Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Nohe didn’t want to be Pierrot. The writer Fabio Genovesi reveals it in a special issue of Linus, published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Viareggio Carnival. «A sort of pale Pulcinella, worn out, afflicted by some recent mourning»: this was, for little Fabio, what the others would have seen once the martyrdom of the maternal make-up session was completed to spread the white on the face and draw the tear .
It was enough to read the incipit of his story to feel we were all there, next to himeach locked up in the memories of their childhood and yet brothers/sisters in the same “slaughter”: that “net spread around the children, hidden in the transparent sea of childhood, which suddenly tightened”.
For example, I didn’t want to be the little Indian with feathers on his head and fringed overshoes.. Not because I preferred to identify with cowboys and their belts. The point was the imposition of a chain of cast-off costumes from my older brother. What he had been the previous year, I would ingloriously become at the next party: plus with a few patches, cuffs and an elastic band to tighten the waist.
Only once did I anticipate the passing of the carnival baton: when he dressed up as an astronaut. Blue-grey overalls, helmet, moon boot. It seemed absolutely real, you couldn’t even see that he was there behind the plastic visor. We were at the turn of the Sixties and Seventies, the conquest of the Moon was just behind us and we all dreamed of ourselves in orbit.
But envy – or perhaps any backyard quarrel – dragged the little Armstrong of the family into a senseless tussle before my eyes. He came out with ripped pants and a dented helmet. We also tried to threaten a lawsuit that should have led the rival’s parents to buy us back (I still feel it as a compensation due to both of us) the entire lunar kit.
It didn’t happen and perhaps for this reason the following year I too would have turned, like almost all my companions, into a standard blue fairy, with a conical hat and a magic wand. Surely I consoled myself by fulfilling “the desire to be like the others”, traced by another writerFrancesco Piccolo, in our collective memory.
My daughter, on the other hand, scolds me again for that time when, misinterpreting the nursery school indication, I deposited her in class dressed as Snow White. She was the only one in the mask that morning, immediately the center of all eyes and a few killer giggles. Late as always, there was no scope to bring her home and free her… She would stay like this until the afternoon, rouged outside and eighth dwarf inside.
The bottom line is that Fabio Genovesi is right and our stories are a source of incriminating evidence. Carnival is a New Year’s Eve for minors, a conspiracy of adults: a party we are forced to attend by simulating unbridled contentment, and without alcohol. Better to slip out. Or feeling like Zorro every day.
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All articles by Barbara Stefanelli
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