Marco was born in an asylum; his mother was insane. Is he mad too? Is this his secret, the conundrum that explains his personality? Is this why he always sides with the majority? Does this explain everything, or does it at least explain the essential? And if Marco truly is mad, what is the nature of his madness?
When the scandal broke, there were few who abstained from offering an opinion on his character: journalists, historians, philosophers, professors waded in; not to mention psychologists and psychiatrists. The diagnosis offered by the latter was unanimous and, to a certain extent, concurs with that of many of our man’s acquaintances: Marco is a textbook narcissist. Obviously, narcissism is not a form of madness but rather a personality disorder, a simple psychological anomaly. It is characterised by blind, unwarranted faith in one’s own greatness, a deep-seated need for admiration and a lack of empathy. The narcissist has an inflated sense of self-importance, he is shamelessly self-aggrandising, blows his own trumpet at the slightest pretext and, regardless of what he does, expects to be recognised as superior, unconditionally admired and revered. In addition to a tendency to arrogance and overconfidence, he cultivates fantasies of unlimited power and success and, though loath to put himself in another’s shoes (or incapable of doing so), he ruthlessly exploits others because he believes that the rules that apply to them do not apply to him. He is an incorrigible charmer, a born manipulator, a leader determined to win over disciples, a man hungry for power and control and almost impervious to feelings of guilt. Is the narcissist, then, essentially a man in love with himself? Is the narcissist that psychologists speak of the same as the narcissist of popular wisdom? Or is he the Narcissus of myth? Who is the mythical Narcissus?
There are several versions; the most well known—and the finest—is the account given by Ovid in the third book of the Metamorphoses. It is a tragic story that begins with an act of violence: Cephissus, the river god, abducts and rapes the wave-blue water-nymph Liriope, a Naiad, and as the fruit of this violation she bears a son of dazzling beauty whom she names Narcissus. Liriope hurriedly goes to the blind seer Tiresias to ask whether her son will live to see old age; Tiresias’ response is cryptic yet categorical: yes, “si se non nouerit”; meaning, yes, “if he does not know himself.” The childhood of Narcissus passes without incident, despite the enigmatic prediction of the voice of destiny. During his adolescence, many youths and many girls desire Narcissus, but he does not reciprocate their love. One day, while hunting deer in the woods, he spies Echo, “she of the echoing voice, who cannot be silent when others have spoken, nor learn how to speak first herself”—and she too falls in love with him; unwavering in his coldness and his arrogance, Narcissus scorns her and, filled with shame, and overwhelmed with sorrow, Echo hides herself in the woods and curses he who has mocked so many men and women before her, “So may he himself love, and so may he fail to command what he loves!” And Nemesis, daughter of night and goddess of retribution, hears Echo’s entreaty; her intercession seals Narcissus’ fate. Coming to “an unclouded spring of silver-bright water” ringed by grass, Narcissus stretches out to rest and drink, but, when he seeks to slake his thirst in the pool, a different and insatiable thirst grows within him: “seized by the vision of his reflected form, he loves a bodiless dream, believing what is merely a shadow to be corporeal. He is astonished by himself, and hangs there motionless, with a fixed expression, like a statue carved from Parian marble.” Echo’s curse is fulfilled: burning with love for his image reflected in the water, Narcissus fails to command what he loves; and Tiresias’ prophecy also comes true: when he sees himself, when he knows himself, Narcissus dies and his body is transformed into “a flower, with white petals surrounding a yellow heart”: the narcissus.
So the Narcissus of myth is not the Narcissus of popular wisdom, but his antithesis. In Ovid’s tale, Narcissus does not fall in love with himself, but with his reflected image; in Ovid’s tale, Narcissus hates himself, is horrified by himself, scorns himself with all his might, and this is why when he sees himself he dies. The narcissist, through his self-aggrandisement, fashions delusions of grandeur and heroism, a flattering fantasy, a lie behind which he can shelter and take refuge, a fiction capable of hiding his reality, the sheer sordidness of his life or what he perceives as the sheer sordidness of his life, his mediocrity and his abjectness, the utter contempt he feels for himself. The narcissist has an insatiable need for the admiration of others to shore up his fantasy, just as he needs power and control so that no-one can demolish the magnificent façade he has created to hide behind. The narcissist lives in fear and misery, plagued by a crippling insecurity disguised as self-confidence (even arrogance or smugness), on the brink of madness, terrified by the bottomless void that exists, or that he senses, within him, enamoured of the flattering fiction he has created to forget his repellent reality, and so, he has made himself impervious not only to guilt, but to almost every emotion, which he strives to keep at bay for fear that he might be weakened or even destroyed.
Moreover, many psychologists claim that narcissism develops in childhood, born of violence or of profound injury—just as Narcissus is born of the initial violence Cephissus visits on Liriope—of some terrible trauma the child is incapable of processing, some humiliation, some devastating blow to his self-esteem, some premature experience of horror suffered within the bosom of the family. This may be true. What is certain is that fiction saves Narcissus, and that, if Marco in his own way is a narcissist, perhaps it was his lies that saved him: Marco was an orphan forcibly removed from his mother, a poor, mentally ill woman who had been abused by her husband; a boy who experienced a nomadic, loveless childhood; an adolescent inspired by a short-lived revolution and crushed by a horrifying war; a born loser who, at some point in his life, in an attempt to win the love and admiration he had never had, decided to invent his past, to reinvent himself, to rework his life into a glorious fiction that would hide the embarrassing, pedestrian reality. He proclaimed that he was not who he was—an utterly normal man, a member of the vast, silent, cowardly, grey, depressing majority who always say Yes—but an exceptional person, one of those singular individuals who always says No, or who says No when everyone else says Yes, or when it is most crucial to say No: at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, though he was hardly more than a child; as an impassioned combatant against fascism in places of the greatest risk and stress; as an intrepid anarchist guerrilla operating behind enemy lines during the war and, after the war, the first or one of the first foolhardy resistants to oppose the victorious Franco regime; as a political exile, a victim of and fighter against the Nazis, a champion of liberty. These were Marco’s lies. This was the fiction that perhaps saved him, and which, as in the case of Narcissus, prevented him for many years from knowing himself or from recognising himself for who he was. Of course, if lies saved Marco, the truth I am telling in this book will kill him. Because fiction saves, but reality kills.