So I am at Nina place once again. The room is quite bare as I remembered it, the lightning a little gloom and careless, and there are the piano and the cello, still looking a little abandoned. The two slender small dogs are looking at us intently from the couch, and the large bed seems to wait in the shaded room nearby.
Officially I am here to help with a translation that in fact turned out to be of only three words she is undecided about. She is on to write some dissertation in English for her graduation. She's going to graduate in the same week Libi will -- and this coincidence disturbs me.
"I can't believe it you actually called me to help you with the dissertation, for real"
"I can't have sex with you" she smiles.

She leans forward scrolling down the pages in Word. We are sitting very close, our legs touching. "just as much and how", she reads, "how can I put this nicely?"
I am caressing her on the back as we plunge our faces in the bluish light of the display. My hand reaches under her top, feeling her smooth skin, the round side of her small breast.
I didn't remember I liked her absurdly immature body this much.
Apparently there's no problem, though. I am having an erection, and she's leaning on me more, losing the place in the file. She put her thigh on mine. We kiss. We haven't seen each other for months.
"I can't have sex with you. I have to finish this."

It's this city's fault, I think. It's too difficult to make things happen here. As I just read in that Luciano Bianciardi's book, cities where people work hard are places where sex is avoided when possible, or used for other means, or mistaken for something useful more than pleasurable.
He was writing about Milano, so he knew.

A moment later we're back to the file. She protests against my approach "too abrupt", and we joke about it for a while.
"It's not my fault if you always set us up when there's no time for anything," I say.
Her oblique eyes look at me seriously for a second. Her hair is longer, her skin slightly tanned. The possibility of having sex with her on the spot hypnotizes me for a moment.

I help her to cope with a couple of problems she's having with her new Mac. Then we just set for a chat, about how things are going (and this ends pretty fast) and about how we are, and what are our defects or problems (and this takes a lot).
We look at each other warmly, but I know there won't be any sex. Doesn't matter. It's all to complicated.

"Please come back Thursday", she says, "I'll be ready then"

Coming back home, I don't feel guilty, which is a liberation because I always feel guilty for something. Because my mood was suicidal yesterday, and it's not now, I don't want to go over the thing, evaluate it, or I just can't. What should I explain to myself?

The sky is light blue out here, veiled by remote clouds. The horizon is always imperceivable, somewhere behind the countless buildings filled with lives and symbols. It's a city.
People are crowding certain parts of the sidewalks, where open bars diffuse music over the roaring of the city, and smokers idle outside talking on the cellphones. Cars are lining up at my semaphore as I pass. It's not important where I'm headed but where I'm coming from, I think.
Although I know neither of the two is really important, because it's nowhere anyway.