The green revolution
I came back quite tired that night, riding on the bicycle for more than 50 kms in a day is something I was not accustomed to. I am not either during these days. Just the time for a brief shower, then back to my highly demanding social life.
Since I have moved here, a small club of expatriates, free thinkers, some tinkers and really few ladies, although not deprived of aristocratic blood, has gathered around my abode or in the nearby bistros.
A British cockney, whose brilliant career at the bar has not deprived her of some sense of humour, a persian zoroastrian, whose faith will help his country to get ridden of the Ayatollahs, an Italian architect who does not regret to have left the Roman stones behind him, just to describe a meaningful specimen.
I used to meet them on Saturday and Friday evenings, sometimes also on Thursdays, whenever my finances appeared particularly florid, carefully rotating my companions. Not to avoid to get far too much involved in their lives, and problems, but just to be sure not to spend my time alone. Also by recurring to a moderate overbooking.
Strange thoughts were developed in my brain, especially when marauding alone in the heart of town, linking stones and monuments to the war against Prussia, the defeat, the annexation to the Empire and the second, harsher collapse, that brought to the III Reich. I made strange parallels, troubled by the commies waiting for me in the parlour of my family mansion, and my best effort to collect enough money and buy a roof on the other side of the recently rebuilt Iron Curtain.
That evening I had already fixed a date with some locals, including a young fellow with moroccan background. I could not restrain myself, against the common sense, to mention him the arabic graffitis that have amused, with a nuance of exotic adventure, my afternoon.
"No, my friend, sorry", he replied me with his broken English more proper to the bad guy facing James Bond, "but in Morocco we don't have any Green Revolution. We do not shut down our old energy plants, nor we shoot our leaders. We prefer to live wise and prosper". I would have never thought about any inkling to organized riots. At the best I had imagined a gathering of a gang of rappers smoking a joint and showing off scarce civic sense, or disrespect to the local institutions, through spray painting and loud music.
"How could you know that? Have you got any contacts?", the late hour and a couple of beers behind the safety line had definitely killed my concepts of caution and discretion. A Viking, just landed on the shores of Danelaw, would have proved a better practice of diplomacy.
Nevertheless the Moroccan laughed and gave me a hug, he smiled with that kind of complacency common to Mediterranean traders when are going to fraud a tourist. He reminded me of a taxi driver in East Jerusalem insisting about the importance of visiting the birthplace of our Lord Jesus, even if he was a professed muslim activist in a pro Palestinian association created by Soviets in the 1980s and 30 years later supported with the money of European left radicals.
