Love for that land
It is a bit like when one lets oneself be enchanted by markets where unlikely and miserable things are sold for a European but which after all in their context transmit the love for all the pieces of creation. The terrible dysentery arrives, the terrible malaria arrives, but they are overcome by melting in the love for that land, in all its aspects, in an unreserved pantheism. Father Faustino becomes formator of the Comboni postulancy of Cacaveli. One of the many African toponyms with a sound so different that it takes you elsewhere and that it is not by chance that the author, Andrea Salonia, cites in abundance: Cacaveli, Kologon, Anfamè … But for what purpose, man asks himself, to bring Christ among those people? What do they know about Christ? What can they understand? What need do they have of him? The questions continue because Faustino has learned to “love his own restlessness”, but more than a restlessness those questions are a drift that leads him to abandon himself to Africa, to be fascinated and subjugated by it to the point of behaving like many naive and romantics sex tourists in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall marrying the first woman they met.
Father Faustino meets an African girl with an archaic Italian name, Nives, with her cheek marked by the furrows of animist scars, knows sensual love for the first time and gets married without regrets or doubts. After all, can fate not manifest itself in a sensational and sudden way? When the children become grown up – not eleven like Nives and her brothers, but only two – the happy family returns to the angular, cold and stony mountains where the faith of God- Christ is pure and up there condenses after a snowfall – the first that Nives witnesses, despite the name – the tragedy where suddenly all the good intentions scattered throughout the missionary’s path transform life into hell on earth.
Basically it is a much worse outcome, just for having believed, than that of Bardamu; even more mocking. If you believe in God, perhaps you just have to hate him.The language, like Céline’s work, is that of the narrative flow. Free of transgressions, modest but sincere and delicate, almost childish on the trail of novels of formation and deformation like Mark Twain, Salinger and so on, especially in the initial part, the one where the protagonist’s childhood is told, the future missionary and therefore the future former missionary Faustino Martinelli. The central part, the African part, was very happy and successful, evidently the result of an experience, as for Céline the management of a cocoa plantation in Cameroon, paludism etc. Eventually the delirium takes shape and the style adapts too. If you believe in God, maybe in the end you just have to hate him, but you can’t: he taught you to accept, he taught you to forgive. Because he has a lot to be forgiven himself. Like Céline, the author is also a doctor, professor of urology at the San Raffaele University.
Andrea Salonia, Odiodio, The ship of Teso, pp. 464, euro 20