Stefania: This generation of youths horrifies me. Supported by this state for years, when they realise they’re smart, they go study or work in America or London, forgetting about the support. They have no civil vocation. As a young girl, in the occupied arts department, I oozed civil vocation.
Jep: Is that so?
Stefania: Yes, why?
Eusebio: Come off it…
Stefania: What do you know? In those years you were in Naples being a loafer with posh girls and writing your only novelette.
Jep: I didn’t notice that history was being made.
Romano: Novelette? It was a masterpiece of Italian literature! I confirm that Jep and civil vocation never got along, he was lazy and the other hyperactive.
Stefania: Romano, stop sucking up to your idol, you’re pathetic! “The Human Apparatus” was a narrow-minded, frivolous book and pretentious too, like its title. Jep knows that. That’s why he stopped there.
Jep: Sorry, what about you then?
Stefania: I tried changing things with literature. I wrote 11 novels, and a book about the Party’s official history.
Jep: You’re forgetting your contribution
to that reality show…
Romano: “Girl Farm”.
Stefania: Television can be a very formative experience! I always go when I’m invited. I get my hands dirty, I try things…I don’t spend my life being a snob.
Dadina: Are you saying that a socially committed writer is advantaged, and safeguarded, compared to a novelist who deals with, how can I say…with feelings?
Jep: Of course she is!
Stefania: The cause someone commits their life to isn’t secondary. Like creating a family, dedicating oneself with sacrifice to raising one’s children day after day. Eusebio and I have four children, we plan the future together. I work hard to be both a mother and a woman, but at the end of the day I feel I’ve done something important.
Dadina: So if we don’t have children we should contemplate the idea of suicide?
Stefania: I don’t mean you, of course.
Jep: She means me.
Stefania: Dadina, I admire you greatly. You’re a badass.
Jep: Do you use “badass” in any of your 11 novels?
Stefania: Yes, I do, I try to be modern. Modernity is badass.
Jep: What great conviction! Should I envy you or be repelled?
Stefania: Yes, I have convictions. I’m 53…
Jep: You’d never know.
Romano: Never.
Stefania: I’m 53, I’ve suffered, I bounced back, and learned lots about life. Well, I can see you have nothing to say, at last.
Jep: I was drinking…As we care about you, we don’t want to embarrass you. You know, all this boastful talk, all this serious ostentatiousness, all this ego…These harsh damning judgments of yours hide a certain fragility, a feeling of inadequacy and above all a series of untruths. We care about you, we know you. We also know our untruths and for this, unlike you, we end up talking about nonsense, about trivial matters, because we don’t want to revel in our pettiness.
Stefania: What untruths are you talking about? Everything I said is true, it’s what I am, what I believe in.
Jep: Please, I’m a gentleman. Don’t destroy my only certainty.
Stefania: Tell me exactly what my lies are and what my fragility is! I’m a woman with balls, tell me!
Jep: “Woman with balls” would be too much for any gentleman. All right, Stefania, you asked for it. In random order: Your civil vocation during your student days went unnoticed. But another vocation of yours is remembered by many, the one practiced by you then, in the university toilets. You wrote about the Party because you were its leader’s mistress. And your 11 novels, published by a small publishing house subsidized by the Party, reviewed by minor Party-affiliated newspapers, are insignificant, everyone says so. I’m not saying my novelette was any better, I agree with you there. Your relationship with Eusebio…What relationship? Eusebio loves Giordano, everyone knows. He has for years. They lunch every day at Arnaldo’s, under the coat rack, like sweethearts under an oak tree. You all know but turn a blind eye. Your dedication to your children, with all the sacrifices entailed… You work all week in TV, you go out every night, even on Mondays, when popper dealers don’t even venture out. You’re never with your children, not even on the long holidays you take. And plus you have a butler, a waiter, a cook, a chauffeur who drives the kids to school, three babysitters, so… how and when exactly do you make any sacrifices? These are the untruths and fragility I’m talking about. Stefania, mother and woman. You’re 53, with a life in tatters, like the rest of us. Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We’re all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little…Don’t you agree?
Sokan magukra vehetnék.
