To Patrizia Cavalli Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 29, 2022 Two months have now passed since Patrizia’s death and yet, even if I dreamed of her, I don’t feel like talking about it — no, it’s not easy for me. Two months — what are two months compared to more than half a century of uninterrupted familiarity? Tonight, in a dream, we were with other people at her house on the corner between Biscione and Paradiso — between sin and salvation — that home that I know as mine — and at a some point I got closer to Patrizia lying upon a bed or a sofa and I scrutinised her face as if her last truth was fixed in it. The last truth: a contradictory claim, which Patrizia was too true to accept and against which she staged the theatre, the forever open theatre of which there has been a lot of talk — even too much. Patrizia’s home — but is it really possible to separate Patrizia from her home, that home which will now disappear forever along with the thousands things that filled it, odds and ends or wonderful objects that were Patrizia’s world — for somehow they were Patrizia, because the world, the body and the mind cannot be separated. And perhaps it is good that that home and that world do not survive Patrizia — they died with her and could no longer talk to us without her. The position of a poet’s friend is embarassing. If, on the one hand, intimacy suggests the claim of an incomparably deeper acquaintanceship than that of a common reader, on the other hand it is enough to let time do and such claim reveals its absolute inconsistency. If that poet will continue to be read two or three centuries later, whoever confronts his work will certainly not be in any way in an inferior position than his now deceased friend — quite the opposite, in fact. For this, the gesture of those critics who claim their intimacy with the author sounds specious, to say the least. Hence, one can say of the poet’s friend — in this case of me with respect to Patrizia — what I have just said about her home: it is good that he disappears with him, his testimony risks being misleading with respect to the only thing that will end up counting: the written work. However, nevertheless... Perhaps that testimony doomed to fall was not irrelevant, just as the house and the objects with which the poet loved to surround himself were not quantité negligeable. Indeed, perhaps they were so important that just for this reason we must let them fall. Like the face and character of the poet, his way of walking and standing, his voice, his irrefutable, unmistakable gestures. So important, that in the unfortunate selection that every tradition is compelled to make if it is to be effective, it cannot be taken into account. In the handbooks of history of literature there is no room for Patrizia’s voice, for her gesture, for the thousand, precious trifles which filled her Biscione house. And when, as it happens, the poet’s home becomes a museum, things become objects forever delivered in articulo mortis to their defunct identity. If they are no longer important to him, how could they matter to us? The throne room of her home, of her affable and surly royal palace, was certainly the kitchen. The legend of Patrizia’s dinners, which has been commented on so many times, is anything but a golden legend. Did she really enjoy cooking? Did she really like to eat? Greed, at first glance one of her dominant passions, was not aimed at her own pleasure; it was, rather, a painful compensation, a price paid for the unfailing dissatisfaction of her every desire. For this reason, in the kitchen, Patrizia had nothing of the ferocious meticulousness of the cooks. I, being admitted into that sancta sanctorum as a “pasta doctor”, always saw her moving to the stove cloudy and impatient, half solicitous and half distracted, as if every time she missed crockery and pots — as if she had to constantly remedy a flaw or a defect. All the more surprising was the sublime, predictable goodness of a result apparently so random. Why did Patrizia know love so well? Why is the whole of her poetry a sea of love? For she did not love herself, for she knew that it is because of our impossibility to love that we are condemned to love. The all mine singular I of which, in order not to get confused, she seemed to speak uninterruptedly — that “I”, “if it were momshit, if it were cocock”(*), half grammatical and half carnal, which Patrizia used to wear like an insufficient, greedy expiation for her inability to love herself and to love others. For this, like Elsa, in the end Patrizia stopped trying to expiate for a sin she never committed and, with the complicity of doctors, like Elsa she let herself slip into illness and death. And just as Elsa denied herself the possibility of love by loving to madness men who could not reciprocate her, so Patrizia did the same with her mums. Yet, as long as her prehistoric body and her primordial mind held her up, Patrizia wrote the most fanatical, pedantic and scathing amorous songbook of the twentieth century. And, just like in Elsa, tragedy and comedy, which seemed so insatiable, eventually give way to a childlike gesture — and hence clear, almost serene. A blue bonnet found back like a realm or one of those many scarves and foulards that Patrizia, on her exhausted journey from one room to another, dropped on a chair or on the floor. (*) A verse from one of Cavalli’s longest poems, L’io singolare proprio mio, now in Cavalli, “Poesie 1974–1992”, literally reading, in Italian, “fosse mammerda e fosse anche cacazzo”, including two mashups (“mammerda” and “cacazzo”). |
(English translation by I, Robot)
