«The world is full of good people who do bad things» Poirot would say, and this is what comes to mind reading the recent narrative adventure by Domenico Cacopardo Crovini88 years old, Letojanni from Messinaformer state councilor, journalist and writer who has reached his twentieth novel with «I am your destiny» (Ianieri Edizioni). A “mystery”, for the father of the lucky character, deputy prosecutor-detective Italo Agrò, who unseats the canons of the classic mystery, as confirmed by the presence of the volume in the young series “Le dalie nere” by Ianieri Edizioni (the name recalls James Ellroy ) in which classic detective stories, noir, court cases, historical intrigues and contaminations come together.
Contaminations that the author of «I am your destiny» (allusive right from the title with the emphasis placed on the verb and the personal pronoun) has been mixing for some time in his research which always starts from reality, with its own character at times surreal, clear from Agrò’s “method”. Thus Cacopardo, once again, plumbs with Sciascian scruple the recesses of the human psyche, the amoral and frequently criminal familism, the ruinous passions, the chauvinism in all its retrograde gravity, the misunderstanding and the deception, the imposture and the truths confused to the point of crime. Because it is in reality that everything is played out, the lie and the evil with which the accounts, Sciascia said in Manzonian style, are always open.
The dead man, or rather the dead woman is there, right from the beginning, emerges from the waters of the Enza river, it is the beautiful veterinarian Berenice Stellanotte, who with her husband, the general practitioner Temoteo Barraci, had moved to the province of Reggio Emilia from the town in the Sicilian Ionian province where they were both born. From a bourgeois family, they were young and bold, he without hiding anything of his erotic charge (a value he nurtured equal to the family “honor”), she aware of his sensual charm, when they arrived from the South, but of the new province, as they continued their social ascent, they soon acquired appearances and vices, between ordinary conformisms and transgressions.
The couple enters into crisis when she loses the child she was expecting (a boy, to whom, in Temoteo’s idea, she would pass on those paternal and patriarchal “duties” of honor) and so he has fleeting sexual encounters with friends whenever he can and patients, until the fatal meeting with the teacher Milena known as Molly, a young assistant with red hair and green eyes (“I am your destiny”, she repeats to him in the moment of supreme passion), while Berenice allows herself to be courted until give in completely, out of boredom and sadness, to Santo, Temoteo’s cousin, a young idler who arrived in the North, as expected, to look for a job.
So far everything has been “normal”, appearances, as we know, are always saved, but then other insinuating factors take over which the author, in his long narrative research, always lingers on, the gray areas of the facts, the hidden aspects of personality, bipolarism, which serves the writer to dismantle the myth of love and affection, transformed into obsession or, on the contrary, into amoral lack of affection, the dark side of the psyche. Like the “false self” investigated by psychologists, the artificial identity that one builds for oneself, perhaps absorbing it from family “myths” or prejudices rooted in communities, especially small ones, the deception of the present by which one feels betrayed compared to “promises” of the past.
And then there are the personal demons from which no one is immune. Therefore Cacopardo, in this story too, chooses mixed time, that narrative movement between past and present which he has already defined as “sinusoidal”, to tell about this “quiet” and well-off family in which what unfortunately happens more and more frequently happens: the feminicide, Temoteo who kills his wife for having discovered the betrayal, as we learn from the first pages (Cacopardo plays with the “mystery” by deconstructing it, but always supervising it, and leading it to an investigation anthropology on the human and the social).
And here begins that “surreal” part (but what tragic reality isn’t?) in which bad ideas follow their own implacable logic: the confusion between evil and good in the minds of those who cannot distinguish them, the mental hospital determination with which Temoteo , clearly guilty (there is a certain narcissistic pride in confessing to the honor killing…) but sure of keeping his conscience at bay, he will face the years to come, certain that in the end he will have “his” redemption, the sick one from he imagined.
A corrugated and ambiguous story with its underground family connotations, between a past of lies, the deception of the present and the future, the muddy situations and contexts, the enigmatic characters bordering on pathology, the time shattered and caged in the repetitiveness of a everyday life of insignificance, a story to which a new, apparently dystopian, «arbitrary but plausible» element warns the author: the story told ends in 2026, after a foiled attempt to divide Italy «with the constitution of the democratic and independent Republic of Padania, a plan to which the support of Russia was not unrelated, which together with Belarus, the Republics of Donbass, North Korea and to some states of the former Soviet Union, but without China, it sent large diplomatic missions and its special troops and units of the Wagner militia”.
