Adolescence at the time of the Lira
Claudio Ruggeri
Translated by Anna Sigillo
“Adolescence at the time of the Lira”
Written By Claudio Ruggeri
Copyright © 2014 Clara Natoli (http://claranatoli.blogspot.com/)
All rights reserved
Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.
www.babelcube.com
Translated by Anna Sigillo
“Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Author's Notes | My intention, in these few pages, it will not be the one to compare, in purely economic level, our old currency with the current one, with relative strengths and weaknesses of both, but to stop for a moment and observe the world that the lira could represent fine, that has been shelved and forgotten, perhaps too quickly.
Author's Notes
My intention, in these few pages, it will not be the one to compare, in purely economic level, our old currency with the current one, with relative strengths and weaknesses of both, but to stop for a moment and observe the world that the lira could represent fine, that has been shelved and forgotten, perhaps too quickly.
I have decided to write this story for two main reasons, the first is the fact that recently rumors have started, not only among citizens, about the fact that a return to our old currency , the Lira, it could be something to be taken very seriously into account to revive the fortunes of our ailing economy .
The second reason is far different, it is the consequence of a recent conversation I had with a boy of sixteen, Roberto, during which, being now about to turn thirty, I was inevitably associated to another era, my era, in which being an adolescent had a very different meaning; for this reason everything I said or suggested to my young friend was trivially dismissed with a "Those were different times... ".
The sentence, however, that finally took the wind out of my sails, was the last one, at the end of the conversation that had lasted for more than two hours, "When you were a kid you even had different money ... ".
Yeah, the world has changed too fast in the last fifteen years, I wish I told my friend Roberto, but in the end I gave up, after all, how can I be sure that our adolescence has been better than the one they live today?
Not to sound pathetic I preferred to swallow the bitter pill, made of words that forced me to reflect on whether the cause of the increasing amount of hair that I find on my comb in the morning, can be attributed only to chance.
These days I get the impression that wanting to revive our old currency hides in the fact the will to resurrect a way of life, the one we had before and that maybe was much more suited to the characteristics of the average Italian man than the one we have today.
It is often said that the modern world has been digitized but there are actually a multitude of extra papers that the average Italian has to deal with, that he must read carefully and subscribe.
Today you sign a contract often without realizing it, you do it dozens of times in a year, such as when you subscribe to a ringtones service for your mobile phone or you pay a parking ticket, just to mention two of the most common and less visible examples.
There are constraints and caveats to which we use to think as useless phrases put there only to better complete a sheet of paper, which instead require us to commitments which, undersigning, also force us to respect them.
Here we miserably fall in our being so convinced that in the end everything will be okay, eating tarallucci accompanied with a good glass of wine, or with a handshake guarantor of future commitments; but it doesn’t work like that, even for an unpaid penalty of few tens of euro we find ourselves in front of people, organizations, companies that continue to demand the penalty what our failings had been for years.
But the average Italian continues on his way, and when he can’t succeed by using his great ability as charmer, which he is secretly convinced of being the depositary on this earth, then he tries to venture into one of the many " You do not know who I am... " , and then turn, less worthily, in a more classic
" I have a family ... " .
Often, however, those who find themselves on the other side is not a fool , they know well the Italic vices and continue to require that he complies with the terms; then the poor Italian has nothing left to do but rely on luck .
Who among us has never insisted on not paying a penalty, hoping that sooner or later, the other side would have forgotten the debt? That by sitting in silence, but without pay, at the end we would have got away with it?
When in the end, however, it turns out that every attempt of evasion miserably fails, what burns is not represented, basically, by the amount to be paid, but to accept that, still believing we are the smartest ever, deep down, we have to admit we're not.
I think this is one of the reason that makes it very difficult to fight in Italy against tax evasion; the biggest problem is not represented, from being in front of skilled scammers, difficult to unearth, but ordinary citizens fighting everyday against the payment of taxes as if it were nothing more than the confirmation that in the world does exist someone smarter than them, a cage from which they can not exit without leaving something within, the State indeed.
The general confusion that is afflicting us Italians during this troubled phase is quite different from that found in the other Country, at least in those who are facing the same problems; the cause is in the first place not to be found in complicated financial alchemy which we will never understand the nature and evolution of, but in the fact that suddenly we found ourselves with a partner more to deal with, the State.
Which has manifested its presence by avoiding unnecessary preambles, which with no extra frills confronts us with the reality of things, expressing simple concepts the nature of which should be familiar to many, as the one in which if you do give nothing it will be impossible for you to get something in exchange .
Simple concept, isn’t it? It depends ... by the fact that everything can be interpreted, has double or triple valence and so on.
One day we will get used to the fact that things change, even starting to appreciate the benefits, but now it's too early; this is the time of nostalgia for the old things, the ones we so easily scrapped not because we didn’t like them anymore, but only to have them considered old, not cool , not at all in line with the modern world.
Today we realize how we have been superficial, rocking the illusion of being trendy or cutting-edge simply holding some technological gadget, to come to realize then that it is not important how you do something but more what you really do.
If they are actually the old friends or the girlfriend to call you, you don’t need anything of hyper-technological, simply the old good phone you have at home, that is also cheaper than the high technologies; and there you see people being called again home, in the office or at the bar (this latter assumption may seem like an invention of mine, but I saw it and I see it more and more often) .
How many times we happened to stop, astonished to see a bunch of people in the throes of a flash-compulsive mania? That is that sort of contagious semi-madness in photographing anything around us?
Running into such situations at some point I started to behave differently than before, and I noticed something very interesting.
Until now, I used to observe it at distance, still wondering what the hell was so important among those flashes, then one day I decided to stop and check; looking around I discovered that in fact there was quite nothing that deserved to be photographed and had the impression that for many of tho
se people it was only an involuntary twitch, an automatic behavior and nothing more.
Here's how technology can profoundly change our habits; in order to justify an expensive purchase you start to misuse it, denaturing it, mixing things all together making it impossible in the end to tell what is really worthy of note.
In making a hundred photographs only because it’s free, you will lose the real value of those, very few of them, that even years later would be able to give you an emotion, to tell a story, and that’s why a sixteen years old boy almost envies his thirty years old friend who browses his photo album printed on Kodak paper, on which, to each photo there is always an anecdote or a story to tell.
The stories about the '90s , such as those that may come to mind browsing a photo album, inevitably intertwined with that of our old currency, which contributes in its own way, to make the idea of time passing, of fashions and styles that have been lost.
It comes to mind when the pizzas cost a thousand lire and you bought them at the near grocery store; today that same butcher or grocery store maybe still exists, may have changed its name or company name, but what it sells it’s always pizzas, at a price almost the equivalent, but if you are talking to a little boy and you give away a phrase like, "When we bought the pizzas with a thousand lire ...", you will see his change in attitude, often accompanied by a slight smile that seems to say, " it was better when it was worse ... " .
Yeah, the stories of the '90s... it seems strange today to tell about them, how many mistakes and omissions in the tales just because you believe they are granted details, but they’re not at all.
For example, telling of when I happened to hoof it because of a scooter " Ciao " borrowed by a friend of mine, I could not understand why my young interlocutor showed himself so dubious when, speaking of fuel, I continued to use the word
" mixture ".
He then confided that, giving up to understand its meaning, he came to the conclusion that the " mixture " could not be other than a drug, since I, pushing that old scooter, was desperately looking for it as you search for a glass of water when you are in the middle of the desert.
Then when I started to further explain how it had to be done a good liter of mixture, measuring the right percentages of oil mixed with gasoline " Four-star petrol ", my friend surely had come to the deduction that the guys of my time were all " little chemists " that during the long summer afternoons spent their time to mix gasoline, in order to have good " home-made " fuel, as if you were talking about tomato sauce.
For the record, at the end of my story, I also told him that telling to the gas station attendant " Put me twenty thousand lire of four-star petrol " was not so different from saying " Put ten euro of petrol "; fuels are almost the same indeed, but, from the way he looked at me, I realized that my young friend did not believe in those last words of mine.
But the culminating point of the story, in which I have also seen him putting his hands in his hair, was when, still dry of
" mixture ", I began to desperately seek a two hundred lire coin in my pocket, because without it, it was impossible to call, except for the police and the ambulance.
My story must have touched the peaks of suspense almost at the level of a yellow–noir, because he continued to ask me to continue the story and do not miss any step or detail, thought, action or question that I made. He was over the moon when I got to the end of it, when I finally remembered to turn the lever that gave access to the small reserve of fuel and managed to get up and start the scooter towards home; along this journey I also met my partner in misfortune, the owner of the scooter who, realizing the scooter was off again and fearing the reaction of his parents to see him coming home late, he thought to go home walking.
I came across him in one of the last corners, when he literally assaulted me for the happiness to finally see me arriving, since he had been waiting for me without the possibility to know when I would have appeared, since there were no mobile phones, only in the hope that I would have finally arrived; the alternative would have been to inform our parents and to organize the search at the "poor boy without money and without mixture ".
Far different from now, was also the idea that we had of the School in the '90s, which for us was a sort of full-time job, whereby you could get various bonuses and prizes, in addition to the obvious promotion.
The bad report cards and failures could compromise the any request to your parents, even Christmas gifts suffered a backlash when at school things were not going the right way.
It did not matter the standard of living of the family in question, the father could also go around driving a car cost fifty millions ( lire! ) but if the child had not been a good student, he would have get not even the latest collection of Panini stickers ...
Anyone working in the school and for the school, as a result, had a greater consideration in society, the professor was a star in our little world, because of his power of judgment to which we were inevitably subjected.
It would have been something unimaginable to see a parent lash out at the principal and / or teacher and why not against a simple janitor, only to defend his son from harassment or accusations that had been moved against him; when I was a child at the end of the '90s, if you did upset the teacher you got a double dose of scolding, at school and then at home, but my young friend can not understand this, indeed he even seemed shocked when I told him.
Many of the teachers I've had, even those with whom I did not get along with or who rejected me, they lived that job as something more than just a paycheck at the end of the month, with even Christmas bonus and paid vacations, they tried to give you something and often they succeeded.
With a school lived in this way, the summer job could be seen not more as a joke for us, almost like a hobby, something you do more for the pleasure of having a few lira in your pocket than as a real need of money.
I saw my peers taking many different crafts, as well as those classic job such as bartenders and waiters; they were entertainers, baby-sitters, hairdressers, mechanics, plumbers and DJs, I even met a guy who worked during the summer for a funeral home, he told me that the work during that period increased and accordingly the pay was not so bad ...
I was one of those " waiters in percentage ", I got fifty thousand lire every night with the addition of some tips; at sixteen I brought water, bread and cleared the tables when customers left, it was a little bit hard to run back and forward in the heat for several hours, and " at the time" it was still possible to smoke inside the restaurant, so you had to extricate between hot flashes coming from the kitchen and the dense fog of smoke of the rooms.
It was such a satisfaction, however, when looking inside the wallet you saw the next morning that you could afford a nice breakfast at the bar and a pack of cigarettes, without asking to parents, grandparents or uncles to give you money.
Those few thousand lire made you feel a real gentleman, one who was working and who was now an integral part of society, no longer a helpless spectator of the beauty and ugliness of others’ life.
Then, when with those money you could even buy some object, you felt you could touch the sky with a finger; my first second-hand cell phone cost me two hundred thousand lire, I took care of it for many years and I still keep it and someone says that I do it to occasionally dust off moments of nostalgia, perhaps it is true, also because, I like to think that keeping it well preserved in that drawer could turn out to be useful one day, maybe as a backup if the cell phone I have now started to throw a tantrum ...
I am more and more convinced, seeing what is happening today, to be born, as well as many boys of my age, from rich parents who thought they were poor, the exact opposite of today, where the certainties no longer exist and assets often are winding down, but optimism always reigns thanks to modern parents who think and live as rich with pockets full of debts.
Even debts have changed, or at least have changed their shape, once they were called " loans " when it was a friend to help you,
or " promissory notes " when it was someone less friend to help you , or " mortgage" when it was a bank that financed you .
Today they have invented the installment, " comfortable " payments for which you can buy anything but not to own anything; because it happens very often that you realize, or worst you don’t even realize it, that when you’ll have finished these " subsidized payments ", the object in question will not be worth anything, and perhaps you have already replaced it, even before you have finished paying.
In this way it vanishes that feeling of having worked for something, to have saved with sacrifices to get something that is better than what you had before; without realizing it, then, we become mere tenants of objects, often of uncertain value, which will never be fully ours because there will always be someone to whom we must continue to give money only to be able to continue using them.
My young friend, told me during our conversation, he had been wondering what exactly was all that joy that he saw on my face the day I brought home my first " new car ", he just could not explain it, so I tried to do it myself .
Those cars that we considered "new" , in the fact, had very often already past dozen years, they were considered "new" for the simple fact they had never been driven, that’s all, not because they left the factory the day before ...
They often were pieces of junk, mine was a Lancia with more than fifteen years of age, with a story behind it and that’s why it deserved to be respected.
He tried to imitate me, he tried to see if his first car, purchased by his parents, also did the same effect, but he was disappointed; yet it was new, it could be driven without a license and was also very expensive, so in theory it had all the ingredients to make him happy at least during his first day in the garage, but it did not.
I think the reason was the fact that he has not wanted and bought himself, that he had only sought and accordingly had been given, even though his parents are not so wealthy to afford the bills for his son's car.
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