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giovedì 20 ottobre 2011

The voice of the dead



In the Ponti household, tradition wanted the masters to be either professors or sultans. The “professors” were family men, loyal to their wives, backs straight, guardians of the papers, knots and  thorns of the family; the sultans were quite their opposite: skirt chasers, windy in thought, moody and, often enough, they themselvers core of the family problems... The lawyer, my father, was of the first type; his brother, my uncle, of the second. They both got married in those long lost years of the late Fifties and they both had five children and, funnily enough, both had  twin boys: the major twins (my brothers) and the minor ones (my cousins). Age made the difference, my brothers arrived eight years before my cousins did and so, that is that.
My mother was all but a “professoressa”. She wore short, quick hair when all around her women paraded cotton candy heads; she married in short, no veil, no nothing, when brides, in those days of memory, looked like sugar cakes. The wife of the journalist, my aunt, to soothe her loneliness due to her husband's balloon head passed long forlon afternoons recording the voices of the dead. “Did you hear them?”, she asked me once with pleading eyes. I only heard deep silences and the rustle of the tape. My mother, ice in her eyes, said: “We must go now...”. And we went.
Many years later, I was watching, for the sake of someone else, a James Bond movie that my father, already passed away, loved like a life he had not had. I thought wouldn't it be great if he was here! In that I heard a furious rattle coming from the kitchen, as if some neighbour was hammering nails at that time of night. I translated the language of the dead. My father was saying: I'me here too! The voice of the dead.

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