“I’m afraid. I’m ashamed to say it. Don’t say it,
but, I would be more ashamed. I’m afraid because I have
hope. Because, absurdly, I feel I have
still something to lose.”
The text of this monologue comes from the novel by Maurizio Torchio, Cattivi, published by Einaudi in 2015. The author’s second novel, its protagonist is a prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment and “forgotten” in the isolation cell of an island prison. A tense and suspended writing, a voice that listens while speaking, that sometimes abdicates without resistance to silence and that becomes gesture, sigh, look. A story that is at times lyrical, as when it observes the prison-world from above or the immobile time of isolation, at times essential and simple like the resilient humanity of the protagonist. Life before, life after, the moment of the crime that marks the entire existence, the nakedness of one’s own guilt, the violence of the institution, finally, also, a victim in a guilty person. Poetry nests in the details of events, in the particulars where prison life gathers. The poetic power of this monologue also lies in Tommaso Banfi’s acting: surprisingly organic, humid, broken, surrendered, so technically sophisticated that the actor disappears and all theatricality is forgotten. Or maybe who knows… the sweetest poetry will be what happens at the end of the show: what we, after having been close to this bad man, will discover in our hearts.
“The narrative voice of Cattivi deluded itself into thinking it was abstract, universal, with the slightly crazy lucidity of someone who wanders aimlessly because they no longer have a world. How wonderful to meet her like this: toothless, dialectal, tired, finally incarnated in that body that she knew she had, but persisted in denying.”
Maurizio Torchio
