Marina Plasmati, "Il viaggio dolce"

“It was as if he had the world inside his heart, not in front of his eyes”

“The sweet journey” is what the protagonist of the novel by Marina Plasmati is about to make shortly thereafter, fatal and final. The protagonist is always “the guest of honor”, a shy person who stays closed in the room without disturbing, speaking softly, with mild kindness. But we know very well who he is, even if he is never mentioned, it is Giacomo Leopardi, and this beautiful novel is almost a prose version of his immortal poems.

The novel recounts the poet’s last months of life, those spent in Campania, at Villa Ferrigni, with his friend Ranieri’s brother-in-law, and Plasmati recreates them by drawing directly on Leopardian texts. These are the same events and the same protagonists described in “Seven years of association with Giacomo Leopardi”, by Antonio Ranieri, without the spiteful malice of the nineteenth-century biographer but with the respect and compassion of the scholar.

The landscape is the same as “La ginestra”, the penultimate song before death, born in those extreme places and republished here in the appendix, together with the “Discourse on the present state of Italian customs”. The broom is a poor and tenacious flower, with a persistent scent, beautiful despite its rough simplicity, as good as the people who live in those places, capable like them of snatching their existence from the desert — “happy with the desert” — to feel satisfied with it anyway, but destined, in the end, to succumb like everything else. The broom speaks to us of the strength and hostility of a splendid and stepmother nature and of how man must, with an act of supreme courage, look reality in the face, “nothing to the truth denying”, recognizing in other human beings his condition and joining them to endure it. The volcano keeps the inhabitants in check, it can awaken at any moment and destroy everything, as it has already done with Pompeii, which the protagonist visits on the back of a mule, it can bury human vainglory in one breath.

But no matter how bad, nature remains longed for, precisely because everything is so fleeting, transient, ephemeral. Denying the values ​​of life, keeping away from them, only serves to make them loved more and the famous cosmic pessimism is nothing more than a desperate call of life and love.

“As soon as they left the view of the villa, an almost horizonless panorama opened to their gaze: hills and vineyards on the right, patches of fruit trees on the left, flower meadows in front, the restless volcano behind and the calm sea in the distance. Summer invigorated the colors, flavors and smells of the whole landscape with an impetuous force. Everywhere the earth gave birth to shoots and buds of herbs, plants and flowers: the air boiled with noisy insects, in crazy search of food, the sky resounded with the songs of breathless birds at work in the nest, the light itself shone full of a dazzling intensity. Everything, even the desert of ash and lava, seemed to explode with new life. “

Explosion and luxuriance that contrasts the violence of the “exterminator Vesevo”, the dryness of the lava desert, the nothingness that is about to swallow the poet, to which only a stoic resignation, a quiet sweetness, an underground and never dormant love for life, the one that is finally reborn in Silvia’s womb. This shy and sad man, timid and embittered, even a little capricious because of the evils that afflict him, is the loneliest and most thirsty for life:

“He dreamed of glory and love, he flew with his thoughts beyond all boundaries, he created infinite worlds with his imagination and in the meantime he saw real life, the life of flesh and blood, fleeing far away and not looking back: he cried for it, sought it in the page, he sometimes raised it in verse, or he would chase it to look at it from the window into the lives of others, desperately regretting its absence.”

So much suffering is the result of a higher mind locked up in an ugly and sick body, it is the result, above all, of a very acute and painful sensitivity. “A trifle could upset him to the core, in an unruly, excessive way.”

At the villa he converses with more or less erudite guests, guests who reveal themselves to be narrow-minded, tough-minded and highlight, by contrast, his disdainful nobility. On another level, however, Cosimo and Silvia move, two young servants who like each other. They represent all that the poet yearns for and lost, they represent the very matter of the Idylls. She, naive, fresh and with a bewitching voice like Teresa Fattorini, the lamented and never forgotten Silvia of whom she is the unaware homonymous. He is a young, strong, joking little boy with his whole life still ahead of him, with promises in bloom, with a good and kind heart. Finally, there is Pasquale, older, the bearer of ancient wisdom. To them, the epitome of all that is precious, what he is about to leave, the affection of the distinguished guest goes.

And they are also the only ones who can truly understand poetry, which speaks directly to the heart through intuitive shortcuts. Poetry is considered by Leopardi as belonging to the sphere of instinct, inherent in the simplest of societies and individuals. The questions that naive people ask themselves, such as the wandering shepherd of Asia, are the same as the humanity that faces the mystery of the universe, of life and death, of which all of us, philosophers or illiterates, are ignorant.

“That is our broom,” she said aloud and his mouth opened to the simplest of smiles.

He smiled too, continuing to stare at her.

Yes, that’s it, what do you say?

“It is beautiful, exclaimed the girl with the astonished chariots.”

It is the same amazement that captures us in front of Leopardi’s verses, when we read them with humility and without superstructures, letting ourselves be bathed in their beauty.

Note the use of dialogue without quotation marks that transforms conversations into a sort of indirekte rede, halfway between acting and thought, between narration and analysis of the Leopardian text.

The description of this revived Silvia recalls the famous painting by Veermer and the novel by Tracy Chevalier.

“The wind began to play with her dress and hair again, her dress adhered to the curves of her hips and outlined the swollen belly of a young girl. Her hair began to flutter softly and playfully across her forehead and around her ears. A beam of transparent light struck her very pale eyes and illuminated the bluish lines of the veins of her chest and of her uncovered nape. Her mouth stood out a deep red, like her sweat-soaked cheeks. So motionless, absorbed in a dream flooded with light, the distinguished guest found her, silently looking out into her room. “

The style is lyrical and poignant, worthy of paraphrasing of wonderful verses that are in the hearts of all of us.

“She felt that it was not happiness that we were dealing with, but subtle and very wise simplicity, the simplicity of the flower, of the fireflies, of the swallow, of each creature one by one. She felt that it was not understanding or deceiving herself the drama, but living, simply living, as does the flower, the firefly, the swallow, to live, only to vanish, as every creature does, one by one. He felt that no consolation or reticence was possible, that no ambition was essential, except the life, simple and wise, that of the flower, of the firefly, of the swallow, of each creature, one by one. And in each of his creatures, one by one, nature continues to exude crime and shine forth grace, in each of its creatures, forever “