Aldo Dalla Vecchia, “”Le tre parche”

Public and private life coincide in the writings of Aldo Dalla Vecchia, one of the best known journalist and television author, so that this new effort of his mixes the fresco of costume with the family saga, the characters known to all with the figures who populated the Venetian province many years ago. Between sleepy summers in the countryside, uncles and aunts who saved from the boredom of a construction site job imposed by his father, comics and photo-novels read avidly on Thursdays as soon as they hit the newsstands, these letters wind, dedicated to someone who once was there and now isn’t there.

A series of paintings depicting fundamental figures in Dalla Vecchia’s life, linked by a red, or rather black, thread, death. Of the three fates, it is Atropos who always wins, even if the other two, Clotho and Lachesis, are busy confusing our existence, filling it with random encounters and coincidences that will prove to be important. But death, democratic and spiteful, comes for everyone. And the author’s childhood, adolescence and maturity are dotted with deaths, in this “novel” that goes back in time, where the beginning is the end and vice versa.

All these deaths, these disappearances, these lacerations of the soul, anticipate and prefigure the other, the most important, the one that marked the existence of the writer, the loss of his father Michele, who died suddenly in an accident in the mountains when Dalla Vecchia was a child.

Deceased persons are referred to by their name only; some are familiar, such as uncles and aunts, grandparents, others are friends, others are famous figures, granite TV personalities like Mike (Bongiorno) or historical and gigantic like Carol (Wojtyla).

There is no shortage of dogs and cats, first great friends lost, first pains suffered, and even a fictitious character, the dog Argo from the Odyssey. With Argo, Dalla Vecchia takes us back in a leap, recreates a small period painting, we see him together with his grandmother watching what were the great television dramas of the time, we imagine him sobbing in despair over the death of the faithful animal. This sketch rekindled in me the memory of my inconsolable and excruciating tears, after watching a cartoon in which an unfortunate penguin died of cold and starvation because he was unable to abandon the egg that did not hatch and which had actually been replaced with a stone. Still, if I think about it, I feel the same agony as Aldo and the lump closes my throat.

The cheerful nostalgia of Dalla Vecchia’s first texts, for me that I have read them all, is becoming ever more bitter, it is losing the vivacity of youth to become poignant and painful, almost cruel. Book after book, time passes. Maybe for someone as sensitive as Aldo it goes even more, it leaves a mark, it ties and unties the threads of existence and destiny.

Everything is lost and everything comes back, the end and the beginning match. Atropos unfolds his scissors and waits.