Mauro Cesaretti's "Se è vita lo sarà per sempre"

In the collection “If It is Life it Will Always Be”, by Mauro Cesaretti, the first book of a future trilogy, the object of the dispute is Life, as it may appear to a very emotional boy: difficult, full of disappointments and fears. Managing emotions is the hardest task.

Mauro Cesaretti is a teenager with a rich inner life, a performer who accompanies his verses with dance and gesture. The wave of emotions threatens to overwhelm him, so he takes his pen and writes to stem suggestions, disturbances, anxieties, phobias, dreams. If too sensitive, he lives without skin, with his nerves exposed: everything hurts, everything magnifies, everything hurts. This is why, at eighteen, Cesaretti already feels the fatigue of living, he already feels “lasso”. And, however, he would never stop looking at the world “with the eyes of the heart”, get excited, revealing the objects in their essence, removing the veil of mediocrity.

He talks to us about everyday things: the cat in the garden, the father, the girl, poetry, loneliness, the metaphor of travel, the lost baggage that symbolizes what we have been, our memories, but already considers life “filthy”, and it can really be, at all ages, in all conditions, because suffering never leaves us. However, there is resistance to pain, not abandonment, an attempt to renew oneself: “the following summer I recreate myself / in a jet of hot water.”

When one is very young — and eighteen years are few nowadays — one tends not to give up anything written. It is not even ostentation or vanity, rather the enthusiasm to share all the emotions, and the fear of leaving something out. We therefore have, here, a stylistic research that is still immature, and with ample room for improvement. Various paths are experimented without neglecting anything, from the recovery of nineteenth-century stylistic features to an attempt at bland hermeticism — without, at least in appearance, washing away, distinguishing, choosing, cleaning up. It is an investigation that has not yet found its way, amid sibilant assonances — “The interesting company / of heavy stones. / The joy passing through the pressing sounds.” — and cacophonous — “It will be a firm shot, taken aback / by an oversight mixed with second thoughts / by impending uncertain choices and disappointments.”

There is a metric study, up to the point of finding a certain pleasant rhythm which, however, is not fully maintained. The author seems to stray, change style with each verse, does not reach the desired intensity and even run into a few too many licenses. As often happens, the most beautiful images are the unpretentious ones, almost escaped by the distracted author, such as “the lighthouse on the tired hill.”

We conclude by proposing one of the most pleasant poems:

Me and you

It’s just you and me.

Everything else is stationary

and silent.

Only that tear moves

on your rosy face

and the whole world becomes

salty and dry.

These white pebbles

covered with ashes,

are dusted by

this smile of yours.

I hug you tightly and your gaze

penetrates my heart,

your bitter gaze,

but still friendly.

Your blue eyes

they shine in the sunset

of this serious and serene face,

and while you are absorbed in some thought,

in the void of infinity,

the sky turns gray.