The wind blew across the still city. Last Sunday, in Genoa, even the church bells seemed to shatter on the stopped port. Above the liners held at the docks, the cranes that trace the sky remained silent. Genoa is beautiful and few people realize it. It is hidden behind a dizzying tangle of old palaces and new constructions, a labyrinth of tunnels and crooked alleys. Heaven no longer knows what to do with all this so, in certain dark streets, it lets the Genoese live without it.
From the Carignano lookout, I watched this spectacle of immobility while humming a song by Fabrizio De André. Behind me, a child was riding astride a balance bike, under the caring eyes of his father, a man of my age, wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled down on his head. He was walking behind his son, who stopped in front of me with the amazed smile of someone who learns. I had fun observing the precarious balance of a 3 year old child. He pitches, hesitates, stands up, wobbles, gets back on the road. After a while, the boy stumbled on the sidewalk and fell to the ground. His father picked him up without panic. The little one wasn’t crying. He then taught him that the sidewalk was an obstacle. And when faced with an obstacle, we either stop, or we get carried away and end up falling. The child got back on the balance bike and took off again.
This insignificant event reminded me of a discussion I had just had a few days earlier with a friend. She told me that the greatest fear of her life was falling. She had never fallen, never broken anything. She had prevented herself from a thousand things, risks and discoveries, because she did not want to fall. When she was little, her parents didn’t take care of her. They had never taught him how to ride a bike, tell the time, play on a swing. They had never taught him how to fall and get up again. For the young girl who had grown up, the fall was a great unknown; to fall was to die a little. At 27, she was forced to buy her first bike in a city where living without it had become impossible. Holding it in her hand, she went to a park for several days in a row, alone, to learn. I imagined the moving scene of this courageous woman who tried to put one foot after the other on the pedals, exhilarated by the impression of sudden speed offered by the bike. Unlike the child from Genoa, she had no one behind her to watch in case of an accident.
Falling is part of my life because I have fallen a hundred times and because I am concerned about men who fall. I was barely 10 years old when I lived in Paris Match the photo of these men who threw themselves out of the windows of the World Trade Center to escape the flames. These bodies thrown into the void haunted me. I still remember, two years later, the terrible fall of Joseba Beloki during the 2003 Tour de France, its irremediability: this wheel swinging on the melted tar and this champion’s body swung downhill on the burning bitumen, its screaming in front of televisions around the world.
Long later, I imagined Pasolini’s massacred body on the wasteland of Ostia, molested on the ground then crushed by his own car. These men on the ground, dying, also teach me to stand up. They pick me up with them. Didn’t I grow up in a religion where God became man to come and stumble alongside us? Three times, walking towards his torment, He ends up biting the dust. Now I believe that it was by going up to Golgotha, bending under the weight of the cross, kneeling on the ground, that Jesus completely embraced our condition. “I waver, my oppressors exult,” says the psalm. Our unsteady life is punctuated by the falls we cause and those we fail to prevent. «If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out.» If your hand, if your foot… We know Christ’s warning in the Gospel according to Saint Mark. We will continue to fall and, despite everything, we will be saved.
I hadn’t thought about it until then, but it was here in Genoa, a few years ago, that the Morandi bridge collapsed on the city. He seemed unshakeable. In front of the happy sea of Sunday mornings, I thought that to live in a city built vertically it was necessary to tame the fear of heights knowing that one day or another even the bridges end up falling. Humble cities teach us that they are made by proud men. Like us, they fall and get up again.