1000 strokes

illy offers its support to Scritture Giovani and the Festivaletteratura Mantova with the aim of providing opportunities, stimulating discussion and encouraging dialogue.

“Do you think one is willing to cross conventional boundary lines when their objectives that lies beyond is clear?”
Border crossing is actually easier tackled when what lies beyond is relatively unknown, when it’s not all that clear and predictable. For example, who would ever want to go to London to work as a kitchen-helper if it were clear from the start how miserable and menial the days that lie ahead can be, days of having to pluck chicken clean in the company, lets say, of sweaty Sevillians or Greeks?

Yet there are stacks of kids all over southern Europe who daydream of a British summer, of going for a ride on a red double-decker. And there’s no better reason for wanting to do it than the fact that the border is there and you just can’t wait to get across it, to look back over your shoulder at those left behind and make a rude gesture, to be done with all the wingtrimming rules and regulations back home. Wings can give the thrill of flight but only when used to overcome a prohibition, a restriction, a border, a boundary line that was always there, coldly staring back at you and growing more unbearable day by day, and now it’s finally left behind. Little does it matter what it’s like on the other side. You’re there and that’s already a reward in itself.
It’s a life-booster, a taste of something new and flavoursome:-for a few days at least.

COME LOOSE YOUR DOGS
He walks through the city fighting mutely against the March cold, he’s tall and thin, with wide cheekbones and deep-set eyes,people stop to look at him,he’s handsome and knows it,his name is Elias and at eighteen he fled from an island in the South and, today, his father called him for the first time in years,after a century of silence between them, and hatred from the boy for that man who one September evening, wounded him forever, he fled from a land of sunshine and now he battles with seven million souls in a metropolis-world.

He’s been to see a Mexican film in the little cinema at the Angel, a story of dogs and betting and life which scratches and makes you bleed, a story of people as desperate as he was when he arrived here, in a dirty wicked city the likes of which he’d never seen before, nor imagined -You can’t catch me – he says to his father in his thoughts – I’m not yours any more, I’m nobody’s – he’s twenty-three and it seems a lot to him, he’s got a weekend job and a bed-sit on the border between the bohemian quarter and the tower block suburbs bursting with Turkish and Indian and Pakistani families…