John Francis Lane
More than two decades since his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini is still causing ructions in Italy. People are still fighting over his artistic and political legacy, but they are even more divided over the circumstances of his death. Was he killed by a rent-boy? Was he killed by a rent-boy in league with fascists? Was he killed by the fascists alone? His friends are split, the politicians are split and, of course, the public at large is split. To add fuel to the flames, a recent film supports the idea of a cover-up.
When Marco Tullio Giordana’s docu-drama Pasolini: An Italian Crime was first shown at the Venice Film Festival, one of the lawyers involved in the trial of the rent- boy who had confessed to killing Pasolini was present. Nino Marazzita announced that new evidence had been found that the killer, Pino Pelosi, 17 at the time, had not been alone on the night of November 1 1975, in the field near the sea at Ostia where Pasolini’s corpse was found.
According to Marazzita, two retired policemen who had been involved in the investigation into Pasolini’s death were now prepared to say things that at the time had been hushed up but which are hinted at in the film. Pelosi has already served his sentence and couldn’t be retried, but a reopening of the case could have repercussions on public opinion which has kept open the “moral” responsibility for Pasolini’s death.
Above all it would vindicate Laura Betti – the dynamic force behind the Pasolini Foundation in Rome – and other friends, including director Bernardo Bertolucci, that Pelosi was not alone. They have always insisted that fascist thugs followed Pasolini from the station where he picked up Pelosi, and that, either with or without the complicity of the boy himself, it was they who battered Pasolini to death and drove over his prostrate body.
Yet as always with Pasolini, things aren’t as straightforward as they appear. You’d expect Betti to be a strong supporter of Giordana’s film. But she’s not. Yes, it takes her line on the killing, but she believes it demeans the maestro in the process. Betti, who acted in Pasolini’s Theorem and Canterbury Tales and was very close to him, considers herself PPP’s “moral” widow. By dredging up the sordid details of Pasolini the homosexual, she asserts, we forget Pasolini the intellectual, Pasolini the poet, Pasolini the writer, Pasolini the great film-maker.
Pelosi has always stuck to his original story that he alone killed Pasolini in self- defence, even in a TV interview from prison to which he has returned several times for other (pettier) crimes. One person who has continued to believe that Pelosi was telling the truth is Pasolini’s cousin Nico Naldini, a homosexual himself, who was familiar with the world of the male prostitutes that gathered around the gardens and cafs close to the Rome railway station in those years. Naldini, one of Pasolini’s literary heirs, is at war with Betti but is also angry about Giordana’s film, for different reasons. Above all, he accuses Marazzita of letting himself be used as a publicity boost for the film when it was premiered in Venice.
Naldini says: “I had never met Pelosi, but I found out afterwards that he had been picked up before by a person I know, who said the boy came home with him and was very sweet and obliging. If Pelosi reacted so violently that night at Ostia, it was because Pier Paolo enjoyed playing a sadomasochistic game with the boys he picked up. If they misunderstood his intentions, it was inevitable that they should react violently. Yes, Pier Paolo, even at 50, was athletic, but when you get kicked in the balls it isn’t easy to defend yourself.”
Naldini accuses Betti and her friends on the left of want ing Pasolini to emerge as a martyr like Federico Garca Lorca, who was murdered by the nationalists in Spain in the 1930s.
Naldini, who edited Pasolini’s Collected Letters, has published many volumes by or about his cousin, including a recent little book about their first political and homosexual experiences when they were growing up. He believes that the best way to commemorate Pasolini is to study his works rather than dig up the controversy over how he died.
Pasolini’s ideological position is a subject for heated debate in these difficult times for Italian politics. With the right trying hard to win intellectual respectability, there have even been pathetic attempts to claim Pasolini as one of theirs, just because the writer often criticised the former Communist Party for its conformism (they had taken away his party card when, as a teacher, he was charged with corrupting minors, though PPP went on supporting the communists to the end).
The right also claim that Pasolini’s attacks on modernism made him a conservative, but PPP made it clear that his objections were a question of aesthetics. He hated the consumerism fostered by television, which already in the early 1970s he believed was destroying the values of Italian society.
More threatening for Pasolini’s legacy are the attacks on his literary works made by poets like Edoardo Sanguineti, who despised Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio, published posthumously. It “shows that Pasolini couldn’t even write pornography”, he sneered. Yet the most scurrilous chapter of the book – describing the semi- autobiographical narrator’s marathon oral- sex session in a Roman field not so different from the one where PPP met his own end – was recently adapted brilliantly for the stage. Its merit was the total lack of pornography.
However bloody the various battles over Pasolini, it is good that he is being remembered, especially in an Italy still torn between left and right. One can be grateful to those who, in their different ways, are keeping the PPP flame burning.