TRAVEL NOTEBOOK

I

…and so I can’t see you.  I’m sorry…but I can’t.  Take care.  Yours.  And so I won’t respond to you, and I’ll swallow, not only saliva, not only dust, not only the sunset of a warm September going downhill on an 18% slope, not only.
At a quarter to seven the radio-alarm attacks in crescendo.  These assholes made it or fixed it so that I have to suffer for it, or tolerate the glow that reverberates in the room, I don’t know where to unplug it, I’ll put my shirt there …
I emerge with all the mountains and archipelagos.  Pachydermic.  Oceanic.  I wash the plain and the moorland, a little toothpaste on the canine towers, a swathe to the bushes, just to irritate the skin and the mirror that looks at me crosswise and deodorizes itself with sage or lemon, it’s all the same anyway.  I take the daily weedkiller pill and I get on my way, waiting for the weedkiller to have its effect on all the weeds wound around my heart.  Here I am, ready to forget you, all you have to do is push the button.  Click.  And instead you know how different it is, you know well how much it takes to reconstruct a devastated city.  And you know this and you know that and you know more than I do.  And so I won’t respond to you and I’ll swallow. 

II

Let’s start everything over, a polished plane that the light bounces off of without blinding, a straight line the only possible geometry. I surprised myself waiting for the future, I age waiting. And every time something happens and time goes away for fun. My ending. It waits too. Waits for me. With every beat of an eyelash. There’s lots of space around me and lots and lots of time. I could decide to be a murderer, someone’s gotta do it. How would I be as a drug addict? Would heroin fit me? Click. A snapshot. And now I’ll dress myself up like a windmill, like that one you can see out of the southern window. Going around all day. I’d have lots of stories to tell. Like that time with those two below me on the high grass. He kissed her crying sweetly. Her children played hide-and-seek among the wheat. I believe they were saying goodbye. I kept turning, I couldn’t interfere with the human world. But even us windmills say goodbye every so often. We break, then we wait, we wait for our ending. I lose myself. Now I will be a cartoon. Here, in this case it depends on my creator’s pencil. He decides every move. If I’m hungry I have to wait for the sandwich with mustard. Now he forces me to attack the railway with nerve gas. No, wait, stop…On my shining plateau I can decide to do everything absolutely everything, wherever the wind may blow.

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III

Last night a little white dog bit me. A little path like that one for bicycles passed through the living room of an elderly woman. It seemed to me that this dog had already bitten me some time before, I show my foot to the lady, the foot where I’ve gotten candidiasis in the past few days, my foot is bandaged and the white dog only left me a black mark, but you can see the traces of the first bite. Then the husband arrives with a big black dog that takes my microphone headphone and doesn’t want to give it up. His owner shouts something at him. Suddenly I find myself at the kindergarten with lots of little boys and girls who have to play one of pieces of music. The teachers were worried because it hadn’t been rehearsed much, but anyway it’ll pass. I have to take a piss, immediately. Before the performance. In my pee I see traces of blood. 09/0103

IV

We’re wallowing in a hot and dampish swamp, whose borders were previously drawn. Next stop, end of the line. The return to my homeland is impelling. I depart like a snail; the trail embroiders a prohibited and familiar smell. I could talk to you all about our last meeting in the ring, a battle of articulations, bodies, and mouths; today, thank heavens it’s her oral day; the snail wraps itself discreet around the cupola and explodes in subtle orange and yellow lines; a burst of flame, a lazy echo that lingers in the stairwell. I go crazy for the vanilla pudding with strawberries. I love it on the breasts that smell like vanilla pudding with strawberries. Today on the tram I lost the wool cap, the last bond that kept me tied to my mother. I suck them and I feel nostalgia. I would want to cry, but I feel like laughing. Martin’s nose is bleeding, they say it’s because of jealousy; some small red spots on the snow wake me up from the post deflagration torpor, I find myself at the market where a small flock of evangelists sings praise amongst the crowd.
It’s come time to go back to my wife.
On the road towards the east.

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V

Sometimes I amaze myself with how happy I am. Go to hell all of you. Berlin under the snow, on a magnificent sunny day. At the station a completely wasted Polish girl got on the train along with her protector, he was wasted as well. She tripped on the first step and fell dead-weight between the door and the track. She looked at me with two enormous eyes, Grandma what big eyes you have! Everything is O.K., O.K.; Wilhelm, you gave me this shit. Wilhelm in the meantime did all he could to search for a couple more beers, while the audience strove to ignore the performance. From what little I managed to understand, the actress was going back to Poland for Christmas and the director didn’t have his passport. The brush with customs was inevitable, just as the burst of laughter from the audience, especially at the epitaph: “but Poland is coming inside the European Union!”.
At the Legnica station the sun is almost at the end of its trip. I still have a little ways to go; the trajectory will bring me more or less to the counties where two years before I went hunting, for theatres and radiophonic forests. Pum…pum…  got it! my wife, the prey! Eaten, chewn and digested. I brought her with me on the horse to my father’s castle. We celebrated our wedding, burning red pizza for all the subjects of the kingdom. We lived happily ever after. Without cash. No one ever tells the sequel to the story. One is afraid of a downfall of class. To tell you the truth, when the prince brings the princess to his father’s castle things change. The princess has a headache every day. She has to look after the children. Instead, the young maid, the villanelle with big fragrant breasts, occupies the prince, sucks him every day at sunset after having served him lime-blossom and fennel tea to the lament of the candelabrum. A turn of the page backwards: when Cinderella was brought to the prince’s father’s castle, she quit cleaning the house of the wicked stepsisters and started cleaning the castle. In the dead of night, she lies below the prince, strictly below. Another turn of the page backwards. She discovers that the prince is not really a prince at all, he’s simply a serf who works his ass off from morning to night. She waits in vain for his return. The smiling cheeks fade. He swears. He doesn’t have money to pay the insurance and the tax on the horse. She washes, irons, falls asleep with the iron in her hand; the castle burns; the king and the queen burn too. This piece of paper burns too. I burn too and there will be no further discussion.

VI

I have the key to the second apartment in my pocket. They forgot to ask me for it, at least I hope that’s what happened and that they won’t claim months of rent arrears. I search for number 15 and finally find it in a small courtyard on the side of the street. I enter with her, stating that we have little time, it’s almost noon.
You enter the apartment from the skylight. Contrary to our expectations, the inside is completely destroyed, there are heaps of dirt everywhere, in every room. Scene change. I come back later with my father and my mother, everything seems in order, even if there is a lot of dust. At any rate, the furniture is intact. 

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VII

My first goal has been achieved: to spend Christmas with the family, preserving the ritual.. My wife doesn’t kiss me. Besides I don’t feel like it either, after six months I have to redefine the smell. Instead, my mother-in-law loves me. For my good and for the good of my family she makes sure to frame me in a music school where I can gather the Christian charity of a crust of bread for the future. She paints me with the enigmatic smile of the ascetics, the smile of Mona Lisa, she besmears an icon in which, with my index finger pointed, I teach how to play the round of do all my life, the one of sol too. The siege starts up close, not even any preliminaries. The orgasm coincides with the intertwining of my broken and mangled limbs with the chords of the guitar. It’s all for your own good! Anyway it’s not possible to live as an artist in the blessed countries. The union doesn’t protect those who don’t produce bread, automobiles, and bowler hats stinking with bureaucratic gas. Five people in a room: the invader, the neutral, the ally, the child, the besieged. I observe the scene from above the dresser where I’ve climbed up to pick my feathers. I unfold my wings, I pardon all their sins and take flight. Now I’m on the roofs of Piaskowa Gora, the snow piles up at the windows of the seamstress who laughs like the frog with the wide mouth. She cleans her dentures in holy water, the evening of the vigil. Her neighbour drowns himself in pure spirit diluted with grapefruit juice. Nitroglycerine. Vapours of ammonium and trichloroethylene. The streets fall into nothing, the walls crumble, the triumph of the soot. From above I contemplate the time signals and the television news reports, I ask why all of this. I explore the happening, the repeating of oneself without going back. I get a little pissed off. The world is depressed because it can’t manage to do what it wants, it pays the bill without a receipt. I paid a very expensive ticket and now I demand a seat in the first row. Actually, I want to be the star in the film, and if possible the producing director. I paid all of this a long time ago, and I have no intention of going back. I sharpened my nails on the carbon paper and now I dirty the page around the writing, between the lines, in the interstices and in the caverns overwhelmed with words. The filth increases, heaps of black and thick dust coagulate on the streets and sidewalks. Wherever we step we bring the dirt behind. It’s useless to clean our shoes. It sticks like glue, a dry lubricant that poisons fields, hills, rivers and lakes, home carpets, mattresses, saucepans, bras and Christmas trees, it merges with the waters of the ocean. Finally it poisons men and animals and everyone wallows in the swamp.

VIII

Piotr has come to visit. We go to pick him up at the Walbrzych Glowny station. The city is deserted.
A day of useless discussions, I do what I want to anyway. Everyone tries to convince me how selfish the life of an artist is, for the family, trampling on others, etc. etc.. In the evening I provoke my mother-in-law by saying that people change. She responds by saying that she loves me a lot. But that my thoughts are destructively close to those of “certain Germans”. Cinderella doesn’t suck me tonight either, I really don’t give a damn about the rest. 

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IX

On the train for Warsawa.
Used maxi-pads with streaks of blood in the W.C. In the next one the shit is accurately spread a little bit everywhere. The stains crop up like in a random score. The ticket inspector, to whom we point out with Polish courtesy that there’s no water and that the train makes you want to throw up, responds with just as much courtesy that the train isn’t his. In the face of the avenging temptation to bite his probably hairy calves in detail, I substitute real hunger with a ham sandwich. My wife starts to smile at me maliciously. I don’t yield.
  
X

Worpswede, the beginning of January.
It’s over. My home seems like a warehouse. The piled-up boxes discuss with each other, a dusty babbling that annoys the cobwebs. I move. I turn the page. I scarcely manage to decipher it. I charge my memory in the car and I transform myself into lane, track, river with no return. Yes, because in fact we won’t return at all. We probably won’t even exist. And still as I cross the whitish cloud I catch a glimpse of the last branches of the forbidden forest. Lost. Found. Lost again. And the flowers. The scent childish and adult at the same time, the solid and abundant curves, an international safety. The buds of the milk and honey breath. And all the landscapes that we can imagine together, simultaneously, in the mirror… and then the poison, the discontinuity, a small landscape that obstructs the mechanism and you have to start from the beginning, with the negotiations and the buying-selling.  She possesses a kind of poison that’s not lethal, but rather painful, that opens deep wounds and that penetrates through the skin down down along the tunnel, and she sets fire to your lymph and to some of your chief motivations. The anxiety of the return comes on in waves. A grey and unreal tide swallows me darkness falls.

XI

I imagine the Ring like a score. A pentagram in a circle that plays, in automatic writing, the daily poisons, the downfalls of class, love and shame and all the rest. The real city is everywhere. Dammit, Marcello has to bring me back to Italy and I can’t get a hold of him. Alan is waiting to feel himself be disciplined by me. Peter seems calm, I said seems. Andreas is stressed out. I haven’t read an Italian newspaper for months, I don’t even know if the Holy Roman Empire of the South still exists or if it shot itself with a bullet to the bladder, self obliterated, or simply dismissed. But it should still exist because this morning my wife called me with the problem of the bills to pay, while I have the problem of the masterpiece. There’s snow everywhere, white and grey. It’s starting to snow again, on Berlin, all over the Kindergeld, the Erziunsgeld, the Kebab, the woods, the Private Grundstück. You only eat meat at Alan’s, there’s now way to educate him about a little bit of vegetables. You only eat fruit at Johanna’s. Andreas has the best Neapolitan pasta. Patrick always has the table set with cheeses, sweets, magazines, rolls of toilet paper, magnifying glasses, clean and dirty dishes, candies. And I continue to be hungry. A big hunger for everything that surrounds me. I’d like to lick a couple of these little sluts from the Ost, in a bathtub like the one Leszek and Jola have. Both of them. Together. No less than 23 years old, no more than 30. My wife, my daughter oh how much I miss you, Mariola would laugh at the rhetorical figures and at the cinematographic tone, she wouldn’t get angry. Yes, she would get a little angry. A lot. She would get fucking pissed off. I would get pissed off too in her place. We ran after each other. We made plans. Flowers. Her oceanic eyes, her asymmetrical smile, her big tits, her black skirt. You were beautiful at the Hotel Kopernika, waiting for the guests I warm your hand up, you let yourself go a little.
I have to go see Peter, I’m late. We’ll eat vegetarian, we’ll talk about music and women. I dismiss myself too along with all the other Italians, I salute Mameli and all the Soldiers of Christ, between Papestr. And Tempelhof, in the Ring. (13/01/03)

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XII

An old man with a black coat came close to me. The sun liquefied the thick lenses of his glasses that ooze frozen lava on the floor of the cathedral.  He strips, he is completely naked. He moves indifferently along the central nave. The church gets longer with each step, elastic, and so does his voyage. We come closer to the absent country. Our extinction. Inexorably, like a tired bolero that proceeds from the lost country to the found city. I observe the four smiling Branderburghesi to my left as they grow and diminish in summer colours, little by little retreating towards (their) ending. Two get lost along the line. Kisses and hugs, promises to meet again, promises, promises. They go to meet their ending, an orchestrated death with a simple cadence. I turn the page. On a bicycle with my father behind me. We lose our balance, the bicycle slides out and the handlebars knock the head of a child without hurting him. But since the child cries, his parents demand compensation. Argument.

XIII

The sand rises suddenly, it blocks the sun and my journey. I’m in middle-earth, it doesn’t make sense. I learn the alphabet of not doing. Not acting. Stop yourself. Accept the blank page, the absence, the non. I learn. Impossibile to touch the waters of the Baltic, the children are beautiful. I get to almost total quiet. Momentary. A light vortex transforms me, a nun passes with her flock. The sea breeze covers the smell of incense and mouldy furniture. I must renounce any possibility of salvation, (salvation of my soul, of course). Matilde is doing the imitation of the priest, fish, algae and seagulls listen with great interest.
We’ve arrived in Piatki, the last land before Kaliningrad. The sand on the beach produces a strange sound with every step, like a squeaking of new shoes on the pavement, given by the rubbing of sand on sand. Due to laziness I didn’t bring my recorder with me, not even my camera. Little fishing boats rest in peace at the banks. Some dead fish. A tower on the dunes anticipates by three km the Russian customs. Then an abandoned military truck full of small flags, one wheel in the water. It rests in peace. Bless him too. Ropes, old chains, other stuff, who knows how long it’s been there. The desert grows more and more as I get closer to the border. Only a few little tents here and there, a provisional shelter from the winds, only provisional, I think. At 1 km from the border I am overtaken by an indescribable fear, I slow down, I turn around and go back. 

XIV

Sunday afternoon. At 6:30 p.m. the bells I heard this morning ring. The concert develops in crescendo, a metallic and shining spiral; the epicentre is on the cathedral of Baden-Baden. A thousand bells. Then silence. At 6:45 p.m. a brief carillon. Then the bells play again, majestic. MI DO LA MI DO LA. Impossible to go back. RE RE RE RE RE. I turn myself off to leave space for the shadows. A light breath of wind appeases the last tolls, rounds off the corners, closes its eyes to the city. 14/09/03 Two evenings ago, at the Gondola, I met Carmen, a German fakir who alternates games of fire, nails, and glass to take care of refugee children.  A sort of unbearable tape-player who talks non-stop, completely focused on herself, on money, and on Italian food.

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XV

Welcome on board Trenitalia. We would like to inform our kind customers that speaking loudly or keeping one’s mobile phone ringtone set to loud may disturb other passengers. We request that you moderate the tone of your voice and keep your mobile phone at a low volume or turned off. Is this the train to Mainland? Yes. Do you come from Japan? Yes, how do you see? Well, you’re not a black and I suppose you’re not a Finnish.

XVI

We pass the time deciding who is right or wrong. More or less all our lives. The gadflies are right. They settle themselves on your sweaty skin as you walk, you can never get them off of you. The piranhas and the crocodiles are right. They tear you to pieces without a regular process. For survival, that’s all. The mayor, the priest, mom and dad, mom most of all, the Gospel, Vangelis, my mother-in-law are right. And the well I’m sitting on is right, that swallows the night and conceals the abyss…a small breath of wind and down, in the electric dizziness, in the preterit or the future perfect. They’re wrong: me, naturally; my children colleagues, the liars and the listless, the princes and the princesses. The astronauts and the divers. The village idiots (there’s one in every village). E K., yes, that’s her. I observe her from my studio with my bio-cybernetic glasses. She’s gathering zucchini in the garden. Stooping down over the plants at 90°, her dressing gown recedes like the Red Sea, revealing the opposite of a thong (grandma-style underwear). I start off with hairy fantasies. I imagine for myself, on the other side of the cotton blend, her two nice tits swinging unanimously, grazing the zucchini leaves (which are prickly, too). I could get her pregnant like that, from that position. Too late. The zucchini already got to it. Two of them curve up like fluted cobras, trying to hypnotize her. K., petrified with terror at first, breaks the seal and runs away, letting the basket fall. About ten fresh zucchini, just picked, follow her. Others detach from the plant. K. trips on a pepper, it’s over for her. They catch her and immobilize her. K. yells uselessly, no one will hear her anyway (except for me with my super-hearing). A zucchini flower caresses her hymen, a zucchini wets her neck with dew. It seems like K. is starting to like the game. She’s ready. The pumpkin arrives in a dramatically toned crescendo. There, it’s done. She comes closer. She shoots the seeds in her belly and explodes like a suicidal bee. K. is beautiful. K. is red in the face. K. is pregnant. In a few hours she gives birth to many flowers, one for every pumpkin seed, it’s impossible to say how many. The number increases every time you look at it. The army of newborn zucchini grows rapidly in number and age. As soon as they are adults and autonomous they take sides in political parties and start to argue over who’s right and wrong. They destroy everything. K. has aged rapidly, her teeth are falling out like dried branches, her breasts have deflated like third-day balloons. Before closing her curtain on the world, K. leaves a modest inheritance to the pumpkin, to the children of the children of the children: a box of milk, a small battery-powered radio, a little golden ring with a worn-down stone, a pressure cooker on sale, a savings book with a little change. She goes to paradise and is canonized, she represents the angels and the saints in sacred images to be kissed and wet with holy water. But here comes S. to gather the eggplant. My super-super glasses never fail me. She stoops down at 90°, revealing the opposite of the grandma-style underwear (the thong). I see her hair shine in the moon. The cycle begins again. (21/09/03 Gattaiola)

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XVII

Today my memory suddenly cancelled out without warning. An entire population of data simply went away, without warning. It simply changed destination, without warning. And I find myself on foot, repeating automatic actions, the sense of which I have difficulty guessing. Petra started planting the knife in Giampaolo’s back, of course she wants some money, then she will blunt the blade, sweetly, as if nothing had happened. That’s how it happens. From one moment to the next. Oscar will arrive tomorrow night, from Venice. An everlastingly late airplane for Paris. A train from Agrigento, without water. A coughing fit puts the candle out. Like that. Simply. Without warning. I didn’t save anything, not a song, not a note. Not even you. You never let me know you’re alive anyway. And not even dead. You keep yourself holed up in your shit, with the right to do everything, sacrosanct and profane. And, instead, no. You are still in memory and you will stay there as long as the system holds up. Then a handful of dust brought in by the wind will reveal you as a fossil, hidden in a flint stone in a casket in a museum. The guitar is sleeping. My fingers, petrified by a computerized witch, only produce numbers to be consequently formatted. An arpeggio in binary code substitutes the favourite chords, and it’s repetition as it was before. It’s forgetfulness and reconstruction, preservation of the dust for the dust. In 50 million years we won’t be here anymore. You won’t be here anymore.  

XVIII

I take Matilde by the hand in the fields, searching for puddles and fresh mud.  We jump over a ditch, we find ourselves in front of a rabbit warren where the victims turn over themselves, waiting to stumble on the bitter olives.  Stewed.  With lots of bread.  Beyond the spiral of death, the goat and the horse recognize us, they wait for their daily cob.  But the field is threshed, there’s nothing left to distribute or multiply.  Grazia and Sergio are administering hay and dry focaccia to the goat.  The sky promises waterfalls and whirlpools.  How’s work going?  Fine, thanks, they fired me from all the schools, now I’m free as a fish (free to let myself get eaten like a fish).  And how’s the restaurant going with you?  Well, it’s holding up.  It’s a delicate moment, the euro’s ruined everything, no one spends a cent anymore. And my partner wants to leave, that’s fine since he’s a pain in the ass, pardon my language. He’s a pain in the ass? Yes, he’s a pain in the ass. We keep going on as long as we can stand it. Matilde is already leaning out towards the next stop, Rachele’s house. Bye. Bye, take care. I leave the little princesses playing in wedding gowns (the pink ones) and go home under a black and white sky. My parents’ house. The door next to ours. A light is on, they must’ve forgotten it, because their car’s not there. I walk around the garden, the basil and chard still have to be gathered. The last tomatoes, depressed. I go back. Now the light is out, but the door is closed. I turn the key. Silence. Darkness. I call my mother. A weak voice responds. I go up the stairs and into her room. She’s lying down in the dark, the small light of a lit cigarette moves slowly, like a counterclockwise satellite. What are you doing there in the dark? I don’t know what to do. Why don’t you read a bit? I’ve been reading all day. I recalled my youthful senility, the memory of obscurity, an era when I fell ill from solitude; my mother began to slowly consume herself long ago, with an infinite patience. It attacked her stomach when I was a child. Then her head when I was an adolescent. Back, legs, knees, when I was an adult. I lost track of her when I was newly old. As soon as I tried to revive, only the little light of the lit cigarette was left, in her bedroom in the dark, to illuminate the weight of her discontent. It’s too bad that my first reaction, impulsively, was to run after her with a stick, without hitting her, just to scare her, with my jaws lowered like an ogre. Today, though, for the first time, I felt all the weight of her anguish and I would have wanted to hug her. But I didn’t do it. I treated her with the usual indifference. And I disappeared into nothing, inconspicuously, almost in secret.             

XIX

We cross the ocean on foot.  We walk on the waters like on a tableland petrified from fear.  The fire blazes and the sea transforms itself into a dry and tempting brushwood, stinging with every step.  I’ve seen lots of fish, pierced like skewers on the coral, waiting to be digested.  Chew, chew.  The world is reduced to mush.  Like the state railways.  Like the havoc of bodies during love.  We’re still travelling, my wife and I.  We go through the daily strains, having fun.  Without too much clamour.  We are content with the small daily progresses.  And the pain, the real pain is around us, it rotates concentrically around our axis.  For now, we reside in the cavern of Didone, in the centre of the spinning top.  Tunnel.  I take advantage of the dark to steal that small amount of virginity that you managed to save on the sharpened blade of your smile.  A pinch between your legs.  And I shoot you a kiss that I had saved in quivers for a long time, maybe meant for someone else.  The fire is almost out, dominated.  The sea goes back to being the same one it always is, a mystic expanse of life and death.  And so I can’t see you…I’m sorry, but I can’t.  And so I don’t …

Worpswede, Walbrzych, Berlin, Sopot, Baden-Baden, Gattaiola 2002/2003

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