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Imagine a future, more or less near (a quarter of a century, a couple of years, or just a few months).
Imagine that suddenly the light goes out, it never comes back, and takes away with it the entire world you have taken for granted until now. Of the cities, only the skeletons of the buildings remain. The vegetation has vanished, and a layer of ash that weighs down the air covers everything, erasing colors and oppressing lungs.
Imagine that everything that was precious to you in the world that no longer exists is useless. All your current wealth is packed in a heavy supermarket cart, covered by a plastic sheet, which you are forced to drag behind you, and which is all that remains of the consumer society that once was.
Imagine that the landscape surrounding you is of real desolation: shops, homes, all kinds of buildings have been looted and stripped of anything that seemed edible or combustible. A gun, among the things you drag behind, helps you defend yourself from other survivors, who wander in small groups like zombies, searching for food and shelter, in a senseless struggle for mutual annihilation. A humanity frighteningly regressed whose desperation drives to heinous acts, to take advantage of others’ weaknesses, to boil the remains of those who did not make it.
What keeps you alive, what saves you from the brutality that rampant despair incites, is the child sleeping next to you. Protecting him means you must resist and fight, but also instill in him the hope and trust necessary to not let him give up. His protection means safeguarding that serene and colorful past he connects you to but has never known.
"La strada" is a long journey without origin or destination toward an unspecified south. A journey of survival where the night has lost the stars, and the day knows only gray light: a journey to reach the ocean that, however, is also gray... There is no room for a happy ending, there is no intervention of a hero who sets everything right. There is only the intense but silent love of a father and an unnamed son, made of gestures, of concrete rituals of survival, of eyes scanning the desolate landscape for danger, of hands building bedding and opening canned food, but also of cries of despair and anger, desperate tears that are astonished by the disarming ingenuousness and incredible generosity of which a child, who has known an absurdly fierce world, is still capable.
After imagining all this, what remains of us? Probably a lot of dismay, a deep mistrust towards others, some justified fear of not being able to, if not being scouts, survive long in a world without gas and electricity. But perhaps, right at the end, there also remains the courage of hope.
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