'A paura

The Smorfia ends with fear, and the choice isn’t random. Ninety is the last number, the one past which there’s no more counting, and it went to the thing that stops us in our tracks: 'a paura. In a list made of Madonnas, dead people, saints and devils, the last word goes to a feeling — not a character, not an object. As if to say that at the end of all the images in the world there is what we feel in front of them. In dreams, ninety almost always arrives in disguise. It isn’t the monster under the bed: it’s the dream where you arrive late and the door closes, the one where you’re looking for something and can’t find it, the one where you have to speak and no voice comes out. It’s fear wearing the face of ordinary life — an exam, a phone call that’s supposed to come, a checkup, a decision put off for weeks. Whoever wakes up with their heart in their throat already knows what it’s about, even when they can’t put it into words. The images that lead here seem to contradict it, and instead they explain it. The sea, frightening precisely because you can’t see where it ends. The summit, which in dreams can bring vertigo instead of satisfaction: looking down from up there is one of the few things that make you shut your eyes. And even good fortune, which frightens some people more than bad luck — because good fortune asks you to live up to it, and bad luck doesn’t. Ninety isn’t a number of misfortune: it’s a number of alarm, and alarms are useful. In Naples people say it plainly — fear is something you admit, and admitting it is already putting it in its place. If it showed up in your dream, the Smorfia is saying that the thing exists, that you’ve seen it too, and that no longer pretending otherwise is the first useful step. The rest nobody knows, least of all us: here we read images, we don’t predict anything.