Maybe she's born with it

Smack. The mirror reflects blood red lips. Slash. The eyelashes are decorated with mascara. Puff. The face becomes a vivid pink thanks to powder. Fever! The glossy little radio sings Ella.
She was carefully painting her visage; she was more perfect than a photograph, well blown up. Every body could have look at her for hours.
Indeed Sam was observing her with all the interest an eight year-old girl could have..
She was alive and gold and she should never grow old, Sam thought.
“It’s night, Sam you should go to bed. I have a cab coming to bring me to the disco scene. I’ don’t want to be late!”
Sam nodded without saying anything. Her mother was going dancing and that was sacred.
Now the little girl was alone in her dark room. But she wanted to start her own party, so she turned on the lights, switched on the music, her hectic small feet running in her mother’s bedroom and stopping in front of the maquillage mirror. She put on everything she could reach out for, all of her friends. She wasn’t alone anymore.
“Welcome home lip gloss and rouge, come to me!”
Sam knew she wasn’t allowed; the last time her mother found out she got slapped across the face.
However Sam was hearing the rhythm of “Le freak, so chic” in the air, she couldn’t resist. There was an atmosphere and her face changed to a freaky look; she was a comfortable comic figure.
Power, energy, glory these were the keywords when she was wearing make up. She was unstoppable; the momentum of the strokes of her eyeliner built the instant into insanity.
Smash. The mirror reflects a little girl suddenly fallen asleep on the floor. Uff. Mother comes back home, sees her, has a secret tantrum and leaves her on the carpet. Wow. Too much make up.
The next morning Sam’s cereal was getting sluggish, she was watching TV and was distracted by Grace Jones’s face on the Morning show.
“She was at Studio 54 too yesterday night, naked”.
“Louise darling, a woman is never naked”, Sam, blushing, answered back trying to imitate her mother’s agent.
Louise wasn’t of the same opinion, she thought it was a fun idea, but she just continued with her chat:
“I was travolting with Bianca, Margo and Liza, when Scavullo came up to me, asked if he could take a picture, then I instantly posed. I will finally have my break through.”
The little girl rolled her eyes. She understood the antiphon.
As expected her mother never made the cover of any magazine and for sure not with Scavullo’s photos. In the meantime anyway she met a man that made her fall in love.
Or that is what she said, but the reality was that she had many men and many proposed to her. She had at her feat at least seven man-prototypes a woman could dream of (Sam synthesized them into these categories); the Charming, the Handsome, the Rich, the Famous, the Smart, the Sensitive and the Real-Man, all of them on the palm of her hand, all of them would have done anything for her, she just had to choose who would do it. But she wasn’t much of a decider. She wanted that the whole group would be at her service, one for every emotional state.
Louise wanted to create her own little harem, she wanted to overturn the custom of the one presided by males. She was the new female. She was the alpha-female.
However this didn’t last long, because eventually her passionate emotional state took over the others.
She found herself knocked up, with only one guy being guilty (in her opinion it was a crime). That man was the Real-Man.
Real-Man in many senses, first of all because he responded to every stereotype a man carries and secondly because his testosterone was very high, to the point in which almost every time he had sex, with or without condom, he would score big time. Well this was evident. He was also very caring and these just made the situation unlivable.
Obviously Louise forced the man to marry her because she was scared she would remain completely alone. BAD CHOICE.
So the period started. A seven years long period. Those seven years in which the marriage, the fights, the A.A. meetings and the divorce took place one after the other.
After those seven years Louise, the beauty queen, was completely broken inside as well as in her bank account.
Her friends, all those crazy people, the fashion pack, the people you saw in the magazines, the ones that smiled always in their limousines, the ones that were going out only at night were a very far mirage.
Yes, Louise had changed. She let her self go, because over time she failed everything. She had fucked up her modest career as publicity star after presenting herself drunk and high and with “some” pounds too much. Her marriage and her money were out the window after she started hitting the former “Real-man” with vodka bottles. She had drunken everything, all her resources.
In other words she was everything a person would expect from a fallen “meteorite”, a person longing for fame and getting burned.
But why did this happened Sam couldn’t explain it. She guessed that probably the day, the everyday had won, had overwhelmed her mother. She was disgusted by her mother’s surrender. Surrender first of all to the great pleasure of civilization, which for Sam was a metaphor for life that meant everything.
By letting her beauty go, her mother let her life go with it. Her mother became slack with time repudiating her body and therefore her soul.
“I don’t understand why you care so much about your external appearance? Anyway it will fade soon. What you are living is fake, an illusion, listen to me, I had made the same mistake. But don’t worry, you will have my same destiny and you should be happy since I am your mother!”
Sam sighed to the idea. She didn’t answer what probably wasn’t even a provocation.
A very common scene in their life together: Louise would invite home her new friends, who she met at the dry cleaning she was working at. They would play strip poker, get naked and then tease Sam for her make up mania and her prudery.
Her mother arrived at the point to fart and not care about it, moreover she would laugh.
Sam viscerally hated them. She was embarrassed by her mother’s behavior and she thought that if she stayed there much longer she would become as vulgar as her mother&friends.
She didn’t stay long enough for that to happen, because in that period she was working as a make up artist on Broadway and she was then proposed to go to Hollywood for a good job. She went, with one big suitcase. She left. She finally had escaped.
Well fate was initially good to Sam: she became quickly known for her perfect skills and knowledge, she got a scholarship to study cosmetics and she landed a job as a counselor at a very big make up company. At one point she had enough money to open her own cosmetic industry. A small one.
Nevertheless she could still feel the phantom of her mother, of what her mother represented. Even a thousands miles away she could fell her mother’s deadly breath on her neck. She could still feel the fear of becoming like her. Of letting go. She was scared of the vertigo.
She dreamed more and more often of being in front of a precipice where the dark was calling her, was telling her to fall. Everything she had created was weighing so much on her shoulders. The only solution was to fall, to jump into the nothing, in a vortex of oblivion that would destroy one by one all her past beliefs.
It would inebriate her, she would experience the loss of senses, the loss of reason and judgment, she would be finally light in the stupor of obscurity.
She too could go around naked with her girlfriends touching each other’s tits to see who had the biggest ones. She wouldn’t be anymore unsure and ashamed of her body and all the things it stood for.
That call to the annulment, to the cancellation, to the denial was close. It was a cozy idea that followed her everywhere.
However fate played again a great role in her life, maybe a horrible one, or maybe the one of her savior depending from which prospective.
As any other day, Sam went down town to her offices. At the top of the pile of letters on her desk there was an envelope that struck her the first moment she entered the room. She opened it. Written on the back was a lawyer’s office address.
Her heart was pounding. She knew what the letter meant. She put it down, went toward the phone, picked up the receiver and dialed a number.
The trial against her company started. She was accused of producing cosmetics that contained lead that caused a group of angry women and one very angry man to have skin cancer.
Samantha Schonberg Vs. foaming at the mouth ex-costumers.
The case was fast and clean. It was like a guillotine on Sam’s head. She didn’t know how it happened; her head was just off her shoulders.
The “victims” of eyeliner and lip-pencil had won the case. Sam had to pay. She closed her little company. Destroyed.
Irony: Eventually she had to go to the doctor because she had problems of her own with skin.
“You have a Squamous cell carcinoma. It’s skin cancer.
“What can I do about it? Can I take some kind of medicine?”
“I am afraid not. We have to operate because the inner layers of skin are damaged and it won’t be long till your external skin will be attacked.”
“But how is it possible? I used all possible creams, I treat my skin like my only treasure”.
“You were probably born with it. What I suggest for now is that you stop wearing make up until we’ve resolved the problem, because the make up would help the cancer spread due to all the ingredients it is made out of.”
A gasp. She drew her breath in. A tear was forced to stay in the gland.
Samantha was in the boudoir. She was already wearing her nigh-gown.
Her face was horrible, her skin was indescribable. She simply couldn’t look at it. And the worst was that a month after her operation she still couldn’t satisfy her passion. But at the same time she couldn’t stare in the mirror.
Suddenly the whole flashback came to her. A clear image of her past. A photograph of her mother. In her mind she ripped it. She ripped the connection between the two of them.
She felt strong again. Samantha wouldn’t surrender. She didn’t give a shit if she was allowed or not. She knew it would be the medicine. She knew it was the permanent centre of gravity around which she gravitated and nobody would move her.
Smack. The mirror reflects blood red lips. Slash. The eyelashes are decorated with mascara. Puff. The face becomes a vivid pink thanks to powder.
When she was done she turned off the light and went under the silk bed covers.

The day of the dead

"The dog was barking non-stop".
"Well it is twelve o'clock at night, I think it is normal" I replied.
Still frustrated John reinforced his moaning "Is it possible that a dog has to bark at a wall, a supermarket, a swan swimming in the lake and a bicycle?"
I tried to calm him down by telling him that probably the dog was scared at night. "Everything is so silent, so still at night, there is nobody around, you know, Scotty is used to noise and crowds of people, we live in the centre it is normal that he feels a difference between night and day. For sure this is what troubles him. And besides, he did it already many times with me.
John thought about it looking himself into the mirror. It seemed that the dog's barking didn't bother him anymore; he actually looked like he was happy and serene. He then said jokingly "Maybe he saw a ghost. They say dogs can see them. Maybe he saw your father or my brother".
I automatically answered that it could be, without thinking too much about it. Supernatural subjects always upset me since I was a little girl.
We sat down in front of the TV. John put on the DVD he rented, it was a action movie, maybe the new James Bond movie, I can't recall anymore, for me all those movies are quite similar.
After the movie ended he asked me if I wanted a piece of cake with ice cream on it, for which I didn't have the will to refuse, even though I was on a diet.
"Hey John, do you think I gained weight this last weeks?" The same second I asked this rhetoric question, he returned with an "obviously not! On the other hand you look you have lost some pounds!” He knew that he was supposed to say this in order to make me eat that ice cream with the surplus of the cake. And on top of all he wanted me to give him a blowjob the same night, maybe in bed or directly on the couch. He had all these cheeky little ways to persuade me in doing things; he thought I didn’t like it…well he was wrong.
"The ice-cream is great, huh?" he said this with his deep manly voice.
By all means it was delicious. He zapped through the channel to find something that could entertain us before going to bed.
“Is today the second of November?”
He just nodded ignoring me. Then I pinch him “Well the fourth I have a big exam!”
Again he didn’t pay attention: "Nothing is on. I'm not still tired. Let's cuddle a little, come here. I love you." What John said was more like an order that a wish.
I sat up, put my hair back, kissed him and promptly knelt so my head would be in front of his crotch. I perfectly knew he was damn horny. I unbuttoned his pants and gave him pleasure.
He tilted his head back moaning in delight and enjoying his present.
Because I was doing my thing, in these moments I was in the position of asking him whatever I wanted, I told him that tomorrow we would go see my parents and he wouldn't be allowed to complain about it!
Afterwards the lights were on in our bedroom, we still weren't sleeping, we both wanted to read our respective books, because we both had to catch up with our studies; the week had passed without our books being opened not even once and we were going to have exams the next month, before Christmas break. Moreover my English classes weren't going so well and I was expected to write a couple of short stories by the end of the following week.
At last the lights went off. My thoughts didn't, I had a really bad feeling, but I couldn't understand what it was. I tried concentrating on sleeping. I was always flustered when I had problems sleeping, but tonight seemed different, I was particularly agitated. Every little noise bothered me. I could hear the elevator going up and down the apartment building and I started wondering who in the hell was going out at this time of the night. The dog was making strange noises; they weren't growls or barks, rather like very light mewls.
Then John put his arm around me. He notices that I couldn't sleep; it was happening more and more often; his wrap around me was the only way I could relax completely and fall asleep.
My dreams flowed like water, but I didn't feel comfortable in any of them. They were unpleasant.
I woke up. John's arm was still on my shoulder. "Good morning" I said. Nothing. There was a pale November light coming out of the window. John was cold. I was in a drowsy state.
A shriek broke the silence. A shriek of terror and of disgust. I shriek that I emitted. I fell to the floor. I couldn't move. I was paralyzed. An eternity seemed to have been passed from the moment of my shriek to the instant I decided to stand up again. An eternity that was not only of time but also of place. For one eternal second I was in another world. Everything was white.
I got on my feet, trying to resist gravity that was slamming me to the ground. I was up, still dizzy. I stared at the bed now with tears running down my face. The sheets were soaked with deep red blood. John was immobile; his eyes were wide open looking at the wall. His throat was ripped. I ran out of the room. Another shriek. Another blood bath. Another corpse. I couldn't even look at it now. It wasn't anymore Scotty. It was just flesh. I threw up on the floor. Again I felt sick. Again I threw up, this time trying to reach the bathroom.
I woke up in the bathroom, on the floor, in my puck after having passed out.
The telephone was ringing, I ran toward it, refused the call and instead I composed 911. A female operator answered, my voice was trembling. I told her to send someone right away at Emerald dr. 37010. Then, after I replaced the receiver.
The ambulance came, but obviously there was nothing to do. He was dead.
Then, after the ambulance, along came also the police. They wanted to know so many things. They made so many questions. And I couldn't answer one of them. They asked me if they could inspect the apartment, maybe they could find some clues. Then after that they brought me to the police station so the could have their official interrogation and I am still here.”
Isabelle was telling the entire story to her best friend Charlie. She was on the phone with her while with her eyes she was passing the desks full of papers and in front of them the secretaries trying to finish their duties.
Charlie prayed he with impatiens to continue.
“The police left me in a cold room without any furniture, I was tired, I felt I was going to faint. Then an officer came in, sat at the other end of the table I was standing beside. He told me he was sorry for what had happened and then added that they had already found something. They found a story about a murder, exact to the one that happened in my apartment. Every detail, every word, everything, do you understand?!” her voice seemed broken by sighs. Charlie could her that her friend was crying in disbelief and she was also bewildered.
“Well the story was found in my computer. They think I have written it. So they could come any minute here to interrupt this conversation.”
A gasp on the other line revealed the disgust. Charlie didn’t know what to think, but certainly it was a mistake she said. Actually any body could have been in Isabelle’s pc and transferred a file, it would have quite fast and easy, Isabelle just needed a lawyer with square balls so that all this would be forgotten a part from the grief for John she added.
Isabelle toke a big breath than answered: “They are coming now, I guess the conversation won’t be much longer. But before, I want to tell you something I didn’t confess to the police. When I was calling 911 I found on the telephone table a note and it was strange since the table was usually empty. I was still in shock, I didn’t have the power to read it, but something struck me: it was written with blood. So I reached for it, I read it. It said: “Happy day of the dead”. It was written with my handwriting.”
The line gave no signal.

Cinecittà

On the stove the water was boiling, the kettle was whistling. The typical sound of coffee when it is almost ready was dominating the silence of the apartment and the aroma was creeping in the rooms asleep, knocking into the dreaming minds to interrupt their vision.
As usual the mother had to wake up the kids by yelling, but it didn’t bother her, she always thought the more the kids slept the stronger they would get and the more energies they would have.
That day she prepared a lemon cake that was standing on the table waiting to be eaten. She cooked it especially for Maurizio, because she was sure it would be a lucky day, he was going to find a job. It was already a month and a half since he had finished his school and still he didn’t find anything. He was now a grown up and it was time for him to bring dough to the house. Again she started to yell, this time a bit exasperated, nobody still showed up. After a little while she saw the first face, it was Maria, her youngest daughter. “Go wash your face quickly or breakfast will get cold.” Then all the others came out from their dens, with faces swollen from the sleep and with their eyes not still completely open.
They all seated themselves around the table, three children, a young man and their mother. They were all silent looking first at each other and then down at their plates.
Their father wasn’t there, they didn’t hear from him since he went on a trip three weeks ago; after a while, when they sensed he wasn’t coming back at all, the subject never came up again due to their silent agreement. He was now dead as far as they were concerned.
The three younger kids were eating very fast because they risked to lose the only bus that would take them to school.
The mother started to speak to Maurizio about jobs. She hoped that he would get one in a bar or in a shop as a clerk. “Here in Rome it is easy to get tips thanks to all these tourists full of money. Usually their tips are even higher than the pay itself Maurizio.” She said. “Or what about working at an auto mechanic shop? You know that they always need help. Everybody has a car these days.” She smiled and hugged him.
He didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in getting a job at all. Even though his father wasn’t there and it would be more and more difficult for the family to continue paying bills and the help of their grandparents wasn’t going to last forever.
“Don’t worry mother, today I will go to the centre with Ettore and together we will ask around, alright? I am going to eat out so don’t prepare anything for me” he answered.
She nodded approving his idea of going from one place to the other simply asking everyone. But she reminded him that he should be careful not to get an offer mugged by his friend. He should stop being so nice to his friends!
“Yes, yes mother don’t worry”.
Very slowly he got up, he went to the bathroom to prepare himself. He put cologne on his face. Then he went back to his room to dress. It took him at least an hour to get out of the small apartment. But finally out he was. He went down the stairs and he heard the splash of the mops soaked in the buckets from the open doors of apartments. The women were now cleaning unanimously, with rhythmical strokes, now and then brushing back the hair that was in front of their foreheads. They were all dressed in dark clothes despite the heat outside. One after the other they raised their heads when Maurizio passed their apartments, they looked at him and said “Buon giorno”.
Everybody knew each other but above all everybody knew about each other.
Rome was a big city but it didn’t mean that nosy people didn’t exist; on the contrary in those blocks of buildings they were more curious then ever.
He was out of the house now and he went straight to the tabacchi to buy cigarettes, he knew that he would go to the centre in two hours or so, maybe when he was finished talking about soccer with his friends at the bar, with his small cup of coffee. Finally Attire arrived smiling and together they decided that it was time to go.
In the centre they just lazily asked around.
The owner of a bar suggested that it was dumb to disturb working people; they should rather buy a newspaper with all the jobs listed. Indeed they followed the suggestion, they bought a paper, but not a job listing paper, instead a tabloid so they could appreciate the pictures of famous female stars that were in Rome for that week. They were shooting Fellini’s new movie. Maurizio loved Fellini because he used good-looking actresses, the ones he thought about while being in bet.
It was a beautiful September day, with immense sky and with a deep sun.
The centre was a real concert thanks to the clicks of the tourist. They called Rome the eternal city probably because it was completely immortalized, Maurizio thought.
Then they went to villa Borghese looking for their other friends. They went up to via Gabriele D’Annunzio and then they were in front of one of Rome’s most beautiful panoramic views, the Cupola, piazza del Popolo and the entire white landscape of the monuments were in front of their eyes.
Their friends were waiting for them with their scooters running. The girls in the back seat were calling for Maurizio and Ettore.
One of them started to talk: “Hey Maurizio, I heard you father left you mother. I bet he is now fucking another woman, you know I would do the same thing keeping in mind your mother with those sagging breasts and her fat stomach”.
“Fuck you Stefano. Did you see your mother?! Actually you probably didn’t since you are in bed at night and when you get up in the morning she is sleeping because her job was hard. Actually not very hard for her considering her talent, hard was something else let’s hope. I bet that’s how your father met her!”
Everybody started to laugh. Then Stefano changed completely the subject while the girls were talking to Maurizio still giggling.
They wanted to go to that old lady in via Cavour who sold fruit and vegetables he said. It was Maurizio’s turn to rob the money, but he wasn’t in the mood to do it, he felt a little bit guilty thinking about his mother who was convinced that he was looking for a new job. But the pressure was greater.
Scooters rumbling with their acid shrill, after ten minutes they arrived at the shop. The group was waiting outside for him.
They looked inside the window where Maurizio was going to create a commotion. Ettore whispered in his friend’s hear that he shouldn’t do it if he was scared, but on the other hand this simply added to Maurizio’s will. They gave him a knife, Stefano then told him “to do it as fast as possible and don’t make a big mess.”
Maurizio started to walk toward the store with a whole in his stomach.
He went in, at the beginning just looking at the stuff the old lady had and then he yelled straight in her face: “Or your money or your life!”
He wasn’t thinking, his head was hot, his heart bumping fast the adrenalin through his whole body.
In an instant he heard laughter. He turned around and there was an old man with a big smile.
“ You little boys today play in a strange way. When I was young we would play with a ball and certainly not with old women like this one here. We thought that old women were boring. I guess you don’t think the same way. But if you aren’t playing and you are doing it seriously well then I think you are quite stupid. With a knife? Don’t you know that almost every store, even this old woman’s, has a gun in their cash register? Do you want to get killed or what?”
Then looking toward the old woman he asked her: “Iole leave him to me, ok? Don’t call the police please, do it as a favor to me”.
The old woman nodded she was an old friend of his.
In the meantime outside the boys saw this scene, then they heard: “We’ve got him, now we will call the police”. They left. They turned on their scooters and flew away.
Then the man turned back and he noticed Maurizio’s terrorized eyes. He started asking him with a grin: “How old are you?” He learned the boy was 18. “Oh then you are already able to vote. What were they thinking when they legalized the vote at 18 years old!? My god they should put into prison those fucking politicians.” Then he asked the boy if he wanted to take a ride with him. They would go where he was working, to Cinecittà. He assumed that he looked like a boy needing a job.
They were driving fast in the new flaming cinquecento, passing the policemen who were giving road orders to millions and millions of people who trying to get into the city in order to do something. All together they seemed an octopus to Maurizio, a never sleeping octopus, always with the same number of enormous tentacles that released a disturbing force. The octopus was nameless, was anonymous and it crystallized Rome since years and years, always with the same noise.
Now they were running along the Tevere; the sun was playing with the tree leaves, mixing its shining rays with the shadows of the leaves causing a fascinating late summer light. Yet Maurizio never noticed these vanities of the city, he just saw the dirt.
The man then opened his small window. A fresh breeze flowed in the car bringing about the salty gold scent of the Dolce vita. The perfume of Rome always gave a sensation of continual holiday.
Maurizio wondered where they were going, he was scared of the man, he knew that something was going to happen but at least he wanted to be paid for it, like so many other times it happened with men that were working in Cinecittà. “They promise gold and honey but the only thing they’ve got is a little bit of money and a lot of stink,” he thought.
Then he complained: “When are we going to do it? I have to be home at a certain hour and I want to do many other things in the meantime.”
The man understood and again he laughed. “Look I dint even ask your name. It doesn’t even matter actually, with this attitude you would give me a fake one. I know you people are scared to dishonor the name of your family, maybe I’ll ask you when you trust me more.”
“Anyway I don’t want sex,” he continued “I have a wife and even though she isn’t the best woman in bed...”
The man looked at the boy to see if he had loosened up a bit. On the contrary, the boy just thought the joke was dull and sad for a married man. Strangely enough Maurizio had some bourgeois values inculcated by his mother, other than that he didn’t have much.
“I work in Cinecittà” the man repeated “and I do movies”. “Do you like movies?”
Maurizio looked the other way, not being interested anymore in what the man had to say, since clearly he wasn’t going to receive any sort of money.
“Well I’ll get to the point, boy. I need an assistant and since I saw you were giving problems I thought you would be perfect on my set.”
The boy was surprised by his proposal, but ignored it and simply answered his question; “ I like the movies that have nice babes, but only those ones. I love to look at boobs that juggle, like in those American musicals where the women, and their breasts, dance, dance and dance. Alas the Americane! Here the women are just good to stay in the kitchen, cooking and churning out babies”
The man laughed and agreed and then said: “Not bad for a start, I like your taste!”
“But there is much more.
They say cinema is the seventh art, an art that include all the others. But people don’t realize that the result is completely different, different for example from the one of theater, even from the great tragedies of the ancient Greek. Cinema is not just an adding, it is real alchemy!
The Greeks wanted a universal euphoria among its people, they craved to become an only thing together, to get lost in the multitude. That is why the theater was compulsory to the entire population, from the free men to the slaves, from the poor to the rich. By all means the state paid who didn’t have the money to go there, so for three days, the Dionysus’s days, everybody had to assist at the plays after which they weren’t anymore able to distinguish reality from invention, because of the thin border between the two. The viewers were mesmerized. They were at the same time in the play, singing in the chorus, losing their reason, leaving all the logical means behind. Every one of them felt like a raindrop in the rain.
Cinema also speaks with a universal language to everyone, but the viewer is detached, he is in a dark room away from the world, silent, thinking. Cinema is also religious, but a silent religion, an own private one. All this is thanks to the syntax of cinema, the montage of the scenes, of the photos, therefore the juxtaposition of emotions. Every viewer senses something completely different from another, and that is the secret. It’s an art in which you cal be lyrical or epical, you just have to decide it yourself. It is you and the art. It is the art of the individual par exellance!
Cinema donates you a new condition for at least two hours, a new personal atmosphere thanks to which you can escape reality and be newly inspired”.
The man was fervent, intense and passionate when he said this, and created a whole thinking process in Maurizio’s mind.
The boy could just understand part of the speech, but at the same time he felt full, he felt energy. He, himself, was going to experience what cinema was, what something was if that is the case, since he never had passions in his life and this was the first time he caught it in another man. The man had opened an entire new universe in front of his eyes, not for cinema per se, rather for the vision of a new life.
Meanwhile the man was so immersed deeply in his speech that he didn’t realize he was going 100 miles per hour. He didn’t realize both that he was in the wrong lane and a car was coming at them. He regained consciousness, he tried to swerve, but it was late.
Not very far from the side of the road a farmer hear a terrible noise, a crash, he turned around and he saw two destroyed cars.
Maurizio looked at the director, his face completely red, then he stared outside with blank eyes and he saw the golden cupola of a church reflecting the sun.
At home the mother was preparing the dough for the fresh pasta. She looked down, pored some water in the flour and then decided to take off her wedding ring.

The charming writer

There was once a boy that didn't really know what he wanted to do when he grew up. He was a very energetic little boy. He always sparkled of an aura everybody loved. He always had a pleasant smile and knew how to laugh about anything, not because he was a dizzy kid, but because he was enthusiastic about everything, about life. Every year he grew older. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven...till he was eighteen. He was always charming, he was still cheerful, exuberant and high spirited. His classmates wanted to continuously stay around him. He was neither a good student nor a bad one, average, but the professors loved him the most. He had the power to make everybody in a good mood. Anything serious and boring people would talk about he would be able to transform in appealing and entertaining. He could speak about everything, from politics to cinema, from gossips to values, never falling in banal prejudges or pre-constructed ideas. Everything that came out of his gracious mouth was full of fascinating folds and interesting wit. His allure was irresistible.
The day came when he had to decide what to do. He was yes one of the most enchanting boys, but he had to do something in life. He didn't know what to do, so he started snooping around, trying to discover what more interested him. So he watched movies, read books, he got informed about news and law, he talked to doctors and engineers. Still he didn't know. He couldn't make up his mind.
There was a terminus, a time lap in which he should have decided. His age was the age in which young men usually go to university.
The time came to choose what school to attend, but still he wasn't sure. He knew he was not good, but neither bad in many things. It wasn't enough. He knew at the same time that the moment wasn't a big problem, he could decide another day, he could give a big rain check to everything. But one day or another he would have to make up his mind.
So he decided to study literature since it wasn't really a decision. He thought that that was a subject that wouldn't limit him. In college he would study philosophy, literature and much more.
The time came when he obtained his degree. This meant the time when he should have started working. He knew so much now and he was more captivating then before. He was an attractive man now.
He started writing. He thought that maybe that could be his path.
He started writing about what he could write.
He had so many projects. He thought about them at night, but he didn't know how to start them. He always talked about them with his friends, his girlfriends and his ex professors. To everybody his projects seemed to be very promising, full of good ideas.
He thought and thought. He talked and talked, and got the positive appreciation of many people, not only they respected him, but also respected his ideas.
Years past. Years past, but he still didn't write a novel or a poem or an essay, nothing of that sort, just projects started.
More years passed, but nothing was wrote, even though he was so enthusiastic about it every time he talked about it. He just thought about writing, but nothing was coming out, nothing that was in his mind was reproduced or represented.
One day, after more years had passed, he realized that he would never write anything. He couldn't.
Today many of his admirers visit him still.
His epitaph reads: "The most charming and delightful writer in literature". He became a legend. He is still now a beautiful myth.

Testamento Spirituale

Signore. Perdonami.
Quel che ho fatto è stato forse un errore, ma non credere che l’abbia fatto per procurarTi dispiacere, anzi è proprio per questo motivo che la decisione è stata enormemente straziante.
Creasti questo mondo in modo perfetto, addirittura dotandoci di una volontà. Eliminasti ogni confine che c’era tra Te e gli uomini. Finalmente noi potevamo sperare nel Tuo amore.
Non più Eros, demone nato dai nostri bisogni più reconditi, ma Carità, il simbolo del nostro debito nei Tuoi confronti direttamente annullato da Te. Rappresenta l’amore disinteressato, diretto e reciproco che tu nutri per noi uomini. Tu che ami gli uomini e lasci che questi ultimi prendano la decisione di fare altrettanto.
Mi donasti la vita, il più grande dono che potessi fare e insieme a questo il libero arbitrio. Allora potrebbe sembrare che io sia stato un ingrato, che Ti abbia voltato le spalle, beffeggiato, schiaffeggiato, tradito con la mia ingratitudine.
Non è così.
So che questo mondo terreno non è per noi uomini; Tu ci ha riservato ben altro. Sono consapevole del fatto che il corpo è soltanto un mezzo, uno strumento per vivere in questo mondo perché quello che conta è lo spirito, la nostra essenza.
So che l’uomo è comunque costretto a perseguire fino alla
fine il suo cammino una volta regalatogli, terminandolo soltanto quando la Provvidenza lo desideri.
So che l’uomo dovrebbe, e quindi anch’io avrei dovuto, apprezzare il mondo materiale, che Tu hai creato specificatamente per i Tuoi figli, senza però amarlo ed esserne attaccato in modo viscerale.
Signore chiedo misericordia.
Quel mio corpo, sudicio corpo, maledettissimo corpo, che tu creasti, avrebbe dovuto rappresentare l’immenso splendore della Tua creazione, ma non era affatto glorioso, splendido, vigoroso, come avrei voluto che fosse per osservare con compiacimento la grandezza di tutto il Tuo creato.
Quel mio corpo non mi aiutava ad avvicinarmi a Te. Mi impediva di fare qualunque cosa, mi bloccava, mi rendeva inetto.
È come se il corpo avesse fermato il tragitto che il mio amore doveva compiere per arrivare a Te. Sono convinto che Tu non riuscissi a sentirlo. Da quanto tempo?! Ormai troppo.
Quel mio corpo mi soffocava, mi imbavagliava, mi paralizzava, ma soprattutto mi imprigionava. Imprigionava la mia essenza, la mia anima, il mio Io.
Io non vivevo. Vivere in una prigione non è vita. Non poter vedere la luce non è aver il soffio della vita.
La mia libertà, tanto agognata, non esisteva. La mia volontà era stata liquidata, subordinata al mio corpo.
Anzi nemmeno subordinata al mio corpo, piuttosto a dei macchinari.
Ero un automa, non ero più uomo, non ero la tua creatura…Mi sentivo umiliato.
Plastica, metallo, elettricità fungevano per la solita magia. La Tecnica aveva rimpiazzato almeno parzialmente la Natura.
Certo, sono riusciti a superara la Provvidenza sulla carta, il mio cuore pulsava, ma dentro ero morto già da tempo…troppo tempo.
Ormai puoi fare ciò che vuoi di me. Sei Tu il supremo giudice. Vuoi mettermi tra i dannati? Tra i violenti contro se stessi? Accetto il Tuo volere senza suppliche. Sei Tu che mi collocherai dove più Ti sembra giusto. Credo nella Tua giustizia.
Quella è stata l’ultima e massima manifestazione della mia volontà in vita.
Per favore accettala.
Ormai l’unica cosa che mi rimane è la Speranza.
Signore pietà.

Hedonistic Altruism

I saw a man with a dog by his side. In the right hand he held on to the dog's leash, while in the other he had an umbrella. He looked sorrowful, his eyes full of an icy blue that gave him a deep expression.
Outside it was raining, the sky was gloomy with black clouds and all around were massive buildings with faceless facades painted with all the possible shades of smoky gray.
He was waiting, in his solitude he looked nervous, as if he knew something was about to change, as if his clairvoyance suggested him that he was still able to change. But what he started asking himself. Was it so important after all?
He wanted to move, to do something, so that he wouldn't be found in that altered state. The earphones were being put in his ears, while his other hand was now turning on the music. Now he felt more detached from reality, from his agitated discomfort.
Finally he looked up to stare at me. He seemed surprised to see me.
He started talking to me. I noticed that his voice was sweet, gentle and uncontaminated from the pollution of the outside world. When he spoke my mind gave me the illusion to be in front a little defenseless boy, who needed protection, who was trying desperately to trust someone, because he missed something.
I acted out the part of the tender person at first, trying to be as polite and well mannered as possible, which I guessed was the most effective way to know something more about him. I was conscious that he was willing to show himself to me, to tell me his story and I was more than pleased to listen to him.
In an instant we weren't anymore in the same spot, we had moved without noticing it at all. I was concentrated on this puzzling man. It was simple. I liked him. At fist I looked at him and I realized how handsome he was. His face with strong features fooled his inner side and this fascinated me I was fascinated. His appearance was his first protection, something nature donated him when he was born, foreseeing what difficulties he would encounter.
He was sipping another drink and looking at me. I was telling him my recent stories, my usual chitchat to entertain people, to please them so they could like me. But he didn't appear to be so interested in my cheap chat as to my glances, my fugitive glimpses at his face, at his body, at his expressions.
I lit a cigarette. In the moment I inhaled the smoke my mind went back to the first words I spoke to him. I hadn't talked to him before this first meeting, but I wrote, I mean we wrote to each other, in chat, in a gay chat. I was thinking: "How bizarre to be here with him. I actually could have been with some one else, maybe anyone."
For a moment I thought, thanks to my tacky romance, that it was "meant to be", that we were there drawn together for the will of some cosmic power. But that thought didn't last long. As I said, it could have been anyone and this is the most fascinating matter. It was just accidental, a manifestation of the fortuity. It did not matter to me anyway. I get caught in these reflections, but I don't truly believe in them or I don't have the will to think too much about them. Maybe I should simply say I'm lazy and under the effect of my cigarette.
We were the only ones in the bar, even though there were numerous old ladies and Berlin type of freaks.
I could tell that we had created an intimacy not because we were sharing the same feelings for what we were talking about. No, we were sharing what we didn't say. We were sharing our possibilities of existence, we were sharing what we didn't live, what we could live, what we were capable of living, of what we could become. I felt that reality wasn't important with him. Finally the dog's bark woke me from my trance. He laughed in an unusual way and suggested to get more drinks. More drinks came. More alcohol flowed into my veins.
"I want some one to hold my hands, I am afraid". I was guessing his thoughts. All that came up to me were cheesy lines. My imagination was dreadfully arid. "I don't care about the world around, I have to live in it! I was born in this fucking world. Did I ask for it? I don't think so. I have to do something or I will feel doomed, more close to death. I am from the black generation, but drugs for me aren't an option, it is too easy. At any rate I want to live this wicked burden with all its flaws. I am masochistic!" This seemed more authentic. Maybe he really thought this.
"I have to go now, I will see you soon" I said. He nodded. We separated roads. I went to my hotel.
After one hour I had already forgotten about that nice rendezvous. After one hour I already felt nothing.
Is nothing something? No. So what is nothing? Nothing! What senseless questions I asked myself, as usual. In that period I was convinced that everything was nonsensical, it didn't concern me if I should have lived to the next day or not.
I went out to eat, since eating was the only thing that could fill me up. Well maybe also sperm, it would fill my mouth and my mind, it would stop me from bullshitting.
"Yes, maybe after the food I'll go fuck somewhere". I went to Mc Donald's, my favorite restaurant, I ordered a Big Mac. I looked down on the street while my hands were searching for some greasy fries, I saw some ladies covered by veils and babies wrapped around their bodies. "Someone is still killing souls by giving birth" one side of me said, but another countered " Shut up, you should be happy that you are alive, something is better than nothing!" and again my nihilist side fired back " You sound just like my fucking grandma or a fundamentalist priest". I toke bigger bites to finish quickly; I wanted to get to my Mac to start chatting, with the only intent to find a shag for the night. How shallow I was, I loved it!
I logged on. No messages, what a surprise! I had to look for someone and fast, I was still horny, but I didn't know how much longer it would last. "He is cute, he too, he is tremendously lousy, he is ok, he is not, he is filthy/gorgeous, he should pay to put his pics online". I wrote my message: "Hey, what's up! You look cute, what are you doing tonight? I am kind of bored, do you wanna go out, do something, maybe watch a movie at your place?" an anonymous standard message for something anonymous and standard. It wasn't a love letter but it suited what it was meant to do...I copied it, pasted it and sent it to at least 20 guys. They deserved the same and I wanted to give them the same possibilities, as a strong believer in DEMOCRACY.
Five of them answered back. I composed another unique message that would be identical for everyone " Let's meet directly at your place, it will be easier for you and it will give me time to have a walk in the park. Then we can do what ever you want!" I was actually ashamed of my lame message.
I left the DDR building with relief. It was all finished. I fucked. It didn't give me anything. I felt more dead than before. I was speechless during the whole session. The scene came back to my mind. I thought that if it were recorded it could result funny to many, but to me it was just vulgar. I touched the bottom, I didn't speak a word, and it was all mechanical. My machinery worked together with his, I can't even recall his name (maybe Dario?!), to give an automatic, power-driven result. I came. Unemotional, unthinking, robotic. Like the city I chose for my vacation: Berlin. Like the music I like to listen to: electronic.
Was this the life I wanted to live?! I devoured my state of consciousness trying to reduce it to something resembling insanity.
I searched around the hotel room to find a bottle of alcohol, nothing. Regardless everything I was numb.
Mac on. Typing on the screen gay sites, gay communities, and gay chats.
He was online.
“Hey".
"Hey, how is it going?".
"Everything fine" my usual lie...how stupid question by the way, no body expects a different answer.
"What are you doing?".
"Nothing much. I just woke up from a terrible nightmere, you?”
" I am working on my music".
" Wow cool. Lemme listen to something of yours".
"Here is the link..."
"Awesome music" another lie, but I couldn't help myself.
" Thank you. Why don't we go out?"
"Maybe it's not a great idea".
"Why not?"
"I should study".
"What do you study?"
"Quite nothing. Fine lets go out, where to".
" Do you want to go to the pony?"
"No I have a better idea.."....Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never being. I went to bed with these words in my head, not thinking about the appointment I him.
The next day we were together in the St. Hedwig's Cathedral to attend the mass. I needed something sacred, something magic, and he seemed to be enjoying it.
Around us there were believers that continuously sat up then down, then again up and down, nonstop. We both knew that in all that meaningless speech of the priest's there was something absolute, something that couldn't be reached by anything except the mind.
"Do you believe in God?".
"No I don't." I answered back. " I actually don't believe in anything". I could see he didn't understand what I meant. It didn't matter.
We were holding hands till a lady saw us. I felt somewhat guilty about it.
He was concentrated on the words that were said by the priest, he was repeating them in his head, trying to extract every symbol they represented, everything that he could relate to his own life. He was living in the world of symbols. He was lucky. Someone that could read a book and still reproduce in his fantasy the images the writer tries to create, someone who could feel the non-existing experiences.
After the ceremony we went for a walk on the riverbanks. The water was green and boats full of tourists flashing their camera were floating along, parallel from where we were. It was a nice day, but not for me. Something was boiling inside. I wasn't capable of discovering what it was.
Again he started talking about himself and again I started asking him questions of little significance. I cared about him.
He told me he loved me. I wasn't taken aback. I knew it already. It seemed all too easy. But I wanted to give him what he needed. Illusion is the first of pleasures. He kissed me; I didn't stop him. That was the last time I saw him.

Merde and Civilisation

Merde and Civilisation

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are
Looking at the stars!
“Oscar Wilde”


To the reader

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse 

As beggars nourish their vermin.
Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint; 

We exact a high price for our confessions, 

And we gaily return to the miry path, 

Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.
On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist, 

Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds, 

And the noble metal of our will 

Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.
The Devil holds the strings which move us! 

In repugnant things we discover charms; 

Every day we descend a step further toward Hell, 

Without horror, through gloom that stinks.
Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites 

Tortures the breast of an old prostitute, 

We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure 

That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.
Serried, swarming, like a million maggots, 

A legion of Demons carouses in our brains, 

And when we breathe, Death, that Unseen River, 

Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.
If rape, poison, daggers, arson 

Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs 

The banal canvas of our pitiable lives, 

It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,

The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,

The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,

In the filthy menagerie of our vices,
There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! 

Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries, 

He would willingly make of the earth a shambles 

And, in a yawn, swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears, 

He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.

You know him reader, that refined monster,

— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!
— Charles Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal)





Where there is dirt there is system

We live in a period in which everything is eternally brought into question, in which all the antique cycles of time and of nature have been forgotten.
In this difficult scenario we have lost a part of our own identity.
There is an overwhelming insecurity that could undermine the entire system of the society, throwing into disorder concepts that were by now ascertained, because of absolute validity.
Man since some time, or maybe since always, feels alone, because he doesn’t recognize himself among his fellow men, he is scared of being different and fears of not having the same value as the others maybe due to the capitalistic mechanism which ratifies the predominance of the stronger over the weaker, but according to a logic that isn’t always meritocratic.
We can find evident examples on a macroscopic level, think of the problem between the western countries and the middle east, of the skepticism about a United Europe approved by a constitution or of everyday arguments and prejudges.
In other words, on the one hand there is the danger of transforming the current system in a place in which differences are just discriminated, and on the other, because of this discrimination, people aren’t propelled to develop an own individuality that can contribute to elaborate diversified answers towards the needs of society.
In order to remember the value of “égalité” and “fraternité” we just need to always consider the nature of man, as much his soul provided of great reason as his biological condition.
Indeed it seems ridiculous to remind that everybody comes to life and dies, and that every man has physiological needs in common with each other, like for example the extremely more trivial need to go to the bathroom.
It is a great truth, maybe a little difficult to face, but every human settlement has to deal with the need to defecate, without differences of cult or religion.
Shit is one of the most democratizing elements because to the gold-food inequality corresponds a total and substantial ano-fecal equality.
The human equality is structural. The ways and the places of dumping change, not the dump. It is simple: every one of us does it, from the stars of Hollywood to the powerful, from the Queen of Britain to a simple crook who lives like a hobo.
Like this it is possible to put into effects a downsizing of the deism of stars, simply by thinking of the on the john. We arrive finally to the revenge of the housewife: how does the envied diva make it? Solid, thick and sturdy? Gassy?
The game is done! The principle is the one of the carnival, social stabilizer thanks to the mechanism of the turnover. King for one day or, in this case, all men made of the same prosaic substance of who is on the silver screen.
Therefore it isn’t “music that brings people together”, rather it is shit that we have all in common, men, women, old and young!
It is important to keep in mind that shit, like all the other common features, is yes a formal unity principle (thus man has to be treated equally in front of law), but at the same time it doesn’t limit its action in this direction, on the contrary, in a curious manner it is able of creating very interesting differences among all of us.
As a matter of fact in psychology feces have a pivotal role in the explanation of certain behaviors, because the influences of society, of the social classes, but above all of the first educators, have modified the mysterious connection between “product” and producer. Between man and his wastes.
It is absolutely dangerous to underestimate this aspect, which loses value in our environment a bit hypocrite and easily scandalized. The problem of waste is a global one, the environmental alarm, could truly produce devastating effects on the world’s asset, with the result of a danger also for the humans.
Thus it is fundamental to understand the connection that exists between man and his wastes in the different social classes, so that we can elaborate a new view that will enable us to treat different problems that exist in our present thanks to new methods.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
“It seemed like a village festival with the crackle of the farts” G. Pascoli

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I'm.
In the table drawer he found an old number of Titbits. He folded it under his armpit, went to the door and opened it.
He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then.
He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The king was in his counting house. Nobody.
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit. Matcham's Masterstrike. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers' club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds thirteen and six.
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the master-stroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six (…).
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air (…). James Joyce’s “Ulysses”(episode 4 “Calipso”)

In society everything that is seen as negative has to be necessarily hidden. Society battles an endless war to ignore certain of its obscure sides, unthinkable, or more likely unspeakable. This happens also in the present, where everything is allowed only in appearance since everything is administrated by the logic of propaganda and by the pseudo-liberalist market.
The establishment has to be clean, stiff-necked, with a deep-rooted concept of ownership and of order, with honor and a perfect reputation as passwords.
In this situation the influence on the single is fundamental because the dominant way of thinking succeeds in transforming the single in order to adapt to the group.
So to enter in the club of the “bigs”, of those who live the “great life”, you must reorganize yourself and deny some aspects that don’t coincide whit the bon-ton of the bourgeois prototype.
According to the popular imaginary, if you want to pertain to the ideal prototype of health and wealth everything that you posses must be “stainless”. It means that you have to eliminate all nuances of life. (So as to enter the sheep-pen you must shear all your black wool).
Therefore there isn’t anymore room for the various vices that belong to the lower class, to that part of the population which is accustomed to every sort of infernal circle. You can imagine dammed who live in the slums or in any sort of Hooverville where chaos and delinquency spread.
We arrived to the point of confirming a neurosis common to everyone: we realize it when we admit that the entire society is affected by obsessive-compulsive syndrome towards hygiene. Dirt is linked to danger and danger is the effective cause of fear.
The bourgeoisie becomes the synonymous of removal and concealment, while the quest for “purity”, socially absent, appears fundamental for life’s stability.
Obviously not every one is willing to make these big sacrifices and so, like in the Victorian society, these people begin to live a double life, on the one hand the official and respectable one, glittery and dazzling, represented by a beautiful home in a dignifying residential neighborhood, regular family, son, daughter and a golden retriever that completes the perfect happy frame; on the other hand there is the life of the dark suburbs, of the sordid, of the illicit, of the most secluded perversions.
Lo and behold, man has a new schizophrenia, caused by the social aspirations that end up generating only morbidity and too often neurosis of all sorts.
An emblematic example is the quite bizarre character of Petrolio, Pasolini’s last book.
The protagonist, il Merda (the Shit), young around twenty five years old, small in height, with narrow shoulders, with thinning hair and a little greasy, with small yellow teeth that form a glut and secure smile, and thus a certain disdain for everything. One of the many Parioli (the richest roman neighborhood) guys with a well-off family behind his back and an eternally full billfold, as well as not many preoccupations in his head. However il Merda, model of the bourgeois respectability, is described in a grim and revolting way. The conformism that the character represents decays as soon as the author shows the his hidden personality. Pasolini brings the character on the usual night walk, during which we can catch a glimpse of the hell populated by women with dubious sex appeal, rent boys, junkies and pushers. In short the suburbs frequented by il Merda are the mirrors of his corrupt soul, which he would never show during the daylight.
Pasolini therefore, through his il Merda, wants to offer us an image of the Italian bourgeoisie very difficult to digest.
Anyway it isn’t a chance if Pasolini chose this name for his repressed and wretch anti-hero. Shit, in fact, represents par exellence what the individual has to refuse to delimitate the boundaries of his subjectivity. Shit becomes separated from the individual, who doesn’t recognize it anymore as his own. Man is caught between his desires and his unconscious impulses, which he must restrict in order to remain in a social order (culture, language and law).
This constraint is taught since infancy. Freud says that a child, during the anal phase, is used to hold his feces stimulating the nerves around the anus and hence feeling an erotic pleasure. In order to stop these “harmful” habits parents start a system of interdictions and inhibitions, which will provoke the debasement of the ritual concerning excrement.
Nevertheless the educational interference can be disadvantageous, fixing the child in that situation of total insecurity that can determine the emerging of an obsessive neurosis. Virtually the child is castrated for his, otherwise, natural behavior, and consequently he remains confused and bewildered, he doesn’t know anymore how to act, because the mother denies his fecal-gift, which, in his mind, should have produced self-affirmation and appreciation.
After this traumatizing experience the first symptoms of shame, guilt and repression are developed.
Hence the main desire that follows us since early childhood is the need to transgress the limits of civilization, to break all the chains around our instincts too often knowingly abjured.
To criticize the society we use the taboos that were created by society itself. Symbol of this is Carlo Emilio Gadda's (Italian writer) real obsession towards shit, which he uses as a metaphor of degradation in many of his books (among which "Una tigre nel Parco"). The reason is probably found in his dissolute biography. Maybe, just child, he brought his feces to his mother, so that he would establish with her his first love exchange. The mother, bourgeois of the Italy full of hope and will, denied his gift, that according to her was only disgusting and fetid...in other word to eliminate as soon as possible.
As a matter of fact, during his childhood, Gadda came across the Milanese status symbol, for which solidity and efficiency were its fundamental totems.
The engineer felt a cult for the rational, for the love of order appropriate to the bourgeoisie.
However he lived split life because the other part of him violently hated the insubstantial law of appearance. In appearance he was powerless because he couldn’t reveal his real personality (he couldn’t show his mother his small inconvenient secrets because she would have found them highly harmful for the his career); as a result not even finding order in the bourgeois life he decided to criticize it. The poor writer was nauseated by the sewer world into which he was forced to live and he used shit to attack fascism and his Duce, maybe the last pivot of his quest for order, which collapsed for obvious reasons; therefore Mussolini becomes Merdonio who embodies Kant's radikal Böse.
Traumatized by the horrors of the fascism and by the fall of those values, sense of hierarchy and obedience to the superiors among them, in which he can't believe anymore, the "Ingegnere" tried to transfer all his fears, that were his dominating passions, in sordid images, declaiming an epiphany of diarrhea that was just a consequence of his discomfort.
Sure enough Gadda was the greatest exponent of that part of the society that looks for purity at all costs because in his personality existed a chaos that made him unstable and created a paralysis that blocked his life.
The same is for Joyce, who recognized the problem of the impulses and the role of the society in front of the single. Indeed, the author had the power to break up the trinity identity, system and order describing in his books a protagonist with habits and corporal needs that weren’t anymore "magic"; thus we see the protagonist walking around with his pants down searching for a place to defecate as if he were a child who wasn't educated to the common behavior in society, synonymous of a bourgeois man (like Gadda) who isn't anymore capable of living in an environment of constrictions and lets go, yet remaining in conflict with that social class he comes from.
Joyce tried to definitely free the protagonist (that in this case could be his alter-ego) from a mental invasion of the trash around him, as it appears evident in the episode "Calipso" from the Ulysses, where he provided a fun and at the same time cruel equation between excrement and bad literature; in this episode Leopold Bloom, feeling a light intestinal movement, goes to the narrow water cabinet outside his house to accomplish the excremental act, not without bringing an adequate literature, that will accompany and, in a certain way, facilitate the act itself. The reading is spotted in the "awarded story" of a newspaper. The final act of Bloom (He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it) tells about Joyce's fiercely critic disposition towards social and literary principles ruling in his time. Bad literature in this story is the symbol of all those bourgeois principles applied entirely to the human knowledge. Joyce was against that literature because in reality it limited his, more original, but less excepted. So artists like Gadda and Joyce, who never abandoned their bourgeois vein, lived in two worlds, between the desire to find an impossible harmony and a will to live in the full artistic and spiritual freedom.
The guilt, the sense of shame, the repression become superfine artwork, however the human being in these books is unable to manage by himself in the crushing and incomprehensible social system and ends up being an inept. Chiharu Shiota (“Bathroom”)







“La propreté des desmoiselles belges”
Elle puait comme une fleur moisie
Moi, je lui dis (mais avec courtoisie):
"Vous devriez prendre un bain régulier
Pour dissiper ce parfum de bélier."
Que me répond cette jeune hébétée?
Je ne suis pas, moi, de vous dégoûtée!"
- Ici pourtant on lave le trottoir
Et leparquet avec un savon noir!
Charles Baudelaire

Prolètariat pantagruelique: “Quel magnifique affaire fecal!” F. Rabelais

Two of Trygaeus’s laves are seen in front of the stable, one of them kneading cakes of dung, the other taking the finished cakes and throwing them into the stable.
SERVANT A: Quick, quick, bring the dung-beetle his cake.
SERVANT B:There it is. Give it to him, and may it kill him! And may he never eat a better.
SERVANT A: Now give him this other one kneaded up with ass's dung.
SERVANT B: There! I've done that too. And where's what you gave him just now? Surely he can't have devoured it yet!
SERVANT A: Indeed he has; he snatched it, rolled it between his feet and bolted it. Come, hurry up, knead up a lot and knead them stiffly.
SERVANT B: Oh, scavengers, help me in the name of the gods, if you do not wish to see me fall down choked.
SERVANT A: Come, come, another made from the stool of a fairy's favourite. That will be to the beetle's taste; he likes it well ground.
SERVANT B: There! I am free at least from suspicion; none will accuse me of tasting what I mix.
SERVANT A: Faugh! come, now another! keep on mixing with all your might.
SERVANT B: By god, no. I can stand this awful cesspool stench no longer.
SERVANT A: I shall bring you the whole ill-smelling gear.
SERVANT B: Pitch it down the sewer sooner, and yourself with it.
To the AUDIENCE Maybe, one of you can tell me where I can buy a stopped-up nose, for there is no work more disgusting than to mix food for a dung-beetle and to carry it to him. A pig or a dog will at least pounce upon our excrement without more ado, but this foul wretch affects the disdainful, the spoilt mistress, and won't eat unless I offer him a cake that has been kneaded for an entire day.... But let us open the door a bit ajar without his seeing it. Has he done eating? Come, pluck up courage, cram yourself till you burst! The cursed creature! It wallows in its food! It grips it between its claws like a wrestler clutching his opponent, and with head and feet together rolls up its paste like a rope-maker twisting a hawser. What an indecent, stinking, gluttonous beast! I don't know what angry god let this monster loose upon us, but of a certainty it was neither Aphrodite nor the Graces.
SERVANT A: Who was it then?
SERVANT B: No doubt Zeus, the God of the Thundercrap.
SERVANT A: But perhaps some spectator, some beardless youth, who thinks himself a sage, will say, "What is this? What does the beetle mean?" And then an Ionian, sitting next him, will add, "I think it's an allusion to Cleon, who so shamelessly feeds on filth all by himself."-But now I'm going indoors to fetch the beetle a drink.

Extract from the “Peace” by Aristophanes

The bourgeoisie has been able, through the denying of defecation, to officially remove the aura of subversive comedy from shit. It succeeded in muzzling shit, which as a result is not anymore able to arouse some playful moments without malice and shame. The positive vision resident in the grotesque representation of shit has become purely negative with the arrival of the medium-upper class together with its contradictions and repressions included in the package. This happened because the proletariat, till a little while ago, was relegated in the area of filthy and disreputable class, therefore discriminated, along with its background culture.
In the ancient times the use of shit in comedies was very popular because it was supposed to remind the abundance and the richness of the earth, the health and the prosperity of the body which had to procreate kids full of strengths on the one hand and on the other bring sexual pleasure. Thanks to shit the soil became florid so it could fulfill humans’ vital needs.
Also for this reason, the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin analyzing the work of Rabelais explained: "Let's not forget anyway that the excrement is a joyful subject that at the same time lowers and lifts, transforming fear into laughter".
It lowers because the value is minimal, but it lifts because, even though it isn't a very suitable theme for high poetry, it represents a central substance for the life of those populations who depended for their survival on agriculture.
They recognized the importance of shit even at a religious level; an example are Aristophanes's comedies (like "the Peace") which were performed during the festivals in honor of the god of theater Dionysus, to satisfy a need to reverse the categories of reality and to create a new structure in the social order, that would change the prospective of the public, transporting it in a fantastic universe.
The carnivalesque element, the satirical inversion, has in shit its philosopher’s stone!
Also the act of eating shit (see the dung beetle that succeeds in taking his master Trigeo, an Athenian peasant, to the Olympus to ask the gods to stop the war, just by eating his master’s excrements) is an all time classic of the satire. There is a psychological aspect that affects in the depths. Anciently it was even a ritual of the religious clownery together with drinking urine: apotropaic obscenities that concealed subtle symbolic meanings that today we couldn’t anymore conceive.
Subsequently the Latin culture brings back comedy and submits it to significant revisions, therefore regenerating it. The Latin people were very attracted to the trivial sphere, this was inborn in the nature of the countrymen; for this reason the comedies of Plauto had uproarious success thanks to their promiscuous content and their street language.
Other celebrated example of coprophagia in literature are Swift’s novels; Swift used shit as an eccentric metaphor to attend the functioning of the interpersonal relationships, as if it were an answer to other problems…in other words a panacea.
Recently coprophagia and the humor about feces have assumed a degenerating role in the allegoric representations, maybe due to the evolution of the culture and of our alimentary habits.
Obviously we aren’t linked anymore to the rural world because the factories produce our food. From here the synonym eating-shit-eating-to-consume is born.
This new interpretation appeared often in the Italian cinema during the period that followed the economic boom. The cinema like Perseus, who, thanks to his shield, reflects Medusa and kills her; cinema reflects the reality of the moment through its universal dialectic, but above all to that part of the population to whom the critique and moralistic message is addressed. To those people who don’t whish a proletarian revolution, but who are satisfied being ridiculous petits bourgeois with the frenzy of becoming full-fledged ones. They want to become something that before was their worst enemy. They want to homologate themselves with the most boorish world possible!
In “La grande abbuffata” (M. Ferreri) four friends (P. Noiret, M. Mastroianni, U. Tognazzi and M. piccoli) reunite in a villa out of Paris, determined to perform a quadruple gasto-erotic hara-kiri. A pinguid angel of death, insatiable and maternal teacher accompanies them (A. Ferréol). This apologue hyper-realistic has the snaps of a irreverent and salacious buffoonery, the wrathful tones of Lenten preach and, together, the provocative impiety of a satirical pamphlet; it isn’t anymore a joyful Rabelaisian comedy; there is instead black humor, desperation and sorrow. Its traumatic force resides in the calm lucidity of the eye and in the honesty of the language. The four friends, tired of life, abandon themselves to what capitalism imposes: the law of consume. In a disgusting way they eat so much that the toilet is filled up and overflows the shit, extreme metaphor that indicates what is properly happening in reality. The waste that is winning over the characters, forces them to live in a villa more and more filthy. The protagonists are convinced of being on a happy island, where they can forget all of those constrictions of the external world by being libertines, but what they don’t expect is that in reality they are following the cruel laws of capitalism.
Also in “Le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Salò” by Pasolini of the same years, we assist at a message of the same expressive force, the one with which Pasolini wants to criticize sourly the system-world by now grown exclusively into a economical gear.
Pasolini reproduced the architecture very similar to the one in Dante’s hell, even adding the circle of shit in which the kidnapped kids are coerced to eat their own shit just to satisfy the turpitudes of the fascist hierarchs.
The obscene metaphor of shit is needed to underline the anxiety of equality (equality to that so abject bourgeoisie), in the consumerist degradation symbol of the capitalistic perversions. Consumerism becomes authentic dictatorship that imprisons the minds of those people who aren’t aware of living in a second “fascism” much more worse than the first.
Like this other European directors, Luis Bunuel and Greenaway out in front, who remember the ancestral desolation that resides in man thanks to their acid and cattish attacks.
In particular, in the movies of Luis Bunuel there are bizarre scenes, like the one in “Belle de journ” in which Katherine Denevue is covered in shit, or the shit that comes out of the piano in “L’age d’or”, but ultimately the most emblematic and significant scene is in “The phantom of liberty” in which Leonardo’s last supper is parodied in order to engrave with force the agonizing scream that the viewer should listen to, the scream preoccupied because the entire human species is committing a slow suicide with the continual production of wastes: corporal, industrial, atomic, of the earth and of the air.
At the end these great intellectuals are part of that group of revolutionary subjects capable of knocking down the system that Marcuse had anticipated in the “One-dimensional man”, the ones who recognize the disgust and the superfluous in the product of the surplus economy. These damned activists are the ones who understand that shit is the tragic expression of the today society, but they, through an art accessible to the many, manage to give hope, an utopian gasp thanks to which you can transform once more the tragic in comic, giving back the comic essence that pertains to shit.

Artist’s shit and shitty artists: “J’ai pètri du merde et j’en fait de l’or!”C. Baudelaire


(Shit vision 1)
Gala: Salvador, darling, I have a bad feeling, you know?
Dalì: What do you mean?
Gala: Your friends say that you are eating shit. I would like to know if this rumor is true or not; it is always better to know if the person you love has particular tastes in the kitchen. Just think that those suspicious bastards didn’t have the balls to ask you themselves and they wanted to throw you out of the circle, alas such hypocrites, like if they didn’t have some kind of mania! Obviously I am the only one to have the guts to face the subject-matter, you know, certain things don’t disgust, by now I am a woman of the world darling!
Dalì: Ahahahaha, I enjoy your foolishness. Scatology is for me a shocking element just as locusts and blood. I loathe such perversions.
Gala: Alright Salvador, I believe you, even though I think that you want to keep up appearances. I remember quite well you picture of the man with the boxer full of his own excrements. Also in other pieces of your work there are turds everywhere and you are so gut that your painting almost stink, transude a certain fetor!
Dalì: I believe that the excrement is symbol of life and if shit were semi-liquid, like a string similar to the one the Moerae weaved and cut to their delight, life would be longer.
Gala: Very fascinating, but we can talk about it later. Let’s decide that you concentrate more on creation instead and in the meantime I bring home the bred!
Dalì: Fair enough, then get two baguettes, with a phallic shape possibly, or even better shaped as a turd, maybe mushy if I am lucky.
Gala goes out exasperated.

(Douche d’or poetic license)

Saturday night, Riccione, Cocoricò, I enter the bathroom-dance floor.
I ask: “Who is that that crazy hysteric masked at the dj-set? She looks like a madman.”
An anonym face dressed in a scanty way replies me: “Why that is Isabella Santacroce, the writer, don’t you know?”
While the hyper active girl was whispering indecipherable words to my ear I was thinking about her book that I read, Destroy.
I go up to the dj-set to ask her about the book.
Isabella looks at me: “Hello! How do you do.”
I answer: “How do you do! I admire you a lot, you know? I liked your book. I found it incredibly bizarre and interesting.”
She exclaims: “Galaxy in my blood slave and shy. What follows is just boredom. Yours forever Isabella.
Now I have to go to the loo, wanna come with me?
We enter it. She closes the door. She continues: “I hate company, the only moment in which I can stay in front of someone is when I sit on the john.”
Embarrassed I try to reassume from where I left: “But do you believe that the characters of your books reflect the postmodern nihilist life?”
She sits on the toilet indifferent to the question just asked. She lights a cigarette. The music explodes from the boxes. Everything vibrates. Outside every one writhes, slave of the rhythm.
Isabella: “Reproduce the sound of my essence that flows!”
I feel confused and lost. I satisfy her: “psssssssss!” (An admirer must always satisfy his idolatrized artist, I believe).
In the meantime she gratifies her need and she continues to speak as a Cumaean Sibyl: “I read fairy-tails to destroy them right after. Lines after lines of fantastic words in flame. Fire and dreams. To burn fantasy right when this has brushes with its wings my heart. Romantic, don’t you find it?”
I nod and reply: “Isabella have you ever fallen in love?” (A question that didn’t have anything to do with this moment, in this place, asked at this woman)
A guy walks in that bathroom that was just occupied by us with a glass. He comes out with the glass full of a yellowy liquid. The robber yells: “Dear Santacroce, now I will sell your piss on eBay! Somebody will certainly buy it!”
Santacroce turns around and answers him: “My ego that comes out of my orifice. I can’t use it. It would be egoistic. I give it to the world. A part of me disseminated in the space. A transcendent Isabella. My gold.”
I leave between disgusted and fascinated. The acid music of a porno projection continues to slam against my body.

(Shit vision 2)

“Come Dolcenera, come and sit on me”, Gabriele told her before laying down on the mauve colored carpet with the perfume of web woven by some exotic beauty. “You will be more comfortable on my abdomen, in front of the fire that will warm up your blood. I want to live uniquely in you and for you, without tomorrow, without yesterday, without any other bond, without any other preference, out of the world, entirely lost in your being, for ever, till death. What pleasures you can give to an exquisite lover!
Gabriele comes close to her ear and caressed her with is sweet and voluptuous words; he longed for a terrible erotic act that she initially didn’t want to perform.
Dolceamare woman of many virtues, of such a delicate beauty, like a north Europe tulip, never considered such depravation, instead she thought that his amorous demand was a vain cruelty.
Nonetheless Gabriele insisted designing with his fingers the magnificent outline of her back only comparable to the Greek statuary and asking again to satisfy him.
She, persuaded from the pleasure she was feeling, pleased him. She began doing what she normally did on Arial’s elegant urinal decorated with the eye of God at the bottom and the writing on the back “keep me clean, use me often, what I see I won’t tell the public.”
While Dolcenera was concentrated not to disappoint him, D’Annunzio was looking at her perfect anal sphincter contracting, he felt the warmth of the woman on his chest augment more and more, and he kissed her with passion still dirty from the gift received.

“We are what we eat”. This is one of Salvador Dalì’s fixation, not very known, but very meaningful to understand a good portion of the modern times.
Dalì was obsessed with all the nutritive-digestive procession, from the lunch plate to the expulsion of the physiological needs: he inspected scrupulously all his intestinal products, analyzing them in every detail through sight, smell and maybe also touch.
He calculated the time and the frequency of production and also the fatigue or the pleasure felt during the act and he deduced his present and past health conditions with his paranoic-critic method. He arrived, in the moments of maximum self-celebration to claim that his feces were clean, pure and odorless thanks to his cosmic perfection.
However Dalì is just one of the many artists that had a certain enchant in front of the scatological material.
Piero Manzoni in his most famous piece of art, “Artist’s shit”, uses Duchamp’s “Fountain” concept revolutionizing it, bestowing it a new life. As a matter of fact, instead of using a ready-made made from a third party (maybe some industry) he reposes the whole procedure in the hands of the artist. The ready-made becomes a pure material, directly born from him.
The metaphor of the “Artist’s shit” alludes with irony at the deep origin of the artist’s work, or in a wider meaning to man that creatively produces.
The artist’s body is offered to the public as a work of art and the body’s vestigial become relics.
Manzoni therefore gives a corporeity to art and he throws the foundations for what will be art performance like the one of the Japanese Chiaru Shiota, who uses the scatological metaphor in “The bathroom” in order to turn over the ritual of hygiene, to denigrate the society’s obsession and to radically refuse the technological fetish (because according to her the technological society isn’t able to muzzle all problems) returning to forms of art more physical and simple. In her performance Shiota claimed of being reborn after her submission to her miseries.
These artists recognize the authenticity of Freud’s theories about excrements, according to which shit is the child’s first real property connected to creativity.
The first form of the human expression.
The anal phase in fact is a phase during which the mind of the child elaborates to achieve a goal, to create something, just like he creates his “golden eggs”.
In other words after having said that for the child feces are a proof of his almighty creativity, enclosed in a fragment of the libido, we understand that to produce art is innate in the human’s soul and in the man’s psychology.
Obviously only the ones who can overcome shame, guilt and the moral teaching around certain topics are able to produce something great.
The attempt of silence towards art and literature is translated into a new esthetic and linguistic code for which trespassing taboos becomes the way of expression.
Initially a subculture will be produced that will be a revelation to what was before rejected, but that is now revaluated as an inspiring element.
Hence shit, that we all despise and denigrate, assumes a visceral philosophical meaning; a universal archetype meaning, the desire of transcendental unity, for which it is important to know one’s limits overcoming them once and for all.
The artist does just this. Or better still Piero Manzoni, the artist for antonomasia, does just this: he uses shit, part of his body, his product, selling it to people that in reality despise it. He succeeds in giving a new life to something that the others would trash. He is able, with his opinion, to change the way of thinking, to modify morality, to evolve the mind of those people who live in a continuous fog.
Gabriele D’Annunzio and Isabella Santacroce aren’t afraid of doing it either. They use the return of the repressed in order to find one of art’s characteristic form, always expression of a human crave for liberty. They, the real transgressors, move the point of view risking to be repudiated for a value that not everybody has. The one of liberty.




Refuse to flush our shit from the public view

I found the occasion to use a Trojan horse thanks to which I could observe without being seen. Understanding the mechanisms that were normally hidden.
However the opening of the mouth was too high for me, out of reach, and the belly button one was sealed, a downright cul-de-sac, thus the only way that remained was the one on the back, the secondary door, the service one. This door that not many decide to enter, because uncomfortable and with thousands of hidden dangers, brought me along an interesting backwards journey, where everything was reversed.
A journey in the intestine of the mythical horse where the waste, the superfluous and the useless are the background to the encounters with the various authors and artists who are looking for new inspirations produced by what everybody else evacuates and ignores.
(Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure).
Of the same opinion is Levi Strass, who claims in his book “L’homme nu” that the excrements have always been useful and recyclable, whether figural or literally. Gary Bloom, proud inventor of the Goose poop art, collects geese’ shit, he separates it in four different colors on the basis of the alimentation of the beasts, he dries it in a toast machine, reduces it into powder and afterwards uses the shit-colors to paint.
At last Oliviero Toscani, cunning photographer who doesn’t need presentations, editor of the book Cacas, a coffee-table book, conceptual homage to shit with 70 photographs of animal excrements, of all forms, colors and sizes. Homage because shit is something natural, but removed.
What these great men want to tell us is the importance of understanding feces in order to understand what we are doing. Because, on the environmental point view, the humans have reached the climax of the problem caused by wastes.
Indeed the other side of the coin of the technological progress at all costs is shit and if we don’t learn to coexist with it, to use it in the best way, we are going to be invaded both psychologically and physically. Practical examples are the ones of Naples and other cities with waste problems.
We have to begin to face our problems, to resolve them without looking for scapegoats as the immoderate mania for cleanness.
We must refuse to refuse our won refuse! In other words we must regain the contact with our natural side and stop putting it aside. If we were in harmony with nature, with our nature, crisis of this type wouldn’t arise anymore.
Thus let’s say a radical yes to shit, as a synonymous of the knowledge of our limits and as the recognition of the illusion of mass-production’s endless power, of having to look further than our noses, of having to free the human mind, of tout se tient!
If every one of us will succeed in regaining the connection with our nature, with our natural cycle, we will arrive to a personal transformation that could, together with the transformation of many other, bring an economic and cultural evolution on great scale, finally modifying society’s sick mentality and probably reaching a democracy in which man is accepted for what he is and not because he lowers his head for the fear of being ostracized, of becoming an excluded.

The end