Certain news items are striking in their cruelty and abomination. Sometimes even by their implausibility. In some cases, when an abyss of incomprehension opens up, it is literature that must take over after justice and journalism, which have remained powerless to understand or name the origin of the evil.
On March 6, 2016, the body of Luca Varani, 23, the only son of itinerant confectionery vendors, was discovered in an apartment in central Rome. The investigation will establish that he was tortured for hours with a hammer and a knife.
Marco Prato, organizer of gay scene events, tries to kill himself the next day in a hotel in Rome by swallowing a mixture of barbiturates and alcohol, leaving to play on loop Ciao love, ciao in Dalida’s version. He had time to sign a few farewell letters: “I discovered horrible things in myself and in the world. Manuel Foffo, son of a major entrepreneur in the Italian capital, confesses the next day to the murder to his father, who easily convinces him to go to the police.
After three uninterrupted days of high, alcohol and cocaine, the two men in their twenties, from supposedly respectable families, had decided to take action. To attract their victim, a heterosexual also without history, the two men would have offered him 100 euros in exchange for sex.
A crime without motive. They did it to “see what it does”, one of the two murderers told the police. “We had a desire to hurt someone randomly. »
Are Luca Varani’s executioners monsters or men? A bit like Truman Capote and Philippe Jaenada, it was partly to try to answer this question that the novelist Nicola Lagioia, born in Bari in 1973, won the Viareggio prize in 2014 for Starting point (Arléa, 2014) and Strega prize in 2015 with The Fierce (Flammarion, 2017), agreed to poke his nose into this sordid affair.
But alongside this unspeakable crime, Nicola Lagioia does in equal parts, in The city of the living, the portrait of the city of seven hills. Not of the Rome of the beautiful districts and the monuments, but that of the periphery and the lowlands. The Rome of Pasolini, of the suburban underclass and the outcasts. A city that has been falling into decay for 2,700 years, which has seen all the colors and which still and always harbors “the inimitable concentration of paralysis and rhetorical artifice of Italian politics, as well as the epicenter of theocratic disillusion world”.
Testimonials, court documents, expert opinions, correspondence from the victim and the accused, meetings with relatives of each other, exchange of letters with Manuel Foffo: Nicola Lagioia hits the nail on the head. At the origin of his fascination, he says he perceived something familiar. “I knew what it meant to tiptoe into a cone of shadow, I knew to back up as soon as possible. »
But what happened to those who didn’t stop or couldn’t? “Passed a certain threshold, an unknown world opened up. »