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

– Jago Noja

So I fantasize that I receive the emails I am waiting for, open them, give a look at them, very fast, jumping from one line to the other (certain words appearing as in bold, or as slightly larger than the other words). Then I put the emails away — without actually reading them from start to end, instead going to bed, finally sleeping knowing that waking up the next day won’t be a disappointment or a torment. I think we have these dreams (with the classic open eyes) because we dream to do good to ourselves– And I remember all the times I did that, even as a kid: with letters my mother wrote, or my father, my brother. Letters girlfriends wrote, that went in the drawer without being read until later. But inexactly now it feels like I never waited for those.

— In picture, above: magic episodes of traveling, from the museum of anthropology, Ciudad de Mexico.

“Mi sono fatto distrarre da ogni cosa possibile, nel tentativo di non focalizzare su il nodo che dovevo sciogliere: minchiate malfunzionanti nel computer, puttanate da scaricare illegalmente, sfondi per il desktop, la caccia dei bruchi attaccati alla pagine inferiore delle foglie delle piante sul terrazzo (è più facile trovarli alla sera tardi), le litigate dei vicini, le notizie merdosissime dei merdossissimi siti di notizie (tanto ormai non credo più a un cazzo di quello che dicono, e se mi dicono di avere paura, ecco che, come magicamente, la paura si solleva dal mio petto e vola via in una risata), ricontrollare la posta, ancora una volta… There are no messages on the server. E sì che mi è costata tanta fatica scriverle. Poi ho capito che il mio problema era così banale, provenire da una vita prevedibile e volere tuffarsi in un mondo oscuro dove almeno qualcosa di inaspettato potesse succedere, ogni giorno, almeno ogni giorno. La prevedibilità non essendo imputabile alla vita tuttavia, come se la vita mi suonasse la musica sbagliata. La prevedibilità l’ho vista galleggiare a mezza via fra la familiarità e la noia, in una area appena al di fuori e appena al di dentro della mia mente bacata.” (da uno dei post che cercavano di spiegare, smarritosi poi a spiegare perché non sapevo spiegare.)

I am learning that Libi is a resourceful person, more than I thought. That her soul is larger and stronger than I thought. That her sexual life, her sexual fantasies matter more for her than I thought (well, Mars moved). How stupid of me to notice these things now. Learning that she can say the strongest things without faltering a bit, like she was talking about going out to buy some milk, only lowering her eyes (“I’d jump into the fire to keep our relationship alive, but it wouldn’t do no good, would it”) then raising them them up and looking straight at me. Because I told Libi about Martina, and Libi learned about her and my confused feelings, I myself learned of Libi’s shades of pain, and how she never looses her bravery and her sense of humor. At first comes at you as a form of denial, but then it becomes a complex and unforeseen expression of sorrow and salvation. I hadn’t noticed how strong she was before (I said that already, did I. These are the things you go on saying on and on like in a remix when you know you are causing a lot of pain to someone.)
I listened and answered and explained, this I did. I must be really growing up. I learned that my words aren’t good until they are honest. Aren’t good until they are straight, I mean. I knew about honesty, which doesn’t mean I was willing to use it all the time (this is the kind of joke I learned to use in a conversation with Libi, because to no one like Libi a joke, even the meanest joke, in a dramatic moment does good). We talked about Nina, too, and for the first time Libi told me explicitly how she discovered about Nina and how much she suffered for it. So I learned that too (this was today).
“Why you didn’t say anything back then”, I asked. Only much later we had talked about it, only in bits. “I felt like an ass and humiliated. Just like now”, she said. “That was worse than now, though” she added. “Why is so?” “Because I thought that Nina was disgusting — as a person, you know. And I hated the idea of you two together. This one I don’t know, instead, so my feeling is less precise”. She really said so, ‘disgusting’, and only as she said that I learned how much she had suffered from it, while I didn’t know, while I was sleeping or reading or thinking about myself in those stupid days of mine, probably: because she wanted to erase that person away with her stronger words.
I am learning how to bite my lips to keep from coming out words like “more than everything I wish you could wait for me”, “don’t stop loving me”. I am learning (again) that falling in love, struggling in love, makes my heart beat harder everyday, my stomach to jump around and to give that warm weird feeling, everyday. Sounds rhetorical, the classical automatic rhetorical description of love, but it is actually true. My heart does beat harder most of the time these days. Every time I think I might be losing what I so badly wanted; that I might be a step closer to it; that I am causing tears and confusion; that I am distancing someone I love so much from me; that I might be find myself very high and fall down very hard; that I really don’t know what I’m wanting –but it’s oh so strong. The two dominating body parts of my love life: my heart, my stomach. They express it all, not exhaustively, but clearly. I am not surprised the heart is the metaphor of love, I am surprised I forgot I knew why.
I am learning that prejudices really prevent you from crucial experiences. Now I see people with prejudices as unlucky people, and feel sorry for them, even when I understand their prejudices so well (Nina is not ‘disgusting’ like Libi said. I know it. But I can’t tell her why.) I learned that I want a different life, I want more things to happen around me. I learned that sometimes you are being called egoist and there’s nothing you can do about it, but face it, face your egoism. I always hated the indulgence by which most of the people declare their own egoism as affordable, like if the world could cope with it, when in reality with their indulgence and self-spoiling they are making the world a worse place. I think egoism is an hazard and should not be used but in case of emergency… It is a tool that can be used and then disposed of, and because you will need it at a given moment, that moment is the time to use it and face it and accept it, which means accepting to be a smaller person. I know I am.
I am learning that knowing I will regret every single thing I am turning my back to doesn’t prevent me to do it anyway. Like if I kept saying to myself, I need this mistake, this crucial mistake, like a inoculation. I am sure I need many other things that are out of reach (…). And I learned many other things, about the surprises of my sexual life, about the pleasure I feel at hearing the word “entonces”, about my changing looks (no the nose still creaks but it’s all right) and that maybe wanting to live it’s all about fearing to die, and maybe that soon all my books will be back into a self-storage box, where they were only two years ago. Two years ago when this blog was born, happy birthday to it.

— In picture, above, the absurd tangle of cables attached to every light pole in Tegucigalpa. No idea why I am posting this right now.

“What he had written that day was irrelevant and meaningless; he should have never written it, for to write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin.”
— Peter Handke

You may think this blog is sleeping dead. Instead I have written five posts the past week, all unpublishable (disorienting). Two in italian — and they were the less hazy, to tell you how bad the situation is. Really, it went together with my efforts to write emails, in spanish, that I never finished or sent (then I sent one, but it got no answer).
The following page about a pencil is the best I could come up with since when I came back and tried to tell my story here on the blog. It has nothing to do with the story. I was writing on a notebook with a pencil, I only use pencils to write. It was one of the pencils I bought the past year in Prague (supposedly good graphite, lead pencils is one of the things Czechoslovakia was famous for): this one actually too light to write with, but of good paste (no crumbling like a infamous french pencil) and hard to break (good for traveling). I held it in my hand (the pencil had gone and came back with me from central america), and looked at the side with writings on it, only partly removed by the sharpening. I tried to make sense of the writings, black on green as they were. There was a 13 figures long code number, then a bar code, then the famous name of the brand, then another five figures code number at the rear end.
Che cazzo, I always loved pencils, even before Handke’s “History of the pencil” (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts), obviously because what you write can be easily deleted (even though I never do that, and behave with a pencil like with a pen, scribbling all over the wrong word and writing the new one next to the scrawl) and because of the old joke or myth of the russian astronauts versus the american ones — when I think about it, holding a pencil still gives me the feeling of holding a irreplaceable technological achievement (so much more irreplaceable of the iPhone, for example), because there is no possible better way to write on paper in any position of the hand. You can’t make it better or more economical. Not to mention the smell of wood when you sharp it. Better: the pause in writing or drawing you are forced to take when you have to sharp it.
But then I was holding one and trying to make sense of the writings on it and because they made no sense at all (they were not meant to be read by me, but by a machine) I felt that holding a bar coded pencil was like holding another piece of human stupidity (I don’t want to write ‘contemporary stupidity’ anymore). Except for the brand (the pencil bore no indications of its toughness) the codes undoubtedly were signs of digital classification, a bloated one, and digital classification could only remind me of human stupidity.
Why? It’s obvious and depressing to be told, but I’ll explain it. Our times are times of a special form of stupidity that considers information, classification and memory (absolute memory) as forms of knowledge. This is a mistake that only kids who went to the wrong schools could make (the schools where nothing is learned by heart anymore.) Not forms of knowledge: classification and memory are tools that should follow and serve knowledge. When they lead, like species without predators they multiply and invade and take over the making of knowledge and experience, everywhere, at all costs. Because humans are stupid, or weak, or vulnerable (pick your word) we let the machine classify every aspect of our life, and our safes (digital, or chemical) to preserve every bit of memory: we assume we are being given cheap forms of knowledge in exchange. That’s why a bar coded pencil easily reminds me of this special present moment of global stupidity, sort of matrix-like war between man and machine, only machine have won already and left their mark on every surrendered bit of reality and we don’t really notice it anymore. Anyway that’s not true ’cause I noticed it today writing with a pencil and this post was about that. I am about to hit the ‘publish’ button so help me god, because I didn’t want to write about this. I wanted to write about that other form of human stupidity (or weakness, or vulnerability, pick your word), called love. But that’s how it goes, next time maybe, ice be broken.

(…) y sé muy bien que no estarás,
ni aquí adentro, la cárcel donde aun te retengo,
ni allí fuera, este rió de calles y de puentes.
No estarás para nada, no serás ni recuerdo,
y cuando piense en ti pensaré un pensamiento
que oscuramente trata de acordarse de ti.

— Julio Cortazar, Futuro

Linate is the old claiming baggage hall, the dark grey and yellow interiors, the faces of the policemen saying welcome back to Italy, the guy from Modena coming back from Brazil — he says laughing, welcome to the place in the world where it is the hardest to make love — I stand there feeling dizzy for the twentyfive hours three planes flight, my bag sliding to me over the conveyor belt, opened from the top, the plastic bag with coffee from chiapas and oaxaca chocolate spat out few bags past — a pair of pants from guatemala is there too — I don’t care, what’s lost is lost, I throw it all above the plastic seats and repack the bag mumbling a welcome to italy to myself– outside, she’s there in a violet dress, others unknown crowding the picture of the waiting –the warmth of Milano’s air around us is less intense but somewhat ready to suffocate — the sky low over the airport, in hues of gray and blue too bright to be looked at — our embrace is honest? it is honest–

me and Libi have sex inside the car outside of the airport of Linate, her body is in my hands, obeys in the old familiar hard way we know –she gives out high pitched shrills, I feel like eating and swallowing and digesting her body– it’s different from the other sex across the ocean. I think I can’t compare. I warn her to be careful, because I have a half broken nose I should take to the hospital tomorrow or so– not that I feel like it. I don’t make up the story of how it got broken, I just leave out the detail — of the girl I was with –I don’t even let the thought get into my mind. I say I know, it doesn’t look broken, but I can feel it, like it is harder to breathe with the left nostril — also it creaks when I touch it– kept together by the skin — gives me a weird feeling to the stomach. I learned to talk about love with my heart and now I suspect I love two persons, or I suspected it. I wish I had the room to say that as well.

At home we talk and make love again few times, I am tired and what I see is confused at moments –though real. Later we are half naked on the pavement, I am pouring out the many presents in front of her, it’s fun, but then the feast is over pretty soon. I missed Libi, and yet her picture in front of me is not entirely on focus. Now I just feel in need to talk it out with someone. What I can’t say bothers me more than the need to sleep– although pretty soon I fall asleep, and wake up at the beginning of the night — and awake in front of the window I still try to keep down the thought that, all right, now I wish I could leave — tomorrow — again. The bulky memories, labyrinths of words and desires — the thought of Martina and the bad bad way we said goodbye to each other is down somewhere too, and it’s like when the story you want to tell or write about is so big — too big — you’ll never find a way to begin the job to tell it all out.

Todo se hace en silencio. Como
se hace la luz dentro del ojo.

— Jaime Sabinas

the night falls over oaxaca very slowly. for hours the houses and the trees have been shining with a very sharp light, it has been for hours the light of the end of the day, I don’t know how it is possible, probably the help of the old consumed stones of the colonial houses– a light honest and direct like the appearance of the people walking about in the streets, families, kids, old folks, students, politicians, activists, mariachi bands, nuns and clowns; the mexican flags, big and familiar, have been waving against the blue sky with perfection above the relevant buildings; and the vendors, tireless, have been offering, the musicians have been playing instruments. I have been eating another quesadilla sitting at the comedor inside the market, bored to death by the corny mexican music, admiring the ceaseless animation, and the way the light, hazed by the releases of the kitchens working all around in the market house, entered from the above.
Now I sit in front of the monastery of santo domingo, there’s still another guy playing, a bagpipe this time, high and trembling like a bird, and a dog looming down from a flat roof above a bar. There’s only one thing I am able to think about now, only one person, two persons; but the eyes, in the silence of the visions, do all the dances. I just stay and observe. With a side of my mind, I repeat some spanish conjugation– I regret the lack of irony and, the weakness. Then it’s night time. Of everything else I am obviously unsure.

(…) her dark skin shines in the shade of the room as I enter, the morning light pours in from the side of the open roof, I see parts of her legs and shoulders, her beautiful face half turned against the pillow, the eyes closed in a peaceful sleep; this happen two or three times, especially when I get up early because of montezuma’s revenge, and silently getting back to the room, every time I stand bewildered for a second at the vision of the sleeping beauty, my heart beating faster and harder, almost immediately a hard-on forces me to undress, I long to undress and lay next to Martina again, make love to her again; this mexican girl looks a india and a japanese and a thailandese at the same time; she’s from the city, and very emancipated, lively, superstitious– keeps saying she went to work when she was fourteen to be independent– when she smiles she looks like a kid, in a way that strangely reminds me of my stepbrother when he was a kid, ages ago– so enthusiast of the company– we don’t have a language in common, so it’s all about me trying to speak spanish and missing the words, failing the grammar. Martina smiles at my mistakes, strokes my leg, I long for her mouth, for another slow dance– outside the sea of mazunte keeps roaring against the long uneven beach– all the rest is quiet– unfulfilled warnings of a hurricane approaching– when Martina and myself separate in the bed, I am sweating, and panting, the bed is full of sand, our fingers meet, we try to tell another story; in the silence of the last moments before the usual sneaking out, desayuno on the solitaire terrace deserted by the low season– I wonder if I am in love now, and if so, what proportions this disaster will take, if any. ¿Can I bear the idea of spreading pain and tears once again? ¿is it a hastened dream? Soon we separate, with a warm smile, the same way we will separate on the last day, she going to el d.f., I going to oaxaca. It is possible necessary that we meet again in the city in a few day; so she runs to the back of the camioneta– I go back to the beach for a last goodbye to the unsteady waters of mazunte– the restaurants are playing the languid musics to the sea, the stray dogs populate and play on the foreground of the scene; the response, that it is necessary to meet again, to reach her body and smile again– might be lost to the waves or to some other equally distracting, hypnotic phenomenon, and the residual forces are needed to pick up my sandals — shake the sand away for the last time, and leave.

…but the village wants to give me something other than products to buy, something that I can’t use. So I just sit there, writing postcards that are not sincere and are not funny, trying to make something happen in the mind, something revealing, shivering at the thought of being back soon to the life I had before (isn’t travelling life? yes– and no), in the house that isn’t mine and to a job that isn’t going to be mine. What a folly, what a waste, to stretch the rope so, and still being attached to it. I kill a small fly with a quick slap. The insect’s body is smeared across the palm of my hands, bits of it are trapped between my fingers. I don’t feel nothing, no sense of success or relief. If only they stopped to play the music and we could go down to the lake and look at the stars and talk about life and other stronzate without the need of the booze, the radios, the yelling laughs of the lost moments [probably in San Pedro, Atitlan]

Outside goes on the happy and sad music of the band hired by the local association of vendors. In front of the stage, only the drunks dare to dance, while a large platoon of people by the beautiful, colorful clothes stands in silence, looking and listening. Everyone is shy, and also, the mexican music playing is obviously not their music. The town, voided of tourists (us two are the sole representatives of the category) appears finally as a shred of truth after all the set-up stages for gringos, but the truth is nothing special. Not that special places really exist. They should not be considered as such, probably, and the only decent question is always: what I am doing here? For many the answer seems always to be, I am here to drink cheap, to take pictures, to buy stuff. I don’t think I am different from anyone else. I am a stranger, and I don’t have a good reason to be here, no special keys in my pockets. Because the force of tourism is such that you cannot pretend not to be one.
The town around the music and the market, dirty and old and vexed by cars, ugly restaurants, ice cream place, hardware store, and two white churches on the opposite sides of the square, around the market stretch on the pavement of the square, around the forever dried fountain. Everything is obvious like in any other country of the world, like in Puglia, or in Somalia, what is that, being people? [in Chichicastenago]

When the night falls the faces become confused, the cars in the streets impel the passersby with imperious honking and the little kids disappear behind the corners of the streets. My wet clothes are wavering up on the roof of the hotel in the cold night wind, and I can see my blue pants slapping in the dark night, glowing orange from every side. What I learned from this trip? What questions! nothing, nothing of course [in Copan]

Mexicans remind me of Italians, and of course people from the U.S., in ways that disturb me and make me sad. It is especially about the music, the horrible music imposed on every one’s ears, or maybe it’s the popularity of cell phones, and fancy cars, and fancy clothes. Maybe it’s the stupidity of junk food, of eating meat twice a day, and the stupidity of the fiestas, that are supposed to be noisy because they break everyday’s calm, when in reality there is no calm, no quietness to break anymore, because no one is ever left alone by the new powerful noises of modernity.
But just like in other countries of central America I visited, people here have something we don’t have, I mean anymore of course, something that they can’t teach us and that no one could ever learn anyway. It’s something you can only notice and look at, knowing it is out of reach. It is a form of innocence, I guess, and innocence can only be lost, just like we lost ours and just like everyone and every people is bound to lose its own in these times. Just like they have lost or are losing their own and it can’t be helped. Nobody knows why this happens. Only to some it is clear how.
(Would I ever write these things if I wasn’t here? Innocence? I doubt it.)

It’s precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

— Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character… People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the “alternatives” go to the pub “revolucion” apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever– although nothing does, just like it didn’t the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone’s ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.

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.