“The time for action has come. Whatever it takes. Because the climate crisis is not a distant shadow, it is here, now. And those who live in the rich part of the world cannot pretend not to see it.”
Piero Malenotti, a sociologist and journalist committed to environmental issues, has no doubts in his debut as a writer, with Per l’ultima goccia, a novel with a slow pace that plummets into a surprising and unexpected ending. And he does not choose dystopian futures or apocalyptic worlds to tell the parable of protagonist Valerio Lupi, a mining engineer passionate about his work, who arrives in Africa to direct yet another mission to build an offshore oil rig. But he roots his story in the present, in the reality of a world we know and too often prefer not to see.
Providing the backdrop is a beautiful, fictional but verisimilar place, which we discover by following the protagonist in subjective view as he wanders through the alleys of the small town medina, where he chooses to live for the duration of the mission.
El Amal does not exist on maps, but it immediately ignites in the reader the vivid memory of Atlantic Morocco, amid markets throbbing with life and scented with spices, gates inlaid with Andalusian motifs, tile decorations reminiscent of Portuguese azulejos, and walls painted blue.
Because El Amal, which means hope in Arabic, is a synthesis of a country and a culture: harmoniously designed places at the opposite end of the modern periphery, where women, especially in the innermost villages, are still victims of a patriarchal culture, and with an economy based fundamentally on fishing and recent development related to tourism and surfing. A world poised between modernity and tradition, where the beauty of landscapes and cultural richness clash with the brutality of an economic system that puts profit before people’s lives.
That’s what Valerio discovers as he becomes more involved and open to the life of the community of fishermen and shepherds, who will soon have to contend with the new mining plant in the middle of the sea and a new industrial area, which will take land away from grazing, particularly valuable in a drought-prone area.
And so it is that, in a gradual awakening of consciousness, Valerio begins to perceive, precisely in his passion for his work, the contradiction between an economy based on hydrocarbons and the reasons for an increasingly hot and arid territory, where the West still moves as a coloniser, stripping it of resources and polluting it. Until his gaze becomes that of the community, and then a tragic event will be enough to trigger, for him, a point of no return.
And the mild-mannered professional transforms himself by performing an extreme act, but one born of empathy, friendship and love. It is a gesture that disorients the reader, but in which, rather than the legitimisation of violence and the indication of a way forward, we rather like to read a provocation, a warning that shakes and questions, and which stands on the imaginative synthesis and strength that are proper to the language of art. Valerio’s gesture becomes a powerful metaphor, an invitation to engage against an unjust model of development that we will all pay for in the long run whether we like it or not.
