“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

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.

I don’t really care about football/soccer (or, in our language, “Calcio”, which, as everyone knows, means “kick”) and I could accept to talk diffusely about it only if Calcio was a forgotten sport of the past, like, say, the race of the chariots.
It’s not even true I could talk diffusely about it, ’cause I have no clue really, although I immensely like the prose of old-school Calcio experts like the past Gianni Brera, when I happen to read it.
Otherwise Calcio bores me, and as a moderate fan of the “unlucky” team Inter (only because my grandfather was) I know italian Calcio to be a stupid fraud. I always felt it was very depressing to see people going nuts for it, since here in Italy it was all so obviously fixed, and when not fixed, too violent.
So, I am not surprised by, nor interested to, such news.

Anyway: (blah blah) important investigations are going on against Juventus, Milan, Lazio, Fiorentina and other minor Calcio teams. It seems that Juventus football team, that absurdly won this year’s championship today, was in control of all the nominations of referees in the Italian championship, and shared its puppets with a bunch of friendly teams to fix the championship. They also gambled on it, but mostly it was probably considered “necessary” to cheat because big teams are listed companies, and lots of money are at stake.

So, years of “stunning” results and astonishing “luck” of Juventus and Milan and other teams should be revisited, I guess. But it’s too late. I know that nothing significant will happen, and that next year it will be all the same fraud over again.
It’s all so depressing, to see how in Italy everything, everywhere is rotten, although clearly Calcio it’s the most obvious place to find rotten stuff here.
Yet even if you don’t care for it, even if you somehow knew it was so ( if only because “everything else is” ), it gives a little pain to forcefully acknowledge the greedy immorality that pervades everything.

Oh, well! What should I say? Calcio… Let’s not talk about it anymore.

— in picture: Google trends. It’s hard to find a search term more popular among italian Google’s users than “calcio”. Try with “figa” “sesso”, “droga”, “Berlusconi”…

We meet near the bridge of via Cassala, where the shadows bounce and the tables of an Italian bar are cluttered in a small stretch of sidewalk. Around us and everywhere in the city the warm wind is spreading methodically the white furry filaments dropped by the high poplars. Jawa carries her baby boy in a knapsack tight on her belly and smiles radiantly from twenty yards as I approach her, hug her, kiss her on the mouth.
I tried in the past not to kiss her on the mouth when we greet, because although we were lovers it didn’t seem natural to do it– particularly if in front of friends who didn’t know we were lovers. Now that we’re not lovers anymore I just accept the kiss on the mouth as it comes. I even anticipate it. But in the end I always accepted it, so she doesn’t notice the difference.

There’s the typical chaos of Milano around us, mopeds screaming and buses yelling and cars trumpeting and trucks barking. I praise her baby whom I’m meeting for the first time, tanned and sulky five months years old, and we go, in the clouds of invisible dusts and noise, talking about the baby and the weather and what he’s liking of the world and what not.
( I mentioned anonymously Jawa in this blog before, hers was an afternoon or a morning spent in someone else’s house, curled up together in bed listening to blackbirds and pigeons on the other side of Via Savona, Milano of course, which is always the same untellable place. Now those days and those places seem so distant and impossible. And they are not distant at all. )

We stroll up and down the grid of roads around Naviglio Grande, via Savona (coincidentally), Giambellino, Vigevano. The stores and offices are busy and the people busy, and pretty soon the little boy falls asleep in the knapsack regardless the chaos, and everyone, man or woman, passing by look at him tenderly.
“This is a very seductive boy,” I say admiringly. “Everyone loves him.”
“It’s true” says Jawa
It is hard to look at her face walking at her side, ’cause her bulky Sicilian black hair always covers her profile, but I think she looks beautiful and I tell her. She smiles and we don’t say anything for a while.

Later we’re going on talking about the boy, and her life with Ernesto and their projects.
Twice Jawa asks about me, and both times I manage to change argument. Then we sit down on a bench in a patch of green behind some new houses, because she has to feed the baby. This patch of green, what in Milan is called a garden, is lousy conceived, covered with clover and infested with sand-flies, divided by irrational rotten tracks made of tartan and small ill young trees in bad shape. The bench faces the new housing projects which also are visibly falling to pieces already.

“Think at those who bought into this dump”, I say. “How happy they must be now.”
“Tell me about you” she says. She has freed the little boy from the knapsack, and now the sulky face is giving place to a bright toothless smile.
“I live with a girl, very sweet and lovely and all. But somehow I feel suffocating, I don’t know why.”
“I’m sorry to hear that”
“Yeah well” I said. “I learned something about myself recently. I learned that I dedicate less energies to love and relationships and friends, because I am always engaged in this inside battle with myself and my thoughts.”
“Yeah, I know” Jawa says, smiling.
“I never really realized it. I need to save energy for the battle and so I neglect my relationships. Actually, any activity is less important than the battle. And what is worse, I favor relationships that need less energies to be moved on. Isn’t it horrible?”
“I always thought my life would be different. Now with the baby it’s even more unforeseeable and inevitable. Me and Ernesto don’t have much time for each other. All is turning into something else. Very out of control. Maybe you want to avoid all this, I don’t know, although I’m actually liking it.”
“Oh, I envy you.” I say not persuasively. “I wish I had a baby with someone and a job I like and all that stuff. Only, not with my head. Anyway, I have no idea of what I once thought my life should turn out to be. If I ever had a plan or a vision, I forgot about it.”
“Don’t you ever do any progress in the battle with your inside self?” Jawa asks.

Good luck I don’t have to answer because the little kid asks for our attentions now. And then it is late, and we say goodbye near the bridge of Via Cassala again. Above our heads the traffic is rumbling and the concrete vibrates against the metal pylons and the smell of diesel engines floats down to us.
It is all, and I go back home on foot again, slowly, thinking about having a kid or a family or nothing. In my head is everything.

my relationship with her, something is happening– suddenly I find boring what she says and I drop out of conversations without a warning– suddenly I don’t want to touch her or hug her for too long and I’d rather hug someone on the tram– then i take it back, but then the thought is solid for a moment and I look at it as if it isn’t mine–
She says something to me and I look at her for a second too long, because something slips into my mind in between, the thou– the thought, why are we together? why do I live here? Then I lean my forehead against the cold pane over the low courtyard by the round roofs, astonished to see how I am just letting this love go, when I know love it’s so precious and rare, I would find hard to forgive me afterwards, I think, for having let this rare and precious love go, and where– and her pain and frustration–
It’s like if my hands were just to weak to cling at it– “shitty hands” my father used to call me when stuff dropped from my hands, then he would slap me hard in the face, so I learned– Christmas ball, breakfast cup, keys, brand new issue of “Topolino” down the manhole, gas lamp at camping, Aguilas Spain, 19** — but this has nothing to do with the thing–
I push my forehead against the pane and I think at my mug behind the window from the other side– is it mysterious? I wish–
Behind my back she is still at the table where we ate and nobody has anything left to say, dirty dishes left to take to the sink, efforts to break through the sphinx my soul is becoming day by day– whatever a soul is, why– (curtains)

I feel his eyes on me as I am climbing the slope at the beginning of Naviglio Pavese. I wonder how is it possible that I “feel it” when someone is looking at me. I am both alert for the traffic rushing around and absent-minded in my daydream but I feel and look back. The city was washed by the rain today, and in the white light, the fresh wind is gathering waters in the puddles near the sidewalks, where trees and wires reflect. People hasten by with grocery bags, dragging children, complaining on the telephone, driving in the mess with the tongue sticking out of the left corner of their mouth. Girls are smoking white cigarettes in the shadows of the fancy cockpits, honking & lined behind the trams. His face is in focus in the noise of the city as I move towards him.

We smile at each other, and O.K., I manage to greet him warmly. We haven’t seen each other in four years or so, but he’s so at ease in dealing with all sort of people he deals fine with me. Pretty soon I am updated about the enormous range of things he did and places where he lived in the past four years. He says he just had his second baby and now he’s back to his work. He says he paints too. “Huge paintings. Two-three thousand euros a picture” he says. Makes me think at that character in “Hannah and her sisters”.
He asks me what I do, and I say “unemployed”, where I live, and I say, “at this girl’s”.
“Don’t you work at the university anymore? I heard you had a career there.”
“No.”
“But why?” he is surprised. We both are repeaters from Art School and once troubled hard to fit-in boys. Being the one with a career at the University was what made me a real loser, so he’s disappointed. Or this is what my paranoia figures.
“I don’t know. Long story. I was tired,” I say.
“You still write?” he asks.
I hate him for asking this. I had this thing that I wanted to write a long ago, when we were at school and briefly after that. He shouldn’t be so aware I am still stuck with my unfulfilled delusion.
“Sure” I say reluctantly. Somehow I know he never ceased to look at me as at an alien.

Then it’s time we part, as the energy of the encounter dissipates.
“Let’s keep in touch” he says.
“We’ll never see each other again” I smile.
“Don’t say that!”

As I move away, it’s O.K. that I still have a long way to walk home. I m slowing down in the crowd of Viale Bligny to let the impressions of the city do their job on me. I try to meet girls’ eyes as they approach me and pass by. But they all seem so angry and impatient today.

I only imagine these characters who look at me with complicity, much irony, a possibility to get away from it all together. It’s all invented. I draw them and they come out when their expression is right, but then again the expression doesn’t change, and it all remains dead. I am trapped in my daydreams, an enclosure under the sun or the dark clouds and the sudden showers, my friends are long gone (’cause I ignored their calls), my heart is too wrapped up in itself for love, and just like I was obsessed with pleasing my father in the past, now I am obsessed with displeasing him. But I just want out.

“There is an indifference that is more helpful than your blabbering about being humane, as the right hand pets some of us like Mother Teresa, and the left hand swings the sword of the tribunal against others. Little devils of goodness. Humanity hyenas. There is no one less open to suffering than you official humanitarians. Marsbodies that appear as the protectors of human rights… The people here have become as evil as they are not. And the war has made you tourists as evil as you are.”

— Peter Handke, Dugout Canoe, The Play About The Film About The War

You may be taught to believe that it is great how wealthy people donate amounts of their money and time to some “humanitarian” cause. But it’s not. It’s disgusting, instead. First of all, it is useless: the world is more and more divided among the lucky ones and the unlucky ones, so the system obviously doesn’t work. But also, it is a race for hypocrisy so disgusting and shameful it can’t even be called evil: it must be called shameful, so that we don’t waste time with exceptions, like those who do it not because they’re “evil” but because they’re “good”, those who didn’t mean it that way, those who went there in person, those who just wanted to do good, those who “wanted to see”, those who couldn’t find a place for them at home, those who made so much money they “felt it was right to…”, etc.
For example, on the past week’s issue of TIME.

( Parenthesis: I made the mistake months ago to subscribe for $5 to TIME magazine in order to access their archive on line. I wanted to read some stuff happened on the year I was born. The stuff wasn’t interesting at all, but I have been receiving their crappy magazine every week since then, although I have canceled my subscription as soon as the trial period expired. And every time I read it, I know there is something in it that gives me the creeps. )

So, on the past week’s issue of TIME there was a list of the supposed 100 “most influential” people of the world. Well, typical TIME’s crap, I guess. “Influential” according to their lousy point of view of course.
I browsed the article terrorized to find Berlusconi’s face in it. Luckily there wasn’t.
Among them though, looking upward so that his double chin doesn’t show, with his “I’m so committed” smile, was obviously Bill Gates (and wife). They were on the cover of another disgusting issue of TIME with Bono few weeks ago already, and it was all about how much good they were all making to Africa. The caption about Bill Gates went: “Giving money and Hope to the world”. See, he “gives money to the world”. He’s not part of the band of brothers who drain money from everywhere wishing for a crowded unhappy world where everybody uses his cheap products. He actually gives hope.

Not surprisingly, more than a half of the names in the TIME’s list are of American fellows whose supposed merit is to give away part of their money to some “association”. The fact is always citied among the great things they did in life for which they turned out to be influential.

It’s interesting to learn why affluent men of rich societies tip around more than women. Even if they do it with all the discretion in the world, the reason is always public. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller explained why in his impressive and fascinating book “The Mating Mind” (a must read, first book I ever read to give a reasonable explanation to why creativity exists): tips and donations are part of a sort of “peacock tale” extended behavior. It is all about the show of fitness we use to extend our right of choice in our circles under many forms. Everybody does it, in a way or another, you know, just to be “influential” in his own way, just as we all do creative things or test jokes around to allure the other sex, or friends.
The way I see it, though, to donate to Humanitarian Associations is particularly hateful in the picture, even though is almost a must now, especially in the US. Because the unhappiness of the world is transformed into your personal triumph, and everybody would be disgusted and ashamed by the deal if it wasn’t for the physical distance between the tragedies you throw money at, and the living rooms where you can announce how you threw the money.
After all, all you gave is just your money, but nothing permanently good can come from the money itself.

I always thought that most of humanitarian associations devoted to the developing of “peacock tales” of affluent or middle-class men around the world should be banished and neglected, so that the evidence of the problems our richness create around wouldn’t have any excuse.

Now, when I read that this is a world where in survivors camps peacekeepers in Liberia exchange beer food and cigarettes — and trips to town on large SUVs — with sex with boys and girls and kids recluse into the camps, I am not really surprised. I can perfectly imagine how and why this happens. What strikes me though, is that nobody seem to notice how this is obviously in the nature of “Humanitarian” help. It is bound to happen in this context.

In the “Humanitarian” world, in fact, everything is supposed to relay on the “Humanity” of the people involved, because nothing else in the order of things is ever discussed: not the unjust world, not the wars, not the price some pays for our Oil or Gas or goods and all that sort of stuff. It all relays on the fact that someone is “Human” enough to go there and do something without changing anything in the long term. “Human” enough to go there and face all the problems knowing there’s nothing effective to do about them, grinding his teeth for the moment he will be cheered getting back home — that “human”.
But “Human” is also sex desires, greed, perversions, deceit, the fascination of one self’s power, the unbearable sight of others’ pain, the long hot days idling far from everything you know, the routine of misery, the temptations of corruption etc. It’s all so human, just like craving to be influential is. Because being human never meant being good, how come we always forget it.

— in picture above: another engraving by Bruegel

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.

Today is May 5th, which is an important day for Italy. Why? Because it marks the death of Napoleon, year 1821, and is also the title of a famous Italian poem.

Napoleon has been a very important figure for Italy because his brief rule over our peninsula meant, for the first time in Italy after the fall of Roman Empire, rules and principles equal for all the cities in it, and some sort of dignity that the French Revolution’s principles brought to us. This gave strength to the idea of a unified Italian nation, and its foundation, forty years after Napoleon’s death, is certainly one of his merits. Or, demerits, whatever.

Anyway, our national poet and novelist, the reassuring, catholic, milanese, elegant, bookish patriot Alessandro Manzoni, wrote this famous poem about the death of Napoleon and called it “Il cinque Maggio”, “The Fifth of May”. You can read it here (in Italian).
The poem is unfailingly taught at the elementary or secondary school, and in theory should be learned by heart by any Italian pupil. Obviously very few remember anything of it.

Everybody knows the first verse, though, “Ei fu. Siccome immobile”, which means roughly “He passed away. Just like unmovable”. Well, “just like unmovable” is explained three verses below, when his unmovable corpse is paralleled with the “astounded land” that remains still like a dead corpse at the hearing of the news. What happened in our modern language is that the two phrases got linked together in a quite funny tautology that goes like “He passed away, just like unmovable”, which obviously doesn’t mean a great deal.
Anyway, since the Italian language used in poems and plays in those years is hardly recognizable as a spoken language, nobody can really “feel” a poem like that at the first read now, without making a not easy mental translation into contemporary Italian. Thus the verses are easily forgotten, and, as I said, as in this case very few remember anything after the first verse or so.

That said, “Il 5 Maggio” is still a very important poem, and the reason is very simple: aside of the first verse, other two catching phrases in comprehensible Italian that can be read in the poem are very well alive in our modern language as proverbs, or euphemisms.
“Dall’Alpi alle Piramidi”, “From the alps to the Pyramids”, is sometimes used to characterize some very long path or distance one covered during a task. And “Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza”, “posterity will be the judge of it” is used everywhere there’s some doubt about something that can be considered either good or bad.

This is pretty much all that remains alive of a poem that supposedly meant so much for our history given the fact that it’s mandatory to learn it at school. I certainly learned many verses of it when they told me to, maybe even them all. But I know I recited them without minding their meaning at all, just like (I suppose, since I am not even baptized) some do with prayers.
Blah-blah-blah, blah-blah.

I wonder if, other that meaning that we don’t actually learn anything useful from teachers at school, which is pretty obvious, this means also that the poem is actually not very good, not meant to last, because its language is too literary and abstract.
Actually, I found only a couple of verses I’d save, throwing all the rest away for posterity, you know, closed into some cupboard.

how many times, at the silent
dying of a inert day,
he stayed, (…)
his arm folded at his breast

it’s the only moment in the poem when you can actually picture something in your imagination, other than ideas, and something “to see”, to walk into, is all I ask to literature. End of the post.

— in picture, above: mr. Napoleon

I live only here, between your eyes and you,
But I live in your world. What do I do?
– Collect no interest – otherwise what I can;
Above all I am not that staring man.