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- Herausgeber: Virginia Bettinelli
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
There are muddled lives that never
manage to undo those knots formed
even earlier than the umbilical cord.
Sad, rather unlucky lives, for which
the wheel never seems to turn. Angry
lives, shaky lives, short, broken lives,
that in turn gave life though.
Once I saw a yellow butterfly seal its
fate, flying and uncertainly fluttering
its wings just a few centimetres from
the asphalt, scorching in the Summer;
I thought risk is exciting, though free
flight is less insidious.
The yellow of the butterfly’s wings,
stark against the black, scorching of
asphalt, switched on in my mind
the full, indelible awareness of the
infinite, divine quantity of beauty
that exists in the world.
Fulmicotone was noticed by Mr. Edoardo Fainello, Director of Piccolo Teatro Dante (a theatrical academy near Venice, Italy), and is being made into a play. Fulmicotone, the play, will soon begin touring in Italy.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Fulmicotone:
Nitrocellulose: is a highly flammable compound formed by nitrating cellulose through exposure to nitric acid or another powerful nitrating agent. When used as a propellant or low-order explosive, it was originally known as guncotton.
On the cover: Vittorio Bettinelli freefalling on his skateboard from the Flathorse[1] (1979).
Cover graphics created by Studio Fabbro, Maniago (PN), Italy.
Translated by Avelira Servizi Linguistici, Dosson di Casier (TV), Italy.
Both life and art involve pain and to write honestly is worth whatever conflicts this causes, including estrangement from friends and relatives. P. Donleavy went so far as to say that unless at least three people sue you after the publication of your first novel, you haven’t been honest enough.
Fulmicotone English Version: First Print Italy, October 2015
Indice dei contenuti
Mascara-smudged eyes
Johnny Chopper
Malcricca
The perfect band
Drinkin’ Milan
Police and Thieves
The King and the Queen
Shekda
The dovecote
Bucolic time
The distiller
Rolex
The Goldrake Skitch
Yuppie Orgies
Automobile solidarity
The innocent Hair-bun
Shake it like a tambourine
The Rooms
Penelope’s Helicopter
The atomic Mushroom
The disturbing Bars
Mandarin Balls
Ramas
Windy! It’s windy!
Blind Fury
Total Destruction
The oboe in love
The axe
Eight times the viewpoint
Crime news
Joy and misery
Fuck the system
Black Mamba
Inside the sea
The Lawyer
Thanks
Just one more
To Virginia Bettinelli, our creak.
Cockney
Note
Ringraziamenti
To Music
Even though I was sitting on the top of the world I was still looking beyond
Sir Edmund Hilary Mount Everest Nepal
Mascara-smudged eyes
Here’s another glass of rum from Cuba, 23-year old vintage, and your mind goes crazy. I’m trying to make my life easier; I think back to the writings of Kafka or the poet Rimbaud, and turn to the thought, “Masters, I bow before you” compared to you, I am nothing but fly-crap forgotten on the windowsill ledge and dried by the sun.
But the fact is, I have in my hand a story spinning through my mind and I cannot escape because something gets lost on the way from my head through my arm to the page, so I have removed the barrier and decided to let the thoughts, the shattered memories, flow and run back. Memories exploding in short stories. If I think back to the first book I was so gripped by that I devoured it when barely more than a teen-age girl, it was “The Underwater Bar” by Stefano Benni: short, eccentric stories told by equally off-beat characters.
Look: the 23-year old has razed the cement barrier and the dyke is overflowing. The mascara-smudged eyes are not caused by weeping or tiredness – no, no – they are the result of peals of laughter accompanied by tears of joy: I have you in my fist, story; I have you by the balls and I won’t let you go.
There is nothing special, there’s nothing outstanding or romantic, just humanity: nothing more than footprints on land, marked out by the banal ticking of everyday life, unique and unrepeatable, bursts of existences.
No copy can do justice to the original.
“Write me a book”, I’d said to my father; “If I can’t have my own fucking experience, I’ll read about yours while I spend my life sitting on the sofa”.
But it isn’t like that. Each to his own, but you have to know that everyone needs others to move ahead. A faded article in a frivolous magazine made me think: “You need the others to keep you going”. So here I am, attached to the throng of strange people whose baggage helps me grow. As if everyone’s little experiences were a small, basic part of the contents of my suitcase, and the more you move on, the more this suitcase is filled itself with shards, fragments… and the heavier it gets, the more loaded I find it with an infinite rainbow of colours glowing in their unity. The golden hues of the scales of a trout swimming and reflecting the sparkling flare of the sun; now everything is clear to me: as an unmuddied lake, sir. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, sir[2].
There are confused lives that never manage to undo those knots formed even before the umbilical cords.
Sad, rather unlucky lives, for which the wheel never seems to turn. Angry lives, tottering lives, short and broken lives that still give life in turn.
I would like to talk about my father, even though I’ve never been any great shakes as a writer.
One day a dear friend told me that writing about him would be a cathartic experience for me; when he said so, I immediately thought of the comedian from Zelig[3] and burst out laughing, but the truth is that I need to. I despised, hated, appreciated and loved my father in a sequence of oxymoronic stages till I felt sick; with the sweetness and bitterness that covers everyone’s existences. So pulp[4] it put me off my food, but at the same time I wanted to tuck in and throw up and wolf delights down again. Cathartic means purifying, liberating. In psychoanalysis, the cathartic method is based on re-evoking lived-through traumas. I do not want to feel sorry for myself or write an adventure, comedy or tear-jerker, but to tell a story just as I know it and lived through it.
And from under the influence of rum I came back to my senses with mascara-smudged eyes.
WELCOME TO THE ITALIAN NORTH EAST
BEFORE BIRTH
Think outside the box
Johnny Chopper
Johnny Chopper was a boy born to a well-off, bourgeois family, with a heart-rending gaze and great ambitions which he never achieved simply because he had never had to exert himself; the minute his bottom was red, Mum applied cream to rub its crinkle[5] clean. But Johnny Chopper liked to think of himself as a revolutionary, a ball-busting communist with radical ideas fighting for the people, and to feel fulfilled in his trendy, misfit clothes, he snooped into the most varied situations and went around with people on the edge of society, like my father.
Johnny was a handsome boy, tall and slim, with long hair which his parents wanted to cut, but which he moodily dared to leave on his head smoothened and softened by balsam, always wild like a Studio 54 star’s. Suede jacket with fringes almost as long as those the Who sang about – very alternative, cool.
With his clean face and his fine, white fingers that hardly ever worked, Mr. Chopper earned his nickname because he rode a Chopper, its colour flaming orange like the Patagonia sunset, its forks so long they gave you pins and needles the minute you put your hands on the handlebars. Its engine was like Captain America meets Easy Rider, only for the privileged few. A motorcycle lightened by removing the fenders and the turn signals, the seat placed a few centimetres above the ground , chrome mirrored in structural details. Those running footboards placed so far in front he always had to wear slightly wedged shoes to press them; he had to spread the balls as if they were “nutella[6]” on the small, drop-shaped tank. Overall, a jewel for fans of the genre.
He set off, scampered, studied; then gave up, worked and gave up again. He always went back home.
Johnny had tried to end it all, more to appear naked in his obscene selfishness than to bring this extreme project to a conclusion. Agonizing in his sweet idleness and the void of a meagre everyday life with so little to achieve, but a lot of time to think.
Johnny tried for the first time. Legs astride, he leapt onto his beloved chopper and headed for the closest level crossing. He found the tracks, but instead of crossing from one side to the other, he brusquely turned left: soon ended up on the big rocks inside the rails, he went on like that for hours, grinding his teeth out of the rebound effect caused by the wooden sleepers and amplified by the lack of shock absorbers removed from the oh-so-cool-looking forks. His jacket fringes bounced all over the place, up and down and in front, further in front and still further in front without a fucking train popping up, at least to give the death blow to that poor, ill-treated fringe, just like his tormented existence.
Disappointed, he reached some hamlet or other in the middle of nowhere, turned into another level crossing and came out, more embittered and melancholy, but with many new sparks for the near future.
I imagine I’m on a level crossing and go out to wait for him and play with the street stones. Pretty tired of waiting, I finally hear the dull rumble of the overheated chopper in the silence broken only by some insolent cricket; I get up, my hand on my forehead to protect my gaze from the sun, now low on the horizon. I watch him arrive slowly, first a small dot with some lucid reflection from the chrome, and then closer and closer. Now I make out the forks; then I see his hair wave in the wind and finally I recognize the fringes... When he’s close I hear him swear; he turns right and disappears. What a sight!
The second time was more dramatic. This time Johnny had a really crappy idea to get it over with: overshooting the red light at top speed... This time too he passed I don’t know how many red lights before he violently hit the door of a car bearing a lady who saw the furious Mr Chopper running into her with all his fringes angrily flapping backward. She screamed and her neatly curled hair fell flat all over her shoulders, as if straightened by sizzling hot tongs. Sound of the fork stopping, and Johnny ahead, flying further and further up, way up, riding the car, gliding to arrive many metres away. The fact is that the motorbike was destroyed, the lady’s car was sliced in half and the lady wasn’t doing too well either – but Jonny was fine, just a few fringes left on the asphalt, no more!
Johnny decided it was time to get over with this business of getting it over with.
Johnny’s father had a lot of money and owned a nice roadster, the type my father was hooked on. My father was a pilot manqué, fearless yes, but able to drive: for him, motorbikes or cars had to be racers without secrets. My father could diagnose a sick engine by ear and his hands could work miracles to enliven the roar of any engine.
The first Kawasaki I remember was yellow, pretty similar to the one I have now, but meagre and with fewer chain guards, more rudimental, its windshield ahead to stick your face into and everything underneath, one to go full throttle by. I once took my mother to Amsterdam on it – what a trip!
My dad said the real thrill came when the speed was so high the road turns into a triangle behind you... Once I was returning from the lake with a hastily-assembled group of friends: it was dark and started to rain. We all hurriedly gathered our towels and headed on foot along the path towards the parking lot. My father was already on his motorbike; the others were on vehicles of various types: 2CV Citroen, Renaults 5[7] and maybe a phlegmatic working Opel somewhere too. My father decided to take me with him. I had a great time on the motorbike, because when you’re young, unawareness is a frame of mind so I trusted him: I would have gone anywhere with him. My mother was against it, but I was already on the seat wearing my loose helmet, too big for my little head. Before leaving, he told me the rain would make the experience unique; I was worried about the cold. We were wearing short pants and sweaters and one of the smartasses had lent me a denim jacket – that was oversize too – but my father solemnly said, “You’ll feel the rain on your skin; the drops will be like pins.” It was dark and started to pour; the vehicles were now microscopic spotlights reflected on the rear-view mirrors, and I was now a prisoner of this psychopath like Lieutenant “Daaan”[8] in Forrest Gump when he argues with God, tormented on the stumpy tree. At first the rain was awesome, but then it started to do me real harm. It was like thousands and thousands of little pins piercing my girly skin, but it was too late now, I was alone, in the hands of this crazy madman. I think he slowed down at one point, but only because my mother came up and cursed through the window, signalling at him to stop so I could get into her car, but he shot back off, scattering everything again... I reached home safe and sound, but rather upset and afraid: it was the only time in my life I’d felt the pins of rain on my skin.
One evening, Johnny had returned from the ashes after his various failed attempts and went out onto the square with his father’s brand-new roadster. My dad was drooling and, his face contorted like a little boy, his eyes shining, he asked him to let him drive. “No way mate!”“Oh come on, give us a chance!” “No – way!” “Oh look, just a five-minuter!” “No way, me old man’ll ’ave me!” “How d’yer know? Mmmmm – all right – just a spin though!”
Place swaps. My father was possessed and started to rev into first gear, the tyres screeched like mad, people turned, some cursed, others applauded – Johnny was inside and could no longer escape like me: I was stuck on the high motorbike seat – followed by the furious madman. My father sneered and he was off again, he stopped at the parking lot; then first gear, his foot right down and a 360-degree turn. You can’t beat rear traction for fun, vrooming off, brakes in hand… “No way, slow down or they’ll ’ave you... He’ll ’ave you!” “No worries mate! That way you’ll be up shit creek this time!” A nocturnal laugh burst from outside the windows. In the pitch black ahead there was a short stretch between two rows of middle-class houses built in the ’70’s, their gardens well-tended, their hedges low in front of the fencing… A speed-driven swerve and the car went off, hurtling from right to left; my father steered the other way, held, held it, held it and fuck, no way did he hold – he didn’t hold – fuck me! Johnny screamed and grasped the handlebars – I imagine his father followed him through the yard with a shovel to slice into his shins! I felt such pain just thinking about it! The car twisted one last time and shot off into the fence of one of the little houses. Plink plonk plonk, 3 or 4 poles flew off, the furious race slowed down and they stopped like that, almost overturned, their heads towards the centre of the road. The rumble, the brake, the shatter of poles, they all awoke the women. Sleepy in their rancid nightgowns, the same things still on their heads, they poked their noses out of the holes at night and peeked out to see the car in an unlikely position. They started to scream in chorus like in a Gospel mass: “They’ll ’ave ’im – Oh Lord, will they ’ave ’im!”... Some were gripped by pangs… They steadied their gaze and looked like a succession of Munch’s ‘The Scream’… And my father, a professional stuntman, lurched out of the open window and stood on the broken wall to look imposing; he raised his hand and shouted: “Women, you can all go back inside – you all get out of here and go to bed!”... He kept repeating it, his voice peremptory, until there were no more repeats and all the faded dressing gowns turned round to disappear, swallowed up into the darkness of their homes.
The problem of the nocturnal nightgowns was solved, but not the problem of the shovel. My father watched Johnny being vulcanized in the leather seat, not reacting, motionless; he started with a convincing, “Sorry butt fuck, I dunno what happened; look soz, I’d never ’ave thought such a thing...”.
Johnny, stuck to the chair, showed no signs of reacting.
He breathes, he isn’t wounded, but the shovel is uppermost in his thoughts. “Ouch Johnny, tell ’im that yesterdays you wuz at the steering-wheel and a dog were crossin’ de street and you crashed. Ouch, c’mon, not like dat… Yer dad’s loaded, he’ll put it back good as new”...
Johnny turned round, vacant; his pupil absorbed his iris and the white part. “Fine, c’mon, let’s do that ’cuz if I tell ’im it was you it’ll be worse”… Different kinds of expletives alternated with colourful curses, hands to the sky, hands in his sky rockets and so on. Johnny home on foot. My dad to the square on foot. Aware of the sad bullshit, thoughtful.
It soon turned out that Johnny, whose balls had been left smeared on the tank like nutella[9], did not say the agreed-upon lie. He dribbled and his fucking fear of the shovel made him inundate his father with the saddest whimpering in the world, and so my dad ended up paying the first in an overlong series of interminable debt instalments to repair the car for Mr Chopper’s father... who then got kitted out with a car radio, borrowed or “rented” from other people, or with bags of tea grown on roofs – but that’s another story. The fact is, Johnny would have wrapped him in his fringes and cast him off a bridge, but he paid every last cent.
As soon as the car was completely paid back and safely parked inside the villa garage, Johnny, obsessed by a car that could rebel against his father’s dictatorship, took a bottle, filled it with petrol added a wick, industriously opened the garage door with a cigarette between his lips and put a little cloth inside; then he lit a cigarette, used it to set fire to the wick and, his eyes bright, watched it burn properly – and threw the bottle right into the garage with all his might... Red fire burned everywhere. He span around, just in time not to get the shovel. He proudly told all this to my father, who said: “Nice ’un you muppet. You coulda done it before I finished paying the instalments”.
This is the story of Johnny Chopper, a melancholy buffoon.
Malcricca
My father was considered a burden for everyone, from his mother through his stepfather’s family and even to his grandmother: she couldn’t bear everything on her own and could at most offer a slice of stale bread and butter with a little sugar as a snack (best in the world). So at sixteen, my dad was dumped in a Milan boarding school, where he was able to associate with the crème del la crème, all concentrated inside those four decaying walls, and learn his trade somewhat. He had decided to work iron, that hardest of materials, with abundance, intelligence and force. They tried to teach him life there but respect was scanty and sound principles were even scantier.
One evening someone almost got killed when the group of rabid boys left aside gathered above the high trumpet on the third-floor stairs and threw a 1-kilo object. From that height – around 7.20 meters – it reached a speed of 39.6 Km/h and smashed on the ground, smearing everything. Little shards exploding everywhere, metal ringing and reflected glitter, forming a violent rainbow, brushing the institutor’s head by a few millimetres. He was coming to check, thinking what a pain in the ass it was to look after those little delinquents and scoundrels, not understanding you only need comprehension and good manners. Other times, same abandonments; other times, same discomforts, same aridity in your heart. There is a clear difference between the good guys, the shits and those whose character is already molded by their guests’ near-maturity in that humid, far-from-warm place. There is a clear difference between living and getting a one-kilogramme weight hit your head at 11 m/s. There is a clear difference between having a full head or having shreds of brain spread all over the place. I think he probably deserved the weight on his loaf, even though that isn’t how to solve problems. What they learned was violence and repression, lack of respect, revulsion from rules, corporal punishment perpetuating itself day after day. There was enough din to catch the attention of all those present, from the controller, who went white and rearranged his tufts, just ruffled by the killer missile; his heart stopped, a loud patter and feet on the run, all hidden under the covers in the dark… They heard the bad guy’s charged-up step, his moustache already peeping out like Hitler’s and off with blind pats: “I get who I get!” - until one gave in and grassed and even more bad, bad, bad mixed with more bad... If you insert and save nothing but cruel files in a virgin child, you can only get a hard disk full of badness. My father continually tried to escape that bland, heated-up minestrone and those near-green slices of mortadella ham. Then one day he succeeded, together with his friend Malcricca, a strong, Roman, nervous guy, the type with big, already-formed biceps and a throbbing, web-like vein above his muscles. His hair was kept long, abundant, thick, wavy, rebellious. A haired head, made crazy by wind and grains of sand, a head to shake like a dog coming out of water, the eyes dark, piercing, fearless. An impulsive, irascible guy, master of theft, champion of burglary. He was a kleptomaniac. He saw a closed blind and kept assailing it with his high, incompletely-tied combat boots; he hung with his hands down at risk of busting a vein with the effort, he had to open it, he pulled, panted through his nose, let go and dropped the boots’ iron heel… Bang bang bang… And it was my father who told him to behave as all that fuss was drawing a bunch of attention. But inside, behind that fucking lowered blind, he imagined the pirates’ chest, full of gold coins, white pearls, big, glowing diamonds and ancient queens’ crowns, badges, medals, iridescent necklaces, money, lots of money in different coinage, fanned out, ready to be taken and spent outside. Dreams behind that closed blind, never to come true.
Tools of burglary for Malcricca were like handbags for women: inevitable, inseparable, fundamental. The dress sword was magical, any lock you put it into magically made the fateful shlock and opened. In more extreme cases there was also the crowbar, but he was getting pretty skimpy too now, a true king of burglary. My father watched him, observed him and learned from him. Life with Malcricca was full of bandit duties and values, the unarmed, respectable thief and the duty not to hurt people. Ambushes, hours and hours of parking to study the movements of the prey, sandwiches eaten behind a bush, fast movements, a city feline. Stereos stolen from houses; people then reacquired them as they were and got them back as they were; nicking, selling again and it was all intrigue. Once he was ready to “borrow” a nice new car. He watched it from afar, studied its movements and there was the calm silence of people now asleep; he looked at night, his eyes went yellow like a cat’s, he pulled out the dress sword, one soft sound in the night, shlock open, fist under the steering-wheel, the plastic opened in one piece, intact, two threads popping out of the plastic, copper out of the lead and copper out of the other lead, contact, the engine responded, ignition, he got into first gear with his foot on the velvet-like clutch, the engine sounded as sensual as a singer at a piano bar, slow at first, then starting like a cruise… A bit further on he stopped in an isolated parking lot somewhere, layed on the seat and stretched his arms a little; my father spent a few moments on the passenger’s seat to calm his heartbeat, and then gathered his breath and pulled out the sunshade so a bunch of documents fell onto his legs… “Mhmm the personal documents of… mhmm of mhmm mhmm oh fuck, fuck, fuck, of a COP! A fucking cop!” They can’t believe it, they’ve stolen a car off a cop, an all-on pig … He opened the glove box and, “Bleeding Hell, you could shoot me dead! How the fuck can he have left his duty pistol… Well it might not be working… Fuck, fuck”… Two traffic lights away a car was turning slowly, my father was terrified, immobile, he was scared, really scared. Malcricca swore, thinking and reasoning. “Are there cops on duty for the night shift? And if they now ask for the documents we’re fucked, more than a girl for sale from the Amsterdam Red Light District”. Malcricca was as reactive as a falcon dive-bombing at 300km/h and shooting right down to the ground toward its prey... He hugged my father and pretended to snog him furiously, while one eye watched the car come closer and closer, setting its lights at him, everything inside lit up like day; but what the cops saw was two young lovers seeking a little intimacy in the city suburbs. A pretty, long-haired girl kissing her partner and on the brink of making love. With a little envy in their hearts, remembering their youthful passion as against their current morning wanks – so many mechanical, loveless movements – they changed direction and turned around slowly as if the street finished there. They relit the profile of a girl with her stallion, felt a little hard-on rise in their pants what with the spontaneity of the young lovers’ movements, and then headed off into the night, disappearing like two vibrating red lights, further and further away, until they were gone. After a few lines to my father from Malcricca - "If yer a poof an' all... Give over, yer might like me" - what an evening guys! Malricca gave up too. It wasn't even evening, better dump the car and leave in their boots, which were hard, runined but resistant.
Another adventure with Malcricca ended with his running to the end of the horizon.
The two boys went through the city and it was warm. But how nice it would be to go to the sea... Which sea? The Adriatic, full of tanned, eager pussy, pretty, uninhibited Austrians, free-spirited Germans, warm Italians. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip – not to mention a nice new Mini Minor, its glow created by an artist, its chrome beaming and a stereo to give you the thrills even when switched off, never mind when you listen to a good, booming Led Zeppelin track. “Whola lotta love” or “Immigrant song”… shlock the door opens, roar and that’s the engine, “How can they stick all these 70 pieces in a hole like that!” Milan-Lignano 360 kilometers, nearly all sped along by road, and Malcricca was fast, he went like a racer, 160 Km/h flat out the whole way, laughing in his mirrored glasses, sometimes dreaming of the nearby sea... The notes of Jimi Hendrix’ “Voodo child” shot out of the speakers and they sang, aping the words in English and keeping the rhythm, one beating on the steering-wheel, the other on the dashboard. There was so much energy in that metal cube hurtling along the motorway without even a minute to stop for a snack, “Foxy lady”, on imitating Jimi with his electric guitar. It was youth, sea, sun, the city Summer that made you escape, the smell of sea-salt already entering from the window and your head darting back and forth to the rhythm, the wish to shag and freedom, freedom nibbled like an apple picked from a tree that was still tepid from the sun. “It’s so nice here,” repeated Malcricca, and my father proudly pointed out unknown places, and soon the trees turned into high, imposing maritime pine trees; and not long after they saw the lagoon and then what a sight – the sea! The seaside was teeming with people and they walked at a man’s pace for the whole length of the seafront, admiring the shapely thighs of girls twittering and eating ice-cream, winking from the window, they followed the firm, costumed butts of the girl on roller-skates, her pig-tails like a girl’s but her tits like a woman’s. They admired the children playing with their parents near and maybe a little sadness veiled their gaze, but look, there are the long, amber-coloured legs again and the hair, hot from the sun, ruffled by the marine breeze. “Come on, let’s go to the sea!” Malcricca dumped the car and took his boots off and in an instant he was already running, throwing his shirt off, almost stumbling to take his tattered, lived-in, dirty jeans off too… On and on, faster! For him, entering the water was a moment of total spiritual renewal and he no longer felt unlucky, he no longer felt neglected and cast aside, he felt like he were in the belly of the world. He played dead and floated, freed from his own weight, and could have stayed there forever. There, suddenly, now. Forever. My father too; his element: water. My father was a fantastic swimmer, self-taught, and I learned from him the importance of the element water, so I can never stay away from it again. Sea water, salty, wrapping you, raising you, carrying you, shamelessly opening up your secrets. Strong and imperious, if you like. The sea, what a sight!
