La voce delle borgate

When in the January of 1950 Pasolini got off from the train at the station Termini, he was carrying with himself only a suitcase of cardboard, a few notebooks of poems Friulian and the scandal that him had forced to flee from Casarsa. He was twenty-eight years old. His mother Susanna to him was walking beside, silent, like a widow premature. Rome, in that winter cold and dirty, to him appeared immediately not as the capital solemn of the monuments, but as a creature alive, unraveled, peripheral. He would have written, years later, that the his true birth had begun in those days: the birth of a writer who had still to invent for himself a language and a world to narrate.

The borgate him attracted like a destiny. They were buildings of tufa and lime risen at the edges of the city, inhabited by a humanity that the fascism first and the Republic then had pushed out of the center as one pushes the dust under a carpet. There, between Pietralata and the Tiburtino, Donna Olimpia and the Mandrione, Pasolini discovered a people that spoke a language alive, inventive, bold, capable of laughing and of cursing in the same breath. The boys ran barefoot on the asphalt, themselves dove into the Aniene, stole for play and out of hunger. That vitality, he thought, was the last form of sacredness surviving in a world that itself was slowly sterilizing.

He began to write then Ragazzi di vita. The novel came out in 1955 and was received by a storm. The right-thinkers cried obscenity, the communists him accused of complacency decadent, the judiciary him tried for pornography. And yet that book was not was a book: it was an act of love fierce toward a language that the culture official did not want to hear. Pasolini had learned the Roman dialect of the borgate as one learns a prayer in a church new. He transcribed, listened, recomposed. The Riccetto, the Caciotta, the Begalone were not were characters: they were voices that to him had been entrusted, and he them returned intact, dirty with earth and with sun.

In 1959 came Una vita violenta, and with it a awareness more somber. Italy was changing. The miracle economic brought refrigerators, cars, televisions into the homes of the poor, but took away something that Pasolini did not know yet how to name. Tommaso Puzzilli, the protagonist, was dying consumptive in a hospital, between his his last affiliations political and a dignity that did not manage to save him. It was as if the writer sensed that the people whom he had loved was about to be devoured not by poverty, but by prosperity. An mutation anthropological was approaching, silent and implacable, and no one of it of it noticed.

When, at the start of the years sixties, he decided to move to cinema, not it did out of ambition, but out of necessity. The word written to him seemed by now insufficient. He wanted to see those faces, those bodies, that light. Accattone, shot in 1961, was made as one writes a poem: without concessions, with a stubbornness almost sacred. Franco Citti, taken from the street, lent his his face to the protagonist. Pasolini him filmed in close ups frontal, as Giotto depicted his his saints: without perspective, without psychology, only with the presence naked of the being human. The cinema, for him, was a writing of reality, and the reality spoke in dialect.

The year following he filmed Mamma Roma with Anna Magnani. The great actress crossed by night the avenues of the outskirts, singing, laughing, shouting, with that voice hoarse that seemed to come directly from the depths of the Lazio peasant. She was a Madonna secular, a mother desperate who wanted to tear her son from the fate of the borgata and who precisely for this him lost. Pasolini filmed the houses working-class as if they were frescoes of the fourteenth century, and the boys who played in the meadows uncultivated to him seemed figures medieval, still intact, not yet corrupted by advertising and by the myths new. Already then, however, he knew that them was filming for the last time.

In the years seventies his his diagnosis itself became terrible. He wrote in the Corriere della Sera with a fury prophetic that many mistook for neurosis. He said that the Power, the true one, was no longer was any more the fascism nor the Church, but the consumption: a force new, totalitarian, capable of homogenizing the bodies and the souls more than any dictatorship. The boys of the borgate, who until to a few years earlier had had a face, a gait, a way of laughing irreducible, now wore the same jeans, spoke the same language flat of television, desired the same things. They had been colonized from within. The borgata that he had loved no longer existed any more; there remained its its simulacrum, identical on the surface and emptied of every mystery.

He published then the Scritti corsari and the Lettere luterane. That prose lightning-quick, rapid, often unjust, was the last attempt of a poet to speak to his contemporaries as a citizen. I know, he wrote in November of 1974, the names of the perpetrators of the massacres, of those who have plotted, of those who have covered up. He did not have proof, and it declared openly: he had only the intuition of the intellectual, who knows because reads the reality as one reads a poem. Many him mocked, others him hated. Few understood that that man, ever more alone, was trying to save what that remained of the country by speaking a language that by then no one wanted to listen to.

The night between the first and the second November of 1975, at the seaplane port of Ostia, between the shacks and the sand dirty with oil, someone him killed. Him they found in the morning, unrecognizable, crushed by his own car. The inquiries themselves multiplied, the truths official each other contradicted, the archives fell silent. There remained his his work, and there remained above all that question that had crossed all his his life: who are we, Italians, when we cease to resemble ourselves? The young man who had arrived at Termini with a suitcase of cardboard had spent twenty-five years to interrogating Rome, and Rome, in the end, to him had answered with the silence of a beach in winter. There remained, on the asphalt wet of the seaplane port, the trace of a body, and inside that body the trace of an era that was ending.