Monica Sarsini, p.2
frangenti
You can go months without meeting a frangente: there are those who kill time fishing and those who decide to be sick so they can slip into bed and wait for the frangenti to rouse them like the Prince roused Sleeping Beauty in the woods. It can be the rock hurled from a catapult, a coin in the brook.
The inhabitants of Bagno Cavallo find bunches of them in the crops. From this interesting fact, it can be deduced that common frangenti belong to the family of fungi, and that they therefore need, for their own well-being, the presence of a cool environment, barely dressed in light. Without someone who knows how to prepare them, they assume an abulic air, but, in reality like carnivorous plants, they’re ready to seize the gaze that settles on them. Something arises from the reflection, as if they had the power to produce in those that have deviated from carelessness an energetic push forward, an impulse to change the state of things.
Frangenti inhabited the universe before men and any other living organism. It’s difficult to establish if the circulatory movement with which they flutter about on the earth’s crust follows a purpose, or if they too, like us, justify only gropingly the opportunity to founder, to sink or emerge. Studies maintain that moving in a circle has permitted man the leisure to extricate himself from the flora and the fauna with which he was going to come to blows. Others hypothesize that it was the frangenti to promote the birth of men in order to have someone who acts and puts history before indolence. There are, furthermore, those who assert that frangenti and men are the same thing.
Southern frangenti are found in the fire-works that gush forth from the liquid eyes of the inhabitants of white, azure and pink houses, in the middle of the prickly pears whose leaves resemble tails of young beavers. The women of the place, dressed in black and hidden by the recurrent curves of the small sunny walls, vanish in the bluish fig-trees, in giant olive-trees, and hide behind the dramatics of bearing a row of thunderous teeth, and numerous winking looks.
Children burst into flame there, gestures wriggle like clear water fish in futurist neighborhoods, bombarded at the corners with light.
In the northern zones the frangente doesn’t possess a body. It makes so much noise that they all address their thought, their desire to it, but it’s left where it’s found because when they were ready there was no one with whom to share it. It has dark almond-shaped eyes that wander up and down. There’s one who still believes us, but to prevail it’s the irritation that sprouts sharpened among the roots of divans, on the importunate remains of drawing-rooms, where tresses of flowers, high up, establish the stillness of the house, a not innocuous museum of stolen steps, of suffocated stammering from the humming of the television always on.
On the tops of the mountains, the frangenti are up against serious problems for the beaks of coupling birds are like swordsmen among the thin sheets of rocks. The frangenti have elaborated a defense that allows them to live there ar least a season, camouflaging themselves like petals in the not very fleshy corolla of edelweiss. It happens that men with pickaxes bent furtively to collect them without suspecting that they would slip into the vase on the fire-place an element contrary to the stasis, which day after day would modify the state of the soul of the room. Thus, no one will feel in the mood anymore for a game of cards or a drink of grappa in company, the gesture of drawing the chairs near the table or of uncorking the bottle will be cracked by an impression of emptiness and ridicule. Surely, it’s a question of silenced moods, repressed in the mind of he who notices them, refusing to comply with them.
It’s then that the frangenti fatten, becoming exorbitant, and there’s no way to limit their undertaking until the person who hosts them decides to fling cards down on the table. Once the noise of something that’s going to pieces is perceived, they return to the mountaintops softened with snow, to the crests transparent with ice, to the trees hooded with white, to the impressions sunk in the paths, to the weight of silence on the intersected brow of the wood, to the bending of the highest branches, to the thin and intoxicating air, to the skin dotted with red.
It’s amazing how, at times, instead of attributing the event that upsets our habits to the presence of a frangente, it makes us take it by the hand and lose a sense of proportion, without realizing that we’re thus playing exactly the game at which the frangente was aiming. Peculiar to it is, in fact, its wanting to be noticed, the arrogance with which it inserts itself into tranquility, the craving to be the protagonist. There are archaic frangenti, ancient as armadillos, stretched out in the prehistoric sun to rush more quickly against the body of an innocent person. It’s a sacrificial dynasty of frangenti, which exasperates and obscures.