I titoli di coda di una vita insieme

“I would like to isolate the moment when I saw the crack and realised it was over, but I can’t find it, because it doesn’t exist. Love is discreet when it dies, it doesn’t complain or make a scene, it doesn’t tell us when it’s sick. We are the ones who are responsible for it, and everything that happens to it is our fault.” Fosco and Alice loved each other deeply. And soon, without really knowing why, they will say goodbye. For this reason, in a whirlwind of words that are more or less right or more or less wrong, night-time embraces, slammed doors, brand new lawyers and old recriminations, they decide to tell their story in their own way. With stubbornness, pain and even irony: everything that will never find a place in legal documents. Diego De Silva lets his most beloved character, the “failed lawyer” Vincenzo Malinconico, rest, to give us a great novel about the end of love. “Love is not one story, but two”. That is why Fosco and Alice have entrusted their respective lawyers with the words they cannot say to each other as they part. Alice longs for a dramatic conclusion, as if a great love were measured by the wounds, by the pain that can be inflicted. She wants emphasis, conflict, a stage. Fosco is softer, almost passive, inclined to accept any condition. And in the end, as in all separations, their positions will be translated into humiliating documents that say nothing because they know nothing about a life together. They sum up the pain, and also the joy, in simple words. To rewrite the closing credits of their story with a different dignity, they decide to retreat to a beloved house, among the ghosts of the past and of what has been betrayed, whether it be the happy years of childhood, that beautiful time when one learns about the world, lifelong friends or their own bond. Being there, in that house, also means searching for a common fire: their fire. It means going through regrets together until the suffering is exhausted, extracting what remains alive from the rubble of time and finding the strength to face things, even when they are frightening. Without renouncing the irony that distinguishes him, as a way of illuminating what matters, Diego De Silva manages to powerfully recount, through the voices of Fosco and Alice, the hopes, disappointments, buried happiness and complicated tangle of feelings that always accompany the end of a love affair.