Anna Spissu
Ed. Corbaccio, Milan 2008
pagg.189
On the one hand, the incarnation of absolute Evil, the pirate Dragut, on the other the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria who, in the pay of Charles V, "spent a good part of his long life chasing him". In the middle dead, many dead.
It is a story told in first person by the protagonists what is found in this first novel by Anna Spissu, from Liguria but transplanted to Milan.
"Today, Vico Dragut no longer exists. Or rather, this narrow alley between the houses has changed its name. The municipal administration has named it after a hero of the Risorgimento, one of those mentioned in the history books."
Dragut, indeed Thorgud, la Unsheathed sword of Islam, raged in the sixteenth century along the coasts of the Mediterranean sowing terror and death. He "was a loner, the pirate did it for himself, for his glory."
The sea was his world. "Finally I am back at sea, where there is the best life I know. I could say that I feel at home, even if a real house, as most human beings mean, I don't have it. All I need is the sword and my ships. They are my home. " Thus the pirate expresses himself in one of his elaborate reflections when his raids left him free time. Scorrerie that have also affected the Gulf of Tigullio. "That old bastard of Andrea Doria will be happy to know that I went near his house. He arms his galleys to chase me, I wait for him. So the ones I didn't kill yesterday in Rapallo, there. I'll kill one by one now. "
It is a story of the sea, with its men, good or bad, but in any case "there is nothing more extraordinary than the sea to transform a man."
Admiral Genovese, in his diary, reports what Charles V once said to him: "No one can be powerful on earth unless he is also powerful at sea." The admiral died shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday, the 25 November of the 1560. The same fate was followed by the Pirate, 5 years later, the 17 June 1565.
During yet another assault, this time on the island of Malta, a "splinter of a cannonball smashed his head." A curiosity: the cannon ball hangs on a wall of the Sanctuary of the Madonna di Valverde, in the province of Catania. The death of the Pirate was a great liberation. When his fleet was visible off some country, "in the short time of a dawn, the whole existence of a human being could change forever in the ferocity of an assault."
The Evil, however, did not die with Dragut and, in the last of the short stories set in our age, with which the chapters of the book are interspersed, presents itself: "men are mine when they kill other human beings, when they torture them, they rape them, or, more coldly, they wait with indifference, in their comfortable houses, that others die of hunger, of thirst, that they go mad with despair. I am always here. And I wait, with joy, for the darkness to cover everything. "
Gianlorenzo Capano
