the book of my life
NoonAugust 12, 2022 – 08:55
“Universal tensions and meanings: something like a manifesto”
from Paolo Macry
I don’t want the dear editor of this newspaper, but no, I don’t think there is “the book of my life”. There are classic readings, perhaps the closest to the title of the column. Who has not been deeply impressed – perhaps unwittingly – by the “Divine Comedy” or the “Promessi sposi”? It is enough to reread them to realize the debt we owe to them. And then there are certainly generational readings, my youthful ribs, for example, were made to vibrate by the “Young Holden” or by the later “Portnoy’s Lament”. And yet I wonder today to what extent my ribs were or rather the mainstream of a season, the sixties of contestation, the seventies of free sexuality. And finally there are the recent memories, the magnificent subtleties of Ian McEwan, the senile writings of Roth, books we read not too many years ago, too few to give him the Oscar for the book of a lifetime. So why am I continuing to write on this blank page? Because, yes, if you think about it, I believe that there are books with a capital L, foundation books, books that are intertwined with one’s life in singular ways, by the force of chance or by a sort of predestination, beyond the their own content. Books of fate.
Mine is “Mortally wounded.” But not because I’m Neapolitan: I’m not. Nor because he has much in common with the enfant gâté Massimo De Luca, the alter ego of Raffaele La Capria who after a “beautiful day” spent with friends on the Posillipo coast takes a train and moves to Rome. No, these are not mere analogies. For me “Wounded to death” has rather constituted a kind of mental structure, a psychological paradigm, something like a manifesto. And it invested my life when I didn’t even know what Palazzo Donn’Anna was like, when I had never set foot in Naples. It was 1961, I lived in the town where I was born, in Sulmona, I had a close friend, Sandro. And it was Sandro who introduced me to mythology. He told me about a book that Mimmo, his older brother, had just bought. He told me about that sentence. “A city that cuts you to death or puts you to sleep.” Sandro often repeated it, widening his eyes with emphasis, as if it were a scandalous warning, the discovery of a poignant and indispensable revolution, a flag that it was up to us, to him, to me, to take in our hands and fill with our life. We too had to leave, as Massimo De Luca had done, we had to break deep family and friends ties, rebel against what seemed to us the slow rhythms of existence, go beyond the borders of a small harmonious and sterile valley. La Capria’s words became a final sentence for our condition. We hadn’t even read the book, we read it years later, but that powerful phrase was enough to make it “the book of a lifetime.”
We did not stop for a moment to reflect on the abysmal difference between the context experienced by La Capria and ours. We were too involved, too young to stop at such details. For us, the “city that cuts you to death or puts you to sleep” was not Naples, it was a small town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants at the foot of the Maiella. And the place of the interminable, painful introspective chat between me and Sandro was not the Bar Middleton in via Partenope, it was the Gran Caffè in the square in front of the Sulmonese high school, it was the benches of the Villa Comunale. And the view in front of our eyes still intact was not the bay that can be observed from the Mergellina Nautical Club, it was the balcony of Sandro’s home that overlooked the “struscio” (today one would say: the nightlife) of Corso Ovidio. But by definition a symbol is this: it is immaterial, it is capable of trespassing from its own context of origin, it manages to influence beyond time and space. La Capria spoke of an escape that painfully truncated with the most intense roots, hers was a fatal departure, necessary in order not to be mortally wounded. His words were symbolic. And prophetic. We had no hesitation, we too left shortly after, when the high school years ended. Sandro went to Rome, I to Milan. We have never returned to Sulmona.
I cannot say what Sandro thinks of La Capria’s novel today, what weight he attributes to it in our abandonment of the Abruzzo valley where we lived. I never asked him, the few times we met afterwards. Perhaps we would have smiled at that youthful comparison between Naples and Sulmona. Or perhaps, instead, we would have recognized that La Capria had dictated the choices of life to us to some extent, as happens to literature that knows how to express universal tensions and meanings, to painting that strikes our eyes even from distant centuries, to music that evokes the more unexpected strings of the soul, as happens to art, to put it briefly. Ours had not been the theft of a slogan, the superficial adoption of unlikely paternities. We had adopted La Capria because we understood it. Because, unknowingly, we had warned that La Capria did not speak only of Naples and perhaps did not speak of any place. He was talking about the human condition.
I realized this later. For the cases of life, my escape from the primeval roots took me in 1970 to that Naples from which La Capria had left twenty years earlier. And so I was finally able to see his places, I observed the ruined palace of its pages, I bathed in the sea of Posillipo, I met those who knew him, I felt the sweetness and the dangers of his Partenope, the persuasive friendships, the narcosis of slowness, the addiction to the tiring ways of Neapolitan daily life. It often seemed vaguely mocking to me that those words of the Master – cutting, definitive – had finally made me land right in the city “that cuts you to death or puts you to sleep”. I could have left, I was still young enough to flee a second time. I did not. Perhaps because I am convinced that even wounds, sleep, death – even Raffaele La Capria’s fears – are stages in life, and it takes more than a one-way ticket to face them.
12 August 2022 | 08:55
© Time.News