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The twilight

Apr 212012

For many years I sacrificed to my studies my emotional life, my family life, participation in the life of my generation: although I lived in my time, in some ways I didn’t belong to that time. I hardly knew anything about sport, music, songwriters, dancing, the fashions which young people followed, holidays and much else. I had no choice if I wanted to recoup, culturally speaking, the years I had lived with animals “in the wild”. I was prepared to pay any price, to deprive myself of anything in order to attain my goals. For human beings everywhere this should be a sacred, inviolable and inalienable right.

The Righteous

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Apr 202012

More than once I turned down the opportunity of fortune or, let’s say, a certain financial security. Here are three examples. The first was with Paris Vision. The owner, Mr. Georges, if I remember his name correctly, offered me a career in the company. With a little determination and my knowledge of languages I knew I could have become an excellent organizer of Paris Vision and earned some good money, but I turned it down. The second opportunity occurred in Australia, at the European School of Languages, in fact. The parents of Rebecca G. ( whose mother, Mrs. G., in order to get to know me, had attended one of my French courses for two years, even though she knew French better than me) wanted to marry me off to their only daughter, and if I had accepted, a villa and half a million dollars would have been included in the package. Rebecca, who taught English at my school, was apparently in love with me but I, unfortunately, was not in love with her. So I turned down this splendid offer. The third occasion also concerned my school. I had somehow, instinctively, turned into a miser, something which had always been totally alien to my nature but which developed once money started to fall into my pockets so easily. Then I would feel a greedy shiver, the call of money demanding more money. I no longer wanted to spend, I just wanted to save, pile it up, put money in the bank. I got to the point where I would even deny myself the purchase of a book that I really wanted! In short, I no longer recognised myself. So I sold the school, putting an end to the temptation to become yet another worshipper of the god of egoism.

The nightmare

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Apr 162012

Everyone has his borderline experiences. I had had one of these in Paris a few years before I started working as a tourist guide for Paris Vision. My existential angst, which I had long been keeping under control by sheer will power, suddenly exploded. Then a nauseating, gloomy, intolerable vision of life took hold of me, possessed me. There was no escape from it. I hated everything, death above all. Just the idea of it terrified me, made me feel powerless, rebellious, neurotic. I felt trapped, couldn’t free my mind and my gut of these destructive, negative feelings. I even despised the world that man had constructed, a world that I knew something of by then, having had personal experience of it. I knew what it meant to work, to struggle to survive. I tried to find an acceptable comparison between living with human animals and living with animal animals, such as goats, and I couldn’t find one. Goat society seemed to me to be a million times better than human society. Goats don’t kill each other, they live pacifically together. I had become convinced that any other animal on earth, however brutal, could not possibly have created such a false, bestial society.

The dream

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Apr 132012

At the beginning of the Seventies, I began to give French and Italian lessons to small groups of students in private schools – International School of Languages, Holmes Language School, Berlitz Language school in Melbourne. I would have liked to have had a deeper, more academic knowledge of these languages but what I did have was, in any case, more than adequate for my courses.

A few years later, with some financial help from a friend, and sticking to my principle, if other people can be successful why shouldn’t I be ?, I opened a language school: European School of Languages, in the centre of the town where I was living. I would never have expected it to be such an amazing success; it was incredible. In the space of a few years about twenty-five part-time mother-tongue teachers were teaching at the European School of Languages and all the classrooms were constantly in use. Fantastic!

The cost

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Mar 142012

Today I am in possession of three diplomas, two from universities and one from a college: one I obtained in Australia, at the Holmes College of Melbourne, one in Spain, from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and one in Italy from the Università per Stranieri di Perugia. I have no idea what they are worth. Perhaps nothing, perhaps they are just pieces of paper and nothing more. But I have never been interested in qualifications. Whenever I took an exam the challenge was always with myself. I wasn’t desperate to get a diploma, I was desperate for knowledge; it wasn’t for the professors that I racked my brains, but because I needed to satisfy my hunger for knowledge. I wanted to understand the world, I wanted to know languages, to understand peoples, life, everything. My motto was and still is: I don’t know, therefore I suffer.

At any rate, and without wishing to offend educational institutions, I regard myself as self-taught. I did not meet the writers and people who transformed me, formed me, opened my eyes and revolutionized my existence in schools or universities but in real life and in the course of my reading. The books that I have read and the experiences that I have had have been my teachers; they are what have given meaning to my life, illuminated it.

The leap

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Mar 132012

When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.

In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.

My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.

In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.

Brief Autobiography

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Feb 142012

The case

I was born in a mountain village in Calabria in 1942. It was late afternoon on a Wednesday in February. My mother told me later that, just as I was coming into the world, she could hear cannons in the distance out at sea, firing from a warship against the planes which were trying to sink it.

When I was two a maniac who lived nearby killed my father, for no apparent reason, by hitting him on the head with an axe while he was working in the fields. My mother had married twice and I was the son of this second husband.

It was the autumn of ’46 and the war was barely over, its macabre stench still hovering in the air, when mother found an apple, the only one on the tree to have escaped the notice of marauders. She divided it into three parts and gave it to us three children, my two sisters and me; ( my brother, who was twenty years older than me, was a prisoner in Russia at the time) but she didn’t take any for herself. For almost three days that apple was the only food we had.