text in the work:

All the time that I told the story of my name

Since I was born, everybody calls me Pablo, but my first name is Michele. In every document I am Michele, just Michele Chiereghin. Everytime somebody asks me about my name, I have two choices. A long story, if I have to keep the conversation up, or a shorter one, if I have to be polite, but short.

The long story is that I have no Spanish roots although I know Pablo is a Spanish name. Yes, I speak Spanish but just because, in my twenties, I lived in Madrid for a while. Sometimes at this point Italian people ask me if my name comes form the famous song Pablo from the Italian cantautore De Gregori. This is really a cool song about an Italian emigrant in Switzerland who meets a Spanish workmate who knows the women and cheats on his wife and if one day he fell, he did it thinking of his wife, putting on weight or of his fighting cockerel, but my parents assured me that my name doesn’t come from there.  Well, it is all about my parents, nobody has a full copyright on their own name. My parents were atheists, they were left-wingers, they liked Neruda and Picasso, and both of them wanted to give me a special name, a name that would marks my existence. So they decided on Pablo. Pablo Chiereghin, that doesn’t sound that Italian at all.

But where does Michele come from? Well, both the families of my parents are from Veneto, a region renowned for its conservative Catholicism and for its ‘facade of Catholic behaviour’. Both the families (and especially my father’s mother Nonna Parigina) were pretty looking forward to having a traditional wedding and a ‘traditionally named’ grandson, growing up following church behaviours.  My parents married in bell bottom jeans in full summer, on the 21st of August. All this was a sort of weird thing, but at least my parents were married, so all my grandparents, although not invited to the wedding, were somehow happy. The wedding was performed with a bunch of friends by a really close friend that was the PCI vice-major of Adria at that time. I have some photos and I am really proud of them (now my parents have changed, my mother also told me that sometimes she regrets not having had a white dress and a more traditional wedding).

Well, after four months my mother got pregnant and they decided to call their son, me, Pablo, well Michele. I still wonder why they were not brave enough to go just for Pablo. I actually found out that I had another name on my first day of primary school. They called Michele Chiereghin and my mum pushed me in. After a while I started asking myself about this weird name that was written everywhere, but that didn’t belong to me. The explanation by my parents was that they really liked Pablo, but Pablo could also have been considered a political name, so they went for a more normal one so that nobody could discriminated me. At that time it was enough for me. Furthermore, my mum had problems with her name, too. When my great-grandfather went to register her name, he couldn’t register Odette - a name stemming from an easy-reading French novel - because there was still a fascist law that allowed kids to be registered only with Italian names. My great-grandfather got really upset and went for Odetta, saying that it was a female Italian name because it ended with an ‘a’. So my mother Odetta and my father Nerino (that is also a strange name that translated sounds like small blacky and my father, except when he was a kid and blond, was black-haired and not that tall. Anyway, now he is white-haired) didn’t want to mark me for all my life with a communist name. I understand it.  They had always been looking out for my future. Furthermore, my father‘s mum searched for a Pablo among the saints of the calendar and she couldn’t accept that Pablo wasn’t present. The Italian translation was Paolo, but that was not enough for her. Considering all the circumstances, my parents had a lot of doubts until the very last day. They had always done what they wanted to, but this was for them the first important issue that could have directly affected somebody else’s life.

I was born on the 29th of September, which is regrettably the birthday of Silvio Berlusconi, too. The 29th of September is San Michele, that is not a proper saint because he is one of the three archangels. He was a fighter that defeated the dragon personifying the devil. Not bad. That means that my birthday is also my saint’s day. Michele means who is like God?. That was somehow enough for my Grandma to deal with the fact, too, that her grandson would have the strange opportunity to decide at 18 years old if he would like to be baptised. So that day my father went to register me at the council house. He named me Michele Chiereghin. In the meanwhile my mum was holding me at her breast, telling her friends and relatives how beautiful her Pablo was.

The short story I tell about my name is that I was named Pablo because my parents loved Neruda.