thunderstorms

Is a thunderstorm always a thunderstorm, even when it comes with no rain? There is this sound of warm air through the speakers in my studio, wind finding its own way through a corn field and my monitor. Some lightning and rumbling, and you could imagine heavy, large and still not wet enough pearls of rain. An energy field is altering its shape, and still nothing is happening.

There was this night of thunderstorms in Remanzacco. R. was scared, so cocoa was made, and the wide glass double door opened onto the terrace, while wrapped in blankets, and girly feet swept cold tiles. There was no questioning if something could have changed or would have changed. That was just a storm away. Something was happening over there and not here, or at least so R. thought when she slept that night. The large bed in old oak was heavy and loud when you turned, restless, the linen sheet thick on your sweated body, eyes wide open, measuring breath against the warm air.

Ends of summer in Lignano always left me with a bitter-sweet taste rising from the top of my stomach. Tourists had left and soon we would pack, too. And still, part of me, felt like a local, left with a shit show to sort out, whatever was left behind the scene, scrubbing of pontoons from hardened chewing gums, the cleaning and mending of the props left in the wings. E. and all the other tourists came, pitched their tent, left to roam free from their parents, met you at the swimming pool at 4 pm, when the regulated 2 quiet hours ended, fell in love and fell out of love when the dads paid the bill at the end of the 2-week holiday [promises of I will call you, I will write, ...], and then went back home. You are instead just going back to your cabin, where your all-year-round summer dresses hang, to your same old life, your same old family. And wait for this year sun tan to peel itself away.
You have put on the usual show and now it’s the time to clean the beach, rake the half-smoked fags, polish the waves, and curate your next year soundtrack of laughter. Nothing else to do, till Easter when the first cluster will come back: just mend, fix, sand, paint, and stow away. Of course, there is the questioning, always there, muted, in the background, if anyone could have taken you with them, or decided to stay, because no one, ever, decides to stay when the first evening goose bumps appear. No one ever offers. There is kind of sadness in Lignano in early fall, when even the thunderstorms have finished their show, have punched the card, and moved some place else, and the only opened chemist is in the next town.
Corn fields, wetless rain, and warm winds are just texture of something happening on the border. The circus which entertained you is dismantling its tents, and animals are chewing and defecating in places you are not allowed to see. Just a different version of an empty beach. Stages exists everywhere, but the actors are nowhere to be seen, and you question if that’s because they have not yet arrived, or because they have already left. The aftermath of tension in the air, gone; movement in the distance; gone; something happening not here and the world feels dense, austere and suspended.

What one sees is just the structure, not the play. A kind of soft melancholic carnival, a mix of joy and unease. Father used to whistle this tune, this sad melancholic waltz, repetitive, on a mechanical cylinder organ, over and over and round and round we go, while he was packing, hissing directives, slamming some car doors, lighting up another MS. Spinning horses, lights, laughter of children with mouths wide open, all out of synch now. My dad, Juventino Rosas and their haunting distortion, obsessive, hypnotic tune. My mind wonders on damp air, faded colours, travelling performers, everything and everyone at the margins of ordinary society. Us. Dad’s whistling, me standing still observing a black sky that does nothing. A temporary theatre of oddity: a fishing boat going out, smell of gasoline mixed with sand, clowns and fortune-tellers with half-chewed chipped nails, the baker eating his own leftover bread, mechanical rides and this façade covering exhaustion, wrong turns and impermanence. And that specific stench of a left-over barbeque, oil and coal and chunks of red peppers, left in the rain. That was just a spectacle.
Lights go out, the performers pack up but the music is still repeating, enticing, this mechanical piper. Grotesque, me as a clown, crying on the inside.

I sucked up that sadness belonging to someone else, and took it with me in my own circus. The summer of 1986 will see me touring around Turin. I was a guest in someone’s house, and I felt totally displaced. I was there, and not there. An unfamiliar room, a bed that wasn’t mine, a cotton sheet stiff with starch [so formal and impersonal] and its strong smell. A bed I was only a guest in. Summer warmth and still I felt cold inside. And then this echo of the night moving through the street. I was being a visitor in a world that continued without me: Turin moved while I lie still in a borrowed space. I knew I was safe, yet suspended. I belonged to nowhere in that moment.
There, again, I was present in a place that is never fully mine, and where events have either not yet begun, or have already ended. Always out of synch with life’s sinusoidal. Either way too early, or when things have finished.

A solitary observer in a world temporarily hosting thunderstorms.