There are Foucault’s pendulum, Tolstoy’s and Alfonso Signorini’s. Who has lived the last few years oscillating between two shamelessness: that of gossip and that of reality shows. Where the first is the science of the private that is revealed in the square, while the second is the practice of the intimate that is created and destroyed in public, in a spiral of the submerged and the saved of which he is Dante, Virgil, Pope and Charon. It is no coincidence that both those who fear him and those who love him have renamed him the “great poet”.
Editor of the weekly for 18 years Chi and now at the helm of Big Brother, as soon as the last edition (which lasted a whopping 197 days) ended, he jumped on a plane for a 36-hour journey, on the day of his sixty-first birthday, with the explicit intention of not speaking to any human being apart from his long-time boyfriend Paolo Galimberti. The destination? He kept it a secret. The intentions regarding the future, too: «I need to find myself», he admits. As if to say that the pendulum not only wears out those who suffer it, but also those who have operated it for thirty years.
In what sense does the lazy photo on your WhatsApp profile, while you doze with a Panama hat pulled over your eyes, represent you?
«I am decadent and since I was three years old I have had melancholy as a companion. I love to surrender myself to the sweetness of memory, which thus becomes idealized. While the future makes me anxious. Indeed, it is a dimension that I cannot imagine and does not exist.”
A social climber like the people she put on the front page, she, therefore, is not.
«I haven’t had any big goals in life, much less have I been ambitious. In all honesty, I find myself having what I never thought I could have. On the other hand, I was able to take leaps in the dark and hurt myself, like when I left Mondadori because I was fed up with being just “the Alfonso Signorini of Who”, or when I accepted the direction of Turandot without even knowing what a fifth was.”
Also because the only wings he had seen were in the bodices of certain rotogravure oversizes.
«In fact I have seen many but enjoyed few! If we exclude an adventure with Valeria Marini and a few other flirtations with TV women whose names I will never reveal. After all, I came from libraries, I taught at the Jesuit high school and I lived like a Trappist monk: it’s normal that in front of Ela Weber half naked in a dressing room, I too was fascinated by the world of entertainment.”
When he contacted us, his secretary said: “Ok to the interview, but no gossip”. Comments as desired.
«If your aim had been to ask me about Belén’s last secret love, I would have declined, also because that world amuses me less and less. In short, if at 61 I was still there to get excited about Rodríguez’s new man I would feel sad on my own, the same sadness that certain peers who dance on the tables in Saint-Tropez convey to me.”
To say “I’ll stop, I’m not interested anymore”, however, he just can’t do it.
«I can’t do it because inside I remain a servant and if there is something to gossip about I don’t hold back, but I do it about other types of people. Let’s say that the thermometer of my curiosity has shifted and I would like to grow a little. Also because I believe I have several arrows in my quiver: for example, I would be an excellent cultural communicator.”
Speaking of disclosure, in a recent interview he said: “I went to Cuba looking for dicks.” Is being shameless a way to disarm opponents?
«Absolutely yes. Also because I don’t have any skeletons in my closet and therefore I say everything that seems interesting and constructive to me. Those erotic-professional trips to Cuba refined my sexuality and my affectivity. I went there at the expense of the newspaper, it’s true, but together with the lovers I collected the reports: I interviewed Aleida Guevara, Che’s daughter. And I found the fisherman who inspired Ernest Hemingway for The Old Man and the Sea. He told me that they had been lovers. It was an international scoop.”
Didn’t you feel like a colonialist sexually?
«No, I’m a geisha and he was always the servant on duty. In Cuba I had my first man: his name was Ulysses and I felt like Penelope. For years I was a different woman on each island. And if necessary, I also transformed into the sows of the sorceress Circe.”
Where did he run off to last April 7th?
«In Australia. I wanted to see the sights of Blackbirds and be as far away as possible.”
Do you consider yourself a functional sociopath?
«The further I go, the more I hate the human race. But I am also Catholic, therefore with that inspiration of universal love that brings me to emotion in front of an old man. For the rest, I am “pathetic” about many things: an impressive hypochondriac for example, so much so that before leaving I underwent a total-body MRI which revealed a bit of cervical arthrosis. A week later I rebooked but the doctors refused to let me. The head doctor at San Raffaele said: but don’t you have shit to do in life?
You think of a bloody secret that he will never reveal.
«Ok… done».
If it were disclosed, would it change your opinion of her or of himself?
“It would change the opinion that people commonly have of me.”
Would you say he’s a bad person?
“You’d think I’m crazy.”
She has crossed a world whose survivors are now a little grotesque: Mora, Corona, Gregoraci, Rodríguez, Marini. How did he save himself?
«Burning ties, to the point of being considered ungrateful. But from the beginning I realized that if I wanted to survive, save my conscience and guard my depth, I would have to do it. That world, which seduced me and seduced us, ultimately depressed me. I didn’t see any fun in sabre-rattling, in full refrigerators, in toy trains: I saw little in it and it was all fake. I caught the decay at its peak, one night at Lele Mora’s house, when everyone left and he asked me to stay a while to keep him company, he collapsed on the sofa and I stayed there watching him snore. I saw the king’s solitude.”
In private scandals, from Noemi Letizia to Bunga Bunga, did you protect Berlusconi out of convenience, conviction or out of tenderness?
«If I protected him, I did it in the last phase of his life. I helped him at the time. I have never regretted it and I did it out of love.”
His wife Veronica Lario published a letter on Republic talking about “Shameless junk” and alluding to a sick man.
«When the scandal came out I was in the Maldives with some friends. He sent a plane to pick me up, asked me to come back. I was surprised to see him not overwhelmed by anger but completely disorientated and, above all, convinced that he was in good faith and right. When my mother died she didn’t leave me for a second. And he was close to me in many personal events. Including the secret matter that I will never reveal. For him I would have thrown myself into the fire.”
Was there a political turning point in which he moved pawns in the shadows?
«No one knows this. When Renzi became Prime Minister I acted as mediator between him and Berlusconi: we met in secret at the Hotel Bernini, in Rome, to discuss the Nazarene Pact and other vital issues of the country. I translated Berlusconi to Renzi but above all vice versa. Unfortunately, nothing concrete came of it.”
But why did they choose her, who was a desecrator for a living?
«Because it is easier to place trust in a mediator who works out of pure passion, rather than in a fixer who does it for a living».
Once upon a time, the stuff of politicians, captains of industry and artists was made of public virtue and private vices. Today, with everyone uninhibited on stage but in private lambs, it seems the opposite.
«And that’s why gossip is dead. The reason why my seventy-year-old maid is more interesting, who would like a man with a car and a house by the lake and boasts of never having given a blowjob in her life, rather than Elodie who blurts out her b-side in your face every day.”
When big people existed, was gossip a democratic tool in the hands of the people?
«No, because the people have never managed it. On the contrary, it was an instrument of blackmail, power and oppression. At best, a pastime to fill the horror vacui of our existences.”
