The disasters, the big scams, the messes of catastrophic dimensions; I like the opposite of small everyday failures, which are worthy in their drama, but my heart tends towards cataclysms. I feel a weakness for enormous stumbles, for explosions, for wrong calculations that end in a slap and perplexity followed by a curtain falling.
Because? Partly out of character, out of a sense of one's own ridiculousness. But if I try to justify that character, I would say that these types of misfortunes—the ones that almost kill one—are the only thing that blows up what was, in reality, only fixed in appearance, only functional on the surface.
Traveling last week, at the train station crowded with passengers, someone suddenly fell at the bottom of the escalator. The rest began to run up the stairs, while the steps continued impassively downward. The staircase did not stop, and those who were unable to climb against the inertia with their suitcases and children and adults ended up in a pile of bodies upon tangled bodies.
It was a scene worthy of Chaplin: when we live it in a comedic way, we all like to witness the fall, the slip, the unexpected banana peel for the confident protagonist. But it also happens in life, and suddenly what could have been funny takes on gigantic dimensions: despite its usual functioning, something small fails and triggers something enormous. It happens in health, it happens in love, it happens in poorly built buildings: suddenly an irreversible diagnosis, a secret, a fire. When what we have automated breaks, and when we have taken the artificial for natural, the absurdity of these automatisms is revealed to us through—surprise—a calamity.
Maybe that's why I gravitate—in life and in writing—toward disasters. Any great work contains, at some point, an unexpected twist in the script, and for those who resist this aspect of everyday life—the unforeseen, the unfair, the absurd—that twist threatens to be an existential landslide, a catastrophe with spectators. included. We should, perhaps, walk around with the banana peel in our pocket and, when no one is looking, place it on the ground: pretend to stumble, yes, but skate and slide on the drama itself.
