“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“And when the driver, suspicious of that silence, turned around […] he saw them so alone in the world and recognized them in the caprice of God and in the irremediable violence of nature.”
“Old village” is one of those books that when you recommend them together you say “lucky you, you’re reading it for the first time”. Because we would like to reread it right away but we are stuck in a bizarre witchcraft, made of sadness and hope, we don’t understand what really happened but this book has just settled in our hearts – with grace and a certain boldness, as if to say: you won’t forget me.
Let’s talk about how this spell is constructed, that even telling it won’t make it vanish, it’s like a magic trick without the trick and therefore, ultimately, it’s just magic. “Borgo Vecchio” is a place of the soul and memory and monsters and saints live inside it, all there, in the life of the Neighborhood. We (re)cognize them one after the other, like figurines that detach themselves from the background and each one brings with it another and another. Little by little this picture takes shape, changing and becoming more precise and moving every time we blink: and then the stories of the inhabitants begin to connect, small and epic characters at the same time, and we begin to understand that no piece, no scent, no gesture is there by chance.
The more we go forward, the more each line of that broken time falls back into its right place and from those scattered notes here is a melody (something reminiscent of the suite from Swan Lake) – there is the sweetness of Celeste, with Mimmo who stays to “sigh for her well beyond the times recommended by love”, there is Cristofaro and the desperate beatings of his father, Carmela the whore and her Madonna del Manto, the gang of animals and the cops, ridiculous and infamous, the good horse Naná, the scent of bread and the flood and Totò, Totò the robber. In a crescendo not devoid of humor, Calaciura bends the Italian language and makes it a good, loving thing, an instrument of infinite compassion: everyone is forgiven and even death is merciful and helps those who cannot be saved. Tragedy, poetry and also, unexpectedly, hope: reading this handful of pages is like receiving a gift of beauty.
“Totò ran with the happiness of getting away with it, tackling the curves of the roads at great speed, with the air hissing between the teeth of his smile, his feet barely touching the road. He smelled the sea, he imagined himself at home. And as he slowed down in the first light of dawn he convinced himself that he was faster than bullets”. De Andrè would have loved it, we like to believe, we loved it, “with a sharp pain in the heart”, too.
Written by Delis
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Giosuè Calaciura, Borgo Vecchio, Sellerio, Palermo, 2017