‘You almost never
write about women,’ a woman friend told me not long ago. ‘Most of
your articles talk about men.’
I had not been tallying up
the statistics. ‘Really?’ I asked, doubtful at first.
She nodded. ‘Definitely.’
Since then, I’ve
thought about it. Perhaps it’s because I like to record harmless
controversy and Italian men arguing without really caring who wins.
Or it could be that I write about expressions and men are not always
apt to measure their comments until someone else does. Or maybe it’s
just un puro caso,
simply a chance trend.
Not this time, however.
This week, I’m writing about a man on purpose. And the reason
behind it is perfectly clear: it’s because I love him although
we’ve never met. And it’s because I think he deserves it.
Yet, before, I spill
my guts about unrequited love, let’s start off by pinpointing where
this all started and that would be precisely between channel 2 and
channel 4. In televisione, infatti.
In truth, if TV is a
window onto the world, then Italians have had to witness some pretty
rough scenery these past few weeks. Pompeii is crumbling again, the
North and South are both underwater and the majority of the country’s
politicians would do well to drown their ideas in Rome’s deepest
well. Overall, the country’s general mood appears to negate both
optimism and pessimism. We don’t know whether the glass is vuoto o pieno;
we only know it needs a good run through the dishwasher.
In the midst of it
all, there’s Benigni. Italy’s most famed entertainer recently
visited Rai Tre and I’m itching to tell you about it just in case you didn’t see
him march on stage in his usual wiry way, to the rhythm of his solito puppet show tune. When Benigni dances, it makes me happy, and when
he’s done clowning, the man whom Fellini wanted as Pinocchio tells
anything but lies. Benigni excites souls when he recites Dante, spits
fire when he quotes Berlusconi and unfailingly conjures fireworks
when he speaks to mere mortals like you and me.
Last week, il
Toscanaccio stood with his arm around
the show’s main guest, Roberto Saviano, very possibly the only
modest Neapolitan on the planet. A 31-year-old journalist, Saviano-a
man, as Benigni says, ‘with many worlds behind his gaze’-was
silent during the whole of the speech. For his genius book in protest
against the Camorra, for his real-life stab at the entrails of
organized crime, Saviano lives under constant police escort and
shoulders death threats the way most people shoulder rain. Benigni
was uncharacteristically quiet in his initial comment. ‘La vita
è stata una sorpresa,’ he said. ‘Lo sarà anche la
morte.’
That’s when I
started holding my breath. And I didn’t start breathing again until
he’d brought the house down half an hour later with ‘Vieni
via con me,’ Paolo Conte’s husky
cabaret song in which, as Benigni explained, ‘a person who loves
possesses the entire world.’
The night’s show was
full of unmeasured words. Not like the thoughtless remarks made by
the country’s most powerful. Not like the harmless banter I so
willingly share during casual daytime chat. These unmeasured words
truly knew no fixed dimension. They felt big enough to stop a moving
train and small enough to enter the human breast and find the place
where the beating first starts.
To the Camorra boss whom
he called by name, Benigni issued a challenge, much like a bard from
bygone times calling for a royal show of courage. ‘Saviano wrote a
book and you want to kill him,’ he argued. ‘I say that an eye for
an eye is only fair. You can write a book, too! Kill him with a
book!’
The same man who is
capable of reciting the whole of Paradise by memory knows when to remember the more earthy wisdom of spaghetti
westerns. For soon he quoted Sergio Leone. ‘It’s like Leone said:
“when a man with a pistol meets a man with a ballpoint, the man
with the pistol is dead, because it’s the ballpoint that gives
immortality.”‘
‘Non insegno niente,’
Benigni insisted finally. ‘I don’t teach
anything. I’m sharing some things that someone else said that I
liked. È tutto da imparare.’
For me, this last
statement is a spark of reassurance-televised permission to write
about Roberto-his expression, not just an expression.
So, vieni via con me. Andiamo. It may well be easy. And truly I do, I hope we all
go.
