Giuseppe Ungaretti
In memoria

"His name was Moammed Sceab

Descendant of nomadic emirs

He committed suicide because he no longer had a Homeland

He loved France and changed his name to Marcel

but he was not French and no longer knew how to live

in the tent of his people where one listens to the chant

of the Quran savoring a coffee

And he didn’t know how to release the song of his abandonment

I accompanied him with the owner of the hotel

where we lived in Paris from number 5 of rue des Carmes

withered downhill alley

He rests in Ivry cemetery, a suburb that always seems

on a day of a scattered fair

And maybe only I still know that he lived".

Abandoned, withered, uprooted. Lost. This was Moammed Sceab. This is the man of the 20th century: stateless and not cosmopolitan, a stranger to everyone and himself. Alone. The triumphant and beautiful myths of positivism are now a distant, indistinguishable echo, from jubilant proclamations of progress they have turned into deaf and unheard laments. A life ends in the indifference of all, only the affection of a friend offering feeble comfort. A life ends in the absolute anonymity of an apartment building in the Latin Quarter; in the center of a capital that they say is the city of the future and a new era, just steps away from the University, just steps away from the heart of Western culture; from the chairs where Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas taught, just steps away from those classrooms from whence the very Thought emanated of which all of us are children. Moammed too would have wanted to be one. For the love of France he had even renounced his noble origins, he set off— a modern Ulysses— to build his existence. Unaware that each journey carries with it an abandonment, an uncertain destination. But he would not find treasures nor wonders nor Phaeacians on his path, only the awareness of no longer belonging to anything or anyone. Not even to an Ithaca to which he could never return, because his ties to it were now severed. He was Marcel— he became it without being it. An artificial makeshift creation, a man without an identity anymore. A branch broken before it could bloom. 

A dweller of neither Paris nor Africa, but of an eternally interposed empty space, he had discovered the existence of a desert far more dreadful than the one known by the emirs his ancestors. The "song of abandonment" was not released, it remained a knot in the throat. A knot so strong it choked. 

Two souls to accompany his body, down that "withered downhill alley"— the journey continues, but towards the abyss. The sea has swallowed Ulysses forever, this time no trick will save the hero (but what hero? There are no gods nor heroes in this story). A lifeless street frames him in its gloomy grayness. The air is that of a fair coming to an end; everyone departs, the bustling anthill of a few moments ago dissolves into nothingness. Flesh in slow decomposition, energy and life turning to ash.

A hope: where life condemns, Poetry saves. The Poet immortalizes where others forget. And just as "letters full of love" can be born beside the corpse of a companion, in the ultimate surge of a desperate attachment to life, so the memory of a friend can become a seal through the written word. Everyone today knows who Moammed Sceab is, although they never knew him.

In the desolation of the white space, few words that imprint indelibly. 

"When I find in this my silence a word, it is carved into my life like an abyss".