CORPORAL PUNISHMENT was ruled out entirely, while sanctions of an economic nature (“No allowance for a week”) were dismissed as vulgar, and prohibitions (“No motor scooter for you, it stays in the garage for a month”: sure, but then if your son used it anyway, without telling you, how could you react to that without availing yourself of punishments that had now been abolished? Once overthrown, it’s not as if the ancien régime springs back to its feet at a word of command . . . once the institution is liquidated, the servants of the glebe don’t just come trooping back, in dribs and drabs, one day on, one day off . . .) were deemed counterproductive or impracticable, so parents were left with minimal room to maneuver in terms of punishing their children—without stopping to delve into the merits of their transgressions or whether the youngsters deserved it, which is a separate chapter. No one knew any longer what was right and what was wrong, or perhaps we should say, what common sense concurred was, in principle, absolutely right and absolutely wrong. The sacrosanct school of dialogue had taught that every single point of cohabitation and way of life, every so-called value or duty or principle was subject to negotiation; but if, when all these civil discussions drew to a close, you had been able to come to an accord, a compromise that could make the punishment superfluous, then what? What punishment would then be applied, and how—and most important of all, in the name of what, given that the punishment in and of itself contradicted the path followed to reach it? The age-old family art of scolding and punishment would have to be rewritten from scratch but, instead of a new edifice, solid and consistent, what emerged was a tangled mess, an eclectic tangle of different pedagogical styles, old repressive adages mixed with liberal slogans, screaming fights and scenes and scoldings, the occasional face-slap administered for the most part out of exasperation and received as a personal offense devoid of any educational value, sob sessions, not only for the children, but also for the exhausted parents. The cold administration of punishment is replaced by a generalized state of nervous irritation. When we no longer knew what to do and who was supposed to do it, since our fathers by now recoiled from what till then had been considered a privilege but also a duty, the exercise of the punishment power, something they had held on an exclusive basis for millennia, a new attitude surfaced in the history of family relations, namely, indifference, a reluctance to interfere, to judge, and consequently, to impose sanctions on one’s children’s behavior, indeed, a preference not to know what that behavior even was, to intentionally remain ignorant of it, limiting oneself to a policy of laissez faire, laissez passer that, translated into domestic language, was something along the lines of “oh, just do whatever the hell you think best,” sometimes pushed out to the edge of “as long as you don’t bust my balls,” roughly equivalent to the vague precept “for the love of God, just don’t get into the kind of trouble that could lead to serious and lasting consequences.” Let me say it again, aside from some families that are truly and stubbornly old-school, and some other families that are instead so progressive as to create a sort of latter-day phalanstery, what prevailed in nearly all of them was a hybrid, a sort of patchwork of rules, customs, prohibitions, and obligations of various extraction, veering and fading and in perennial transformation, so that what was forbidden one day might be allowed a week later, and so on for several weeks, only to return to its previous outlawed status, or maybe that was true for a son but not a daughter . . . Some parents were convinced that they’d discovered that putting on an afflicted and discontented attitude with their children, without saying a thing, or almost nothing to explain their attitude, was more effective than the open display of anger . . .
IN THOSE YEARS, the intoxication of defending tradition to the furthest extreme and the opposite thrill of shaking off tradition were mixed: generally we think of only the latter approach as somehow exalting, capable of generating euphoria, an unstoppable wave that rises higher and higher, until it sweeps away the old state of things. But truth be told, reactionaries and religious bigots were starting a riot all their own, a visceral response, a savage sentiment that came from the gut . . . that fed on desire much more than it was fueled by reality. In fact, nobody gave a damn about reality. It wasn’t a situation with (demented) idealists on one side and (prudent) realists on the other: everyone was equally deranged. And in the demonstrations that filled the streets, where one might expect the community spirit, the collective soul, to prevail, in reality everyone was fighting for themselves alone, shouting and marching for themselves, seized by the thrill of liberty, a delirious fever of the ego that lusted for its independence, its own enjoyment. Even those seized by a nostalgia for order and authority were shaken by the violent fever of individual initiative, the determination to triumph whatever the cost—be it one’s own life, or someone else’s. Everyone could afford the luxury of desires, but these individual desires were further fueled by shared actions. One mistreated oneself and others with the same indifference. Everyone was alone, facing off with the dizzying risk of “living life.”
Alone, and yet together with many others, lifted high on a collective wave.
THE SAME YEAR as the principal event around which this book revolves, the maximum concentration of simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous was attained, to use the brilliant expression coined by the philosopher of history Ernst Bloch, and that is to say, the miraculous coexistence and convergence in the present instant of large slabs of the past, dating back to the postwar years, and an equally substantial chunk of the future, at least extending forward to the turning point of the millennium. Half a century was compressed into a single year, in such a way that an observer could turn his gaze backward or forward, with an incredible depth, experiencing a sense of continuity and one of rupture, neither of them ever previously experienced. Time had extended, covering a very broad span, and then, suddenly, contracted, crushed, the sort of thing you see when those boulders are cut open revealing subsequent layers, forming serpentine curves of different colors.
After the fireworks celebrating the famous New Year’s Eve of 2000, time stretched out again and events began to return to a spacing that corresponded to their actual cadence, the events that hadn’t crossed that barrier, if even by a short span of time, slid backward down the steep slope of the past millennium, and the future returned to its process of churning up prophecies.
THEY SEEMED LIKE DEMANDS that sprang from difficult living conditions, but in fact they were the product of at least a partial liberation from those conditions. The student protest movement is living proof of the matter. That such a vast social group could dedicate itself to protesting against the established order meant that they, in plain fact, that is to say, in their condition as students, not laborers, had been freed of the basic necessity to provide for their own subsistence, a necessity that had been taken care of by the preceding generation. The established order against which they were rebelling was, in fact, the first in human history to create spaces of freedom, first of all, freedom from need, sufficient to facilitate the rebellion instead of hindering it. Whereas in the past the rebels, in small clandestine groups, challenged oppressive regimes, and their struggles almost always ended on the gallows or before a firing squad, in the mass student movements of the prosperous nations, they were fighting against a system and an economic model that had allowed those who were protesting against it to find themselves at age sixteen or eighteen or twenty in a school classroom or a university lecture hall, instead of in a manufacturing plant or tilling the fields. (In Italy the successive transition, trying to emerge from this contradiction by resolving it in a radical manner, was to go back in time, in a certain sense, tracking back thirty years or a century or even a century and a half, that is, to the old custom of underground groups, and the armed struggle. The student movement, as such—undermined by its own incongruous social composition, and the fact that it had too long breathed the overrich and inherently unstable mixture of demands for freedom and pleasure, on the one hand, and violent practices and authoritarian asp
irations, on the other—dissolved, handing the initiative to paramilitary vanguard groups that fought their battle, taking inspiration from the Carbonari, the nihilists, or the partisan formations. And sure enough, after roughly a decade of relative tolerance, the state police and judiciary unleashed a campaign of repression, and this time it was the real thing, inflexible, nineteenth-century in persuasion and method, uninterested in the fine print, unconcerned about spilling blood, but with one main difference: instead of being sent to the gallows, the rebels who were captured alive were given life sentences. And so, in the course of just a few years, this alleged revolution failed.)
THE PROBLEM AROSE when the things that had been thought or said till then also began to be done. The threatening slogans began to be implemented. It marked the end of a hypocrisy and the beginning of a collapse. The structure was unable to withstand the impact of the truths that it had been built to guard against; and so quite soon it was inevitable that people would begin to yearn for the old hieroglyphic world, whose sloppy arcane rules, for better or worse, had held up for multiple generations, specifically because they had rejected any embarrassing truths.
WHAT IS IT that we were searching for? What was everyone looking for back then, what is it they’re still looking for, or at least so it seems, searching, still searching for? Aside from justice, an idea so generic that it includes versions of opposite polarities, I believe that what each and every individual was seeking with all his might was Recognition, Acceptance, Indulgence, Approval, Redemption.
AND THE QUESTION “Who am I and what am I doing in this world?” even before it ever expected an answer, was really designed to find someone who might listen, hoped to be taken seriously by someone, a friend, a couple of friends, comrades, classmates, a girlfriend, a priest or a doctor, or anyone who might answer a call dialed at random. People who found not one of these figures, because they were as shy and prickly as a cactus, or more demanding than an English lord, would eventually address that question to a book, or else in the darkness of certain film forums, in the presence of a black-and-white film, like say L’Atalante or Day of Wrath or The Killing or Destiny or Pierrot le Fou or Wild Strawberries or The Lost Weekend or Antonio das Mortes (which was in color, however) or Fists in the Pocket or The Red and the White or The Swindle or Gioventù, amore e rabbia (called that only in Italian, originally known as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner).
THERE, THAT’S RIGHT. There was an age. That age. The age of the saturnalia. The golden age. There was an age when no prohibitions existed, no punishments existed, no laws, either, and the ones that did exist were confidently ignored or broken. An age when all social differences had been abolished, not in reality, of course, but in words, threats, and dreams. That’s already something, in fact, it’s a great deal. If something’s easy for you to say, then you go ahead and say it. You face up to the intolerable with words, if there’s no other way. It was a primordial age in which you could easily lose your life and just as easily take ownership of it, take possession of the life that others told you was already yours, but it wasn’t, and the only way to seize it and call it your own was by sheer force. You had to reach out take possession of your life, by force. Force counted for a lot. It’s not that punishments no longer existed: but now, instead of suffering them, you were the one who had conquered the right to administer them to those who deserved them. Who made that decision? Who were the guilty parties? And guilty of what? That was up to you, you decided, you and your handful of comrades. From the base. In a meeting. There was a general proliferation of spontaneous tribunals. Tribunals that issued sentences, and then carried them out. Some of those sentences were death sentences. Sometimes, only a few seconds passed between sentence and execution, that is, the person sentenced to death learned of his sentence at the very instant it was carried out. From a blessed absence of law, we therefore slid into an excess of it. Everyone judged everyone else. And sentenced them, too. It was a vast open-air tribunal. The state regained control and judged all those who had set out to judge in its place. There was an exponential proliferation of warrants, arrests, verdicts, sentences, mandatory life sentences, exemplary executions and punishments, and reprisals. “Strike one to educate one hundred.”
7
THE PROBLEM WITH CONTEMPORARIES is that they’re with you for the rest of your life. It’s not like any of them age any faster or slower than you, so that you can somehow break free of them: not a bit of it, if someone is the same age as you when you’re fifteen, they still will be at age fifty or sixty. From your desk at school till the day you retire, the distances remain unchanged. And this is ridiculous and tremendous. Whatever you might do to try to differentiate yourself, the chronological alignment persists, the clocks all tick in unison. You can go to the South Seas, become a slave dealer, change your sex, have six wives, or become a priest, but your contemporaries follow you outflank you wait for you around the corner, their faces covered with synchronized wrinkles. The gap in all the various aspects of life can become enormous in the meantime: there are some who are millionaires and others who don’t have enough money to buy dinner, this one’s on the front pages of the newspapers for murder, for bribes, because he’s a cabinet minister or because he won first prize at Cannes: no matter what, next to each of them, invisible, are his classmates, as if for the year-end class picture. Certainly, there are those who might stumble, sprawl by the side of the track, fall sick or even die, but that’s simply the exception that confirms the rule that the others continue marching along in line so that, seen in profile, you’d say they were all one single person.
There was a time when this unbreakable generational affiliation was marked by the intervals between wars: the ones you fought together with your contemporaries or narrowly avoided, as well as the wars you witnessed with the clear eye of childhood. Entire draft years recognized themselves and one another in the flickering light of a bombing raid. I think it was Heinrich Böll who commented ironically (in all seriousness) on the foreseeable employment crisis among the makers of gravestones in Germany that would begin in the mid-eighties, when one might have expected a wave of deaths by old age from the generation of Germans that had instead been mown down during the Second World War. A shortfall of millions of graves: a missing link, a glaring gap in the ranks of time. And, in the final analysis, a considerable spike in unemployment among the marble cutters and engravers. The dead walked arm in arm with their dwindling number of living contemporaries. In the last half century we continued, out of inertia and habit, to imagine that the dotted lines of the generations would fall along the fault lines of outbreaks of war. In the absence of wars in the West, a number of evocative surrogates have been identified: the student revolt of 1968, and then in certain countries, the years of terrorism (the “years of lead”), that is, events that resonated powerfully throughout society, even though they directly affected only a minority of the population, giving those who lived through them the sensation of experiencing a time that brought them all together, especially once that time was left behind them and, in spite of it all, missed. Key dates from which you could reckon and recount a “before” and an “after.” Hence the typical postwar phenomenon, of reducismo, or veteran’s syndrome, which marked the so-called sessantottini, or sixty-eighters, so indelibly: the line of the awkward slogan, “those years were formidable.” Jesus, yes, it must have been hard to shake loose of that band of brothers of their contemporaries! Scratch away the demographic proximity that continued to push them forward, all in a single line, like the croupier’s rake pushing the chips along the green felt, even when their fates had diverged to an inconceivable degree: one had become the undersecretary for agricultural policy, another is a television host, a third is in prison, but they’re all united by the bags under their eyes and the old gray locks of hair, hallmarks of an era that was thought, rightly or wrongly, to have been heroic.
I’M TEMPTED to wonder what impact we had on the world, or, to take it down a notch, on Italy, on the city,
on our quarter, on our workplace, in my circle of friends—there must be some circle, however small, where my presence left a mark, for better or worse, an imprint . . . and, for that matter, the 1970s, a decade I entered at age thirteen and left at age twenty-three, decisive years, what did they produce that was any good? Any good for the collective, I mean to say, and not just for that teenager and that young man?
IT ISN’T TRUE that feelings and dreams are always subjective. There are such things as objective feelings and dreams, especially collective ones. What do we lose by being born in a certain year instead of, say, not even an entirely different generation, but just three or four years before or after the year we actually were born? Or, for that matter, what do we gain? Into what events do we slide unconsciously or happen to lurch into unexpectedly, and what kind of a moment was it: the right one or the wrong one? Does the wave of the new hit us and drown us, or does it lift us upward, into the heights, if we have the right age to ride it, neither too young and naïve but also not too mature and already part of the mechanism, cynical?
My father, born in 1926, was too young to go to war, and then he caught the economic boom times that followed, at the prime of his strength and energy, at its full. I, theoretically, could have done the same thing, in the years when so many of my contemporaries stuffed their pockets (I was born in Rome in 1956), during the new twenty-year era of expansion between 1980 and 2000, since I was the exact same age as my father was when he stuffed his pockets full, but the miracle wasn’t repeated. Why not? Perhaps for two essential reasons: the first is that the family pockets were in fact already sufficiently full that I no longer felt such a powerful urge to stuff them any fuller; and yet, for that matter, those family pockets were not stuffed so extraordinarily full as the pockets of a genuinely wealthy man, of someone who can live off the interest of their estate, or a captain of industry, that I might feel the obligation to compete in the amassing of wealth, or the need to hand down a mighty financial empire. None of all this. As the scion of the family, in other words, I had no obligation, of the sort one might have felt either toward great poverty or great wealth—to emancipate oneself from the former, or to conserve and grow the latter. Neither a poverty to be stamped out nor a prestige to be expanded could influence my decisions. And so I chose a nonprofession, a noncareer.
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