paolo di stefano – aiutami tu

di domenica perrone

With his fourth novel Aiutami tu Paolo Di Stefano uses a modern fairytale style to touch once again some of the themes most congenial to him such as that of the family, a violated infancy, and solitude, introducing new reasons for social denunciation like that of loan-sharking. In a bad smelling city, within squalid and suffocating interiors, the story of a family adrift is told: a father and a mother that don’t get on leave a thirteen year old boy and his nine year old sister at the mercy of a couple of old loan-sharks.

This is, therefore, the pretext for a story of the unrealistic and delirious tasks carried out by an adolescent and his accomplice who he calls “the snotty kid”, so as to eliminate the interfering and hated jailers, the ruthless, bigoted and hypocrite Nespola’s. However, on this fairytale-like background, in this first elementary narrative structure, a more complex representation of feelings, desires and obsessions are introduced to which the epistolary novel’s form gives adequate expression.

The 164 letters without a reply are written by Pietro Baldi, a thirteen year old boy; they are received by a mysterious Marianna whose identity is unveiled only well on into the novel. The protagonist refers to her using fantastic and metaphoric names (Dear Perfume of Paradise, Dear Perfection, Dearest Calm, etc.) which are provoked by the preceding letter like a kind of chain connection:

(…) The snotty kid doesn’t know anything, only you now know, I’d like to have many secrets to share with you and this is the first of a long series.

Dear Secret,
I can’t describe the happiness I felt when I finally saw what I saw.

To this silent conversation partner, who intervenes only when events precipitate irreparably, the writer repeatedly sends his invocation, his supplication for help which is announced by the title: “Aiutami tu (Help Me)” and the leitmotiv which accompanies his uninterrupted conversation-confession.

Moreover, Di Stefano has often used the epistolary strategy. In Baci da non ripetere, for example, the continuous monologue of the narrator who described the events of a sad family story, was interrupted by an alternative dialogic made up of a group of letters; just like in Azzurro troppo azzurro, which was the story of a pathologic solitude, towards the end of the novel the epistolary voice of the enigmatic female character often evoked by the protagonist, is introduced.

However, that which in other novels was an expedient for the expression of more than one point of view, more than one narrative level, here becomes the structural element of the novel, the means and the way through which the psychological dynamics of the narrator, the mental procedures, the emotional connections that accompany his ever growing uneasiness, his frustrated wanting of security and normality, emerge and are told from within. The daily notes and summary acquire, in fact, a rhythm, a diary-like step which are aimed at finding a “you”, at establishing a communication with the external world. The writer himself has declared on more than one occasion that the novel, in a first moment, was drafted in diary form. In this sense, the fact that the narrator remembers the Diary of Anne Frank seems a homage to that first draft; he establishes a parallel which, because of its lack of proportion, its different tragic nature, underlines the dramatic power of his condition:

Dear M.,
I read Anne Frank’s diary. Do you know what she wrote? At one point she writes: I see the world transform itself into a desert. I could also write this phrase: the world is a desert for me too. E tu noi sei un’ : help me and you don’t care. There’s nobody left for me except the snotty kid. My letters, however, are no less dramatic than Anne Frank’s diary, even if she has the war and all the rest, I have terrorism and the Nespola’s, so more or less it’s the same: the only real difference is that she was a genius and I’m not. However, you don’t need a war to write a diary and maybe forty years from now someone will read my letters as if they had been written in a concentration camp or in a secret place (p.142).

Some critics have observed that the young protagonist demonstrates a cultural knowledge which is maybe excessive for his age. It is due to the successful mixture of maturity and ingenuity, of clearness of mind and stubbornness, of teenage slang and adult language that Di Stefano makes his character plausible. Through the eyes of Pietro, due to his adolescent spontaneity, thanks to his questions that produce a kind of alienation, through his logic which is so urgent and extreme that it confines with paranoia, the author makes the rot and social deformities come to the top, and he denounces the violence and degradation of the contemporaneous world:

I don’t know if in Athens and Sparta the situation was worse than this, I read that there were many slaves that worked like animals. Here, however, there are a lot of drug addicts either lying in the park all day or sitting in parking lots behind the parked cars so that they can give themselves their dose. The underground is full of sad people asking for charity, whilst asking for charity in Greece was prohibited, maybe because they didn’t have an underground. Asking for charity was above all prohibited in Sparta which was a much more brutal city with respect to Athens, so much so that they won the Peloponnesus war. I explained all this to the snotty kid. Her reply was:
– With the hairs she has on her legs, the Nespola woman could easily have won the Pelonponnesus war by piercing the enemy (p.106).

Highs and lows, cultured references and a brutal acquisition of reality (in other parts, however, there is also fiction and truth) translate with great efficacy the totally adolescent way of connecting the different experiences with a certain freshness. Furthermore, in the letters, he resorts to the formula of the narrator in the first person which happily solves the difficulties of making the spontaneity of his young language credible.

Hence, if the metaphorical richness of the common nouns used in reference to Marianna gives consistence to the game and to invention, the hammering insistence of the supplication “Aiutami tu (Help me)”, glorifies the unsustainable tension which weighs on the protagonist. Just like the repetition of some expressive nervous tics – the denial or the affirmation corrected by a contrary adverb, or the urgency of the verb to want, or the game of the opposite affirmations – all exalt the psychological emergency, the existential imbalance in which he lives:
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To tell the truth, I didn’t believe it either, matter of fact I didn’t believe it at all, I’ll tell you more, I never believed it (p.103);
(…) the situation is ever more urgent, actually it’s unsupportable, and I’m not exaggerating (p.115);

I want to breathe, speak to someone, I want a sister that doesn’t sleepwalk at night (…) I want to think of the holidays in Tuscany (…) I want to be thirteen and not fifty like the years I feel (…) I want to turn on the television and see normal things (…) I want a mother who smiles (…) I want a father who speaks and says things that are normal for a child (p.118);

Every now and then I hear cars go by and I’m shattered.
Better turn off.
Better turn on. I can’t sleep (…). It’s gone eleven o’clock, the snotty kid must still be on the couch sleeping. Better turn off. Better turn on. I keep turning over in bed and I keep asking myself the same questions (pp.133-134).

In this way, thanks to the construction of a language and an epistolary style, the character and the personality of the writer of the letters begins to gain consistence. Into this demanding elaboration the author has undoubtedly been able to pour his rich experience as a journalist, to draw from the surprising well of reportages which he himself carried out, first and foremost for example, from Famiglia in bilico.

However, such a calibrated narrative orchestration could incur in the risk of monotony if it isn’t balanced by solutions that animate and brighten up the story. This is the case of the dialogues between Pietro and his little sister, real and proper duets that, even through the cocky infantile slang of the so-called snotty kid, give breath and rhythm to the page:

Dear M.,
The snotty kid and I were lying on our beds, in the dark:
– Wow, can you hear that rain?
– Are you scared?
– No, I’m hardly ever scared.
– Don’t be stupid, sometimes you shake because you’re scared.
– So? There’s nothing wrong with being scared sometimes.
– I know, there’s nothing wrong with that.
– Wow, can you hear that rain?
– Are you scared?
– Yes (p.48).

It is also the case of those changes and insistent affirmations that create suspense:

In my opinion, behind the Nespola’s there’s something rotten, and sooner or later we’ll find out what it is (p.40).

I can feel the catastrophe coming nearer and nearer and I can’t do anything about it (p.104).

(…) I feel that I’m going mad, only you can help me if you want to (p.105).

As the story goes on, the fairytale becomes a thriller. After a crescendo of happenings (a night time intrusion by unknown people in the Nespola household, the stealing of jewels by the children, their strange kidnapping), the situation precipitates: a crime is carried out. At this point, however, that which could seem the logical interpretation of a tragic finale, suggested by the letters, is denied by the service note written by the Commissioner of Police Nicola Vetere who is in charge of the case. With a clever movement of the observation point, Di Stefano overturns the facts and invites us to take a better look, to sharpen our sight so as to take more notice of the bad things happening in our time.

november 2006