Il dio disarmato

‘At first there is a squeal of tyres on the asphalt, a bump in the air, the sound of a car horn, and immediately afterwards what sounds like the concert of a jackhammer. The student looks up from the newspaper and turns in the direction from which that noise is coming. What happened at 9.02 a.m. on 16 March 1978 is still happening’. The kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades and the massacre of the five escort agents is the event that generated the most serious emotional, political and social rift in republican history. The attack lasted three minutes. Three minutes that, more than forty years later, continue to be the subject of research, reconstruction and speculation. But this, it must be said, is not an essay: we are in the territory of literature here. And every writer, as we know, manipulates time, he can condense ten years into a sentence or dilute a few seconds and make them last as long as he wants, if in those seconds there is a truth on which the gaze continues to rest. In a way, the method is that of traumatic realism, the same one Andy Warhol used in his serial images: staging and replicating in order to touch the truth. Not the historical truth, but the more elusive one of individual and collective perception. Here then are alternating in the narration the eyewitnesses, the brigadiers, the politicians, the men of the escort, even historical figures who lived centuries earlier. And the action, the shots, the escape, the device that is triggered and endlessly replicated, perennially identical to itself, but observed each time from a different perspective. Interwoven with the public facts is the private account of the last eight hours of Aldo Moro’s life before the kidnapping. Il dio disarmato is a novel without adjectives: historical, political, philosophical, lyrical, documentary; no term can really define it. It is a book that deeply investigates individual choices and the designs of destiny, the territory and urban space, the substance of time, the secret murmur of the life of one of the most important men in the history of Italy, who when he returned home shrugged off the adjective ‘political’ to try to be just a man.