G – Good bye

25 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

Bip. Bip Bip. The automatic door of the train starts to close. In my mind still the last words I told her: ‘I am a crazy man’. She had looked at me and with a slight smile and had replied: ‘Could be worse’.  Now the door is closed and whatever I want to reply will stay this side of the glass window. I look at her. Our daughter is holding her hand and looking at me with an interrogative expression as she would be asking: ‘papa’ where is this train bringing you?’

The train moves. I put a hand on my lips and then touch the glass while the two of them disappear from the frame. I walk down the aisle and sit at my place. I close my eyes and fall asleep in just few seconds.

I wake up when my station is announced. There is still time. Stretch my harms and get my bag. The train stops. Doors open and I am on the platform with just two other passengers. I feel suddenly alone and the urge to get back on the train and the safety of travelling in between destinations.

The car is parked where we left it. I start it but do not want to listen music for the time being. Just 25 km and I will be at our cottage. A smooth ride on a country side road. I drive slowly and arrive in 45 minutes. I crossed just two cars on the way and the feeling of solitude intensifies. But maybe, I think, that is what I need right now.

I park the car get my things and walk to the cottage. When I open the door and enter let the bag fall on the floor with a ‘thund’ and take a deep breath. I then turn around and walk out on the terrace and watch the familiar scenery of the lake and trees.

‘I did not sleep well’, is my first thought the next morning. I get up and carry my bad mood downstairs and put on the coffee machine. Get out on the terrace and feel the chilly air on my skin. Stretch a bit and smell the coffee from the inside which lifts somehow my mood.

I get ready to write. The laptop on the table. One more cup of coffee and the CD by Haruka Nakamura. I write for about two-two and half hours with the CD playing again and again its 13 tunes. I stand up and realize that the sun shines in between clouds and think that it may be a good idea to walk a bit in the forest. I put on my wellingtons, long sleeves shirt and start to walk following the lake side. I decide to head to the big huge stone which is right on the water and where we had pic nic several times during the summer.

I step on old and dry branches and my steps are followed by an echo of crac, crac, crac. I also step on soft moss which in some points is as think as a carpet. I protect my face with the hand and move branches aside. I am now just 40 meters from the stone and see that somebody is sitting on top of it wearing kind of dark clothes. ‘Damn, a Russian fishermen’, I think as such and encounter would disturb the solitude that I have searched for some time now. I consider whether to turn back or continue but when I move my first step a branch breaks with a loud crac and can see that the person on the stone turns and look in my direction. There is no going back anymore.

The branches makes it difficult to to see if it is a man of a woman and only when I am really close I recognize him as my eyes fill with tears and the whole forest and stone picture blurs into one watery painting: ‘it is you’.

When I recover I see he is looking at me from the stone and smiles. He tells me to go up the stone and so I do as following orders not yet able to speak a word. I sit there in front of him. I look at my brother not just in the eyes but his harms legs hairs as to check if this would not be just a dream. ‘It is real’, he says. I relax a bit hearing his familiar voice and step into this non-dream. He then explains that only now and then there is a possibility to meet once more.  As I have kept talking to him in my mind for all these years, here he is. Until afternoon is all we have, he says without a trace of emotion.

I try to regroup my thoughts. ‘So, how are things? How is life?’, he asks me. While I search for words for a few seconds,  I hear the wind gently shaking the top of the trees above us. Hear some birds singing. The small waves hitting the stone below us. Hundreds of images flash in my mind in few seconds a whole story partly told and mostly untold. I see  my daughters, I see her, I see his son, I see our past, mine and his. I hear and see all this and feel part of it and understand what it means to let it go: ‘Life is good’… and so we start talking and we talk until the late afternoon when we finally say good bye.

O – Old people

19 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

‘We are both so old’, I think looking at our hands. The thin skin that wraps the bones as a glove. The wrinkles on our fingers. The blue veins. Yet the same feeling of holding her hands as long ago. We are sitting on this small beach made by millions of tiny corals pieces. Sitting at the edge of the water, sipping beer from two bottles. Soft waves reaching the shore in the quiet night. The few rooms of this hotel behind us in this hidden place on this tiny Island.

We are sitting next to each other. My right shoulder is almost, just almost touching hers. We are both bare feet and enjoying the nice feeling of the coral gravel on our feet and toes. We stare calmly at the water.

‘Do you remember when we have been here last time?’, I ask. ‘Yes, I do. How long has it been?’, she wonders as speaking with herself as if running the movie of her life in her mind in a couple of seconds . ‘‘I thin it is maybe twenty six years. It was when we had just arrived here for my project.’

‘Yes’, I say, ‘we were here with the girls. They were still small. How old were they?’. ‘Maybe five and three.’, she replies.

I take a sip of beer while sinking into my memories.  ‘I remember we were sitting here. You had got two beers for us. We sat and looked at the water as we are doing now. I started then to talk something about emotions. Do you remember?’

She turns and look at me. Smiles. ‘Yes, I remember.’, she recalls, ‘You said how great was your need to express emotions and that you had not done it for so long and you were just learning how to do it.’

‘Yes’, I say with a kind-of-embarrassed smile recalling that conversation long ago. ‘Salinger would have said that I was in the middle of my Blue Period‘, wasn’t I?’.

‘Yes, you were and it lasted for some time, I remember.’ She pauses for few seconds as to recall images and words. ‘How many evenings you kept me awake to talk about you and how you were trying to explain to yourself what you did and what you did not do.’

‘Yes.’ I say and stare up the horizon to the stars which seem to want to dive into the sea tonight. Take a sip of the beer which is now almost warm.  ‘Yes, it was my Blue Period’, I think within myself. It lasted for some months. It then disappeared as it came, all of a sudden. I remember trying to explain what I could not grasp for myself. I remember, me longing for love within me, love for myself first of all.

I am in my thoughts when I feel she is moving next to me.  ‘I am getting a bit cold’, she says. I take the pareo which is next to me and put it on our shoulders. ‘Are you better now’. ‘Yes, I am’. I take a deep breath under this starry night and feel the scent of her white hairs resting on my shoulder.

Alphabet stories

19 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

It is hot. The sound of the crickets is loud from the garden immersed in the tropical night. I tried to keep my eyes closed and find the sleep within my thoughts but it does not work. I put my hands under my head and look at the ceiling through the thin mosquito net which hags over the bed. I follow the lines drawn by the shadow of the window frame. I close my eyes once again but know that the sleep will not come. It has been like this for some time now.

Somebody walking in the silent street. I can hear the flip flops which are dragged on the asphalt with a sound that is magnified by the outside silence. A late night in on of the few bars in the barangay where we live. I wonder whether a ways to claim the sleep back the sleep would be to go to one of those bars or maybe one in town and get really drunk after so many years. Then I think about the headache the next day and the churning stomach and decide that is not a good idea after all.

I turn to my right. She is sleeping peacefully. Breathing softly. She is under the thin cotton blanket . No matter what temperature we are living in she still needs to be under a blanket.

‘Good you can sleep’, I whisper to her and turn my head and find that the shadows of the window frame are still there on the ceiling, above the blue mosquito net. The crickets still singing. All quiet. The flip flops that passed next to the house hopefully in front of  a door and the man or woman wearing them sleeping inside a house and finding some peace.

I take the wrist watch to check the time: 2:21. I decide to get up.  Lift the side of the mosquito net, put my feet on the warm wooden floor and sit for few seconds thinking what to do. I stand up and get my laptop. I glance at the bed before closing the door and switch on the light of the kitchen table. I sit, lift the screen up and start the laptop.

I have had this idea in mind for some days now. Instead of trying to find a sleep which was not there and why not to start writing short stories, maybe following the letters of the alphabet as Goffredo Parise did in a book that I loved very much: Sillabario.

Slow Economy

17 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

Frase tratta dalla recensione del nuovo libro di F. Rampini, Slow Economy:

‘E questo bel saggio del nostro inviato analizza proprio il “passaggio di consegne” da Ovest a Est. Quando descrive il suo viaggio da Pechino a New York, scrive che è stato «come fare un salto nel passato». Il vecchiume dell’aeroporto e degli aerei newyorkesi, il decadimento della rete stradale-autostradale, il metrò scassato e maleodorante sono i segnali che in fatto di infrastrutture la Cina stravince la sfida con l’America. E questo confronto sorprendente, induce Rampini a indicarci la strada per ritrovare la modernità e l’efficienza smarrite.’

Proprio quello che ho pensato al mio arrivo a NY il mese scorso dopo essere passato negli utlimi mesi per Hong Kong, Singapore e Bangkok. Poi ovviamente bisogona anche pensare alla liberta’ di stampa e di idee. Ma l’idea del viaggio nel passato andando verso occidente dopo tanti anni che vado verso l’oriente mi sembra interessante.

What Have I Lived For

12 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

This was written by philosopher Bertrand Russell at the age of 84:

‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.’

How do you hug in your country?

3 November 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

I am standing at the departure area in Noi Bai airport in Ha Noi. People come and go carrying luggages and looking for the monitors which display the check in counters. Young Vietnamese men and women wear cotton jackets with a company name printed on them. It is the company which is sending them to work overseas. They sit in groups on their luggages. They have probably arrived too early and the check in has not yet started. They look like factory workers on a shift break with their uniforms, sitting sipping imaginary green tea. One very young man arrives accompanied by his all family. Several generations accompanying him for his departure to who-knows-where: grand mother, mother, father, sisters and brothers. They all look nervous. The good bye, the departure for an unknown country maybe in the middle east.

I observe the group. They do not exchange many words. At one point the mother gives a shy hug to his son. A very quick hug, with her harms around his waist. She does not look at him while hugging and he also looks somewhere else a bit embarrassed (or maybe touched but he cannot show that). He then bends down takes his luggage and move to the check in. It is all happening too fast and tears starts to fall from his mother eyes. I am touched as well. She takes paper napkin from her trousers and dries her eyes but it does not work. She sobs a couple of times. I look at her family members. Some look at the brother. Some talk to each other, but nobody hugs her or put and harm around her shoulder. Why? I almost feel going there and do it myself.

It is obvious that different countries have different rules when it comes to exchange of emotions. Hugging is not something you do in Vietnam or only very rarely. It is too much linked to showing emotions.

Where I come from, Italy, hugging is more common among male friends or relatives. In other cases with people you meet, or female friends, and so on a cheek to cheek kiss is what is more common and often substitutes a hug.  In Finland, on the other hand, kisses are not very common or even rare. While a hug with a certain careful distance between the bodies, avoidance of cheek touch and a slight tapping of the hand on the shoulder is more acceptable. In the UK nice hugging and tapping among colleagues and friends.

Different places, different habits and how many words can a hug say when there are feelings I think while the mother leaves from the glass door of the airport. Her thoughts for his son and the memory of a shy hug at Noi Bai airport.

On the way to Doha

28 October 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

A week ago. I’am boarding the TG fly from Manila to Bangkok. Walk in the aisle looking up for the row number, holding my boarding card in one hand. I must have looked at the number printed on it at least 50 times an yet I keep on looking at it and then look up to search for the right row. Why can’t I remember these plane seats numbers?

I reach it, 34 aisle seat. A Filipino lady is next to me. She looks nervous. I store my luggage up, sit and notice that she is looking at the middle seat row. Another lady is sitting there and they both look at me. They are friends and want to sit  next to each other. So I offer my seat and move to the middle three seat row. They are happy and smile. Do not speak English though. I seat down and notice that at my right side sits a young Filipino lady, small, kind of petite type. Black t-shirt, light brown trousers and simple sandals. Longish black hair. ‘Hi’, I said. ‘Hi’, she replies in English with a shy smile. A stewards comes waving immigration cards for Thailand. The young lady does not know for what they are and I explain that she should fill them only in the case she stops in Bangkok. ‘No, I am going to Doha’. A Filipino young woman on the way to Doha can mean several things. Join the large Filipino expat community living there and working in hotels, or being a made or nanny in the house of some rich families or else be on the way to become a bar girl. There must be several other options, but these are  the three that come to my mind.

‘I am going to join a friend in Doha’, she tells me when we are are flying over the South China sea. ‘What is she doing’, I ask. ‘She is working in tourism sector, in a kind of company over there’, she explains but to me it sounds she does not know much about it. ‘What kind of visa do you have’, I ask. ‘A three months one until end of the year’, she says taking from her bag all the documentation she is carrying to enter Qatar. She finally finds the pink A4 page which is the temporary visa. Processed from Qatar as Filipino immigrants must have a connection there in order to enter the country. Arabic words from right to left and their English translation from left to right. Read her name, Maria Lourdes. She is born in 1982, so she is 27 years old but looks younger.

‘What will you do after December, when the visa will expire?’. ‘I hope to find a work before then and then change my visa’. ‘How long do you plan to stay there?’. ‘Some years’.

I ask if she has been overseas before. I am a bit surprised when she says that she has been living in Japan, near Tokyo for 5 years working as a maid. ‘Why did you leave?’. ‘Japan in the end was difficult place to be’. I imagine her as a Filipino workers in Japan. Maybe lonely. Earning a decent salary, saving and sending money home but cut out from society. Hopefully there were other Filipino staying in the same city or area. At least in Doha is full of Filipinos workers, I think.

So she has been overseas but seems a bit nervous or tense. As if she would not leave again the Philippine but had no choice. The seat belt sign is switched on. At the same time when the captain announces with a calm voice that we will meet a turbulence the plane pliunges several hundred meters. Some people shouts. Mari Lourdes grabs my harm with a nervous laugh. It si all ok in few seconds and we continue to cruise calmly. She keeps holding my harm and tells me that the two lady on our right side shouted in Tagalo something about ‘God save us’. She says this with a smile as she found quite funny the expression they used. I fall asleep and at one point I feel her head resting lightly on my left shoulder and open my eyes. She is also sleeping and I try not to move too much so not to wake her up.

We land in BKK. Grey clouds but no rain. The plane taxis in an open space, so we all have to go down and get the bus to the transfer terminal. I walk down the stair with her. When she sees the bus she asks me if we need to pay for it. ‘No, it is for free. It will bring us to the terminal where you will check the gate of your next flight’. She looks a bit worried. When we enter the bus she looks at the plane and says: ‘But that is the plane that will bring me to Doha. How do I get back to it?’. I tell her that she will have to change plane a larger one as the flight to Doha is quite long.  She is still a bit nervous. We reach the terminal. Walk in the arrival corridor which is 900 meters long in BKK and has little signs. One has to walk either 450 meters right or 450 meters left to reach the transfer desks. So one may walk to the wrong transfer desk and have then to walk back the whole airport to reach right concourse. ‘Follow me’, I say, ‘Let’s go this way’. She looks around a bit amazed of how big is this concourse is with its three levels, the modern architecture and design, the shops, and all these people walking to one gate to another.

We reach the Thai Airways transfer desk. My time is also running out as I have only 40 minutes connection time and have to find Jeff who arrived this morning from London and will continue with me to Hanoi. I read to her the gate she need to go, C5. We pass through a new security check in.  They stop her to open her bag and search it carefully which make her even more nervous. She doe snot look suspicious to me, but will that is the job of the security staff. We reach the corner where I can show her the huge letter C of the C councourse. Point her to that direction and tell her she has plenty of time. Up to this point all her attention was for the airport, the building, the people, the shops. She now looks at me. We stand for a moment in this walking crowd and look at each other. ‘Thank you very much for helping me’ and she extend her hand to say good bye. ‘Nothing to thank’. I take her hand. ‘All the best and good buy. Take care. Ok?’. She holds my hand firmly for few seconds. Strong little hand. We then turn to opposite directions and fade in the walking crowd.

Ha Noi is back. I am back in Ha Noi.

25 October 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

I left Ha Noi with the girls on 6. April this year. So not too long ago. Seems much longer. We live now in anew country. Rented a nice house which has become home. Girls go to the Silliman school and do their prayers and national anthem ceremony every morning. The Silliman beach is 300 meters from our house. Katja works in an interesting project on forestry and local planning.

So Ha Noi. It is 00:49 and I just walked back with my ODI colleague Jeff from Jo Jo’s on 23 Hai Ba Trung to the Horison hotel. It was a half an hour walk in almost empty streets as this town goes to sleep at night. We walked by shadows of motorbikes drivers asking if we wanted a ride. Taxi with the vacant sign on driving slowly to catch the few customers left in the Ha Noi night.

Clear air, the moist warmth of this town all around buildings, trees on the side of the streets, and myself. The sign of being in Asia. Few guards sleeping outside larger shops on two or three chairs aligned to create a sort of bed.  Jeff is telling me about his adventure on a hotel in Uganda facing the Lake Victoria.  At one point a group of 5-6 youngsters on the side of the street near the Temple of Literature. I tense for a second but then realize that in the end this is Ha Noi and it is safe. I would not walk the same way in Phnom Penh or Manila.  This is Ha Noi and have the feeling that there something untold between me and this city. And now I am back.

When we left in April i think I wrote a entry in this blog on the reasons I did not fall in love with the town. But is this story really finished? Actually not. I am back and see sides of the town I did not see when I was here. I walk its streets in the middle of the night. I meet Akiko of UNFPA who knows Katja from the UN staff association and realize the small circle of expat that defines working and living in Hanoi.  Out with Toon and Ha to eat at the Petit Bruxelles and hear about their next move to BKK.  Think that I may be able to overnight at their place when on transit there. Sip a nice coffee on the Highland Coffee at Hoa Kiem lake and enjoy the chill out music while reading a book.   Walk around the Temple of Literature which is now hidden in darkness of the night and holds the secretes of its long history and of people lives who have studied and lived there long time ago. 

Tomorrow this same place will be full of motorbikes, cars, horns, bicycles and hide its serendipitous peace and tranquility for tomorrow night.

I walk in the warm and cool night and walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. Ha Noi is back and I am back in Ha Noi.

Believes, thoughts, and emotions and a sunrise in Dumaguete

13 October 2009
by Arnaldo Pellini
Uncategorised

What does influence our way of thinking? What does determine our believes, our point of view of the world? These are questions that have been around for some time and probably will never cease to be. Each of us has an own point of view and interpretation of reality. When Obama was elected many people were happy. However that election meant something different to all those people because each of them as a particular point of view, a particular way to understand and comprehend that event or define the word change which was used so much during the campaign. If tragedy struck, like the recent floods in Northern Luzon in the Philippines, each individual who lived through that or through TV images sees that tragedy in a particular way. It is like as people see reality in different colors and within each color an almost infinite gradation of green, blue, yellow, red, and so on.

What comes first? Believes? Thoughts? Emotions? They are all interconnected and mutually reinforcing. A friend used to have books on emotional intelligence in her bookshelf (she reads also this blog at times). I always found that the two terms were contradicting each other: intelligence belongs to the realm of rationality, cause-effect thinking, almost by definition void of emotions. Emotions, on the other hand, belong to the realm of what is not rational, the often uncontrolled physical response to an event or a thought thorough a pang in the chest, cold sweat, the feeling of having the heart beating in the throat, trembling. Physical reactions which are triggered by an event or a thought.

I came now to realize how the three are interconnected and that emotional intelligence may be a way to describe in a quasi scientific way the links between believes, thoughts and emotions. It is a way to make sense of this complex relationships among the three.  Believes are defined not only by thoughts but a lot, depending on the individual, on emotions. Emotions are defined by our believes and thoughts. Our thoughts are closely related with emotions and believes. All this, I now realize, at times is difficult to manage and feels overwhelming.

It is funny to think that in the end this is all about each of us, how we are inside, how life influenced us and determined the ways we see and interpret it.  The link between believes, thoughts and emotions is like the colors I mentioned before, which are different for each individual. Some are more inclined to be influenced by emotions, others are more able to put their mind and thinking before emotions. We all build our believes in different ways depending on who we are and what life experiences we lived through. This make us different but at the same time all so similar. The difference being the gradation of colors through which we see reality. A little bit like the sunrise in Dumaguete pictured here, I am sure we all see the colors of it in a slightly different way for, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet , ‘nothing is bad or good, but our mind makes it so.’