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Bagnoli, squeezed between NATO and the sea, between Italsider and the sky, is where he grew up. When the child was not even an itch in underwear, not even an X in the nitrogen cycle, the factory closed, retiring everyone early. When the child was a child, his world, Bagnoli, was populated only by old men with odd teeth and children with black knees. In the summer, everyone stayed outside all day. You only went home to sleep and eat. They played soccer - the shop shutters were their goals -, spat in each other’s faces, listened, when they were truly exhausted, to stories from the old men who had gone on strike more often than they had worked, who had seen the funerals of Berlinguer and Togliatti, who were missing a few fingers, had strange feet, who had swallowed steel and fire for decades, and who had forgotten their prostate somewhere they couldn't remember well. When September came, summer ended, and when summer ended, the child was just a child who, sitting at a school desk, longed for the street. With his head resting on a hand, the teachers talked, he didn’t listen. He thought about Gennaro o’giurnalist’ and whether, sitting in that awful newsstand, he still rooted for Fiorentina. He thought about Mario of the goldfish and whether he had installed the new tanks. He didn’t think about the kids with black knees; that time hadn't come yet.
Tommaso walks the sidewalks of Rome, kicking stones with the new soles of old shoes. His pants almost reach his knees, his shirt is worn. He walked with Enzo, the sharper one who earned a few bucks with the teacher’s attention. Tommasino envied him. Tommasino wanted all the bucks in the world for himself - yesterday as today -, he wanted teeth to bite into this life, to take time by the teeth, to escape from the suburbs. Years have passed, but the wind that insults Tommaso's jacket from bottom to top is the same, the same as that dawn that tousled Enzo’s hair just moments before the tram severed his foot, a few hours after hanging out on the street. The clouds left after God urinated on the INA-Casa rooftops all night, the wind took their place. Tommaso has changed, he has seen so much that he forgets what he should think about each event that has happened to him. Since he recovered from tuberculosis, since he's been with Irene - yes, the robust young girl with calves born of a difficult life -, since he left the hospital, he feels better, he feels for the people, he feels communist. He is communist, not like those from the section. He is convinced, or at least he believes, for the little he knows he knows, that that's how it should be. Tommaso promised that the other night at the cinema was the last time. He will never again jerk off some unnoticed invert to earn a few bucks. It doesn’t matter, he will never again spend a Sunday on the bank of the river with Irene. It doesn’t matter. Not because it’s a bad thing, just because he doesn’t want to anymore. He thought about it while searching for the last piece of cigarette he had in his jacket pocket, looking at those crammed in the bar that someone would call friends from the past. Enough, he told himself, enough with everything. This is what he told himself, without realizing that his life was...
1959 - A Violent Life, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Marxist analysis, produced by a Marxist thesis, regarding the constraints in the life of the subproletariat, in the form of a coming-of-age, almost, novel. Morality is dead, replaced by economic constraints and sexual urges, there is no serenity, compassion, self-love, or love for others, happiness, and sensitivity that can withstand. One dies inside, thoughts stop. Thoughts are of no use. It is not thoughts that will feed you. Nothing will feed you in this world made for people who only desire teeth. Teeth to devour themselves and everyone else.
<< The references to individual people, events, and real places described here are fictional: however, I would like it to be clear to the reader that what he has read in this novel is, in essence, something that really happened and continues to really happen. >> PPP
To N., who died of violence, as a violent man, as a young man, as a handsome man... leaving the ugly life to the ugly.
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