Andrea Pazienza
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo

I discovered Andrea Pazienza's work—Paz—late, on the occasion of the 2006 reprint of his most important graphic novels.

It must have been wonderful to live in Bologna at the end of the '70s, a meeting place for intellectuals and great artists like Paz, attending DAMS, where he was among the students and perhaps being able to brush against him in the joyful crowd that filled Piazza Maggiore, especially in the evening.

Few comics leave a mark like Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo, the effect is that of a real punch in the stomach. The homage to the American underground comic, particularly Robert Crumb's, is very evident, in whose style we sometimes find the same harshness.

But in reality, the first artist I thought of was Caravaggio. The dramatic nature of the line and the strong contrasts of lights and shadows reminded me of the cursed painter.

And cursed is the story, that of the 27 hours separating Pompeo from his death, told without euphemisms, indeed in an absolutely unique slang, "pazienziano" in the sense that it is a creation of the Author himself who, not surprisingly, also worked on advertising campaigns. Neologisms, dialect phrases: Paz is brilliant in language just as he is in drawing.

From the first panel that precedes the start of the comic, we feel all of Paz’s sarcasm towards word sellers disguised as pseudo-intellectuals and we can already get an idea of what will be the language of Pazienza, unique in its kind, capable of reaching poetic peaks and skirting the most vulgar idiom.

Comparable to the sorrows of young Werther, Pazienza narrates Pompeo's vicissitudes, a drawing teacher in Bologna during, as mentioned, the 27 hours that separate him from a suicide attempt through a heroin overdose. The comic opens with the description of the implementation of the insane act and with the protagonist's sorrowful comment: "He sought fear but did not find it," in my opinion, one of the pearls of Pompeo's text. As we will see many pages later, it will be the old cleaning lady (the term is Paz’s) who saves him, forcing him to seek death in another way: "Horrified despite himself and by what he is about to do and why he will do it. He will do it!"

Before attempting suicide, Pompeo spends more than a whole day in the frantic search for heroin, fearing withdrawal and any occasion is good to get high. In this regard, I believe that instead of dedicating Pompeo to an adult audience (as recommended at the bottom of the cover), the reading of this graphic novel should be mandatory in high schools to illustrate to adolescents not only how devastating heroin use is, but how it invades the entire life of those who use it, leaving no room for anything but its pursuit. As if to say: "You shall have no other God before me."

That Pompeo is Pazienza is beyond doubt: there is the memory of the ancient great lost love and the hint of a new order, that "of the white pizza," referring to the new companion, the reference to the drawing school of Bologna, the very physique of the protagonist is that of Paz.

It is a self-portrait in which it is impossible to find a homogeneous style, a single hand (one might even think it is drawn by many hands) such is the versatility of Pazienza. If the mood is calm, the drawing and the characters themselves of the words become linear, if instead a dramatic situation prevails, chiaroscuro predominates.

In the comic, there is room for Paz's narcissism in the panels dedicated to the school, but there is also the opposite side, namely the admission of being at the mercy of the worst people with whom he spends much of his time, just to have the drug, he who defines himself as "once so fastidious."

And yet more than once in the text Pazienza admits that everything becomes beautiful and bright again after getting high, even the resurgence from the heroin-produced withdrawal through the same is much better than what bourgeois society can offer you, specifically waking up at eight, business dinners, study, the very disintegration of the body, in a word standardization. Surrounded by false smiles, we must respond with the mask of cheerfulness: "Balls even there, balls worse than here."

Pompeo-Paz is not entirely wrong; his was a generation indifferent to the future, even disturbed by it ("A future... puah, the mere thought tires me..."), unfortunately for many, including Andrea, the future ended in a syringe, for Pompeo in a jump hanging with car chains from a tree ("He jumped as if he had suddenly been pushed").

Pazienza's departure from Bologna, desired by friends to distance him from drugs, was to no avail. The call of the Mother ("The other mother" as Enrico Ruggeri defined it in a song written for Fiorella Mannoia) was stronger and ultimately fatal.

And Pompeo is definitely Pazienza's testament, despite the final postscript that leaves him imagined serene, "no longer depressed." In the countryside, where he spends his days, the boys call him "old Paz" and he is only 29 years old: a tragic premonition of a destiny already written for an Artist destined not to see his youth wither.