The happiest day of his life is not so far away.
It was played on a Thursday in January, in 2020. While the French Academy elected, almost unanimously, the Italian writer Maurizio Serra to succeed Simone Veil, Eduardo Pisani obtained the vote of an academician.
Divine surprise for the former singer of variety, popularized in the mid-90s by the refrain
I love you on Monday
and who, during his previous attempts to enter the dome, had not received the slightest vote.
One voice, just one, was enough for the happiness of this stubborn Neapolitan.
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Eduardo Pisani, who at 66 describes himself as a poet, was not discouraged.
This Thursday, November 26, he will present himself for the twelfth time at the French Academy!
This time to try to sit down in Jean d'Ormesson's chair.
Without illusion, but with the same consistency that would earn him a few academic palms.
“I don't even have a one in a billion chance of winning.
I appear like a far-fetched candidate, ”
he admits.
The adjective perfectly describes the former variety singer whose repeated candidacies end up tiring the immortals, as evidenced by their refusal, courteous but firm, to evoke this curious character knocking so regularly on their door.
“I am lazy, having lost a lot of time.
I missed my life several times ”
Twelve candidates, love tends to obsession.
What is Eduardo Pisani looking for in this company?
"Catch up with Émile Zola, refused by the French Academy twenty times," he
confides.
Through this challenge, which is not or no longer quite a game, the singer seeks to secure the interest of a few journalists and a small part of the literary world.
A little light in a very dull life for those who now live in an Emmaüs pension, a fifteen square meter room in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, rue du Recherches-Midi.
The poet has lived there for almost ten years, benefiting from a very low rent, commensurate with the few hundred euros he receives each month.
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The songs and poems of the fellow, with the face holding both Ozzy Osbourne and Marc Veyrat, earn him almost nothing.
However, Eduardo Pisani, stringy gray hair, half-closed eyes hidden behind fancy glasses and pale complexion, enjoyed success during the 1990s. Television hosts, from Michel Drucker to Jean-Luc Delarue, were passionate about it. singer of
I love you on Monday
, in pursuit of his immense lost love, a named Katia.
The advertisements also, that of Orange in particular, crunched the Italian, landed in Paris in 1981.
But, the peak of his artistic career lasted very short.
From 1995, the musician then tumbled down the steps to fame.
“I'm a failure,
assumes Eduardo Pisani.
I messed up my life several times.
The stout and marginal poet who depresses strongly and frequently, describes himself as "
a lazy person, having lost a lot of time"
.
The words of Erri de Luca, a Neapolitan like him, at the opening of the novel
Montedidio
, allow us to grasp his state of mind:
“'A iurnata è nu muorzo'.
"
" The day is a mouthful. "
Pisani devoured everything, too quickly.
Digestion was made even more difficult.
Regret, sadness and nostalgia block his horizon.
Its story is that of an abandoned dream.
Eduardo Pisani no longer hopes to become a great singer, more than fifty years after having written his first lyrics.
He stopped vocalizing for a decade.
“Yet I had a beautiful voice.
I could become a tenor, ”he
says.
Before lambasting the
“artistic racism
” of which he claims to have been a victim.
The Italian indeed considers that the French have made him their Turkish face.
“I was labeled as outdated
,” he laments.
My songs were taken as crap. ”
In the desert crossed by the musician, some oases remain.
Friend of Eduardo Pisani for twenty years, Frédéric Vignale has a fraternal and compassionate gaze towards his friend.
This photographer and director believes he knows a
"total artist, brilliant, despised and misunderstood."
Eduardo continues the tradition of the mountebank, the king's fool, in poverty ”
.
“I have not read any text by Jean d'Ormesson, and vice versa.
I only drew his portrait a few years ago ”
He sang Katia long ago so that she would come back.
But it is another broken romance that explains the trajectory of this man obsessed with obtaining recognition in France, his adopted country.
Born in Naples, in April 1954, into a working-class family, Eduardo Pisani fell in love with Baudelaire's homeland, where he has lived for nearly forty years.
“He is living a failed French dream,”
reveals Frédéric Vignale.
His multiple applications to the Academy correspond to proof of love for a country and its culture. ”
The Italian artist has turned his back on his country of origin.
A land of suffering.
Especially after the deaths of his father and mother, in 1997 and 2006, both victims of the asbestos present in the factory where they worked.
His brother still lives in Italy, but has lost sight of him since 2010, after an annoyance.
"I will never return to Naples"
, admits the almost unattached 60-something who every day publishes verses on the blog,
Les Poèmes tout nus
.
He also multiplies the messages on social networks to promote his work.
His YouTube channel has about fifty videos.
The latest, posted at the end of July 2020, is entitled
Fou by Roselyne Bachelot
, a slightly saucy and Dadaist hymn to the glory of the Minister of Culture.
A digital life that Eduardo Pisani leads like a filibuster.
He does not have a computer at Emmaüs and only has a rudimentary cell phone.
Friends welcome him and allow him to use the material necessary for his conquest of the Internet, the web appearing to him as an ideal space to publish his texts.
“Unlike the Poetry Market, I don't sell my verses like vegetables”.
Coveting the chair of Jean d'Ormesson, the Neapolitan does not pretend to know the work of the former director of
Figaro who
died on December 5, 2017:
“I have not read any text by this writer, and vice versa.
I only drew his portrait a few years ago. ”
As the election approaches, Eduardo Pisani is not shy.
“The inventor of the buzz”,
as Frédéric Vignale describes it, asserts:
“I am stupid to think that I am the greatest living poet.
"It is up to the
academicians, their swords by their side, to decide ...
Cinema, theater, music ... The student journalists of
IPJ, the Practical Institute of Journalism of the University of Paris Dauphine
, offer their perspective on cultural news.
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