Now that Virgil Scapin is dead

Now that Virgilio Scapin is dead, we will have to do our best not to reproach him for leaving us alone to remember him.
(Marco Cavalli)

Now that Virgilio Scapin is dead, we will have to do our best not to reproach him for leaving us alone to remember Him. It is difficult to break away from the person we love, the goodness he inspires which makes us so precious, so dear. Lucky Virgilio had the gift of being loved especially for his faults.

If there is one thing that he cannot be blamed for, it is precisely to have made his flaws some of his many qualities. Not that it cost him a lot of effort: he did everything for us.

But for this reason we feel that we must thank him: we will no longer encounter a person who has succeeded as himself and by giving us the illusion of having manufactured it according to our own desires.

His infinite laziness will be missed. Finally a man who refused to appear better in the eyes of anyone and who urged us with his behavior to resign a scruple so tiring and harassing.

Many were the things that Virgilio could not do and more numerous still those he had no desire to learn how; not even if the occasion presented itself. What was the need, moreover, to learn something others could do better than him? Chronic laziness, not redeemable, does not know what to do with the hand it would need. It does not feed on good examples, it does not see in the diversity of the characters a reproach aimed at its own.

It tolerates the relief that lifts it just from its fertile inertia, the time to regret it and the rush to savor its pleasures.

Ah, Virgilio Scapin’s gaze in front of the spectacle of the neighbor bustling around the things with which he established some sort of preferential relationship!

Brazenly inoperative, he observed us with entomological interest… us beings who are: breathless, judicious, a little humble, who believe in the end of the world and together discuss the sensible and honest way to improve it.

That presocratic Gaze said: Can an immortal soul be competent in superseded triumphs and ephemeral happiness?

Virgilio did not have a philosophy of life and could not miss it. On request, he suggested that he had much thought about the cases of human comedy, but he generally did not feel at home in thought.

He liked literature, and almost more as a reader than a writer. Consequently, he could not please his life, in particular the lives of others, the lives of those who do not want or can not be satisfied to contemplate it. The life of us who work, marry, bare children, believing with this to defeat the fear of not living Enough, not to live more.

Virgilio loved the country life, with its seasonal rhythms, its breaks from work that is ever so plentiful, its georgian culture of the senses, thoughts of food and drinks, sex in the middle and sleep in the tail end, a kind of presentiment and exorcism of death.

He immortalized this culture in his most beautiful and truest book, the Magnasoete, which has the outward form of a novel but the breath and brightness of a full-wall fresco.

Every time we open his book we are sure to find Virgilio and we would like that those who loved him did not forget how much Virgilio loved literature.

We remember with gratitude, how much Virgilio loved us, to our existences so far from his, even only to be able to make literature, and we read, we do not stop reading, his books. In them we meet; us, among each other, and him along with us.

Marco Cavalli