cThere are many ways to approach fifty. Or sixty, and beyond. One is the military intervention based on cosmetic surgery-laser-botox. Another is to take them as they come, go with the flow and feel young “inside”. Still another is to write about it. They did Erica Jong (Fear of 50), Nora Ephron (The neck drives me crazy), Lidia Ravera (The third time), Daniela Fedi (Women 6.0). Now it’s up to Guia Soncini And Romulus Bugaro.
novel vs. memoir
He, twice a finalist at the Campiello, publishes the delightful little novel, Sixty-year-old boys (Einaudi). The protagonists are “they”, a generation of almost elderly people who «still have a lot of hair, read without glasses, ride a scooter even in winter, have created a gym in the garage, use K-Way jackets and defend with nails and with his teeth a position he won’t be able to hold.’ Instead, These are 50 (Marsilius) by Guia Soncini, a journalist who would like to understand “how we became who we are”, is an irreverent personal and political memoir, as well as a reflection on the disappearance of adults. Bugaro and Soncini talk about things they know very well.
Everything is autobiographical
Is it all autobiography?
Guia Soncini A certain Borges said that everything you write is autobiographical, even when you write “Once upon a time there was a king who had three sons”, let alone when you are the king.
Romulus Bugaro Unavoidable. I coincide with the generation of which I speak (I was born in 1961), even if I thought more of a collective character. Then there are completely autobiographical details. Every Wednesday, I meet with some friends to have these fifteen-year-old evenings that I tell: we drink, we smoke, we talk about nonsense, we go home very late, and that’s it.
When does the fight against time start?
gs The race against time exists only in cosmetics commercials, and in the lives of ladies dumb enough to prefer to be called “Miss.”
R.B Almost immediately. We, the famous boomers, on the one hand grew up with My Generation of the Who who sang “I want to die before I get old”, but then came the 80s and 90s, consumerism and the obligation of eternal youth. Rebellion
and hypercapitalism have added up. The fight against
the weather has become very ferocious and we have given up on dying early.
How does it compare to others (40, 80 year olds)? Or with one’s age, in the past tense?
gs I suffer from an unbridled superiority complex towards everyone else, regardless of age. I don’t have a driving licence, but I’d take it just to invest my thirty-year-old self on the stripes. Indeed, no: Back to the Future teaches that in that case then I would not have the precious fifty-year-old me. Let’s say that if I met her, that silly thirty-year-old me, I would change sidewalk.
Guia Soncini and Romolo Bugaro
R.B Terrible. There is, creeping, a war between generations. Boomers had (and have) all the perks, from pensions to health care. Old employees make twice as much as their younger bosses. With forty-year-olds there is an asymmetry that produces tension. With octogenarians
it’s different: these infinite old ages worry me, elderly children who mourn the premature death of centenary parents…
Becoming an adult
Is a birthday enough to become an adult?
gs It takes a lifetime to grow up, I’m afraid.
R.B Age is a state of mind.
How old do you “feel” you are?
gs Fifty, luckily.
R.B Fifteen! I’ve never bolted from there. We sixty-year-olds live in amazement at seeing that the external age differs from the internal one. Then everyone feels it. Some stay in their thirties forever.
What scares you about the passing of time?
gs The collapse of the pension system, the laundry to be done piling up, the disappearance of the products I used to use: I would give any progress
and rocket to Mars in exchange for the return of a matte forest green eyeshadow
which they no longer produce.
R.B The decline. It is inevitable to think about health. Sometimes even to death.
What are the benefits (if any)?
gs Are you kidding? There are pretty much only pluses. Stop being stupid, stop waiting for Tizio to leave his wife, stop starting a new diet every Monday, stop telling yourself that now you’ll change, stop believing in the changes promised by others. You understand who you are and what you want, if you’re lucky. If, on the other hand, not even at fifty you have understood what you are like and what you want, I suggest you do
lawsuit for damage to nature.
R.B You may decide that you are tired of being who you were, of doing the things you used to do. You can rebel against your own past. You don’t have to enter a pattern: the rashness of youth, the responsibility of 40, the wisdom of 60…
“Twenty-somethings are complicated”
Is it easier to live as a non-young person in a liquid society?
gs I have excellent, watertight windows: the liquid company does not enter my house.
R.B Surely. How they jumped, rightly so,
the obligations of sexual orientation, thus those of age-related behaviors have been skipped. If you don’t feel like sixty, you can as well be a kid. I am libertarian!
What changes in the couple? And in love?
gs I used to tell Natalia Aspesi that, among the many improvements made to awareness by the passage of time, there is also the fact of knowing that the couple is not for me. And she told me that when the man she’d been with for decades, and got involved with in her early fifties, left his wife for her, she suddenly realized she didn’t want a man around the house, but by now he had rigged such a mess that he could no longer hold back. When I’m fifty, if someone leaves his wife, I change my phone number and maybe even the city.
R.B For the sixty-year-old boy, in a long-term couple there must be complicity, understanding, listening, closeness, but – absolutely – not love. Yes, some break up marriages over a much younger woman, but they’re extremely strained liaisons,
difficult to govern. Twenty-somethings are complicated. Fifty-year-olds are better.
We and the body
And what changes in the relationship with the body? Everywhere they offer fitness programs and anti-aging treatments.
gs. I don’t know about her, but I don’t live in a house lined with mirrors. I don’t even take pictures of myself all the time, it’s a tic from which luckily I’m immune. So, my looks are not my problem. It’s the others who look at my face that falls: my beauty or my old age are someone else’s drama or pleasure. Let alone if I tire myself out working for them, selfish as I am.
R.B You listen to the body, much more than before. You tell yourself: I’m fine, I’m still whole. But then you lose your voice and you immediately think of cancer.
I tell it in the final part of the book (this too is autobiographical).
Is there an age at which, if you could, you would return?
gs No. I wrote 190 pages to say it: no.
R.B I’m 15, inside.
Which definition would you abolish? Senior, Senior Citizen, Old?
gs I would not use any word other than “old” to say that someone is old: when I read
“he disappeared” I always think it is a case for Who has seen?, then I understand that it is simply a title made by someone who is afraid of words and does not dare to say “dead”. Of course you have to decide what “old” means: for a fifty-year-old and a ninety-year-old perhaps it makes no sense to use the same word.
I use “old woman” for myself, but more than with age it has to do with antiques, with being – in tastes, training, aptitudes – a
girl of the last century.
R.B At any age, we are all kids.
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