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.