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Rating: Brutalization? So be it.
Sometimes it is right and humane to claim the respect of the Inalienable Right of the Average Male. The supreme, general, unifying, and cohesive Right to Repellency. The active/passive subject of this right cannot be described unequivocally. Age varies from 18 years (liberation through a driver's license) to 65 (when the slightest hint of a cough from Toscanello alla Grappa causes uncontrolled urination and saliva losses at inhuman distances). Social status ranges from "single" (in this case, the aforementioned Right is exercised to escape the chronic lack of girls and the resulting degrading madness by diving into a horrid and greasy world like a kebab) to "sentimentally occupied" (the subject brutalizes themselves to forget the obligations, burdens, and duties consequent to the sporadic consumption of female company). Profession varies from subject to subject. In the cases closest to me, the most represented work activities are: unemployed, part-time gardener, alcoholic, semi-professional musician beggar, kept, unemployed-bis, subsistence horticulturist, onanist, leaflet distributor, photosynthetic plant.
Height and weight can vary from 1.70 m for 60 kg to 1.95 m for 125 kg.
On October 19, 2009, the unthinkable happened. Herman Medrano, undisputed star of Rap in the Venetian language, was to ascend to Valrovina (VI) for the annual Chestnut Festival.
The occasion to reveal to the world that Zappa was not lying. That there are more ugly bastards like us in the world than pretty boys like you. A gathering of dozens and dozens of people united by the noble purpose of feasting on chestnuts, wine, polenta, and the blasphemous vapors of the festival.
How do I dress to attend the great Medrano? The variables are many, but all easily predictable. Altitude of Valrovina? Only 149 m above sea level. However, surrounded by medium-height hills. Time: Late October. Predicted temperature thanks to the previous information: freezing. Presence of damsels: likely. Chance of success: practically nil.
So, here's my outfit. I finish work at 6:30 p.m. Stop at the service station along the SS 47 to refuel the van with gasoline and the stomach with Cabernet. At 7 p.m. I'm home. Work suit greasy with resin, boots covered in mud, green coat with patches on the elbows added by mom. Straw hat from Mangimi Veronesi, Zootecnical Feed. I get out of the van, greet the boss. Take everything off, put on long underwear, put everything back on. Reluctantly leave the cleaver behind, as much as it might be useful at the Chestnut Festival.
Away, in the Panda, to pick up other survivors along the way, loyal friends who wouldn't look out of place in a drawing by Pazienza if he had been a student of Bosch.
Valrovina welcomes us like a whore, under the hopeful light of stars, in the silence and a slight melancholy emanating from a village that has known stone houses and tobacco fields and now rests in satellite dishes and concrete.
But we are not melancholy in the cold night, and even if we were, we are accompanied by wine and cigarettes that chase away a strange and frightening future and the loneliness of an empty bed upon our return.
Blinding light of headlights. People moved, young like us, dogs in tow. And wine, so much wine on the concrete expanse where soon Herman Medrano, in the world-known Ermanno Menegazzo, the greatest rapper in the world, will appear. We look around, buy a kilo of scalding chestnuts and glasses of wine on repeat. At the first, a smile at the girl serving drinks, at the second, a greeting, at the third, a joke let loose under a week's beard. At the tenth, the first songs erupt in anticipation, curses, greetings with some acquaintances and even with strangers. Great fires are lit at the ends of the night, they seem to me furnaces where you burn yourself to forget the cold.
And finally, among invocations to a swine God and distributions of Rabosello and cigarettes, the playing of the lone accordionist with a thousand bases ceases and He appears. Short, with grotesque hair and a Cabernet Boys T-shirt, Herman, alone on stage as the tradition of village festivals demands, gives us all his greatest hits: "Poca Broca", causing sways and injuries among the spectators, overly excited by the epic and sincere refrain (Poca poca poca poca poca poca broca/ Poca poca poca poca poca poca gnoca/Poca poca broca/Poca poca gnoca/Poca poca broca/Poca poca gnoca!). "El salto dea Cuaia" is the narration of a hallucinatory journey in the Venetian discos, a violent and Dantesque kingdom similar to the chemical toilet in which I insert myself. Medrano's words return to my mind, like those of an apocalyptic prophet: "Baemo al centro, ma un umido e un sofego, spusa da salvadego, cadavaro e rumatego". But I do not tremble, no, I enter and brutalize myself, extract the member and piss, thunderous like and more than the waterfall of the Silan.
Herman, great agitator of crowds, continues with other immense pieces: "Copate col Majo" and "Generassione decespulliatore" are just two great tracks among many.
For me, the peak is reached with what I would struggle to define merely as a "song". That piece that accompanied me when I returned from the north in solitude and, upon reaching the plain, discovered that the girl I was in love with was with someone else. That piece that was in my ears while I drank a beer with my brother, fishing at sunset. That piece that everyone puts on at parties when the first idiot vomits on the stairs. That piece that inspires us when, at night, returning home, we meet Lupo- sandwiches and drinks- and, swollen with hunger, we seek vile lipids at a low price.
"El panin ludro", sum of sums, brilliant hymn to filth, essential nourishment for distant evenings, social glue, hymn of the resistance to prevailing preppiness, gross deprecation, life beyond the body, creator of irregular and powerful defecation, god of brutalization, dirt of dirt, eternal litany of enjoyment, terror of any tedium: "El panin ludro".
"EL PANIN LUDRO, UHO HO HO!
CO DENTRO DE TUTO, UHO HO HO!
FRITO SOL BURO, UHO HO HO!
COL GRASSO E COL STRUTO, UAAAAH"
Everything has an end. Even a concert by Herman Medrano. Even the Chestnut Festival.
But the small, great, and miserable woes we drag behind us often are not allowed to have an end before death. And so all we have left is a quiet smile, a head held high in the night, and a proud laugh. ‘Ndemo vanti, and we go home as dawn is near.
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