Giuseppe Benassi, "Lomicidio Serpenti o l'enigma del bosco sacro"

As always in Benassi, crime story is a pretext to talk about esoteric culture, about alchemical paths, which he approaches not as an adept but as a scholar, fascinated even if disenchanted. In this novel — the second of a series starring the irreverent lawyer Borrani — more than in the other two, the characters remain in the background, they are colorless like the story around which the plot revolves, i.e. the murder of the handsome Rosario Serpenti, a goldsmith and former butcher, who, already from his name, is more than what appears. And everything is really played on the contrast between what lies behind things and the appearance, between the dreamlike and the real.

“He thought of his life in his dream as an infinite and ever-changing gallery of faces or snouts, faces and grins that look out, greet, say something or say nothing, and then vanish into thin air.”

We are not so interested — and the author is not interested either — to find out why Serpenti was killed and, in this second novel, not even the interiority of the protagonist, the author’s alter ego, has much place. All the space is occupied by artistic-philosophical speculation that will lead to the solution (not even that much) of the enigma of the Sacred Wood. Without revealing too much, let’s say that, if there is a common thread in the story, it is the one that starts from Renaissance paganism and leads up to the surrealism of de Chirico.

“Psychoanalysis and surrealism”, explains Borrani/Benassi, “have reopened the mind of man, they have repopulated it with pagan divinities, after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation joined hands at the end of the sixteenth century to extinguish the imaginative capacity of which the Renaissance, drawing on classicism, was the highest example.”

The fantastic garden of Bomarzo, or Sacro Bosco, is a concrete paradigm of this imaginative capacity, with its bizarre, improbable shapes, with its monsters, small temples and leaning houses, perhaps alchemical symbols, conjunctions of opposites. In this wood Rosario Serpenti has an experience as an initiate, through the Dutch Dietrich, of him as his “teacher”, a sort of Dorian Gray who corrupts him and, at the same time, opens his mind. Rosario Serpenti is killed as if to atone for the guilt of having evolved, transformed from a butcher into a free soul, into a gnostic who no longer knows the boundaries between male and female, between inside and outside, but becomes an androgynous figure, emancipated from conventions and moralisms. In addition to the mystical-sexual experience in the sacred wood, fundamental for the development of Rosario (whose surname already prefigures a kind of ouroboros) is the vision of De Chirico’s paintings.

“De Chirico, at the beginning of the 20th century, read Nietzsche’s pages on Dionysus and, enlightened by those readings, suddenly realized that the removal of paganism was one of the most tragic mistakes in the history of ideas.”

In fact, the canvases found in Serpenti’s possession after his death are by De Chirico. De Chirico opens his mind, moves the boundaries beyond good and evil and for this Serpenti will have to pay, and, through him, the author will have to punish himself and make his latent sense of guilt explicit.

The style of the novel is that, eschatological/scatological, typical of Benassi, which alternates cultured quotations with sports bar vulgarity. As always, the little sympathy that the author has for his kind shines through, who have only appeared in surreal dreams, who have grins and not faces, physicalities to sexually exploit rather than souls to embrace. The most beautiful parts are those, almost unconscious, where Benassi forgets for a moment that he wants to be unpleasant at all costs and lets himself go to lyrical and heartfelt descriptions of the Tuscan landscape, with its light, its sea, the tips of the cypresses illuminated by the sunset.