These are days when fate brings back memories overbearingly and painfully, and with them faces, people linked to memories of a distant but so well-defined (and finished) time that they stand there, like a work of art hanging on the walls of your soul.
Memories that often inevitably become associated with the most beautiful age and with an era that seems better to you, memories that you must however recognise, cultivate and handle with care so as not to let them tear your heart out. In the case of the Malindi of thirty, thirty-five years ago, it is all the more persuasive and dangerous, with the aggravation of the malady of a purer Africa.
I have not yet finished thinking back to the moments, the anecdotes, the adventures, the laughter linked to one of the Italian characters of that time, Gabriellone, when I receive the news of the passing away, at just 63 years of age, of Macino, someone who was not just a ‘character’, but a friend, someone I loved and who was really hard not to love.
But above all, unlike others who have soiled their and my memories, disowning the values with which we grew up at that time, which made us brothers and sisters even though we were very different as well as proud and happy to be so, he was still the same.
Riccardo Balducci, known as Macino, from Rimini, animated the group of Rimini residents who in the early 1990s were many, came and went and often stayed and invented jobs, life and freedom.
Macino had been a postman, an accountant, was curious and knew how to do a bit of everything.
Macino was positivity and lightness, he was all-Roman sympathy and great dignity. At a certain point an unexpected encounter, a new passion, and life radically changed. A fortune that to many seemed to have kissed him, had swept him hither and thither, and he was carried along without being a weathercock at all, despite having to face novelties and storms. He had ended up in Lusaka, Zambia, where he had lived for many years and started a family. More than once I had postponed the trip to visit him and had read his ‘maybe I'll go back to Kenya sometime’ messages.
A bad illness brought him back to where he was born and where fate took him, before memories did.