3.
I look out the bars, hotels on one of the intersections of the center of my city, and I seem to be a tourist. There is the sun. It rained early in the morning rain and perhaps even later. Yet there is a beautiful light, which articulates the details of that architecture that I know how my pocket and now it seems to me to see for the first time. The green sign of an antique shop, there until I was a child and now replaced by a fashion label. The tables in the bar. The floor of cobblestones, the red walls of the buildings. Bikes. Even people I do not think that my city. For once I do not know anyone. Finally. I feel suddenly distant. On holiday or even in another world.
lunch time and see, out of the bar, the loops that come and go with the waterproof temporarily strung on colorful jackets, cameras, his nose in the air to track down the bows of medieval buildings.
The girl at the bar asks us what we want to eat. It has a foreign accent.
"E 'slave," he says Luca.
Just to stay in theme with his story.
The girl is tall and thin, beautiful and young. But the angular face, the skin of the cheeks marked by just a bit 'of rosacea and eyes with the shadow of some folk who will soon be turning them off a bit', as a whole are already guess how it will be in thirty years, from elderly.
Luke has the same face of the boy's picture in Albania. Eighteen years more, however, and less curly gray hair, but still long to focus their backs.
Open your computer and displays photos of Durres. From that day on which the first or perhaps the second vessel carrying packed with Albanians left for the Adriatic coast of Italy.
I listen and I guess the landing of those illegal immigrants at the beginning of a hot August of 1991.
Once you finally put foot in Albania, Luca heading straight towards Tirana. The room at the Hotel Central in the capital cost more than he imagined. The hotel was still used by the regime in its heyday, to accommodate the nomenklatura and diplomats who came from outside, to give an illusion of well being, comfort and out of there would not be traced in any other part of the city, between the common people. That story was also told over the yellowed walls of the room assigned to this unexpected visitor, the only guest. Then he told the solevate carpet edges, light bulbs missing in abundance from the large crystal chandeliers, the uniforms of the staff remained greyed, grumpy and listless.
arrived at the hotel that was almost evening, Luke asked to eat a sandwich, whatever. He was told that everything was over, that the kitchens were closed for months: first had to empty the cupboards, then the staff was also fired. Needless to those days charged for services that no one would take.
Luca decided they still sit at the bar, a beer in some way remedy and drinking it to him the idea would come. After a while, 'who was there to point the rim of the glass, he noticed that in that room exterminated, delusions of grandeur of a regime that thought forever, a group of Albanian boys sat on the other side of the counter, drinking beer and eating toast. Luke came over to ask if I could get one.
Slavic She brings us our meals. Luke leaves the computer access is a photo from the air a bit 'crumpled: he's there, thin and younger. It is on the roof of a house and takes his arm around the shoulders of a man down, his face marked: it looks older, but then maybe it is not that much. He'll start it one morning in haste from Tirana to Durres, on a train overloaded with people; Luca to look around to try to understand where will all these people, because in a country that seems to have remained static for centuries as if everyone, one day, suddenly, had woken same time.
(Continued)
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