Cuoio

In Santa Croce, tanners pass down their craft like a faith, imprisoned in warehouses that resemble cathedrals, surrounded by expanses of leather made eternal by chrome: “Leather is everywhere, leather is the place where all the memories of people like us come together”. It is there that Michelangelo insists on staying. “What have we become?” he keeps asking himself, as he tries to defend what remains of his family and his former life. Before his father bankrupted his grandfather’s tannery, before his mother disappeared on a hot summer’s day and before his brother stopped talking forever. Michelangelo does not know if his battle is lost from the outset. But it is one he cannot give up, made of the same stuff as his universe: a small world branded with fire that bears a frightening resemblance to the world we all inhabit. Santa Croce is a leather paradise. Seen from above, it can look like “a futuristic city and, at the same time, the most ancient and unchanging place of a furious civilisation”. Once upon a time, Cavalcanti e Figli had no competitors among the tanneries of Tuscany, with orders from all over the world and the granite strength of an empire. Now, however, almost nothing remains. Just the responsibilities of fathers and the pain of children, just the inability to talk to each other despite the good, just the hides. The hides that chemistry can make eternal, just as eternal are the omissions of a family that has consumed its existence in chrome. In Michelangelo’s immobile world, what awakens him is the opportunity to make a career in the tannery that has engulfed them. He could become a process manager, he could become one at twenty-five, provided he convinces his father to sell the walls of their industry. But for that increasingly helpless father, increasingly similar to the plants he lovingly cares for every day, giving in would be like admitting that he had destroyed the fabric that was supposed to keep them all together, and badly tanned leather is useless. So Michelangelo sets out to find his mother: her signature would suffice, but above all, it would suffice to know where she is, because she left, to understand when they broke up and what they really became. That would suffice, perhaps, at least to save his brother: everything is to save Emanuele. To pull him out of the darkness, to go back. Thanks to his feverish imagination and a language where every word is weighed with a contagious obsession, Gabriele Cavallini transports us to a world of rare power, told by someone who knows it from the inside, with technical expertise and desperate closeness. Cuoio is the novel of an empire that no longer exists, founded and destroyed in the space of three generations. It is the story of violence that strikes men and animals with the same intensity as burning comets. And it is the parable of two brothers, the same one that begins with Cain and Abel and continues to this day, blurring the lines of guilt. Because some lives are born wounded, and all they can do is stay close and try to preserve the light.