Sunny Day

Cars and vans pass by the freeway, many trucks, almost never buses. The asphalt and the smog, the windows in the distance where you can imagine the laughter and crying of children, a decrepit supermarket, the deserted pharmacy at the corner of the alley. It's as if the world has moved on without this neighborhood. I imagine a whole team of Gae Aulenti on the case taking care of the matter and at the end of the meeting they go to lunch. And then he appears there, the structural nightmare, the place that nobody gives a damn about rehabilitating. And the building plan does not foresee any changes.

I spit off my bench. I've always looked at the bubbles of my saliva on the ground, almost always I find a big one that rests on a myriad of small ones. I've always found him fascinating, in his own way...

A couple of trees in the parking lot and a little park with rusty carousels, the aroma of cumin from the houses on the ground floor and a beggar looking for the mirage of a coin. The sun is high, my beer heats up quickly. An old man removes sheets and wrinkles from the balcony before being swallowed from the inside; the façade is probably the same age as him. It is certainly equally marked.

A group of pretty young girls; a little further on than the boys are playing with a jar on the sidewalk, their old T-shirts show sweat and turned bodies from (who knows?) some kind ancient toil or profession, the ectoplasmic legacy of a dying generation. Shoemakers, grinders, unskilled workers, even blacksmiths: their dynasty counts at most one hairdresser. No doctor, no engineer, no banker. No sir, no notable.

I seem to see them there, hovering around the young people, the ghosts of their grandparents, uncles, their ancestors, mute and toothless, with big calloused hands in their mended and curved clothes under the weight of eternity, the weight of the most disturbing sin established by the world: anonymity. They look and do nothing else, for them no more fields to plow or mines or wars in which to die, no, for them the eternal shame of blame and the shame of vices; and of that desperate sexuality which has borne such bitter fruits, leaving as an inheritance the law of brute force as the only alternative to deception. It's thus, already almost faded, that even those boys of wild beauty knowing so early the law of living, that is, of forgetting and forgetting until one is forgotten, last in a competition of first. They laugh while kicking cans, they smoke and they know the gifts of sex, broken shoes and lit screens; will-o'-the-wisps of a future badly photocopied by ancestral nothing; this is how they prostrate themselves, unaware, to a religion that claims their backs, their hands, their knees, as steps and mortar on which to build their altar to self-celebrate with unsustainable lifestyles through complicit posters, 'cause the privilege has always sunk pernicious pillars on the multitudes, in the priceless dream of being, one day, "someone".

Faded boys and girls, faded images confused in the mass, already beautiful spirits too, confused and faded in their long nameless generations, vain stories of which it is sadly relevant to note that even in this valley of the most vulgar misery there is no lack of a couple of ripped jeans or a layer of jelly on the hair, a thread of lipstick that blossomed prematurely, a skirt really too short, the inability to understand a written text. The sun is also high on them, the smog also plagues their runs, the sweat also covers their thighs. Small as little droplets of spit that we are nothing else, nothing more.

The nearby Catholic school that borders the neighborhood has used the good taste of placing the entrance gates on the other side, so that mothers and children do not attend the daily ritual of decadence and austerity, and the municipality, for its part, has maximized the effect by raising palisades of electoral and propaganda posters. None of them ever venture down those streets, not even a priest, not even a road operator, perhaps some mum looking for "exotic" adventures or some young man looking for synthetic emotions. No one who knows the ways of the lawful or the respectable - whatever it is.

A bird hovers in the distance, near the town hall or just beyond; I feel fine, I finish my beer and smoke another cigarette; I watch the empty spirals get lost in the same wind that makes leaves and kites fly and mixes with all this smog. I have a spider on my shoe and the feeling that I have always lived on this bench. I close my eyes for a moment and slowly fade while it seems to be a really nice sunny day.

The bench is free. The big bubble has burst.

The sidewalk remained empty, the jar disappeared.