picture in international newspapers, or only a few words on twitter.
For sure, we're in crisis, less budget, less adverstising, less readers, less confidence in the future. I ask myself how our children will be informed, between the newspapers purchased by capitalist tycoon for one euro, and the web which from time to time forgets to check the source and to give meaning to information. As if I was one of the latest generation doing this job, replaced by machinelearning as for the forecast of hearth break. What's next ? Watson predicted that…Sentiment analytics say eighty pour cent of American feel connected to Donald Trump messages for his campaign. Scary…
Did you already attend a demonstration ? I mean a real one, for a noble cause. I'm convinced that we need heroes. People who fight for ideas, whatever the cost in their life or for their beloved.
I'm not like that. I'm just a man. But in the people flow, I feel our humanity. Looking at a young and thin guy, with his first scarced beard, jumping on the fontain with a big flag, and the three plump girls with small tee shirts, yelling like it's the cause of their life. The mothers, fat ones with flower dresses from another time, and short hair no hairdresser would advise anylonger. Mother in love. Defending their children and grandchildren, defending their values and their country, fighting for freedom of speech. Then the military, arriving on stage, with weapons. All kinds of weapons. And all people running. The air loosing the joy and belief in everything is possible in one single minute. Ruining hopes and lifes. Dismantling families and friendships.
I've got my best friend that lost one of his eyes in the fight with the police in Le Caire. You're a journalist ? We don't care. They don't say it, but you feel it.
One of my other friend was nearly raped in Croatia. Now people go for vacations, fifty kilometers from the place where people were slaughtered. Montenegro, Dubrovnik, they eat ice creams as a family, walking peacefully in the old city protected by the old walls, or they kiss on the lips as a young couple in front of the sunset on the sea, impatient of the night to come.
Children were killed with their mother looking at them, then women were tortured in front of their husbands, a nightmare that has disappeared and is not even the history books for teeneagers. You know, it's too early, perhaps later when time will tell if the thousands of young death are meaningfull. If the killers have to go in jail.
Trial take time. I met a woman that had to see our rapers every Sunday before going to the church. They were taking a drink at the coffee nearby. Nobody did even touch them. She was lost. Like the exceptionnal, unbearable becoming part of daily life, and nobody giving her a clue of why it would be acceptable. Nobody acknowledged our suffering, and it was even a burden for our family to have her feeling so bad and depressed, as something went wrong for the honor of the family, and they would prefer to forget and begin their new life.
I've just realised that I lost my goal for my next movie. It can't be something to intellectual. I must deal with reality and fantasy.
I better understand the latest Carlos Fuentes book. I found it superficial. I was dealing with real issues but with lightness, which is different.
This country is not my country but it makes me sad and feel bad to be without any power in front of impunity.
We should all fight against that.
I've fighted for democracy in Tunisia. It's funny to think intellectuals spoke about arabic spring for all the revolutions, from Lybia to Egypt.
It's a nightmare in all those countries now, but life continues in Europe and in the US, and it's not the subject now.
Like Bokohara in Nigeria, nobody speaks really about it. Lack of information.
My son wants to play music. I don't know if you can earn a living with it. My daughter loves litterature, she has already read more books than me, in the twenty years of her life.
Sometimes, I remember myself at the same age. I was a tennis player. Loving to go out. Drinking mojitos and kissing girls with passion. Always fan of my girl of the moment. Believing I would leave more than a century and feeling like having thousand years in front of me.
Now, that I'm nearly fifty years old, I feel less funny than I was, less interested by the present. Like a machine built to believe in the future, and trying to connect things with the past. Indeed, never in the present.
I wonder if my wife still loves me. We have the same values. We're an open minded couple. Meaning if one of us wants an adventure, the deal is not to talk about it, but permission granted. Therefore, I was never tempted by any woman, for sure alone in a war in Serbie or now in Mexico.
I like looking at their nibs and they golden skin, trying to make me feel excited after one beer. But it's just curiosity. I think in twenty years I will even have lost that. Perhaps that just mean to grow old. You love things and people with passion, you're engaged in any meaningful fight, then you see people forget very quickly, sometimes you're one of the only ones to have attended a war, nobody cares anylonger, to remember the American guy loosing his life because of a rocket never intended to kill him. Just like that, by the blood disappearing in the sand, and his face becoming white and his eyes big.
I feel I've got a burden I didn't have at twenty or at thirty. I love my job. But perhaps the quest of truth make you discover things you would like to avoid.
I dream of being in vacation in Tuscany like last year. To avoid the nightmare of violence and unbearable warmth in the city, and my feeling of loneliness.
One morning, I went to the village Greve in Chianti. It was surrealistic.
It's often like that, we live our life without taking attention to details, it enable us to live, else it's too strange. But suddenly, what you would call reality is in your face, like another dimension.
First, the mercery with dentels and all colors of fabrics and buttons. Thousands of buttons, all shapes and sizes.
Then, the butcher, "Forlani", at least the fifth generation, with the picture of them in front of a big "sanglier"killed one morning in the forest. The ham suspended like proof of success and immortality. The meat like choice of a tasty lunch with for ever friends.
And also the market on the plazza, a truck with chicken and polenta given in big bags by generous female looking at their customers as they're being their mama.
The old men were in their chairs, looking at the life of the plazza. There were six on them. They looked happy, somewhat distant, wise and with a joke ready on their lips to share. They looked as if the place belonged to them, as born, raised, growing old in the same town, known by others, respected for their life and what matters. They looked at the others, and then their glasses and the paper nap on the table. Two thin women with long blond brushed hair, looking good in their sixty, sharing an ice tea, perhaps discussing the latest production of Chianti of their domain. A tourist family drinking freshly squezed orange juice with ice, the wife looking in charge with the map, the children glad to have a pause, the guy in tee shirt with a cap, looking at the old men like envying their noble attitude and fresh haircut.
The old men spoke in Italian. One of them looked like proud of himself, but the others not giving a shit in their white shirt and polos, polos carefully ironed by a loyal wife at home, waiting for cooking their lunch. I understood they spoke about a horse race, then saucer, then the guy that had gone to the South of France that they were criticizing saying his wife was deciding life for him, which was not a good thing for sure.
It looked good. I decided that day, that when one day I would get retired (if anyone to pay for my generation), I would find a place like that : an old house with a sienna color changing with the sun each hour, cricket songs around, a landscape with cypres like sentinelles at the horizon, olive trees like eternal friends, my beloved in the swimming pool to refresh their suntanned skin after a delicious barbecue with the famous Forlanis' agnello, a big salad with olives and juicy fruits as a dessert, and a village nearby to look at other humans and remember that I'm still alive and that nobody can take care of all the wars, if even God doesn't move his little
finger for men.
Just before the sunset, when the hot day still felt, in the stones near the swimming pool, and deep in the wall of the old house (which you will understand around three in the morning, sweating in your bed, naked), when the mosquitoes become your ennemies of the moment and you applauded your progress to spray them, the birds came to drink the water of the pool.
They came by thirty or more. They flew, and just two or three of them went fast at the surface of the water. It was impossible to see if they drank or just checked if it was safe. It was like a beautiful choregraphy, during nearly an hour. Times was flying.
Tuscany August 2015
I'm the mother
I had nine children. One is dead. Eight of them, still four alive, the others died before I did. It means I live with a lot of memories, we accumulate furnitures and souvenirs as not to forget, but we still do. I'm dead and near Marie who I adore. I'm happy to see my three daughters going to Lourdes every year to worship her and to prey for our souls, I think they chose the birthday of my disappearing on earth.
I'm the last generation before all the machines to take care by myself of caring, nourrishing my boys and girls. The latest to clean my house without a vacuum cleaner.
I light spiders