The Pith And Marrow Of A Trip To Italy
“Something surreal, a special and atypical manifestation of the author-readers encounter was beyond reason going to evolve from morning to evening, and my role as a participant observer in the event had clearly some logical relevance that day. The street was closed to traffic, and a row of tables had been set up, heavy with dishes in various sauces and without, bottles of Chianti and large pieces of traditional bread. Among the row of tables, in the middle, one had been set apart for dozens of copies of the novel The Butcher’s Aesthetics translated into Italian.” Mohamed Magani, author and president of Algerian PEN, wrote a novel and suddenly found himself the center of a tightly knit community of butchers. Magani explores the power of stories and finds a world of wonder and surprises.
By Mohamed Magani, author
Photo: Maksim Samuilionak/Unsplash
The 1960’s, Algeria’s sky in the first decade of independence was filled with both bright sunny promises and dark clouds looming large in the country's young history. Lacking interest and motivation for any other subject in the 1980s, I embarked on the writing of the novel Esthétique de boucher, (The Butcher’s aesthetics) with the settled ambition of drawing up the profile and portrait of a generation, my own, carried away by the high winds of freedom, but already confronted with the rules and authoritarianism, the violence and prohibitions of the new authorities. I needed a divergent voice, preferably unfamiliar in literature, in view to convey, from a distance and in perspective, the time, space and mindset of individual emancipation at grips with opposing forces, socially and traditionally dominant, more powerful, while highlighting the uncertainties and anxieties of the present, factors of confusion and disarray.
I did not have to search long. I decided quickly for a butcher who was just out of adolescence, who hardly had time to experience the rebellion crisis of his age, since, as an only child, he was immediately promoted to head of the family and owner of a butcher's shop following his father’s death.
And it was this same young butcher, the narrator in Esthétique de boucher, who dragged me behind him in a unique experience, which no writer will probably ever manage to invent and put down on paper. Although he was the most imaginary of the whole gallery of young characters in the novel.
The translation of Esthétique de boucher into Italian took me one day, in 2002, to the side of Florence, to a charming little town called Panzano, perched on a hill in the Tuscan wine region. In fact, Panzano is located exactly halfway between Florence and Siena in the province of Florence.
From the outset, the welcome in Panzano was nothing like my previous experiences of readings, conferences, book signings and other encounters between authors and readers. Instead of a meeting in a closed place, a conference room or a bookshop, I found myself shaking hands with a host of people at the bottom of a winding street invaded by a tight crowd, brandishing Estetica di macellaio in joy and contagious good mood. Then I realized that we were standing in front of a butcher's shop, under the sign of Antica Macelleria Cecchini. The translator of Estetica di macellaio introduced me to its owner, who dressed me there and then in a white smock with the logo of his butchery on the chest, a smock worn by many more people around.
Something surreal, a special and atypical manifestation of the author-readers encounter was beyond reason going to evolve from morning to evening, and my role as a participant observer in the event had clearly some logical relevance that day. The street was closed to traffic, and a row of tables had been set up, heavy with dishes in various sauces and without, bottles of Chianti and large pieces of traditional bread. Among the row of tables, in the middle, one had been set apart for dozens of copies of the novel Esthétique de boucher translated into Italian. A crowd gathered in front of the improvised literature stand, men and women of the same butchers' guild all wanted their Estetica di macellaio. Naturally, everyone wanted to know if I was a butcher by trade in my country.
In fact, at the same time every year, an international event involving butchers from all over Europe is held in Panzano to celebrate Sant'Antonio Abate, the patron saint of butchers. My invitation to the event was therefore not really a matter of chance. The publisher of the novel and Dario Cecchini, the owner of the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, had agreed that I should attend the gathering, on the grounds that the narrator of the novel regarded butchers with sympathy, and presented a vision and representation far removed from the widespread clichés about them. It is true that the young butcher narrator in the novel is out of the ordinary, he develops a more than a little intellectual inclination, which does not fit in with the practices of the meat trade. The greatest frustration in his life is that he was taken out of school at an early age, at a time when he was nurturing a keen interest in history and literature, and his close friends were constantly bringing him bits of knowledge of the two fields in his very butchery. A butcher who is, moreover, almost a vegetarian, he floats in the absolute dream of living among the Hunzas, a mountain people in Pakistan, adepts of total vegetarianism, assumed since the dawn of time.
Dario Cecchini can’t stop hugging me all the time, and introducing me to the crowd. He disappears one minute, then returns to warmly wrap his arms around my shoulders the next minute, without tiring. Moving through the crowd like a fish in water, time and again he stands still and begins to recite Dante's poems, learned by heart. Crowds of butchers, guests and passers-by listen. An exuberant character, communicative and generous like no other, I soon learn that he is a well-known personality in Italy; he enjoys a great and respectable reputation thanks to his television programs on meat and its countless recipes, and the training he gives, around the world, on the techniques of meat cutting.
With his copy of Estetica di macellaio constantly in his hand, he is more than proud of the book cover, the outcome of his design and collaboration with the publisher. I refrained from telling him that I almost fell in a swoon on the floor the moment I saw it for the very first time, infuriated and speechless. Outrageous, unsightly to the last degree, such was its appearance; in its entirety almost, a photo of a young, athletic man, shirtless, muscles bulging, head bent forward on his chest, so that the face was unrecognizable. The heap of human meat on the cover of the book stood before me in real life, escorted by Dario Cecchini and surrounded by a merry band. Dario told him to take off his shirt, and the young man transformed himself into a butcher's model, embodying his corporation, on the cover of a novel, in the most extreme way; I signed his copy of Estetica di macellaio. Then, invited to follow Dario, we all headed for a wall.
Photo: Mohamed Magani
In two rows, a good thirty butchers, dressed in white work smocks bearing the effigy of the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, posed for a group photo session. Somehow, the idea of myself as a writer began to crack and to accommodate a certain sense of belongingness to a professional body foreign to literature a priori. Back in Algeria, I received the group portrait, and for years remained undecided as whether to hang it on the wall or to put it forever out of sight. The writer's permanent expectation of expanding his/her readership branched off without any warning, in my case into a kind of dead end haunted by a party of men whose occupation centered on animal flesh and bones.
At one point, on the threshold of his butcher's shop, Dario began haranguing his colleagues, who gathered in front of him, then followed him inside. He opened his Estetica di macellaio, I opened Esthétique de boucher, on the pages of the first chapter he pointed out to me, in perfect French. Behind the glass meat display, facing an assembly of silent butchers, I read passages in French; Dario took them up in Italian. "This is my life", he said, after reading a couple of minutes. On the verge of tears, he read on, in a moving atmosphere, intensely shared in the butchery.
Once the reading over, Dario took my arm and led me to the first floor of his house, where the butchery takes up the entire ground floor. He opened the door of a room, then the window overlooking the street, and began to recite once more Dante’s poetry. All heads rose, butchers, butchers' wives, guests and passers-by turned their backs on the meat dishes on the tables, on the bottles of Chianti, yielding to the exalted tone of the most famous butcher in Italy.
Back on the street, a surprise awaited us. Journalists from the RAI television came to make a report on the international butchers' meeting in Panzano. I was interviewed, and without thinking I answered a question about the reason of my interest in butchers with a hackneyed cliché. "I wanted to show the man in the butcher, not the other way round!" I said. Applause erupted on the street, mingled with a lot of laughter and joyful assenting commentaries. Soon after, the RAI broadcasted the report, and I had the opportunity to dine, one evening in an Algiers restaurant, with the Italian ambassador. He was so puzzled and burning with curiosity that he sacrificed hours of his precious time to my incredible journey to his country. I showed him a series of photos, supporting the words and images of the RAI report.
Adjacent to the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, a modest room with no animal flesh was full of books and documents shelved against the walls. I was told that this was a meat research center. This is where a distinguished gentleman chose to approach me. He introduced himself as the director of the National Library of Luxembourg, and said: "Two years ago, the Library organized a symposium on bread. Next October, we plan to organize a symposium on meat. Could you come?" I looked at him, bewildered, "Who do you want to invite, me or the butcher in the novel? The director assured me that he would be delighted to welcome both of us!
Before Luxembourg, it was another country that opened its arms to the butcher narrator. Translated into German, Esthétique de boucher (The Butcher's aesthetics) took me to Austria, to Salzburg, where a reading session was arranged in a large hall. I read substantial passages from the novel, alternating with their translation into German. I could tell there were butchers in the audience. At the end of the reading, a woman asked to speak, and became just as if she was their spokesperson. She urged me to go to Chicago where, she added, butchers have serious psychological problems. Reading Die Ästhetik des Metzgers might be the beginning of a therapy for them, in her opinion.
In the course of a short trip to Italy, my vocation as an aspiring writer staggered. From the second novel, Esthétique de boucher, it found itself seriously compromised by taking a constrained direction: I became at best a spokesman for butchers or an analyst of fellow creatures in crisis among them. In Algeria, after a while of frowning and questioning the veracity of the barely believable event in Panzano, the visit of a fictitious Algerian butcher to real Italian butchers turned into a farcical, and pressing request. Newspapers seized on the weird and unique travel case, dismissing all ideas of literature and its world, fiction, formal inventions, writing, reading and reception. Given the high cost of red meat, well-meaning people urged me to intercede with the Italian butchers' guild to import sufficient quantities from their country, and inject them into the commercial circuit at affordable prices.
Upon my return to Algiers, I realized the enormity of the novel reception, the extent to which Esthétique de boucher, now the object of a destiny beyond its author's control, was perceived, due to its intrinsic content, to the Italian butchers, to the book's publisher, to the patron saint of butchers, to their combined effects, or to the confusing mistake of seeing me, resolutely, as a butcher by trade; it was unclear to me. The ambition of Esthétique de boucher was to biographing a generation, of enlightened passion and daring vision of society, aimed at representing a decisive period in the life of the people of a country at the end of colonization. The young men who populate it were all people whom I had close friendly ties with in real life, and for whom I had the greatest admiration. We all belonged to the same circle, bathed in a concrete reality. With the exception of the butcher narrator, who is in his own way an unusual character, the product of a long process of investigation and imagination. To a significant extent, the novel depicts a parallel and oppositional consciousness at odds with the actual world. Right after Panzano, what become central in its content seems to lie in the meeting of two worlds that one could hardly imagine interacting: the world of books and that of the butcher’s shop. The immediate proximity of the library shelves and the meat displays. The intimate association of the passionate reader and the gluttonous meat-eater.
And beyond that, the apprehension of seeing butchers take over bookshops and libraries in droves would not be ruled out. Just as the unwelcome idea of having to deal with a category of readers, stereotypically deemed boorish and uncultured, would diminish the symbolic prestige of reading. A slogan like “Butchers of the world, unite for reading!” would undoubtedly impact, upend the business of book publishing.
The not-so-appealing prospect of seeing my vocation as a writer plummet into the alien universe of the butchery, there was a good reason to be concerned about that fateful turning point, as self-definition and self-representation were at stake. I had begun getting used to the idea of never talking about it again, and of refusing any hint, or discussion of the Panzano event. I managed to hold my tongue, until another meeting provided me the opportunity to talk out of the hard to figure out experience. In 2014, in The Hague, the Netherlands, the Winter Nights Literary Festival was held, an annual meeting that brings together many writers from different countries. This festival has the particular feature of devoting two mornings to debates, behind closed doors, between invited writers on a theme defined in advance by the organizers of the meeting. In 2014, “shame” was the choice. The opportunity then arose to look back in detail at Esthétique de boucher in Italy, as described in these lines, before a score of writers indiscriminately seized with unfathomable amazement, mute questioning and irrepressible hilarity. Yet, as a young man, the butcher narrator in the novel makes it a rule to skip the games and distractions, hobbies and deviances of his age group, and builds a world for himself in honor of school and education, and a future dedicated to history and literature.
Algiers, Marsh 2022
Photo: Tristan Frank/Unsplash