2023-06-20 15:08:13
Time.news – “Ei fu” (he is) like Duke Valentino, like Cagliostro or Garibaldi: “All complete and arch-Italian men, all buried under mountains of bibliographies and legends”, “a person who becomes a character”. But only he compared to them “is imposed on posterity with a surplus of imagination”. “Blessed is he” who remains in history when the supporting actors of his four seasons, and the extras who followed one another shining with very fatuous glory, are already ground into oblivion of this “albeit peripheral and infinitely small Italy”.
“lucky him“: this is the title of the “panegyric of the arch-Italian Silvio Berlusconi”, which Pietrangelo Buttafuoco it has been published by Longanesi (pages 144, 17 euros) and arrives in bookstores almost as an addendum or literary alternative to the homily that the Archbishop of Milan delivered in the Cathedral on 14 June last, greeting the Knight at the state funeral. Panegyric in the form of rhapsody of a beloved and hated human, entrepreneurial, political parable, Buttafuoco’s book is theThe first testimony that with death this parable will not end. How did not end for Valentino, Cagliostro and Garibaldi. Because Berlusconi, loved or hated but hardly arouser of indifference, is like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, comparison that recurs between the pages of this “Blessed him”: the bewitching or irritating smile remains even after he has left – and this time more seriously than the others. As in the room full of mirrors, which Orson Welles organized on the finale of the “Lady of Shanghai” (and Bruce Lee reprized in “The Three of Operation Dragon”), Silvio’s face multiplied by a thousand while that of the other politicians always remained only one.
It multiplied by a thousand and a thousand swore, depending on who they were rather than him, on what the Knight’s image really was, aiming to break it with his own personal bet: enemies, fake friends, converts on the road to Damascus sometimes with a return ticket (see the poetic Bondi). And he who knows at the end of this rhapsody how many things the reader will retrieve from his own memory, which some he had kept and others – long was Silvio’s parable – abandoned in the less frequented nooks of the attic.
Which mirror was or will be the right one to place the “Blessed him” yesterday, today and tomorrow? Many possible answers but one thing, says Buttafuoco, we already know: “Anyone who gets up in the morning, looking in the mirror, sees an asshole. Berlusconi instead sees Berlusconi and shows us all – we who are all assholes – Berlusconi”. “Lucky him” was the man who he did not have a people with him, but an audience. Which was (and for some remains) one of the rare “absolute enemies”. An atypical super-rich because I’m never stingy. A seducer inspired more by the paradigm of “my friends” than by the cliché of the playboy à la Gigi Rizzi, oscillating between Count Mascetti when he still had billions and Professor Sassaroli when he was sent to atone for his sentence among the old men in the nursing home.
“The most Mozartian of politicians”, writes Buttafuoco; the “myth forged from reality, superior to any fantasy, flamboyant and successful in the solemnity of the institutions, the Silvio who would open the doors of Paradise even to Lucifer if only he sent a polite letter of greetings to the master of the house”; the character almost cleared by his opponents when he seemed to step aside and recommended “vaccinate yourselves” by raging Covid, but who once again became the very bad guy when he manifested quirinal ambitions and once again slipped off the shelf, the one at hand, “the catalog of insults”: the State-Mafia negotiation, the conflict of interests, the Bunga-Bunga, Mubarak’s granddaughter. Until the end and until after the end.
“The arch-Italian” is dead but it’s not completely true and he realizes it who followed the story not as a companion or as an opponent, but as a witness who now writes about it by turning the last bars of the score – because this panegyric is a rhapsody – in the minor mode, that of melancholy. Buttafuoco concludes: “To each Silvio of him and everyone, with him, for him, from him-lucky him-brings a piece of himself”. The author writes and asks for confirmation by phoning those who had been there for so long and are no longer there (but this too, like all deaths, cannot be completely true). To find out who Buttafuoco calls when leaving Palazzo Grazioli, you have to read it to the end. There are no spoilers. (Of course, what happened between the famous “descent into the field” and the rite at the Milan Cathedral is the mirrors, always them, to notify it. But those who know how to tell are not afraid).
#Blessed #Knight #panegyric