There is never a shortage of moments that make writing about Andrea Pazienza “topical”, so indelible is the mark his “invincible line” has left on the Italian cultural landscape of recent decades. The great exhibition that most recently traveled to Bagnoli (Naples), richer each time; his brothers’ tireless and meticulous work of collecting; the new editions of his works (Baldini & Castoldi will soon reissue the dense and penetrating Pompeo); and in the near future a film based on his stories. The one daring to do it is Renato De Maria, the director who made the documentary for RAI about Bifo’s apartment, once home to Radio Alice and to other moments of the Bologna movement of ’77. After Hotel Paura, a film starring Sergio Castellitto and Isabella Ferrari, the Bolognese director, who shared transitional moments with Pazienza between ’77 and the ’80s, will take on bringing to the screen three different but emblematic Paz episodes: Pentothal, Giorno and Zanardi. This interview with Andrea Pazienza talked about that transition, from the peak of the ’77 movement to the first signs of the individualistic cynicism of the “horrible Eighties”; from the anarchic and liberating creativity of youth, still part of a left in which a few cracks could already be glimpsed, to the grim and hateful side of commodities and of the adolescent delusion of omnipotence that nestled in those crevices. In Pisa in 1981, on the occasion of a fine exhibition at Palazzo Lanfranchi dedicated to the monthly Frigidaire, the “trendsetting” publication of the time, both as counter-information and as comics, we had sat down on the floor, tucked away in a corner. As always back then, chatting with him was an unpredictable stream of consciousness, which luckily on that occasion was captured on tape by a running recorder.

From Pentothal to Zanardi, which is Pazienza’s character?
Let’s do it like this: I’ll answer questions in a somewhat general way… just talking… sometimes going off topic… So here’s what I think: there are two moments in my life. One is the Pentothal moment, which in turn splits into two others: one very Catholic, clerical, sacristy-like, with a whirl of games, fun, excuses, affectations, stammering, congestion, big noses, pimples, etc. Then, still within Pentothal, there’s a much harder moment, which is in fact the Pentothal moment, the one I defined that way, which was supposed to be this truth serum but turned out to be more than that… which was much more wooden, totemic, and which I could refer to without exposing myself so much. But this is an early phase of absolute unfamiliarity with the medium through which I was presenting myself… and so, a bit like in school essays when they tell you “good, but off topic”, I spread myself across the paper in a rather disjointed way, without practicing my line much, doing what I already knew how to do, that is presenting myself through keys I already knew, which I had already tried out on other occasions, in private or when I was painting. Whereas all my latest work – the best – is the work I like most, and it comes from the desire to have fun, not so much to tell stories as the urge to recreate situations that are as evocative as possible. In me these moments arise on the wave of what would like to be a mathematical discovery. I mean, I missed out on math at school because I hated it. But now I miss it, in the sense that I would like to build things through modules, symmetrically, mirror-like, defined, things that are as possible and realistic as can be. Zanardi is the guilty conscience of us all, he’s our little schoolmate, the wicked childhood friend who humiliated us in a thousand ways. He’s the person we hated most of all, yet the one we would have liked to resemble, the one we took most inspiration from. He was wicked, ignorant, unscrupulous, because he was utterly empty.

Why at high school and not in normal life, where this kind of person also exists?
Right now, with age, I’m gaining static strength and losing the strength that used to make me fly up the stairs, which all of us – we’re the same age – remember all too well, almost painfully, because it belongs to yesterday, not yet to the day before yesterday or to last year. And so there are still moments when I test myself, and I no longer find that very particular dynamism in me.

And what do you think?
I think it’s going badly from that point of view, I’m very sorry about it. I’m not interested in maturity, because I don’t believe in maturity in the sense of acquiring knowledge, taking on responsibility, becoming aware of certain facts. I’d like to stay young as long as possible, in the sense of never having to lecture anyone about what I think they should or shouldn’t do.

And is that how you behave?
No, I don’t behave like that, absolutely not, but when I have to invent characters I try to make them respond as much as possible to this particular kind of eccentric, violent dynamism, which has rebellion within it, because it can’t be contained. Anyway, that’s not the most important aspect, or the one I’m interested in… I realize that in a city there are a thousand different situations, and I recognize them much more in kids than in adults, or in people who, like me, represent the in-between age, when you no longer have time to devote to petty fashion, to the color of your Vespa, to that particular gadget that sets you apart. And I like all this movement. From a certain point of view it disgusts me: why? When I did it myself, I somehow scattered all my dynamic energy, because in the end I didn’t reach any worthy conclusion, given that today I find myself with enormous doubts… so I scattered it in politics. I spent high school making a mess in politics, whereas today in high schools nobody talks about politics even a little, there are no more assemblies, there’s nothing anymore. And after all? pure fun?… It’s certainly a step backward, if one can speak of a step backward, but maybe there’s no point talking about it.

Some say you sometimes have fun when you make your comics, but…
Right, may I answer? First of all, comics have timescales that are the timescales of comics, timescales that don’t give comics the dignity they could rise to in other particular circumstances. Of course nobody forces us, or forces me, to work producing one story a month or every two months, but in the end you get into a particular game of situations in which you’re forced, perhaps more than if there really were someone obliging you to do it. The fact is – and I want to put it in plain terms too – that I get paid 100-120 thousand lire per page. Just take the magazine and count the pages: what I tend to do, like everyone who manages to publish everything they make, is guarantee myself a salary. It’s what everyone does, everyone looking for work tries to do this… For example, there’s a page in Amore mio with a crouching figure looking at a crumpled piece of paper in front of him, it’s in color. Behind it I would have liked to do a Victor Vasarelli, all mathematical, a sort of constructivist project with very studied, very particular colors, and I assure you I would have managed it if I’d had the time. I didn’t have the time, and I had to settle for a demeaning series of colored diamonds. People may like it, but it’s not what I would have wanted to do if I’d had a different amount of time. But that’s not important… When I manage to produce something I really like, I enjoy it, I have fun doing it, I spend moments that are unforgettable for me. When instead I do something I don’t feel like doing, I’ve suffered for a month, so I don’t lose any sleep thinking about the 3,500 lire the guy lost buying the magazine and being disappointed, because he lost 3,500 lire and I felt much, much worse about it… I’m the one who feels worst, so I don’t feel obliged to explain myself to anyone from that point of view. A work of art, or a painting, or a vase, or a toilet means exactly what you manage to see. What you see is what it is. Nobody obliges you – and rightly so – to know its history, to know the steps of the research behind the project, all the theories of evolution that led to that particular kind of object. That’s a separate story. In my view the critic is a parasite because he lives off other people’s work, so a work means or doesn’t mean what you manage to see. Everything else belongs to other disciplines, historiography, the thousand definitions that make up the universe, the galaxy of subjects at DAMS, for example, each one more stupid than the next, or less definable than the next, more acrobatic than the next in its definition. Then, in fact, if the thing manages to convey something to you, it has worked; if it doesn’t, it hasn’t worked, and that’s the end of it. Sometimes it’s a matter of a millimeter… There are mathematics that determine all this. These are the mathematics I’d like to reach, but it’s hard work, because when you’re there, you go, you know?

Is there a strand of political satire in your work, or do you not even consider the issue?
No, I’d like to have a range of different styles at my disposal and be able to make use of them, but they have to be cultivated somehow. I don’t have much time or desire… And in truth, if I had to start doing political satire now, after two years of not doing it, I wouldn’t be able to. Just as it would make no sense for me now to do a cartoon of De Michelis captioned “De Michelis is a Red Brigades member”, whereas if I had done it two years ago – but using a particular way of presenting the image – it might have worked.

What music do you like now?
I listen to the radio, but I don’t have a stereo, I don’t collect records, I don’t know… since I usually say things I believe in, at least at the moment… If you ask me a question about music, I can answer with something tossed off that tomorrow I wouldn’t remember.

Then more bluntly: what record would you put on right now?
Ah, I’d put on the latest King Crimson, Discipline , with Robert Fripp doing the elephant trumpeting.

Do you feel like a star?
Tsk! No.

Are you still the same old…
…I’ve never been old, I’m 25… Only on certain occasions like this do you get the chance to meet up; otherwise, and luckily, you don’t experience certain things at all. Thank goodness. It’s not a ghetto or anything else, it’s simply happy normality, the life of someone who went looking for it and is living it with idiotic calm. I have an infinite number of problems, but not these ones; I mean, real problems: avoiding military service, moving house…