***
I saw one of my old colleagues from Anonima Nuotatori on the train up to Torino a few months. He looked like shit. Or more precisely he smelled like shit. He’d caked himself in some shit smell like it was perfume. I think he thought he was the vulgar Italian salesperson’s white station wagon of perfume. You know those cars you sense have been driven on the highways by guys listening to techno from 6 in the morning, roving the smooth asphalt up and down the country looking for in places you don’t even know exist? Well my old colleague (my old pal, I could almost say) was trying to smell like one of those cars. But only an idiot has a face like his and smells like that. It was pure farce.
It was the last train up from Milan that I saw him on. The one most people don’t even believe exists anymore if you tell them you’re going to catch it. It leaves from the Centrale at 12:30am. He told me he was going up to Torino to look at the spaces he had been given to curate a show in, I didn’t ask the details, I didn’t want to know, to think about when we’d been friends made me shakey, made me secrete miniscule acrid smells from my underarms.
Anyway I didn’t believe his story, I think he was on the train looking for prostitutes – they’re usually on there, on that particular train: black ones, sort of black ones, eastern European ones, the occasional very fresh Italian one (short term stint, you’re lucky if you get her), fat ones, ones taking a break from the bbqs on the side of the highway they usually work at. In fact when I told him let’s talk about art he said fuck that let’s talk about pussy (figa), let’s go look at some pussies he said, I told him I knew a good bar we could go to talk about pussy back in Milan if we had to but I wasn’t going to talk to him about then and there. He told me to calm down, in fact he started raising his voice at me, he told I’d done enough talking and now was my time to listen, he said relax yourself and stop writing – writing??? That stopped me in my tracks. What did he know about my writing?
Frankly I don’t think he knew anything about my writing, I don’t think he’d read of it even when we’d been together on the committee, that bearded perfumed stinking midget. Because I’d paused at the thing he said I took the moment to look at his face. In it I could make out an enormous amount of private pleasure. I think he was thinking about how I’d betrayed him. I could see that he liked it, the betrayal, that it made feel like he’d been right about everything all along.
It was very boring. I thought this is a man who is going to start a war (him and all his stupid fucking Anonima Nuotatori friends and all the other shits he was probably doing a show with). I thought he’ll incite the war because he thinks he deserves one and they’ll kill him first and they’ll kill me along with him because they’ll assume I’m just like him. But I’m not (but that’s another story).
I thought that all these people, whether they really know it or not, are desperate to enter into the system of war, the hiding, the subterfuge, the moment in which another human can truly become an enemy, the fantasy of escape, the betrayal obviously, the very physical strata (being shot in your bed, ratted on by the neighbours) added to the city’s landscape and so on and so forth.
Then I looked at the hairs on his face, then specifically the ones around his mouth (what was he eating these days? Something that contributed to the stink?) and then I looked at his eyes which he was filling with colour in that moment as he looked at me as though he was just about to teach me a lesson in compassion (I was a miserable overly-worried idiot who didn’t understand anything, who didn’t understand the unknown and he would take pity on me and in the moment in which he took pity he would become my bestfriend because it was a delicious feeling for him).
As I looked him and took all this in I realised that he didn’t have a fucking clue how to fight a war, but that he’d start one anyway, and he’d be murdered in his bed before it even really started (that would be his contribution to starting it).
Then, as he continued to fill his eyes with that warm brown colour and hold the punchline in him as though he was waiting to hear the anticipatory breath of his (imagined and enormous) audience become so desperate that it would reverberate through his microphone that he held close to his mouth, I got up (and as I did so I could see the shocked disappointment in his eyes, that he wouldn’t be able to feel like my bestfriend for a moment, as he had prepared to do) and left and walked down the aisle to the next carriage and the train started slowing down so I kept walking down the train and in the moment it stopped I got out at the station (whose name I didn’t recognise, but I’m not really from these parts), and walked out into the rather liquid black night. Then I went to the edge of the platform where there was no longer light (there was nobody there either) and I jerked off (a stupid thing to do I know, and a bad habit to boot) and then flicked my wrist sharply and let my dangling fingers with the come on them be thrown in the direction of the bushes, some of it came off and I wiped the rest on the concrete of the ground (I didn’t have any tissues with me), then spat in my hand twice and rubbed it again on the concrete and though a little was still stuck between my fingers I put my hand in my pocket and walked back to the centre of the platform and sat down on the wooden bench and thought again of that moment, in the Bresson film about the man who escapes from prison, where a man decides, truly, that another man is his enemy and thus can kill him without a thought, in silence as it were. I thought about this and after about four and a half hours the first morning train arrived for Torino and I got on.
It was the last train up from Milan that I saw him on. The one most people don’t even believe exists anymore if you tell them you’re going to catch it. It leaves from the Centrale at 12:30am. He told me he was going up to Torino to look at the spaces he had been given to curate a show in, I didn’t ask the details, I didn’t want to know, to think about when we’d been friends made me shakey, made me secrete miniscule acrid smells from my underarms.
Anyway I didn’t believe his story, I think he was on the train looking for prostitutes – they’re usually on there, on that particular train: black ones, sort of black ones, eastern European ones, the occasional very fresh Italian one (short term stint, you’re lucky if you get her), fat ones, ones taking a break from the bbqs on the side of the highway they usually work at. In fact when I told him let’s talk about art he said fuck that let’s talk about pussy (figa), let’s go look at some pussies he said, I told him I knew a good bar we could go to talk about pussy back in Milan if we had to but I wasn’t going to talk to him about then and there. He told me to calm down, in fact he started raising his voice at me, he told I’d done enough talking and now was my time to listen, he said relax yourself and stop writing – writing??? That stopped me in my tracks. What did he know about my writing?
Frankly I don’t think he knew anything about my writing, I don’t think he’d read of it even when we’d been together on the committee, that bearded perfumed stinking midget. Because I’d paused at the thing he said I took the moment to look at his face. In it I could make out an enormous amount of private pleasure. I think he was thinking about how I’d betrayed him. I could see that he liked it, the betrayal, that it made feel like he’d been right about everything all along.
It was very boring. I thought this is a man who is going to start a war (him and all his stupid fucking Anonima Nuotatori friends and all the other shits he was probably doing a show with). I thought he’ll incite the war because he thinks he deserves one and they’ll kill him first and they’ll kill me along with him because they’ll assume I’m just like him. But I’m not (but that’s another story).
I thought that all these people, whether they really know it or not, are desperate to enter into the system of war, the hiding, the subterfuge, the moment in which another human can truly become an enemy, the fantasy of escape, the betrayal obviously, the very physical strata (being shot in your bed, ratted on by the neighbours) added to the city’s landscape and so on and so forth.
Then I looked at the hairs on his face, then specifically the ones around his mouth (what was he eating these days? Something that contributed to the stink?) and then I looked at his eyes which he was filling with colour in that moment as he looked at me as though he was just about to teach me a lesson in compassion (I was a miserable overly-worried idiot who didn’t understand anything, who didn’t understand the unknown and he would take pity on me and in the moment in which he took pity he would become my bestfriend because it was a delicious feeling for him).
As I looked him and took all this in I realised that he didn’t have a fucking clue how to fight a war, but that he’d start one anyway, and he’d be murdered in his bed before it even really started (that would be his contribution to starting it).
Then, as he continued to fill his eyes with that warm brown colour and hold the punchline in him as though he was waiting to hear the anticipatory breath of his (imagined and enormous) audience become so desperate that it would reverberate through his microphone that he held close to his mouth, I got up (and as I did so I could see the shocked disappointment in his eyes, that he wouldn’t be able to feel like my bestfriend for a moment, as he had prepared to do) and left and walked down the aisle to the next carriage and the train started slowing down so I kept walking down the train and in the moment it stopped I got out at the station (whose name I didn’t recognise, but I’m not really from these parts), and walked out into the rather liquid black night. Then I went to the edge of the platform where there was no longer light (there was nobody there either) and I jerked off (a stupid thing to do I know, and a bad habit to boot) and then flicked my wrist sharply and let my dangling fingers with the come on them be thrown in the direction of the bushes, some of it came off and I wiped the rest on the concrete of the ground (I didn’t have any tissues with me), then spat in my hand twice and rubbed it again on the concrete and though a little was still stuck between my fingers I put my hand in my pocket and walked back to the centre of the platform and sat down on the wooden bench and thought again of that moment, in the Bresson film about the man who escapes from prison, where a man decides, truly, that another man is his enemy and thus can kill him without a thought, in silence as it were. I thought about this and after about four and a half hours the first morning train arrived for Torino and I got on.
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