Macaco

Macaco lives alone, chats with his cats and cannot forget the woman he loved. With his friends Bestemmia and Zitto, he digs the hard soil of the Aosta Valley by hand. On Sundays, when the earth rests, he moves from the potato fields to the basketball courts. “You don’t confuse words, you confuse life,” someone tells him. And to confuse himself less, Macaco begins to tell stories. With a lively language that moves us and makes us laugh in the same sentence. His thoughts get to the heart of things, they excite, reveal and engage. Because they come from his special mind and are set in a candid, contemporary peasant epic, as cruel and powerful as life itself. In Macaco there is a world that one might believe to be distant but which is closer than ever: Simone Torino, who worked as a farm labourer for years, knows this well. There is the life of men of few words but carefully chosen ones. There are the old haystacks, the ones that don’t come apart, that look like yellow clouds. There is pity for a hen caught by a hawk and half eaten alive, in Macaco’s face as he lowers his axe. And there is Bestemmia, who drinks like an animal and then sets about learning sign language to talk to Zitto, who, when he wants to communicate, “moves the air up and down, with a dance of fingers and hands”. Working the fields together, Macaco, Bestemmia and Zitto have become brothers. Bestemmia ploughs better than a tractor, Zitto is a master of weeding and smells of aftershave and cigarettes, Macaco always seems to be walking downhill. And it is with this closeness, built more on presence than on words, that they face everything. Bestemmia’s problems, Zitto’s accident, a girl’s rejection or the eternal gestures of the harvest. And then the biggest event of all: that phone call before the new year with the order to “fertilise chemically, weed chemically, spray chemically”. The three of them know that nature is like us: sometimes it is welcoming, like the furrows for potatoes, other times less so, like stony ground. But you gain from the fact that the sheaves are clouds, that you become a “slave to the nose” of the wind, the theatre of cats in their sleep, and two friends, the kind who know how to think.