And there is no apparent exit to make your way back. Until he meets Merlin, that is, likewise the prisoner of an enchantment that has chained him forever here in the world of the dead. Merlin’s voice hovers in the air like the rustling of branches . . .
MERLIN: Gawain, neither will you ever return among other human beings.
GAWAIN: What are you saying? I’m already among other human beings, I’m free, the Green Knight spared me!
MERLIN: You don’t have to lose your head in order to be lost forever.
GAWAIN: What else am I supposed to have lost? Are you referring to my honor?
MERLIN: Oh, no, you have more than enough honor left over, good knight, but where you are now, honor counts for nothing. This isn’t the world of the living, Gawain. Are you still struggling to grasp what’s happened to you?
GAWAIN: Then . . . I’m . . .
MERLIN: You’ve been ferried over, Gawain! You’re on the other side.
GAWAIN: My brothers, the knights, will come to get me. I’m sure of it!
MERLIN: To them, you’re a ghost, they can see you only when they’re asleep, at night, as you brandish your sword in vain, and in the morning they rub their eyes to erase you from their sight.
Now that I, too, have passed through the straits, through the grindstones of doubt and sorrow and fear, and I’ve emerged from them, far weaker and much reduced, what is left of me? What are the forces upon which I can rely? By now it’s obvious I cannot place my reliance on anyone other than myself, and this causes me a tremendous sense of anguish because I feel that I have been reduced to the minimum viable state of existence by the ordeals I have been put through, alive, certainly, alive but weakened far more than rendered wise and astute. My bewilderment is clear evidence of how little the school of life has taught me. It is true, I have withstood the test in the presence of nothingness, I withstood its impact, and yet I have the sensation that nevertheless, nothingness has taken possession of me. While I was defeating it, it was penetrating me, that’s right, I managed to defeat it only by virtue of its forces, forces that I had taken as my own, forces that had become me. The nothingness that I had—now in front of me, now beside me, like an adversary attempting to catch me off guard—is now inside me.
A PART OF THE EDUCATION RECEIVED was focused on death. Or really, on a life that wasn’t, however, this one. The priests’ continuous referral to the extrasensory world, in class, during mass, in prayers, in the explanations of the catechism, did nothing but emphasize the void that we felt around and inside us. It wasn’t clear what good it did to live or not live, what difference there was, seeing that, after all, eternity was somewhere else entirely, afterward, at the end, and the life we were living now was just a hasty parenthesis. And if the material world was devoid of meaning, well, the promise of heaven struck us as equally empty (and we wouldn’t have known how to populate it with sighing words or vague and glittering images like that of the angels, feathered, golden-haired youngsters), the World Supernal, which awaited us at the end of the exercise, that sort of training ground to which the priests, in their discussions, always overbrimming with promises, reduced life. Theology could teach us to become aware, become conscious of our condition: but not how to get out of it.
(Someone must once have said of the angels that they were actually dead children who had flown up into heaven.)
WHY AM I WRITING ABOUT THIS NOW? About fear and death? Because the news that Cosmo is no longer among the living shakes me down to the roots of my being.
In every modern story, a mythical element is always present, implicit, as if lying in ambush, ready to step forward and take over the story itself.
THE POEM ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER that I never send to Rummo is titled “Steel and Gold” and it focuses on the wristwatch that he was wearing when he threw himself down the stairwell, just like Primo Levi did. It was a Rolex dating back to the thirties or forties: not even the specialized watch repairmen I talked to could tell me the exact name of the model. The model that most closely resembles it is familiarly called the “Ovetto.”
As I tap at the keyboard, glittering on my wrist
is the steel-and-gold Rolex that belonged to my grandfather, the Fascist
who killed himself. The hours are practically illegible on it.
It was fastened to his wrist when he jumped
down the stairwell with its handrail, black
and mournful as his political convictions:
whose values, in the final analysis, he didn’t so much believe in
with any rational conviction as much as he incarnated
them due to a matter of nerves, a mood swing
at the bottom of his dark and tortured heart.
Six floors straight down. No one saw it, but the thud
was heard in every apartment.
Upon impact in the darkness at the foot of the stairs
the fragile gearings of the watch shattered
as did the organs of the man wearing it.
Today a highly paid craftsman, drawing on a supply
of spare parts and cogs now out of production,
managed to get the Ovetto going again, he gave it back to me
insisting on fastening it to my wrist in person
as if it were the shackle on a convict’s wrist:
and as I write its widowed hands
spin around the dial, seeking in vain
traces of the lost hours.
20
AH, MY GOOD SIR, we don’t sleep like we used to, in the old days . . . When we slept like dormice . . .
WAKING AT FOUR to soundless dark, I stare . . .
NO MATTER WHAT TIME I’ve gone to bed the night before, I wake up too early, when it’s still night out and daybreak is far away, at say four, or four thirty, I open my eyes in the darkness and I’m pervaded by anxiety; I take half a tablet of a well-known psychopharmaceutical and wait for it to take effect.
The first times that I took it, within fifteen minutes it made me so indifferent to whatever problems I had, that out of gratitude I wanted to dedicate a poem to it . . .
Now because of overuse, it takes much more, no matter how much I toss and turn in the sheets.
For many years now I have been afflicted with the habit of waking up early. What afflicts me most of all is its uselessness. Since I am neither a baker nor a farmer, much less a poetic soul, I don’t know what to do with the dawn. The bards of early-morning hard work ought to explain to me what they get done in the afternoon, when, that is, they’ve already been at it for eight or ten hours, how they spend their time until dinner, are they still able to work then, do they trot along, spraying energy in all directions? If so, where do they find it? Aren’t they already dead to the world by the middle of the day? And in that case, what benefit have they gained?
Waking up when it’s still dark out scares you.
Now that it takes so much longer, I’ve transformed the time I spend waiting for the benzodiazepine to lay me out into an opportunity for some reading: a rather hallucinatory reading session, gluttonous, unfocused, which gradually relaxes—the body chemistry starts to function, the effect of the pill that I’ve dissolved in my mouth, under my tongue, begins to arrive in short waves, one upon the heels of the other, subsiding each into the next, as I absorb it as if I were sand—there, the waves stop interfering, entangling, it becomes linear, and the relaxation of my nerves starts to correspond with the relaxation of the sentences that line up in orderly fashion without any particular effort or snags, one follows another, while their content becomes less pressing, less important, or maybe it just appears to be what it is, neither more nor less, but just what it actually means, without my having to overload that sentence with meanings, without my having to comment upon it or reject it or be struck by it as a revelation: it passes through me and goes out the other way. Page 123 of the book has leafed past to become page 148 without my being fully aware of just how I got there, who pushed me there, and finally the sublime detachment
that I’ve been waiting for starts to set in, detachment from the individual sentences, from the book that I hold in my hand, from the story told in the book, from the story of my life, which I no longer need to reconstruct, and from the lives of all those around me, and from the toil and tribulations that will begin again when the cell phone alarm goes off, well, I no longer feel any of that, dawn has come and it filters in through the windows but it doesn’t cause any particular fear, it’s just a source of light, it doesn’t give any hope or illusions that might later be painfully given the lie, I no longer expect or fear anything from the new day that’s dawning and I feel no other desire than to go back to sleep for another delicious hour or so, until the alarm goes off again, my head heavy on the cool pillow, the reality around me clearly defined in what is its authentic dimension: meaninglessness, insignificance.
. . . and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse . . .
THE XANAX + NOVEL METHOD (better if it’s a long one, many hundreds of pages . . .) has been working for a long time now, I can safely say that I have not yet been strangled by my dependency. The fact remains, though, that for the past several months, since I bought a digital tablet, and I stopped being able to find large and engrossing novels, or else I began to be frightened by their sheer mass, instead of reading literature I’ve started to peruse online newspapers. Not the news, which at that hour I wouldn’t even understand, but rather the reader comments. I’ve discovered that they are a genuine genre all their own, perhaps not exactly literary, but pretty close. If I’ve developed a dependency, it’s not so much a dependency on the pharmaceutical that tranquilizes me, as much as a dependency on the comments that alarms me. They inform me about the state of things, about the way the world works, about what people think, much more than do the articles they’re only there to gloss and rebut. I have the impression that that’s really the point: not so much the things that happen but what people think about them, how they react, what words they use. And how pissed off they seem to get. Because the commenters are almost always pissed off. Their comments are 90 percent overflowing with rancor and resentment. You would say that rancor is the feeling that these days inspires nine out of ten Italians, nine out of ten human beings, it gets them out of the house in the morning and brings them back home in the evening, makes them breathe and think, and then sit down at the keyboard to twist names and invent nicknames, threaten retaliation, mock, promise the other commenters that they will all soon be “swept away.” Still half asleep, but already sufficiently lucid to be amused and at the same time, horrified, I run my finger down the tablet’s screen, skimming through dozens and dozens of bitter wisecracks, accusations, remonstrances, and retorts along the lines of: you’re all just abject slaves, thieves, miserable lackeys, sellouts, brain-dead, sodden drunks, spies, jack offs. The term “troll” is widely used, a piece of pejorative online jargon that means “an individual who interacts by means of messages that are variously provocative, annoying, off topic, or meaningless, with a view to disrupting communication and sow discord.”
“TROLL”: a word I was fond of and that has always stirred a subtle thrill within me, ever since the days when I first read Peer Gynt in an illustrated children’s edition, which I found at my family’s beach house, a book that I am looking at even as I write, published by Aristea Editrice, translated by Rossana Bagaloni, and I leaf through it now, my emotions at a high pitch . . .
But now I hear that trolls have appeared online? Who are they talking about? Who is it that’s talking? The comments would seem to refer to the original article, which gave rise to the dispute, but by now that’s a hundred or two hundred comments away, the spool of thread has become hopelessly tangled, falling very far from the beginning of it all, and who can even remember what that was about in the first place? By now people only address those who commented right before them, commentaries pile up atop commentaries, in a spiral where you can get the upper hand only by being more aggressive or more sarcastic or funnier . . .
ONE OF THE THINGS that’s been keeping me from sleeping lately is the fact that I’m writing this book. Its subject. Its phantoms. The crime that triggered it in the first place. I hadn’t thought about the CR/M in years and years . . . then someone got back in touch. Came knocking at the door.
When I was a boy, my insomnia was much different, pure, uncontaminated. Preliminary. It was impossible to fall asleep.
At age twelve, thirteen . . . at age fifteen . . . sleepless nights with my heart churning and my mind noisy with clashing thoughts, an enormous, inconclusive, uninterrupted hive of thinking.
In the darkness, continents of thoughts smashed into each other, with a crunching sound, enormous slabs of ice drifting freely. Vain, incessant thought . . . The body calling out for rest . . . the mind hungering. What was I thinking? Actually, nothing. It wasn’t me thinking, it was the thoughts themselves that arrived en masse, swirling like flocks of birds in the winter sky, every so often forming a figure that gave the impression of having meaning, only to dissolve almost instantly.
21
WELL, FINE, the time came. The necessity for this book was born, or perhaps came back to life, ten years ago. It was reawakened like a mummy in a budget horror movie.
ON APRIL 29, 2005, near Campobasso, two dead women are found buried in the garden of a small villa.
AMONG THE PROTAGONISTS OF THIS STORY is Dario Saccomani (the inmates called him “il truffaldino”—the con artist: his projects with the prison had only one objective, to secure public financing).
SACCOMANI: “I am a person who acknowledges in his existence the hand of God.” He founded in Campobasso the association Città Futura, which works in four different fields of social importance: alcoholism, prison inmates, at-risk youth, and sexual problems.
IN THE MEANTIME, in the Palermo prison, the theater and writing workshops were being run by Giuseppe Pittà, a cultural activist who, according to the prisoner Giovanni Maiorano, whenever he heard Angelo tell about his criminal exploits, would simply laugh.
Angelo is the author of a novel, one of whose chapters is entitled “Uccidiamo le pischelle,” “Let’s Kill the Young Girls.” Pittà helped him write it. According to Pittà, most of the things described in Angelo’s book are “products of the imagination.”
LUCA PALAIA, a pimply young man. The son of a Calabrian lifer serving his time in prison with Angelo.
Palaia and Angelo meeting in August 2002 while out on furlough.
ANGELO: “I was captivated by Palaia. Despite the fact that he’d had an unhappy, troubled life, the evil he’d faced seemed to have slipped right off him, he was always cheery, always smiling. Other people in his place would have become embittered, but not him. I developed a crush on him, even though I want it to be clear that there was nothing homosexual about this attachment of mine to Luca. He was like a son to me.”
DURING FURLOUGHS, in Campobasso, after eight in the evening, Angelo lived at the Roxy, a four-star hotel, where he held dinners for his guests, as many as ten people at a time, including (he claims) members of the parliament of the Italian Republic.
PALAIA WAS PREPARING to spend the night with Angelo at the Roxy when the police came calling, for a routine check. A report was filed on that “unclear, turbid situation.” The officers found Palaia’s pajamas in Angelo’s hotel room.
ACCORDING TO THE CHIEF of the Mobile Squad of Campobasso, Angelo, while being interviewed, had no hesitation admitting his homosexual tendencies. Saccomani says that he was bisexual. Guido Palladino (the other accomplice) said that he liked little boys. “Palaia was his type.” It was in any case a morbid relationship, even if Angelo Izzo denies having had any physical relations with him.
AS A RESULT OF THIS INCIDENT, Izzo loses his work-release status and is sent from Campobasso back to prison in Palermo, in the Pagliarelli maximum security prison.
THERE HE ESTABLISHES TIES with Giovanni Maiorano, whom he had previously met in various prisons. Maiorano, from Pugl
ia, had murdered a drug dealer and, it is said, had played ball with his head.
MAIORANO WASN’T THE FIRST to be ensnared by Angelo’s intellectual profile. What profile? one is tempted to enquire. The one established by the fact that he comes from a good family, that he attended university (just one year, actually, then prison). The crème de la crème of magistrates and journalists, both male and female, fell for it, so why not a few hoods and criminals possessing little or no schooling?
“He gave me advice, he’d give me books, and I’d cook for him, I’d give him lunch.” Maiorano becomes convinced that Angelo is a gifted entrepreneur and expert in finance, well connected, and he decides to entrust him with his savings, he’s confident that Angelo will help his wife, Antonella Linciano, and his daughter, Valentina, who happen to live in Campobasso, once Angelo is able to go out on work furloughs again, leaving the prison for his job at the association run by Pastor Saccomani. And in fact, it is none other than Maiorano who urges the two women, mother and daughter, to entrust themselves to “Uncle Angelo,” which is what the young girl will soon call him. He states that he is not jealous, in this case, because it is a well-known fact that Angelo likes young men, not women.
ANGELO MINIMIZES HIS RELATIONS WITH MAIORANO: “We talked and walked together . . . we ate a bowl of pasta together . . . that sort of thing.”
“He wanted to commit crimes with me . . . but I have much more impressive criminal connections, there’s no reason for someone like Maiorano to think he can go into business with me.”
GRADUALLY, as Angelo moves closer and closer to obtaining work-release status again, Maiorano becomes more insistent. According to Angelo, it is Maiorano who tells him to “make use” of his wife—who is a clever sort—however he sees fit, and in exchange to lend a hand. Lend a hand to her and to his daughter outside prison, and lend a hand to him, behind bars.
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