the book of my life
NoonSeptember 8, 2022 – 08:47
«The theme is the father-son relationship. I wrote what I never told him “
from Matteo Cosenza
The book of my life? Not one, but many who accompanied it, marking its phases in different degrees. It began, and never ended or waned, with “Don Quixote”, then two milestones: “The letters of the European Resistance sentenced to death” and Voltaire’s fundamental “Treaty on tolerance”. We will understand, therefore, the never finished journey at the end of the political and history books and of the more or less great literary works tells a personal story of formation. There was no lack of real falls in love. A dear desk colleague for sixteen years called me Fedör because every other day I would also tell him about my “white nights” with Dostoevsky. In reality, I loved Russian literature and, although I belonged to another school, I had only postponed the encounter with the immense Tolstoy, finally receiving the gift of “sweet shipwreck” in his unattainable “Tales.”
From East to West, I, like others, have traveled around the world with essential readings, but I do not make other quotations so as not to incur the sin of immodesty, I just say that in my past as a reader there are many books of my life , but I would have a hard time indicating one of them all. Or not? With no small modesty I dare to say that perhaps the “book of my life” was written by me. I say this by not referring to writing, style, plot, content: I have the meter in my pocket and I know where to stop in order not to run into the pathetic that at a certain age is a non-abstract risk. The theme, in fact, is the father-son relationship, between me and my father, my book of life is Comrade Saul. There were many books in the modest house of a worker from the shipyard of Castellammare. As an ordinance for an already well-known Communist leader, they could seem a way to reaffirm the hegemony that the PCI preached and achieved as well with culture, but surprising was the presence of hundreds of books of great literature: to understand this, I discovered later that there was also the whole mythical series “Il Parnaso” of Einaudi.
I grew up in this climate, between admiration for that father engaged in hard work as a caulker and in politics in an all-encompassing way, and in a house full of cultural traps. I also went into politics not long after I stopped wearing shorts not because he wanted it, but because I was attracted to that paternal passion. Since the years of high school I did things that in the space of a few years also led me to achieve a precocious notoriety and even some honor. And my father was happy. My crisis came by itself when, even after some disagreement, so to speak, familiar in the party, I realized that I had to leave politics, even get out of my father’s shadow and build an “other” professional itinerary to avoid making politics my job. It was a difficult choice that caused great pain in “Comrade Saul”, not only because he imagined a future full of successes for his son, but also and perhaps above all because the party was losing one of its potential leaders. This wound never healed but I felt that he was following my business and from time to time he found a way to compliment some article I had written. And I knew that the last words before dying prematurely a few days after the earthquake of November 23, 1980 were for me.
For years I have set out to tell his legendary life whether he was talking to a desperate unemployed person or a workmate, whether he had to argue with Amendola or Berlinguer or whether he had to converse with a historian like Paolo Spriano while he was writing the «History of the Communist Party Italian ”, but I gave up because I was too busy. Then one day a Calabrian comrade who had hidden Pietro Ingrao on the Sila during the Resistance, who had fled from Milan when the Germans were hunting him, said to me: «But you will never be out of this story. Write and don’t worry ». So it was and I wrote the book. I came to terms with my father, writing between the lines what I had never, unforgivably, told him in life: the “book of my life” and above all of his. A story, let it be said without nostalgia, of another world. When there was politics. When a worker with an unlikely fifth grade, without a father, who grew up in the middle of the street, discovers the way to emancipate himself and propose himself as a protagonist not only in the life of his beloved factory but also in the renewal of society, and when a boy , even a child, is fascinated by his father, follows in his footsteps and then, without renouncing common ideas, with painful laceration decides to seek his place in the world alone. Dear Editor, I’m sorry for this off-topic article, but can I write about a different “book of my life”?
8 September 2022 | 08:47
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