I am sure that even in many years, on a remote afternoon lost in the future, comfortably sitting on the red electric lift chair placed in a corner of the common room of an RSA in Asti Nord paid for by the pension of engineer Negro, my wife, I will remember the day where a bookseller from Asti took me to learn about magical realism.
The New Year’s Eve bell struck six in the afternoon, the shelves smelled of beeswax and mordant carnauba, the floor creaked and we went down a spiral staircase hidden from view by a screen decorated with hunting motifs, and from there we continued the descent down another forked staircase; we took the ramp on the left, we reached a landing where the staircase divided into two smaller side ramps; we took the ramp on the right, and then the one on the left again, and another on the left, and after other ramps (how many? Maybe three, maybe five, maybe more; following the bookseller who was walking confidently in front of me I completely lost the account) we reached the basement of the bookshop, where I finally became acquainted with magical realism.
Colombia, reportage on the places of Gabriel García Márquez
by Matteo Nucci
The bookseller pointed at it with his crooked finger: it looked like a gaunt donkey ridden by a dancing skeleton, and the next it was an iguana, the song of a goldfinch, a flower whose name is unknown, and the next still a citrulli-catcher who sells maps of lost cities to clumsy travelers and pilgrims in search of profane ecstasy.
In the bookseller’s eyes there was the same dazzling emotion that I imagined might have crept into the eyes of the first readers of the book. Metamorphosis by Kafka. Come closer, he told me. Magical realism has many names and many forms, she added, but one of its most beautiful names is Pedro Paramoand one of its most satisfying and entertaining forms is that of the book.
I approached, hesitant, and the closer I got, the more I could smell the scent of those herbs that grow in May along the border of the roads between Asti and Montemagno (chicory, dandelion, rosolaccio), in that lost space between Monferrato and nothing, a perfume that reminded me of the evenings at the abandoned convent, when the world was young and we fell in love with South American poetesses, startled from time to time by the nocturnal whispers of ghosts – the warrior nun (ah, if then we had known how to communicate with the dead, and if if we could have asked him what would have become of our life, we would perhaps have lived another one, completely the same and completely different), the holy demon, the deceitful sorceress who, in addition to whispering, grunted, blew her nose, farted and then he sneered.
When I was now one step away from magical realism (now it had taken the form of a witch that opened its mouth to take in all the air it could, like a fish forgotten by the fishermen on the deck of a fishing boat), I seemed to hear that smell that the first drops of rain make on the asphalt, that scent of petrichor that brought with it all the pain and all the mourning of a gender, the human one, which would soon fight for a garba of clean water in a world that was burning circling madly on the edge of a cliff. I looked at the bookseller, and from my perspective, the perspective of a startled young reader, he looked like the grandest man I had ever seen, a gargantuan Pantagruel (or even a gargantuan Gargantua). He again pointed to magical realism, which in the meantime had taken the form (wonderful, unsurpassed, ruthlessly perfect) of the book. Take it, he said, it’s yours now. It may be that it will age like the dusty streets of Macondo, like the ruined houses of Comala, but it will never stop transforming, since magical realism is a version of reality, a reality in which there is always something that doesn’t add up, an intricacy hatched by a man who has heard many stories, an unsolved enigma like the life of Pedro Páramo, like the life of Gabo, like the life of all of us.
This is how I took magical realism into my hands and I felt like when, many years before, I kissed my first girlfriend behind the knees and she laughingly said not to do it, because I tickled her, and I kept kissing her precisely to tickle her. ticklish, and I felt incredibly alive, ready to discover the truth behind the magic.
When I left the bookshop, several hours later, the streets of Asti smelled of rain, the sky was a brush of mercurochrome dripping on the damp roofs of Piazza Alfieri, the New Year’s Eve bell struck six in the afternoon.
#demon #magical #realism
– 2024-04-01 10:36:49
