Emanuele Trevi

Something Written

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Emanuele Trevi, 2012

English translation copyright © Ann Goldstein, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Elisabetta Catalano

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Qualcosa di scritto in Italy in 2012 by Ponte alle Grazie, an imprint of Adriano Salani Editore S.p.A.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-083-7

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may

be made of the information contained herein.

This book has been translated thanks to a translation grant awarded by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Questo libro e’stato tradotto grazie ad un contributo alla traduzione assegnato dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri Italiano.

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for my father

It’s a novel, but it’s not written the way real novels are written: its language is that of essays, of newspaper articles, of reviews, of private letters, even of poetry.

pier paolo pasolini, Petrolio

(letter to Alberto Moravia)

For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing—all I’d learned from film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?

truman capote, Music for Chameleons

##

Among the many—too many—people who worked for Laura Betti at the Pier Paolo Pasolini Foundation in Rome, all of them endowed with a colorful store of more or less unpleasant memories, I believe that I can boast of, if nothing else, above-average endurance. Not that I was at all spared the extravagant daily persecution that the Madwoman (as I soon took to calling her, in my own mind) felt it her duty to inflict on her subordinates. On the contrary, I was so irredeemably odious to her (there is no more precise word) that I succeeded in plucking all the strings of her protean sadism: from the ceaseless invention of humiliating nicknames to real physical threat. Every time I entered the offices of the foundation, in a dark, massive corner building on Piazza Cavour, not far from Castel Sant’Angelo, I sensed almost physically the animal hostility, the uncontrollable rage that flashed, like the zigzag lightning in a comic book, from behind the lenses of her big square sunglasses. The standard greetings immediately followed. ‘Good morning, little slut, did you finally figure out that it’s time to GIVE HIM YOUR ASS? Or do you think you can still get away with it?!? But you don’t fool ME, you sweet-talking little slut, it takes a lot more than someone like you’—and this first blast of amenities was ended only by the eruption of a laugh that seemed to come from a subterranean cavern, and was made more threatening by the counterpoint of an indescribable sound halfway between a roar and a sob. Very rarely could the avalanche of insults dumped on the unfortunate victim be traced back to meaningful concepts. Besides, as a general rule, the Madwoman detested meaning, in every form. There was no human instrument that in her hands did not become a dangerously explosive device. And language was no exception. Her tirades revolved on the pivot of an offensive epithet, savored with pleasure and constantly repeated, as if the gist of the conversation resided there, in the pure formulation of the insult. If addressed to a male, the epithet was generally feminine. Even people she liked, and admired, had to put up with this sort of symbolic emasculation. Alberto Moravia, for example, to whom she was very attached, at a certain point became ‘grandma,’ and there was nothing to be done about it.1 The entire remainder of the conversation, once the insult had been uttered, was pure and simple improvisation—a Piranesian prison of malevolence and contempt, heedless of logic and syntax. ‘Little slut’—that was from the start the essence, the perfect expression of what I inspired in her. Sweet-talking, vain, lying, fascist little slut. Jesuit, murderer. Ambitious. As for me, though I wasn’t yet thirty, I had already, like the prisoner of Edgar Allan Poe, groped my way around the walls of my character, which, as in all dungeons, were properly damp and dark. That the Madwoman was not completely wrong I could easily enough admit. What really infuriated her was my wish to please her, my ostentatious lack of aggressiveness, and, ultimately, the indifference that has always been my sole defense against the threats of the world. There was no doubt about the type of damned who would willingly take charge of tormenting for eternity that sort of Dantesque monster, enveloped in the smoke of the cigarettes she left burning in the ashtray, with her excessive bulk and her hair, of a terrifying reddish-orange hue, knotted in a tuft that inevitably made you think, when she shook it, of the jet of a whale, or the crest of a psychotic pineapple. Laura hated hypocrites and, more generally, all those persons who, incapable of expressing themselves, appeared to her as fake, condemned to hide behind a papier-mâché mask. This was what I liked about her, even as I suffered the consequences. It seemed to me that, hidden in the recesses of all that hostility, there was a kind of medicine, a lesson leading to salvation. And so, from the moment I started going to the foundation, where I quickly gained experience of every sort of temperamental storm, from the slightest to the most severe, I had concluded that the time I spent there, in the shadow of that mental Chernobyl, was time well spent. What was it, exactly—a punishment that I had inflicted on myself by myself to expiate some grave sin? A spiritual exercise imbued with the most rigorous masochism? At a certain point, there could be no doubt, the Madwoman would fire me, as she had dozens of others (some such relationships had lasted no more than a few hours). But I, as far as it was in my power, would do nothing to leave. My job, which wasn’t very complicated, consisted of tracking down all the interviews that Pasolini had done: from the first, which went back to the time of Street Kids, up to the most famous, the one he did with Furio Colombo a few hours before his death.2 Once the material was gathered, I would assemble it into a book. Nothing exceptional, apart from the labor of doing it; and Laura was very generous when it came to money. She liked to tear off checks, after writing them in her dramatic way, transforming every compensation into an undeserved gift, something stolen from her greatness of soul, and a clear, unalterable confirmation of that greatness. If she could, she would have carved those checks in marble. She was also very skillful at getting hold of any type of public financing, to support all the initiatives of the foundation, and to pay a few regular employees: a great archivist, Giuseppe Iafrate, who was as patient and detached as a Tibetan bonze, and a couple of girls whom she flayed alive but who, without admitting it to themselves, ended up almost loving her. As far as I was concerned, inevitably, sooner or later, I would be fired: I was mathematically certain of it. The fact is that Laura had her own notions about how to publish those interviews. They were crazy, incomprehensible ideas, of no practical use, and she tortured me about them for hours. ‘Listen to me, little slut, these interviews of Pier Paolo are BURNING, do you understand? You’ve read them. Even you must get it. Burn-ing. And so, in this book, all the words have to FLY, you understand what a form that flies is? You have to make them fly, fly, fly.’ And I: Yes, Laura, I absolutely agree, that’s what I want, too, to make them fly. Like eagles. In reality, I wanted to publish those interviews as they deserved, and I would never ever understand how they would be made to fly. I continued on the only path that I considered possible. The accomplished fact—I predicted—would trigger the catastrophe. And that was how it happened. In the meantime, having tracked down all the interviews, I had arranged them in chronological order, taking care to eliminate the mistakes and misprints of the newspapers, translating some from French or English, and preparing lengthy, informative notes. Finally, I had written an introductory essay, in which I tried to explain how Pasolini, more than any other artist of his time, had considered the interview a literary genre that was anything but minor and casual. At that point, I could no longer put off the reckoning. For the entire duration of my last meeting with Laura, in her office, the sharp blade of a box cutter quivered a few millimeters from my jugular. The chain of insults reached levels of verbal tightrope-walking worthy of a Rabelais. I understood how precise and literal the expression ‘foaming with rage’ is. I was afraid at any moment of bringing on a stroke, for which I would have been in some way responsible. The wretched file containing all my work ended up, not without the usual melodramatic solemnity, in the wastebasket. The threat of that blade made an impression, but I didn’t think the Madwoman would go so far as to kill or wound me—it wasn’t that type of madness. Apart from the assault of cold steel, I had foreseen it all, in my insistence on carrying out the work as I thought best. Many months had passed, more than a year, in fact, since I started going to the foundation. I worked slowly, and other duties had been added, which delayed the collection and preparation of those damn interviews. What ended so abruptly had been, therefore, a period of time that was in all senses very instructive—I don’t know how else to describe it—for me. I consider it a kind of apprenticeship. We all need to learn something, and, before that, learn to learn. But the only schools that are truly worth attending are the ones we don’t choose, those whose thresholds we cross, so to speak, by chance; just as the only materials that we ought to study deeply are those which don’t have a precise name, and still less a rational method of being studied. Everything else, finally, is relative. Laura was a raucous and unpleasant textbook to page through, but full of revelations that, if they remained hard to describe, were no less penetrating. And to this I would immediately add, because it’s a fundamental fact, the publication of Petrolio, which struck Laura’s little kingdom in Piazza Cavour like a thunderbolt, like a handful of gunpowder on a crackling fire.

##

Petrolio is a large fragment, what remains of a mad, visionary work, outside the rules, revelatory. Pasolini works on it from the spring of 1972 up until the days immediately preceding his death, the night between the first and second of November, 1975. Petrolio is a savage beast. It’s an account of a process of knowledge and transformation. It’s a becoming aware of the world and an experiment on itself. Technically: an initiation. Petrolio is published by Einaudi in 1992, seventeen years after P.P.P.’s death, in the series Supercoralli. It has a white cover, and the letters of the author’s name and the title are red and black—it’s an object of rare beauty. This posthumous publication has two editors: Maria Careri and Graziella Chiarcossi. The long note at the end of the volume is by the great philologist Aurelio Roncaglia, a longtime friend of Pasolini. One can read Petrolio as a provocation, as a confession, as an exploration. And, obviously, as a will. All blood-stained. It should immediately be added that in 1992, when Petrolio is torn from the blessed sleep of the unpublished, such books are no longer being written. They are creations that have become incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of the world. Something happened. Compared with the literature of 1975, the literature of 1992 seems much more—how to put it?—impoverished. The diversity of genres, and the entire, infinite range of nuances, impurities, individual variations, seems to have almost disappeared, reduced to a single requirement, a single preoccupation: telling stories, writing a good novel. In a few years, in other words, a mutation has taken place that is so radical and so irreversible that Petrolio, emerging from the bottom of the drawer, seems to come not from another epoch but from another dimension, like one of those objects made of an unknown material, resistant to the laws of physics and Euclidean geometry, which in science-fiction stories break into our world from some recess or hole in space-time. But what happened that is so serious? For more than two hundred years (since the times of Diderot, of Sterne, just to establish a point) literature didn’t stop, one might say, running. It pursued an ideal end, always a little beyond the possibility of the individual. From its own wastes and failures it extracted valuable fuels. Among human fields of knowledge, it could be considered a cutting edge. More destiny than profession, its practice produced for every generation forms of holiness and folly fated to remain exemplary for a long time. What the Christian martyrs, the ascetics, the great sinners enlightened by Grace represented in medieval legends was now embodied by equally exceptional individuals like Mandelstam, Céline, Sylvia Plath, Mishima. Thomas Bernhard hoped that his neighbors would use him to frighten the children: ‘If you don’t behave, Mr. Bernhard will come and take you away!!!’ Today, on the contrary, the greatest aspiration of writers is to be loved by parents and children, like Santa Claus (women writers, obviously, will aspire to resemble the Befana—but the vocation of bearer of gifts is the same). Taking into account innumerable failures, that now faded conception of literary writing continued to proceed on the stilts of Experiment and the Unprecedented. A natural elective affinity made it the accomplice of every sort of revolt and subversion, whether the target was the political order or the habits of inner life. All this we call, using a word that is somewhat worn but, all in all, adequate, ‘modernity.’ Almost automatically connected to the word is the idea, identical in its infinite variety of styles and individual visions, that literature is an irreplaceable form of knowledge of the world. Not a storehouse of good plots for movies, much less a product intended for an illusory ‘spiritual’ elevation, but a challenge, an irreparable outrage, the final blow intended to drive the nail into the very heart of truth. Born in 1922, Pier Paolo Pasolini never even had to ponder these concepts, which today sound so exotic, archeological. Being modern was his primordial soup, the state of departure, a conditioned reflex. Like many men of his generation, he couldn’t have suspected what the future held—if he had remained alive, he would only have had to take note of it, like many others. Until the end, in short, P.P.P. worked as a perfect representative of the modern age, not knowing that he was one of the last. The years of Petrolio are the same as those of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for one example, or of the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari, for another. There’s nothing, in these vast and ambitious works, that lets us suspect the least awareness of being, in some way, the end of the match. As long as it lasted, modernity convinced everyone that it was eternal. Each generation raised the bar, like a high jumper who is testing himself, and found a way of getting over it. Then, suddenly, just in the period when the pile of pages of Petrolio is waiting in the shadows for its moment, that prodigious machine comes to a halt—perhaps forever. Not that literature ‘dies,’ as for more than a century people hoped or feared (or both together). It remains—alas—more alive and well than ever: if anything, it drastically reduces, once and for all, its potentialities and its prerogatives. This reduction should necessarily and in every case be understood as a decline. The fact is that by the mid-eighties the most important writer of the epoch is surely Raymond Carver. An artist who is anything but modest, and the author of unforgettable stories like Cathedral, Carver perfectly exemplifies the extraordinary change that had taken place. In his books, we are present at the disconcerting spectacle of a literature that no longer thinks. The writer’s sole task is that of the storyteller. The only world he talks about is the one that he knows empirically—the portion of the cage that has been allotted to him. His only hope is that a good number of readers like his stories. It’s no coincidence, naturally, that, more than any other literary or human influence, Carver endured that of his editor, the notorious Gordon Lish. Lish, a handsome man with the sharp features of a bird of prey, is the founder of a new type of technocrat of writing—technocrats who, scattered throughout the four corners of the world, are obsessed by efficacy, by functioning, as the supreme duty of the literary product. The comparison (made possible by more recent editions) between what Carver wrote out of his own head and what Lish made of it is one of the most terrifying and instructive testimonies offered by literary history. It would be superficial to claim that the editor makes the material he works on ‘salable.’ That can happen, but not everything the editor lays his hands on becomes gold. His secret vocation is incomparably more metaphysical, more fiendish than any innocent commercial desire. What the editor intends to do is to transform all of literature entirely into narrative. Forgive me this insistent recourse to the historical present. But it seems to me the most fitting style in which to render a phenomenon as ineluctable as it is sudden, similar to a spiritual coup d’état. And so: an era begins in which literary excellence increasingly coincides with the ability to entertain. The writer: he who, watched over by his editor, the most important human presence in his life, invents plots. This means that the fundamental emotion he seeks to rouse in the reader is recognition. How true, how all this resembles me! It’s really like that! But in order for this delicate and uncertain psychological miracle to really take place, the writer has to pay dues. At the cost of sacrificing remarkable aspects of his life and his character, he has to resemble his readers as closely as possible. To be made, as they say, of the same clay. Mutual support, and mutual corruption (only like corrupts like). The editor: he who without respite strives to make the writer and his reader homogeneous. And here, precisely defined, is the Copernican revolution that in 1992 makes that monster from the past that is Petrolio practically illegible. The assumption of Pasolini’s writing—one might almost say his basic method—is exactly the fact that he, P.P.P., doesn’t resemble anyone. Not even History, that infallible plane, smoothed out the anomaly that he is. To enable a reader to recognize in his pages something of himself and the existence that surrounds him—that doesn’t even occur to P.P.P. It would be equivalent, for him, to a failure. Already in his own time, Pasolini thought of himself as a survivor, an isolate, a force of the past. But if he had come back to life in 1992 along with the manuscript of Petrolio, he would truly have been identical to the resurrected man Dante speaks of in the Convivio, who no longer understands the language spoken in his city.

##

Luckily, these big collective changes leave madmen, desperate cases, untouched—all those who can’t make it. Laura Betti and Petrolio: one of those careless chemical reactions that in cartoons end with a deafening boom and the laboratory in ruins. For the aspiring writer I was at the time, this was a subject for reflection. Because literature, understood as a grand experiment on the limitations of the human, should always be this: a detonator, a disaster that produces irreversible changes in life. A factor for imbalance. The more genuine greatness a book possesses, the more capable it should be of fertilizing forms of madness adequate to that greatness. But this is very rare, and not exactly official. The critics, the professors, the intellectuals arrive, cold and serious, like the black rabbits at Pinocchio’s bedside. Tenacious and patient, mediocrity always asserts its rights. If you’re looking for a mastermind in the death of P.P.P., mediocrity should be first on the list of suspects. Homicide, incidentally, is an anything but marginal number in its repertory. What I mean to declare, with the good faith of the witness, is that Laura Betti was the ideal reader of Petrolio. What does that expression mean, ideal reader? Laura was firmly, unshakably, convinced that she was the only person in the world who understood P.P.P.—the man and his multifaceted work. What was in effect the content of that understanding we cannot know. Certain secrets only she knew. Maybe the wicked were plotting in the shadows, impeding or delaying their revelation. You had to hint, to proceed obliquely, to let out only half of certain remarks, as if the silent half contained some unspeakable truths. Laura knew perfectly all the intonations and nuances of the jargon of plotters. If she had only wanted to, she would have been an extraordinary paranoiac. But paranoia was only one of the colors on her palette, one possibility among others, a form of madness too small for her aspirations. Despite the atmosphere of a modest, dusty archive, relatively pre-technology, the rooms of the Pasolini Foundation on Piazza Cavour were the avant-garde of a cruel and silent war. The stolid, reassuring normality of life, in that chaotic, heavily trafficked place in Rome, was only an appearance, yet another mask put on by an unfathomable reality, imbued with Violence and Secrecy. The enormous bulk of the Palace of Justice, with its garish and threatening shapes, loomed over the piazza; Orson Welles had used it as a set for some scenes of his film inspired by Kafka’s The Trial. The architect of the wretched Palace, Guglielmo Calderini, was accused of building that immense structure on treacherous terrain, on sand and clay, exposed to infiltrations from the Tiber. It seems that the polemics were so bitter he was driven to suicide. But I don’t want to lose sight of Laura. It can’t be denied that the idea of being the privileged addressee, and in some way the heir and guardian of a work, is an obvious sign of madness—how else to define it? At the same time, we can’t rule out that a certain amount of madness is an essential element the moment we decide that something is truly important, even crucial for us. Words that seem addressed to all our kind (as by definition the words of a writer are) become charged with an unbearable degree of intentionality. Where the collective appears hypocritical and lacking in attention, the individual can go so far as to see himself as the unique recipient of a message, a will, a mandate. All of which, it must be admitted, can make a literary text extraordinarily effective, capable of generating decisive inner repercussions. Literature’s only chance of lasting and of having an effect is entrusted not to collective judgments and values but to individual human beings, to their capacity to admit that they are alone and unique, to the unnamable drives and unconfessable hopes that determine their fate. Gradually, as the file of articles on Petrolio expanded, Laura’s rage found new, inexhaustible nourishment. In her typical day, the morning reading of the newspapers represented a kind of general trial, in view of more demanding exercises of madness. Like practicing scales for a pianist. She brimmed with contempt and pity as she waved around those poor crackling sheets of paper. She oozed the blackest sarcasm. The clippings that accumulated in a fat cardboard folder were the concrete proof, and the eloquent symbol, of the pettiness and the cowardice of humanity. Was she wrong? The portraits she offered me of the most illustrious pens of Italian criticism and literature can’t be reported. ‘Those little men ... all fags of the worst kind ... the Catholic kind ... are not worthy of even mentioning the name of Pier Paolo ... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA [sob] ... secret fags, with their little wifey ... their career as spongers ... you understood me, SPONGERS, people good for nothing but swiping something!!! Like Wimpy, Popeye’s friend: as soon as THE MEATBALLS are ready, they show up. And you, little slut, with your polite manners, you’re getting ready to join that fine crowd ... but why not just kill yourself?’ And indeed: why not kill myself, just in time, before I turned into one of those shits, those spongers? The day comes when the idea of being the maker of one’s own destiny is revealed as an illusion. One begins to feel like a billiard ball on an inclined plane, incapable of braking or changing direction. The Madwoman’s laugh thundered in my head, like the indecipherable warning of an obese Fury, while I rolled faster and faster toward everything that fate had in store for me.

##

Encounters that truly, as they say, leave a mark are extremely rare. I mean an indelible mark—more a scar or even an amputation than a system of memories. The majority of the people we meet, sad to say, do not cause in us a profound reaction, much less an even minimal change. We would be perfectly the same without ever having met them. But that depressing rule only makes the exception more dangerous. There are always individuals who play in the life of their fellows a role that I wouldn’t know how to describe better than disastrous. Reflecting on Laura’s devotion to P.P.P. while witnessing all its disconcerting and turbulent manifestations, I often happened to think of him, of P.P.P., the way one might consider a hurricane by contemplating the uprooted trees, the blown-off roofs, the collapsed embankments it leaves behind. Indirect knowledge (of one person through another) is undeniably a source of all sorts of errors, but it can stimulate the muscle of intuition. Was P.P.P. the cause of the stunning and noisy effect that I was facing? As Cioran says, inner violence is contagious. That means that exceptional individuals, engaged in complex and laborious—not to say dangerous—experiments on themselves, end up, without taking responsibility for it, dragging into their treacherous current those who are near them.3 Yet the saddest part is that these individuals not only have no direct responsibility for the havoc they bring to others’ lives but most of the time don’t even realize what they’ve done. They don’t have the time; they have to proceed straight on their path—wherever it’s taking them. Probably, they believe in good faith that their intimates are endowed with a character fairly similar to theirs, and so are capable of watching out for themselves, without harboring harmful dependencies. The Cause ignores the Effect—isn’t all the sadness, injustice, irremediable dissymmetry of life concealed in this little formula, savoring of philosophy? It should be added that P.P.P. died so suddenly and mysteriously, not to say atrociously, that he was inevitably transformed into a kind of Hamlet-like ghost: still more present, requiring still more attention than alive, if that was possible. Like everything that has to do with common sense and with the shrewd management of life, the so-called elaboration of mourning is not a very romantic or poetic idea. It implies the need to keep going, attributing to time the virtue of a palliative drug. He who dies lies down—says the adage, irrefutably—and he who lives resigns himself. It was this prosaic but necessary going on that Laura’s life seemed to lack. Rather than proceeding, it rolled, spun around the unmoving pivot of something that, although absent, was more present than any presence. Being around her, you inevitably ended up perceiving its presence. Livid and mutilated by beatings, unburied and stinking, the corpse of P.P.P. hovered in the rooms of the foundation like a sinister and indecipherable warning. What do the dead want from us?

When Laura’s bursts of rage became uncontrollable, I beat a retreat from the foundation, as discreetly as possible, and wandered around the neighborhood of Piazza Cavour, waiting until she cooled down or had something to do elsewhere. Aimless wandering has always been a specialty of mine. It creates the illusion that life is long, that there’s time for everything. As everyone in Rome knows, in any neighborhood and at any hour of the day or night, there are more people lounging around with no purpose than those engaged in some concrete business. Thus one morning, as I was ambling along the Lungotevere after having slipped out of the clutches of the Madwoman, I happened on the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory. A visit in all senses illuminating. The museum, whose holdings are contained in a single, small bare room, is in the church of the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, a questionable imitation in reinforced concrete of the Duomo of Milan, almost at the corner of Via Ulpiano. In 1897, inside the just finished fake-Gothic church, a fire broke out, and in a smoke stain left by the flames on one wall the priest recognized, unmistakably, the features of a suffering face. For that priest, whose name was Vittore Jouet, it was like receiving a command directly from on High: and he began to travel around Europe, in search of every type of object that showed evidence of contact between the living and the dead—the sufferers in Purgatory who asked for Masses for the repose of their souls and charitable works to alleviate and shorten their punishments. Astonishing Catholic bookkeeping: one of the most remarkable manifestations of human perversion and candor. Almost all the exhibits displayed in the cases of the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory are objects of daily use: books, pillowcases, items of clothing, humble tools for work. On these objects appear signs of burning, often in the form of the fingers of a hand. In his adventurous research Father Jouet followed a sort of theory, a general criterion: death is manifested by a burning pressure; it leaves an indelible trace of its passage, of its summons. This is the most terrifying and direct of languages—contact. All those dead, besides, are basically reprimanding the living. They are rousing them from forgetfulness and recalling them to inescapable duties of piety. Put crudely: they’re breaking their balls. Because life, like all special states, needs to guarantee its own ephemeral duration through egoism, and a certain degree of unconsciousness. Affinities between places have always struck me much more than affinities between human beings, which are after all inevitable. And undoubtedly the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory and the Pasolini Foundation, a few dozen meters apart, were so similar that they could be considered two parts, or variations, or branches, of the same place. But at this point I have to implore the patient reader not to attribute to me, jumping ahead, a banal and false thought. I don’t in the least intend to transform the ghost of P.P.P. into a vapid, literary-page metaphor, declaring that that ghost exercises, or has exercised, some form of influence on Italian ‘culture’ or ‘society.’ Among other things, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ lie totally outside my interests; their nature as essentially hypocritical conventions makes me suspect that in fact they don’t really interest anyone—much less those who, for lack of something better, boast about them. Father Jouet, the inventor of the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory, would never have been so delirious as to declare that his ghosts were capable of frightening and admonishing the Church, or the community of Catholics. It doesn’t work like that. The action of ghosts is effective when it’s addressed to the individual, to his weakness and his solitude. And, as the books and the scorched clothing preserved in the museum’s dusty cases were displayed as obvious proofs of supernatural contact, so Laura’s mind, equally burned and blackened, seemed to me the tangible sign of a presence, of a request so urgent and desperate as to eliminate the border between life and death.

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Something written. Neither more nor less—this is the formula that on various occasions surfaces in Petrolio as the most fitting definition of the work that is taking shape. The most fitting definition, in fact, of the nature of a text that, like a shadow or a sticky secretion, can’t, or is unwilling to, detach itself completely from its origin: a human being, a living body (‘I live,’ Pasolini states, not coincidentally, on one of the first pages, ‘the genesis of my book.’ But that this is a genesis is not a simple premise: this particular God, by vocation or necessity, does not unglue himself from his Creation, he stays there, creating it, he can’t help it, no seventh day is provided for him).4 According to the circumstances, something written, that shapeless monster (all true monsters are shapeless and all truly shapeless things are monstrous), might resemble a novel, an essay, a mythological poem, a travel book, a collection of linked stories like The Thousand and One Nights or The Canterbury Tales. But no genre of writing, considered in the abstract, not even a diary, could support the weight of that presence, of that breath that fogs every mirror: him, P.P.P., in flesh and blood. ‘I have spoken to the reader as myself,’ he confesses in a letter to his friend Alberto Moravia, an old fox who instantly grasps the gravity and the enormity of the sin. I was no longer able, P.P.P. explains, to take on with humility the garments of ‘a narrator.’ In the end, and in spite of all appearances, a narrator is ‘like all other narrators.’ More precisely, it’s a convention. Not him: he has no wish to play that game, which, since the world began, is the game of literature, which in turn imitates the Game of Creation. Something written: it means to maintain through words the same painful intimacy that connects the child who pees in his bed to the warm stain spreading on the sheet. And at the same time, without contradiction, with that shame completely expiated, something written means to exercise over the body of the language a pressure that is not only mental, not only cultural. To begin to live a form is like saying that starting from there, from that pressure which produces a kind of mold, an individual begins to take possession of reality. In a way that, Pasolini observes, can only be violent and brutal, as happens in every act of possession. And it’s not only the act that is completed by the writing of the book, the search for the ‘sense of reality’ in order to possess it, which can’t happen without violence and brutality. It’s also a self-destruction. ‘I wished,’ Pasolini says plainly, ‘also to free myself from myself, that is to die.’ To live his own creation to the end of life: as when one dies in childbirth. But the comparison with childbirth isn’t completely adequate, and immediately afterward he suggests a second, which is even more apt: ‘as in effect one dies, ejaculating into the mother’s womb.’