Without him, perhaps, he would not have been born Amarcord. “Titta is the same as me!”, Said in 1974 a moved Luigi Benzi, an appreciated criminal lawyer and, above all, an inseparable partner at the Giulio Cesare high school in Rimini of that “Fellas” who, known to the rest of the world as Federico Fellini, would have supported the his character the kaleidoscope of their youth. Beside him, Hans Schwarz would cross the shadow line of adolescence only to discover that Konradin von Hohenfels, the friend lost in the mists of Nazism, had become The friend found, who died in the vain and noble attempt to free humanity from Adolf Hitler’s demon. Thanks to him, the fragile Nelli conquers the dignity to cross the book with his head held high Heart, no longer subjected to the ante litteram bullying of cruel comrades, put back in line by the threat of a “scapaccione” by Garrone, of those who do “three turns”.
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“He”, or “she”, as unavoidable as a narrative topos or a deep memory, has a different identity for each of us. He is the counter partner (or partner). That (or that) of the irrepressible giggle at the last hour; the naval battle whispered during the lesson of technical applications; the life-saving tip before submitting the math test; confessor of an impossible love, emotional substitute for an anaffective family. He is not just a friend or a friend: he is a brother or a sister pro tempore, for a time that can sometimes expand to the rest of existence and, even when this is not the case, remains unchangeable in us, in the features, in the tics; in that astounding ability to color, better than anyone else in the classroom, Linus’ 1973 diary; in the blunder on the «swallows» that «rise in the sky /… e forgive over there… », thus freeing us, with revolutionary metric foolishness, from a bad poem right on the edge of the bell.
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Karol Wojtyla and Jerzy Kluger, his classmate in elementary school in Wadowice–
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All this will be taken away from our children and grandchildren, soon (and hopefully for a while). The “single counter”, imposed by Covid-19 together with the hideous neologism that describes its solitary position in the universe, has already made its appearance in the schools of places most plagued by the pandemic: delivered earlier than elsewhere in Codogno, Alzano e Nembro. Between 14 September and early October it is expected to arrive everywhere, certainly necessary and yet shocking. Because ours is a story of small and large sharing, of complicity and quarrels, which form us by similarity or contrast. Of physical and spiritual proximity. It is the story of classmates.
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«Does God exist? The craziest laughs … “, sings Guccini, “for Piero”. Eugenio Scalfari and Italo Calvino, at the Cassini high school in Sanremo, thus wondered about “Filippo”, the familiar nickname they had given to the Eternal Father: “This is a transit, but then what is the use, Filippo is not there », The founder of will recall many years later Republic in his friend’s painful obituary. And who knows how much of Karol Wojtyla’s sublime lightness came from Jerzy Kluger, a Polish Jew and his companion at the elementary school desk in Wadowice and then on the ski slopes, on the hockey fields, on the dance floors where they took lessons together, until they visited the 2000, side by side, at the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
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Eugenio Scalfari (first from left) with, among others, Italo Calvino (right)–
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Kanjak, successful footballer, recognizing his old friend Andreas in that Holy drinker a vagabond on the edge of Paris, he recalls in a moment its essence, “we were classmates and you let me copy”: because this would ultimately be a real classmate, a remedy for our shortcomings (not just scholastic), at least for us, as far as we are from the exasperated Calvinist meritocracy. But perhaps little Berlusconi, a bit Calvinist, must have been so in his heart, so that Guido Possa, his classmate from sixth grade to third high school at the Salesian school, recalled in 2006 that, no, “Silvio did not let you copy”, being however “a generous man”, always ready “to explain the versions you did not understand”: so it is not known whether, in addition to the merits of the old friend, it was for generosity or guilt that the Knight first hired him in Fininvest and then he appointed him Deputy Minister of Education. Calvinist ethics then does not solve everything, so whoever would have passed for standard bearer, Sergio Marchionne, was very inclined to let the less skilled like Luciano Gentile peek at the notebook, next to him in 1961 at the Nolli school in Chieti. It seems that the coexistence at the first bench of the Manin high school in Cremona between Orsetto De Carolis and Pierpaolo Pasolini was instead pure competition, having Orsetto decided to overcome PPP in no less than Italian (“but he always had an extra point”): and having drawn from it evidently so much literary frustration that he became an engineer when he grew up.
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Certain secrets remain in the counter. We will never know how much of a galactic megadirector Paolo Villaggio has glimpsed in Paolo Fresco, top manager and his partner at the Doria in Genoa. Nor how much comedy the classmates Carlo Verdone and Christian De Sica in Rome or Enrico Beruschi and Cochi Ponzoni in Milan have infected each other. Nor how much two opposite characters such as the fumantino Maurizio Sarri and the plush David Ermini, in Figline Valdarno, were shaped by contrast. Rather, we have some confirmation of what we suspected. That Cossiga had a rather high opinion of himself: “If you are very good, I am more talented”, he said to Manlio Brigaglia, Azuni 1938 school. That Renzi (already?) In middle school “he dreamed of president of the Republic” we finally learn by Alessandro Baldi. But basically we ordinary schoolchildren find ourselves closer to the humanity of Andrea Camilleri, who let Giuliana sack the “stuffed” vocabulary of a secret grammar compendium, doe eyes next to him. She returned it to him “stuffed” in turn with love notes, so well hidden that he, holy ingenuity, never noticed it: until the professor burned the tickets and deported Giuliana to another counter. Prehistory of yesterday. For schoolchildren with no companions of tomorrow, there is nothing left but WhatsApp.
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29 August 2020 (change 29 August 2020 | 22:16)
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