Drunk US soldiers, driving a jeep, hit two children, killing them during a procession in Vulture. An indelible memory in Mimì’s life, with the many questions and inevitable curses as to why? could have happened. On the procession like drunk pigs, as had happened to pigs guzzling river water into which hectoliters of wine had poured. Similarities filmed in an Iranian film, but which brings us to what continues to happen on the roads of the Bel Paese. It is difficult to find consolation and justice, when and how it comes. The loss of a life is never adequately compensated. Perhaps the verses of Vittorio Sereni, as Armando Lostaglio writes, can soothe that pain.
That time the pigs got drunk
by Armando Lostaglio
Mimì remembers the time a winery in Rionero had spoiled wine poured into the canals. And they ended up in the stream, where the pigs drank. By drinking that adulterated water, the poor beasts got drunk. Crazy, they ran aimlessly and grunted for days.
Laments and laughter, widespread hilarity over that very unusual episode. In that distant time that today seems untrue. The title of that film directed in 2000 by the Kurdish-Iranian Bahman Ghobadi “The Time of Drunken Horses” comes to mind, a story of the suffering of children which made a great impression at the Cannes festival. Other geographies, other times.
Mimì remembers, she remembers that time, like flashes of light, and events that happened in her adolescence, with the tragedies of war just behind her. Of that time it was the Octave of Easter, 1945, the 8th of April, when that damned American military jeep hit the procession near the slaughterhouse, mortally wounding two children. He had seen those black soldiers escape, all the way to the Annunziata district, and he was so impressed by that dried blood on the dark skin he had never seen before. “What an impression!”
And he still remembers the playful time that made them climb the slippery and soapy masso, the maypole loaded with hams and salamis and cod: at the feast of the SS. Annunziata, but also in Sant’ Mauro celebrated in the neighborhood of the Dead, there stood the mascio (the etymology will be May) which seemed very tall, with an unreachable peak. And in Monticchio, on the golden lake, towards the cable car that reached Sopalamuntagn, the Walls of Sant’Apolito or Sant’Ippolito and the Abbey of San Michele which is reflected in the small lake. The Festa r’ la Maronna, the popular procession, the band of good musicians in Rionero by Giuseppe Verdi, the cavzun and the r’cotta aròcia, a specialty only of this place. What a party! And how much faith: “How much thanks avimm avut…”
This is how Mimì remembers them, as she mourns her older brother, Donato, who has just passed away.
Bright years of hopes, often dashed, but still enthralled by goals achieved, better or worse, from that time of drunken pigs.
Vittorio Sereni’s verses go to Mimi’:
The terrace
The evening suddenly overtakes us. /You no longer know /where the lake ends;
only a murmur /touches our life /under a hanging terrace.
We are all suspended / to a tacit event
this evening /within that torpedo boat range
who scrutinizes us then turns/goes away…
