The Chill (review)

Immediately reminiscent of Albert Camus's The Stranger, Romano Bilenchi's The Chill is a spare, epigrammatic novella of roughly eighty pages that details the gradual disillusionment of a teenage boy, never named, who is growing up in Italy during the 1950s. When his grandfather dies suddenly in his sleep, the young boy is thrust into a series of seemingly banal and yet increasingly sinister encounters with his friends and family by which the veil of childhood is stripped away, and the boy realizes that behind the false bonhomie and social veneer of manners that human beings can be both dishonorable and treacherous.

Indeed, it seems that the only person who ever loved the protagonist was his grandfather, while other family members and his so-called friends either project their own fears or ambitions onto him or actively torment him as he grows uncertainly to young adulthood. I must confess that my "way in" to this text comes from a somewhat similar series of experiences in my youth. My father died when I was four, leaving me and my three-year-old brother in the care of a distraught mother who never really recovered from the shock of his death. Shortly after, my mother was obliged to return to work to support us, and so I was often left in the care of relatives while growing up and was later conscripted to look after my grandfather, my father's father, in his final years.

But like the protagonist of Bilenchi's novella, I never perceived this duty as an onerous task. I connected with my grandfather more readily than with all the other members of my family. Even in my early teens, I correctly perceived that out of all my family members, the only one who loved me unconditionally, if often uncomprehendingly, was my grandfather. As with Bilenchi's central character, who must navigate the often difficult paths of adolescent sexuality as well as the rituals of high school life, I found great comfort in my grandfather's counsel and his tales of a time long past, the late nineteenth century.

Then as now utterly disinterested in sports, I would nevertheless watch endless double-header baseball games with my grandfather, listening raptly as he dispensed life lessons between innings, consciously schooling me in the realities of life, speaking frankly of his son's (my father's) death as the one great tragedy that had ever befallen him. He was also, of course, preparing me for his own death, which came when I was eighteen, and which left me deeply, profoundly shaken. I didn't understand the entire value of his intellectual legacy to me at the time, of course, and neither does Bilenchi's narrator. Yet Bilenchi's protagonist is marked for life by his grandfather's passing in some fashion that even in old age he still cannot fully comprehend.

With his grandfather gone, the young man turns to his family and friends for solace and a new beginning but discovers instead treachery and indifference. In the immediate aftermath of his passing, the young boy recalls an expedition with his grandfather on which they visited an archaeological "dig" site, supervised by the director of a local museum. In the course of the afternoon, workers discover a bust of the Roman emperor Augustus as an adolescent, possessing a "dazed, dreamy, pained look. It reveal[ed] a young man stricken by a preoccupation that sadden[ed] him," much like that of the young man. Suddenly, the workers make a second discovery—a bag of ancient Roman coins, preserved in a leather pouch.

The men are astonished by the near-mint condition of the coins, centuries old, and speculate on how they came to be buried with the statue in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater. As grandfather and grandson leave the site, the director remarks "today, dear friends, we have seen death, we have seen how precarious our existence is, and who can say if we will leave even a coin purse as a relic of our time on earth...