Lo sbilico

Alcide is in his forties, he still sometimes sleeps in his mother’s bed, he takes seven pills a day, five in the morning and two after dinner, and he “is a lucid, alert, and cooperative patient with fluid speech”. He is a “defective” human being among many, his flaws are listed in four pages of diagnoses countersigned by one of the most famous Italian psychiatrists: “bipolar disorder”, “autism spectrum”, “ego dissociation”, “antipsychotics”, “thoughts of lack of self-preservation”…
From his exile in a small town in Abruzzo, where everything seems forever the same, Alcide tells us about the gloomy weather of his days. The hours spent at the beach, or tiring himself out at the gym, where he goes to regain in muscle what he has lost in mental clarity. But, most of all, he tells us what happens when his psychological balance breaks down: the onset of paranoia, the doubling perception, how still time spent waiting is never really still because that is when the thoughts arrive. His story alternates between moments from a before (before going definitively mad) in Milan, the city that seemed to be able to keep him alive, and from an even before, a childhood in which everything already hurt too much, but with a grandmother, a bicycle, and a petting zoo that could save him. While in the present there is his life with his mother, who is at once the origin, the sounding board, and the only possible embankment to his psychoses (if he imagines a place where it is possible to rest, to breathe, it has the exact shape of his mother’s body). And there is also his obsession with words, his daily searches in the library, in dictionaries, in books, for the exact words, which can reduce the irreducible and name the unnameable. His story of feeling lost, of living in the “unbalance” of things, can really speak to anyone who has been unable to recognize themselves in their own reflection in the mirror at least once.
Alcide Pierantozzi wrote these searing pages as if his body were a seismograph, recording his psychic distress in its purest form. He describes the poetic and brutal violence of a lost mind that is trying to find an impossible stability, but which is always, always, trying to save itself. Pierantozzi has succeeded in giving voice to a very strong collective need: accurately naming psychological distress, alienation, medicalization, and loneliness. A feat that can only be achieved by great literature.