— and where have they gone, the swarms of crinkly-mouthed climacterials with black, butterfly-wing-framed glasses like carnival masks, cobweb-fine matron’s coifs for their laundry-blue-rinsed hair and ants in their pants? Where have their Mennen-drenched, corpse-washed escorts and consorts gone with their raspberry-colored slacks, violently checkered clown jackets, snow-white moccasins on huge feet, and toilet-bowl-white porcelain teeth in their kissers, the Supermen of America’s short-lived supremacy? …
to be sure, one must bear in mind that anyone born then, twenty years ago, is now twenty years old: for anyone at the outset of his life, a decade is enough to change a world, and certainly more so two decades, or even four; but seen from the end of a life, the decades went by like last week — and yet the fusti of Trastevere, so much liked by the American climacterials, with attractively swollen thorax muscles under skintight T-shirts, are now dyspeptic postal workers and fat espresso-bar managers; Anita Ekberg and Gina Lollobrigida hint at their not sharing the secret of Dorian Gray, in their cases the news has leaked out; meanwhile, the babies born in Lollo’s and Anita’s heyday and now twenty years old are crippling one another with monkey wrenches and bicycle chains, mowing down dutiful government servants and unpopular judges in broad daylight with sheaves of machine-gun fire; yet the epoch is not lively and dynamic, but oddly stagnant, not colorful, gaudy, but utterly gray like the winter weather — the closer the Molotov cocktails and homemade bombs explode (philanthropic publishers offer how-to instructions at a low cost in paperback editions), the more blood flows across the sidewalk into the gutters, the more hectically the pantere of the Carabinieri race around corners with howling sirens and flashing blue lights, then the more life becomes provincial, a drab Biedermeier: the cities are quiet, dead quiet, anyone with an eight- or nine-digit bank account (lire are such a flimsy currency) fears to venture out after the stores close for the night, bodyguards with machine guns, safety catches released, stand in front of building entrances, the children are in Switzerland (and most bank accounts too, of course), the evening’s entertainment on television is both suspenseful and paralyzing: it shows you highly exciting events of no consequence whatever, a most romantic standstill, a still-life of chaos, so to say, of scandals, of corruption and continuous crises — government crises, oil crises, supply crises; the national passions for soccer and bicycle racing are gradually replaced by a national passion for strikes; the more visible the mechanisms of behind-the-scenes wire-pullers become, thanks to the indefatigable educational efforts of (bribable) journalism, then the more anonymously these selfsame wire-pullers withdraw into obscurity ….
meanwhile, clouds of poison gas escape accidentally and turn children’s faces into cactus blossoms, the coasts rot under the beached dead fish, the climate of southern Italy becomes like Scotland’s but scientists assure us that this has nothing to do with the increasing density of jet planes in the stratosphere … it may be understandable that the twenty-year-olds today are restless, more restless than even we were at their age, the pressure bothers them more than it bothers us, our generation has gone through so much it can put up with this, too — above all, we have learned to put up with things, to make the best, even of the worst; but the young people, born back then when he first had come to Rome — in a word, his son’s contemporaries, if the son had survived, the poor little thing …
he instantly pushes the thought aside: he stops thinking of his son, forbids himself to think of him — what was I thinking about? Yes, the young people of today: why are they so restless? We were restless because of our dreams — dreams of the future. Do they have a future? What do they dream about? socialism come true at last? heroism in the adventure of the Revolution? or simply world fame as a rock singer? as a hero of Formula-I racing? … Certainly not about love, as we did when we were their age; they’ve got it too easy in this respect, they’re already copulating at the onset of puberty, in short pants and pinafores, so to speak; at twenty, they have acquired the sexual experiences of an active man in his mid-forties; enviable but of course detrimental to eroticism; the feelings are sure to deaden with such an unresisting, such an insensitive, such a semi-involved possibility of sexual activity — or at least so our envy encourages us to presume. As for great love, the very notion of which in our time made all the feelings in the forehead and the pit of the stomach and the Venus mound contract in poignantly sweet ardor — the unique great love with which life is fulfilled and bliss on earth attained, the one great love that is the attained goal of troth, loyalty, allegiance to the banner that waves over a life — they, the young ones today, most likely never dream of that. So they say, in magazines, anyway; and polls, surveys, and statistical analyses confirm it ….
Be that as it may: they must dream about something, they too, these young people, even if only about finding their identity. For what made him, the man with gray hair and the box of marrons glacés under his arm, walking along the Via Veneto to visit a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife — what made him identical with the forty-year-old of twenty years ago, here, outside one of the now vanished cafés, Rome-hungry and future-minded, freshly divorced from his (second, Jewish) wife, and expecting his little boy to be awarded to him; what made him one and the same person as the adolescent on the hilltop in the Carpathians half a century ago and, even further back, the child who awakened at night (because they feared the Bolsheviks were coming), or the air-raid-shelter sitter under the hail of bombs in Berlin, and the freebooter in the intellectuals’ interregnum during the Ice Age of the German rubble-cities, and the writer of screenplays for Cinecittaà during the fifties — what made him one with all these characters and various other forms of his diverse metamorphoses? Yes, there was an answer. The thing that made them all one and the same person was: dreaming. When he thought I, he felt as if he were dreaming himself up: Somnio, ergo sum—I dream myself up, therefore I am.