Letras de tango un libro di Ivana Brigliadori

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Letras de Tango by Ivana Brigliadori is a book that astonishes, amazes, moves and scandalizes, to be read as if it were a tale and listened to as if it were music, poetry, song: all of this “togetherness” is drawn from the moods and hints of an inspiration (one might think) that is enthralling, and intoxicating like the wine that runs through these pages and that will end up intoxicating even the reader. These verses are worth reading out loud, more than once, to fully comprehend the rhythm which is contained in them (the rhymes, the syncopated time which unites them with the tango, the brusque interruptions, the ups and the downs), and in order to participate in the flight taken by the words, when everything around them spins due to the strong wine or emotions which can no longer be kept inside, for the anger or the delusion, for the nostalgia and the desire to live life as it is: beautiful and brutal, we read both. Even so, death wafts over the existence of these characters (awkward and wretched heroes, “old drunks” or unfortunate children, deluded or in-love wayfarers), the netherworld is in fact always ambushing the poetry of Ivana Brigliadori, underlining true human “misery”; to put it better, the fact that life is destined (for everyone, really everyone), without fail, to end, and in this sense, her poetry verges on tragedy. The tango, in all of this, is an undisputed protagonist, a metaphor for flight (the dream) and sometimes even the salvation of those who still have the strength to imagine how beautiful the world would be if everyone could dance:

Tonight it’s her birthday.
For this reason, I have a clean tie
And with all the change
I had scraped together in my little plates
I will give her the debut
Before she disappears into nothing:
Shoes with a nice high heel
A skirt with a nice big split
The best tango dancers
And a lot of wine for everyone.
When I see her dance
I think I will go crazy!
(The Debut)

The ballerina in these verses is the date most certainly of a tired and lonely man (“and it’s in the very moment in which/ I think I will die/ and not be able to go on/ as if in a dream/ my childhood friend arrives, Him/ it’s never certain if he will come every evening”, The Debut) who made a park, we imagine, his home (“in the same instant in which the sun goes down/this enormous park seems to be heaven/ and I feel like a fly / in winter in agony/ thrown here and there by the wind!”, The Debut) and we catch a glimpse of the tango’s redemption, finally a “Wind / that lifts the dead leaves”, (The ballerina). If the tango is life in this collection (intended as a dream, audacity, desire and craziness) death is the opposite, it is present in everything that, inanimate and presumptuous, continues in the blunder of believing itself to be better:
[…]
Let’s go away
From these pinched faces
Dull
Cadaverous
Spent.
Boredom is so widespread
Among these people
In this whole environment
Which makes it even more insignificant.
Don’t you see?
Even the plants are dead.
[…]
(Love Found Again)

These few verses, taken from Love Found Again, are only a short instant of that which in reality is a true poetic tale, a piece that merits a place in the theater in order to be fully appreciated in all its frenetic whisperings of undulating words, amalgamated among themselves by a mix of love and anger that is quite difficult to explain, but that you can feel pulsing in every step of the lyric, in every debunking joke. The mother of all scenes of this literary composition is in the meeting, the unfortunate meeting, of a woman marred by time (“In a mirror in front of me/ I see myself after a long time. / I try to keep my composure. / I put on a little blush. / …Maybe I’m a little aged? / Well-groomed? / Certainly not! / I’m like an old comforter / I’m large like a sumo wrestler”, Love Found Again) and her former lover, in the company of his new flame: an impetuous woman like a manikin, a little too sure of herself, arrogant (“Her presence is so forceful / superb and arrogant”, Love Found Again). This sort of prototype of mundane and rampant superficiality, is a true insult both to fantasy and to reality, and it is for this that the reader can do nothing but empathize with “the old drunk woman” (“She looks at me with an air of sufficiency / she’s really a bitch / she says to you in falsetto: / “Love! / Look at that old drunk! / And do you smell that?!” / But you / don’t even listen / you put your hands on her hips / and you whisper more words words… / I feel an enormous twinge in my heart”, Love Found Again) who, like a true hero, takes the “manikin” apart with cutting verses, with the irony and sarcasm of a person who has been given (at least) the gift of imagination in life.
This and much more is the poetry of Ivana Brigliadori, an author who has the talent to recognize the beauty beneath the appearance of things and the irony to mock even death:
[…]
“But I’m afraid of death!”
First you look at the alarm clock
Then my ankle:
“What a bore!
What rashness!
You are more here than there
And you didn’t even notice!
You’ll see
That when you are completely here
You won’t think about it anymore!”
“Well then, viva death and viva the cemetery!”
[…]
(Don Ciro)

Marina Paola Sambusseti