Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

  Then, a folder containing eight images of buildings constructed during the fascist regime: the Casa del Fascio in Como; the Victory Monument in Bolzano (South Tyrol); and the Stadio dei Marmi, Palazzo dei Congressi, and Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, all in Rome. The photographs seem to be part of a set of postcards commercially printed with the implicit objective of popularizing these buildings, and the explicit objective of serving as postcards. They have been scratched with some sharp object, possibly an awl or a pen nib without ink, making the buildings look as if they are in ruins: the statues surrounding the Stadio dei Marmi’s track look mutilated; the columns of the Palazzo dei Congressi have fallen, as has part of the roof; the balconies of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana have also given way; the Victory who presides over the monument bearing her name in Bolzano has lost her wings and the inscription at her feet has been mutilated, leaving only the phrase “Hic patriae multas siste signa” with no reference to language, law, or culture any longer; the Casa del Fascio in Como has collapsed in the middle, splitting into unequal halves. He must have scratched the margins of some of the images in an attempt to make the buildings look overgrown with vegetation, though it’s impossible to see what sort of vegetation, whether native to the Italian peninsula or some invasive foreign species. That depends in part on your interpretation of the images, which must have been created around 1944 at the earliest, as one of them—the photo of the Casa del Fascio—is decorated with swastikas, whose presence in Italy was relatively rare before that date. In most of the images the people who appear in front of or near those buildings—who seem unaware they are being photographed—have been left unscathed, but in a couple the people, not the buildings, have been scratched to the point of almost disappearing. One of those shows a mother and child; the arm that unites them has been erased.

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  (The ruins seem to be the result not of an unexpected event, but rather of years of neglect; if there’s an accident here, in the piece, it is political: corruption, apathy, arrogance, etc.)

  A series of gialli thrillers published by Arnoldo Mondadori, and amended by the Borrello. This “piece” seems to reveal a crisis of some sort in Borrello’s political ideas. In the first, a translation of Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie, the lines have been hand numbered; the author’s note, inserted on the book’s final pages, consists of only a series of numbers—I quote the beginning: “74, 11, 67, 70, 12, 22, 40,” etc.—which is disconcerting at first but later explained when you return to the book, because the numbers correspond to the lines in the text that reveal the crime. (The same procedure appears in a second copy of the Agatha Christie book, in which the selected lines do not reveal the crime plot but rather read as a completely different work, primarily focused on a romantic relationship between Elinor Carlisle and Peter Lord.) A third giallo, Over My Dead Body by Rex Stout, has some pages torn out; inserted in their place is a small typed booklet with a list of words taken from the original work that, hypothetically, allow you to determine—this writer didn’t bother—who the murderer in Stout’s book is: “women,” “diamonds,” “adoption,” “British,” “sword,” “especially,” “glove,” “chocolate ice cream” (?), etc. In the next giallo, Il mistero di cinecittà by Augusto De Angelis, every word in the text has been crossed out, except for those that make up—spread out over the entire book but distributed into two grammatically correct independent clauses—the sentence “The monkey ate my hand; the monkey devoured my grief,” which serves as the title for this series of amended books. Something similar happens in the fifth giallo in the series, The First Time He Died by Ethel Lina White, where all the words have been crossed out except for “horror,” which appears fourteen times throughout the text.

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  (These pieces all reveal the author’s passage from the figure of “creator” to that of “modifier,” or director, or however you want to put it. This doesn’t point in a specific direction, and possibly Luca Borrello himself doubted his path, as seen in some relapses visible in works done after the modified gialli. It does seem that, for one reason or another, Borrello no longer thought of himself as a writer; or, more generally, he no longer believed in literature as a “creative” activity. Despite that, almost all his found work has to do with literature, in one way or another. It is also a deeply political body of work, not so much for its adherence to the guidelines of Futurism—the trend that did the most to turn aesthetics into politics, by the way—but rather because the gialli had been banned by the Italian Social Republic in 1943: B.’s use of them seems to point to, as much as or more than the images of fascist buildings in ruins, his discontent or disappointment with fascism. There is no need to mention that if that discontent or disappointment were absolute, then Borrello wouldn’t have attended the Fascist Writers’ Conference in Pinerolo, though there are those who claim he did so precisely in order to demonstrate his opposition and even convince others to join him in his stance. The key, in some sense, is that—as the gialli show—around 1941, the publication date of a good part of the original titles, Luca Borrello (as a fascist writer and, generally, as a writer) no longer seemed interested in holding any stance, because the author was disappearing, emptying himself out, ceasing to occupy the places he’d occupied, whatever they were.)

  A cardboard box containing seven postcards, of the following cities: Rome, Florence, Perugia, Naples, Turin, Trieste, and Milan. The postcards were sent from, respectively, Milan, Trieste, Turin, Perugia, Naples, Florence, and Rome—in other words, the one of Rome from Milan, the one of Florence from Trieste, etc.—all including the phrase “out of place,” which probably lends its name to the “piece.” (In many of them, actually, there is a third dissonance; the text written on the postcard doesn’t correspond to the image or the place it was postmarked. So, for example, the postcard of Milan mailed in Rome talks about a visit to Florence.) This box is the first of Borrello’s works concerned with the customary use of mailed correspondence. The other, entitled simply “> ≠,” is Borrello’s only known concession to the proposal made by Marinetti, in his May 11, 1912, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (i.e., “abolishing” punctuation and replacing it with “mathematical signs”): it consists of the same images mechanically reproduced on large pieces of paper, along with envelopes and stamps to mail them, but the papers are too big to fit inside the envelopes even when carefully folded and, as such, are useless.

  Another giallo, in this case L’uomo dal laccio by Mario Datri; the copy is carefully tied up, making it impossible to read without cutting the threads: if that is done, of course, the “piece” no longer exists as such. The same is true of other works in the series—titled “The Banned Books Segment”—in which the content of the pieces is inaccessible. One piece consists, for example, of what seems to be a book carefully wrapped in newspaper; determining if it really is a book—and which one—would mean destroying the piece, which perhaps constitutes some sort of reflection on what a book is exactly, though one can only speculate on the reasons why Luca Borrello would have believed that reading a work destroys it. In another piece a book’s cover, which corresponds to a translation of The Wall by Mary Roberts Rinehart, seems to have been torn off and replaced by pages from a different work, but the problem is the copy has been sewn in such a way that it cannot be read without cutting the threads; in that sense—and perhaps that’s the meaning of the piece—the book is only its outer walls, in keeping with the title that appears on the cover.

  A series of poems that are made of appropriated and reordered poems by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Ugo Ojetti, Luigi Spazzapan, Renato Guttuso, Quinto Martini, and Orfeo Tamburi; all the poems were published in Mino Maccari’s magazine Il Selvaggio prior to 1939, as the author indicates. In the endnote, Borrello maintains that he considers the original texts “defective” drafts of his own work, in which the authors of the poems would merely be involuntary bit players.

  A short st
ory entitled “The Perfect Goodbye,” whose lines are glued to an envelope in such a way that they make up a rectangle several millimeters thick, almost a sculpture made of paper.

  A variant on the prior idea, with the title “A Landscape of Events,” consisting of the typed transcription of the title poem onto a single line, the verses superimposed to the point of illegibility, a mere inkblot.

  A piece entitled “Incomprehension of the Machine,” consisting of six typed, numbered, and signed pages. According to the author’s note, it is a short story written circa 1938: the author has no other copy of it and it’s not a manuscript, it’s finished. Despite that, the “piece” only takes on meaning when it is dispersed, for which each of the pages has to be sold independently: each buyer acquires something unique, but also something incomplete that forms part of a coherent whole he cannot access. The sale of more than one of the pages to a single buyer is ruled out: the buyer, states Borrello, must be satisfied with a fragment of text in exchange for participating in the production and enjoyment of a work of art, because the incomplete nature of the piece—what Borrello calls “its ‘open’ nature”—and the possibility of reuniting the fragments, which the author rejects but accepts as a logical possibility, is what makes it a work of art. The note goes on for several paragraphs; although sometimes confusing, what can be inferred from it is the distinctiveness of this “hidden” work by Luca Borrello (which postdates his abandoning the Perugian literary scene and, therefore, his “disappearance” as an author): pieces that are neither originals nor copies, neither truth nor lies, that exist as separate entities but depend closely on their environment, their context, and occupy a space outside of the usual categories.

  A small untitled volume made up of rejection letters from the publications L’Impero, La Città Nuova, and Stile Futurista. The letters’ lines have been die-cut in such a way that each of them makes a flap that can be lifted, revealing the corresponding line of text on the following page. The “piece”—it isn’t easy to define any other way, a problem that affects many works produced by Borrello after, for lack of a better word, this “tipping point” in his literary production; “literary” is also a problematic term when characterizing his work—is made up of five pages made up in turn by five paragraphs of five lines each, which offer six hundred and twenty-five possible readings. (The idea may be to demonstrate the interchangeable nature of critical judgment, or simply to mock those who rejected his writing: perhaps the piece has some other meaning. The work referenced here, entitled “The Start of Spring,” has been lost, by the way.)

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  (If this last “piece” sums up the—childish—drama of the writer whose work is rejected, it is a more than appropriate ending to the trajectory Luca Borrello seems to have taken in his “hidden” work, occupying and later abandoning the functions of writer, modifier, editor, and finally audience of the work of art. This trajectory could also be described as a voyage to the kingdom of the dead and the difficult task of returning from there, though in this case the kingdom of the dead would be literature, or art; or as a transformation from fascist writer to antifascist writer, as seen in the visual pieces where buildings of the regime appear in ruins and the use of the gialli, and the later adoption of an “antiantifascist” writer stance (if that stance is fascist or not is a matter of debate). Less controversial, however, is another type of journey, which to this writer seems very eloquent: the transformation of the author into artwork, into his own work. Perhaps the kingdom of the dead, in the end, was the condition of being an author, and Borrello only lived through his final years in order to escape it.)

  Milan

  DECEMBER 2014

  What does it matter that this pure fire merely consumed itself. It sincerely wanted to be pure.

  ANTONIN ARTAUD, “Surrealism and Revolution”

  At first he listens to A/Political and then to the Edgar Broughton Band, to Kronstadt Uprising and Flux of Pink Indians; later he discovers the Mob, KUKL, the Poison Girls and Zounds and Atari Teenage Riot. It all happens quickly, like the music he prefers, deliberately crude but also direct and often violent, and he only adds to the speed with alcohol and sometimes drugs. He lives in Quarto Oggiaro, a neighborhood in northwest Milan, with his maternal grandfather, who for much of his life worked with a team of housepainters. He hasn’t seen his mother in some time; in fact, he doesn’t even know where she is now. Sometimes his mother sends him postcards of lofty and not always beautiful temples in India, Pakistan, or Tibet. At one point she also sent him some postcards from Thailand, during a trip she took with someone named “Richard,” whom she sometimes calls “Rich” or “R” and other times “he,” and the trip must have been rushed because the content of the postcards and the images on them didn’t match up: on the back of an image of the Wat Chaiwatthanaram temple she wrote about her stay in Bangkok, on the back of a photo of the mountains in the Luang Prabang Range, about her visit to the temple, etc. It all seemed very typical of his mother, of his mother’s indifference to formalities and, in general, toward others, including her son: she wasn’t actually interested in sharing her impressions of her trip with him, and she didn’t have time for things like geographic precision; the whole point was to maintain contact with her son but, at the same time, avoid the inconveniences that contact entailed. More than his mother’s lack of interest in him, he was surprised by her desire to keep up the illusion of contact. He hadn’t been an accident exactly, but more of an anchor for his mother at a moment when she hadn’t yet decided whether to give in to her nature and leave, or to teach a lesson to herself and others by staying. His mother was on what she dubbed “a voyage of self-discovery”; he thought it unnecessary to move geographically when what you really wanted—or said you wanted—was to reach a greater “knowledge” of yourself. Perhaps that knowledge would in fact be easier to find when your object of study wasn’t so distracted by mountain landscapes, beaches, and ancient temples, though it’s possible your discovery—if that discovery is possible—would be boring if it took place in, let’s say, Milan’s metropolitan area, where his mother had grown up and which, after meeting his father and conceiving him, she’d abandoned when he was eleven years old. He had only seen her once since then, on a brief visit she made to Milan for some dental treatment when he was fourteen; due to the hygienic conditions and diet in India, his mother had lost many teeth, and seeing her that way made him hate her, as if her neglect had been directed at him and not, as was the case, against herself. That was still during the “Richard”—or “Rich” or “R” or “he”—period, but the man hadn’t come with her; reading between the lines, it seemed to him that Richard and his mother wanted to have a child and for a few days he thought that child would be him. At the time he felt euphoric despite having no interest in India and not liking the idea of living with a stranger; two strangers if you include his mother. They lived in an ashram in some place whose name he couldn’t remember, surviving on what they managed to pull out of the ground or buy off the peasants. Their “guru” was a man who made watches “appear” on the wrists of his followers, his mother said, but he wasn’t as impressed by that as by the other things his mother told him on that visit: practically no one slept in the ashram, as maintaining it took many hours and the rest of their time was devoted to prayer; his mother drank her own urine and ate balls of mud and ash, which she said had purifying effects; some peasants had violently burst into the ashram one night and stolen the two squalid cows that had been providing them with milk; several women who had wandered away from the grounds out of curiosity had been raped by the locals without the authorities doing anything to prevent it or to even pretend they were trying to capture and punish the guilty men. It seemed clear that the world his mother lived in offered no time for the introspection that had brought her there; perhaps the only function of the ashram was to dissuade people, through physical torment and intellectual exhaustion, from the possibility of thinking about thems
elves; if that wasn’t the case, if the objective of the ashram was, indeed, for those who lived there to “find” themselves, it was even more ridiculous, since obviously that life transformed people in such a way that they were incapable of remembering what they’d once been like and what they’d wanted to understand in the first place. He however was already drawn to the idea of being “someone else,” and for a few days fantasized about the life he would have in India with “Richard” and his mother; despite which his mother left alone after her dental treatment, dashing his hopes: the last thing he remembers seeing in the airport was her perfect and therefore completely fake set of teeth. Then his mother again cast out the line of postcards and brief letters that linked her more and more tenuously to him, and he hadn’t thought of her much in three years. “Richard,” “Rich,” or simply “R” disappeared from the correspondence shortly after his mother returned to India, but the personal pronoun “he” continued to show up, first designating some “Markus” and then a “Tobi”—a nephew of Richard, who had left the ashram the year before—and a Spaniard named “José Antonio,” like all Spaniards of a certain age. At some point he understood that there were going to be other men and that he would bear witness to their time as part of his mother’s life, until his mother got old and men stopped being so interested in her, or until his mother stopped writing to him. Their correspondence was one-sided, of course, and was, as a result, all he needed to understand his mother, to achieve that knowledge of herself she’d gone off to India to find. She was the only one writing, with self-detachment but also with no interest in what her son might have had to tell her: none of the letters ever included an address where he could write her back, and it had been some time since he’d stopped wanting to anyway.