Antonio Skármeta died a few days ago, leaving us with an increasingly desolate landscape. There are writers of long productions and others who become immortal with a single novel. In the case of the Chilean, his masterpiece, brief and profound, was originally titled ‘Burning Patience’. A descendant of Croatians, a graduate in philosophy and a self-confessed Ortega native, Skármeta closes with his disappearance the story of three fierce deaths: that of a novelist (himself), that of a poet (Neruda) and that of his postman (the Italian actor Massimo de Troisi ).
It’s hard to forget that beautiful movie, ‘Il postino’: On the Italian Salina Island, Mario Ruoppolo is a postman whose only client is Pablo Nerudaexiled because of his ideas. The quantity of the Chilean’s correspondence is such that the postman must go to the poet’s house every day, which is why a close friendship is established between the two. A sensual woman flies over the cards, but the strength of the conversations between the two protagonists is such that the passion is diluted in the beauty of the conversations. In the end, Neruda is authorized to return to his homeland and “disappears” from the scene; Years later he returns to the island and finds the news of the violent death of the postman due to police brutality.
What happens on the other side of the cameras is even sadder: Troisi, the protagonist, had postponed emergency heart surgery and the day after filming finished, when everyone was celebrating the end, exhausted, he retired to rest. They found him dead on the sheets. Nerudaexiled for his political ideas, obtained the Nobel Prize in 1971. A couple of years later, Pinochet burst in with blood and fire, overthrowing the president Salvador Allendeimposes his regime of terror, and the poet’s deteriorating health worsens: he dies a week later. They determine prostate cancer.
However, suspicions of crime appear immediately; a lethal injection, they say, could have been the cause. Those who at that time requested an obituary study of the poet’s remains were wrong; Some joined the list of those who disappeared during the brutal rule of the tyrant. The poet’s house in Black Island She was raped, looted, and her books burned. Today I make the postman’s words my own: “Do you believe that the entire world is a metaphor for something?”
#deaths #postman
