Murderous Mothers Sixth Part

Mamme assassine: Samuele

Careless of the opinion of psychiatrists and criminologists, supported by her whole family Anna Maria Franzoni organizes, for Samuel her son, a funeral[1] which is perfect from a media point of view: she claims a band, the children of the village each of them with a bunch of flowers in their hands[2], she doesn’t forget to go to the hairdresser and look after her make-up

A very long line of people, the inhabitants who are there to salute and offer their condolences to Anna Maria, forms at the funeral: for each of them the woman has a different word. ” She was really perfect” – an acquaintance says. The mayor and all the cogneins, at first, accept reluctantly the request of a band[3] and the children with flowers. They rally around Lorenzi Family to protect those persons they don’t consider, after all, their fellow villagers, then, shocked by the Lorenzi’s charges against the villagers themselves, they rediscover their dignity of highlanders and shut themselves up in the ancient silence of the woods and mountains.

The event of Cogne includes many typical aspects of Italian reality:

• the Italian style thriller where eventually it seems that the poor victim may be killed by himself
• The silence of innocents where everybody, but really everybody, speak but obviously the victim who is moreover condemned at a sort of damnatio memoriae[4]
  

  Geta’s face deleted from the tondo by his brother

• the country of the funerals
• Italian style mammismo: in the instalment of ” Maurizio Costanzo Show” of 16^th July 2002, Anna Maria Franzoni surprisingly announces to expect another baby. Just for these features and despite mother’s responsability hasn’t been ascertained at all, the tragic story of little Samuel had the merit of consolidating the category of murderous mothers definitively.[1] ( The Country of Funerals ). Since some years the habit of solving problems connected to tragic events of our country by resorting to a very ancient rite, the funeral, in a modern key, has spread. The church, the priest, the relatives and the friends in tears, the crowd of curious people and of course the coffin represent the traditional part. Journalists, photographers, television and above all applause are the novelty. The applause borrowed from television where it scans every passage of a programme, at the moment when the coffin leaves the church, turns the poor victims into heroes, From a logical point of view this metamorphosis seems to be absurd and we can’t understand why a person must be considered a hero only because he is killed by a rapist or by a road hog or dies in a silly way because somebody didn’t do what he was to do or did what he wasn’t to do. Yet from an anthropological point of view the funeral-show has the function of setting each of us free from the responsability we have in each of the happened tragedies. The three poisons which caused them: stupidity-ignorance, anger, avidity are a part of us in the same way as they determined the guilty action of the persons materially responsible for the various tragedies. To recognize such poisons and try, in order to avoid new losses, to remove them by ourselves seems it is a very difficult task and we prefer to exorcize our demons with a sacrificial offer represented by the victims of the moment and by their funeral: we applaud them because they let us not see the three poisons in ourselves.
  

  Scapegoat

  In ancient Greece scapegoats Οι φαρμακοι were fellows in the flesh who blamed themselves for the wrongs of the community and when they were killed or sent away the community was considered set free and purified. We don’t kill sacrificial victims but make use of them as scapegoats, oi farmaco, already pre-established victims and in order to make the transposition more acceptable we turn them into heroes.

  

  Human sacrifices

  [1]In little Samuel‘s homicide we find a victim whose innocence, the small white coffin is the symbol, and whose silence are such as to give us a perfect Sacrificial Victim. His mother’s return home from the jail, conciding with Easter, makes the symbolism more disturbing.

  [2]Just Mrs Franzoni had called, one after the other, all the mothers of Cogne asking them to take their children. And flowers, so many flowers.

  [3]A band at Cogne had never been seen.

  [4]In ancient Rome the persons who committed particular crimes and above all public personalities who, according to those who remained, had sullied themselves with particular faults, were condemned to damnatio memoriae, that is the removal of their names from any document or epigraph so that not even their memory could remain.

  

  damnatio-memoriae

  Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

• See also:

  1) Murderous Mothers First Part

  2) Murderous Mothers Second Part

  3) Murderous Mothers Third Part

  4) Murderous Mothers Fourth Part

  5) Murderous mothers Fifth Part