In 1951, the great Italian writer Dino Buzatti (1906-1972) used irony to express his displeasure with Christmas grumps. Learning that an Australian radio station has just explained to children that Santa Claus does not exist, he pretends to rejoice at such a victory of the scientific spirit over superstitions. Let our children, he writes, “learn to believe in what they can see, what can be concretely demonstrated, what belongs to the realm of science — and that’s it.”
Without warning, however, the writer changes tone to deliver the true essence of his thought. “Yes, good God, let’s make abominable cretins out of them,” he notes. Let’s transform them into men without relief, dim, sad as a vegetarian menu, in perfect accord with reason and with science and therefore horribly melancholy. We understand that killing the imagination, for Buzatti, is to make humans “cold and presumptuous”, it is to make life unbearable.
Journalist for more than 40 years at Corriere della Sera, the major Milanese daily, Buzatti found renewed inspiration in the Christmas celebrations to feed the imagination of its readership. The unique collection Christmas stories and other texts (Robert Laffont, 2022, 272 pages) contains around thirty chronicles and news related to this theme. It offers, to Christmas friends, rich and moving literary delicacies.
Buzatti, a Catholic by education, said he was a non-believer, but was nonetheless fascinated by the mystery of the afterlife. In particular, he is credited with the formula “God who does not exist, I implore you”. In the preface to this collection, Delphine Gachet, his French translator, emphasizes that he often speaks of God or believers with “great benevolence”. His sensitivity for the humble and the little ones also brings him closer to the Christian tradition, whose canonical or apocryphal stories inspire him.
In 1959, in a short story entitled “Christmas is enough! Buzatti depicts the souls of the donkey and the ox in the nativity scene, who decide to come down to Earth to observe humans on Christmas Eve. So here they are in town, in the commercial excitement that precedes New Year’s Eve.
While the donkey rejoices in the spectacle, the ox worries about the fever that seizes everyone. A teacher, the donkey tries to reassure his bovine friend by explaining to him that things have changed over time. “You’re not used to hanging out with Modern Men, that’s all,” he said. To have fun, to experience joy, to feel happy, they need to put their nerves to the test. »
In the past, Buzatti recounts in his chronicle of the following year, Christmas was a “tender, moving and somewhat melancholy celebration”. Today, it has become “a frenzied fever, a kind of babelic fury” that stuns us and leaves us exhausted.
What happened ? Have we, asks the Italian writer, succumbed to Anglo-Saxon commercial customs? To the hype of capitalists without borders? To the conformism that pulls us down? The fact remains, concludes Buzatti, that “once again, we remain amazed at the impressive imbecility of the man who succeeded in transforming into torture one of the most beautiful things he had been able to invent. “.
Make no mistake about it, however: Buzatti, if he handles social criticism with cutting edge, is not moralizing and never departs from a delicate sense of humor. In a short story from 1957, he tells the story of a weary man who ends up in the Great Survivors Club, a club welcoming people who have survived great ordeals such as, he gives as an example, brain surgery, a bankruptcy or the reading of the complete works of Proust. Our man, we can guess, survived the “profane mess” of the holiday season.
Christmas, writes Buzatti, is “the greatest date in history”. Even today, its transforming force operates. On this day, humans, contrary to their habits, want to become good, to love their neighbor. This Christmas miracle, however, is accompanied by another mystery: why, if they experience so much joy in doing good, do humans “not continue in this way”? Why, the next day, do they eagerly resume “their petty habits”? Such a distressing enigma.
In 1961, Buzatti lost his mother. The sad Christmas of that year was the happiest of his life. “Perhaps the most beautiful things in this world are there,” he explains. In the pain, in the regret of what has been and will no longer be, in our loneliness, which we generally do not notice, or which we prefer not to think about. But that day will come. “To those who, like me, know this regret, I wish a very Merry Christmas