A Word In Edgewise: What Do You Say When Words Fail?

In parlous times, what can an individual say? What may one say, and to whom? What words will even affect a given situation? Will a single voice ameliorate or inflame? Should one acknowledge and perhaps amplify, calling attention to oneself? Or, pass on in silence and be judged cold and/or compliant?

Individuals throughout history have had to balance these questions while taking into account their own situation at a given moment. Are you young or old? Healthy and competent, or elderly and unsteady? Married? Single? Have you offspring?

Where do you live, city or suburb? What’s the weather, the neighborhood, the emotional temperature of those involved? And what, if you have time and temperament to consider, will be the judgments of others and of your future self — a sentence you will serve for life?

Literature has dealt with these questions since its inception, and one of the words — concepts, perhaps — that inevitably surfaces, in every era and every language is “truth.” Some languages have a neat way of shading even the simplest verities. In Dutch, for example, recall may be voiced according to accountability. Take, for example, the verb “vergeten,” to forget:

“Ik ben zijn naam vergeten” is understood as “I have forgotten (I no longer know) his name,” while “Ik heb mijn boek vergeten” reveals, “I have (negligently) forgotten my book.”

For the English “have,” in the present perfect, the use of two different working verbs, “zijn” or “hebben,”reveals a certain “truthfulness” from the speaker to the listener.

I can’t answer here the above questions for our particular time and setting, but a recently published mystery novel by Italian author Alessandro Robecchi deals very artfully with the problems involved.

“Broken Truths,” published in 2024 and just translated by Gregory Conti, introduces the reader to acclaimed film director Manlio Parrini, “Maestro” to myriad fans for his world-acclaimed film, “Broken Truths,” after which he abandoned the cinema altogether. He retired to a villa sold for a song by Cavalier Bastoni, an immensely wealthy admirer, who, with his wife, resided in the adjacent villa on the property.

Parrini had declared the film industry “a place without truth,” but now, in his 70s, is planning a comeback with a film about Augusto De Angelis, a crime novel writer ruined by fascist censorship in the ‘40s and brutally murdered July 2, 1944, in what Parrini believes remains an unsolved case.

Just as he gets underway, the widow Bastoni in the adjoining villa is herself brutally murdered, strangled, just steps away.

Reality, police investigations, publicity hounds and reporters become threaded through Parrini’s life as he insists on hewing to the truth of De Angelis’ murder and to the truth of his own cinematic vision.

The announcement of the Maestro’s return draws dark wings circling with offers from Hollywood extravaganza producers to French cinématistes, which Parrini refused, focusing on his own treatment of De Angelis’ Inspector De Vinicenzi as the thoughtful intellectual of his author’s creation. De Angelis had resisted the cruder punch-‘em-out types the ‘40’s fascist regime demanded: allowing no Italian criminals, then increasing restrictions until mystery novels were banned entirely.

Parrini assembles his own band of fiercely loyal co-workers, including red-haired Sara De Viesti, co-writer on the screenplay, and a young historical researcher with whom Parrini and De Viesti travel to the hinterlands to locate a nonagenarian whose grandfather, a Major Astarita, was a Carabinieri who arrived at the site of De Angelis’s fatal beating. They discover things. They return home.

The next-door murder of the elderly becomes as complex and shrouded as that of the mystery author. Parrini, tangled in the midst, is taught through two deaths that “When you break the small truths, you also break the big ones.” A lesson to draw from fact or fiction, past or present — right here and now.