November 25 is the day of violence against women. Violence against women is expressed through the phrases “stalker” and “femicide” in Italy. The discussions mainly concern the brutal facts of chronicle. Journalists oscillate between an apocalyptic vision in one of irrelevance. Conditions at work, on time management for the care of family and self, and access to education, have improved significantly since the seventies for all: males and females. The element of discussion in Italy is still elementary: the woman’s body. Public opinion sometimes doubts on physical violence to women. Many people debate whether the responsibility is the victim. The media analyze a single event and not the system of social networks. The system of repression, the legal, health and economic minimum subsistence, amplifies all the violence and the condition of subjugation of women.
Males do not speak. They are indifferent. Some males are violent. Males comment on the violence, sometimes with witticism and stereotypes. Or not?
Men should recognize the phenomenon. If men were witnessed events of violence against women, they should honestly express judgments about themselves and about their attitudes.
It was a Sunday afternoon in late May in 1985. The air was warm and the sky was clear. I was sitting with friends on the stairs of the main entrance of the municipality of Marino (town near Rome). A woman appeared with the dress to the nines. She ran to the streets asking for help. A scruffy old burly man chasing her. The man grabbed the woman and threw her to the ground. The brute slapped the woman. It all happened in less than 10 seconds. We did not have time to move. We looked at each other in disbelief, inert and dazed. A young man came over and ordered him to stop the brute. Another man arrived: an undercover policeman.
Colonna’s Palace – Municipality of Marino (Rome)
The brute calmed down. The woman gets up and pulled himself together. We remained standing as puppets. Some acquaintances of the couple arrived and they talked animatedly. Everyone left a few minutes later.
On the side, there were some ladies sitting on the balcony and others on chairs outside their house entrances. I knew them all along: how many times they told me to be careful of the cars when I was a kid and I used to play with their children, and when they offered snacks to their children and to me. They infused the stability, security and a sense of time. They were lovely: a trace my childhood.
Their look was grim and dour. I observe for the first time those faces. I listened to their harsh comments against the woman who was appealed as a “prostitute”. I do not I caught no judgment toward the man. The “acquired” aunts looked like statues full of cold and soot, now.
The houses appeared black with a sky without a reflection. I had the image of the first page of the novel “The Protocny’ alley” Elijah Ehrenburg, where a man hit in the head with a brick a woman in the street. And what for me was experienced as a fiction, all this he twisted bowel, now. I stammered incoherently as my two friends next door.
We looked at each other still blushing. We were humiliated our inactivity and fear. And after a long time before the mirror and no excuses, I realized that the shame which I had after the event, was also an excuse: we thought to ourselves, not to the woman. The tangle of emotions was a network off the violence and absurdity of the scene. I had buried the woman in the streets of my mind. I had become, in spite myself, an accomplice of that violence. It answered that, at that moment, the safe childhood was disintegrated: I was expelled from Paradise.
