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Rating: I'm not sure, but I'm convinced that there are moments and events that stop your time. They stop it and become a symbol of it. I imagine my grandfather hearing the announcement that the War is over, that he can leave the tunnel of Fuorigrotta where he sleeps with his family, that he has escaped the Germans and the hunger of the cockroaches. I imagine my father, with his nose glued to the TV, watching Neil Armstrong hopping on the beach of Varcaturo, dodging sanitary pads and toxic waste, making everyone believe that the inhabitants of the Moon are uncivil too.
I've always wondered what it means to face your own moment. With a gun pointed at your head, you feel like you've reached the moment, the final showdown, the last level... the one with the monster that's incredibly hard to beat. You don't think about your life, your life doesn't flash before your eyes in one of those third-rate movie flashbacks. You don't have time to do anything, you can't speak, you don't think, you do nothing but shit yourself with fear. When I found myself with a gun pointed at me, all I did was watch the breath coming out of my mouth and turning into a cloud in the cold. If I had died, it would have just been my moment and nothing more. Why? Because people like me have only one thing to trade: the body. No words, no gestures. Just the body: this is my merchandise.
The mark of this generation of mine, the education, the end that awaits us, we received when we were young. It's July 17, 1994, it's my name day, and Roberto Baggio at that moment is the person closest to God. Put the ball on the penalty spot, all he has to do is score the last penalty. He doesn't, he misses. At the peak of excitement, the world collapses on you, you can do nothing about it, and what's the point of saying that even if he had scored, it would have continued? To nothing: you have eyes and ears only when needed, only when there's a reason to be outraged. I was very small, I cried in my bed all night. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.
Saviano takes the stage. He looks into the camera, he moves, he touches his nose. His pants are untidy, a bit bigger than they should be, they don't hang well, and to me, it seems like something that's not by chance. Roberto Saviano is not a novelist, writing is an exercise in style, and Roberto has no style. Roberto has only a mountain of shit pressing on his stomach, pushing the words out. He has words in his throat that choke him, the Heimlich maneuver is done by the shit. Roberto Saviano dances frantically on stage, the cameraman follows him with difficulty. Roberto repeats Gomorrah. Not the same concepts, but just the same process. He speaks, he shoots, he communicates the things that in these three years of alienation have clashed in his head and his non-life. His eyes are tired, I can see that, but you don't stop halfway: you go towards the kicks in the mouth. He repeats like a rosary, 'my land', 'my territory', 'in my territory'. Roberto Saviano hasn't escaped. When you are born with disgust in your eyes, that disgust always remains in front of your eyes. He tells, he gets indignant, the whole world has stopped on his lips, at the mercy of his words. The whole world has stopped to watch, to feel, the pain, the anguish, the boredom that constitute today's life of Saviano, of the controlled Saviano, but so similar to the life before... it's the birth we didn't want, a sharp-eyed person would say.
I feel old and tired like an old man and angry like a fifteen-year-old. I'm an old angry man who, for once, just once, has returned to feel like a child. I don't know why, I only know that, just like when Roberto Baggio missed the penalty, I tossed and turned in bed, the sheets annoying me and a few tears dampening the pillowcase. Fifteen years of awareness erased in two hours... The words I would have liked to say have been said, finally someone takes the television medium, steps down from the podium and speaks, tells. I'm alive, I feel it. I have seen, now I write, tomorrow I will remember.
Thank you, Roberto.
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