“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“You don’t notice love, because it begins when it has already begun..“
If we had read this book at 17, we would have done so with anger and a yearning for revolution; today we read it with melancholy, but beneath the ashes, the revolution still blazes.
What has De André always done if not tell us small stories, with little explanation, that prod dormant senses, like that of justice, of humility? Most of all: that of freedom. He does so also in this book, born from his meeting with Alessandro Gennari and blossoming in their dialogue, in which the painful and vexing needs of both have found a way to crystallize through the few pages of this story. The poetry is the same as those songs we know well, the same very human characters, the same street stories. Everyone has their own dream, their own utopia, an idea they’re bringing into focus and that life, distracted, disrupts like a gust of wind.
It’s strange, this propensity we have to imagine alternatives by changing a single detail. At that point we invent an entity responsible for the shipwreck of a hypothesis and call it fate.
It’s a book of cruel sweetness. The words, the words. Certain words detach themselves from the pages and flutter spitefully under our noses before flying away, leaving us breathless for a moment: piling up, marauding, a light destined for shadow, its outrageous flesh… the city is just a larger prison, where you don’t realize you’re locked up. One might say, give us back this beauty, because we need it.
But there’s also a plot. Three men, above all, and a place. Salvatore, a Sardinian shepherd just released from prison; Carlo, a pimp and mama’s boy, who likes to think of himself as already a man; Bernard, a psychiatrist from Nice, a mythological and elusive figure. And Genoa, a city of alleyways and whores, ports and nightlife bars. These trajectories intertwine to attempt a coup, which instead goes awry, and then launch them back into the world, lost. Fabrizio and Alessandro are secondary characters, who become bearers of others’ stories, gathering fire.
Perhaps, however, more than the threads of the action, it makes sense to talk about why, in these pages, we’ve had such a good time. It’s like getting lost and finding yourself again in the same place. Getting lost because following the traces of those destinies that are forming makes us sad, we want to intervene, to say that things don’t necessarily happen this way, we want to dissolve a bitterness with sweeter caresses. But what we rediscover is more important: that total absence of judgment, that community in defeat, the concreteness of a path that builds step by step. One can try to give oneself a direction, a hope: all it takes is knowing that, like a hypothesis, that hope can be denied or confirmed. There is no fatalism in this perspective, only awareness. Freedom is a responsibility; doing everything to earn and maintain it doesn’t guarantee any reward, any pat on the back. Perhaps just a little dignity on our journey. But that little bit could be worth more than everything else.
Written by Delis
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Fabrizio De André, Alessandro Gennari, Un destino ridicolo, Einaudi, Torino, 2003 (prima edizione 1996)