Marco Campogiani, "Smalltown boy"

“When we were Us, and the world stood outside, everything was light, and as if slippery, while now I can’t take a step.”

In the end, they are still Babi and Step, in the end it is still “another love story”. And yet …

“Smalltown boy”, by Marco Campogiani, finalist at the XXVI Calvino prize, is part of the trend of young adult love but, above all, of the search for sexual identity, now so much in vogue. It does so with a slight, almost tragicomic attack, as if we were, in fact, still “three meters above the sky”, then, however, it grows towards the inner excavation, towards the acceptance of the ineluctable, towards suffering, towards the ‘being forced to measure himself against the yardstick of so-called normality, with the “other than himself”.

Davide Guizzardo falls deeply in love at fourteen, with a dramatic absoluteness, superior to his age, and his love is as tragic as Romeo’s. But the soul mate is not Juliet, but Guido, the friend with whom he usually plays football and talks about girls. Guido is handsome, strong, athletic, he is the champion everyone wants. Guido is homosexual, Guido has a twin, Martina, considered by all to be weird, dark, lonely. Martina is also homosexual and she loves Cristina whom everyone believes to be Guido’s girlfriend. To be together, Davide and Guido, Martina and Cristina, will have to pretend to conform, to become in the eyes of the world what society requires. “To be. How. The. Other.”

Thus a comedy of misunderstandings will be born, a strange intertwining between the four youngsters, where Davide will pretend to be with Martina, while Guido will show that he is Cristina’s boyfriend. In reality, real couples will be homo and not straight.

As we said, the story starts with a light tone, at the beginning homosexuality is just an eventuality, an exploration in the context of a confused age, of which all the potentials are tested. Davide, Guido, Martina try to be like everyone else, they test the sensations of their body and the emotions of their heart in contact with the other sex, but love has a vital, playful upper hand. The young people accept what they can no longer hide or reject, they live in a bubble isolated from the rest of the world, they create their own alternative space, a secret garden where they cultivate their personal happiness. “God how beautiful we are, I think.”

But their external and internal beauty is not understood, it must be denied.

“What else could I tell the Captain of the Carabinieri? It would take a long time to explain the Parallel World of the “Special rules” to him. Or the theory of Our Moments. What would he understand? Anything. Because what he lives in is a different world, which does not belong to us: the world of the Order.“

Inevitably, these pure and happy young people will have to clash with respectability, with society, with the family, with the school, with the Church, who want them as they are not, who pretend to change them even if they do nothing wrong, even if they are good studious guys. Because Davide, Guido and Martina are not only their homosexuality but also any young people, who mark their lives to the sound of pizzas and eighties music. The songs are the soundtrack to the whole novel and rhythm the chapters (and this too, lately, is becoming a cliché of fiction.)

“Who decides what’s in order and what’s not?”

The breakthrough of the Order, in what only from the outside looks like Disorder without being, will lead to ruptures, lacerations, painful separations that destroy the energy of the protagonist, that “reify” him, that transform him into an automaton capable only to feel nostalgia, loss, loneliness. Davide’s drama is narrated with a simple and penetrating tone, where the pain is even more intense because it is over-restrained.

“I get up, I have breakfast, I go to school, I even answer when my mother asks me something, but it’s like it’s not me, it’s like I’ve pressed the red button on the remote and now I’m on standby.”

If the atmospheres, we repeat, can be ascribed to a climate reminiscent of Moccia or even the songs of Pausini, the interior excavation is, however, lucid and sharp in its elementarity, the language rough and studied. The dialogues feel the effects of Campogiani’s experience as a screenwriter, they are compelling, realistic, far too perfect for a young protagonist, to the point that it is the writer himself, at times, who criticizes himself: “You could have said something more original Guido: ‘ I was wrong, I don’t want to lose you… ‘You’re… mushy. You’re fake. “ It is peculiar the habit of zooming from the third person to the second, to get closer to the character, to talk to each other.

I conclude by saying that in the text there is also a strong component of denunciation of homophobia, albeit nuanced, domesticated. After gaining awareness, there is a rejection of prejudices, categorizations, labeling.

“I’ve never known the life of a truck driver. I never speak of love with a truck driver. And suddenly I realize maybe something simple, but I want to say it. There are no “truck drivers”. There are men, people who are truck drivers. Simple isn’t it? But I had never thought about it yet. You learn a lot of things by traveling.“