Signor Dido by Alberto Savinio

Author:Alberto Savinio [Savinio, Alberto; Pevear, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023581
Publisher: Counterpoint

A Strange Family

SIGNOR DIDO IS A PAINTER. TO ONE of his paintings he has given the name A Strange Family. It shows a family: father, mother, daughter. The pose of a group before the photographer’s lens. The father in a frock coat and standing (approximate era: 1905). The mother in the middle, the daughter to the right: both seated. The daughter on the verge of spinsterhood, which she combats by means of gauzy blouses and big ribbons at her waist and in her hair. The mother going on fifty (the fifty of 1905, far different from the fifty of today: cette jeunesse), that is, the age at which a woman, by rubbing her face with cucumber, assiduously correcting her eyelashes, cheeks, and lips, and smoothing out her network of wrinkles, transformed herself into a taffeta woman: shiny and rustling. The father a commendatore.

This is the group that forms the Strange Family. But, put like that, the group of the Strange Family has nothing strange about it.

The strangeness is in their faces. It comes from their faces. From that sort of banana that bars the father’s face; from the eye that swells like the entrance to an anthill on the mother’s face; from the eyes that protrude like celestial ping-pong balls from the eye sockets of the daughter.

Those who have seen this picture and arrived at a judgment of it are divided into two categories: those, and they are the majority, who say that these strangely eczematous faces have no other reason for being than that of making Signor Dido pass for an original painter; and those few who, knowing Signor Dido well, have taught themselves to understand the legitimacy and profundity of these strange representations.

Which are said to be strange, but in fact are the exact representation of the truth.

I will explain myself.

Man looks at the men and things around him and believes he sees them, but in truth he does not see them. Instead he sees so many fixed schemes of men and things that he carries inside him, which together form his personal and idealistic representation of the world.

What is wrong with this believing one sees while not seeing? Think of a policeman who, even in the most inveterate criminals, goes on seeing honest men and nothing but honest men.

Like a policeman of humanity and the world, Signor Dido is not an idealist. Whether by training or by innate faculty, he sees men and things beyond the veil of idealism. Not always (that would be frightening): sometimes. Then men and things reveal their—how shall I say?—archaeological aspect. Better: their profound aspect. Signor Dido, in other words, reveals what might be called the psychism of forms.

Men and things, seen in this way, are not beautiful. But for Signor Dido this lack of beauty does not matter. On the contrary. It makes him love men and things even more deeply. A sort of leper’s kiss.

Yesterday Signor Dido went to visit Colle del Cardinale, in the neighborhood of Perugia. At lunch,

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