Alfredo M. Bonanno
Love and death
(Elizabeth Barrett Browing)
From an extended silence lacking signals, a taciturn pact based on the freedom between comrades, bursts out, breaking the ice, the police notice of death, which every hope of the soul insists on not believing. Little lines from the journals. The death of an anarchist with his explosive. Luigi Di Blasi, lacerated by a bomb. Impossible. Everyone of those who had known him, and loved him, negate the categorizing thought of death, the definitive closing that like a bleak basalt that seals the uncessant emerging of life and gives it to the regard of those who survived, remorseful actors of a requiem whom in other times, before the spontaneous and unstoppable insurgence of projects and actions, were dispersed among sophisms of uncertitude, sufficient to ensure their own greedy and inconceivable safety.
Believing in this reality, which on the other sides the silence strives to reiterate, means only that to admit the mortal unattainability of our rocky dreams, of the construction of a marvelous world, never closed off in a program or in ties of rational coldness, but precisely because of this always imaginable, always spurred, dragged, by the way Gigi saw reality, by the way in which reality was seen by his eyes. But his tongue, merciless and rigid, doesn't admit unfathomable paths. He needs, in the very use of the past tense, the surety of a police certificate. So the grammatical instrument brings us to the end, in the sunny territory of safety, while Gigi favored the shady edges, where he could walk closer to the joyous feeling of life, with his comrades, that in the torrid necessity of action often found only cataloguing and closing. Surely, one of the only ones we ever knew whose personality's plenitude was seized in the things to be done and, at the same time, in the way they were done ,because, beyond doing there were other comrades with whom he had to do it, and this only in the perspective of a common growth not based on the gossip of ideology, but on feelings, on mutual trust, on respecting one another, on desire and joy for life.
It is not our intention to write an obituary, a dreadful word that reminds us of the inescapable mission that often our deads silently leave us and which we have always denied to accomplish. This time again we are ugly gatherers of memories, also because, like Empedocles' sandal, not some part but all of Gigi's short life stays with us, promptly alive, actively meaningful.
We don't want to remember, we want to live. The rest, from the dull silence to the fleeting chit-chat that teaches us to roam left and right, building fantastic deductions and preoccupied distanciations, doesn't tell us a thing. Injustice and ignorance seem to be walking surely. It doesn't bother us. But the air we breath can still make us remember the polished cortex of his words heard trough duinatic elogies, and as much as this could be one of our operations, if man has the strength to go beyond itself, it can also go beyond time, win suffering, pain, even death.
With Baudelaire we can clearly, always see deep down his (the cat's) adorable eyes the hour, always that same one, an immense hour, solemn, big like the space, not partitioned in minutes or seconds, a motionless hour that is not shown by clocks.
It is our way to tie back a memory, of respecting a will that sought to go beyond the limits that enclose man and its excessively humane mishaps, a revolutionary will that sought to transform the world.