“I would have liked to hurt them. Kill them maybe. Father and mother. Make them suffer as I had suffered. Now I know it was just a bad thought. It lasted throughout my adolescence. I caught myself planning how. And I felt ashamed. In the end I healed. At a certain point, exhausted, I simply stopped thinking about them alive and dead.” Strong phrases are those that Massimiliano Smeriglio, writer, university professor, politician, today councilor for culture of Rome Capital, entrusts to his memoir novel, in bookstores by Fuoriscena editions (pg. 176, euro 16). A Bildungsroman, a family story that takes place among public housing, courtyards full of children, the primordial law of the herd, the beatings with compressed cardboard bars, the humiliation of the banks’ no and even sometimes the denial of a piece of bread, the extended family of the neighborhood as a parachute.
We are in Rome, Garbatella. The narrative begins with the intimate story of an unwanted pregnancy, of parents who are little more than teenagers. What follows is a sequence of events full of setbacks, of unspoken desires, of families with little love and a lot of indolence. The very strong bonds between gangs of kids trying to survive. Because you can be a pack without being hyenas. Emme came into the world in the mid-sixties, growing up with her grandparents, communist tradition, anti-fascists, working class with the smell of the Resistance still in her. At several points his personal story intersects with great history, the Fosse Ardeatine, with his great-grandfather Enrico Mancini among the victims of Nazi fury; the Panther student protest; the murder of Vincenzo Paparelli in a tragically unforgettable Roma-Lazio derby and that of Valerio Verbano in Montesacro, the story that does not heal and that does not pass. Emme experiences the road, the opportunities, the dangers, until adolescence, in which she will manage to unseat a destiny that seemed already written. Reading and political activism as a new way of being in the world. Until the final twist.