Written by Anna from prison on the occasion of a day dedicated to Marilù
There are people who are a safe harbor to land in. Marilu had all the characteristics, although thorny and ironic in the discussion and in certain cynical anecdotes of the miseries of the movement, she knew how to be welcoming, always and in any case, without fear or difficulty. In her telling and recounting, far from the rhetoric of some of her writings that linger in a certain hagiographic complacency in painting portraits of comrades and episodes of the 80s, she gave her best in the daily concreteness, with the simplicity of those who have known and lived the most varied experiences. Thus surfaced the revolutionary wave and the times of backwash and the companions of a life of militancy (term now a bit ‘retro, but full of meaning on her lips): from the old anarchist partisans from Carrara described in an anti-rhetorical form, in the act of digging up their infracycles treasures to help the young people of AR, to the ” comrades ” of the Roman squats of the 90s to support in the occupations; from Horst Fantazzini in the few periods of freedom between one jail and another, greedy for life and adventure, to Gianfranco Faina, an intellectual in struggle and on the run; Fernando Del Grosso, a partisan from Abruzzo, who told of not giving himself peace until he reached all those responsible for the death of his brothers slaughtered by the Nazi-Fascists. All this mixed with memories of a trip to Nicaragua to support the struggle and the stories of the Bangladeshi stallholder to help with his problems of being an illegal immigrant in the metropolis, the posters of Casa Pound under the arcades of Piazza Vittorio to tear down (“and if no one helps me I’ll go”, and she really did! ) and the frequentation of the chorus of women singers of the popular tradition and struggle, the flamenco shoes shown with pride and the heart medicine “forgotten” in the drawer, her presence at any parade, making fun of the dismayed look on the guards’ faces when they saw this lady in a camel-colored coat and half-heeled shoes surrounded by young punks, the same smile with which she whispered, twenty years ago in the streets of Genoa, “we’re going together” taking under her arm the comrades she saw weighed down by “overly” loaded backpacks.
The same density of stratified experience immediately caught the attention of those who crossed the threshold of the old house in Piazza Vittorio for the first time, also of lived and crumpled nobility, between the Bangla market and the Chinese stores, open day and night for the comrades. On the walls were oil portraits of a frowning nineteenth-century ancestor (Marilu came from a noble and “fascist” family of Ferrara, of which she was the refractory daughter) and posters of the fight against special prisons; the photos of dead comrades and the lace tablecloths worn to welcome the living ones, the peach stones carved in the shape of a ring “Horst’s gift when he was in jail” and the ” diary” with the phone numbers written in pen on the wall (“so when they come for the next search, even if they take away the diary I’ll have them”), behind the heavy frame that enclosed the aforementioned noble frown.
It was clear that there were no stereotypes of movement applicable, but solidarity and indestructible bonds were always valid, despite galleys and ideal shipwrecks; pride was valid, in narrating her and her comrades’ experiences of struggle, the pride of narrating something well done, a job completed to the end.
In this sense, above all, she was enlightening and luminous in revealing, almost in a fairy-tale way, the hardness of the blows she received and the beauty of resistance, freeing those who came into contact with her from the heavy weight we carry on us, in order to travel light.
It would have made a mockery of the infamous presence of the police, up to the occasion of the last farewell to her, the last anecdote of an anarchist watched by living and dead, as if a funeral could be a seditious demonstration. Or perhaps, in these dark times, the dead are considered more alive than the living?
Anna, Rebibbia Prison
Source: Il Rovescio
