really wanted to, you know."

I am looking at her from my elbow now. I watch her as she rubs her eyes with her thumbs and looks away. This is something I wasn't expecting. I know she should not notice how this scares me. I stroke her forehead and say "Wow. That's something I didn't imagine."
"Yeah, didn't you?" She says. We laugh for a second.
"I didn't wanted to die, really. I took the pills but then I called my father. I also texted him at a certain point"
"You mean the guy?"
"Yeah, I said 'goodbye' or something like that. Very dramatic. My memories aren't very clear." We laugh again.
"But, what had happened?"
"Just a typical wishy washy situation. We split up, I moved to another workplace, trying to forget him and to catch up with exams, then he came back, then one day he said he had changed his mind again, and was going back to her. At that point the pain was so big I just wanted to sleep forever."
"But you called your father."
"And my father had to call the firemen because my keys were into the lock and I was very passed out. Then he arrived too, just about when all the disaster was going on, and the police asked him who he was. They had my cellphone, they read the messages, so they knew he was the repository of all the craziness. My mother handbagged him, I think, poor guy. Later she said it was all my fault, that I obsessed him."

There's a pause. Our bodies are still entangled under the sheets and the house is quiet. From behind the shades Ornella Vanoni's voice oozes in. It's a song I don't know.
"Yeah, I guess you scared him away," I say then.
Somehow, I feel we are both sorry for it, in a quiet way.

In the dream I was sleeping somewhere, in an unfriendly school maybe, and I must have tried to say something out loud, because then I felt these hands against me, my back and the back of my skull. So typically the dream turned into this story where someone was sneaking behind me to kill me, and I couldn't move to struggle or run away. Actually, I think that the dream's imagination made up the entire story of me sleeping and getting killed the moment I felt threatened, nonetheless it made complete sense and was very persuasive in the context.
I tried to scream to call for help and I must have screamed in the real world for a while. But the hands remained there, since it was just Libi trying to soothe me (so much for meddling into someone's dreams to save him out of trouble, I guess).

I never entirely woke up, I just managed to roll away from Libi hands to calm down. I knew my mouth was dry because some weird new allergy clogged my nose, and I knew I had to wake up to get me some water. But I had to finish my dream first.
There was a memory of when I used to go visit my dad in Trento, few years ago, before he retired to Liguria. I was a student in Venice and sometimes I had to ride the Valsugana "little train" up to Trento to stay at his place a couple of days. The Valsugana "little train" was a blue and white diesel train with two carriages mostly used by students in the weekends. Among them was this beautiful girl I really liked, from Borgo Valsugana. She had long gorgeous legs and long black hair, and I never dared to talk to her. I never knew her name. But this has nothing to do with the story.
I was never happy to visit my dad, it was very stressful (in fact I don't do it anymore). But it was an occasion to eat real food, meat for example, since I never had any money.
At my father's I used to sleep in the living room, on a small folding bed shorter than I was. Before falling asleep into it, all my care was devoted to resist at masturbating into it. I stayed awake until late instead, reading. I used to read a lot then, in the before-I-had-a-computer days.

Many of those nights in the short folding bed I could hear my father screaming in his sleep, which was something he probably always did since when I first knew him and we all lived together under the same roof. From those days I think somewhere in my mind rests the conviction that grown-ups scream in their dreams, so that others can pity them and admire their troubled soul.
Now every time I have a loud dream I get in the back of my head some immediate reward, because I finally got to be a troubled adult (not that I ignore how much it sucks to be one). But then I also get some guilty feeling, because during those nights in Trento I never got out of bed to wake my father out of his own bad dreams.

I left him there instead, calling for help. I just stayed still, turned toward the wall that divided the two rooms, until he had finished calling. I probably thought he couldn't appreciate my helping him out, since he always made so much to hide all his soft spots (but then I knew them all).
Probably I also had thoughts like "now you see what it means to be scared, jerk". What a jerk I was.

In the dream I wondered if I had to make up for this. Call him, visit him, soothe him out of his bad dreams. But isn't it exactly this that scared you even more tonight? I argued.
Then I remembered Art Spiegelman's miraculous words: "I'd rather feel guilty", and slowly I came back from the sleepers.

We live
In singing-emptied rooms, robbed-like
(Guido Ceronetti)

S. gets out of the bed and into the bathroom. She's leaving for Paris in the morning. I have been staying up all night. I am not leaving. Perhaps I'll be leaving later, tomorrow, in another direction.
I'm preparing her two sandwiches, one hard-boiled egg, three peeled carrots I bundle in a piece of paper. The sandwiches have pieces of green, of red, of white into them. The slices of bread are thin. I'm putting everything in a small bag of paper to show it to her when she comes to the kitchen. I'm preparing her coffee too.
"I smelled you was preparing me the egg."
"Oh! Sorry I wake you up."
"No! It was sweet of you to think."
"Yep."
"I like the way you wrap the sandwiches up in a piece of paper and then you fold everything up in domopak film."
"Yep."

I learned from Leni to wrap up sandwiches that way. Often I stop for a second to recall when I first learned something I just did which is not entirely obvious, whatever that is. Then I am usually surprised by the fact that it's not so long ago I learned it.

A. used to prepare these little tasty sandwiches every time we were going somewhere on a trip. The last time she did it was when we were leaving for Rotterdam. We had a rented van filled up with our stuff. I mean her stuff. The sandwiches had cucumber and meat and lettuce and cheese. Austrian bread. We ate them in one of those vast rest areas of the german autobahns. The rest area had a piece of circular road far in the back, behind a line of trees. We sat there on the grassy curb and ate the sandwiches looking at the squared shape of the SHELL gas station floating behind the layers of vapors heated by the sun.
We didn't have much to say then. The magpies were coming down from the trees behind us appearing and disappearing in the high meadow grass before flying further away in the big lawn.
The sandwiches were good.
"Do you like it?" She asked.
"I like the way you wrap the sandwiches up in paper and domopak film", I said.
"Thanks" Leni said, smiling. It was very typical of her to say "thanks" even if the thing she was thanking you for was casual or meant ironically. She needed every little compliment she could fish, and it made me sad, sometimes.

S. and I smile when we're about to kiss. Kissing is a thing I don't concede very often. But our kisses are very pleasurable. We look tenderly in each other's eyes and the kiss is wet and warm.
We are parting outside the door, on the small terrace. I hate it when she makes these endless goodbyes, but I try to endure them without losing my attention. I wonder if I love her, I mean if I am really in love with her. I wonder if the invite Nina texted me to go together to Trieste is still valid, but I don't believe so.
Then I am alone in the apartment. The sun pours in, the dishes are in the sink for me to wash them.
Is my heart so empty? I ask. But it's just a voice. I can love.