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.

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.

Miami says to me the same things places like Las Vegas or Saint Tropez say. Solitude, unhappiness, dominance of the appearance, weakness, boredom, excessive loud music everywhere, hard drinks, everything under a blanket of lies and money that keeps it all together. There's nothing into it and nothing I can do here.
There's many many very sexy women around on sunday night, and their unapproachability or even their easy reachability it's not something I am able to use. I long for the sex but everything that surrounds the sex keeps me away.
Walking down the streets at night I am solicited by prostitutes posing as tourists or students, and all their professional questions and attitudes make me depressed and withdrawn into myself. Soliciting is illegal, which means, like with all the illegal things, that just a little more lies and precautions are needed to access certain pleasures.
Ishtar, or whatever invented name she is using, approaches me in front of some big hotel on Ocean drive and we walk together the some twelve blocks down to the Mango club. I haven't invited or asked her anything, I only smiled at her the way I got accustomed to do here. But she wants to ask all her uninterested questions and tell her story and I let her. She's cute, but it is not a real conversation.
From Lithuania, studies in New York, all of a sudden has to pay the term to the school and hasn't the money, she is also a professional masseuse, 21, etc. I try to tell her that I am not the right target for her, that she is wasting her time. I feel more and more naive and stupid talking to her like that. I tell her that I never paid for sex and I am not going to start now. She pretends it is different if I just give her money for the school. I kind of laugh at this. Say no again. I try not to sound judgmental or anything, it's just the way it is. She doesn't seem to want to listen. Finally we part in front of the club, she goes in. She'll probably find one of the many lonesome men in there, those standing there watching at the half-naked bar girls dancing on the counter of the bar, their phallic bottles of beer in hand.
As I walk away, I think of the things I would have wanted to tell her. Those occur to me always when it's too late.
"Ishtar", I would have said, "did it ever happened to you to feel so lonesome and apart from everyone else and impossible to reach and trapped in your solitude, exactly when someone, maybe many, were desperately trying to have you, or have something from you?"
Ishtar would jump into the window opened by the word 'solitude' and say something like, "I can take care of your solitude, you know", but I wouldn't mind the interruption. "What you're doing to me right now, Ishtar, it's exactly that. You are making me feel lonesome and unreachable and trapped in my solitude. You are showing me how wrong it is for me to be here, or how wrong I seem to be for this world. I know that this enhanced feeling of solitude in some weird way is supposed to work in your favor... but I am not like that. I want the real thing, even for one night I need to know that someone is there actually desiring me or finding me attractive or interesting."
"I am just offering you some fun, if you don't want that..." she would say at that point, giving her hopes away. "I am sure the sex would be 'fun' as you say", I would answer. "But I dread the moment when the money is given, the sex is done, and nothing at all is left, not even a bit of regret. I am scared of that moment and of its consequences on my mood." Because I don't want to use the world 'spirit' or similar imprecise tools.

I walk away wondering what Ishtar would have said then. If at my words she would have wandered outside of all the prepared speeches full of details and the well known answers and the well known careful questions. I don't know. It's pretty frustrating and idiot to invent conversations like that anyway. I slowly go back to the hostel, walking under the palms and the neon lights, carefully trying not to smile at the pretty girls again, but there will be more prostitutes to dodge before I am safe in bed, horny and in a bad, bad mood.

I sit on the bunk bed in the small bare room. The sliding window is half open, so are the blinds, and a faint cold breeze searches the room.
Through the not blooming branches of a tree that almost reaches for my windowsill, comes in from the outside the rumble of the city, endless engine noises covering sparse traces of voices and creatures. Occasionally cars run 20th street, but mostly it's the constant pushing uptown of the traffic on 8th avenue to give the rhythm.
There's an indistinct smell in the room, a mix of clothes scattered around and in the bag, shoes, the old faint red carpet, and the car exhaust rising up from the street, gasoline, tires, dust, maybe some remote coffee place spreading aroma along the sidewalks.
I try not to move my leg and wonder what the best position is supposed to be. My feelings, mostly shame for this failure of my body. An old injury, the right meniscus that got broken so many years ago, waking up again, so badly, without an obvious reason. Sure it must have been the weather, I argue, 'cause changing weather always caused my right knee to hurt a little, to swollen when I used it too much. And I always limped a little, unnoticeable. But it never happened to hurt so distinctly, for so many days without ever getting better -- at moments so stiff and painful and unavoidable. What a shame.

I am worried by the thought that it might be self-sabotage, too. That's probably what the feeling of shame relates to. On some level, am I maybe causing this to be so bad so that the whole trip is screwed? I wonder. Out of fear? Out of guilt? Because Libi everyday reminds me how lonely she's feeling, how unreasonably far I am going? Because my father ignores my emails, ignores to acknowledge my being away? My keep trying to be in my own way?
Because I still fail to get hold of concrete reasons for my choices, and to mark significant steps forward?

Could be, I mean. After all there must be an explanation, I say to myself. I might need a traumatologist, or I might need a psychologist, or both. Together analyzing me. Plus an acupuncturist maybe.

I felt so bad this morning that I had to cancel a get together with Robert, one of the fellow Userlands contributors, because of this fucking sabotage (if he ever received my message, which, at this point, not having received any answer from him, I worryingly start to doubt). And it's not like I make new friends everyday. But it was crazy to think I could go around walking, when just half a mile around the block it's painful to do.

I sit on the bed, writing and drawing, the room enlightened by a uniform white light pouring in through the blinds. I look at the knee and it looks fucking normal. I touch it and it feels normal. A fucking normal knee that hurts every time I move it.
I have these absurd fantasies of being frown upon, wondered about, by the latino girls cleaning the rooms, and the guys at the reception, or by the guests I meet more than once a day while limping up and down the stairs.

Weird limping guy by the half-mad half-desperate expression on his face, roaming around the hostel. Call black-uniform anti-terrorism homeland security squads and have him shackled away, over.

I get out to grab a cup of coffee and something to eat. It feels pretty lonely to stay in line at the Deli, random individuals as we are, each of us getting the preferred food the way we want, each going its own way to eat it by ourselves. I'd rather have the wrong, the least special food and have it shared at a table with these people. Everything feels wrong. I limp back at the hostel. Soon I fall into a worked up, raging sleep.

I dream with clarity of my father's face, so regular and severe. He doesn't look at me, he looks so much younger, taken by his life, going away. In the dream I clearly know he's wishing he had a different son, the one he wanted, someone who was expected to come out different from everything else, brand new, of the brand new world, and certainly not so similar to his mother, or what's worse, to his grandfather. Not so fragile or introverted or a day dreamer.
He wishes for it, but it's not like he cares much.
He keeps looking away, seems like having better things to do, and in the dream I want to ask, what about me, can't I have better things to do now?

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.

My last night in Budapest, it was raining, it was cold. I had been walking around all day. The next morning it was going to be the early train to Zagreb but, being my last day in Budapest, despite the rain I moved closer to the center.
I took the wrong path, then the wrong tram, then finally the right path again and after an hour I was still walking under the rain, freezing, my feet burning, still directed downtown.
I wanted the people, the bars, some animation, hear voices, see faces.

Then I started to talk with God in english, you know, those kind of things you do when you're alone. "It's my last night in the city. Aren't you gonna make me meet an hungarian woman tonight?"
You know, I didn't want to have sex or anything. I'm just imagining some talking, listening, unexpected meeting with unexpected people of the opposite sex. They say you make new friends when you travel alone, but it's not so true. At least not anymore. You do, if you pick them in the same category you are from (tourists meeting each other in the hotels). Otherwise there are certain barriers, and then everything seems to disappear from you hands as soon as you leave.

Half way downtown, the shape of St. Stephen cathedral appeared in the haze and it was unreal, fantastic in the frayed glowing of the streetlights under the rain. Nobody was around. All the places were closed. After a while, I talked with God again.
"Would you give me a dry bench instead?"
(pause)
"No! Forget what I just said! I'd still prefer the woman if possible!" This must have pissed God. I knew it, so I tried to haggle, making things worse.
"Let's say that if you give me the dry bench I'll know you are not going to give me the woman?"

Next thing I knew, at the bus stop of the 56 there was a dry bench. I sat on it, disconsolate. I rested my feet and resumed walking after a while, hoping that maybe God had decided to give me both the dry bench and the woman anyway. See, I am an optimist.
I also thought that probably real hobos have this sort of conversations all the time. They never get the company. Only sometimes, the dry bench.

Then, down along the riverfront, walking by all the big hotels, I finally had beautiful Hungarian women throwing themselves at me.
"Hey! where are you going?"
"Nowhere, just walking"
"Wouldn't you like some company?"
"What do you mean?" When my feet are burning, my mind is particularly slow.
"Where are you from?"
"Italy."
"Oh, Italy! How nice! Now, what about a nice hotel room and some company?"

You know, I never went with a prostitute in my life. I don't think I ever will, unless I get really desperate. That night, rebuffing prostitute calls all the way to the central bridge, I really thought God was making fun of me. "You read that thing on the blog about Hungarian women, did you?" I asked him.
But, you know, there are many who reads you but never publicly admit that they do, even if they get ideas from what you write. God is just one of them.

Finally I had reached the center, after all. It was all closed down except for the tourist-trap night clubs. I walked all the way back to the hotel and it never stopped raining. The next morning I was directed to Zagreb, on a train that left the bitter and sweet city of Budapest right on time.

-- p.s. thanks to you all who are commenting and sending emails to me these days. I'll answer you all as soon as i get back in Milan. Promise.