Clash of Civilizations for an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

by Amara Lakhous

  FIFTH WAIL

  Saturday May 23, 10:55 P.M.

  Today I read an article in the Corriere della Sera with a significant title: “Is the Italian a Dinosaur?” The article analyzes the problem of Italy’s falling birth rate; compared with the other countries of the world its growth rate is very low. The author states that the Italian is doomed to die out in the next century. The solution lies in the increasing presence of immigrants. Maybe Italy should make an agreement with the Chinese authorities to import human beings. There really are a lot of old people in this country.

  Sunday October 26, 11:29 P.M.

  This afternoon I saw Maria Cristina at the station with her fellow-countrymen and she seemed happy, like a fish returning to the sea after a brief agony far from the water. You can’t help feeling sorry for that girl; she goes out of the house only for a few minutes at a time to do the shopping. Maria Cristina suffers terribly from solitude within those four walls.

  Wednesday June 23, 9:58 P.M.

  Tonight I saw a great film on TV, with Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale, which tells the story of a certain Amedeo, an immigrant who works in Australia. The life of Italian immigrants in the past closely resembles the life of the immigrants arriving in Italy today. Throughout history, immigrants have always been the same. All that changes is their language, their religion, and the color of their skin.

  Tuesday October 26, 11:44 P.M.

  Tomorrow Maria Cristina will go to the doctor for an abortion, not for the first time. Stefania is right when she says that Maria Cristina will enter the Guinness Book of Records for the number of abortions she’s had. I wonder if I’m like her, if all I do is abort. Is wailing an abortion of the truth? Auuuuuuuuuu . . .

  Thursday June 3, 10:09 P.M.

  This morning I read an article by the philosopher Karl Popper on the influence of television in our daily lives. Popper maintains that TV has become a member of the family, and that its voice is the most listened to in the whole family. Maria Cristina said to me one day, “TV is my new family.”

  Saturday April 20, 11:52 P.M.

  Tonight I quarreled with Lorenzo Manfredini. I told him to leave Maria Cristina alone. That poor girl lives in a prison. I thought of going to Inspector Bettarini, but I was afraid of causing problems for her, because she doesn’t have a residency permit. That thug doesn’t deserve his nickname, the Gladiator. It’s an insult to Spartacus, the liberator of the slaves!

  THE TRUTH ACCORDING

  TO ANTONIO MARINI

  This morning I waited half an hour for the 70 bus at the terminus on Via Giolitti, near Piazza Vittorio. Finally three buses arrived, one after the other. The drivers got out, paying no attention to the people waiting, went over to the café across from the bus stop, and sat down at a table outside to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and chat. We waited another half hour to leave. Eventually, the drivers got up, climbed into their buses, and drove off! Madonna! Where in the world are we? In Mogadishu or Addis Ababa? In Rome or Bombay? In the developed world or the Third World? Pretty soon they’ll throw us out of the club of rich nations. These things don’t happen in the north. I’m from Milan and I’m not used to this chaos. In Milan keeping an appointment is sacred—no one would dare say to you, “Let’s meet between five and six,” which in Rome happens frequently. In such cases my policy is to say firmly, “We’ll meet at exactly five or at exactly six!” What’s the meaning of the expression “Time is money” if no one takes account of it? The decision to leave Milan and come to Rome wasn’t a wise one. I gave in to pressure from my father: “Antonio, go to Rome, don’t lose the chance to work when you have it, son! Work is precious.” So I accepted the job of assistant professor in the department of modern history at the Sapienza University of Rome. At first I had thought I would stay a year or two at most and then return to Milan, but I resigned myself to the situation when I got a professorship. Now I’m about to retire. How I regret all the years I’ve spent here!

  Rome! The eternal city! Beautiful Rome! Beloved Rome! No, I’m sorry, I don’t look at Rome with the eyes of the visitor who comes for a week or two, tours Piazza Navona, Piazza di Spagna, the Trevi Fountain, takes some souvenir photos, eats pizza and spaghetti, and goes back to his own country. I don’t live in the paradise of tourists; I live in the inferno of chaos! For me there is no difference between Rome and the cities of the south, Naples, Palermo, Bari, and Siracusa. Rome is a city of the south; it has nothing to do with cities like Milan, Turin, and Florence. The people of Rome are lazy, that’s the obvious truth. They live off the fat of the land, exploiting the ruins, the churches, the museums, and that sun which all the tourists from northern Europe are mad about. Imagine Rome without the Coliseum, St. Peter’s dome, the Trevi Fountain, and the Vatican Museums! Laziness is the daily bread of the Romans. Just listen to the dialect they use in conversation: they swallow half their words out of laziness. I get angry when my Roman colleagues at the university call me Anto’, and I say to them, with annoyance, “My name is Antonio!” You just have to watch the films of Alberto Sordi, like Count Max or Il Marchese del Grillo or A Very Little Man, to discover the truth about the Romans. They’re proud of their failings; they aren’t embarrassed to express their admiration for the woman who betrays her husband or the person who doesn’t pay taxes or the delinquent who rides the bus without a ticket! I hate their arrogance. Remember Alberto Sordi’s line “I am me, and the rest of you are less than shit”? That is the true nature of the Romans.

  Isn’t the wolf, after all, the symbol of Rome? I never trust the children of the wolf, because they’re wild animals. Cunning is their greatest talent for taking advantage of the sweat of others. So the people of the north work, produce, pay taxes, and the people of the south use this wealth to set up criminal organizations like the Mafia, the Camorra, the ’ndrangheta, and the gangs of kidnappers in Sardinia. The tragedy is that the north is an economic giant and a political dwarf. That’s the bitter truth. I always advise my students to read Christ Stopped at Eboli, that wonderful book by Carlo Levi, to understand how the south was born into laziness and underdevelopment. Nor has the situation changed compared with the past; the mentality has stayed the same. There’s no point in racing ahead of ourselves, the time has come to admit that the unification of Italy was an irreparable historical mistake.

  Amedeo is an immigrant! To me there is no difference between immigrants and people from the south. Even though I don’t understand Amedeo’s relationship to the south. I’m an attentive observer, I can distinguish between someone who is lazy and someone who wants to work. For example, the Neapolitan concierge, Sandro Dandini, and Elisabetta Fabiani are symbols of the south, with their sadness, their chatter, their underdevelopment, gossip, credulousness, superstition. I’m not a racist. I can quote the great Neapolitan historian Giustino Fortunato, patented southerner, who maintains that the tragedy of the south is the uncertainty of tomorrow. They do not plant and they do not sow, that is, they do not invest. The early bird catches the worm.

  When the concierge told me that Amedeo is from the south I didn’t believe it, because his way of speaking, of greeting, of walking resembles that of the Lombards, the Piedmontese. I didn’t ask where he was from. Such things have to do with his private life, and I have no right to meddle. Once I heard him say, “I’m from the south of the south.” So I deduced that Rome is the south and the cities of southern Italy like Naples, Potenza, Bari, and Palermo are the extreme of the south! We ran into each other often in the history department library at the university. We touched on various subjects regarding the history of ancient Rome, and I discovered that he was very well versed in Roman colonialism in Africa. I saw him reading Sallust’s War of Jugurtha. What caught my attention was his knowledge of St. Augustine. He is obviously a true Catholic. He believes in the values of the Church, in the sacredness of work and family. He also knows the Bible. I recall a long discussion we had of Jesus’ saying “If you continue in my word, then are you my disciples indeed; and you
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” He wasn’t convinced that the truth will make us free. In fact, on the contrary, the truth according to him is a chain that makes us slaves. I know that he is a translator, but I didn’t ask him what language he translates from. I can’t believe that he is the murderer.

  A sense of outrage keeps me from remaining silent: do you know that the residents of our building pee in the elevator? It’s really disgraceful. Certainly Amedeo is not among the suspects, because he never uses the elevator—he prefers the stairs. I’ve frequently advised him not to take the stairs: going up and down all the time can cause a heart attack, according to a study by researchers at the Pasteur Institute. But he paid no attention. I’ve tried quite a few times to organize tenants’ meetings to deal once and for all with some serious problems, especially the problem of the elevator. I repeated that the elevator is a matter of civilization, and that we must establish clear rules for using it: tossing out cigarette butts is prohibited, eating is forbidden, writing obscenities is prohibited, urinating is forbidden, and so on. I proposed putting a sign on the door of the elevator: “Please keep the elevator clean!” But the proposal did not win a majority vote, and afterward the Dutch student Van Marten went off saying, “Such a sign should only be at the entrance to a public toilet!”

  The breakdown of the elevator is a catastrophe that forces us to use the stairs, and is thus an offense to modernity, to development, and to enlightenment! I’ve often tried to convince the other residents, but without success. I said, “The elevator is a means of transport produced by civilization. It saves time and effort, it’s as important as the train or the airplane.” I categorically refuse to walk, to waste time by going up and down the stairs. I read a book recently by an American sociologist who claims that the authorities in Los Angeles decided to eliminate pedestrian crossings because people don’t walk anymore. I wonder: when will we get rid of stairs in Italy?

  Amedeo is a contradictory person: he goes to libraries for research and study, yet he spends hours at Sandro’s. This habit is typical of people from the south: sitting in a café talking and gossiping. We should close down the cafés and force everyone to work. Amedeo was not lucky; if he had lived in Milan he would have had a different fate. Unfortunately, going to Sandro’s has had a negative influence on his way of life. As we in Milan say, “Worse than a Roman.” Even the Dutch student Van Marten has not been safe from the negative cultural and social influences of the Romans. I’ve often heard him say, with arrogance and no shame, “I am not gentile!” At first I ignored it because he is a foreigner and hasn’t mastered Italian properly. I tried to correct this error; I am, first of all, a teacher. I took him aside in order not to offend him, saying to him in a low voice, “Don’t repeat that phrase, because, in a word, it means that you are uncivilized and have no manners; that is, that you are a barbarian.” He looked at me with an air of false innocence: “I know that the word ‘gentile’ means well brought up, kind, and polite, but I mean something else.” I couldn’t listen to the rest of his explanation because my role as a respectable university professor prevents me from engaging with a foreign student who intends to debate me on a matter having to do with the Italian language!

  I say that this country is drowning in the sea of miracles. The soccer world championships, for example, demonstrate how the Italians discover they are Italians: they hang national flags in the window, on balconies, in stores. How marvelous, soccer creates identity! Is it really useful to have a single language, a common history, a common future? What is the point of Italian unity? Where are we? Is this how things work in an underdeveloped country? God damn!

  I have to admit that Amedeo’s giving up the use of the elevator, the bus, and the metro and his passion for walking for hours led me to believe that he belonged to a political movement much more dangerous than Nazism, Fascism, or Stalinism. I’m talking about those lousy Greens! I have no problem calling the supporters of the environment new barbarians, because they do their utmost to stop the train of development and technology and carry humanity back to prehistory with ridiculous messages like saving the trees, closing the big factories, forbidding hunting, and boycotting the products of Nestlé and McDonald’s. I know the history of these new barbarians—am I not a historian? These people represent the continuation of the student revolution of ’68 that failed miserably. Poor devils, they thought they would change the world with Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and the anti-technology works of Herbert Marcuse. Many of these failures have gained power by riding the wave of defending the environment. The proof is the former leader of the French students, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who got a seat in the European Parliament. And let’s not forget that the Greens are part of the government in Germany! I posed a single question to Amedeo and begged him to answer yes or no:

  “Are you an activist for the Greens?”

  He answered without hesitation: “No.”

  I drew a sigh of relief and opened the door of the elevator, cursing the barbarians, ancient, modern, and postmodern.

  Don’t ask me who the murderer is, I am a university professor, not Lieutenant Columbo. By the way, do you know what the young man found murdered in the elevator was called? The Gladiator. That is sufficient to demonstrate the backwardness of the Romans and their pathological attachment to the past. You would never find a person in Milan who would give himself a name like that. Such things happen only in the south.

  SIXTH WAIL

  Tuesday December 4, 11:08 P.M.

  I went with Stefania to the Tibur theater in San Lorenzo. We saw Gianni Amelio’s The Way We Laughed. It won the Golden Lion in Venice, and tells the story of Italian emigrants who left the cities and towns of the south after the war and moved to the north to work for their daily bread in the hope of a better future. The workers of the south deserve the credit for the industrial rebirth of the north and the flowering of the Fiat factories. I don’t understand why Antonio Marini accuses the people of the south of laziness and lack of faith in tomorrow!

  Friday June 4, 10:50 P.M.

  Today I ran into Antonio Marini in the Sapienza library. We talked for a long time about the Roman Empire and discussed questions of colonialism in general. I told him that in my opinion the peoples who have endured colonialism in the course of history bear a substantial share of the responsibility. I reflected on the Algerian intellectual Malek Bennabi’s concept of “colonizability.” This colonizability—that is, a susceptibility to colonialism—is the result of a betrayal among brothers. May Bocchus, the betrayer of Jugurtha, who was sold to the Romans, and his followers be damned forever. Auuuuu . . .

  Thursday November 15, 10:48 P.M.

  Marini complains a lot about the bus drivers. He says they don’t do their job properly and should be sent to Milan to learn from their colleagues. He always says that the unification of Italy was a crime against the north and that the south is a heavy burden for the people of the north. If I were a Buddhist I would say that this man was reincarnated as the neighborhood rooster because he sings so much, maybe too much!

  Monday April 9, 11:23 P.M.

  Stefania is right when she calls Antonio Marini the traffic cop. Luckily I don’t use the elevator, so I can keep clear of his obsession. This man has been stricken by a new malady, “elevator-mania,” very similar to paranoia. He never stops repeating that the elevator is civilization and that the fundamental difference between the civilized and the barbarians lies, first of all, in safeguarding the elevator.

  Saturday August 12, 10:54 P.M.

  Tonight Marini advised me to use the elevator, and told me that going up and down the stairs can cause a heart attack or a broken femur and other physical problems. He asked me to come to the next meeting where the elevator will be discussed. Taking my hand and looking me in the eye he said to me, “I know that you are the only civilized person in this building. Help me in the battle against the new barbarians.” I promised him that I would try to convince the other tenants how important
it is to take care of the elevator.

  Thursday March 23, 11:49 P.M.

  This morning Marini asked me insistently if I’m a supporter of the Greens, since I never take the elevator or the bus and always prefer to walk. I said no, and I saw him draw a sigh of relief. According to him the supporters of the environment are the new barbarians and the mortal enemies of civilization, because they would like to stop progress and scientific research, and thus return humanity to its prehistory. He concluded his lesson with a warning: “Watch out for the Greens. They are more dangerous than the Nazis, the Fascists, the Red Brigades, the Stalinists, and the Khmer Rouge.”

  Monday March 2, 10:47 P.M.

  This morning as usual I read Montanelli’s column in the Corriere della Sera. He raised a question very dear to the Northern League, the question of secession. Writing with his usual frankness, he said that the crux of the problem consists in the fact that Italy was born before the Italians; that explains the fragility of Italian unity, which was imposed by a minority despite rejection by the majority. Montanelli’s words led me to think seriously about all this talk that aims at the integration of immigrants into Italian society. I wonder if there is an Italian society that truly accepts the idea of integration for immigrants. At the moment I couldn’t care less about integration. What I really care about is how to be suckled by the wolf without her biting me, and to enjoy my favorite game: wailing! Auuuuuu . . .