"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
-- George Orwell, In front of your Nose, 1946

For the first time in nine or ten years my father called me on the phone few days ago. "Ciao corpodibacco" he said. "How are you doing." My more aware reader knows that what I mean is not that I haven't seen or talked to my father in nine years (we met on Xmas), but that he just never calls me or search for me or anything. That's our deal apparently.
Anyway he did, with my greatest surprise.
Surprise didn't lasted long. He needed help because his email wasn't working anymore. So it began a series of phone calls that went on for the following days entirely revolving around his problem with the fucking email. I mean entirely, like calling the helpdesk of your company and throwing at the voice that's helping you a single "how are you" balloon at the beginning, just to get rid of all formalities and focus on the important things.
There aren't questions about life, about love, about feelings, about the state of the soul or of the pockets or of the bodies or anything.
Where do you live, corpodibacco? What do you love? How's your health, fucking dad? There isn't hesitation, all you are is a name and a cell phone number very easy to remember when you need it --and my voice turns all round and prompt and filling the empty spaces. I keep the thing on track and focused on names of menu commands and procedures and send him home satisfied even when the problem isn't solved. Today he wasn't satisfied because I told him I hadn't time. He used his resentful tone to say "OK. As you wish. Later then". But usually he's satisfied that I took care of him. I'm the good whore.

I wonder what was it that turned my family into this splintered pot, cutting and blind. And where is love? Seriously?
My father always played the victim and always claimed love, the love he deserved and I wasn't giving him -- even after a beating or an humiliation he claimed to be the betrayed one.
But now I am adult, I am lost, I am dispersed and still I wonder, where is love? Love was supposed to be behind it all but there is nothing instead. Just crabbiness and insensitivity, that's all.

I know what's wrong with the splintered pot, it is that truth was never that important -- and it was so easy for him to forget the real face of it -- either when I was staying at my mother's or at my father's but with him it was scientifically perverse-- Politics and commitments and laughs were twisted to adhere to doctrine and so was the constant induced sense of guilt for everything. I dragged so many times my father onto the battlefield and cried and trembled trying to make him a rational enemy and not a so irrational one and was beaten and humiliated --and he never kept a diary of anything he said or thought or did, so that he hadn't to remember all the evil done, all the shit dragged around, or the wounds inflicted. He was the one who believed in Stalin and in the repression of the masses and then worshiped T.S. Eliot--

Yeah thanks for having had so many books dad, I don't know what would have happened of me without books, they showed me the way to sneak out-- so many times

Dad, wait, do you remember when you descended the stairs in a thundering noise and burst into my room where I was staying awake reading and you just started to violently throw the content of the bookshelves at me on the bed, dad? Remember when you sent me off on the streets of Mogadishu alone, eleven years old kid at noon in the empty dusty streets to find the five shelling bill I had somehow lost on the way? In the poorest neighbor? Remember the boy you publicly humiliated countless times because he wasn't brave or virile enough, and later humiliated because he was becoming too much virile? No dad, I know you don't fucking remember.

But I was wrong all the time, I am still wrong, how could I have known that my father was insane? And that I was going to be insane like him, in a different way? Because it's easy to see. Insanity is the only situation where the Orwell rule quoted here doesn't mean no shit. Nothing means no shit with insanity, only being the good whore and placate the beast and forget about the love that was promised a long time ago. I don't know who promised it anyway, if there ever was anyone.