Rocco Carbone's vertical obsession

Shortly after half of The Command, the young musician Lidia visits the septuagenarian old sinologist Logoteta in hospital. She wears her youth with candor and a pinch of irreverence, on the previous page we observed her entering the hospital dressed in a flashy way, with light green tight-fitting trousers, a black sweater, a large checkered jacket on the shoulders, hair held by a red band, he also drank some tea from the same cup as the old patient.

Logoteta is in bad shape, he is dying and is losing his memory, he no longer remembers anything about his recent past, while his reasons for love for China and the East still echo like the fires that go out under the gray sky of a autumn sunset. Lidia and Logoteta like each other, desire each other, but it is a desire that only literature can filter with its exact guises. Classical music is a terrain on which the girl’s aspirations and the memories devastated by the elderly professor’s incurable disease meet. The flesh, the sex, are represented by that cup of tea that they exchange, by the sudden need to comb and wash that patient who until recently was abandoning himself, naked and dirty in a hospital bed. the key is in the passage in which the narrator tells the nature of the desire that burns the young woman for the old man: “It was as if through him she could know something from which she would have remained forever excluded, without his help.”

With this sentence, but also mysterious, we can investigate the case a little better Rocco Carbone, profound, obsessive writer, seeker of analytical truths and very uncomfortable horizons. His books are pervaded by loneliness, by an obsession with the mystery of death, and by an elegant but pervasive sensuality, almost suffocating, never repelling. The narrative voice that tells the story of The Command he is a forty-year-old doctor who deals with Alzheimer’s patients and studies its implications. The man has no name and this is a very risky stylistic device within a book, the impression is that Carbone wanted to shorten the distance between reader and narrator.

At the beginning of the novel, the doctor returns to his town to attend the funeral of his dear friend Edith, an important woman for him, not only a love, but also an unresolved correspondence. Edith has a very young sister, Lidia, eighteen years old, she plays the cello, she has the candor and energy of boys who look at death with distance and romanticism. Lidia will reach the narrator, a man without a name, married to a woman who appears very little, Nora. The “command” that gives the book its name is a transference of the protagonist, a dark projective act, a frightening longing which the doctor tries to oppose in every way, but then in the end he is forced to carry out the dark command, unleashing the inevitable consequences that reverberate in the final pages. Desire is the stone guest of these pages, it is a magnetic force of attraction towards someone without whom, we would feel excluded from a fundamental area of our existence. In short, the desire is an aspiration for completeness, which is contrary to the fragmentation of Logoteta’s past and of all those who are victims of the loss of memory of the Alzheimer’s patients whom the protagonist looks after, cures and studies.

The figure of the doctor is replicated in books, the ego and conscience are investigated, as well as memory. The Calabrian writer’s studies of psychology and psychoanalysis may have been robust, yet what ultimately remains today in the pages that are read with great interest are the literary transfigurations, its nuances, the allusions to an enormous, submerged world within the interiority of each of us. Carbone proceeds through triangulations in this novel. The doctor who tells the story is always one of the three vertices which page after page are occupied by Edith and Lidia, Lidia and his ghostly wife Nora in the second part, again Lidia and Logoteta in the third part and finally in the final one, Logoteta and the prophecy that seems open the scenarios to what will be the author’s next book, namely The Siege, a dystopian novel, full of suggestions on the future of humanity. The triangle, the number three is the perfect harmony between soul, body and mind. Number of perfection, but which is articulated and completed only with those final lines announced throughout the book, but never implemented during the course of the story.

Lydia is a name dear to Latin poets, even if they adapted it to secondary female characters in their elegies, the Lydians are ethereal or slaves in the works of Horace and Martial, and in Arnulf of Orleans in the twelfth century, it will inspire the elegy on a woman unscrupulous and libertine, called Lidia. It is perhaps this hidden quote to understand Lidia’s weight in the life of the protagonist, but above all in the triangulation with Logothetas, which means the one who counts, calculates and rationalizes, and who in the Byzantine era as well as in the kingdom of the two Sicilies, was a accounting bureaucrat and an official of the rulers. Light and heavy, frivolous and rigid, yet the two characters, although alluded to, do not come into conflict, but harmonize with the sad and defeated gaze of the narrator incapable of truly loving. Far from any psychoanalytic interpretation, these shadows (including the elusive one of wife Nora), project the different souls of the narrator’s conscience, parts of the same self that exposes itself to the inevitable.

Over the course of his novels, Rocco Carbone recounted the bumpy (and frightened) journey of his protagonists towards the search and then the avoidance of the self. Trying and then running away from your own feelings and emotions, with the fate of what is conveniently defined as fatalism, the typical anathema with which Southern writers are baptized. The Command was published in 1996, and is still a very relevant book today. At the time of the release Rocco Carbone was a young Calabrian man in his early thirties, he had a very solid intellectual profile (also read his studies in literary criticism or some of the entries written for Letteratura italiana edited by Enzo Siciliano) but he wrote in a way that is very far from the expectations we have of southern writers.

There is no dialectism, no revenge, no magical realism or wink at the rhetoric of the South which will shortly explode with the search for ostentatiously marginal writings. Rocco Carbone’s work is vertical, psychological. His writing is obsessive, where destiny is nothing supernatural, but a simple vocation to the novel, therefore it represents a terrain of great abundance for knowing the world. Rocco Carbone does this by leaving the reader with a small hunger, a little melancholy, the same as those who have begun to look within themselves and towards others, with the fear of having been excluded from something much greater.