Elisabetta Liguori
The distraction of leaves, a reading of “Passa la bellezza”
(Beauty goes by) by Antonio Pascale
There’s
need of time. When time, short and apparently inconsistent like gas passes
on those things that you’re watching for years, that’s the
moment when one needs more time. One looks at what is there, at what was
there, at what remains and to do this dirty job, of observation and synthesis,
there’s need of time.
The point is, in my opinion, after 35 one ends up telling everybody the
same story. That story is the daughter of time and finds companions and
veterans anywhere. It’s a fact. One feels the physical need to talk
about it, in order to make that connection between inside and outside;
maybe, I say maybe, that can help. Internal connection, because where
the mind doesn’t speak, the body does and when the body speaks,
the mind calms down.
A thing like this, easy and simple.
So you can find them sitting on the sofas, those groups of people, the
sort of middle-class people, men, women, often couples, almost always
the same age, with bags under their eyes and a part that widens rapidly
on top of their heads; you find them talking of themselves, as if they,
we, were the exact center of the universe.
Antonio Pascale is testing himself as a mature writer and this time he
chooses to talk about beauty. The beauty of the middle-age, of the average
man, in an average town. The beauty and tragedy of certain three-person
sofas.
Rome, which is the archetypal of the middle, is constantly contaminated
with the province that’s in the memory, the need, the sense of guilt
of the characters who inhabit it. Everything is in motion though in an
illusory immobility. Here human beings meet like trains coming from opposite
directions: it’s never clear to the sitting passenger which of the
two is moving and which is still. In “Beauty passes by” everything
transforms itself. It doesn’t get a grip on the skin. What’s
in the head passes through the body and tells of it. Yes indeed it tells.
The author works a long time on this, using soliloquies and powerful dialogues.
Every event and human inertia are reasoned, understood and justified up
to the limit, described in a highly cerebral, detailed manner, but it’s
always the body that talks first.
In the office, on the road while the car’s driving, in front of
the TV in the evening, along the main street during sales time, at funerals,
and at weddings. The body talks.
The events are minimal, common, the space of time, even with frequent
analysis, is not particularly wide; a plot not complex but engaging.
Life, in other words, described with a calendar and a watch between the
hands.
It’s a life told by cutaneous eczemas the one of Pascale, in detail.
The author chooses Vicenzo Postiglione, a very close alter-ego in order
to describe certain mutations: a ministerial civil servant, sometime writer,
with a wife postulating for blessed ones in the odour of sanctity, expert
in other peoples’ pains with a son distracted by beauty, who observes
and has himself observed.
A retired policeman as father; a deceased mother who keeps fluttering
like a reproach; a brother who has to explain twice a year the reason
for his silences and his normal biological differences, and more couples
of similar friends, colleagues with lovers, doctors as friends and friends
as doctors.
Because after 35 doctors are necessary. Try to manage without, if you
can. There is rising cholesterol, the anti-Nutella gendarme; high blood
pressure; headaches, strange and without remedy, chronic colitis, gastritis,
dermatitis deriving from stress. A doctor is always necessary. Ask around:
we’re all in the sea of possibilities.
The body at war and nobody ever giving any solution, never; only some
sweeteners.
And yet beauty was there. It was in the places, inside the words, in the
movements; it was there before. Pascale reveals the secret and, through
this, the narration acquires a cross-trend, an oblique look; the protagonist
talks about things that apparently have nothing to do with that beauty;
he does this with a technique which is typical of psychoanalysis. What
follows is the unique rhythm of a different perception: the one of pure
emotion, without a tear, at most a little sweat under the armpits or in
the folds of the neck or forearms, right there where normally a dermatitis
would nurse itself, subtly.
Nothing even close to reality. I’ll explain myself better: the author
expounds how men, women, and writers remain during the years what we were
for the people who’ve known, read, and emulated us, while in fact
reality moves away. In this way passing beauty is a secret event, very
confidential and to be lived in solitude, almost without notice. Like
a torn stocking, or a sock with holes, hidden in a shoe. Nobody knows
when, how much and why beauty escapes; it’s not easy to explain
it. It remains a solitary matter, indeed. Until a wave of truth arrives
from somewhere, as cruel as unforeseen and the faded beauty becomes visible
to all. You see it, you can touch it, it’s real.
In this volume, like in his former “Distracted City” Pascale
describes people through real places. Geography. And he does it marvelously:
he moves among the houses, the pieces of furniture, in the gardens and
in the vineyards, elaborating irrefutable theorems, between the beautiful,
the ugly and the daily. Pascale’s cities are visible cities. Always.
There are also girls, with their tangas, guessable under their low waisted
jeans or white linen trousers, on the avenue. Allusive, erotic, visible.
And very beautiful. Beauty that remains repeats itself identically on
other streets, other shops, other sales; it becomes recognizable to most,
identical to that of other ages, the one existing and the one that was,
other seasons, like the beauty of the Greek myths, of its shiny heroes
is traceable even here, on this earth. Today.
That which looks for a narration and somehow draws near, is the idea of
beauty to find or to be found again, that remains at the border, that
distracts you, that enlarges your horizons. A green sky, somewhere, caught
out of the corner of one’s eye, while something completely different
is happening. A sky made of leaves flying frantically with a gust of random
wind, and stray from the central objective.
Like for the protagonist’s son: a distracted son, who cannot save
penalties because he’s unable to concentrate on the ball, rolling
unrestrainedly towards the net.
A child who’s already becoming accustomed to losing something, mimicking
through his face the grimaces of the defeated football players, those
he sees on the television, who smash themselves on the ground, in the
dust, cursing, dribbling, with their eyes turned to the sky. Not a performance
for others, but an exercise only for himself.
And if there’s not always wind, there is however the couple.
Pascale’s book is in fact a book about the necessity of the couple:
only a stable and durable relationship with a partner can save one from
the anguish of death.
Couple as an analgesic, as a lens, as a vocabulary. For translating, for
enlightening. I’m convinced of that too, even if I don’t know
the reason why. I look at my children and it seems to me that I can predict
their future, I feel like one of their prophets, bumptious and wise; I
like this illusion, stable against death.
Could it be that salvation, as the author says, is hiding behind a game
of balances, made of few words and a good laugh when you’re least
expecting it? Inside the ability to foresee events, to arrive first before
the others, with a perfect knowledge of the other’s physiology,
allowing you to prevent the malfunctioning of the microsystem. Maybe.
A book on the necessity for distractions, beyond the couple, anyway. And
between one digression and the other, here extremely healthy spontaneous
instincts, almost a cult to which dedicate oneself, but notwithstanding
these digressions, something doesn’t work after all.
The event stops with a short circuit, in spite of it all. Mirrors are
reflecting ugliness all at once. As if somebody would have opened a window
and made light.
Even worse, they aren’t reflecting any more anything at all and
pain ventures to become useless imagination. The science of the body runs
the risk of becoming something sad. Dermatitis slowly disappears, it’s
true, but something got broken all the same.
The only son continues his explorations in obscure zones, closed up in
a wardrobe with a small torch, dark, light, dark, light, while outside
something is broken. The whole event is crossed by presages, the sort
of daylight saving time/ solar time. It seems that something terrible
should happen, because of that dark coming soon, or too late, whenever
you’re least expecting it, or you’re not expecting it any
more; that the sky, becoming dark as it must, transforms moods and wishes
by treachery.
They call them the changing of seasons: they affect the skin, the abdominal
wall, the scalp. The sea of possibilities of the thirty-five year olds.
The spreading of a new horror and the faint human resistance. At this
point you find out that what has become visible is not ugliness in an
aesthetic sense, but inadequacy; that from the window has entered the
same doubt as ever, the absence of absolute answers, the forgetfulness.
And one moment is enough, one gesture, one short story.
Pascale narrates all of this to all of those who’ve read Carver
and not only to those. He narrates to those with children, to those with
an architect friend, to those with a brother living far away, to those
who have to manage a certain sense of guilt, to those who have a woman
or a man of whom he or she knows questions and answers from here to the
next twenty years.
His is a melancholic and sweet story, a sort of cardiotonic against stress.
That well known monster without a face of whom all are talking, without
any competence, roaming about through the corridors of hospitals, pharmacies,
in hotel rooms, in two-roomed flats, in bathrooms with mirrors, everywhere.
Damned Carver: could it be his fault if today the body narrates and writes
for us, while the mind runs after it, with rapid and confused movements,
in transformation?
Carver, I hate you: you were right.