(Rivista Internazionale - December 1994: We are as old as our hopes - 3/6)

Santiago, Chile. The President of the Chilean Association, Regulo Valenzuela Matte (left), during the ceremony for awarding the Matilde Maresca International Prize "For the Dignity of the Elderly" to Msgr. Sergio Correa Gac, head of the "Fundacion Las Rosas de Ayuda Fraterna" from 1972.

We are all, Buzzati warns us, more or less like the old Signora Luisa: alone with our heap of memories fluttering on the horizon like funeral trappings.
Our children? They are no longer ours, lured away by other interests, other attractions. «Raising their heads they greet us happily from the street, but without any enthusiasm, freeing their souls of this last duty, and then they wander off through the gardens, in love» (5).
Friends? Vanished. You make an effort to find them in town, but your «steps echo mysteriously from one house to the other saying: What are you doing? What do you want? Don't you realize that it's all useless?» (6).
«At night, when sleeping, things and people will pop out of me one by one, and I won't know anything about it. Only after months, or years, one evening, taken by nostalgia, I will send out a plea. Who will reply? Oh, few, very few.
This is how human solitude occurs» (7).
You cannot live with this solitude, not even when you possess all your strength. Cesare Pavese committed suicide at 42 years of age, because he was incapable of supporting «the greatest misfortune which is solitude».
In his poem Lavorare stanca he wrote: Solitary man wants only to sleep. / When the last star goes out in the sky, / man slowly prepares his pipe and lights it.
And if an old man can't manage to sleep? If he is not even able to light a pipe to kill time? Rejecting suicide - few, very few want it - we resign ourselves to living in a small hell: listless, closed and desperate, like Borges, Garcia Marquez or Beckett's characters.
In Marcello Venturi's last novel, Il giorno e l'ora, an old man feels that the time has come to leave home, «when his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren would have thrown him out into the street to enjoy their holidays in peace» (8).
To go where? To a hotel for the old. This is what society calls the old people's home. It changes the names of things «in the attempt to keep its conscience clean». The hero of the novel, rather than ending up in the home which only needs the gravestones to make it a cemetery «took a faster way out».

Helpers in the "Las Rosas de Ayuda Fraterna" Foundation during the distribution of clothing to the elderly.

The fleeting light of sunset
The cases we have presented are dramatic and with no way out. When a society is imbued with materialism and the cult of efficiency; when the so-called youth culture is exalted, presenting the age of a youth as the only life model - that is of those who can produce, possess, and fully enjoy every satisfaction; when essential values (love, friendship, solidarity) are lacking; when one lives under empty and closed skies, without any supernatural and religious dimension, then it is all over for the old person. No hope, no true joy, no goal for which it is worth living. In the sunset - or almost - of this existence some old people have the intuition that these empty and closed skies could become full and populated, offering a decisive turning-point to their sad existence. An old lawyer with a bad heart, protagonist of François Mauriac's Groviglio di Vipere, tells about his defeat as a man, his desperate loneliness, his thirst for hate and revenge.
He is «the man who doesn't love himself», the man with whom he lives because he has money and power, the man who never smiles.
Locked up in his room, he plots against those who have condemned him to his martyrdom of hate and loneliness; he has become a nest of vipers, no longer a man but an obsession, a dialectic force for obligating all those who are waiting for him to "croak" to inherit his goods.
And yet sometimes his abashed and lifeless humanity is jolted and reveals new aspects, as when he feels a little love around him. With little Maria he even manages to be tender («He called her and she came, he grasped her in his arms and she cuddled up to him willingly»). One day when a priest tells him «You are very good» he feels a "kind of sweetness" in his heart which makes him perceive a new dimension in life.
In reality, there is a "secret key" in the heart of the old lawyer capable of freeing him from the cold lethargy in which he had sunk. When he realises that he can become the object of love for someone he awakens, his heart is shaken with feelings of youthfulness, sweet, secret harmonies are heard again. A ray of light strikes through his heart: and if God had come not for the just, but for wretches like me? If Grace could defeat the "frightening poverty of his heart" and change its barrenness? If he could become another person?
The beautiful dream comes true, almost as if by magic. «But this evening I am completely indifferent to what in the deepest meaning of the word, was my interest. I finally belong to nothing.

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(5) ivi, 26.
(6) Id., Sessanta racconti, Mondadori, Milan 1958,404.
(7) Id, In quel preciso momento, cit. 14.
(8) M. Venturi, Il giorno e l'ora, De Agostini, Novara 1987, 52.

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