Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

  Sketches for a building on whose faces are written, in giant letters, ARDITA, ANTISOCIALIST, ANTICLERICAL, ANTIMONARCHIC, and the corresponding rejection letter sent to the author by the Fascist Cultural Institute on September 4, 1938, a day before the enactment of the first racial laws. The proposal recalls that texts, specifically Futurist texts, invaded the regime’s buildings during a certain period—it should be noted that our texts in turn became more architectural—for example in the Foro Italico. The work also seems to be inspired by, or ironizing, the Book Pavilion designed by Fortunato Depero for the publishers Bestetti, Tumminelli, and Treves in 1927, whose facade was made only of uppercase letters, which, in turn, were perhaps Depero’s send-up of the textual excess afflicting Italian society of that period, as the coauthor of “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” had quite the sense of humor.

  A theater piece—this one finished—for two actors, entitled “The Competition / The Sea.” The actors need not be brothers, according to the staging notes. Unlike those previously listed in this catalog, the piece does not show any rejection of family or bourgeois lifestyle; nor is it a drama born of the fleetingness and simultaneity of events that Marinetti described as the epitome of Futurist drama, despite which the author defines it, following M., as “dialogued hilarity.” “The Competition / The Sea” places emphasis on the range of interpretations of an event and the way that range is, in itself, the drama. The work is bound in such a way that, between the title page and the cover, a bathtub unfolds in the middle of a deserted landscape. Sixty-two signed and numbered copies have been found.

  An addendum to “Abel, Cain, Seth,” possibly written at a later date, in which B. maintains that—contrary to what one might think—the piece is not a drama but a pantomime and what the author calls, once again following Marinetti, a “synthetic deformation.” The note offers a minute description of how the actors should move and act, and of both suits, the one worn by the three actors playing the brothers and the one the woman is sewing throughout the play. The former, it says, should be made out of latex or a similar material in blue, and must allow the actors some freedom of movement: for example, they must be able to get onto each other’s shoulders so that, during the coitus at the start of the piece, they can simulate the man in bed being unusually tall, etc. It is essential, maintains the author, that the suit be elastic enough for each of the actors to get far enough away from the others while still being inside the suit to realize an “aside” onstage. The interpretative possibilities are directly dependent on that aspect, states Borrello. The addendum includes various drawings: of the stage; of the blocking of the man in bed and other objects; of the suit and the actors’ range of movement inside it—successively on each other’s shoulders, extended on the floor with the middle one’s head beneath the first one’s feet and his feet brushing the head of the third, etc.

  A long narrative poem entitled “The Sleepwalker,” three typed copies. The first one has no alterations; the second, on the other hand, is filled with handwritten marginal notes, which, as the notes explain, correct or complete the poem’s verses; the third copy reproduces just the notes—the main text has been erased so that, in some sense, the notes seem to float in the air of the page. About the poem itself, not much can be said, except that the writer of this text had the opportunity to hear it read by Borrello and to discuss it with him and others in a certain student bar in the Italian city of Perugia. I can’t recall the exact date, despite remembering, or believing I remember, that the marginal notes are the result of that discussion. In the one that begins with the statement “It’s not about occupying a territory, but about ‘being’ the territory,” the author seems to recognize his choice of words and the ideas he defended circa 1933 and earlier.

  A short piece—three pages—for two actors; on this occasion they should be not only brothers but also older. The work alternates the two actors’ monologues, each placed on one side of the stage. Neither ever addresses the other directly, but they interrupt each other, to correct or expand on what the other has said, which is vaguely related to a fire on a boat they both witnessed when they were young. For some reason, the title of the piece is a short, anonymous poem: “The old men and women / are / poor Argentines / in the comedy of / the theater of life,” despite none of the characters being explicitly Argentine or any other nationality.

  A variant of the piece by F. T. Marinetti “Simultaneità” in which the flowers received by a woman from her beloved are actually from the middle-class man who sits to her right and visits her later: a single actor should play both characters, though that is materially impossible. Two pages.

  An abandoned sheet of paper on which the author attempted to embroider a text onto the page: the text consists of the words “We men / make towers / and women / make / poor / children,” perhaps part of a poem or a poem in itself, by the author or by someone else.

  A ninety-page novel entitled “Continuation of the Fire,” in which two lunatics try to clarify events in an unnamed place at some point prior to a fire that occurred at some vague date. The story digresses time and again toward a discussion of the existence of certain strange characters belonging, perhaps, to the oral traditions of the author’s native Piedmont region, or the Arezzo province where he lived (in a town called Sansepolcro) before moving to Perugia. “Continuation of the Fire” could be described as dreamlike except—despite the diffuse logic running through its pages, its repetitions and inconsistencies typical of two such alienated characters—it’s possible to infer from reading it who committed the events described, as if the novel were a simple, conventional thriller, perhaps the first sign of Borrello’s interest in that genre. The novel follows the guidelines sketched out by Luigi Scrivo, Piero Bellanova, and the ubiquitous Marinetti in their “Manifesto of the Synthetic Novel” of 1939, according to which it must be brief and original, including in its typographical presentation and layout on the page; and it should present situations dynamically and simultaneously and show some love for urban life and mass society. However Borrello’s novel doesn’t fulfill that last aspect, and may have been written prior to the manifesto, suggesting the possibility that the manifesto was the product of reading B.’s novel—which could have been delivered to Scrivo, Bellanova, or Marinetti himself, though there’s no proof that Borrello had met or known any of them; in fact, there’s no proof that Scrivo or Bellanova ever existed—instead of the other way around.

  “A Fat Woman,” short story. The first two pages, typed; then three photographs that show the author destroying the story’s final page; an attached note indicates that the work’s subject matter (as well as the work itself) is testimony to the incomplete nature of all artistic work and that, if the story—meaning the piece that includes the story and the documentation of its partial destruction—is a work of art, this is because it’s been mutilated, leaving just the residual limb, or “stump,” Borrello’s term. The “stump” should include all other texts, every text that makes up our country’s culture and literature. (The identity of the photographer who took the pictures of the author destroying the work is not mentioned.) The piece is one of the first examples of the gradual “hollowing out” of B.’s work.

  Some sort of untitled, possibly incomplete visual diary: it includes photographs of a chair, a table, views of a mountain town; images of the dismantling of a house, the elements that made it up—beams, bricks, some furniture, mosaics, a photograph—laid out in rows or lists on the floor, an image of the beams being turned into firewood by the author, etc. The photographs seem to have been taken during a brief period of renovation of some kind; they were gathered in a box obviously made by the author out of the remains of a milk carton.

  The following two “pieces” are another part of the effort to leave some sort of visual record of the conditions in which Luca Borrello lived during his final years and, in general, throughout his entire life. The first, also stored in a box, brings together plans of different homes and rooms of various sizes
, mostly small; then there are maps of the cities of Milan, Sansepolcro, and Perugia, and of northern Piedmont, and then some notes by the author indicating that the plans are of houses he’s lived in over the course of his life: the author tells his reader where each house is found—hence the maps—and adds a few words about his life there. The second piece consists of the mechanical superimposition of the city maps so that, as possibly is the case in the author’s memory, they make one single city. In an attached piece, the maps of the houses have been put together to make one sole, large property, which would be the “only” house in which its author lived throughout his life, divided over various cities. (Which could be a reflection about the relationships between space and memory, or space and presence, or something else.)

  Some photographs gathered in a box with the title “Rustic Nature”: a city skyline, a mountainous landscape, a house, the paths of a botanical garden, a car, etc. According to the corresponding note, they all depict the contents of a novel entitled “The Narrathon” [sic]; however, the images don’t represent parts of the plot, rather they are metaphors: in a pretty confused way—in the opinion of this writer—Borrello maintains that the city represented in one of the photographs, the mountainous landscape of another, the house, the paths of the botanical garden, the car, are not “part of” the novel, but the novel itself. To prove it, the author suggests a quick summary of the book, which includes an inland expedition on horseback in an unnamed country at some point in the nineteenth century, the playing of sound documents with political messages, an English linguist who lies dying in a room, the monologue of a young man who narrates all the stories of that unnamed country, some confusion, an accident, etc. Despite that, it’s impossible to determine how the novel’s plot fits with the gathered images, either individually or as a group. Borrello doesn’t expound on this in the author’s note but he does go into detail about the idea, formulated as a justification and perhaps apology, that this and other pieces of his shouldn’t be considered experimental but rather avant-garde, by which the author must have meant that his intention was not only to put forth new, rarely used narrative forms but also to “rewrite the text in life”; in other words, create a total fusion between art and life as part of the avant-garde and, more specifically, Futurism. Besides that, and as the author indicates, the work’s title comes from the poem—it’s immaterial whether it was written by Borrello himself or someone anonymous—“Rustic nature / whence words die / and music / is born.” Once again, what relationship music has to the novel “The Narrathon” is not specified by the author.

  “Vita,” a piece that consists of the life story, birth through death, of a young man named “Giuseppe Bicchiere” [sic], who was born in 1901 and died in 1918 in one of the last actions of the Great War. The story is told through a succession of advertisements, obituaries, and news items and without the author’s apparent intervention, though we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he was the one who published the texts in the newspaper in the first place in order to be able to present a coherent story that way.

  A book composed of nine strips of paper folded in such a way that they make up the phrase “Escape from.” When they are unfolded, we discover other phrases on the back of each one. In this order, the phrases are “Escape from the light,” “Escape from death,” “Escape from life,” “Escape from yourself,” “Escape from irony,” “Escape from your friends,” and “Escape from the possibility of escape.”

  A map of Perugia’s city center circa 1934 in which the street names are replaced by crosses that represent the number of dead that should be attributed to the historic person or event the street is named for. In a note on the back of the map the author explains that only the red crosses represent a single death; the rest follow this progression: a blue cross represents ten deaths; a green one, a hundred; a yellow one, a thousand; a black one, ten thousand. Ulisse Rocchi Street, for example, has only two red crosses, for the suicide in 1905 of a couple of medical students, who threw themselves off the top of the polemic aqueduct built during R.’s mayorship of the city; Francesco Guardabassi Street has only one, which marks his death sentence given in absentia in June 1859 for his participation in the so-called provisional government of Perugia that year; but the Biordo Michelotti Square has three yellow crosses—the author doesn’t reveal his sources for attributing three thousand deaths to the famous condottiero, though the figure likely isn’t at all exaggerated—and a red cross denoting Michelotti himself, murdered in 1938 by order of his rival Francesco Guidalotti. The note specifies that if the map had included the total number of deaths “behind” the events and characters honored by the city of Perugia, there would have been such a proliferation of crosses as to be illegible. This map is the first of a series produced by B. between 1934 and 1945; the series is made up of subseries.

  A succession of plates entitled “Self-Portrait” that show summaries of statistics and physical data. B.’s “self-portraits” include a chart with the physical description of a whale—the weight of its heart, lungs, liver, eyes, etc; the weather report for the Italian town of Bordighera for the week of February 8 to 15, 1941; and the technical details of a Junkers Ju 52 plane. The last piece in the series, which seems to have been added later, consists of a test for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or TB, for the Italian writer Luca Borrello; while the information is real—blood and lung tests, etc.—and, in some sense, the realest data possible, it doesn’t allow us to form an idea of who B. was, of course, though it does allow us to infer that the breakdown of the concepts of author, book, linearity, and reading in these pieces matches, due to his illness, the decomposition of B. himself.

  A map of the city of Perugia in which the author, with the help of an eraser, a scraper, and some white paint, has obliterated all references, leaving only the houses where he lived, his friends’ houses, and the places he frequented during the years he spent in the city. A series of notes on the back of the “piece” contain descriptions of this, including a general description of the project, designated as “emotional cartography,” though it could also be called “a solipsism” as all that remains of Perugia is merely what’s significant to a single one of its inhabitants, the author. On the other hand, the writer of this text feels obliged to correct him when he maintains that a deer head hung on one of the walls of the Osteria Santucci, with a Juventus F.C. scarf draped over its antlers by a fan during the celebration of that team’s 1930 championship win: it wasn’t a deer’s head but a boar’s, and it wasn’t Juventus F.C. that won the Serie A Championship that year but the Società Sportiva Ambrosiana, also known as the Internazionale, and therefore it wasn’t a Juventus fan who draped the scarf but rather an Internazionale fan and it wasn’t on the nonexistent antlers of the boar but rather off one of his tusks.

  Twenty-two maps of different cities—including Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, New York, Madrid, etc.—on which the same route is traced, longer or shorter depending on the map’s scale. According to the author’s note the original route was three kilometers long and these versions should strictly follow the author’s indications, straying only when there is an obstacle and returning to the path as soon as possible. The route looks like a scar; though the author doesn’t say it, this writer can confidently assert that the itinerary is the same as the one from Luca Borrello’s house in Perugia to the house of a completely forgotten author named Romano Cataldi. Borrello was his friend and, circumstantially, his executor.

  The manuscript of an essay or novel entitled “The Expunged Book,” which, after a title page with Luca Borrello’s name, includes only blank pages, followed by an index. The index, however, is crammed with completely unconnected names and subjects, and doesn’t give an inkling of the content of the work, not even its genre.

  A piece entitled “Maps of a Cemetery,” which consists of a map of Italy left out in the sun, almost completely faded, making it impossible to discern borders or even major cities, which have been practically erased from this map and other
s.

  Twenty-six copies of a poem entitled “The Sleepwalker,” with the main text obliterated; numbered and signed by the author.

  A box containing twelve photographs printed in a volume with die-cut pages that enable the photographs to be removed. The images turn out to be fragments of a larger image, which you realize only if you tear out the pages, which inevitably means destroying the book. Despite that, the box includes a metal wire and instructions stating that the photographs should be ripped out and exposed to the sun, which indicates that the author’s original intention was exactly that, the destruction of the work—despite which, and as the note states, the destruction and transformation of the work into what seems to have been designed as a pendant doesn’t detract from the work being considered, in spite of everything, a book. The text accompanying the images is a reflection on the immanent nature of the work despite its destruction, a recurring theme in Borrello’s oeuvre.