A Bastard. Solitude. (Bologna at the end of the ’90s)

Life is a relatively stable thing. A piece of metal. A stab. The story I’m going to narrate today belongs to a past I can hardly recognize as mine. I should give an account of that. Bologna at the end of the ’90ies was already at its end. I used to think that it was only my fault if I couldn’t experience the city but it might have been the city itself to oppose resistance: already closing up like who has no more secrets: everything was on sale – double price, triple price. Every sale ultimately only sows inflation – without anyone ever noting the cost of those discounts. Bologna was clear on that: the rents were the higher – food was expensive – and life was affordable only for the students’ rich parents and professors. It was also affordable for those who were selling the city to the coming right wing major. That was the time. I had been able to cope with it living in a religious institution, which was not cheap and yet would be the best available solution for my parents who were covering the fees. It would allow holding down the expense and also my future escapes. After all a nuns’ boarding would hardly become home to anyone. Next step would have been coming back home. I did not “come back home” – it just made all harder for me to imagine a future on a new dry land. After three years of joyful studies and Christian college I made a step out on the city – going to live with a woman acquaintance in her forties – who was leading a double life between her commitment in a lesbian organization and her job as editor for a catholic publisher. Apparently her situation was not so different from mine, but with this “appearance” I believe any communality between us was over. The passage between the nuns and this “lesbian house” meant a passage from a convent to enclosed order life. I had a good friend and kept alive my important connections with Florence. My sentimental relation was ending with a diffused long pain and it potentially could mean breaking the threads of that web which joined Tuscany with the Emilia Romagna. During those years I had continued travelling and traversing l’Appennino almost every week – constantly “coming back home.” Those many trains were “home” – on which I read and studied so often. Home was Bologna’s train station and the surrounding streets. In those months I was over with my lessons and I would spend my days writing the final thesis – which in fact had nothing to do with what it was supposed to be. I was draining ink from my blood – and draining sweat from my breath in the free time. It was the time when my grandparents died. My grandmother suffered a lot – for several months – fighting with illusion and the black door. At first she didn’t know – at first she couldn’t know. My grandfather died one month after her – almost painlessly – and left my dad alone, in some sense. I interrupted my travels between Livorno and Bologna, pretending having home in the latter. Without arrivals and departures though, it was a famine of emotions. I was dying down as death was spreading where the trains wouldn’t bring me anymore. I saw my grandmother a few days before she would die. She cried looking at me – seeing the love I had been unable to show – the desperation I didn’t know. She couldn’t talk anymore. At the time my clothes were too big – any cloth would have been too big on me – the only elegance was disappearance. I had bought myself a jacket and some trousers on the big second hand market next to the train station and they were my only skin. They would protect me from life – they would carefully hide me. The story I mean to retell happened in those days. It didn’t lead to anything and yet, in a sole day – I’d have taken a short cut through life or so. I used to have a long walk almost every day to reach my favorite square, where I could sit and study under the arcades. My companies were mainly students and homeless asking for change. I happened to get acquainted with one of these guys. He was always alone, drunk, and talk nonsense – although there was also some intelligence emerging in a sentence every now and then. But it was alcohol mainly to talk. I cannot recollect which kind of conversations we might have – as he was never sober. But it was a rare conversation though, in the middle of nothing, a smelly disorder – into nothing. He would boast rubbish around throwing words the way he was peeing on his life. I would listen to his sexist lies for a while – trying to distinguish some truth from the glass. I met him a few times, since we shared the square – I had my books, he had his home. He was presumably some ten years older – badly consumed by red wine and the direct sky-light. Light becomes harder when you can never protect yourself from it. A hallucinatory pain. He offered me his home, that day: remain with him and sleep together. It was late in the afternoon and I had planned to see a theatric piece, a musical reading of Paul Celan. I invited him and even if he could hardly walk we went together to the theatre. At the box office neither did they want him, nor did they want him bringing his carton of wine or his little dog. He had both hidden under his jacket – but not hidden enough. After a long discussion in non-sense we entered that hall with dog and wine. As the piece began also his dog started barking and for a long while Celan’s poems were accompanied by wine’s gurgling down his throat and the barks. They tried to have him out – till eventually he left. I stayed until the end of a quite boring performance. I didn’t like that guy at all, or even cared for him. After the theatre I walked towards my square – since there was no other place either for me or my books. I wanted to sleep with him – presuming there might have been some warmth at the end of all. Some safety. The area was empty, he was not there. The steps where I used to read with daylight were alone in the dark. There must have been no moon. I went to my place and never talked to him again.