Ever getting harder to leave the shelter of the flat. The street was unfriendly territory, aggressiveness in the way people looked at you, in the way they walked past you. I felt endowed in a continuous wave of strain, elusive to avoid. Dirty talking, swearwords, chiefly mastered by brand newcomers, house maids, and ever younger school kids. I first bumped into a skin-head who told me I should die. Then there came an immigrant from some central European country whose clothes revealed his origin. A dusk face, mustached middle age man, who seemed to have aged prematurely, sneaked furtive glances to strangers walking hurriedly close to the fence of the park. Two south-American men searched for who knows what among the debris of a garbage container. There was a nouveau riche woman, thirty-something, talking on the cell phone while walking away from her Audi which she closed from the distance by remote control, not turning her head to check. Three old men passed by, pondering about the latest reality shows on TV, their new found faith, bitching about their inconvenient simultaneity in the various channels they got, their not being able to get the most out of them all. Two African couples approached, talking aloud, laughing to some funny remark someone had said in a language foreign to me. Hordes of guys were carrying flags, some of them sharing identical colours and symbols but from some strategical strip of cloth which was coloured differently, reflecting opposite and confronted nationalities behind. A Japanese took me a picture. A rucksacked, T-shirted American young woman, overweight and sweaty, asked me the way to the bullring. A few bulls were going to die for the sake of the fiesta. Loudspeakers blasted. Football coaches swore. Kids fought. Thieves stole and smugglers smuggled. Car accidents, sexual intercourses, nuclear family fissions, teenagers on the phone, tsunamis and earthquakes and suicide bombers, global warming, and per diem too, euthanasia, abortion, the Pope's health on the headlines, the match of the century, rapists, raped, blowjobs, movie stars, have-beens, celebrities celebrating celebrations, new year resolutions, identities amounting to null, self-esteem, drown, dough, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beauty on her car running over you at the zebra-crossing, stepping outside to show her endless legs meeting somewhere beneath her mini-skirt, laughing at you while you are on the ground and blood pours out of your nose dripping onto your silk shirt, but you can't help a hard-on, and she leaves, and the kids in the corner couldn't care less busy as they are having fun with a supermarket trolley which they crash against the cars parked in the street.
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