IN recent weeks, when the Italians treated him as survivor, Marco thought especially the sparrow every day landed on his window sill: “You think it’s always the same, or take turns as the friends who come to see me?”. Matteo Angioli and Laura Hart, who until the end they’ve got their young days, encouraged the tribal rite of visits to the man bent over because “they do smile – they said – and make him happy.” Then, in a low voice: “I resurrect”. I said, “Mark, write your obituary while you are alive. They treat you like you were dead.” He replied: “And I’m ready to die, to treat me alive.” And we laughed, but not unkindly, the Italian funerary prose, “an excellent and huge genre that is rampant in the newspapers thanks to specialists in crocodiles. And ‘confectionery extinct, magnified generally only after death.” And Pannella also changed the overused aphorism: bad and good with the living with the dead. “With me it has become: the bad with the living and good to those about to die. What do you say: I do accoppare? Think what beautiful items ….”
I asked Marco: “You could live without the radicals, not Matthew?” . And then I asked Matteo: “You could live without Marco?”. And I do not know who first began to talk about Dante and Virgil at the Paradise thresholds. Singing is the thirtieth of Purgatory: Dante, who finally sees Beatrice and recognizes in her the signs of the ancient flame, turns to transmit to Virgil his emotion. But Virgil is no longer there, he was gone, “had none left idiots / himself, Virgil sweetest of all fathers.” Pannella had imagined so the gap. Voluntarily, to the threshold of Paradise, was going to be put down: “Everything is ready, without tears,” thou need’st must weep for another sword “.”
Mark, but you afraid to die? “On the contrary, I am afraid to live too.” Benigni had seen starring in TV’s farewell Virgil: “I was amused and touched.” Mark and Matthew had told me: “That is really the great Italian poet.” It seemed to me a banality: “Of course, Dante, I know …”. And Pannella: “No, we’re talking about Benigni.”
Meanwhile, with infinite patience Matthew and Laura took the weight, the manomettevano, it calmed and excited him, put up with his moods sometimes unbearable. Then came Mirella, Rita came … And the trained memory: “Mark, do you remember when Gianluigi Melega said that you had become” too much “for all,” as an aircraft carrier in the lake of Nemi? “What year was that?”. ” And let’s see if you guess who uttered this sentence: “There are too many wonderful things we could do with the enemy to think about delete” “. Marco smiled: “Gandhi.” “No. You.”
He was sleeping when the pain let him: “But sedatives not enough for me anymore.” The man who said of himself: “I live in the streets, in airports,” was a soul recluse trains, only thanks to the love radical, it has never been a soul in pain. Marco Laura called “mistress”. He touched them, she and Matthew, was up more than any other: small fists on the arms, a few pinches, caresses and kisses on the cheek. With the Dalai Lama, in the last meeting, they touched for more than half an hour, “if you do something you do not like to come to Rome and I’ll give you a bite” said the head of Buddhism holding his hand in hand.
When Marco woke sought immediately Matteo. And there was Matthew. What is radical assistance? “It ‘s the reason instead of piety. Laughing, moved and think.” I told Pannella that when Alessandro Manzoni died soon began to circulate, with more wacky anecdotes, memorabilia of all kinds: books, autograph letters, but also fetishes, until al dente fault and the tuft of white hair, a stringy fuzz, the waiter tore Vismara beloved corpse, which remained preserved, along with the famous wooden snuff, in the college of Merate, where Manzoni was younger, he suffered and that therefore he had sung as “filthy fold”. Pannella I even saw a picture of a fecal impaction. Marco, who also is out of tune as a bell, and that by Radio Radicale has even eliminated the light music, he answered with a song: “For some ‘time I played in my mind, I even dreamed of, it’s kind of malaise music “. He has sung for me: “” But flaws, flaws ogne Evening / penzo Napule comm’era / penzo Napule comm’è. “Here’s the problem: it was and is.” It ended with a must Pannellian: “Duration is the shape of things.”
I remember when Mark and Matthew arrived, as two bandits, in my house, in the countryside, the evening of Boxing Day 2000 . Matthew had returned from New Zealand where he had gone to study. The passion between them was broken by mail: radical sentimental education, fragments of a digital amorous. I gave them to read while eating the cold remains of Christmas dinner: stuffed turkey, sausages and bacon, bread sauce and cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts … Pannella said that Christmas lunch “is a complicated algebra, addition and subtraction of taste, touch, the inclinations of the soul “, and while I was reading those beautiful and intense pages that Mark wanted to publish it – argued -” this is the radical future. ” They left at three in the morning under the water leaving the old one filled card-art email.
In radical world that book that never was published, became legendary “such as mining in the gold rush,” as Juvenilia Hemingway, like the black suitcase Benjamin … he has certainly fueled the gossip on homosexuality Pannella who never distinguished between love and sex: “Pasolini said to have used the” I love you “once in all its life, writing to me: “you know how I love you and how much is on your side”. ” Matthew did an interview with Corriere to explain, but then resigned himself: “I know that Mark passes for the first fag of Italy.”
Sixteen years later, Matthew and Laura, his Flemish companion, plurilaureata, charge master and doctoral degrees, a radical Beatrice, have transformed the Roman attic of Pannella in the sanatorium of the Magic Mountain. That house until the day before yesterday, until the ambulance that took him to die really in the clinic, was the metaphysical laboratory of politics, from Berlusconi to Bertinotti, the place where we were discussing and you did experiments of transmutation of species: prisoners, Vasco Rossi … When, for example, was Matteo Renzi to touch the body of the shaman, Marco spoke very little. She listened to him and Roberto Giachetti and Filippo Sensi that harked relations between the radicals and the left, mutual insolence and lexical fever within a common ethical grammar: Ingrao and Cossutta that “we felt for some love, reciprocated”. And the visits of the old Bordiga “that old feeling radical”. And then Vittorini, Sciascia, Tortora, Moravia, Spinelli … until Modugno: “Often – said Pannella – radicalism was a nice way to grow old.” In the evening then he came Clemente Mimun and asked, “How did you like our Prime Minister?”. He looked slightly irritated: “Mica I saw him, has not yet come.” E ‘was the moment in which everyone, including Matthew and Laura, we thought maybe the grandfather of Italy would have to live hidden in a cloud of honor, comfort, home comfort, doctors and family pleasures, including people who are not from him He pretended nothing. Do not went like this: “Can you imagine with eyes glazed and forgetful?”, He said Matteo. Pannella would not permit it. In fact, Pannella did not allow it: “Everyone – he told me – they know what they must do.” So Marco Pannella, in the house on Via della Panetteria, gave everyone the boy in Abruzzo, “bardasce, mammucciòne”, but with the eyes chasing the lights that stretched and moved on the bed and on her long, skinny legs. Recluse at home, the giant in the attic, the irrepressible was left to conquer only by the friendly window, was looking for the sky overcast and rainy, “Today I am happy because the light, when it is so sweet, I really like.” Leopardi also in recent days sought the light. Once I went with Oliviero Toscani have observed him as he slept, “Look, it looks like an Indian chief.” In t-shirt and long johns he said: “Fasting has eaten my muscles because the body eats itself, but discards the
Oliviero, who was taking pictures, he realized that the house reminded him that of Andy Warhol. “Why?” he asked Marco. “Because you’re surrounded by things that do not resemble each other except in the fact that ciascu- na of them resembles to you: the portrait of his great-uncle Monsignor Giacinto, Africans dimensions, these antiques worthless, and then the statues, heads festooned with ribbons congress … the air from student eternity. “
few months earlier when Pannella was not too bad, and still occasionally went out, i went to see him with two of my children. The smaller of 13 years would not come. “Why do you want me to come?”. “To touch the history of Italy”. Pannella conquered, made him visit the wonders of the attic, opened cupboards, drawers emptied, they went up on an iron ladder and emerged on the terrace, gave him an umbrella opening discharged water, made him wear his famous suspenders such as those of the philosopher Siegfried Kracauer “tied the most imaginative ideas to firmer ground,” the knotted some of his wacky ties antipartitocratiche, libertarian, non-violent, anti-prohibitionist. “When they are not on the neck – he said – they sleep and make merry dreams.” Meanwhile he smoked the toscanelli, “70 a day, but the brandy, and thus Bacchus prevents the smell of tobacco: smoking becomes pro-smoke.”
She had two tumors, “one here,” he said, taking the hand to the left lung, “and the other here,” he said putting his hand to the liver. But he spoke only when we asked him and always cheerfully, as if we were in trouble us who wanted to know “how are you?” and not he who would answer “I’m fine.” The courage of the disease “is basically a matter of good manners”, and those who knew Pannella could not wonder. “In taste, in culture, in grace is a man of great intellectual elegance” said Sciascia. Although, he added, “has always had to shout.”
No comments:
Post a Comment