When a Mother Goes Away...

Indonesia, October 2017

Last night I met a dear friend, in a restaurant, that I had not seen for many years.

I met Noli Isabel over fifteen years ago when I frequented the Filipino community a lot; at the time there were still many beauty and talent contests, and he made traditional Filipino clothes, he is also a great singer.

But his great passion has always been acting. At sixty, he starred in over two hundred films. It can be said that he is the most famous Filipino actor in Italy.

Like everyone else, he started with small appearances, chained for years and years to the caricatural role of waiter or servant, because this is how Filipinos are still seen in the Italian common imagination.

But Noli is stubborn and with great passion, finally he has made the leap in quality, being able to live only on this and with roles different from the usual cultural stigma, playing alongside the most famous Italian actors.

This is just to remind us once again that the clichés about migrant communities are always shortcuts of mental laziness which not only will never allow for true social integration but which also make life complicated even for those who try hard to do something else, such as it is natural that it is.

The bitter truth is also agreed upon by my friend Leonardo Cinieri Lombroso with whom we share a passion for Asia which he translates into excellent documentaries.

It was the three of us in the restaurant.

Then Noli said that a few years ago he lost his mother.

At sixty, always living with a child's heart, full of enthusiasm and youthful spirit, he confessed to us that the day after her death, in front of the mirror, he no longer recognized himself. He saw an old man.

Because, he said, that in life the wife, the children, the job, the friends, everything changes, while the love of a mother is always there, in the background, in the silence, but there is always: whatever happens the mother is always there.

Nobody else asks you how you are, if you need something, if you eat well.

All this which has always been taken for granted and that has kept us young, with death suddenly disappears, and all the weight of the years falls in an avalanche on his face, on his body.

Now we are alone, and no one will look after us as only a mother can.

We suddenly become old.

I have never thought about it, also because fortunately, my mother is still with me. But it seemed like a nice reflection to me.

I find the idea of youth and old age linked to the presence of a mother very romantic. And maybe there are many of you who share it.

I have always believed that age is more a state of mind than a number on a document, and in each of my portraits I try to awaken the sense of beauty in women who, in the courses of daily life, have forgotten it or they think they have lost it forever, just because of some wrinkle or white hair.

For me old age or youth – which, however, I absolutely do not coincide with beauty and decadence – have always been a matter linked to the image, of course, as a photographer and portraitist.

Or it can also be linked to the scars that each of us bears, whether they are real on the skin or symbolic in the soul.

I lacked this idea of the perception of one's physical appearance and also of age hanging on the thread of maternal presence.

Like a ripe but still appetizing and round fruit which, once cut, falls to the ground and crushes revealing its seeds and pulp already advanced in time.

Like the portrait in which Dorian Gray aged while preserving the youth of the real Dorian, and then in an instant, he scrapped all the years he spent on the real person, making him old.

 

This sweet bitter reflection by Noli nevertheless confirmed to me the tremendous power that human passions and feelings have.

Like love, which reaches its peak in the mother, capable of keeping us eternal children or of transforming us into poor bodies tested by time and pains.

 

Manila restaurant. Rome, 14 July 2022

Italian version