Sergio Costanzo, "I racconti della mano destra"

“Everyone has their own time and I keep the memory of my days gone by. To that light-hearted purity, to that lightness of mind, it is sometimes pleasant to return. “

I Passi, a suburb north of Pisa, on the outskirts, exposed to the north wind, bordered by the railway and the river, a bunch of modern and square houses, designed around the table and divided by streets that intersect like decumani and cardis. At the beginning of the sixties, young families with small children and some old people in tow moved there. The cells of the hive gradually fill up to form a community, with its shops, the church, the oratory cinema, the makeshift football fields. Here grows Sergio Costanzo, author of “Tales of the right hand” and many historical novels, including “Io Busketo”, dedicated to the cathedral of his city. Costanzo is from Pisa and is proud of it (it’s up to me, who am from Livorno, to remember this, alas). Costanzo is a local boy, a worker father and a housewife mother who supplements her husband’s salary with sewing jobs.

Intelligent, naughty enough and, above all, awake, the little boy experiences the life, friendship, solidarity of the neighborhood. He learns from others, from older kids, from old people, from artisans who pass on knowledge and experience. All around, there is the world of hearsay: that History with a capital H, cast through the news, magazines, conversations captured with childish disinterest which, however, dig and sow in the receptive soul of the boy. And Costanzo filters the story through his personal feelings, he does not hesitate to reveal his thoughts to us, his belief that I think is not held back by preconceptions but knows how to see all sides of the coin. Around, there is also sport that aggregates and disciplines, there is, above all, for this precocious boy, the storm of hormones, aroused, more than anything else, by the fact of not knowing, not having access, desiring without being able to obtain. And the right hand, then, learns to move guided by the imagination, which also feeds the sexuality of adults, when they are intellectually lively.

The atmosphere is the one that reigns in Salvatore Samperi’s film “Malizia”. The protagonist’s sensuality is made up of mental overexcitation, hypersensitivity to stimuli, be they visual, olfactory, tactile. He emanates from seemingly insignificant places and objects. A veiled stocking, the hem of a skirt to reveal unknowable paradises, the scent and warmth of a coat held in your arms, the rustle of a fabric, the softness of a petticoat glimpsed through a crack, are enough to unleash a suffused, refined eroticism, of other times like the barber’s calendars, like the tapered legs of the Kessler. A lasciviousness all in the throat, in the beating of the heart, carnal and aesthetic at the same time.

“A blow, an emotion, a sharp and penetrating scent, even before you see it. It was a volatile, indefinite aroma. Mild, it seemed to touch my skin and immediately evaporate leaving my eyes, lips, mouth dry as if I had been abandoned in the desert. It penetrated the mind at the beginning of the breath, then, inhaling the air, it was lost. “ (page 79)

Elegance is the key to this old-fashioned eroticism and will mark the future taste of the author. It will, therefore, be “high heels” and low-cut shoes, scarves fluttering in the wind, big diva glasses and tube skirts to create that aura of mystery without which the attraction is lacking. It will, in turn, be a shining and poetic style of writing, capable of drawing spiritual languor even from the simplest Tuscan words and knotting your throat.

“And more than a game I perceived boobs resting on my body and smiles and kisses. And I ran home with dry mouth from the lupins and clothes stinking of sweat and salty hands from the husks of the seeds and skin hot and red from the sun and senses alert and utter excitement. “ (page 133)

The other great component of the book is nostalgia. I have already pointed out how, reading texts by authors close to me in age or even older, one finds the more or less painful call of regret in their writings.

“What appears distant, removed, finished, re-emerges with power and arrogance.” (page 31)

In some cases it is the agony of time that never comes back, of time escaped and found only in memory, of the madeleine sweet because transfigured by the memory that, as someone said, knows how to see “the beauty of the ugly”, knows how to make you become attached to “ a meter of uneven sidewalk and dream there “. For others it is an amused, bittersweet, light-hearted re-enactment and, as in this case, also an opportunity for comparison between past and present generations, between the world that once was and that, not necessarily wrong but very different, of their children.

“Perhaps today, in an extremely fragmented and segmented world, this idea of ​​aggregation seems unlikely, but we were everything and everything was in us, clean slates on which multiple experiences left marks. We absorbed the good and the beautiful, we perceived the right and the wrong and our being everywhere and in constant motion allowed us to acquire a critical sense, a broader vision, a multiplicity of expression. “ (page 30)

Yes, those were times when parents, grandparents, uncles, teachers, priests showed you the clear division between Good and Evil, between Right and Unjust. It was right to respect the elderly, to give them a seat on the bus, to honor father and mother, to be loyal to friends, to earn one’s bread honestly. Those were times when form had not yet taken the place of substance.

“(In any case there was in Italian families) the idea of ​​education in rigor, respect for the law, for others, for the disadvantaged, for the elderly. There was the respect of the best, of those who deserved things because they were committed, of those who worked because they had studied. There was the idea of ​​a just world if the rules were respected. Even if they aspired to emancipation and freedom, moral and civil rules were sacred and respect came from example, from the good behavior of adults, from a righteousness and observance of forms, translated into tangible substance. “ (page 68)

I liked this book immensely, for the good memories, for the atmospheres so well reconstructed, for the romantic look on life in which I always reflect myself, for the prose with all the right rhythms and style, which is, at the same time, poetic (“when the fireflies rhythm the breaths”) but also poor, attached to the little everyday things, capable of restoring the meaning of words, whether high or low, Italian or vernacular, capable of making you feel smells and flavors, to make you recall environments and moods, to let you see the guys who do not get off the bus, but “overflow”.

Perhaps I liked “The stories of the right hand” so much because I too find myself in what Costanzo says: “I’m not a young man today and I don’t want to judge, I keep my memories, I keep them and I am very jealous of them”.