I start off my job as a contributor of the Tangueros Quarterly Review with delight at having realized my life’s dream: being an international review’s contributor.
Mayo Castellani assured me that this review (or this newsletter, i didn’t get it yet) counts some thousands subscribers scattered over the whole globe and he provided me with a list of names.
But, as Fioro said in a weird Babelfish translation: “I know my chickens”, and in fact Castellani couldn’t drop his old habit that i used to know since the legendary Manoppo Brothers’ era: the invention of pen-names and subliminal messages. How can i swallow subscribers such as mr. Payperview, or ms. Embalsamada Faraòn from Mexico City !?
Anyway promise is debt and to begin with, i will quote myself:
I was born in the flat region of Padania, and as well as many foreigners of wide horizons i felt a natural wish to venture beyond the Peach Alley’s foggy boundaries.
At the age of thirty, still being black all my hairs and after much roaming the visible and the invisible worlds, the southern hemisphere included, i decided to give myself a hitch in advance, thanks to a tip coming from the former doctor Ernesto Guevara.
Blabbering about life on the Easter Island, he said to his friend Granado: “Nobody but women work on the island; the men’s only duty is to make them happy”.
With such an outlook, i hesitated no longer to search for the Easter Island in the Mediterranean, since I cannot live far from the neapolitan pizza, and stopped at Sardinia.
Which is an isolated island, it’s big, scarce of islanders and still enough for a snob like me.
But the women in the first place!
They are not like the Che’s tales, but they have beautiful eyes; mr. Lawrence (D.H.) first said it and i confirm it.
I love the Sardinians and, generally speaking, the Sardinians love me.
In consequence of this big love of ours, i must start to badmouth them:
One of the islanders’ most umpleasant peculiarities is that they display and spread their rightful nationalism on any object or subject in the sensible world.
This reveals their soft and unaware inferiority complex, which is absolutely without real substance, but nevertheless originates an attitude that doesn’t allow discussions, specially when is matched by their fool obstinacy.
You visit the Maldive Islands with a Sardinian and you will hear him saying: “A nice sea around here… it’s almost as nice as ours.”
I’ve never been there, but i believe the Maldive sea is very clear, very blue, very crispy as it is at Cala E’ Lune, but if you want to sell something to Sardinians in Sardinia, you have to stick a Sardinia label on it, no matter if it is made in India or Taiwan.
I sell to tourists and this problem doesn’t affect me personally, but i know many cases: from the made-in-Holland salami that are sold as “typical Barbagia”, to the porno movies promoted as “true sardinian hard core with local actors ”. So, if any diatribe arises about the place of origin of something yummy, for a Sardinian the uncertain is certain: it comes from Sardinia.
This rule is in force also for famous people, who are really hard to find in the island maybe because the hopes of career are limited everywhere but in the field of brigandage and in politics (which is brigandage as well).
The only one who has reached the fame is Gigi Riva, who by the way is from Leggiuno (Varese), according to my Panini collection of Soccer Players (1969-1970).
Most people are usually “sent off to Sardinia” on punishment; the islanders take the boat to the Continent instead.
Therefore, if a guy is famous in a country with a lot of immigrants and still his birth is uncertain, he is definitely a Sardinian; at least for the Sardinians.
Writing of Tango, i couldn’t miss that Sardinian Tanguero, mobster and politician; of course there will be others, but this one is awfully bigger and better.
His true love for the Tango is proved by the bitter words of Gato Barbieri, another great Argentinian: “I neither listened nor understood the tango» he admits «But when dictator Peron was in power, we were not allowed to play only jazz: we had to put in our concerts also some traditional tunes, from tango to carnavalito”. 
I am talking of Juan Domingo Peron of course, who has already been the subject-matter of an argument between the cities of Lobos and Roque Perez, both claiming his birth in Argentina; imagine if Mamojada would stay out of it!
Mamojada, which is a big village in the Barbagia region that competes without being shamed by the next villages in the championships of morra, sheep fair, and murders, is famous mainly for the mamuthone, a primitive, terrifying almost nuraghic mask.
The mask’s play would have bewitched a lot Giovanni Piras from Mamojada, born in 1891 and expatriated in Argentina, who, needing to change his identity, turned into Juan Domingo Peron and took up that career we all know.
The details, seasoned with plenty of tiresome descriptions of the old good times, are in the website www.piras-peron.it ; maybe the most curious among our readers would like to go deep in the matter and purchase the Peppino Caneddu’s book, which i don’t review since i did not read it.
Actually, you don’t need Freud to psychologize the mamuthone and the Barbagia code or to spot the close resemblance between the pictures of the young Zuanne Piras and Juan Peron, officer at the Olivos Military Academy. I can’t see why Peron hid his origin like a paranoiac when he got the power, even if “Myth must be cultivated, not destroyed” as Michele Rio once said (but who knows where the hell he heard it from).
The clergy and his military colleagues never thought much of Peron, mostly because of his wife’s dubious reputation (she was a tango dancer).
However, being himself a clever guy, he should have noticed that the milongueros don’t give a damn about things like these, neither do the intellectuals, and churchy people knew it too since he said to one of them: “Look out, i am as vindictive as a Sardinian”.
We have biographical notes that see president Peron firmly leading Argentina with a staff of right-and-left-arm men from Barbagia all around him, with whom i imagine he used to attend to barbecues in the Estancias and organize some cruel revenges, exactly as he would have done in the sheepfolds of Supramonte.
A mystery wrapped in a mistery: rumours say that crucial evidence of his true identity are hidden in a trunk that will be open only in 2004, under the provisions of the will. Let’s wait these few months and see.
In short, i feel like to consider the question as a possible spoof story, yet likely.
But coming back to Sardinia: what have the Sardinian bandits been doing recently?
According to the Radio Barbagia chronicles, there is a revival of the milonga’s doubtful habit of rubbing out one another.
The dances began in Oliena: several floral gifts, actually they were early funeral wreaths, have been home delivered to the members of a “dead men walking” list. The shooting has been resumed in Orune and signs of fire are heard around Mamojada and Orgosolo.
But my tango record is over now, and so is my last Boyard cigarette which is the only salary I get for my contribution to this review, as a Co.Co.Co.
I leave to your complaints and to the big boss’ generosity my chance to go on or not with some other items on tango, milonga, or on your and my life.
A fond hug to you all, hasta pronto.

Loriano Pelizzari, 2003  

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