Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
QSometimes, going beyond the borders of this small box, I think about how difficult it is to be a man. Simple men, I mean. Speaking here of us women, and very often of what we don’t have, the conditioned reflex is to think of men as our usurpers.
But our life is dotted with positive male figures that we don’t talk about enough. And of male issues that grow but are never addressed, overwhelmed by ours, which are never resolved, and so we keep talking about it.
Meanwhile, lament is not allowed to men: They can’t express their discomforts without being seen as pathetic or selfish. Nevertheless, sometimes, it would do us good to listen to themputting aside our (legitimate) resentment against patriarchy and that excessive power that actually belongs to a few, always the same.
Some time ago I read a beautiful book by a young author, David Simeonwho enlightened me about it. Tomorrow I will wake up early (Les Flaneurs) is the silent diary of a man who carries within himself the suffering of the sudden loss of his partner due to a car accident.
Roberto unburdens himself by transcribing shreds of memories on paper, making it difficult for him to find anyone who can understand him. Until he meets, by chance, a young and bizarre teenager, Camilla. The name is the one they had chosen with their partner, if they had had a daughter. But it is not only for this strange coincidence that the destinies of Roberto and Camilla end up intertwined.
“Tomorrow I wake up early” by Davide Simeone (Les Flaneurs).
In this really unusual and delicate story of friendship between a man and a little girl (how many have you read?), narrated with the edge of a pen to avoid misunderstandings, Camilla’s purity is the blank sheet on which Roberto will be able to pour his feelings, without the risk of receiving in return distracted listening, hasty judgments, required.
It will be inevitable, for Roberto, find out next to Camilla what kind of father he would have been. Finally, magical will be the way in which all this (and much more) will bring him back to life and to that pleasure of watching the sunrise tomorrow, waking up early.
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