With the affirmation of the idea that every individual has the right to choose their own path to happiness (or unhappiness . . .), we increasingly demand that the conjugal bond be based on love, thus believing that we make it stronger, more lasting, and more authentic, while instead it has actually knocked that bond into a permanent state of emergency. How can a long-lasting relationship be based upon the most capricious sentiment of them all, by very definition?
Matrimony as the grave wherein love is laid, were we saying? In that case, better to have the grave be empty, that there be nothing at all to bury, as back in the day of arranged marriages, because that which was never born cannot die; while there can be nothing sadder than the funeral of a passion.
Erotic individualism is only one aspect of the individualism beneath whose powerful drive the family has no choice but to succumb, and, succumbing, to unleash one last halo of community spirit, emitting glimmers of solidarity, mutual aid, donation, reciprocity, becoming in other words the ideal object of nostalgia and regret that alone, as it wanes and vanishes, manages to push its faults into the background. No one remembers what is hidden behind the little statues of the Christmas crèche once they’ve been shattered in an outburst of rage and the pieces have been swept away. The immense bazaar of consumer choice and sexual options can hardly help but sweep aside the fair-trade flea market where gifts are repurposed, along with used shoes, the hairy kisses of the aunts, the maybe when you’re older’s, the learn to stay in your place’s, the I refuse to allow you to use that tone of voice with me’s, the what’s on TV tonight’s?, the we’ll work it out, sweetheart’s, the leave me be’s, the I’m sick of repeating myself a thousand times’s, the what do you say to a soft-boiled egg’s?; and if there seems to be no getting rid of it all entirely, it’s only because of its dull, stubborn capacity for resistance, which can hardly help but batten off the residual scraps of an ethics that is retrograde, merely biological, and therefore unassailable in the terms that apply to discourses about mere utility. To hell with matters of practicality and modernity. The family listens to no one: it would rather die than give in to flattery and insults. Like a boxer in the corner, it can only huddle in a defensive crouch, trying to offer as little exposure as possible to the hail of punches, offering only the least sensitive parts, at least until it becomes clear that the punches come from within, from beneath his guard, and how can you defend against the blows that you unleash against yourself? The intimism steeped in impotence into which families curl up like hedgehogs (a diehard legacy of the bourgeois model of family that as it spreads, declines, and as it declines, spreads: privacy) offers only a semblance of protection, the principles with which we bandage ourselves, the values that we deploy to screen ourselves really do become a burden, they crush those whose foundations are too fragile to lay claim to them, but at the same time they offer very little protection against the attack from without.
Like a suit of armor that can be easily pierced.
THEREFORE THE ONLY PATH REMAINING is compromise. The tacit strategy of “everything can be worked out.” Everyone’s demands and the promise to everyone of a space of their own, a destiny of their own . . .
The Italy with a Mamma complex, Catholic Italy, bourgeois Italy, and even the Italy that was Communist, all blend together, creating a hue in which one shade or another might prevail, but familism remains the same, and demands its mediation.
And finally the apotheosis in which everyone reconciles, weeping on TV, thanks to a small army of fake mailmen delivering letters oozing remorse.
The family has, or perhaps once had, multiple reasons to exist and countless benefits; in less developed societies, where the individual was by no means independent of the group, if you were outside the nuclear family, you simply died—proof of this is the hardy survival of the model in risky situations, where the individual alone would never survive. But if, instead, these protective functions are performed by other institutions; if the advantage of starting a family becomes hypothetical and its duties are neglected (education, upbringing, protection) or secondary (procreation) or performed by others (care and assistance in case of disease); if the family, in other words, instead of facilitating and protecting, actually hinders the individual, then it is natural that it should wane. If an individual can live perfectly well as a single, or even better than others because freed of responsibilities and free to invest his own earnings only for himself, if the costs of starting a family outweigh the benefits, then why would anyone think of embarking on such a challenging and laborious undertaking?
The family in purely theoretical terms ought to ensure unconditionally human treatment. With our blood relations we ought to be more sincere, more devoted, and more disinterested than with other people. If we need help, who will give it to us? Relations between the generations, bonds of authority, the setting of examples, ties of ideological dependency, all of which were once powerful, are now practically null, while the bonds of economic dependency have increased: they think for themselves, but they don’t have a penny to their name, that is the condition of the new generations. As a result, their parents are obliged to disburse more and more money in exchange for being increasingly ignored.
RELATIONS THAT ARE CONTINUOUS, immediate, and free of charge: to put it with brutal matter-of-factness, you don’t have to pay your wife for sex, nor do you have to hire your son to bring you the newspaper (or, in the old days, to dig up potatoes). And in theory, that’s 365 days a year, talk about affordability. Certainly, your wife and your son may get sick and tired, and in fact, nearly all of the wives and almost all of the children did get sick and tired, and they no longer obey, in bed or at home, and, if you stop to think about it, they no longer receive orders because the head of household no longer dares to issue them, in part because there simply is no such thing anymore as a head of household.
THE NEED FOR ORDER, guidance, and protection. The need for communion, the need for law. Family as a “framework” that holds life together. It’s not just the weak woman, the weak children who need this protection, the shield that was once wielded, in the election posters of a bygone time, to ward off the serpents of moral dissolution.
We are all so exposed, so fragile, all at the mercy of fate (a thin sheet of ice), at the mercy of our nerves, of the ill will of others and our own stupidity, we’re exposed to the even more ruinous winds of our desires, our dreams, the cutting wind of frustrations, riddled with wounds, skinned alive . . .
THAT WHICH IS BORN in secret sooner or later aspires to make itself manifest. The invisible has ambitions to become visible: even though it is superior to the visible, without visibility it feels incomplete. Until He descends to earth, not even God can fully call Himself God. When one discovers the intimate connection that can link two beings, it becomes urgent to tell the whole world about this wonderful discovery, and to all appearances, the world has not yet gotten tired of hearing the announcements of these obvious discoveries, that is to say, that the seeds of another possible life exist in us. Deprived of social visibility, in time even the greatest love turns arid, is mortified; if it remains hidden, secret, people will say that it’s not true love, if it lacks courage, if it is ashamed of itself—“What, are you afraid to let others know that you’re with me? Why don’t you introduce me to your friends, your parents?” It was and still is women in particular who demand this recognition, who desire a step up toward visibility, even though this public aspect might represent the decay of a very pure sentiment into trite, banal, conventional forms.
The traditional expression of all that is matrimony. The decisive step: when sexual attraction becomes a public matter.
THE FAMILY MYSTIQUE demands a totem.
You worship it from childhood.
It’s often physical, sensual in nature—it may be your father’s authority or charisma, your mother’s beauty, all the more celebrated as it drifts toward its sunset (“She was the prettiest girl in all of Parioli . . .,” “He went head over heels, but for
real, he went down on his knees . . .,” “All the boys were in love with her . . .”)—the financial legacy, or the genetic one, resemblance in facial or bodily features. I’ve known families-qua-tribes that stood principally on the extraordinary physical resemblance between parents and children, and then of the children (frequently numerous) to one another, with the testimonial of checkerboards of photographs dotting the walls or else framed on sideboards or shelves or bulking up in stacks of photo albums, with robust bindings in the finest English style, and as you leaf through their pages you could also note to your astonishment that the parents, incredibly, resembled each other, in fact, they were actually identical, like brother and sister, whether that was because they met and chose each other on the basis of this fatal familiarity that already pumped through their bloodstreams, or else because long years of cohabitation wound up influencing their physiognomies, until they overlapped and merged . . . It happened especially to the fair-haired families, such as the Rummos, in fact.
Unity can also be based on money: around the family fortune, the domestic prosperity that must be handed down at all costs. Which emits gleams of light even in the darkness, even when shut up in a coffer, like the treasure in a fairy tale. Nothing could be more sacred; no one can dare, for whatever reason, to endanger it; there can be no argument, taste, idiosyncrasy, predilection opinion whim or personal critique that isn’t relegated to a secondary status with respect to the preservation of that prosperity. The game of differences and personalities ceases immediately when money comes into play, that’s no laughing matter, in any family.
AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, love toward children, too, seems to have been a rather recent invention, more or less a couple of centuries old. Before then, people paid less attention to them, little or none at all, they gave them to wet nurses to suckle, they’d send them as far away as possible. Those who had money seemed to want to get rid of their children quickly and those who had none tried to do the same, selling them as servants or soldiers. When the children were small, they swaddled them tight like tiny mummies, and they left them alone for hours and hours to wail and sob, until they finally tired themselves out. Given that the husband, by definition, didn’t love his wife, and vice versa, for what reason would this couple, so hand in glove, have ever thought to love their children? You popped them out, one after the other, and at least half of them died on you, so better not to get too fond of them. If your veal calf died on you, that was certainly a catastrophe, but no one was paying too much mind to the death of a son or daughter! And then they’d head down to the village, buying on the same shopping trip the syrup for the child on his deathbed and the nails to hammer down the lid, “no point in making two separate trips.”
Do you remember Dino Risi’s Opiate ’67, originally titled I Mostri (Monsters), and one of those monsters spends his last thousand lire, not in the pharmacy to buy medicine for his sick little boy, but instead at the stadium, to see a match with his favorite team, ’a Rooomaaa!!!
Well, there was a time when everyone was a monster like that, it was normal.
Was it the fathers alone who were authoritarian, rigid, and intransigent? Not on your life, it was the mammas, too, the blessed mammas who kept an eye on the children with methods worthy of the secret police (in fact, we can safely say that the principal methods used in espionage were copied from homemade investigative systems—and at home we defended ourselves against this intrusive spying by counterespionage measures of the same kind—invisible inks, secret letters, ciphers and codes, hiding places, disguised voices, misinformation, fake phone calls from cooperative friends to throw the investigators off the trail—methods that have been brought up to date these days with passwords, etc.). For that matter, weren’t spies the reigning heroes of the movies of those years? The people you need to keep the closest eye on are the ones who live right next to you; if not for purposes of repression, those measures will be taken to satisfy the invincible demands of curiosity. The inquisitorial gaze of mothers knew no moral stumbling blocks inasmuch as they themselves were a moral instrument (here, too, the beneficent objective wins out over any and all scruples), and in fact nearly all my friends and, in particular, the girls we grew up with knew their mail was being monitored, their evening stops outside the downstairs entrance to the apartment buildings were under observation from on high, their phone calls were eavesdropped on or even monitored from the other line in the next room, the unmistakable background noise of the receiver of the second phone delicately lifted and every bit as delicately set back down after the shouted protest, “Mamma, would you please hang up the phone?!” since you certainly couldn’t fight back against the right of others to stick their noses into your business in terms of principles, but only on the more concrete grounds of shouting, that is, on a passionate, visceral level, which only wound up binding those spied upon to those spying in an even tighter fashion.
WE HAVE LIBERATED OURSELVES from family ties and community controls, we have started to see marriage as the result of free choice, of a physical and loving attraction between future spouses, and the disparity between husband and wife has gradually been reduced. Which is a good thing. Every member of the family, even the smallest ones, has demanded recognition as a person, and the freedom of an exclusive sphere of action, in search of individual fulfillment. And that’s a good thing. A wave of individualism, free market, and emotions has swept over the family as an institution, shaking it to its foundations. And that’s a good thing. Likewise, love toward one’s children, until not long ago something that was practiced only rarely or with extreme embarrassment, has now become fervent, exclusive, passionate; which has engendered freer relations between parents and children, more balanced, without a doubt, stickier, weaker relations in terms of authority but still, more intimate and richer in emotional content, perhaps even too rich, so much so that the generational rings arranged neatly one after the other have started to overlap and entangle among themselves, giving rise to issues of identification that delay the reciprocal detachment, almost eliminating the differences that still, in so many ways, have never been as great as they are today, in the sense that the present-day world as it is experienced by kids and the way they inhabit it has almost nothing in common with the world of, let’s say, thirty years ago, and yet here we see parents who dress and talk like kids, mothers with their underwear hanging out of their pants just like their daughters, daughters who are practically glued to their mammas, the so-called bamboccioni, children who haven’t grown up . . . The gooey and intrusive love in these overblown communities . . . And that’s a good thing.
When we lament the decline of genuine community feeling, the egalitarian spirit, the values of solidarity and sharing, the capacity to sacrifice oneself in order to meet the needs of the collective, we hardly ever notice the way in which the experience of fraternity, brotherhood in its literal and original meaning, has been so drastically reduced or entirely eliminated with the disappearance of large families. Before, we proceeded to found a political and social realm of the imagination, that’s what brotherhood was: how can we expect such a thing to have any meaning for only children? And so we see parents obliged to become older siblings to those who have no natural siblings of their own.
DON’T SQUANDER YOUR PATRIMONY, don’t allow your assets to fall into the hands of others, and for that reason, make sure, by means of faithfulness (an institute or value that is entirely pragmatic, as we shall see), that the children you raise are actually of your own blood, which nowadays, with DNA testing, is child’s play to determine, in other words, don’t let it happen that you slave away for a lifetime to leave part of your nest egg to a bastard. Doubts, for that matter, legitimized by the incredible percentage in the results of those exams: one child out of every five has been found to have another father.
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