L’ultima estate

Where does Zeta’s voice come from? Apparently from the most uninhabitable and silent place: the disease, in that extreme point that takes away possibilities, breath, future. But it is only appearance: this voice comes from the most irreducible and fiery core of life. Who is not silent, does not stop looking and loving. And indeed, he begins something: writing. The balance that generates these pages is fragile. For Zeta any gesture now is enormous, not only physical fatigue is fatal at any time. And the memories are a lacerating gash in the memory of a tenaciously irregular life: the out-of-wedlock birth of the ‘most loved little girl in the world’, the childhood under the bombs, splendid and mean Venice, the first sentimental disaster and then vulgar and vital, the experience of psychoanalysis, the adventure of feminism, the path of illness. And always the tough and gentle defense of his own individuality, the mockery of the tribes and clinics to which he refused to belong. Thus the story of his life flows sideways, lived intensely but never accepted, as if it were never worthy of full identification. With a clear, ferocious, never rhetorical language, crossed by a vein of sarcasm that concedes nothing to pity, this debut novel written at the age of seventy tackles the most avoided of topics: suffering. Never, throughout these pages, can we forget that the author is seriously ill. However, a crack in the kitchen window is enough to bring in a plane tree or a blackbird. There is a faithful, forgiving, understanding Cat. There is an existence towards which – Zeta would never say it and certainly refuses to even think it – one can have happy pride. Scarred as it was, now it finally looks beautiful. And full of dreams, memories, ghosts, intelligence. It does not degenerate: it can challenge the weight of the remorse of the past and the horror of today’s symptoms, ironically and proudly: «They say that arsonists are born and firefighters die. The opposite happened to me: I would burn everything now.’ He does it in this singular book: a small auto da fé and a magnificent hymn to the life that was and is.