This morning I woke up with a furry mouth and a heavy head. Those are the symptoms of a day of disenchantment and pessimism. Your mood goes round like a ball on the roulette table and every so often it stops on a number that you haven’t bet on. Today is one of those days. It makes me think of a film of many years ago, Papillon, when Steve McQueen was an unachievable example for a young lad. Papillon dreams. He's walking in a desert. After hours of walking he comes across a tribunal, set up in the sand, equal in every aspect to one in a city. The judges look at him severely. They were waiting for him. The verdict is the maximum possible punishment. Papillon asks what crime he has been charged with. He doesn’t remember having done anything, nor of breaking any laws of the Republic. Impossible that he’s been judged guilty. A judge reads out to him the reasoning behind the verdict. The accusation is to have wasted his life. Then Papillon lowers his eyes, admits his guilt, he turns his back on the Judge’s bench and goes back where he came from. How many Italians would accept that they are guilty? Italy’s heart of darkness is this enchantment, this indifference that borders on cynicism that doesn’t manage to get shaken off. Too many times, I have seen those fixed staring eyes, that look through you when you cry out to them that we as a nation have failed and thus they have failed. How many are there of you for God's sake? What has happened to you? What do you dream about when night comes? What are your ambitions for the only life that you will ever have?
I’ll be better tomorrow. I need a few healthy moments of deep depression. It helps me bounce back. It gives me a boost. Yesterday the police stopped me. They asked for the recording of the show I did at Fermo. I told them that I had no recording. They were courteous. They mentioned a denunciation for a possible charge of “public defamation” of Napolitano and they bade me farewell. Napolitano … a parliamentarian in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. The symbol of a petrified Italy.
Perhaps one day there’ll be a bard, a new Pasolini, who will tell our descendents the story of the great sacking, about when the “Bel Paese” was plundered and reduced to a political and economic appendix of the world. He will explain how we were and how we could have been. He will do that with the landscapes disappeared, with the intelligences dispersed in a modern Diaspora, with industries that remain only in name, with a democracy betrayed. Perhaps he will venture out into the search for those responsible for that curse. But no one is responsible. The blame lies with a disease that poisoned the mind of one of the most brilliant people that ever existed and that no longer know who they are. That wanders around like a blind man in the night and if you take him by his arm to walk with him on the road, he pulls back and insults you. He’s not blind. He knows really well what he has to see. There are no cures for this illness apart from those that come from within.
This indolent body of the country that doesn’t budge, doesn’t get indignant, that gulps down any lie, frightens me. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself older, sometimes tired and disheartened, but serene. On 10 September, I’ll be in front of Montecitorio to ask for the “Parlamento Pulito” {Clean up Parliament} law , signed by 350,000 citizens, to be discussed by the Senate. I’ll stay there for as long as is necessary. Even if I’m alone. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.