Maximoff

 

Europe has provided America with many intellectuals, scientists and artists. In return, America offered Europe a few alcoholic writers, blacks fleeing racial segregation and the unconditional attachment of its people to consumer goods. Pietro Maximoff was a European at heart, a lover of opera and the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. Along with his sister, Scarlet Witch, Pietro was probably one of the best X-Men of all time, known as Quicksilver. Able to move as well as think at high speeds, he crossed his century at Mach 5. Thanks to the intervention of Scarlet Witch, he was also able to move through time and jump into the future. 

After various more or less satisfying adventures with the costumed superheroes of his time, after a complicated relationship with Crystal, his wife, he finally did what he had to: he left the Americanized superhero groups, to join his wife and devote himself to her and his daughter, Luna. In doing so, he did the same as his sister Scarlet Witch and many European-born superheroes. He got away from the unhealthy atmosphere of Americans, their fast food subculture, the programming of their failed relationships, their constant ambivalence between lechery and puritanism. Quicksilver has reverted to the Jewish and Polish gypsy Pietro Maximoff.

Pietro and his sister Wanda, Scarlet witch, had the ultimate reflex to survive the American cultural steamroller. They escaped the American antagonistic vision of categorizing the world into Good and Evil. Pietro returned, for a time, to Poland with his wife and sister. They rediscovered a war-torn people, held hostage by both the Communists and the Americans. Pietro and Wanda returned to their mother Magda's native villages. They visited the Gypsy Museum, their mother was a Gypsy, in the town of Tarnow, in southeastern Poland. After doing some research, they went to the Małopolska region around Kraków to try to find clues about their mother's family. In doing so, they learned that their mother was a member of the Bergitka Roma, a group that did not associate with other Gypsies. They eventually tracked down a distant cousin in Nowa Huta, a Soviet-style neighborhood in Krakow.

It was after this trip that Pietro changed. A deeper understanding of his past, especially of his father's character, helped him. Together with his wife and daughter, he learned to let go of his rage and to project himself more calmly into the world. Of course, this was made easier by the family's year-long move to Krakow, Poland's cultural city. Pietro and Crystal settled in a small alley in the district of Rynek Główny, one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. There, Pietro became one of the most frequent listeners of the city's opera and philharmonic orchestras, as well as of many cultural venues, such as the many places where one could listen to klezmer music, the intoxicating instrumental music of the Ashkenazi tradition. Pietro thought a lot about Max Eisenhardt, his father, the one the world knew as Magneto. In his later years, Max Eisenhardt had expressed regrets about his choices, about his life. Pietro did not want to make the same mistakes.

Pietro and Crystal left Earth for good and went to the world of the "Inhumans", Crystal's world. There, they settled as anonymously as possible in the countryside, far from all the powers, ambitions and human greed. By chance or by chance, their final departure took place in December 2019, the day the world learned that the city of Wuhan was affected by a kind of flu.