A chat with Caterina Crepax about her father, Ulisse

There are those who grew up with an ‘Iliad-like’ father, a fighter for whom life is one battle after another until someone discovers your weak spot and strikes you right there, on the heel, so beware of false friends just as you would false gods; and then there are those who had an ‘Odyssey-like’ father, a philosopher for whom linear time does not exist, and life is an eternal interweaving of past, present and a future already lived that need only resurface in one’s consciousness. Caterina Crepax, a renowned paper sculptor and daughter of Guido, had an ‘Odysseus-like’ father, who ‘would read us Rosa Calzecchi’s historic translation in the kitchen, whilst Mum cooked and might even prepare a snack for him too; he had a huge sweet tooth and, once he’d got his slice of tart, he’d retreat back to his studio to draw. He was particularly drawn to the darker episodes of the myth: Polyphemus, Circe, the Laestrygonians. He would bring them to life by changing his voice. It was irresistible.” So, Caterina is convinced that Chris Nolan’s film adaptation “would have appealed to him greatly: he, too, took artistic licence with a given text, especially when he loved and respected it as much as this one, and, like the director, he had a fluid relationship with time. He would have been mad about ‘Interstellar’”.

Guido Crepax’s version of the Odyssey, “Nessuno” (“here, the omission of the stratagem in the film, he would have liked it less, because the foundations of the Odyssey – and indeed of the literature that followed it right up to Joyce – rest upon the utìs”) was first published in 1985, but it was not until 1990 that the complete edition appeared from the historic and much-missed Milano Libri, run by the Gandini family – founders of Linus and heirs to a renowned tailor’s shop from the 1930s. A week ago, the last member of the family, Annamaria, passed away at the age of ninety-three. She was idolised by that generation of Milanese who were fortunate enough to develop their own taste through the marvellous items she brought out every day onto the display counters of the premises on Via Verdi opposite La Scala, now occupied by an unremarkable shop: ‘A great sorrow. I still think of how annoyed Annamaria used to get because her husband Giovanni, the publisher, would come round to our house almost every evening on the pretext of having to study the rules of the board games my father was creating, based on the great battles of history, complete with toy soldiers and all: Austerlitz, Waterloo, but also Magenta, Agincourt, and Marco Polo’s journey. ‘But how many more rules do you still have to perfect?’” In the study at 45 Via De Amicis – which was also the address of Valentina’s character; anyone who read *Linus* knew where the Crepax family lived – we’re really talking about another world – they would come up with the most complicated and eccentric ones: “Just imagine: on the game board for the Battle of Pavia (24 February 1525, the French defeat, the end of medieval chivalry, ed.), my father included a drawing of two half-naked maidens fleeing from the French rabble; but, according to a certain rule, you could either free them or even kill them after seducing them.” A perfectly plausible story, yet who else would have had the courage? Apart from in certain boxes “from Enea – do you remember Enea?” (Enea Bracciali, another great name from Milan’s artisan and ingenious past, drowned out by the endless money-grabbing that followed the deregulation brought about by the Bersani law), and the panels “which were kept in a series of specially made crates lined with Morris wallpaper to blend in with the walls”, public traces of those games remain in an advertising insert designed for the launch of the Volkswagen Polo and in certain Christmas gifts that were sent to subscribers of "Tempo Medico" – for which Crepax illustrated the covers for decades – and which included a chess set sponsored by Acutil Fosforo. The rest forms part of the family archive and was exhibited some time ago at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. “My father had started creating them to entertain us, because he felt guilty about being shut away in his studio all day – a studio which, incidentally, he wanted to be identical in every house: he’d take us to the seaside just long enough for a swim. He hated travelling: he turned down an invitation to the United States because, he replied, he’d only just been to Lugano.”

When we spoke, I had in fact just visited the Brissago Islands, where James Joyce – who was a guest of the owner, the eccentric Baroness Antoinette de Saint Léger – drew inspiration for Circe in his "Ulysses"; Caterina Crepax is, in fact, in the house in Castiglioncello where the large Crepax clan – having sold the famous Villa dei Ronchi designed by Leonardo Ferrari – used to gather in full force until a few years ago. The clan included their second cousin Gigi Zazzeri, a journalist first at "La Stampa" and later at "Il Corriere", and his wife Valentina, daughter of the record producer Franco, from whom Guido took the name for his most famous character; and she, who really bore no resemblance to her at all and was cheerfully blonde and overweight, used to joke about it, just like Rita Hayworth when she said that men went to bed at night with Gilda and woke up in the morning with Señorita Cansino.

In that large holiday home – about which hundreds of thousands of people know everything because Valentina devoted many pages of her collective autobiography to it (“Io e l’asino mio. Storie dei Crepax raccontate da Valentina Crepax”) – there is much of that interplay between classical and pop culture that was the spice of family gatherings in the last century. Homer and William Wyler, Ariosto and the psychedelic flower children – who, on closer inspection, are actually Astolfo. “Exactly. Take ‘Nessuno’, who in the story is Philip Rembrandt, Valentina’s partner, and who was also my father’s alter ego,” observes Caterina: “When he re-emerges from the darkness into which he had fallen after being abducted by the people of the Underworld – who are clearly a symbol of his unconscious – and having blinded the monster, he finds himself in Wisconsin: Guido Crepax was politically hostile to US politics and its interventionism, but he considered certain forms of American art to be unrivalled, such as action films and jazz: in his "Odyssey", Apollo is Jerry Mulligan". His Philip’s journey lasts exactly half the time it took Homer’s Ulysses to return to Ithaca – five years. To depict it – a story spanning nearly two hundred pages – Crepax needed just seven. Valentina, a Penelope torn between bisexual lovers, is dressed in Armani, whilst Calypso, a Black record producer (“he’d got there before Nolan, but it wasn’t the ‘woke’ era; nobody took any notice, let alone made a fuss about it”) is draped in Halston gowns: “He didn’t invent anything; he collected fashion magazines for inspiration”. Complete copies can still be found on the second-hand market.