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

– Jago Noja

Who knows a better world, step forward.
— Ingeborg Bachmann

In my family everyone is an island. On my father’s island there are a lot of paintings, the radio is on, it smells of tobacco pipe. All is neat, colorful, well-kept– His habits are clockwork and very little influenced by anyone’s presence on the island — at least I do my best to let them be. The slight changes that I witness happened on their own, the old habits fading into the new ones over the years. He moved his only cigarette left to after he takes a shit; he now drinks orange juice (from the carton); he does not iron his own clothes anymore. He still passes a lot of time playing solitaire on his PC, and has satellite TV now, but still complains about the quality of programs. Later he will watch a detective thing on a regular channel. Because of his hearing problem he now watches TV with headphones on. The headphones are too cheap though and distort the sound (the soundtrack of the show covers the voices of the actors). I try to explain to him he should get a better headset but, typically, he curtly answers “all headphones are like that.”

He is thinner than last year. Brags about his diet which also worries me, since the diet this summer consisted in eating “whatever I wanted” and still losing weight. Not that I like the idea but I must talk with his wife about it. It is taboo to talk about health on the island.

I know that it is every son and daughter’s fate to picture the death of the parents and feel guilty about it. I stopped wondering whether I picture it because I long for it or I dread it.

I am thankful that the preaching and the reproaching are done as soon as I arrive (how can you afford to live how do you live? how can you not be working? what are you doing with yourself? you certainly need money.) This leaves us a friendlier territory for the days ahead. I suppose we learned to skip past the feelings of disgust and the revolts of pride these moments carry. I certainly did. But it is somewhat amazing to see that he wants it over with as well. This proves that he logically gave up on me. These is just duty and duty come first.

The surroundings of the island are most pleasant. The valley down to the sea is all green, gardens are in blossom and the cicadas sing. The invasion of wasps goes on, and the ligurians all wear long faces, as always. What’s wrong with them? Nobody knows, but it most certainly has to do with money.

Tonight my sister arrives. She is not a island but a peninsula and we will feel a bit of a continental breeze next to her, which us islanders will stand with dignity — hopefully my father will keep for himself his pointless superiority (but life is in the prejudice). I find it unbelievable that after so many years, on the phone with his wife I still hear him referring to my sister as “the princess on the pea”, because she needs a little more comfort and security than he does. What an ass! But it is known that every island, in the end, is a small place. End of a unfair post, written somewhere in Liguria, summer ’09.

Donne e donzelle già di mia figura
arder più d’una vidi in giovanezza;
ch’io ci seppi accoppiar cortesi modi;
ben che stia mal che l’uom se stesso lodi.
— Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XLIII

Late after midnight a storm comes to Cadilù, it rains down hail which bounces off the parked cars with noise of marbles. A few seconds later it is all winds and waters. I watch Clo on the other side of the street turning the neon lights on, taking the plants off the window and closing the panes. They say it generates less heat inside the house. I wouldn’t use neon to light a cellar.

English does not have a word for dirimpettaio (the neighbour who lives in front of where you live) which is a gross limitation, since not all neighbors are equal. The dirimpettaio can see inside your place and so can you.

Clo is my dirimpettaia. We met window to window over via Roma. I was at her place the other night for dinner. Nondescript evening. I got there at seven and her husband looked nervous because the take-away pizza was already there and getting cold. They made me sit at a small table facing a TV, which was on all the time. They gave me icy water to drink. At moments I got grandiosely bored and at first almost offended by their barbaric lack of hospitality manners (and I don’t need much, just turn off the fucking TV. Or the music). But it is always good chatting with Clo who lives in a world of her own, made with animals plants and books. She has a whole cupboard of medicines, her weeks are split between three different kinds of doctors (multiple sclerosis).

I had a crush on Clo’s sister Flo which lasted a whole afternoon during which we took a very long bicycle ride down the canal and talked a lot and discovered to have a lot in common. Back in via Roma at the end of that day she turned down my invitation to eat out with a sorry tilted face which I found quite amusing (the crush was over). When I sat at Clo’s table facing the TV (“paperissima” was on) Clo’s husband said, Flo was supposed to come tonight but then she couldn’t come. She had to go to a concert in Milan. Was she performing? I asked, but they didn’t get it. Clo shrugged, always critic of her sister. She came here asking for my lighter, she said with a puzzled expression. They were all supposed to have a lighter, explained her husband. At the concert.

During the storm I made coffee, got in front of the computer and read and wrote. “I always feel cleaner after it rains”. Etc.

– The best thing that could happen to us would be to always disagree.
– I disagree.

— Anonymous

I went to castorama last month and bought a ventilator made in china. I hanged the ventilator to the ceiling and attached stripes of paper and plastic to the blades (Solaris). If now I close my eyes laying down on the couch surrounded by flat boxes the stripes fanned by the ventilator make the exact noise of rain copiously falling and splashing off crooked rain gutters, hitting a pavement of stone. A house near the lake.

A message to Jawa in Sardinia. I did not want to write you anymore so thanks for writing me first. You were in a very adventurous dream I had. It wasn’t you but it was you. You wore a gray dress, mini, naked legs. Brown hair. You waited for me at the tenth floor of a mysterious building where the elevator did not stop –but I found the way to get to you. We were left alone. Gave ourselves to each other in a small bed –then I woke up, estranged, filled with sweetness in a ugly day.

Before I knew it I was back climbing the straight stairs to my place, sober and alone, thinking how naive it was to expect that some sincerity and your loneliness should make up for all social faux-pas, which are much more relevant. Inside the apartment, the smell of leaking methane again. I shut the whole rig and went to bed. End of the post.

Not to have masters, nor servants, not to have the nightmare of time, not having worries of money and letting the mind and the senses live between dream and action, free and foolish, following a spur almost determined by astral texture. This life, though for short spans, miraculously came true at my house in the country.

— Giovanni Comisso, My house in the country

After a new day of winds that swerved the bicycles and exasperated the antennas came another sudden hailstorm at sunset. The catering place went on unloading food inside the store. The speakers played George Harrison. A car rushed by. I came back with a fancy for writing. At home my smell of kitchen and dishwasher, of rice and sausage and butter and pie (I am a small-paid help in a kitchen).
The ride on the bike in the dark — the air of water and lime trees — to the lights of my little village of Cadilù shook away tiredness, boredom — and the houses and trees and the faces and everything that looked so tired.
I live in Cadilù now. Alone and yes glad to be. Milano, which sits somewhere north of us, a giant that never sleeps, seem so distant or non-existent. Only on saturdays and sunday its presence become clear because of all the excursionists who come here to work out (their commitment leaves a trail of melancholy and pity.)
I have a lover in Cadilù. An affair. Someone’s wife. She comes to my place certain afternoons walking across the village under the sun. Her eyes are grey, her skin is fair, her hair is long. She is emotional. Strangely innocent. When we meet somewhere else… she blushes so hard you’d think she just came back from a race. I am cherishing this affair and keeping it out at the same time.
The other day I found in a box a drawing of a huge and utterly intricate maze I had done when I was sixteen years old. My Affair looked at it dismayed– she said she wasn’t surprised that I was giving so much importance to sex and emotional life, because I was so complicated and lost in my head, which was untrue, but flattering. End of the post.

— In picture, above: banana on the road to Cadilù.

Because I am not in command of my face. My face is in command of me.
–Totò

For us italians, Totò never really had an age. He was our Chaplin… It was of little matter how old was the man behind the mask. Well these things have been written a thousand times, I won’t indulge myself. For some today, italians or not, such a mask has probably the age of the world itself. It is stone dead and undecipherable. All we have are faces now, we don’t have enough imagination or innocence or I don’t know what for masks (I should think about it). The closest thing to an italian mask today is Berlusconi, which probably accounts for the fortunes of our current local emperor in a larger way.
Anyway– it is hard to believe that here (picture above), in L’Imperatore di Capri, 1949, one of his early movies, Totò was fifty years old. He still enjoyed 60 cigarettes and 15 espressos a day, sang, improvised and jumped around the scene restlessly. I am thinking some about Totò these days. It started after one of my neighbors referred to our landlord as “The Count” Il signor Conte, and she meant it with no irony. Moving in and fixing the hole “The Count” was letting me (being The Count one of the cheapest good for nothing counts I ever met), it was natural to think of cheap nobility and of Totò and the characters that surrounded him. So I watched some of his movies and when left alone by the plumber in the apartment still inhabitable I humored myself speaking in my best neapolitan accent, which is still very good (yes I talk by myself all the time and no, it is not a syndrome that has to be cured.) And yes this post, which is already over, was for you non-italians out there. It probably would be very hard for you to learn about Totò without some coaching, I mean to understand him the way he’s meant to– but let it be reminded to you who care, that Italy used to be in that direction too.

What a contradiction! I worked myself at a deed that undertaken by anyone else would have caused my hatred.
— Giacomo Casanova

Everything in the little studio is worn-out and cheap. It is strange, after the large wooden elevator, the doorman/mastiff down at the portal. The furniture is old but also worthless. Calendars of the Carabinieri hang from the walls and Comment naissent les bateaux? frames “bougth at the Senigallia fair” he says.
I know it is only out of this cheapness that I am admitted here, other landlords of equal social standing let the agencies deal with the likes of me, here to rent a two rooms apartment well out of the city.

He has the blue eyes of his northern ancestors, the finest noblemen who ruled this city, shaped this city, readily gave this city away to any invader who kindly requested. The first time I met him he mentioned his family castle, and how his uncle designed and built the most famous modern tower in Milan, in the first five minutes of conversation. His manners, extra polite on the surface, leave you with this feeling of bad taste. It must be because he does not even listen to the answers to his questions. How he just seems to be curbing you. It feels like the attitude I dislike the most in the world.

But it is just a front. The back door leads to the flat which cannot be anything but gigantic. I can tell by how the lights are cast through the glass door by all sides. We are at the upper floor of a palace of bugnato facing the castle of Milan. I think this fronting stands for the same lack of sincerity. For some pretend modesty and lack of imagination. But all these are appearances, my feeling of the appearances and not knowledge. I don’t know this place. I am not understanding this place, I am not even sitting here. I am outside.
With a finger I move the curtain and look out, at the chasm of the courtyard, the majestic columns, the symmetric chimneys on the roof. But I don’t really see anything except how the sun high in the sky cannot reach the bottom of the court. How the pigeons congregate on the rain gutters made of stone.

I try to be amused by the jar of biros he keeps on the desk because one has his name written on a piece of paper attached to the ink straw. But it does not amuse me after all. I find it threatening. I sign the sheets he hands me — after the first two he says “make the signature readable.” I try but I can’t and feel incredibly tired– I could sleep right now, right here on the floor. It is how I would do after a fight with Libi.

He does all he has to do with the papers. I can’t help but thinking that this piece of work, this few hours he consecrates to it, will earn him my money for years.

I try to keep myself up by pushing some talking forward… which is probably why he does not listen, thus losing all my respect in the few minutes left we spend together. I try to comment the heavy rain we had yesterday. He disagrees, it wasn’t good at all. He complains about rain as if God wasn’t respecting a deal with his family. I think, how annoying you are. Then I am given back to the city, I am quite poorer and a tenant of yet another place somewhere else.

The cercis trees in front of the castle are in blossom, tall and pink in the sun. I walk by them, hands in my pocket –shaking the narcolepsy away. Crowds of tourists and professionals on a break roam around me. I feel my stepping down, down the figurative ladder of my life –but it’s fine. I don’t see my being unfit to this world as something to be proud of anymore, nor something to regret. It is only something to worry about now. How odd.

Sono questi i giorni delle grandi nostalgie.
Di una vita migliore, diversa.
— Dario Tessa, Primavera

In one of the vases in line there is a old pear tree I am supposed to prune in the worst possible moment of the year. The vase is too small for its age. The lady laments that it never makes flowers. She seems to be encouraging me to perform some magic trick in order to have the pear tree make flowers.
“Pear trees are wary creatures” I explain without expression. “They take their time to make flowers. In vase, they might never get to that point at all.”
Follows awkward silence. “Pruning and compost will eventually give you flowers” I reassure.
I spend some time removing dead branches from the middle of it. From the main trunk two parallel treetops have grown over the years next to one another. They are not separable and it wouldn’t enter my mind to separate them. They spin around the central axis probably because the vase has been moved around the terrace over the years and their embrace, their pathetic unity, all of a sudden is the most moving thing I have seen all week.
I move past the pear tree… Later I will encourage the lady to get rid of it, for the same coward compassion that urges us to terminate sick cats and dogs.
Outside. I am still clutching the money of a day’s work, when I find a ticket on my car that takes half of it from my hands right away. Is there a lesson? The lessons this city gives are lost on me, at least if they don’t involve love or struggling with the parents or sex or revenge (which they seldom do nowadays).
Yes above the scene are the merciless blue skies of Milan, without tears, without shade, hot as a misplaced day of June.

But if I draw from this pleasure with such caution and circumspection, it won’t be a pleasure for me.
— Le Rouge et le Noir

it was being a good spring. Weather-wise, I explained. After a perfect winter. It had snowed, and it had been cold. Don’t say too cold I told her, it was the right cold. Now it was warmer, and today, sunny. But because it rained, sometimes for a entire day, this made the spring right. I will remember this of this year. Why you care so much, she asked, because you fancy being a gardener?

Enough with the weather. When is she coming already? I could tell Rulla was nervous because of the other mothers and children. She didn’t want to have to talk to them.
Her little child was drawing on the pavement of Campo San Polo with chalk. He made lines and clusters of lines, his hand moved about by the roughness of the slabs of trachyte. The small carousel, singled out in the middle of the square, looked odd and incongruous. It was the last sun of the day setting behind the roofs of the city. It reminded me of the last market stands, left behind and closed, Monday evening in the middle of the deserted square of Bettola. Italian squares, they always look like the things used to be there but aren’t there anymore. Even here with all the kids the tourists the students and the spies. An us two wondering where to go to have some pastry, waiting for her mother to show up.

The days in Venice had went fast, me and Rulla had talked a lot, about her moving to Chile, about the old days, about us being friends, her being a wife and all that. We talked about what was left behind in the small attic where we had lived together years before. I will follow to Chile, I promised, just find me a reason to be there, something I can do. You know I am no good at finding that myself.

At night alone in the attic I had sifted through our old stuff, found relics, felt the duration of time in the things we had used. From the windows, small like portholes, the green narrow canal could still be made out by the reflections of the yellow lamps (a sign of humanity, all humanity). Above against the dark sky and the stars was the endless spread of roofs balconies antennas that more than anything else, to me, to my senses, spoke of Italy, of the country and the people –the unrepeatableness of it.

The train that took me back was brand new and built on technological misunderstanding and flaws, it went fast –two stops before the other city across the plains, the rest just things to pass by– it was the wrong vehicle because it contained nothing of any world I belonged to– it was the right vehicle to forget about any world, which is where it hit me, it was exactly the purpose of it. Etc.

Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.
— Benjamin Franklin

I came down to the small church at the edge of the woods, strangely cars were moving out the dead hamlet onto the gravel road– it was god day. I walked across the church front yard– they held olive branches and had big smiles– I had a cane of locust tree found in the woods –the alpha male gave me the looks but I felt aloof. I had been out early in the morning in the chestnut grove a bit higher in the valley– big patches of mud on my pants –heard the call of a wild boar down the trail. It was a close lowing of a creature invisible in the undergrowth that sloped down to the creeks. It drizzled, I felt in shape and lonely and had talked by myself most of the way except when I needed to breathe. It was my almost daily walk –every time I reached a bit further into the woods until something unknown didn’t discourage me and made me come back. This time it was the mud, the boar call– I went down proudly, skidding on the bottom of putrid leaves, enfolded in moist layers of air, I slipped where the creek crossed the path, hurt my ankle– never had that much balance– sat there listening for the boar again. Picked up the locust branch, I went uphill and found these freshly sowed fields and as I went across them, small clouds were sitting on the hat of the valley, and I heard a rifle shot, imagined it was a warning to me — kept my poise and slowly got across another field and to the concrete road. The cell phone rang in my pocket, struggled to take it out– I had a not pleasant conversation as I descended the winding road — it was reassuring to be on the concrete now– no traffic– and then across another field that fell down to the gravel drive that I knew took to the church high above my place, almost at the bottom of the valley where the river Nure, turbid and azure, ran amid polished white stones and divided me from the side of the valley in the sun. It was annoying to be alone.

Why be sad if Italy vanishes? — Guido Ceronetti

I read a lot in the morning. The sun warmed the room, looking down I watched the smoke and steam from the pipe of the apartment below appearing as a shadow in the rectangle of light projected by the sun on the floor. I looked up, the window was open and there was no smoke at all. I thought, this shit gets into the room, and I closed the window.
I saw the new relay antenna they built right in the middle of the neighbourhood, across the street. Probably HDTV or UMTS or some other demonic thing like that. It was a shame that they had built it without telling anybody, and that very few even knew.

Probably they were all very happy with the signal.

I went out, met Jawa, it is more than a year! we said simultaneously. We walked around and talked a lot, as customary when all we wanted to do was to find someplace to have sex. We had kebab. Walking along the darsena we stopped to look at the trash scattered everywhere near the waters. Plastic bottles and glass bottles mostly. In the thousands among the tall patches of weed growing in the sand color of lead. This landscape, in the richest large city in this country, does not surprise anyone, and neither surprises us.
It was a sad encounter and at moments, almost annoying, because we went on talking and our bodies drifted apart. We talked about all these useless, cursed things (what happens in the world), and about those we know. I liked her, I liked the way she was involved with the others and not with herself (she talked about her now two children, her man, not as ways to refer to herself). She liked me. But we couldn’t or wouldn’t love each other, nor fuck each other for cowardice and when we parted I felt glum and bored, at the same time for being alone again and for not having been alone that afternoon, making boxes, at the apartment, as I should have.

The day after I had a poison headache that still hasn’t gone. I attributed it now to my teeth, something I ate, my cervix, even the relay antenna. All I knew was that it was horrible. A ugly sickness that came and went in waves, involving everything from my stomach to my brain. It seemed like some upper part of the brain, squeezed and upset, titillated and rebellious, was trying to pull the rest of the interiors out. Hoping to vomit didn’t help. I didn’t take any drug, I didn’t know which and I didn’t have any. I just waited for the waves to pass. Occasionally eating seemed to help. The other one time I felt anything like this, was the last time I had stayed in that same apartment (formerly my home). This was why I blamed the relay antenna and ultimately, my head pushed against a pillow, pressing my skull with both hands, feeling the brain on the verge of exploding, moaning I wished for a tin-foil hat that worked.

I still feel the waves of sickness coming as I write, and I think of the milanese bum of when I was a kid, who wrote everywhere around the city with his white paint, “the church kills with its waves”, and similar things. I think of everything I am losing and have lost, and the waves, and that maybe I will become that bum one day. Etc.