cadavrexquis

Fakers and strict machines

To sum it up: if I'm fucking somebody, I don't like it at all if they're unresponsive, even though that's their normal behaviour when they're getting fucked and they enjoy it. Instead, I like them to moan and groan, as if they were really suffering. It doesn't matter whether they're just pretending and putting up an act for me or if they do actually feel what they show. Otherwise, if they don't move, don't say anything, don't spurn me to shove my cock deeper into their arse, I have the feeling I'm screwing a wooden board and that doesn't turn me on at all. After a while it gets pretty mechanical and my mind is switched off so that I have to resort to external fantasies to conjure up the excitement needed. It's very subjective, of course, because some people do enjoy being fucked even if they don't scream and shout when they have a cock in their arse. But I'm superficial and I like the show: so please be kind and moan. On the other hand, when I am getting fucked I like those who fuck me to act in two ways. Either they behave in a dominant way, fucking me hard and commenting on what they're doing to me, or they fuck me in an indifferent way, as if they were just fucking machines. In this case it doesn't matter to me if they don't show any passion at all, because all the passion I need to see is witnessed by the hardness of their cock. I like them to be strict and screw me rhytmically and methodically. They should be impassive, as if I had nothing to do with their lust and as if I were an "object" to be sexually exploited. Any object would do, as it were. I'm well aware this is only a sophisticated form of submission, one which doesn't need the whole paraphernalia of submission tricks used during normal sado-masochistic sessions. I could sing to myself: "I'm in love, I'm in love with a strict machine".

(Italian text: here)

Insights

Forgetfulness can be blissful. Not only those who forget are bound to do again what they have forgotten, as the saying goes, but also those who are constantly reminded of things that otherwise they would have forgotten might be tempted to repeat them, again and again. Remembering the past - being forced to remember it, instead of burying it as it ought to be - may have taught them the trick and the way of doing something they wouldn't have been able to do on their own. "Let bygones be bygones" would be a superior form of wisdom - if one  could only accept it. (And it's the same with writing: one has the impression of getting rid of something disturbing only because they have written about it, but writing itself helps strengthen the manacles one wanted to shake off. Even one word may be one word too much).

***

I am still standing in the rain, as I used to, and I am still getting wet, as I used to. But once I immediately opened my umbrella or sought shelter somewhere, as if the rain could corrode me. I was afraid of the water dripping off my hair, I was annoyed if I couldn't see through my glasses and kept on taking them off and wiping them with a tissue. Now I'll have to learn to keep still in the rain (if I haven't yet) and let it flow down, for it cannot change me too much.

***

You wanted to be cold, didn't you? Alas, you just managed to be lukewarm.

Emotional freezing and shock

You can grow accustomed to an unpleasant situation without realising how unpleasant it was. You do understand its real nature when things seem about to change and you're forced to see them in a different light. Being in a state of crisis gives you the chance of looking at the other side you've been trying to deny (not always unsuccessfully, it should be added). Then you also understand how much you swallowed that you didn't want to eat at all. It boils down to a revelation about yourself: habit has grown into a second skin which has become tighter and tighter and is now threatening to choke you. As long as you live with the automatic pilot on, heading towards nowhere and without even thinking you should head anywhere at all, as long as you don't ask questions, you can't even feel that you're missing anything. The next step is that you unconsciously start believing that it has to be that way and that you have no choice. Then something unexpected happens and you see the emotional freezing you had been living in before. Suddenly there's an added dimension to what you called reality. You should be happy about that and you really are, but there was also something soothing even in a dreary habit. It was soothing as tranquilizers can be: they give you a sort of peace of mind, they erase all conflicts, but at the same time they take away your experience. If you want to live like a robot then you can keep on pretending everything is all right. Unless... unless something unexpected happens. Then you'd rather run, plunge  into the deepest sea, crash against the hardest wall, take the kamikaze attitude and go ahead, come what may: anything but the dreary dullness you were in before. At least you have actually done something instead of just being done yourself. If you're bound to lose, it's better losing after fighting than losing beforehand, in anticipation or fear of a future loss.

Beauty itself

If beauty is an undeclared promise of happiness, then it's a promise which can't be kept: that's what I think when I see him, for the second or third time after some years. I'm not speaking of an objective kind of beauty, as if I were trying to establish the very canon of beauty itself. The latter is more a promise of suffering, I think, as it's cold and distant and hovers almost unhumanly in the air when it descends among us. No, I'm speaking of the beauty each of us finds in his or her own personal inventory of beauty made flesh. What is the link between the beauty of a boy and my desire? That's the question I ask myself after seeing him again. For sure, he's the perfect boy. If I had to give a description of how a boy should look, I shouldn't waste my time and I'd better take a picture of him and show it around. That's what I mean, you see, I would say over and over again. Fair hair, smooth white complexion, black thick plastic spectacles, distant white teeth, an almost unperceivable lisping when speaking, in a slight sing-a-song tone,  firm buttocks drawing the lines of his light cotton trousers, hard biceps betraying that he's not indifferent to his looks. But is there actually a connection between him, his beauty and my desire? When I stumble into such beauty, I feel paralysed and it's as if the frail link between that beauty and my receding desire is being definitely torn. What I see exceeds my grasp - even the thought that I might attempt a grasp at all. The link is missing and my mind goes blank. I wouldn't even dare to express my desire, which has vanished into utter nothingness after being overwhelmed by what I have seen. I have learned to give up, to stop before moving, to refrain from moving, and this hasn't happened only because I am afraid of being rejected, but also because I know that if I tried to pick up this beauty and transform it into some sexual act, even if I only tried to brush the lines of his perfect body with the tips of my fingers, it would mean to translate my desire into flesh and force that beautiful boy to do something which he can't do. I would force him to keep that undeclared promise of happiness, a promise he has never made and he has nothing to do with. I know what would follow then: disappointment, bitterness, frustration. Beauty is there to be admired, I say to myself, but my mind is split. I experience the usual schizophrenia when I'm faced with this perfect and absolute beauty and I have to admit that it won't have any effect on the hard reality outside my mind. There goes, inside my brain, the line of a Leonard Cohen song: "For you've touched her perfect body with your mind", but the reverse won't happen. (Of course beauty is to be interpreted in an absolute and personal way at the same time. There are many beautiful boys, but I'm now speaking of the ones who leave me breathless and on the verge of tears, because they reveal the whole range of impossibilities they stand for). When somebody else, as if reading my mind, asks me if there is anybody I like, I smile and answer in a low voice that I have learned not to look at the boys I like too much. It's hot outdoors, it's almost a stuffy summer day. People are smoking and suddenly I see that he lights a cigarette too and starts smoking. I watch the tip of his cigarette glowing in the dark, I watch his perfect fingers, the way his nails are cut, the veins on the back of his hand. So much beauty. Then I smile and shiver, because I have found the excuse not to love him, so I say to myself: "A smoker. He isn't really worth the effort". The fox can go back indoors and mark one more perfunctory sacrifice in his personal record.

In London again

I

London is more than London, which might be true for any important town anywhere, but still it's truer for London. When you start studying English at school, you learn the language from silly handbooks praising the typical sights of the town which become sort of "icons" having little to do with the original thing. For the average pupil London is no longer the sum of the real people and things which are actually there, but it becomes a listing of places like Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace which don't have any link whatsoever with London as it is. What's the relationship between one of this spots and a person living in London? I also wonder how you can live in such a huge city but by finding (or creating) your own niche. (I was looking at a black woman in Brixton, poorly dressed and visibly unfashionable: what's the connection between her and the touristic icons of her town, if any?)

II

London is like a drug you grow addicted to. You know you're throwing yourself away, you know you're wasting your time as you'll never possess that moloch. You'll never be able to see it as a whole, but you keep wanting more, more, more and more. Exactly like a drug. Even when you're doing nothing at all, apart from looking at the people around you or just being there. You dissolve yourself into the crowd and you experience this loss of identity as a pleasure. You want to lose your own self. You learn to forget how to say "I, me, my" and start feeling your nothingness, your being so tiny among so many people. (That was the first feeling I had when I first went to London years ago. I left my hotel and headed towards Oxford Street where I had to squeeze myself through the crowd. A growing sense of claustrophobia got hold of me and I was overwhelmed by anguish and fear). On Saturday night I was coming back from the whirling fury of Leicester Square, I was swimming in the sea of human flesh in the West End and felt oppressed by a strange feeling of displacement. The Piccadilly Line had some delays, so that more and more people kept coming down to the train platforms. Then the train did arrive and during the travel I started watching somebody dozing off and a sudden thought stroke me like a lightning: "This is not normal, this is not a normal life. This is not how we were meant to live". Of course I don't know how we are meant to live, I don't see any visible purpose in life (I even possibly think that we were not meant to live at all, but that we are mere accidents), yet for a moment I experienced a sense of unreality which was a revelation of sorts. This is an artificial life we lead, in cubicles made of concrete, in a huge town, always in a hurry, among millions and millions of other human beings we know nothing about, without being able to do anything practical to survive, without being able to find our food. Creatures of the city, we think we're powerful, but we're just powerfully dependent. Working machines performing tasks with no recognisable aim, as it were. All of a sudden I felt the fragility of this moloch: it's easy to imagine how the very survival of such a big town could be undermined and how it could be swept off in no time at all. Just imagine that there might be no electrical energy left, for instance. Just imagine the consequences. Then I had another thought: what if we should vanish from the earth? Would that change anything? Take the London underground a lot of times every day and these fears, these thoughts will become common knowledge. Mundane commonplaces. So, mind the gap (in our minds). Ensure that you don't leave your luggage unattended at any time: you might come back and find no luggage any longer. Or not find yourselves.

III

I had made no plans for this trip to London. Surely I didn't want to visit any museums or any "cultural" institutions. Going back to London - after only a few months - is a pleasure also because I can meet R.S. and Ma.S. again (and after seeing me the former has written to me that I look much better "in health and in spirits" than last time. Let it be true!). The rest of the three days is devoted to my roaming about town, which is an excellent way to waste my time and energies in London. I like going to neighbourhoods which are totally neglected by tourists. When walking in Charing Cross Road you hear bits of Italian spoken everywhere - so that it seems as if the town has been invaded by Italians -, but if you go a bit outside you hardly hear people speak English. That's what I do. I go to Brixton, unfashionable Brixton, with no purpose in mind but to see something different. For the same reason, some months ago I went to Whitechapel, then walked to the North towards Bethnal Green and Hackney, to the Grand Union Canal. And every time I take a double decker to come back. I sit on the upper deck and enjoy the sight: this makes me happy like a child. It's pure and animal happiness, untainted and unspoiled by any thoughts. When coming back from Brixton, the bus goes over Westminster bridge and on my left hand side I catch a glimpse of Big Ben and I feel strangely moved by something so obvious.

IV

Gay saunas have greatly improved in London, so that now they can boast a European standard. Now you can fuck and have sex without being forbidden to do so and you even get free condoms and lube everywhere, so that they outstrip quite a few saunas in Europe, especially in Italy and in Germany. It's extremely different now from the first time I visited one in 1997, which is not ages ago, however. I had to go to very distant places, such as Streatham or Walthamstow, where I was met with a conspiratorial look and the question: "How did you learn about us?". Then the sauna was quite dilapidated and down-to-earth. It was prohibited to have sex in the premises: I suppose it was labelled as "grossly indecent", according to the law. Somewhere they did have some cabins, but with no doors, so they could say they were meant only for relaxing and not for private sex. The experience was quite frustrating, because it was tantalising to see so many naked men - and some very attractive too - and not being allowed to try your luck with them. Now it's like everywhere else and some boys (oh, the English Boys) are even becoming spoilt. As a matter of fact, my quest for The English Boy - all words must be written in capital letters - was a complete failure. But what is The English Boy? How does he have to look like? Well, The English Boy must be blond, his skin must be white, he must be slightly effete, his limbs must be fine, his pube soft and furry, his cock rosy. If he blushes when he's sexually aroused or when it's too hot in the steam room, so much the better. If he has a posh British accent, that only adds something special to the charms of the perfect English lad. He shouldn't laugh all the time, shouldn't be too jolly - like the boy we saw sitting at the table in front of ours in the restaurant we went to on the first night out -, but if he's sad and serious instead that only makes him sexier. Moreover he should have slightly jutting cheekbones, because a round face would destroy The perfect English Boy. A special variety of the English Boy - for whom I'd accept even his not being blond - is the London Lad. Young professionals working in the City and wearing elegant suits and ties which only make one dream of tearing off their clothes before bending them over and fucking them wildly. I did see many of them everywhere in town. A wonderful specimen crossed my path in the underground one day and I was mesmerised by his appearance, as he possessed all the main features of The English Boy (extreme blondness, jutting cheekebones, white complexion, nice butt without being much too evident, slight effeteness). Unfortunately enough my quest for The English Boy was not successful and I had to be content with foreigners residing in London or with non-English Londoners who did agree to give me some temporary sexual pleasure and relief.

V

How can one possibly write anything or give a full report about a town which is so deeply loved and worshipped by so many people? I can just give some details I picked up here and there. During the weekend I was impressed by the typical English Girls going out at night. They generally wore a miniskirt, stiletto heels, no stockings to cover their pale legs, a blouse with no sleeves and, sometimes, a bra pushing up their tits. I saw so many of them that I came to the conclusion that they must be an institution of London nightlife. Some of them were very young and quite clumsy when they walked, which marred the very femininity they wanted to stress with that outfit. Their arms and their décolletés were blotched because the night air was cold. They often walked arm in arm with their boyfriends, who must have been proud to flaunt such nice pieces of flesh. While I was sitting on a bench in Leicester Square I saw many of them passing by, then I gave a look to the two old men sitting on the bench next to mine and tried to guess their thoughts while their eyes darted towards those half-naked young "beauties". Ma.S. explained to me then that the more you move northward, the fewer clothes they wear, so that I guess that in Aberdeen they must be wearing only their thongs when they go out on a Saturday night.

VI

... things I do: waking up early in the morning, being frisky and ready for a new day (I like witnessing the awekening of a town when I'm on holiday); walking around town while constantly changing my plans (every time I go to London I feel that I'm seeing fewer things than the time before); looking for nice vegetarians places where to have lunch (my favourite haunt, "Country Life" in Warwick Street, was closed during the weekend, so I had to look for a good alternative: I found "Fresh and Wild" in Brewer Street); popping into every bookshop I find on my path (Waterstone's in Piccadilly is a compulsory stop, though) and buying books even though I don't know when I'll have the time to read them all; eavesdropping bits of conversation while sipping a coffee in a café (because I haven't got used to drinking tea as they do) and trying to make out what other people say and in which language; reading ads and signs everywhere, which always makes me smile when they're funny in an English way (the funniest one was a sign on the wall at the entrance of a pub in Shoreditch: "If you look younger than 21, you could be asked to prove that you are older than 18"); watching The English Boys all around me; taking the tube and pretending I'm one of them...

In praise of women

Whenever I talked about E.M. Cioran with M.H., he always sneered in his typical fashion and retorted that he couldn't really imagine how the famous French-Romanian thinker had managed to earn his living. He surely didn't write best-selling books, did he? So where did he get the money to survive? I couldn't find any answer to that, didn't know what to say to my sceptical friend, but just felt slightly embarrassed because he was attacking one of my favourite authors, sort of half-God. I was young and gullible. Time passed and in 1995 Cioran died. When his Cahiers were published two years later, I discovered that during his whole life - or at least since the fifties - there had been a woman, Simone Boué, behind him and supporting him. And by supporting him, I mean that she must really have fed him: she was the working one, the one who plodded along when in France her companion's books were neglected by mainstream readers. However, she isn't mentioned in any of Cioran's books, so that when reading his aphorisms or his essays one might be tempted to believe that he lived in utter loneliness, in a small and damp poet's garret in rue de l'Odéon, Paris, which is - admittedly - a very attractive picture of a nihilist thinker. Simone Boué was the silent one and led the very normal life of an English teacher in some obscure lycée. I also read that her first assignments as a teacher were very far from Paris. At the same time Cioran kept on babbling about the meaninglessness of life and history and musing about suicide, which he never committed. Then, in the eighties he was discovered by students - and, he ironically added, not even by university students, but by les lycéens. And before that? Before that there had been good Simone Boué, who after Cioran's death collected and typed Cioran's notebooks and edited them. After their publication in 1997, Simone Boué died in an accident. A very strange one, though, because apparently she drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, at Dieppe - if I am not mistaken, as I haven't found any evidence of this in the internet - where the couple had a home. Of course one can't but think that Simone committed the suicide that her companion had written about for so many years without ever taking the final step.

But Cioran and Simone Boué were by no means an exception, as far as the relationship between a man and a woman is concerned. I just have to look around me and see that we are fed an artificial myth according to which men are the pillars of society (the tough guys) and women always just lag behind. This is still true in politics or economics, which are based upon a sophisticated (and sometimes, or somewhere, not so sophisticated) exclusion of women, but daily life is quite different. Let's say that men like to think of themselves as strong, responsible and carrying the burden of life on their shoulders. Women are often wise enough to make their men (husbands or companions) believe it's true, but I suppose they possess the real strength and the real resilience in life. Men just love acting out power, but in case of need they mostly crumble like dilapidated walls. After giving up the little power they had when they were young and active, older men are as powerful as a handful of dust and as hot as ashes which even a gust of wind can blow away. On the other hand, women are steadier in their silent and hidden strength. They have the strength of those who have always been in touch with life and flesh, and not only with their symbols. Most men are braggarts who want to be flattered in their ego and their ego is perfectly satisfied when they can be convinced that they have done great things. However, never ever believe a word of what a male says about himself: more often than not he's lying. When it comes to actual courage - the courage of doing things and not just faking them - women are far superior and, surely, more enduring. Men explode and then deflate, leaving behind themselves only their pitiful words, whereas women store up energies for times when an important decision is to be made. Then you can be sure that it'll be them who take the final step.

I am not exposing a dry theory: I've seen too many of these male weaklings in my life. First in my own family, where my mother has always been the one who had the guts to make a decision my father was too irresolute about. She's always been strong enough to push ahead. Or I think of I.F. who was flooded by debts when her husband died, the very same husband who had lived his life without giving a damn, like a spoilt child, and who had played the role (but only the role) of the rebellious communist. And I think of D.F. who silently held the reins of their household while her husband wasn't even able to charge the people he had worked for and spent the little money he earned for his whims. Surely he led an interesting life, but a life which had been possible only thanks to the silent strength of a woman who worshipped him, didn't complain about anything and sometimes even struggled to make ends meet. Would you say that in these cases men are the practical and rational creatures they give themselves out to be? Let me doubt it. Furthermore, growing old seems to expose human beings for what they really are. Old age destroys the masks they have been wearing during life's comedy. So when I see older couples I must always admit that the real driving force behind them is often the woman. Men are wrinkled not only in their bodies, but also in their minds and in their egos, and they are grown unable to endure the hardships of that season of their lives. They lean on their wives who are supposed to be the "weaker" element of the couple and mostly look like idiots or children, or both at the same time - an experience I always make whenever I meet a man and a woman, say, in a hospital. He is the wreck who is unable to do things alone and must be backed by her. Women do manage alone.

The disbelief of coming back

I am floating on the water surface and it’s not an unpleasant feeling. I am watching the things surrounding me from behind a screen or a glass. I can’t reach out and touch them. No, that’s not correct: I don’t want to reach out and touch them. Things, people, voices: all seem so pointless now and I’m still trapped in my two-week absence. However, I know that it’s time I started concentrating on the old routines while what I’d like to have is just the chance of keeping alive the feelings and experiences I had these last two weeks. Whenever I come back from my journeys I always think it’s going to be different, I delude myself that it’ll be impossible that things will stay the same, that there’ll always be a core which will remain unspoiled within myself, but it’s sheer delusion. Things wane, slowly but unavoidably. Just a few days away from home – if you can call it home – and you forget what you have left, or at least you forget what is unimportant. Dry leaves falling off their branches. When you’re back, before being caught by the same old rat race, there is a time gap in between: you are no longer there (with your body, you might say), but you’re not here (with your mind, you might add). You are nowhere, you are everywhere, you are free. Apparently free.

“What am I? What am I doing here? Could things have taken a different course? What would have become of me if I had acted in a different way, if I had been more insistent, if I had had – let’s tell the bitter truth – more guts? What have I missed?” With my imagination I have tried to purge my life of all that came into it after 1998 and I know it’d be a poorer life I’d be leading now. I can’t even imagine whether it’d been better or not: I draw a sort of balance but I don’t know the place where I should put my character. I’ve understood that I don’t hate the idea of living (or of being born) as I once romantically thought I did, oh no, but I do hate the idea of not being able to lead different – and parallel – lives at the same time: every life is determined and conditioned by the lives you don’t live. So I seem to love life too much, in a way a human being can’t bear. I’d like to have both what I have had until now and the alternatives I somehow rejected – without knowing so. It’s horrible to think about the things that might have happened if only you had gone that path and not the other one you actually took (and if you had gone the former, you’d be regretting that you didn’t take the latter: you can’t hide this fact either). Even in a very mundane way, whenever I have some days off and must decide where to go, I’d always like to go to all the places I have loved in my life and every time I feel sad not being able to see them all at the same time and having to choose one, which means discarding all the other ones. Paradoxically, I could say that I’m embittered because I cannot be ubiquitous and almighty.

Now I am back and I am floating on the water surface because I don’t feel like plunging into any depths. It makes me uncomfortable to think that sooner or later I’ll start pondering over the same old subjects and I’ll go on cutting the same flesh. Mine, that goes without saying. I enjoy this silence as I know it’s so fragile.

Haunted by obnoxious dreams

I still have to decide if dreams do have a meaning and what this might be. I suspect that Freud’s old theory that dreams are often the expression of something sexual which has been suppressed from the conscious self is no longer true. To name just two witnesses: Cioran wrote that he always mistrusted Freud’s dream interpretation because when he was a young boy his father was used to telling him every morning about the dreams he had had during the previous night, while Yourcenar said in an interview that we must accept that dreams may also mean nothing at all and that they could be only debris coming out of the rubbish bin of our daily life. As I happened to write somewhere else, I don’t dream too much or too often, or perhaps I just forget most of my dreams but the ones of the early morning, when I’m more sensitive and my mind is not on the watch, so that I easily fall into their trap and I’m acutely aware of their taking place without being able to get rid of them or sterilize them. They seem more real than reality and sometimes they give me a truly anguished feeling. As a matter of fact, the common feature of these dreams is a sense of danger overwhelming me. I always find myself in a troubled situation and I can never find a way out. Or the way out is even riskier than the situation itself. I wouldn’t call them nightmares, because they’re not scary in the traditional meaning of the word, but they do leave me quite uneasy while sleeping and even after waking up and, as such, they do reveal something about the state of my mind (or the mess in my mind, I might say as well). These are some of the dreams I still remember.

1. It was early in the morning and I had to go to the railway station of the town where I was living. It was late autumn or winter, of course (pathetic fallacy is something I can't do without even in my dreams, apparently). I had just come up the staircase leading to the platforms when I saw the train running towards me at a high speed. Suddenly it went off the rails and we all had to run away screaming in panic. I don’t recall if we saved our lives or we were crushed and killed.

2. My house was surrounded by mad and violent bikers who wanted to murder me. In order to force me to come out, they set the building on fire. I had no way out, I couldn’t escape, so I just hid in a corner of my bedroom, hoping that they’d go away and leave me in peace. At a certain point, though, I felt a giant boot treading on me and crushing me, as if I had been a worm (or perhaps I had actually turned into one, in a Kafkaesque way).

3. We were living in a village and we were all aware of a danger which seemed to have come out of a novel of Stephen King’s (or Richard Matheson’s). Our village was being slowly invaded by vampires who, like all the creatures of their kind, bit other human beings transforming them into vampires too. We decided to join our forces and hunt them out. I was also in the league and I delivered a heartfelt speech to infuse everybody with courage, but while speaking I suddenly realized that they were staring at me. I saw horror in their eyes, I saw them draw back. All of a sudden I realized that it was because of me: I was turning into a vampire too without knowing it. (I had this dream during the night between the 17th and the 18th of July 2002. I remember the date so clearly because on that very day I had moved into the new flat I’m still living in. A new beginning should not give way to such dramatic dreams, but it should be filled with hope. Incidentally, it was also one of the few times I woke up panting and scared, so that M.S. had to shake me and ask me what was happening.)

Then I remember four further dreams which had sexual contents but didn't give me any pleasure because in the middle of them there was always a turning point which made them extremely distasteful, to say the least.

1. I was in a gay sauna, possibly in Germany (not that I recognized it, but my mind reinvented it as a German sauna), and while walking with a towel around my waist somebody warned us that a fire had broken out – like the one at the Everard Baths in New York in the eighties, I guess. So all the people inside had to climb out of the fire exit. In the end we were all naked on the concrete roof of the premises.

2. I went to another gay sauna and when I was inside I realized at once that it was not a sauna but a hospital, with the typical furniture (and the patients, too) of a hospital, which made me feel quite uncomfortable, illness being in my mind the opposite of sex.

3. I was ready to have sex with somebody – a man, of course – but just before starting with it I sensed that there was something disturbing in the whole situation, so I began running as fast as I could. I don't know why or how, but I had discovered that that man wanted to kill me.

4. I was still living with my parents and I was in my bedroom with A. We both wanted to have sex and were quite excited, giggling like two teenagers and frisky (the air was "fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief", to quote old Leonard Cohen again). Unfortunately my mother kept on coming into my room without knocking at the door. She wanted to check if everything was ok and if we needed anything, but it was obvious that she just wanted to keep an eye on us. Finally we were so frustrated and overexcited that we had to give up and just sleep like two innocent children. I left my bed to her and I slept in the orange armchair which was in my bedroom at those times.

I'd rather avoid any interpretation of these dreams, as apparently they are so plain that they don't need any explanation. If they do stem from a mental rubbish bin, I just wonder what else it may contain and if I'll ever be able to empty it.

Changing sex in a dream

This morning I managed to wake up three times before finally crawling out of bed at 9.30. Every time I fell asleep again and kept on dreaming the same dream.

I am again with her and we are in the changing room of a swimming-pool (curiously enough the changing room is mixed, but we are alone). She starts undressing in front of me while I am intently looking at her, though trying not to be too obviously eager to see her naked. First she takes off the upper part of her bathing suit and she reveals a dramatic lack of breasts. Not only is her chest as flat as that of a pubescent boy, but it is also quite skinny, so that I can see her breastbone very clearly. I catch myself thinking where she might be hiding her breasts which are actually round and fleshy. Her skin is also very white, whereas her real complexion is darker. Then she goes on taking off the lower part of her bathing suit, after a short hesitation. I don't want to be too intrusive, but I simply have to keep on staring at her. Her vulva is neither shaven nor hairy, as I expected. In any case it is not a furry triangle, but only a soft line running from her pubis down to her labia, which I catch a glimpse of. I am about to ask her: "So it's not true that you don't shave at all, is it?", but now I can't remember if I refrain from doing so or if just thinking about it makes my question audible.

Then we go outside and walk to her car. While walking, I put an arm around her shoulders, touching one of them with my hand. She gives me an astonished look and draws back pointing out that we are not engaged to each other so that I would be allowed to treat her like that. But I reply that one needn't be engaged to a girl to walk this way with her. When we are sitting in the car, I turn to her and she is no longer there. She has transformed into him. We are no longer in Italy, but in London, and we have to ride through the whole of France to go back to Italy - and he has to go to work on the same day. We stop for a stroll in a sort of dilapidated Oxford street: narrower than the real one, full of pedlars and rubbish on the pavements. It might be in Whitechapel and not in the West End, but I feel that we are in Northern London (but it's not Camden, though). I look at my watch and see that it's twenty to nine. I turn to him and say that it's actually twenty to eight, because we are in England. I ask him if I should take on some driving and he just answers: "We shall see". Needless to say: distances are nothing in our dreams and in this one too I seem to believe that we are going to ride through France in no time at all. And that's the end of the dream. I finally get up. While having breakfast I feel a tingle of desire running through my body. A tingle which doesn't become a pang, but which is more the physical memory of a Sehnsucht and gives me neither pleasure nor pain. I am flabbergasted.

(She and he have only one thing in common, as far as I know. How important that is is left to specialists to establish, not to me).

Come to think of it: although I am not skinny, my breastbone and my shoulderblades are quite visibile when I'm naked. And my complexion is white (I never get tanned). In my dream I saw myself reflected in her: she was my mirror. She has often been.

Rainy days and strange encounters in Milan

Autumn is about to come and today it’s raining in Milan. Rain makes this town comfortably uglier and, although I can’t say that I hate rainy days, I do hate rain and wind together (as much as I love sunny and windy days in an urban landscape in the morning, so that if it existed that would be my idea of a paradise). However, I would like this weather much more if I weren’t forced to go out and could instead enjoy it at home, when my flat is full of shadows making it snug. I can move around like a cat and ignore the world outside. My flat becomes a uterus, which is my ideal of a home: a place you can creep back into and be blessed with delightful forgetfulness.

I had to go out, though, and let me praise the beauty of all those who use their bicycles even in the rain. I met some while I was cycling myself and felt they were my friends and my brothers (or my sisters: one, indeed, was a woman wearing a yellow plastic overcoat). Frail humans about to drown in a rough sea made of metal, concrete, noise. It’s a form of resistance: we are very few and on such occasions as today I feel as if I were a Dane or a Dutch. (Do you know that Dutch song which goes like this: “Hoe sterk is de eenzame fietser die kromgebogen tegen de wind zichzelf een weg baant”? Cycling as a metaphor of the strength of an individual who, bent on the handlebar, finds his way through the wind whipping his face – and the rain lashing his spectacles).

I went to the post office and coming out of it I stumbled into one of my neighbours. It’s a very old man who looks like a dried up prune: he must be eighty-five or older. He’s quite skinny and he’s always wearing a beret and dark sunglasses – even when the sun is not shining, like today. He’s deaf and when he speaks to other people he always shouts without catching their words. He very much looks like the main figure of one of Pirandello’s short stories, the one about the iettatore, the bearer of ill-luck (of course I don’t think or claim he’s a iettatore, but whenever I meet him I can’t but think of that story and of the film with Totò taken from it). The only strange thing is that I keep on stumbling into him whenever I go out: a couple of days ago I saw him at the local supermarket, asking in a loud voice where he could find some coffee, and when a couple of weeks ago I was having breakfast in the café just around the corner with my Swiss guest he was there too, trying to use a public payphone with no success. My theory is that he has a livelier social life than me, so that’s the reason why I keep on seeing him everywhere. Sometimes I think that a gaoler has more contacts with the world than I have and when I do leave my desk I feel guilty because I actually ought to be rattling away on my keyboard: if only I believed in what I do, that would be a progress.