Maria Teresa De Donato, Ph.D.
Traditional Naturopath, Homeopath, Life
Strategist, Author
Listen to this River
Interview with Aldo
Villagrossi Crotti
Writer and Poet
As article for this month I have chosen to interview my dear friend, writer
and poet Aldo Villagrossi Crotti. One man of a kind.
When I think of Aldo two prominent figures come right to my mind: Albert
Einstein and Woody Allen. And there is a reason for that...
Versatile, unpredictable, gifted with a no-nonsense attitude, pragmatic as well
as idealistic, endowed with an intellectual acumen and a sharp sense of humor,
talents of a few... you can like Aldo or not, find him to be nice or
unpleasant, agree with his thought or not but one thing is sure: he will not go
unnoticed at all, but, on the contrary, will leave an indelebile mark on your
life.
In my humble view, one of the professions that suits him best is that of a
stand-up comedian. For the time being, not being most likely fully aware of it
or simply not having been discovered by some eminent insider of the
entertainment industry yet, he opted to work as a writer and as a poet.
T: Aldo, Welcome to my blog
and thank you for having accepted to take part to this interview.
A: Thank you to you and to our readers.
T: Let’s start right away
with a question as simple as it is profound: Who is Aldo?
A: To be honest, I am still trying to figure it out. Most likely I am a
human being who is trying to unravel a complicated relational skein, given that
I love all living beings and all that is needed to their wellness, with this
being something that gives me great satisfactions but, every once in a while,
also too much to think about. After years spent trying to express my feelings
artistically and in different forms I eventually discovered poetry. This
doesn’t mean that I had not considered poetry before that time... in fact my
first poem dates back to the end of 1990, when I was just 22. At that time, I
used to write without having a specific poetic technique behind me, nor a source
for technical inspiration. Contrary to what I do today, I didn’t like to read
other poems and I am fully aware that at that time I was not even able to fully
understand them. We can say that that door, I mean that to the comprehension
[of poetry] had not been opened to me yet. Then one day I met Craig Czury, whom
I can define in no uncertain terms as my mentor. In those days Czury was
practicing what he had defined the “Creative non-poetry”, that is, a poetic
style that had been partially considered by Pier Paolo Pasolini and other poets
but that in Czury took a more consistent form with current issues, and which
appeared extraordinarily attractive to my eyes. Czury used to write poems that
were composed by phrases used by people he would meet while hitchhiking on the
Pennsylvania’s highways. He talked about social unrest, fracking, physical
illness, environmental damage, and of poor people living in a country that
strives to appear rich to its own eyes. It was a revelation. I understood that
that technique well represented the true meaning of my very existence, that is,
to speak up also for the last of the last and to transform their words into
poetry.
T: Very interesting. You
totally nailed one of the themes of the perpetual cultural debate, that is,
whether Art should be considered more as free expression of one’s own
individuality or rather as an instrument of social and political commitment. In
my view it can be both; the most important thing is to always have the
possibility to freely choose.
What is your personal
opinion on the matter?
A: I met artist of different kinds and levels. Sometimes people fall
victims to a strange demon, and they convince themselves to be able to produce
works of art. The main problem is that they actually act as they were really able
to reach that goal! I mean, that happens also to me after spending two hours on
the Milan’s freeway, while listening to the Leoncavallo. I start singing like
Pavarotti, but it’s just me. There are people who truly believe they are both
Pavarotti and D’Annunzio, and they sometimes take advantage of their political
and social connections to try and take off to reach stardom. Obviously, these
individuals remain always at the ground level, but they might still have in
place a certain substrate of notoriety that gives them the minimum dose of
cheers for as long as they remain connected to their sponsors, after that limbo
is assured to them. Art is just like that, it’s difficult to take off when you
are alive. Souls are much lighter and maybe the artist’s death increases the
chance for their credibility, so that the artist is seen as such only once they
have died. I could give you thousands of examples, Alda Merini is one of them.
Here we enter an area wher I have many enemies: I firmly believe that Art is not
necessarily supposed to be a career. I met people who had written a book and
were dreaming of making money out of it even before having their first draft
reviewed, can you imagine? Maybe the truth is the following: the higher the
artistic level the lower the possibility to be understood by the crowd. In
fact, for that matter, it is the crowd that makes stardom possible along with
the pursuing of its consequent and potential wealth. In the 70s being poetes maudits (=cursed
poets) with no money was ok, it was trendy. Today it is difficult to sustain it
even socially. If Art is used, on the contrary, as a form of social commitment,
and it is true art indeed, then why not. I would like, however, to talk about
those who do not have the financial resources to express their own art outside
of themselves, and again I can use the examples of Alda Merini or Cesare
Pavese. Do you remember Verrà la morte e
avrà i tuoi occhi? (=Death Will Come and Have Your Eyes). I mean, How many
worlds are in that sentence... one, two, ten? Are those eyes mine or Pavese’s?
Maybe they are the eyes of all of us. Pavese was, in reality, referring to the
eyes of his beloved one, and yet you can see how in this case Pavese is
speaking about himself as if there were no other human being in the world, and
he speaks in a fraction of time which is the very instant of death. Through La pioggia nel pineto (The Rain in the
Pinewood) what D’Annunzio truly describes are ten minutes of his life with
another person who is just vagly mentioned; ten minutes in a square meter of
ground while it’s raining. This is true art! In the end, if I carefully think
about it, receiving money for this... is quite humiliating for a poet. I know,
I shall end up dying as a poor man.
T: Since you are also an
extremely versatile person, who is interested in a great variety of topics,
many are going to be the themes we shall be considering. Let’s start,
therefore, with one which we do have in common: writing as a form of art,
hence, of free expression, but also as a demonstration of a social and
political commitment, as a therapeutic method, as an instrument of
self-knowledge, self-analysis and self-criticism.
Could you explain to us how
you ended up writing and why?
A: Writing is for me a necessity, although it’s not a way to give play to
my personal imagination. I rather act as an antenna. I pick up, process and
transmit emotional information. I end up knowing myself while writing? Thank
you for this input, I never thought about it. It’s true that every time I write
using the “creative non-poetry” technique I find myself discovering parts of me
I didn’t know. Therefore, yes, it is about self-knowledge, self-analysis, and
self-criticism. As for the self-criticism I would like to say a few things: I
am terrifying when it comes to me while I have the tendency to justify
everybody else. My wife says that if Hitler came tomorrow, a figure that hurts
me the most at 360°, if he came, as I said, crying and asked me to help him, I
would probably do so. And I fear she [my wife] is right. Furthermore, poetry is
not discriminatory, consequently, I would be inclined to help, through poetry,
everybody who would read it, thus including Hitler. I am not sure if what I am
saying makes sense.
T: I believe it does it very
well. This is an aspect related to the human nature, which is as beautiful as
it is rare and that I would really like to discuss with you further... maybe in
another occasion...
A: Whenever you wish. Since we want to believe in the transmigration of
souls, the very day we will be two whales we shall be talking in the shadow of
an iceberg while eating shrimps and drinking an aperitif. You know, something
else that amazes me is that art has undergone a sort of classification from
which specific categories of it have been excluded a priori from being defined
“works of art.” Do you know that when I bring my daughter to the cinema to
watch an animated movie I need to have my sun glasses with me for I shall be
leaving with tears in my eyes? Nothing causes me to get emotional as much as an
animated movie does. There are thousands of people who have worked on that
movie, and their emotions, their lives are all there, inside of it. Really
moving. I can’t help myself.
T: Aldo, in 1992 you
published your first work Appunti, per
l’appunto (Notes, precisely). Could you tell us what motivated you to write
it, about its contents, and its themes?
A: It was on the occasion of a collective art exhibit. Everybody brought
graphics, paintings, sculptures. I showed up with a couple of paintings and a
book that I gave away for free. I had something to say and something to show. I
published on that book some of my first poems, and one in particular, which was
an interesting game (I am still amused today even though I never applied that
technique anymore): I had chosen a text, a song by Jimi Hendrix, Little Wing, which was a sort of text in
between the lysergic and the nonsense that had impressed me for the contrast it
created between its harmonious part, of an extraordinary beauty, and the part
of its text that said almost nothing in terms of profound poetic significance.
I took that text and alternated Hendrix’s text to the verses of my poem that,
contrary to those of Little Wing did
have a very coherent meaning, lesser “airy” than those of Hendrix. The result
was that I ended up having a poem that created a sort of emotional swing, where
the tension of my words was tempered by the relaxing atmosphere of Hendrix’s
words. Absolutely fantastic, maybe even vaguely ironic. I didn’t have to wait
that long for the result: at that time to pay for my studies, I used to work as
a school bus driver for children with disabilities (a job I still regret today
for the richness that has conveyed to me) and people used to stop me outside
the school to tell me how much they appreciated that text.
T: Hence, what was orginally
intended as a simple experimentation ended up being followed, completely
unexpectedly, by a “social” success, so to speak. I am very happy for you and
glad that, since that time, your creativity has been rewarding you in terms of
heart and emotions, as well as also with a sense of being useful as a human
being and as a part of the whole.
A: As I mentioned before, the financial recognition for a work of art is an
aspect I personally consider a Renaissance one. We cannot assume that the
public might acknowledge the beauty of an artist’s work only by giving them
some money. I would rather prefer someone like my insurance agent who one day
said: “You know something, I need to
thank you.” I asked him: “What for?”
He said: “Because you need to know I
never read a book in my life except yours.”
T: This too has been,
therefore, a wonderful experience that has left its mark not only in your life,
but also in that of someone’s else, at least in your insurance agent’s.
In 2012 your book Le False Verità (The Fake Truths)
followed. In describing it you say: “In
1974 my family and I got involved in an international spy-story. At the center
of it there was the embalmed body of Evita Perón, the famous Evita. Everybody
knows she was embalmed; very few know that she was hidden at Milan’s
cemetery... ”
I know that after her death, Evita Perón, wife of Juan Perón, President of
the Argentinean people for two terms (1946-1955 and 1973-1974), was embalmed,
most likely due to her husband’s wishes, and that everything was organized so
that her body might not only find the right location, but also be visited by
and visible to the public. From the news I read, it looks like her premature
death, though, along with the various relocations her body underwent, and the
overthrow of the regime performed by the Colonels, through which Juan Perón
lost his power, determined a time of great turmoil in the country which
probably caused the displacement of Evita’s body.
From the latter’s death,
therefore, how do we end up to your personal involvement in this matter and to
the publication of your book?
A: This is the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. It was 1973 and
my father had just become a contractor for a great steel mill in Northern
Italy. Before we permanently relocated as a family, my father rented a room by
a landlord, a room which was next to the entrance of this big plant. Along with
him, there were other people, among whom an Argentinian technician who, since start,
became my father’s friend. This person insisted my father accompany him to the
abandoned cemetery where whole day long they searched for a tomb the
Argentinian maintained it was to be found there for sure. They found it and
repolished it from the brushwoods. On the tomb there were a name and a date:
Maria Maggi De Magistris’ widow and the date was something like 23-02-1956,
though we are not sure about that. For a
whole year this Argentinian gentleman went to the cemetery each and every
single day, bringing flowers and candles to the tomb, very often in our
company. When asked who that lady was he simply replied: “An acquaintance of mine who lived in Argentina but wished to be buried
here.” In July 1974 this person called us from Milan saying he absolutely
needed to go back to Argentina and asked to meet us for one last time. Somewhat
woozy and confused, we left to go and say him goodbye. That happened to be the
very last time we saw him despite he had given us his address. The letters we
sent him they all came back with a stamp stating “Unknown to the postman.”
We spoke about him for years, each year a little less. Then on Christmas
2008 my father and I were at home sitting on the sofa and watching a
documentary related to the story of
Mrs. Perón. All of a sudden we hear that in 1956, for security reasons, her
mummified body was moved to Italy and buried in Milan under the fake name of
Maria Maggi De Magistris’ widow who, according to Milan’s public records, was
born in the same town where the other tomb with the same name was located, that
is, the one we used to visit with the Argentinian. Picture the scene. My father
and I were looking in each other’s eyes as we had just seen a ghost. The book
was published after a four year reasearch.
T: Absolutely fascinating!
It sounds like reading Indiana Jones
or even The Da Vinci Code by Dan
Brown...
June 10th, 2014 the Italian
online journal Valseriana News in an
article dedicated to your book defined it “a
kaleidoscopic work” and, according to the analysis they made of it, the
book is presented as a thriller that, from start to finish, keeps us holding
our breath ...
Could you better explain
that by giving us a few details?
A: It’s very difficult to do so. This story is complicated on the grandest
imaginable scale. We could easily say that “reality overcomes fantasy,” but
here all elements seem to pinpoint the fact that the mind behind the
organization of the body’s relocation must have been a superior one. We cannot
even exclude the possibility that the corpse actually buried at the Recoleta’s
cemetery might be not that of Mrs. Perón. You must have probably been wondering
why I don’t call her “Evita” as everybody else does: that was a nickname she
used to accept only from children and from the crowds of the Plaza de
Mayo. Even her husband used to call her
not Evita but rather “chinita”, that is, “peasant girl”. Nobody could call her
directly “Evita” without provoking her negative reaction. I believe I checked
all that has been written, said and recorded about Mrs. Perón’s personal story.
I reached my own conclusions, wrote a novel but her story is constantly
evolving. Maybe one day the end of it will come, but only when the Vatican will
make its secret archives public. Otherwise... all are going to remain just hypothesis,
however fair the assumpions might be.
T: Let’s sincerely hope that
the Vatican sooner or later decides to do so. I wonder how many new or
different truths might emerge and what part of history might end up being
completely rewritten...
Now back to us... In 2013
you published La ragazza di Sighet – Da Auschwitz alla California: Una storia di
speranza (Edizioni Paoline) (The Girl from Sighet: A Memoir). What kind of
feelings, thoughts and emotions did you experience while writing this work?
When it comes to it, was your experience somehow different from the one you had
while working on your other books, and if yes, how?
A: I still get emotional. The Girl
from Sighet is one of those things that fell from the sky. One day I
misspelled my name while searching it on Google, and the latter suggested my
uncle’s name, Adolf, who had taken part to the Russian campaign and whose name
appeared on a book published in the US by a lady who survived the massacre at
Auschwitz, a girl coming from Sighet, the very town of Elie Wiesel. Some 10,000
people were deported from Sighet among them the author of this book who, in her
memoir, had wanted to remember my uncle. I got in touch with the author and,
with her permission, I translated her work. I submitted my translation to the
Edizioni Paoline which replied to me within the following two or three days
saying: “Wonderful. This is going to be
the 2013 Memorial Day Book.” The
Forward was written by the Italian historical novel prince Marco Buticchi. It
has been one of my greatest accomplishments.
T: Congratulations! This has
been, therefore, an amazing and well deserved success too. Personally, I do not
believe that things happen by chance... and your experiences seem to confirm
that “Someone” (you may call Him/Her/It G-d, Adonai, Universal Consciousness or
as you like the most) might have been opening doors to you that would have
otherwise been kept closed, hence that He/She/It might have been using you as
an instrument to spread this knowledge to Mankind... something that who knows
where it might lead you in the future...
A: I have a funny
relationship with G-d. Simply stated: we are collaborating.
T: Aldo, throughout our
lives we meet people of all sorts, walks of life, etnicities, cultural backgrounds.
Some will be just passing by... some others will stay for shorter or longer
periods, some forever. Each one of us is for the other an enrichment, a life
lesson. With some people, however, something really magic happens: we tuned in
together, perfectly and from start, thus regardless of age, sex, of being born
and raised in faraway, very different from each other countries and from all
the rest. I know this happened to you with Lu Xsun (Lu Xun) and with others...
Would you like to tell us
about it?
A: Now this is a very interesting topic. I am not sure whether we should
believe in the transmigration of souls or just rely upon a more coherent and
realistic line of thought; there are, however, objectively some times in life
when you meet a person, or simply you see them sitting at the table of a
restaurant, a few meters away from you, and you already know how their face
looks like when they are happy, when they are sad. You simply already know
them. And when you finally do meet them, it’s absolutely amazing to discover
that the impressions you had about them before really meeting them, are
confirmed. When this happens by means of a book, a poem, a phone call, there
you have it, everything is even more magical. Lu Xun or Craig Czury, Mois
Benarroch or my wife Fatma, they are all positive and enlightening loves at
first sight. The only person who came into my life and is my very reason of it
still remains, however, my daughter Claudia.
T: Yes, you are right. There
are things that happen and experiences we live that are beyond our
understanding and that, despite our attempts to explain them, they do remain
nonotheless shrouded in mystery...
Going back to your works...
In 2017 you got involved in the five continent anthology Oír Ese Río: Antologia para los rios del Mundo (Listen to this
River: Anthology for the World’s Rivers), a collection of poems dedicated to
the rivers, to which contemporary poets from all over the World have
contributed with poems written both in their original languages and with their
translations into Spanish and English. To what extent this work is important to
you as a Man and as a Poet and to what extent it is so for Planet Earth? What
motivated you to work on this anthology and how this book has enriched you from
a human, professional and cultural perspective?
A: In December 2015 Craig Czury got in touch with me and said: “Listen, we need to go out for a walk along
the river since Esteban Charpentier said that he wants a poem from each one of
us with the river as a topic.” I happily accepted Craig’s invitation and on
the morning of January 1st, 2016 we were both walking by the river surrounded
by an athmosphere I couldn’t but define ghostly yet wonderful. At that time
Craig was undergoing an excruciating gout attack which invalidated him seriously,
making it very hard for him to land on his right foot, this compelling him to
help himself with a stick he had named “Uncle Louis”, a nickname that, in
harmony with his style, reminded of the Italian expression “Anche lui?” (Him
too?). In short, you can easily imagine how difficult it must have been for
Craig on the first day of the new year, to walk by the river along its mired
and damp banks. Even so, we have to understand here the eroic and poetic side
of Master Craig: when confronted with the possibility of a source of
inspiration nothing can stop him.
We went back home, each one with a different idea. He wrote his poem, I
wrote mine. I wrote a poem that specifically spoke about the vision of a river,
a river that has been raped by man and a nature that has also been abused as
much as the river by the very man who today goes to him, the river, and begs to
be inspired by him in order to write a poem. “How dare you’ nature seems to say ‘to come with such an insolence and ask me this?” and even the
insects and the frogs of my poem seem not to be paying much attention to my
words. I find myself being indirectly guilty, and look at the river under a
different perspective. I describe him as it wouldn’t be him to move but rather
the earth, and everything that we throw into the river doesn’t go anywhere, it
stays there waiting for the next man, who will become aware of the havoc we
have caused.
I wrote all of this in a poetic form and sent it to the publisher.
The book got published and started to be distributed on a continental scale
in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela. One day Charpentier called
me and said: “You know something? There
is a young girl in Cartagena, Colombia who recorded a video where she reads
your poem by the bank of the river.” Later an article on a Colombian
magazine appeared, where my poem on the river was defined as “universal.” I was
surprised, amazed, touched and proud of myself.
T: Another big and well
deserved success, therefore. When what we write is read and appreciated by
somebody – whoever that somebody might be, whatever their profession is,
wherever they live or whatever they might believe in – we cannot be but happy.
As you yourself noticed, in these cases a sort of “Universal Love” ends up
being born between the other person and us; we feel them close to us, as if
they belonged to us, almost as they were members of our family...
Can you tell us about this
experience of yours as a Man and as an Author?
A: It’s a strange mechanism. There are two kinds of intimacy: the objective
one (in my case the restroom is one among the places I love the most for an
objective intimacy) and the induced one. In the case of an author the induced
intimacy is almost always compromised, but in the case of a poet it is
definitely lost. As soon as I write a poem I declare to the world at the top of
my lungs my idea of life. And the very moment I give away my induced intimacy
to the reader, if by any chance the reader tunes in with the author, a
mechanism is triggered that transforms these two elements in two opposite poles
that attract each other. I am aware tha you like what I write, as well as you
look forward for me to write it so that you can read it. Imagine what a deadly
attraction that is!
T: Very true. This is
another as wonderful as profound a thought which would require more time to be
explored and elaborated and which we need, however, to postpone to another
time... How, especially this last book
of yours, could be of help not only to the public at large but also to organizations
working in the Environment or alike fields?
A: When I went to Chile I asked a friend of mine how it was possible to
democratically depose the dictator Augusto Pinochet and his regime. He looked
me in the eyes and said: “By using
metaphors.”
T: Thank you, Aldo, for
having been here with us today. I wish with all my heart that you may continue
to have much success as man, father, husband, as well as as author.
A: Thank you so much, Teresa, it has been my greatest pleasure and I hope
that all that you wish to me may multiply in your life thousands times.
T: Aldo, What if our readers
wished to get in touch with you to gather more information about your
activities or to buy some of your books, how can they do so?
A: aldo.villagrossi@gmail.com
is my email. I usually reply to everybody and I am very happy to do so.
MariaTeresaDeDonato-AldoVillagrossiCrotti©2018. All Rights Reserved.
