The voice is serious, solemn.
So much so that it dyes the Glorieta of Bilbao and the Madrid spring with a Caribbean accent: “Fidel Castro, where will you be?” she asks.
"In the sky?
In purgatory?
Or in hell?”
Perhaps because at this point in the century there are no beliefs from beyond the grave or because the gesture is assumed to be
part of the madness that cities create
, no one is upset.
Nobody falters or responds.
If there is nostalgia
for
or amendment
to
that revolution, here and now they are reduced to this postcard: an Afro-Cuban speaking alone, lost, 10 meters from the subway entrance.
In
The Easy Life
, one of the books recommended this month by my neighborhood library, the Italian poet
Alda Merini
(1931-2009) returns to the theme of
her own mental illness
.
“A sacred electroshock saved me from the great illusion and at that moment my adventure with Joan of Arc began (…) The fact is that I continue wearing my riding boots and declaring war on everyone who stands in front of me,” she says. .
Merini rubbed shoulders with the suburbs and was such a popular writer that even homeless people attended her wake.
Pasolini praised her intuition and Dario Fo even proposed her for the Nobel Prize
.
She was precocious as a poet, she was also precocious as a patient: she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Milan, for the first time, at the age of 34.
But she never accepted the idea that madness led to poetry.
His is
a literature written in moments of painful lucidity
.
“My brother no longer believes in me,” she says, “he only trusts the doctors: I have lost him.”
By chance, I took Merini's book home, the day the images of the 69th birthday of
Bruce Willis
, diagnosed with
frontotemporal dementia, another mysterious neurological disease, which progressively depersonalizes, are released
.
And I can't help but feel sad for that big man, who put his body into
films that we don't forget
(
The Story of Us
)
and that he, perhaps, no longer remembers
.
In
Moonlight
, the mystery-romance series in which he co-starred with Cybill Shepherd in the '80s, when you had to wait a week to see the next episode, Willis stole our hearts.
It was a lifetime ago and
in those photos Willis still smiles as if fear did not exist
.
I hope that idea from The Sixth Sense
, another of his films, is also true for him
: “Sometimes people think they lose things, but in reality they don't lose them.
“They just move.”