Ester Viola’s response
Dear F.,
you know what? It was easier, much easier before. One could count on a vague relationship of premise and consequence. If one wrote, something was bound to happen. From this generation they have taken away the essential: a little logic where there would be less. That minimum that served to make sentimental misfortunes faceable. Today they write to you without wanting to. Much more than before, almost everyone.
We already said that experience for these lands does not exist and, if it does, it consists in having taken half a dozen tricks, then cooling down and becoming capable of noticing that they all do the same things. Thus, equipped with this information paid by the (metaphorical) blows, the smartest ones derive some precise behavioral pattern to identify the idiot, the asshole, the fariniello, the Cleat Collector and various characters to avoid in the sentimental scene.
What the first jumping love taught us. Which was all beautiful, very powerful, extreme like in the poems. I won’t tell you how much light entered the room after weeks of silence on the phone: that notification ping played all the Puccini arias. Ah, what hope and long waits for a “see you” were made of.
If you then add distance – which as an amplifier of twenty-year-old desire is as good as falling in love with forty-year-old married people – you had earthquakes of the senses that shifted the ground under your feet. And you finally felt like you were alive. Not like the others, your friends with the same boyfriend since the third year of high school, with a life of pizzas and cinema on Saturday nights.
In general, we imaginary long-distance relationships soon understood one thing: those who don’t want you hold the thread of the days and hours. And that with one message a week you could keep alive (incredibly) the whole garden of hopes of certain very deluded people (us, me).
B) Bachelor’s degree: the great equivalence
Then came the era of partial lucidity. That is, of the great equivalence. We were forced to resign ourselves to the evidence, that is, whoever doesn’t want you in absolute terms is equal to:
who wants you once a week/month/year
anyone who is married/engaged/is with someone other than you at Christmas
those who write, read, comment, watch the stories
who always watches the stories first
those who are undecided, suffer, are solving other problems
who does the chatting
who makes beautiful chats
who makes chats so special that Woody Allen would buy them to do it again Manhattan.
It wasn’t love, it was beautiful writing.
The two get together and move in together. Tell me something duller than this. Protocol love, love inserted into an objective structure. Love that doesn’t wait for confirmation phone calls, text messages and story views. Love without chat, words without mystery, without expectations, without unresolved sexual tension.
It’s when you don’t write to each other anymore that you know it’s love. In short, what do we do with adult love?
We want to put it as he put it Cesare Pavese? (Better not).
Pavese and the paradox of love
Pavese, in one of the letters of terrible summary, he concluded thus:
But where will we end up, E.? Is there anything more absurd than love? If we enjoy it to the end, we immediately become tired of it, disgusted; if we hold it high to remember it without remorse, one day we will regret our foolishness and cowardice in not having dared. Love only asks to become habit, life in common, one flesh of two, and as soon as it is such, it is dead. Thinking about it makes you crazy.
Peppe, or the wisdom of the country
How has humanity always solved the matrimonial problem? One of the two, the most sensitive to carnal solicitations, seeks some diversion, without any other intentions (in this case it is him, F.). The stable couple will survive safe and immune to the now become table of the law: from the province of Benevento, Peppe for Peppe, I keep Peppe mine.
It’s impossible that someone doesn’t know who Peppe is, we’ve been talking about him for a hundred years, but I repeat myself.
Peppe is the rhetorical figure with which the old women of my town used to refer to the male entelechy. One for all, all equal to one. We didn’t go for very fine individual analyses: depth, in the country, doesn’t matter. In the village they know that every love that God sends before the parish priest is equal to the other, and is subject to betrayal due to statistical obviousness.
Nothing in the country deserved to become an illness: self-inflicted pain was avoided, all introspection was forbidden. Every analysis is disposable. If pining is avoidable, it will be avoided.
The effort of searching (and the avoidable pain)
So here we are, F. The secrets of this love that engages us so much at twenty and thirty years of age have all been revealed. What I understood is that you must always hope to be satisfied soon, at least with disappointments; otherwise you spend your life like this, telling yourself “why don’t you call, why don’t you do something”.
Then adulthood should bring another resolution, combine love with other dreams and other programs, otherwise it is clear that life disappoints you.
But I also think that we have become another humanity. We have condemned ourselves to a kind of pursuit of happiness all day, every day, which is leaving us exhausted. And as a predictable counter-effect there is this: that if unnecessary pain exists, we find it.
