The novella is entitled innocently, even human. The Inauguration. The content, however, brings to mind the wise idea of the two geniuses, the physicist Albert Einstein and the writer Thomas Mann, when they were asked to offer a message that would help people in five thousand years. They were both well aware that, while science and technology would always progress, man would be neither better nor more generous or understanding, and would not love his fellow man as himself, the way Christ had taught him.
We therefore immerse ourselves from the very beginning in a world subject to vice, retrograde, demagogic, located somewhere at the opposite end of the interests of the community. It’s a fallen present from a settlement neither rural nor urban, somehow taken out of time, with no place whatsoever for the dignity, purity, and beauty of the soul. To toil, to put right, to transform, to give, and to smile are verbs completely missing from the realm of events that unravel the thread of the novella. The heroes have a kind of primitive bliss. These are the torments of the sinners, the burlesque of crowds of souls descending into Hell, syncopated from time to time by the crooked grin and pride of the Devil; there is no room for the compassion transposed on canvas hundreds of years ago by famous painters, illustrating a story from the time of Louis XIV, where a young mother visits her father, imprisoned for stealing bread and sentenced to death by starvation. The old man shares milk with the baby at the young mother’s breast. The sacrifice and the total compassion of the young woman brought about the pardon of the old man, who thus also survived the four months of imprisonment.
The heroes of the novella The Inauguration descend one by one all the stages of human degradation. The atmosphere that emerges from the text seems to lead them in the end to the existence of a hope for the better. As a joker put it, Lucifer cannot invent as many sins as the Lord can forgive. The good must prevail, as it has been inoculated to us from infancy.
