Raffaele La Capria
Ferito A Morte

The other night I was on the terrace of a house, one of those in the suburbs, overlooking a street: below, the parking lot, to the right an overpass that passes just a few centimeters from the bedroom of those who live there and spend sleepless nights, to the left the station's containers, the tracks, the wagons, the tangle of metal departing and arriving.

And there, in front of me, the horizon opened up, the city's backdrop and its historic center, the recognizable profiles of the buildings, and behind them, the hills, then, even higher, with a remnant of late spring snow, white and incongruous, the mountains, gentle and not severe, light as a glide towards the plain.

From inside, the living room a birthday party, old faces that will never leave - provided I do not leave with them - and new faces with their questions, faces that in one way or another are my face, adept at unmasking me.

While my gaze wandered and my thoughts followed its path, I thought that evenings like these, the sky with clouds over a suburb and the distant center, promise of beauty and storm, taste of rain and rice salad (without tears), are evenings like this that screw you over, and make you stay, stopping you from leaving, binding your destiny, your future, to the cities and people.

And as I thought about this, I discovered that almost fifty years ago mine was the thought of Raffaele La Capria, or rather, that fifty years later - fresh from reading his "Ferito a morte" - I find myself describing my life in the footsteps of what the Neapolitan author thought and wrote for me and his readers, of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

I find myself, or perhaps I like to find myself, in the position of Massimo de Luca, protagonist and alter ego of the writer in a Naples of the late '40s, early '50s, early '60s, where the protagonist confuses the wave of memories in a continuous coming and going from past to present, describing everything from a future hidden to the reader, where all things have already happened, and I feel surrounded by human types entirely similar, beyond the epochs, spaces, and cultures in this country that loves differences to not see itself too similar to itself at every latitude, in every place.

Small and large provincial bourgeoisie, the one described by La Capria and experienced by me, and by all his readers, bent in their dreams and missed ambitions, satisfied by their memories of evening conquests and summer pains, of diving into water in search of a sea bass that escapes as the protagonist’s existence seems to slip through his fingers, soon called to take on the responsibilities of adult life, changing cities and jobs, panoramas and landscapes, people who define him to such an extent that both departure, with its uncertainties, and the stop, like an embrace offering neither breath nor tenderness, become mortal.

Bourgeoisie, this with its habits, its obligatory stages, from gambling to the club, to tennis, through Sunday lunches and memories of relatives, the myth-tinted deeds of ancestors and nobility decayed before even becoming decadent in a late resurgence of pride and vanity, rituals that become the way to survive oneself and time, to changes, enveloping almost the protagonist, until necessity, even before will, compels him to change, sometimes without even realizing it.

A change experienced without a solution of continuity, described by the author, alternating linguistic registers in the thousand voices of the book’s protagonists that are then the only voice of memory and the lost protagonist, an attempt to rebuild and redefine that shipwrecks in a sea that encircles the city of Naples like a wall, not as an escape route and a chance of escape, and success.

An exemplary story, a no-holds-barred description of an existential failure that is not only that of the thousand children of the south forced to emigrate, or pleased to stay, but turns out to be, in a universal key, the portrait of a nation captured at the moment of maximum economic growth and expected splendor - the early '60s - presaging all that would happen next: going and returning, basking in memory and in a present that seems the best among possible, delighting in the glorious past and isolating oneself from it at the same time by diving into the sea until bursting one’s eardrums, not hearing and letting oneself be enveloped by an only hypothetically beautiful blue.

An inconclusive turning, appreciable for the rhythm of music and the beauty of the scene.

They call me inside for the toast and birthday wishes, I prepare my best face for a mellowed joy, reserving myself to propose a trip downtown for the last ice cream of the evening. And while I toast, I realize they've screwed me over again: I love this city and these people with all the love of someone who knows they are superfluous.