The writer Francesco Abate returns to the Bildungsroman and with «Gli indegni» (Einaudi Stile Libero) he signs one of his most intimate works. Set in the Eighties, it tells the story of Livio and Anaïs, two boys who meet under Patti Smith’s stage in Florence and chase each other for a decade between Cagliari, Paris and London, in search of freedom, love and identity. The Cagliari-born author reconstructs the Italian punk and post-punk season as a collective counter-history: the era of bodies and free radios, of music and AIDS, lived by those who did not want to adapt to the dominant models. Chronicle without nostalgia, «Gli undegni» is a tribute to Pier Vittorio Tondelli and to a generation that was overwhelmed but was able to open spaces of freedom in a country not yet ready to listen to it.
The Unworthy opens with Livio’s escape barefoot. Is it a form of freedom, a political act or a gesture to find one’s identity?
«It is the collective gesture of a generation represented by the young people of the Italian provinces who in those years felt so confined within their cities that they perceived that something was really changing. Through the poets of music they understood that there was someone who was telling them, singing about their loneliness and that desire not to be homologated. And eighty thousand magically flocked to Florence to listen to Patti Smith on 10 September 1979. That concert represents a milestone of a youth counterculture that needed to be told.”
Was she there too?
«I was there but I wasn’t there. Let me explain better. Most of the teenagers present could not claim to be going to see Patti Smith and each made up their own lie. It was almost a fraternity calling, but no one could have imagined that it would be so broad.”
The Eighties he describes are not the dominant ones, between rampantism and yuppies. What remains of that defeated utopia today?
«That generation was strongly affected by the advent of heroin and the wave of AIDS. Yes, in the Italian imagination that counterculture was defeated, swept away by a rampant socialism that prepared Berlusconism. But I am convinced that he left a trace.”
An example?
«The fact that today there can be 20, 30 or 100 thousand people marching at Pride, all united under one flag to demand rights and freedom».
Has anyone forgotten those battles?
«There are sixty-year-olds who have maintained that spirit and others have sacrificed it to reintegrate. There are those who still fight in their own way and those who have renounced those struggles.”
Writing this novel at sixty and looking back to tell the story of the punk generation of the Eighties: what flavor does this literary experience have?
«It does not have the flavor of melancholy memory, nor of self-exaltation for a period that we regret for what we did or for the people we met. Rather, it is a chronicle of those years from 1979 to 1989, on the one hand sufficiently disenchanted and on the other still in love.”
On the one hand Livio, naive and pure, on the other Anaïs, unscrupulous and self-destructive. How do they move on the page?
«The two of them embody two stereotypes of those years. Livio is the nostalgia that risks infecting everything and deludes us that before everything was simpler and cleaner, that we have left the best behind. Anaïs runs faster, but that vital force that bewitches risks making her lose, burning her alive.”
Abbot, who are your unworthy ones?
«A tribute to the master Pier Vittorio Tondelli, who knew how to describe a world that was changing its skin and who knows what else he would have told us with his gaze. My unworthy ones are the other libertines of Tondelli, or at least this is my desire.”
It tells the experience of free radios, spaces of welcome and resistance. Was it important to you?
«We have been living for too long in an era of great individualism, in which we are still hardly able to think as a community. Free radios in those years were a big We. I started at 14, I was absolutely unable to do a radio program, yet they welcomed me and gave me an opportunity. I saw and experienced those spaces: they were crucial to not getting lost.»
With a very rhythmic language and describing the bodies on the page, he addresses the wave of heroin and AIDS that overwhelmed that generation, annihilating it. Decades later, other synthetic drugs are destroying generations of kids. How do you explain it?
«When heroin arrived, that generation totally lacked instructions for its use. To write the book I spoke to those who were boys and girls in the mid-seventies: they didn’t know what they were experiencing, so much so that they didn’t even recognize the first withdrawal symptoms. They told you that drugs are bad for you, but not that for half an hour of pleasure you would have risked your liver and your brains, entering a loop with no way out. Today, however, we know everything, but friends of Lila – the Italian League for the fight against AIDS – tell me that it is still difficult to make kids understand that they have to use condoms. We know everything, yet we make the same mistakes. We believe we are invincible. But we are not, unfortunately.”