I am obsessed with telling stories. I like to tell them because I like to listen to them. I have often told stories to dispute others that I didn’t like. Narration has a duty: to express a point of view, which can be shared or detested. You can agree or disagree, but you can’t come away from a story with every imaginable position in your head. What you do when you tell a story is choose. A monologue, a book, is a place where you propose an idea to others, who accept or reject it. It is not a place where you sound any and all conceivable notions, because in the end, if you do that, you haven’t told any story or put forth any viewpoint.

I have always been struck by the questions that I am asked abroad. How can words represent a danger to criminal organizations? Isn’t that an exaggeration? How can a vulnerable man like you frighten the clan? But it’s not the writer himself who scares them, it’s the scores of people listening, those who read a story, the numerous languages in which the story is told. The word becomes the premise of the action and, in many cases, the action itself. That’s the power of stories, which has always given me faith and kept me from feeling crushed by sorrow, even when I tell a story like that of vote-buying or the love between Mina and Piergiorgio Welby.

There is a story that my grandfather Carlo always told me, a story drawn from the Jewish tradition. In the world, in every generation, there are always thirty-six just men. They don’t know who they are and no one else knows who they are. But when evil seems to prevail, they rise up against it. And this is one of the reasons why God does not destroy the world. That’s why understanding and recognizing wrong and trying to change it has always seemed to me to be an act of great hope. The idea that you can save the world by doing even simple things, or things considered simple, has always filled me with joy. It is a way of saying to anyone who is listening: if I do my job well this morning, I’m saving the whole world. It’s like saying: this is my problem too, it concerns me, like Calamandrei’s ship.

There is a poem by Borges, entitled ‘The Just’, which sums this all up:

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wanted.

Someone who is grateful that there is music on this earth.

One who tracks down an etymology with pleasure.

Two workers in a café in the South, enjoying a silent game of chess.

A potter envisioning a colour and shape.

The typographer who sets this page, though he may not like it.

A man and a woman reading the final tercets of a certain canto.