ERA MIO PADRE - LORENZO LAVORGNA

In this article I speak of a man that would have turned 83 years old on April 23rd 2003. His name is Lorenzo Lavorgna, one of the so many men that big part of the life has lived, surely the last eight five-year periods, "out of his time."
It narrates the legend that Sigfrido, when saw Hagen, asked him if he was friend or less. To the affirmative answer, serene, he turned his shoulders and Hagen hurted him mortally.
I like to begin from this episode of the "Volsungsaga", both to make free to those distant northern roots that unite all the Lavorgnas, both immediately to center the most pregnant aspect of the personality of Lorenzo: his incapability to see the evil in the man, the strong need to confer trust to the people and the great suffering in to discover that the human mind is able to also give birth to perfidy and wickedness.
I remember a man that always had the smile on the lips, able to a peaceful speech, fruit of continuous reflections, and liable of quiver, at times surely excessive, only for the strong love that fed for his family.
The first image that unravels me to the mind is a smiling man that, in a cold morning of over forty years ago it turns on the smoke to avoid the danger of cold in his vineyard, and, with the help of a fed crowd of unbelievers collaborators, race among the rows, imparting, with calm and without being upset, the directives about the right way to use the candelottis furnished by the Montecatini and experimented for the first time.
Many years later, reflecting on that episode, I became me account that the possible loss of the crop had broadly been outclassed by the cheerful enthusiasm sprung by that event, that unintentional protagonist of a turn epochal saw him in the guardianship of the agricultural products from the climatic adversities.
Man of other times, to whom the essence "spiritual" of every contingent reality assumes a bigger importance than the "practical consistence", destined to produce profit and wealth.
If he had devoted to the busy studies, Lorenzo Lavorgna, would have become never an economist or an engineer; perhaps an architect, surely a poet.
Its deeper joy consisted into "to give" and for him, the problem of the choose between being and possession, didn't have sense. What a joy the to feel to be said that its wine was "insuperable"! Man of other times, he would have found very nice to live in the Six hundred French Courts, as Vatel, the big master of ceremonies of the Prince de Condé, able to invent only admirable things for the taste of the beautiful one, to surprise.
Lorenzo Lavorgna and St. Lorenzello. How to synthesize in few lines the deep love that tied him to his roots?
Will it be enough to affirm that it turned continuously his 23 years of permanence to Caserta into a sort go and come, often without real reason, only to “live” his born-country? Will it be enough to remember that one of the most beautiful days of his life it was hat in which his daughter Annalisa confided him that Felice, the future husband, and she had decided to live in St. Lorenzello?
I should certainly speak of the fifties years, those of the great ferments, of the Cooperative for the electrification of the rural zones, of the juicy lunches prepared by that authentic strength of the nature that answers to the name of Giuseppina Federico, the indomitable and pugnacious wife, the lighthouse of a whole life, made still brighter when the complexity of the human took stories the upper hand on the dreams.

It would be too much complex to go down in the details and it will be enough to say that he has always acted with the heart, from true "romantic of other times", to which is be liked reciprocated with equal love its love. But the changing of the times and the sudden transformation of the society toward the forms of the modern cynicism, provoked him more than few sorrows. Luckily in 1966 a new ray of sun radiated the ancestral house of "Cancello Massone"(Rural place of St. Lorenzello)
Annalisa, his daughter born with the seed of the maturity, when Lorenzo had already completed the 46° year of age.
They seem graven on the stone his words, when the girl risked him in the local political life: "Be careful, my daughter. Always behaved seriously, but try to not take too seriously everything around, otherwise you will suffer a lot."
The wisdom of the old age had given birth to the warning towards the beloved daughter, of which it knew well the extreme limit over which its ethics would never have pushed her, also at the cost to suffer heavy oppressions according to the iron laws of the politics.
Lorenzo Lavorgna has departed for the great trip on April 10th 2003 and today it rests to few meters from the other child, Gino, that broke the heart to the family few days before his eighteenth birthday, and from the first-born Pasqualina, that didn't succeed in gathering the warmth of her first sun, when it came to the world in 1950.
A lot of people have rendered him the extreme regard, to testimony of an affection that crosses the confinements of the perceptible one and it wedges in those spheres of the conscience, exclusive heritage of the historical memory of everyone, within which is allowed to enter anybody.
In so many they had not seen him for many years, because the old lion had chosen for a while the almost absolute withdrawal in his abode.
In so many, especially among the more young people, have wondered and have asked who was, in reality, Lorenzo Lavorgna.
Everyone has furnished his own perception of the man, fortified by the most intense memoirs, tied up to anecdotes, ancient friendship, images of a past that it seems distant, despite can contain him in the slim puff of an event that calls life, always too much short, for everybody.
Lorenzo Lavorgna was a good and mild man, certain, but he was also a splendid icon of that man that represents the antithesis of the enlightenment one, whose ethical-moral decadence is under the eyes of everybody, because the irrational nature of the human being has not been moulded by the wish rationalist affirmed him in the 18° century yet, and it will be never it, being alone able to produce the monster called "hypocrisy", bleak and affected with gangrene regulator of the human stories.
Lorenzo Lavorgna didn't know what wanted to say "hypocrisy" and he has always abjured every form of appearance, rowing against current, therefore, in comparison to the laws that govern the world.
I write this memory with the broken heart and a knot to the throat that breaks the voice, while I am reflecting on what I could reply if someone had to ask to me who has been, in reality, Lorenzo Lavorgna.
How many things I could say, drawn by my memoirs, from those of other people's, from his stories. How to do, however, to find the correct words? Everything I could say I would never succeed in transmitting his real essence that could be gathered only in his deep look, in the brief sentences and, in pregnant way even more, in the sound of his voice, stupendous. Everything it would be always few, insufficient, incomplete. A wind of suggestive visions would overwhelm me denying me every descriptive possibility. Better the silence, then, that silence that he loved so much and that it was, at same time, so eloquent! The silence, yes, or perhaps to answer with simple words, to pronounce turning the look to the sky and trying to smile as he was able to do: "He was my father."