Stories of the Foundation

Andrea's story and his changing gaze

This is Andrea's story, and how a look changes. We called him “Ugly Andrew”.

There were five of Andrea, among the teenagers of the complex of newly built buildings, where our families had gone to live, converging from many neighborhoods of the capital. There was Andrea the dark-haired, Andrea the blond, Andrea the red-haired (this is what we Romans call those with red hair), Andrea the handsome. And then, of course, ugly Andrea. The nicknames had been given by the eldest of the boys who found themselves in a group in the square, a good boy, after all, but with the exuberance of a bully. Even though bullying, although many of us had already experienced it, was a term and an awareness far from being understood and rejected, in those early 80s.

We therefore called him ugly Andrea. For convenience, let's say so. In order to distinguish the Andreas, when we talked or formed teams to play football in the middle of the street. But if we didn't yet know what bullying was, the derogatory connotation in that "Ugly Andrew" label was clear.

On the other hand, he was "a strange guy": he had tics, sometimes he seemed to talk to himself, other times he tended to throw outbursts of anger when he thought he had suffered a foul in the game, and for some of us the taste was precisely that to provoke him and see his reaction. His family was also “strange”, from our point of view as teenagers spoiled by the attention of our parents and the well-being they had given us. But we were able to see the dignity of Andrea's mother and father and we felt a little of the fatigue of two parents with disabilities who traveled by public transport to go to work and do the shopping (we who came from families who owned two cars). Among my memories of adolescence is their indelible limp, their limping step, when they return home, slowly dragging themselves across the square onto which our apartments overlooked, like a theater of asphalt and concrete.

And it was to gain acceptance from all of us teenagers in the square that, at the end of eighth grade, Andrea organized a football challenge: us against his classmates. Except that they were coming from the opposite side of the consular road around which our neighborhood was growing. They came from the social housing sector, built many years earlier near the river, "deported" to the middle of nowhere, as happened to many in Italy. Thus, in this Pasolini context, in which Pasolini had actually lived for some time, the game that should never have been played was played, a game that ended immediately after it began and which marked Andrea's relationship with our group.

We were faced with kids who had repeated it once or twice in eighth grade, with the obvious desire to establish who was in charge among the teenagers in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't be who scored the most goals who decided it. I think the brawl lasted longer than the match, given that in the second action I knocked out a guy called "the Cap" with a punch. Unfortunately for the "Cap", I was wearing goalkeeper gloves, whose designs and stitching were printed precisely on his cheekbone. I don't remember much of what happened next, apart from the awareness of having the Cap above me, who in the meantime had knocked me to the ground, and about twenty guys who were fighting each other at random.

What I do remember, however, are the patrols of boys on motorbikes who, in the following days, appeared in the square keeping their chains clearly visible. The Cap was driving them, evidently looking for revenge, and who, after a couple of months in which none of us showed up on the road, got bored and disappeared. And we returned to group life, made up of the first cigarettes, the music of Vasco Rossi and always having a ball at our feet.

Andrea fared worse. He found himself marginalized by us, who thought we had ended up in a trap to make up for how we treated him, but also by his schoolmates, who had not been able to redeem the affront suffered by the "Cap". He was so marginalized by us that we didn't speak to him, in fact we didn't say hello at all, and we excluded him from the only activity that had brought us together: kicking a ball around.

For the following years, while life had disbanded our group and I was one of the few left to live in the neighborhood, at most I gave him a "hello". But more often, when I saw him from afar, I changed direction. I pretended nothing happened, but he knew it: he was "a strange guy", not stupid, as he told me about twenty years ago. And then he was used to being ignored and rejected from an early age. Probably before he became “Ugly Andrew” for us in the square.

Well, I saw Andrea's mental distress. I saw him in some of his manifestations and perhaps I was even a small part of it, contributing to his marginalization, making him pay for his non-conformity, treating him with the ferocity and insensitivity of which one is capable in adolescence.

But when, working for the Di Liegro Foundation, I saw the photos taken by Andrea, whose surname I remembered (even though I had almost never called him by his first and last name), I saw the past, adolescence and life, but with a different and new perspective. The shots taken by Andrea during the Foundation's photography workshops look at the city in a geometric way, drawing interactions between means of transport and the urban context, in which people are blurred, representing an almost negligible part of the landscape, to the point of disappearing.

That the author of those photos was really the Andrea I knew, and not a homonym, I understood during a Foundation meeting on Zoom, during the lockdown. I recognized Andrea's voice and face. In the expressions, in the gaze and in the desire - almost obsessive - for relationships with others, I saw the adolescent Andrea again and recognized the signs of discomfort. That mental discomfort that, before arriving at the Foundation, I ignored and was unable to see in people.

At the summer party that the Di Liegro Foundation organizes every year in June, bringing together users, volunteers and family members, and where the experiences of the art-therapy and socialization workshops held during the year are relived, I met Andrea. He didn't recognize me immediately, because I obviously couldn't be placed in a context other than the neighborhood streets. And this time, I didn't change my path. I went up to him: “Ahò, don't you recognize me?”.

We talked until the party ended, reviewing a few decades of our affairs, our families and our common acquaintances. Andrea still lives there, with his parents, in the apartment that still overlooks the square. A square that is no longer a theater or a football field, but just a parking lot always full of cars.

A volunteer

Photo by Batın Özen from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/kids-playing-soccer-in-the-street-7610880/

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Stories of the Foundation

Andrea's story and his changing gaze

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