It’s an improbable encounter, a priori, as real encounters often are.
In the Italian Alps, near the border with Slovenia, an old watchmaker camping alone in the mountains sees his winter routine disrupted by the irruption into his tent of a 15-year-old squatter. A young gypsy who had broken her ban and decided to flee her community by refusing the forced marriage that awaited her.
A “wild, aggressive, runaway” Roma, she would later say of herself, whose family owned a learned bear and practiced smuggling.
The man – who created a foundation helping the homeless after getting rich in watchmaking – offers hospitality to the teenager and will even decide to protect her. A sort of gentle duel will follow, between teasing and complicity, with a first part made up of numerous dialogues, on men and life, love, old age. “Being old is like bivouac at the top of the woods, where the trees are less dense and there is more light. »
Or on the perception of time: “Watches are measuring instruments, but time is something else. It goes just as well in slow motion as at full speed.”
The two protagonists exchange their knowledge. She teaches him practical things, he teaches her to read. This is the first act of Erri De Luca’s new novel, Mikado rules.
The “old man” is passionate about Mikado, which he plays alone and to which he will introduce the teenager. This game of skill involves about forty long, tapered sticks that are dropped onto the deck in a fan shape before removing the sticks one by one without moving the others. We can well imagine that the metaphor is never far away. And just like in Mikado, where you have to “act without moving anything”, in life, it is better to “act gently without attracting attention”.
Among the rules of Mikado, it is also allowed to use one stick to pick up another.
Born in 1950 in Naples, in the south of Italy, Erri De Luca is the author of several small books, often as polished as pebbles, which regularly take as their setting the streets, characters and motifs of his childhood – You, mio, The opposite of one, Acid, rainbow Or Montedidio (Femina Foreign Prize in 2002).
But not his youngest, Mikado rules. It is still a dense, short and tense book like the others. The writer’s well-known humanitarian commitments resonate strongly in it – notably with Lotta Continua and with Doctors Without Borders.
The second part of this novel with its forking paths tells, with a share of surprises for the readers, what will happen later to the characters, both without names and both in their own way transformed by this encounter. The real encounter, Erri De Luca, master of the game, seems to tell us, only happens between very different people, separated by everything.
A beautiful lesson in hospitality, mutual aid and openness.