vedremo, vedremo

On Saturday, in a a street market in Florence, I saw a thief running away from a leather stall, shrugging on a jacket, the price tag still dangling from the lapel. Well, he was jogging really, and I was impressed by his insistence on keeping on smoking as he went. It was the most relaxed getaway imaginable.

I've been in Tuscany interviewing for jobs. I found one--the right one--in Arezzo on Friday. It's the town where they filmed La Vita e Bella, and the whole place is so mellow and Tuscan it'd make your teeth ache. I like them and they seem to like me alright. They want me to have a National Insurance number and I don't. I'll have to call the UK tax office and find out if this can be managed. I don't want to talk about it anymore just now.

I set myself up in Florence in a tent in an olive grove next to Piazzale Michelangelo. I took it on a miserly impulse--a camp bed in a tent city was seven euro cheaper than a corner of a six-bed dorm, according to the competing spruikers at the train station. I negotiated in English so I could hear what they said to each other in Italian. A leather-tanned old man offered me a room (no view) for 35. I asked him about hostels instead, and he asked his companion.
'Don't tell her about the competition, you lunk.'
'What can she do, poor thing? She can't afford my place.'
'Ah, shitwhore. You're too kind to the tourists.'
'It's true,' I put in. 'I'm poor. I can't pay thirty-five.'
'Ah, never mind, sweetheart,' the cursing man said kindly.

It was a nice tent. It filtered in green light and there were shadow-prints of fallen olive leaves across the ceiling. Does a tent have a cieling? It's kind of all ceiling. At night I listened to the night sounds--the traffic and the shushing branches. I felt exposed, almost too exposed--inside and outside at once. It suited my mood, here still without a job secured, watching my euros and cents, rolling my cigarettes.

I spent the last couple of weeks in London in the high street (winter clothes--it's 1979 in H&M right now, which is very exciting. I told my mum and dad recently that I wished I could go back in time to when my mum was pregnant with me and meet them, at a dinner party or something. Beef stroganoff, brandy alexanders, Pink Floyd on the stereo, pink and grey screenprints on the walls. If I could do it, I would now have just the outfit for the occasion) and in the National Gallery. In the mornings I read about the paintings, in the afternoons I went to see them. I can tell a Michelangelo from a Raphael now, and I can recognise the saints by their props--the Johns and Jeromes, the Annes and Catherines (smug hand propping up a broken wheel). I am hopelessly in love with two young men who have been dust for centuries, but my real obsession is with this painting--gnostic rather than pious, sinister even--Leonardo writes of standing one day at the mouth of a cave, thrilled and terrified at the thought of what he might find inside.

Back in the world, though, and in the flow of time, I'm much preoccupied with bureacracy and solvency and stuff. At nights I cooked for Lily and we talked--we talked more than we used to about what we weigh, what we earn, what to put in the pantry--how to keep earning enough so we can keep weighing enough, not to much though, middle-age-spread ahead--but I see a happy pattern in her efforts--she's working so hard, she's conquering that town inch by determined inch--something that rises above the quotidian worries, and she sees a pattern in mine. We see for each other.

Now I'm back in Reggio for a few days, staying with friends (that is to say, ex-colleagues). Every day I hear new outrages about the school. They ask me why don't I come back? I ask them, why don't they leave? They have nice apartments though, and big televisions and no money for moving vans. I tell them they can come and live in my cupboard in Arezzo. If I get to Arezzo. Vedremo.

bizniss trippin

I landed in Brescia on a grimy, sweat-yellow Tuesday and I wasn’t at all sure the interview would be worth the fuss. But the afternoon cooled off as the train got into the foothills, and me along with it. The track started following a narrow valley between limestone ridges. The steep hills on either side threw everything into a sort of premature twilight, blue and melancholy—even those places still in full sun were suffused by it, as if the rays had retained their light but not their conviction. I got into Bolzano around five. It’s a compact city that fills a little stelliform valley. It's circled in a cosy sort of a way by high, fir-forested hills. And beyond these I caught the odd glimpse of the Dolomites themselves—mad, jagged, vicious looking things, bare as the moon.

The city, like the surrounding South Tyrol area, is an elegant jumble of Austria and Italy. Italianate palazzi stand next to Germanic constructions topped with spires, green-tiled and glossy as dragons' tails. People talk with their hands, but stop their cars at pedestrian crossings. Their universal capacity to switch language mid-sentence is frankly unnerving. The area was only ceded to Italy after World War One, but this resilient biculturality seems to have endured much longer than that, regardless of where the borders were pegged out after this or that scuffle. It was fun to visit. In the city itself, the dominant language is Italian. In the hills—I took the cable car—the balance tips towards the Germanic, all poppyseed pastries and toddlers in lederhosen, and I had to rummage for my bittes and danke schoens. I took the narrow-guage railway that rattles between a half dozen villages along the ridge, and watched the Dolomites revolve in the changing perspective, like turning a paperweight around in the light to see the design inside.

And the prospects? The whole thing looked a lot like last year, with a business class upgrade. Same size city, same degree of wealth, same proportion of foreigners. Nicer apartment in a nicer part of town, more spending money, nicer parks for frisbee and nicer paths for cycling. All very nice. The question is, do I want to live inside a souvenir paperweight? The place was quite delightful, but it struck me that I would get more pleasure from showing visitors around, and seeing how much they approved of my choice, than I would from actually living here, because it’s not what I want now. I think I could spend a very enjoyable year living in Bolzano—but not this one. I’m about to send an email turning down the job, and I shudder at this wilful rejection of a perfectly good and comfortable situation. But I shudder more when I think about a life of seeming contentment at the expense of the genuine article.

domestic with william carlos

this is just to say

that I was saving them for breakfast
to share with you at breakfast
as thoughtful people do

and I hope that they were sweet enough
and cold enough at that
to warrant three nights on the couch
coz that's in store for you my dear
that's what's in store for you.


Well anyway, cathartic as the gratuitous character assassination of my previous post was, it's time we moved on, eh? I don't have any big news, so what can I tell you?

Lily and Den are toilet-training their cat (or, as the instructional video puts it, torletting their cat). It's very exciting.

The skies of London are really huge. Why is that? People say Perth skies are the biggest on earth, and it's supposed to be the flatness of the land that does it. But maybe it's the deep, dramatic perspectives you get here, with buildings and monuments rising up one behind the other. As I walk around the place I feel sort of borne aloft, like Nelson.

I got some work transcribing academic interviews through an acquaintance, and it's quite fun. The best thing is, all the files I've done so far relate to this exhibition, so you'll hear a mumbled phrase, and you'll have to go back and listen to it two or three times before it finally resolves itself into 'animatronic penguin'. Excellent.