FRANCESCA
From the intro to the novel
ITALODISCO, FRANCESCA & BAD HABITS
This novel was written in a couple of weeks on a Lettera 32 typewriter in 1987. I was back at my parents’ apartment in Yeoville, Johannesburg, after being rescued from Italy. I was eighteen years old. This was my first novel.
Milan, by 1989, was the druggy capital of Europe. The heroin wave that had first rolled through Italy in the ’70s had just gotten worse through the ’80s, and by October of 1989, the New York Times[1] was confident enough to report that, “The rapid rise of heroin use in Italy has left the country with the largest number of drug-related deaths in Western Europe. In 1988, the Government said, 809 people died from heroin overdoses, almost three times the number in 1986. Health officials say that with people widely sharing needles, more than half the country’s estimated 300,000 heroin users have been infected with AIDS.”
Heroin being made legal for personal use was part of the problem. A teenager in Italy studying for a law degree, I’d fallen in love with a girl from Parma one hot, breathless summer night in a nightclub in Rimini. A girl who, like so many other kids back then, would find herself on a one-way trip to a full-scale addiction. Years and decades on, I’ve come to think of those days as a time of innocent addiction. Just a bunch of kids having a lot of fun, and with no idea what was waiting on the other side.
Those were the fading days of ItaloDisco and those spectacular nightclubs around Italy dripping in beats, sex, and heroin. Really, there was so much heroin running around back then that practically everyone was on the stuff: guys working in the banks and girls at the university and everyone in-between would blissfully shoot-up at lunch alongside shots of espresso.
I was lucky because I found a way out when things got ugly. My girl and I, we fell off the planet for a while back then, and did things that feel, now, as if the memories belong to another person. From another life. Though the scars are reminders that, while the memories may belong to another, the body was mine. Mine and—well—sure.
You get the picture.
I was lucky, as I said, that my mom flew in from South Africa and rescued me from that squat in Parma where we’d been steadily digging out our own veins and graves, my girl and I. A week later, I was on an Alitalia flight headed home.
And there, in my childhood bedroom, I wrote this novel.
Make of it as you will. It was inspired by what I saw, and those softcover Ludlum novels I carried around with me. It’s a weird novel, I guess, but really, you had to be in Italy in the late-’80s to understand the sheer crazy of it all: the politics, the drugs, the music, the street culture. Mad, intoxicating days.
This novel was never sent to a publisher. It would, of course, never have been published anyway. And so, almost—can it really be?—forty years later, it’s self-published here as it was written then, very much warts and all. Violent, obsessive, remorseless, gritty, restless, and with just some cosmetic edits (including the chapter titles).
At its core is the voice of an eighteen-year-old boy. I hope you’ll forgive him that.
And if you’re wondering what ever happened to the girl I met and fell in love with, the answer is—I never did find out what happened to her. There was no social media back then. No email. No WhatsApp. People simply vanished. I’ve always hoped she got off the H and found a way back to college to continue her art degree. But it’s just as likely that she was found in a café or some backroom squat in Milan or Parma in that killer year, 1989.
So, wherever you are, this one’s for you, Francesca. It’s not great—but it’s who we were, back then. We were works in progress. We always will be. And despite all the darkness, that summer of 1987, in your little green Fiat 500, driving full throttle on the autostrada to Lake Garda, riding that brown horse we loved so much, laughing all the while, windows open and long hair soaring, Righeira’s ‘L’estate sta finendo’ on the Pioneer stereo, those were some of the very best days of my life.
I survived and made a life writing words. It really happened, just as you said it would.
Zürich, Switzerland, May 29, 2024
Every chapter is the name of an ItaloDisco track. You can listen along on Spotify:
Profile: Alex Martini. Playlist: Francesca
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/08/world/rising-heroin-use-and-addict-deaths-alarm-italy-where-drug-is-legal.html