By Marcello Veneziani
Memories sleep beside us. Sometimes it’s nice to wake them up and wake up with them. A world opens up that you thought you didn’t know, but instead you lived in it, and then it seemed natural to you, like the water that flows and the air you breathe. Nostalgia is not a disease but a gift, its melancholy is a shell that protects a joyful fruit.
We really need a clinic of memories, as Georgi Gosdopinov writes in his novel Chronorifugio, where people go to recover memories lost in time or in people’s heads. If I had to choose my favorite decade to relive, as happens to people in Gosdopinov’s novel, I would choose without hesitation the first one I lived in. Because it’s the oldest, the most distant, the most different from today, wrapped in the mythical halo of childhood when you don’t know where reality ends and the fairy tale begins, through fantasy. It dates back to a primitive era, still without TV and household appliances, used recently and by a few pioneers. The key to opening that fabulous drawer, beyond the enchantment of life seen through the magical eyes of childhood – the primordial discovery of things, the charm of the first time of everything, the pleasure of discovering yourself in the world and conquering a piece of life and knowledge every day – is the open sesame of that magical time, that place, that world that no longer exists: free life. It is life within reach, in the open air, without price and without pretensions, simple and generous, free, where everything is accessible to everyone: the refreshment of the fountains, the rest of the benches, the public garden, the fruit hanging from the trees, the carob trees offered by the branches to wayfarers, the stream in which you wash yourself and your clothes, the games played with what you have available, without tools, plus the imagination of a rule or an object that you easily build with your own hands; and then the open sea, like the woods and the countryside.
Are you thirsty? You don’t go to the bar but drink at the fountain, and even at home you don’t buy mineral water but draw from the pumps and streams. The fountains in the summer were crowded meeting places, people drinking, filling jugs, washing their feet, where children are rushed in their water games to make the adults drink. Are you hungry for a snack? You pick a fruit from the tree and eat it; as long as it’s a fruit you can also pick it from a tree that belongs to someone, you’re not plundering it, it’s not a sin. In fact, the opposite would be true, not giving drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry, as we were taught. Do you want to rest? There’s no need to order something at a table, you sit on the bench, as they still do, especially the old people in the village and you wait, you wait for the time to pass, the heat, the tiredness. When you’re old, time is long and life is short; the opposite of young people, for whom the hours pass quickly but the years ahead are many.
Do you want to go for a swim? No beach resort, with sun loungers and umbrellas, no cabins, pedal boats or dinghies, but a free beach with free swimming, sometimes without a swimsuit or with your underwear from home; and if you’re hot you dive back in or find the shade of a cave, the cavity of a rock, or a tree near the shore. Everything seems simpler. And at the seaside, slim bodies, not obese or on a diet, not redone, touched up, siliconed, gym-trained, without tattoos, creams, lamps, cell phones. Then the evening is spent strolling, the pleasure is the meeting, the exchange of words, the joke. It doesn’t take much to live. For free.
Children who play with nothing in the streets and squares, the best is to get a ball. The rest is just fantasy games: hopscotch, the four corners, hide and seek, magician or free, the pyramid, the pacifier, flowers and fruit, plus mime and riddles; games of inventiveness and skill that do not require tools.
This was the free life, especially in the provinces, especially in the south, but after all the world is the same. And it was not a century ago. You could live without money and without limits of access, with few demands. You lived on air, land, water, friendship, expedients and imagination. Then, it is true, there were the wealthy and the needy, private property, perimeter walls, privileges, abundance and scarcity, barefoot children; the beggars were local.
The free life was a world that seemed fresh from creation, just baked by Mother Nature or the Eternal Father; still young, a bit of a child, naive in its small desires, easy to satisfy.
The free life was beautiful, and you say it with a sigh, but who knows if you really mean it. It was a poor life, still raw, difficult in its ease, harsh in its sweetness; a life that we could no longer live, because we need too many things that we didn’t have before and therefore were superfluous; but now we don’t know how to do without them. Nostalgia is bittersweet because you know that that world can’t come back and there’s no point in trying to restore it. All its poetry, its beauty, is in that irremediable.
