My father's house in L. is filled with all the paintings he did since when he retired from work. The house has three floors and a little garden and it faces a steep terraced cliff that goes down to an invisible river which flows silently in winter and noisily in autumn. If you lean out of the balcony you see the blue sea down to the right and the mount before the Five Lands. On the other side of the small valley there's another village fortified on the crown of the hill which looks down to the house. Although the village is the single most visible thing from any window of my father's house, my father recurrently portrays it in his paintings copying it from a photo.

My father and his wife always complain about the cost of life, remarking the bad habits of the middle-class and the non-authentic lifestyle of the Italian bourgeois. They don't have a mirror in the house where they are visible to themselves for what they are in reality. They live in an imaginary world, always on the side of the oppressed and where they don't oppress anyone. For them life is all about revenge and compensations. Never about trying to make peace with things (that would be reactionary).

If it makes him feel better with himself, my father has no problem to demolish anything or everything he can reach for, either by ridiculing or criticizing without stopping short for his son or wife or daughter or whatever. He always saves himself. He always did. Half bald since when he was 25, my father is the kind of guy who can show scorn for your too long hair without feeling ridicule at all. He feels better, instead, because when he was young his hair where 'thicker'.

My father's aggressiveness is always boiling inside him even when it is not noticeable. In the past it was always noticeable, actually, but because we see each other just three days or less at a time, he must believe he has to behave somehow and so he masks it behind silence and occasional exhaling. If I listen to my sister, I am supposed to be thankful for this effort (I am).
But it's there, just like in the old-times, ready to explode as soon as you contradict him more than once. When it happens, in a second his voice comes out sudden and violent, for the smallest thing, and his look turns suddenly crazy and ready for violence. You back out. He has to prevail anyway. Afterwards he makes fun of your wrongness.

His lack of sensitivity depresses me. I know it is not incapacity (he has a great musical sensitivity for example) as much as it is the result of a choice: having decided many years ago that real men don't indulge in sensitiveness and sentimentality, he gradually atrophied them slowing down his empathy responses to almost total immobility. When I came to life he was 37 and already totally affected by this process beyond a point of no-return.

My father's position in life is that he is a victim. Every little thing he does is followed by a moaning of pain and fatigue. His stance with family relationships has always been that nobody loved him enough, period. The largest painting he ever did represent himself in foreground, naked and screaming in pain, while on the background other people, who look a little like his family (his wife, his sons: without being exactly them, all naked) try to pull him away with cruel or dull expression on their faces.
I remember the first time I saw that picture. My father was trying to convince my sister to make her bed on the coach facing the picture.
"Why, what's the problem with facing this way?" he was asking. My sister, who suffered her entire life of nightmares and night fears, was shaking her head firmly, moving the pillow on the other side. My father insistence wasn't wicked, it was only the conflicting desire of not being judged too harshly by his daughter, and still be pitied by her.

I knew then I wanted to tread on that picture and tear it apart and for the first time in my life do something directly against him.
One wants a lot of things he doesn't really wants.

(Every single repetitive lament uttered on this blog against my father is mostly here to adjure away the capital gut-wrenching fear, and that would be to wake up one day and discover that for some crazy rule of hereditariness I am becoming like him.)