Monthly Archives: December 2015

Poetically

@ 25 Poetically: THE GIFTS OF YESTERDAY

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I was at the post office recently. I was in line to pick up some books that I had ordered. Some seniors were not happy arrival of Christmas. They did not have much money to offer some gift his grandchildren. The tone their voice showed a paradox, because it was trembling for the sorrow and guilt for the happiness of being able to see again. They felt a strange shame to a sense of inadequacy – What I can offer but simple objects or some money that it will be less of their weekly pay? –

 

Some grandchildren were almost infants and others were teenagers. They spoke their childhood and how they satisfy themselves with small things. Their memories, however, showed anecdotes and episodes that they were a heritage their grandparents or great-grandparents. The improbable reconstructions were perhaps an attempt to regain his childhood and recall the child who was already in them. And maybe they wanted to talk to their deceased relatives, now. They evoked the lack of time as a limit to think about buying the appropriate gifts, but I believe that their excuses were more a limit due to the idea of having little time to live, because they were not seen younger.

 

I remember my Christmas holidays. Some holidays were sad and boring, others are not. I remembered the gifts, which at that time I forgot the next day. Have we have the charm only in childhood? When we are adults, there is no longer a child?

 

In the row where I was placed, my uncle appeared, my cousin, and other aunts and uncles. The days appeared confused: before and after Christmas. I helped my grandmother and my aunt to beat the eggs to prepare a donut with cream and chocolate frosting. I took wrappers silver cookie named greek and I witnessed my cousin to make up stars and animals. We support sheets of paper on a bench in the hallway. We designed with the pastel green grass, brown trails and then we built a small crib with over the pyramids of clothespins. My sister waved icing sugar to bring up the snow. In fact in those areas it was hot, but, in short, that suited us just fine.

 

In another Christmas I asked in vain for the game of “Battleship”. Someone joked that I had been bad. I cried, but after I took two sheets, I divided them into squares, and I wrote letters and numbers in the column on the first line. I drew two sheets. And with squares cut from another sheet, my sister and I We inserted (with the stapler that I gave my mother) small rectangles to invoke the idea of the ships.

 

With other cousins, we designed every ship with various symbols to divide them into two naval fleets. We finished the job in two hours all together. The adults played with our game. We are not going to play, because in the euphoria, we began to draw, each, a small path to the game of goose. When we finished we draw, we put in our designs in a box for shoes and delivered it to an uncle, that he gave to the poor kid. At that time, we were sure that Uncle would perform the task. We had to award the mandarins and we ate them together.

Io sorrisi, e gli altri in fila mi chiesero perché io stessi ridendo di loro. Io raccontai i Natali di ieri e quelli che avrebbero potuto essere oggi.

 

I related a recent Christmas. We did not have the tree. We used an umbrella stand and we put leaves with photos. Old toys became branches. We called: “tree of drawings and thoughts.” The fruits were envelopes for letters.

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Tree of ideas

We compose another smaller tree with an ashtray, paper clips, pens, caps without the ink. With a roll of toilet paper, we simulated the stars circling comets them as a vortex of a lampshade. We wrote some astral constellation names and the names of deities. Even the younger cousins wrote (in code) all the beautiful phrases that we would have wanted to say to our affections and laziness or pride, or we did not say we could not say (Some relatives were no longer alive). We put the phrases in the envelopes of the first tree. Each of us had his own gift: “I love myself, my life, your life only.”

 

The elders in a row (they laughed) asked me, how old was the youngest of us in this recent Christmas. I said thirty-three years.

 

 

Contamination

#21 CONTAMINATION: WAR IS NOT THE BELL TOLLS.

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November 8, 2015. The Municipality of Colleferro (Rome) for the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the city, organized the project “STORIES FROM THE REFUGES”, in the historic city refuges. The initiative recalls the facts of when the people took refuge from the bombing along the tunnels, between 1943 and 1944. The documentation work of Renzo Rossi, the actors of the “Theatre Workshop of Colleferro”, with the artistic direction of Claudio Dezi the participation of the vocal group “the Slam” of signs, have formed a touring theatrical action in different “circles” in the galleries. They have presented the costumes, the objects of their age and they have played some testimonies of those who lived in the refuges.

 

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Colleferro and neighboring countries such as Segni, Valmontone, Artena, Montecassino were behind the Gustav Line (the defensive line that was prepared by Hitler on Oct. 4, 1943 and it was destroyed May 18, 1944). The plain of Colleferro, chemical plants of the arms industry (the largest in Italy), the Lepine mountains around (with countries of strategic control as Segni and Carpineto), the way “Casilina” – who arrived in Rome – constituted, all , strategic military sites.

 

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The German lines of fortification.

 

Colleferro suffered terrible bombing by allied forces from November onwards, as the March – the fortieth – where were destroyed the electrical connections and any useful infrastructure. The people tried to survive the refuges that were built before the birth of the city. The refuges were pozzolana quarries that were used to build the first buildings for the workers of the munitions factory “Bombrini Parodi Delfino.” In the hills within the city they were traced 6km tunnel, with fifteen different entrances. There was a ban on the use lighting. It set up the artificial fog to hide the sites of interest to allied planes.

 

The refuges were a second Colleferro and life oscillates from hell above, the catacombs below.

 

The actors have recalled the activities of each day. Solidarity (a donut for a wedding that was prepared thanks to the black market). Firefighters, every day after the bombing, they climbed to extinguish fires, to recover the dead, to shine the unexploded bombs and they were going to control the chemical deposits in the industry, so that it would not explode, because it was operating: the workers were forced under the control of the fascists and the Germans.

 

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The Factory “Bombrini Parodi Delfino”

 

Young people drinking wine, in the evening, which was bought on the black market. They played and sang along with the Germans, the Russians and Ukrainians prisoners, and no one understood a word. The next morning, all they went up in hell as enemies, to obtain the salt, for drying clothes because of the moisture of the subsoil. They could not light fires for the small air exchange. Inside the refuges there were a chapel, a registry office, an infirmary. Women did not go out for fear of being raped, if not killed (the film “The Women” with Sophia Loren, is an example in this regard).

 

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One frame of the film “La Ciociara”

 

Fear, darkness, hunger, dirt, infections and the control by the fascist authorities, were the pendulum of days.

 

I have witnessed the magnificent traveling representation. Everything has been a blow to the stomach to every word. Everything seemed to happen at that time, while the public walked at the descent of the dead.

 

I feel the same feeling walking in Amsterdam (Netherlands) at the Anne Frank House (the Jewish girl who died in the field of Auschwizt, – the author of the famous and tragic “Diary”): fear and claustrophobia. Half my family is originally from Valmontone. It is the country that borders Colleferro. Valmontone was completely destroyed in 1944, except the Church, the “Doria’s Building”, and two or three houses. Every square meter was bombed. The deaths of these countries are the patrimony of each family. It is no coincidence that there has been a re-enactment. Witnesses died almost everyone. I was little and adults who had more than fifty years, and they said that they were old, they told these events, in the seventies. I peered through the door, because “old” did not want us small we listened. And at parties, after lunch, in the afternoon hours of digestion, telling them the facts of that time, and their eyes they were changing: their was young, but with tears.

 

We speak of the bombing with extreme superficiality, today. A bomb shakes the body, even at a distance. Well, you have an empty air. The ear stores the noise and any balance is lost. And in the future, for every such timbre, the brain reverts to primordial patterns, causing the beat of the teeth, leaving the adrenaline and the iron in the mouth. The nightmares become brothers every night, if we remain in good health and if we do not go crazy, because insanity is the ultimate gift.

 

The refugees have no homes today. They do not have water. Every ten minutes a difficulty appears. Lice do company. You may not feel the smell of dirt. The skin and hair age immediately. The teeth are lost. Diseases gnaw the body. The little food is dry and bland, but it leaves the temptation to eat insects.

 

The refuge away death, but it shortens life. The population, before the horror was surprised: “To us, just us? – Near Rome? From the Duce?”.

 

I offer a paraphrase of what my grandparents told him (which they did two years of military service in war and they left soon after), my grandmothers and aunts: “War is not the bell tolls. The war is not knocking at door. The war is already within “.

Poetically

@ 24 POETICALLY: The Expulsion from Paradise

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November 25 is the day of violence against women. Violence against women is expressed through the phrases “stalker” and “femicide” in Italy. The discussions mainly concern the brutal facts of chronicle. Journalists oscillate between an apocalyptic vision in one of irrelevance. Conditions at work, on time management for the care of family and self, and access to education, have improved significantly since the seventies for all: males and females. The element of discussion in Italy is still elementary: the woman’s body. Public opinion sometimes doubts on physical violence to women. Many people debate whether the responsibility is the victim. The media analyze a single event and not the system of social networks. The system of repression, the legal, health and economic minimum subsistence, amplifies all the violence and the condition of subjugation of women.

 

 

Males do not speak. They are indifferent. Some males are violent. Males comment on the violence, sometimes with witticism and stereotypes. Or not?

 

Men should recognize the phenomenon. If men were witnessed events of violence against women, they should honestly express judgments about themselves and about their attitudes.

 

It was a Sunday afternoon in late May in 1985. The air was warm and the sky was clear. I was sitting with friends on the stairs of the main entrance of the municipality of Marino (town near Rome). A woman appeared with the dress to the nines. She ran to the streets asking for help. A scruffy old burly man chasing her. The man grabbed the woman and threw her to the ground. The brute slapped the woman. It all happened in less than 10 seconds. We did not have time to move. We looked at each other in disbelief, inert and dazed. A young man came over and ordered him to stop the brute. Another man arrived: an undercover policeman.

 

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Colonna’s Palace – Municipality of Marino (Rome)

The brute calmed down. The woman gets up and pulled himself together. We remained standing as puppets. Some acquaintances of the couple arrived and they talked animatedly. Everyone left a few minutes later.

 

On the side, there were some ladies sitting on the balcony and others on chairs outside their house entrances. I knew them all along: how many times they told me to be careful of the cars when I was a kid and I used to play with their children, and when they offered snacks to their children and to me. They infused the stability, security and a sense of time. They were lovely: a trace my childhood.

 

Their look was grim and dour. I observe for the first time those faces. I listened to their harsh comments against the woman who was appealed as a “prostitute”. I do not I caught no judgment toward the man. The “acquired” aunts looked like statues full of cold and soot, now.

 

The houses appeared black with a sky without a reflection. I had the image of the first page of the novel “The Protocny’ alley” Elijah Ehrenburg, where a man hit in the head with a brick a woman in the street. And what for me was experienced as a fiction, all this he twisted bowel, now. I stammered incoherently as my two friends next door.

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We looked at each other still blushing. We were humiliated our inactivity and fear. And after a long time before the mirror and no excuses, I realized that the shame which I had after the event, was also an excuse: we thought to ourselves, not to the woman. The tangle of emotions was a network off the violence and absurdity of the scene. I had buried the woman in the streets of my mind. I had become, in spite myself, an accomplice of that violence. It answered that, at that moment, the safe childhood was disintegrated: I was expelled from Paradise.