Dacia Maraini's Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed 1611478812, 9781611478815

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Stretching the Critical Framework
1 Too Sweet for the Sweet: Backward and Downward in Il treno per Helsinki
2 Acts of Reconstruction: Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi
3 The Metaphor of Arrested Maternity and the Reconstruction of Maternal Desire: From Donna in guerra to La nave per Kobe
4 The Child Protagonist: Crossing Genres in Dolce per sé and Storie di cani per una bambina
5 The Reconstruction of Cronaca Nera: Buio
6 Postmodern Reconstructions: Individual and Collective Survival in Colomba
Conclusion: Beyond Survival
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies General Editor: Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies is devoted to the publication of scholarly works on Italian literature, film, history, biography, art, and culture, as well as on intercultural connections, such as Italian-American Studies. Recent Publications in Italian Studies Gabriele, Tommasina, Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed (2016) Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (2013) Parati, Graziella, New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies—Volume 2: The Arts and History (2012) Pezzotti, Barbara, The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction (2012) Aliano, David, Mussolini's National Project in Argentina (2012) Parati, Graziella, New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies—Volume 1: Definition, Theory, and Accented Practices (2012) Smith, Shirley Ann, Imperial Designs: Italians in China, 1900–1947 (2012) Rosengarten, Frank, Giacomo Leopardi’s Search for a Common Life through Poetry: A Different Nobility, a Different Love (2012) Baliani, Marco (au.), Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Ellen Nerenberg, Thomas Simpson (trans. and eds.), Body of State: A Nation Divided (2012) Ducci, Lucia, George P. Marsh Correspondence: Images of Italy, 1861–1881 (2012) Godey, Amber R., Sister Souls: The Power of Personal Narrative in the Poetic Works of Antonia Pozzi and Vittorio Sereni (2011) Verdicchio, Pasquale, Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2011) Parati, Graziella and Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds.), The Cultures of Italian Migration (2011) Trubiano, Marisa S., Ennio Flaiano and His Italy: Postcards from a Changing World (2010) Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation (2009) Serra, Ilaria, The Imagined Immigrant: The Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (2009) Lucamante, Stefania (ed.), Italy and the Bourgeoisie: The Re-Thinking of a Class (2009) Van Order, Thomas, Listening to Fellini: Music and Meaning in Black and White (2008) Billiani, Francesca, and Gigliola Sulis, The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions (2008) Parati, Graziella, and Marie Orton (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, Volume 1 (2007) Orton, Marie, and Graziella Parati (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy (2007)

Scambray, Ken, Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian-American Novel (2007) On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival (Re)Constructed Tommasina Gabriele

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Tommasina Gabriele All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabriele, Tommasina, 1962Dacia Maraini's narratives of survival : (re)contructed / Tommasina Gabriele. pages cm. -- (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series in Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61147-881-5 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61147-882-2 (electronic) 1. Maraini, Dacia--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ4873.A69Z68 2016 858'.91409--dc23 2015035861 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Per Sante Gabriele (1935–2008) Amatissimo padre ad Isola Liri figlio di contadini muratore emigrato a Bridgeport, Connecticut operaio capo reparto proprietario di immobiliari che mi ripeteva sempre, “Quand’è che lo scrivi questo libro?”

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Stretching the Critical Framework 1 2 3 4 5 6

Too Sweet for the Sweet: Backward and Downward in Il treno per Helsinki Acts of Reconstruction: Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi The Metaphor of Arrested Maternity and the Reconstruction of Maternal Desire: From Donna in guerra to La nave per Kobe The Child Protagonist: Crossing Genres in Dolce per sé and Storie di cani per una bambina The Reconstruction of Cronaca Nera: Buio Postmodern Reconstructions: Individual and Collective Survival in Colomba

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1 15 31 57 73 103

Conclusion: Beyond Survival

137

Bibliography

143

Index

149

About the Author

153

ix

Acknowledgments

I would first like to express my deep gratitude to Dacia Maraini, whom I met many years ago when I was at the earliest stages of my research. Her availability, warmth, and hospitality, which she has often extended not only to me but to my students, have been invaluable. In addition, I would like to recognize Wheaton College for its support, especially for an early-stage Faculty Summer Research Award, and its sustained scholarship funding for my many conference papers on Dacia Maraini’s work and for the sabbaticals I have devoted to this book project. I am also grateful to many colleagues for their encouragement over the years. Among these I will only mention a few: Stella Cantini, a scholar of Maraini’s work, for her stimulating discussions, and Michelangelo Laluna, for his invitations to participate in conferences in Maraini’s honor, which he held at the University of Rhode Island. At Wheaton College, I would like to acknowledge just a few of the colleagues who have been instrumental to my success: Mary Beth Tierney-Tello, for her intelligent and thoughtful approach to literary criticism; Hector Medina for his long support of my career; and Edward Gallagher, for his patient ear and wise guidance. In addition, I am grateful to the many students who have accompanied me in explorations of Dacia Maraini’s works over the years, and in particular, Kerri Wallace, the first student to request an independent study on Maraini’s work. It was her fortuitous request that launched and inspired a career-long, productive exchange between my scholarship and my teaching. I thank the following editors for permission to use my previous publications in this volume. Complete bibliographic information can be found in my bibliography. I thank Anthony Verna for permission to use an earlier version of “Too Sweet for the Sweet: Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki” (Rivista di studi italiani) in chapter 1. Thanks to Paola Gambarota for permission to xi

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use my very early, brief article, “The Act of Reconstruction: Dacia Maraini’s Isolina” (La Fusta), which I substantially revised and expanded in chapter 2. I also thank Professor Franco Zangrilli for permission to incorporate some parts of my article, “Italian Women’s Journalism and Dacia Maraini” (Journalism and Literature: Symposium between Two Worlds) in chapter 2. Finally, many thanks to Mark Lettieri for permission to use my article, “The Pregnant Nun: Suor Attanasia and the Metaphor of Arrested Maternity in Dacia Maraini,” Italica 81, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 65–80. This article serves as the basis for chapter 3. Last but not least, I wish to express my deepest love and gratitude to my two darling daughters, Enrica and Ivana. Enrica’s eagle eye was indispensable during the final stages of the manuscript formatting process, and she spent many hours of her summer vacation assisting me. Ivana always offered her unfailing encouragement and enthusiasm for the project’s completion. Finally, a special thank-you to my husband, Ken Smith, who has always believed in me, and in my work.

Introduction

Stretching the Critical Framework

“Qui conta solo la sopravvivenza” (Only survival counts here). 1 So, in February, 1942, Emanuele, the child protagonist of Dacia Maraini’s novel, Il treno dell’ultima notte (2008), writes to his dearest friend, Amara. Emanuele writes from the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, where he and his family are on the brink of being deported to a Nazi concentration camp. In the ghetto, survival is the only thing that counts. Maraini understood personally the struggle for survival, for as a child she was at about this same time struggling to survive extreme hunger, starvation, and related illnesses in a concentration camp in Japan. Many of Dacia Maraini’s narratives reflect an aesthetic imagination marked by a deep personal investment in the problem of survival, an investment that has its roots in the life threatening conditions Maraini experienced as a small child when she and her family were imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp for antifascists during World War II. As she reports in many interviews and in Bagheria, Maraini and her family suffered severe and debilitating hunger and the terror of bombings by warplanes. As she says in an interview published in 2000, “La guerra e il campo di concentramento sono stati per me un’esperienza talmente devastante che ancora oggi non riesco a scriverne. Ne ho accennato in Bagheria” (The war and the concentration camp were experiences so devastating for me that even today I can’t write about them. I mentioned them in Bagheria). 2 While Bagheria and La nave per Kobe mention her experiences, none of her texts thus far addresses systematically or in detail her own concentration camp experience. Yet its influence persists in the motif of the threats to survival that pervades many of her texts. Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the social mechanisms that threaten physical survival. Yet her concerns are not limited to survival of the xiii

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body, but include, among others, psychological survival, a concern that is also rooted in the formative experiences of her childhood and adolescence. Bagheria traces some of the difficulties of growing up as a girl in conservative Sicily in the 1940s–1950s after her family’s return from Japan. In a 2001 online interview with Gaither Stewart, Maraini elaborates, “One usually feels nostalgia for childhood. My childhood was terrible. The concentration camp and the Catholic school. My years from 10 to 18 in Sicily were on the survival level. We were poor. Society was closed. I was a prisoner in that repressive mentality. [. . .] My home was freedom but not my surroundings. When I went out the door alone, people looked at me from behind their closed blinds and considered me a whore.” 3 Maraini’s explorations of the limitations for girls and women affected by traditional rigid gendered codes of behavior in Sicily testify to her interest in the struggle for psychological survival, and the ways in which that struggle conditioned her own childhood, despite a home environment imbued with her parents’ liberal values. The gendered aspect of the struggle for survival leads us to a deeply rooted concern, another motif, in Maraini’s essays, interviews, and narrative, which is the survival of a woman author’s work, memory, and legacy in literary historiography, and in particular, after the death of her body. Like the other threats to survival, this one cuts very close to Dacia Maraini’s personal experience and concerns. Maraini is today one of Italy’s preeminent authors, and one of the most internationally renowned. She published her first novel, La vacanza, in 1962, drawing immediate market success. 4 Yet critical study of her work was meager and slow to emerge, and it is astonishing to realize that it was not until the turn of the second millennium, in the year 2000, almost forty years after her successful debut, that the first scholarly book on Maraini was published in the United States, The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini (2000), a fine collection of essays edited by Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Testaferri. 5 Maraini’s prizes are too numerous to list here, but they include the international Formentor Prize for her second novel, L’età del malessere (1963), the Premio Campiello for La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría (1990), and the prestigious Premio Strega for Buio (1999). On the international level, Maraini’s work is widely translated, conferences are held in her honor, and she receives many invitations to speak. 6 In addition, Maraini was a 2011 finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. It was also widely, though speculatively, reported that Maraini was the topranked woman writer for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. While books entirely devoted to Maraini’s work are still few, articles on Maraini’s work now abound, though Cinzia Sartini Blum rightly notes as recently as 2008 that “the Italian intellectual establishment has not adequately recognized [. . .] the contributions” of Italian women writers. 7 Many scholars and writers, including Maraini herself, have addressed the twentieth-century Italian literary phenomenon—to put it simply, the “misog-

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yny”—that has kept women writers out of the critical canon at the same time that they, like Maraini, have garnered numerous literary prizes and have flourished in the book market. 8 The institutional injustice that women writers face is an ongoing concern close to Maraini’s heart. The problem continues to surface in Maraini’s interviews and conversations, and not simply because she is concerned for her own reputation and position in Italian literary history. Maraini perhaps best summarizes her assessment of the ongoing discrimination toward women writers in a 2003 interview with the renowned Maraini scholar, Grazia Sumeli Weinberg: “C’è una difficoltà dal punto di vista dell’istituzione letteraria ad accettare come prestigiosa la letteratura femminile. E’ sempre considerata alla stregua del mercato [. . .] ma per essere apprezzati dalla critica e da coloro che stabiliscono i valori per le prossime generazioni dal punto di vista del modello, cioè, dell’esemplarità, i libri delle donne vengono [. . .] penalizzati [. . .] Io faccio parte di questa situazione” (There is a difficulty from the point of view of the literary establishment in accepting women’s literature as prestigious. It’s considered at the level of the market [. . .] but in order to be valued by the critics and by those who establish the values for future generations from the point of view of a model, that is, of exemplariness, books by women are [. . .] penalized. [. . .] I am part of this situation). 9 She continues, “Anaïs Nin, che è una grande scrittrice francese, è letteralmente scomparsa dopo la sua morte. [. . .] Ci sono delle scrittrici che in vita hanno una rispondenza del pubblico, dei lettori e anche dei critici, ma che poi scompaiono nel momento della sistemazione accademica” (Anaïs Nin, who is a great French writer, literally disappeared after her death. [. . .] There are women writers who in their lifetime have the recognition of the public, of readers and even of the critics, but then they disappear at the moment of selection for academic study). 10 In comparing Italy to other countries abroad, she notes, “Trovo che l’Italia è particolarmente misogina” (I find Italy to be particularly misogynist) (italics ours). 11 Maraini observes that while the market is open to women, who also constitute the majority of readers, market success is “profoundly” despised by the academy. 12 She comments, [Q]uando si passa all’istituzione letteraria, quella che stabilisce quali sono i grandi scrittori del Novecento, che cosa bisogna studiare a scuola e quali modelli prendere per i giovani del futuro, purtroppo, sono quasi tutti uomini che decidono. Sono i grandi critici, i grandi intellettuali, i grandi editori di giornali, e, in tal caso, c’è sempre una scomparsa delle donne. E’ così ancora oggi, almeno in Italia. In Inghilterra, per esempio, e anche in America, c’è più attenzione per le donne, mentre in Italia, il mondo letterario è ancora molto maschile, patriarcale nelle sue gerarchie. 13 When one moves on to the literary establishment, the one that establishes who the great writers of the 1900s are, what should be studied at school and what

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Introduction models to pick for the youth of the future, unfortunately, it’s almost all men who decide. It’s the great critics, the great intellectuals, the great editors of newspapers, and, in these cases, there is always a disappearance of women. It is still like this today, at least in Italy. In England, for example, and even in America, there is more attention for women, while in Italy, the literary world is still very masculine, patriarchal in its hierarchies.

As Maraini herself reminds us repeatedly, there is always the risk that a woman writer’s reputation will die with her body. 14 In her essay, “Women Writers and the Canon in Contemporary Italy,” JoAnn Cannon reminds us that women writers’ chance to become part of a lasting canon “depends not only on their intrinsic ‘worth’ but also on the diligence of their readers and critics in promoting their candidacy. In other words, a canon is intimately and necessarily linked to an interpretive community.” 15 Given that Maraini’s writing over the past half century reflects her continued interest in the social, physical, psychological and historical conditions of women, it is perhaps understandable that her “interpretive community” has often confined her to the category of feminist writer. Maraini is often viewed as “[la] scrittrice più famosa del femminismo italiano” ([the] most famous writer of Italian feminism). 16 We as reviewers, readers and scholars have often enclosed her work in a feminist framework, one that has been invaluable in illuminating the mechanisms of gender that she explores through complex narrative strategies in her work, but also thereby links her to a particular defining moment, to a national (and Western) historical and political movement, to a set of thematic concerns that some view as specific, limiting, or partisan. Sumeli Weinberg is sensitive to this problem of designation in Italian historiography and literary criticism from her earliest work on Maraini. In her book on Maraini, Sumeli Weinberg quotes a 1980 interview in the newspaper, Il Messaggero, in which the writer Sandra Petrignani asks Maraini whether Maraini’s attention to “tematiche esclusivamente femminili” (themes that are exclusively women’s themes) would cause her to define her work as “‘femminista’” (feminist). To which Maraini responds, “Veramente non amo le etichette” (I really don’t like labels). 17 Maraini early in her career identified one of the biggest drawbacks of having her writing described as focusing on “‘denunce, tutto quanto nel mondo non va o potrebbe andare meglio’” (“denunciations, everything in the world that goes wrong or could go better”). 18 This, Maraini tells us, was critic Antonio Debenedetti’s response to her own comment regarding Isolina, “Per me scrivere significa mettermi prima di tutto nei panni delle donne” (For me writing means putting myself in women’s shoes). 19 Debenedetti relegated her writing to the category of “naturalismo,” which Maraini, clearly insulted, saw as an attempt to dismiss her work by branding it with “un sospetto di realismo socialista, qualcosa di sconveniente e deteriore, assoluta-

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mente fuori moda” (a suspicion of socialist realism, something unsuitable and second-rate, absolutely out of fashion). 20 Maraini rejects this category, this description of her work, this judgment, for they imply that she is a writer who “si limita a restituire il disordine così come è” (limits herself to giving the disorder back as is). 21 Ironically, this early criticism resurfaces in a new and positive guise in a text published in 2000, Dedica a Dacia Maraini, in which writers and critics speak in her honor. Another famous writer, Antonio Tabucchi, whose work is known for its postmodern complexity, writes in his tribute, “Di Dacia Maraini vorrei testimoniare qui [. . .] della sua maniera di scendere in prima linea per affrontare le battaglie, grandi o piccole che siano. [. . .] Armata solo della sua gentilezza, del suo sorriso, della sua cultura e della civiltà che porta con sé” (Of Dacia Maraini I would like to bear witness here [. . .] of her way of descending into the frontline to take on battles, whether big or small. [. . .] Armed only with her kindness, her smile, her learning and the civility that she brings with her). 22 In the same venue, the critic Maria Antonietta Cruciata writes, “I viaggi dell’immaginazione della Maraini rivelano una fedele aderenza al reale, una capacità di denuncia sempre più consapevole della subalternità della donna al potere maschile” (Maraini’s flights of imagination reveal a faithful adherence to the real, a capacity for denunciation that is ever more aware of the subalternity of woman to masculine power). 23 Like Tabucchi, Cruciata underlines the commendable force with which Maraini’s texts confront the real—that is, society and its problems. Cruciata repeatedly highlights the “real” in Maraini’s texts. In her book, she characterizes Maraini’s career as a “lunga militanza letteraria” (long literary militancy) 24 and affirms, “Non ci sono [. . .] nelle opera di Dacia Maraini, compiacimenti letterari, quanto una rappresentazione descrittiva, analitica, fedele, della realtà” (There are not [. . .] in Dacia Maraini’s works literary indulgences, so much as a representation that is descriptive, analytic, faithful to reality). 25 Of Lettere a Marina, Cruciata says, “E’ giunto il momento di dire la verità e di togliere qualsiasi maschera” (the time has arrived to tell the truth and remove any masks). 26 La lunga vita is “un’opera [. . .] di forte impronta realistica” (a work [. . .] of strong realistic stamp). 27 In Bagheria “la memoria pacificata si alza su uno scenario reale e vivo” (peaceful memory rises on a scenario that is real and alive). 28 In Voci, “[L]a realtà, con i suoi irrisolvibili effetti di malessere, di perdita, di delirio, non può essere edulcorata. Occorre descriverla, fedelmente, e poi là dove urge la denuncia, denunciare” (Reality, with its irresolvable effects of unease, of loss, of delirium, cannot be sweetened. It’s necessary to describe it faithfully, and then where it requires denunciation, to denounce). 29 She takes up Debenedetti’s word, “denuncia,” in a positive light, which is indeed a high tribute, as we shall see in our final chapter, given current, postmillennial debates in which Italian critics and writers question the relationship between postmodernism and impegno—that

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is, engagement, to use the French word, or commitment. 30 Yet, we must ask whether such a reading of Maraini’s work in fact limits the scope of our analysis. For example, what do we make of the “folletto” (sprite) in Dolce per sé, the angelo (angel) in Colomba, the magic of some of her short stories from La pecora Dolly and others from the mid-1990s? How can we account for those, in such a reading? In an interview in the same Dedica a Dacia Maraini, Maraini again responds to the “luogo comune della Dacia Maraini ‘scrittrice femminista.’” She counters, “Ho sempre cercato di evitare la trappola dell’ideologia pura, dell’ideologia che stringe, che chiude e limita la realtà. Per me la politica era uno strumento per andare al di là, per conoscere di più, per allargare la sensibilità e la coscienza. La gente ha fretta di metterti una etichetta. [. . .] Ma le etichette sono sempre limitative, per questo le odio” (I have always tried to avoid the trap of pure ideology, of ideology that tightens, that closes and limits reality. For me politics was an instrument for going beyond, for knowing more, for increasing sensitivity and awareness. People are in a rush to slap a label on you. [. . .] But labels are always limiting, that’s why I hate them). 31 Of her theater from the period of Centocelle, she comments, “Alcuni di quei testi sono strettamente legati al periodo in cui li ho scritti: adesso li sento troppo ideologici, troppo di intervento e di polemica, il loro valore è soprattutto documentario” (Some of those texts are tightly linked to the period in which I wrote them: today they feel too ideological to me, too interventionist and polemical. Their value is above all documentary). 32 Yet she notes that some of her early plays continue to be performed all over the world. A few years later, in her interview with Sumeli Weinberg, Maraini affirms, “Il femminismo storico delle grandi manifestazioni, degli incontri, dei centri di autocoscienza, non c’è più. Quello delle iniziative culturali, fatte proprio in nome del femminismo, non c’è più” (Historical feminism of the great demonstrations, of the gatherings, of consciousness-raising centers, no longer exists. That of the cultural initiatives undertaken in the name of feminism no longer exists). 33 While Maraini concedes that the analyses generated by feminism continue, she wonders whether the term, “femminismo,” is linked to that particular historical moment. 34 The fear of categorization has its roots in the tensions between “femminismo” as a dated historical phenomenon and feminisms—socialist, materialist, cultural, black, postmodern, lesbian, “posthuman vitalist,” 35 to name a few—as a range of evolving approaches to disciplinary studies, to politics and to emerging third-millennial phenomena. Sumeli Weinberg finds that, in Maraini’s works from about the mid-1990s, Maraini addresses all victims of abuse and violence, not just women. 36 I would like to offer, as one way out of these debates, a flexible paradigm as an approach to Maraini’s works. My paradigm consists of an analysis of the narrative strategy and theme of reconstruction. Such a flexible paradigm promises a literary analysis that can cut across genres, stretch the boundaries

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of the feminist framework within which we as scholars have often enclosed Maraini’s work, and open another window onto the ethical tensions underlying her literary creations. By circumventing analytical approaches entirely based on, or limited to, feminist criticism, gender, or genre, for example, I identify narrative reconstruction as one of the fundamental underpinnings of Maraini’s imagination and as a fundamental mechanism of her narratives. This flexible paradigm can help stretch our critical reading of Maraini’s work while pulling together these same threads of feminism, gender and genre into yet another enlightening, cohesive and coherent, but never monolithic, vision of Maraini’s narrative. The term, “reconstructed,” appears with the “re” in parenthesis in the title of this book to differentiate it from historical terms such as the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War in the United States or after World War II in Italy, and thus to avoid confusion. It also indicates that this book will not merely offer a summary, or reconstruction, of Maraini’s narratives of survival. By separating the term “re” from “constructed,” the parentheses further serve to underline an awareness of, and an emphasis on, the constructed-ness of texts, of fiction; it foregrounds the contemporary self-consciousness of the literary text. If the literary text is always already a creative construction, my inclusion of the parenthetical “re” alerts readers to the possibility that the book will offer a different use of the term “reconstruction,” one that I believe captures an essential technique and ethical core of Maraini’s narratives. By reconstruction, I refer to one of the strategies by which Maraini’s deep investment in survival, which, as we saw, has its roots in the life-threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a Japanese concentration camp, is enacted through a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourse, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. As we saw, Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman’s body); psychological survival; aesthetic or artistic survival; and the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author’s work, memory, and legacy after her death. Her narrative also draws attention to the precarious condition of drug-addicted and self-destructive youth, and by extension, to the importance of collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini’s narratives offer reconstruction as an ethos for survival, as a variation on the “begin again” which marks the end of many of her novels and, as we will see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration. By narrative reconstruction, I mean narrative mechanisms of reconstruction that include both the author’s multiple and complex narrative strategies as well as the necessary process of reconstruction—sometimes memorial, sometimes historical—which subtends character development, transforma-

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tion, and growth. Some of her characters must reconstruct their past, in an often complex process, to overcome their limitations, develop, and grow. In Maraini’s work, reconstruction can also signify the necessary hermeneutic process by which a reader can make meaning of her texts, as well as the necessary strategy for, and key to, individual, collective and artistic survival. I call reconstruction a flexible paradigm because, although I identify it as central to some of her narratives and to her imagination, it indeed operates differently in each text. For example, Il treno per Helsinki reconstructs the failure of the 1960s movements through the motif of food and a historical retrospect that, in feminist and postmodern terms, deconstructs notions of linear humanist progress. In Isolina, the paradigm of reconstruction allows us to see that Maraini reconstructs the process of erasure, not historical presence. In Buio, the notion of reconstruction provides for me a launching pad for an analysis of how literature brings to life the dull and numbing commodified details of cronaca nera; what dominates in this chapter is a series of analyses of the mechanisms in Buio that threaten survival and often, though not always, result in a character’s death. Most productively, the flexible paradigm of reconstruction that I propose opens the texts up to a methodology that combines knowledge of the author’s opus, biography, and thought, and attention to a text’s context, in the broadest sense, with analyses of narrative strategies and close textual and intertextual analyses. In this book, the sequence of the chapters follows more or less the chronological date of publication of Maraini’s texts. The narratives I analyze span a twenty-year period, from about 1984 to 2004. These texts are particularly rich material for the flexible paradigm of reconstruction, but my analyses do not purport to exhaust the paradigm I propose. Taking reconstruction—and, for reading fluidity, this is the last time I italicize the word— as a point of departure for literary analysis proves particularly productive for Maraini’s more recent work, beginning from the early 1980s, but it is especially illuminating for her narratives from the mid-1990s to the present. In the later texts, the stretching of the critical framework leads to some surprising new directions. Among these are: the discovery of a previously undetected thread of playfulness in some of Maraini’s fiction; the recovery of childhood in her work of the 1990s and beyond, such as in Dolce per sé (1996) and La nave per Kobe (2001); the predominance of a child protagonist, as in the curiously understudied, prize-winning Buio (1999); and the unexpected, and therefore startling, possibility, as the author-narrator herself tells us, of a happy ending in one of Maraini’s most recent novels, Colomba (2004). I embark now on the study of some of these new critical directions from the starting point of the inspirational ethical gesture of Antigone, whom Maraini invokes in the title of one of her most recent collections of newspaper articles. As the critic Juan Carlos de Miguel y Canuto comments, in another tribute to Maraini’s work, on Maraini’s civic and ethical commit-

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ment, “Per la sua militanza in campo letterario e civile durata tanto tempo, Dacia fa parte della memoria culturale viva dell’Italia. [. . .] Da anni Dacia Maraini è diventata una parte della coscienza civile del paese.” (For her longtime militancy in civil and literary camps, Dacia is part of the living cultural memory of Italy. [. . .] For years Dacia Maraini has been part of the civil conscience of the country). 37 In 2006, Dacia Maraini published I giorni di Antigone: Quaderno di cinque anni, a collection of newspaper articles primarily penned, as the title indicates, in the preceding five years. These articles are organized into four distinct categories, which underline the political, ecological, and feminist issues that have motivated, and continue to motivate, Maraini’s many journalistic and television interventions in public discourse: “Mondo, politica” (world, politics): “Animali: nostri simili?” (Fellow animals?); “Violenza contro le donne” (Violence against women); and “Dialogo con i lettori” (Dialogue with the readers). But what does the reference to the ancient story of Antigone in the title have to do with the current events discussed in these articles? Maraini begins her own introduction to the collection with a brief explanation that brings to light some of the values espoused in her collection: human dignity, empathy, the right to brotherly/sisterly love, nonviolence, the power of the subversive act. Maraini characterizes thus the timelessness, humanity, and subversive power of Antigone’s gesture, whose inspiration subtends her collection: Questo libro si ispira alla figura di Antigone, che alle disparità e alle intolleranze oppose la pietà e il diritto all’amore fraterno. Contro le leggi di un Signore della guerra Antigone reagì senza violenza, con il solo meraviglioso gesto di ricomporre e seppellire un corpo morto. Non c’è niente di ideologico nella pietà di Antigone. Eppure il Signore della guerra lo interpretò come qualcosa di profondamente eversivo che metteva in dubbio la legittimità del sovrano. A volte è così: le azioni più semplici e umili minano le certezze su cui si basa l’autorità di un capo, la consuetudine di una legge cittadina. 38 This book is inspired by the figure of Antigone, who pitted pity and the right to brotherly love against inequalities and intolerances. Against the laws of a Lord of War Antigone reacted without violence, with only the marvelous gesture of recomposing and burying a dead body. There is nothing ideological in Antigone’s pity. Yet the Lord of War interpreted it as something profoundly subversive that called into question the legitimacy of the sovereign. Sometimes it’s like that: the simplest and most humble actions undermine the certainties on which is based the authority of a leader, the customs of a city’s law.

Maraini’s description and interpretation of Antigone’s famous gesture, mythical in its proportion, provides the perfect starting point for an analysis of Maraini’s fictions through the paradigm of narrative reconstruction. As we have said, this overarching framework allows us to approach Maraini’s fic-

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tions by transcending genre, gender, and feminist theory, three of the overriding critical directions of scholarly criticism on Maraini’s work, while at the same time pulling them together. The New Oxford American Dictionary gives as the core meaning of the word, “reconstruct”: “build or form [something] again after it has been damaged or destroyed.” 39 Antigone, in her act of reconstructing, is forming again her destroyed brother’s body and building again the bond between them. Antigone’s evocative gesture, as Maraini describes it, is the act of recomposing, the act of putting back together and burying a dead human body. The gesture re-dignifies, through a subversive, taboo act of reconstruction, at three levels: the brother, the brother’s body, and the brother’s dead body. Antigone’s gesture re-dignifies the brother on a personal and familial kinship level; on a social and political one; and, finally, on a mythical level. In the civil disobedience of Antigone’s gesture, in her defiance of the king’s laws, in her flying in the face of taboo, in approaching, touching, and recomposing the forbidden, contaminated, illegal body to give it burial lie the key to an ethos that informs most of Maraini’s writing: the sacredness of the human body and of life in its many forms, and of the human and civic bonds that preserve this sacredness. 40 Antigone’s gesture is thus both action and metaphor. Like the word, it can be interpreted, though, as Maraini tells us a few paragraphs later, “purtroppo le parole non hanno la perfezione e la forza assoluta di un gesto come quello di Antigone” (unfortunately words don’t have the perfection and absolute force of a gesture like that of Antigone). 41 Yet words, albeit as compromised as Maraini here says they are, are indeed Maraini’s primary means of recounting facts, of reasoning, and of sharing with the reader “la scoperta continua di una tensione etica che sta dentro le cose, dentro i rapporti, dentro la storia che stiamo attraversando” (the continuous discovery of the ethical tension that is in things, in relationships, in the history that we are crossing). 42 This collection of republished newspaper articles and dialogues with readers who have written letters to her grows out of a historical moment in which Italy “patisce una lacerazione dolorosa e amara” (is suffering a painful and bitter laceration). 43 I giorni di Antigone constitutes Maraini’s own gesture of Antigone, as Maraini tries to understand and share with the reader the ethical tensions, the dilemmas, that are in things, in relationships, in history as we live it today, or—if we interpret the word “storia” differently—in the story that we are traversing, the story that we are creating. In reordering and republishing newspaper articles, which by their nature are ephemeral, she redignifies past conversations and the bodies they discuss, recomposing them into an ethical gesture, like the powerful, brave, and memorable gesture of Maraini’s Antigone. Maraini’s evocative interpretation of Antigone offers both a predictable and a new direction for Maraini scholarship. In Maraini’s depiction, Antigone symbolizes the emblematic female protagonist characteristic of Marai-

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ni’s narratives, and at the same time transcends that figure. Scholars of Maraini’s work over the past three decades have located the ethical tension, Maraini’s engagement, in the female protagonists and women’s issues (la questione femminile) of Maraini’s fiction, theater, poetry, journalism and essays. Yet to stop, if we can force the cliché, with an analysis of women’s oppression by patriarchal structures, is to stop at the edge of the forest. In Antigone’s devotion to her brother exist possibilities for new critical directions. Maraini’s own words in her 2003 interview with Sumeli Weinberg calls for new readings: “Io continuo ad occuparmi delle donne, ma anche di altre cose che riguardano l’emarginazione—tutte le forme di emarginazione, di ingiustizia sociale—, che riguardano gli immigrati, i carcerati. [. . .] Diciamo, comunque, che le donne hanno un posto messo in evidenza, ma il mio discorso va a tutto il mondo che sta ai margini” (I continue to work on women, but also on other things that deal with marginalization—all the forms of marginalization, of social injustice—, that deal with immigrants, prisoners. [. . .] Let’s say, however, that women have a special place, but I address the whole world that is at the margins). 44 Among these new directions is a redemptive, though never idealized, view of family relations. This redemptive view contrasts and complements Maraini’s continuing depiction of abusive and troubled families, such as those in her recent publications, Buio (1999) and Colomba (2004), a redemptive view that nonetheless continues to exclude the institution of matrimony, generally portrayed in her works as troubled, oppressive, and exploitative, particularly to women and children. The notion of a redemptive family bond is a provocative one in Maraini’s fiction and demands the recognition and analysis of new, positive kinship ties, which appear in Dolce per sé (1996) and Colomba (2004). 45 Some Maraini critics have identified a utopian thrust in Maraini’s challenge to Italian society to change. In looking both at and beyond the oppression of women in Maraini’s work, we note her emphasis on the interrelatedness, the interconnectedness, the interdependence of living beings. In fact, the first article of I giorni di Antigone, “Nucleare: la morte silenziosa,” and the section, “Animali: nostri simili?” reveal Maraini’s ecofeminist vision of the world, one which is more fully exploited in her 2004 novel, Colomba, in which Maraini depicts the interrelatedness between men and women, between people and animals, between animate beings and plants. The richness of this interconnected world already lies in the richness of Maraini’s interpretation of Antigone’s famous mythical gesture: the central female figure reaches out, in a simple, unknowingly subversive gesture—a gesture that is not meant to be ideological and thus limiting in its interpretation but “umile” (humble) 46 and polyvalent—to recompose the body of her brother. Her heroic gesture crosses gender boundaries, saves her brother, and erodes the sedi-

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mentation of any facile antagonism between men and women. Maraini’s Antigone allies with her brother to challenge the king. Antigone’s path to reconstruction, as literal recomposition of her brother’s contaminated and forbidden body and as Maraini’s uplifting and transcendent metaphor for her own work, is a somber one. Not surprisingly, the gravity of the social problems addressed in Maraini’s writings have often exacted our unsmiling critical attention. At the risk of sounding glib, we can claim that the exposure of oppression, violence, and corruption is serious business, indeed. Maraini’s narratives explore social ills such as sexual violence, child abuse, political corruption, and disillusionment, to mention a few. Yet surely our earnestness as critics and readers of Maraini’s work has deafened us to another dimension of Maraini’s recent fiction. Another road to narrative reconstruction lies at the opposite end of the spectrum to the somber Antigone. Increasingly since the mid 1990s, Maraini’s writing, while never abandoning its ethical thrust, has sported a playfulness that would seem to contradict, to be incompatible with, the image critics have developed over the decades of a mordant and ironic feminist writer. This playfulness of tone seems to spring from a focus in the mid-1990s on children as readers, and a new focus on children as characters. Such playfulness of tone coincides with Maraini’s foray into writing children’s literature and fairy tale, but also overlaps with her autobiographical investigation, her own reconstruction of her earliest years in La nave per Kobe (2001), in which her memory is supplemented by her mother, Topazia Alliata’s diaries. 47 This playfulness opens up new critical directions, as we can see in the following paradigm of playful reconstruction that offers a startling contrast to the sublimity of Antigone’s gesture. Maraini’s children’s book, La pecora Dolly, published a few years before I giorni di Antigone, ends with a story, “Cani di Roma,” about two dogs who are best friends. Maraini scholars and fans of her fiction will know how much she loves dogs. In a playful tone, Maraini describes Telemaco, the pedigreed and pampered pet of a rich Roman family, and his friendship with Blob, the much-loved but hungry, flee-infested companion of a homeless man. Both the story of Antigone and the story of Telemaco and Blob are about heroism and rescue, and the personal risk and danger facing the one who executes the saving act. But if the myth of Antigone is about the recomposing and redignifying of life through the re-dignifying of the brother’s dead body, about human bonds and blood ties that transcend law, then the story of Telemaco and Blob playfully relates a chase scene and celebrates a narrow but exciting escape from death. One day, Blob goes missing, and Telemaco goes in search of him. The topos of the search is of course familiar to Maraini’s fans. In this playful children’s version, Maraini fuses anthropomorphizing qualities and cinematic, quasi-Disney-style fantasy with canine attributes, such as Telemaco’s

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powerful sense of smell and ability to track scents, in her creation of Telemaco’s heroic rescue. Having escaped his own stultifying, enclosed, high-class life for the day, Telemaco heads for the Lungotevere, the path along the Tiber River, racing down the stairs below the bridge where his friend and his friend’s homeless master, Trucibaldo, live, only to glean that Blob has been stolen. Rejecting Trucibaldo’s tears in favor of action, Telemaco begins to “seguire gli odori che l’avrebbero portato se non proprio a Blob per lo meno alle sue ultime trace” (follow the odors that would take him if not to Blob at least to his last traces). 48 He traces “gli odori forti di Blob” (Blob’s strong odors) 49 until they cease and he picks up the traces of fresh paint and rotten algae “tipico delle barche di fiume” (typical of river boats). 50 At this point, Telemaco digs up and drags a board out of the river’s mucky edge and, in a Disney film stroke, rides it like a raft, barely missing the upcoming rapids by throwing himself into the water, to discover his (presumably innate) ability to swim. He saves himself from the rapids by grabbing onto a branch, then continues, nose down, to track the smell of fish and the tar of the boat. The next step in Telemaco’s adventure entails narrowly escaping a man, accompanied by his young daughter, who, based on Telemaco’s wellgroomed and well-fed appearance, plans to hold him for ransom. When “impovvisamente sentì che l’odore si faceva più forte, più intenso” (suddenly he noticed that the odor was becoming stronger and more intense) he discovers a floating hut attached to the river with steel cords that houses his friend, Blob, and many other dogs being reserved for the horrors of scientific experiments. 51 Once again, in another stroke of Disney fantasy, all the dogs form a sort of grid with their tails for him to climb, so that Telemaco is able to reach the key to open the hut and free all the dogs. In this children’s story, Telemaco must reconstruct, through his sense of smell, Blob’s journey. It is worth noting that The New Oxford American Dictionary offers as subsenses of the word, “reconstruct,” the following pertinent usages: “form an impression, model or reenactment of (a past event or thing) from the available evidence”; “reenact (a crime or other incident) with the aim of discovering the culprit or cause.” 52 Telemaco is involved in just such a reenactment. Yet Telemaco’s journey, his determined search for his friend, is also the journey toward his own freedom. Telemaco must liberate himself from his stultifying, housebound existence and later from the man who literally collars him, in order to free his friend. The need to be “libero” (free) 53 is both his motivation (to free his friend) and the necessary condition (he needs to be able to move around, free of restrictions) for Telemaco to be able to rescue his friend, but it will ultimately constitute his own final goal as well. At the end of the heroic rescue, he decides not to return home to his owners, “che lo rimpinzavano di leccornie ma lo tenevano prigioniero come quei cani dentro la casa-barca” (who stuffed him with delicacies but kept him prisoner like those dogs in that boat-house). 54 Instead he chooses to live with

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Blob and Trucibaldo. Freedom, here, is preferable to creature comforts, and friendship trumps class differences. Telemaco’s efforts to find and save Blob by reconstructing/reenacting Blob’s path gives way to a search marked by adventure and playfulness. Telemaco’s fitness and speed give the chase fluidity, while Blob’s eventual rescue depends on Telemaco’s race against time, fraught with suspense. In her recent book, The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini and Antonio Tabucchi, JoAnn Cannon rightly explores the importance of investigation in several texts by Maraini. 55 Yet an analysis of strategies of narrative reconstruction can act as an overarching critical framework that can subsume the motif of the search or investigation within it. In “Cani di Roma,” an analysis of narrative reconstructions enables us to transcend the genre of the investigative or detective novel, for example, in order to embrace other, less predictable genres in Maraini’s work, such as children’s literature. Let us consider, for example, the various forms of reconstruction offered in the humorous “Cani di Roma”: Telemaco’s search necessitates both the reconstruction of Blob’s traces and Telemaco’s own journey of reenactment of Blob’s passage into danger. Both are essential to Blob’s salvation and to the two dogs’ freedom. In sum, the study of strategies of narrative reconstruction will permit a stimulating pursuit of ethical issues, including postmodern and ecofeminist concerns, in Maraini’s narrative. It will direct our attention to the development of a critical study of a rarely acknowledged but very playful, humorous dimension to Maraini’s narrative world, ushered in by a new emphasis on children and animals. It will embrace the dismantling and reconstruction of historical moments, like the 1968 movement, and feminist topoi, like maternal desire, in Maraini’s work. This critical approach will in fact allow us to expand the borders of our understanding of Maraini’s literary production and to challenge the limits and commonplaces of prevailing criticism on Maraini’s work, to challenge the parameters that—as happened to Telemaco and Blob—hem us in. The first chapter of this book, “Too Sweet for the Sweet: Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki,” considers narrative reconstruction of the past in Maraini’s 1984 novel, Il treno per Helsinki. This quasi-autobiographical novel is an example of the type of reconstruction that occurs through memory, here the memories of the fictional character, Armida, who shares some autobiographical features with Maraini, such as her profession as a writer. The autobiographical elements are more difficult to ascertain in Il treno per Helsinki than in novels in which the author more explicitly traces and recovers autobiographical memory, such as in Bagheria (1993). In Bagheria, Maraini reconstructs in part her childhood years after her family’s release from the Japanese antifascist concentration camp where she and her family were

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interned during World War II. On the other hand, in Il treno per Helsinki, Armida reconstructs her experience of the 1968 movement and the sweetness of a contemporaneous love affair, a reconstruction that allows her to uncover the damaging illusions embedded in each. The reconstruction of the 1968 movement through the experiences of the playwright protagonist, Armida, reveals Armida’s realization of the limitations of that historical moment and the effects of those limitations on her romantic, social, and professional life. The process of narrative reconstruction here begins in the first lines with a present-day Armida peeling a potato, stopped by her ex-lover’s voice on the radio, which takes her back, in an oral-anal image, “dalla gola alle viscere” (from my throat to my bowels) so that she metaphorically descends into her own intestines, her own past of fifteen years ago, her own netherworld, to come out into that world “cacata da me stessa” (shit out by myself). 56 That the reconstruction of that past, bookended in the novel by the image of the potato held in the immobilized Armida’s hand, is written in present tense, testifies to the living and present impact of that past, rekindled by a toofamiliar voice on the radio. Il treno per Helsinki offers us a manipulation of time where the past, as Armida tells us, takes on the consistency of “una minestra” (a soup) and where reconstruction of the past takes the path of an internal digestive trajectory of convivial food experiences that develop a cloyingly collective nature, a gastronomical path in which Armida must find a way to give birth to herself as a freestanding individual. Chapter 2 is devoted to Isolina, published in 1985, and an analysis of the reconstruction of a more remote historical past. This chapter, entitled, “Acts of Reconstruction: Dacia Maraini’s Isolina, La donna tagliata a pezzi,” constitutes a substantial revision of one of my earliest articles. The expanded study helps to chart the course for the complexities of narrative reconstruction as narrative strategy. It explores the strategies Maraini employs not to reconstruct a character, as we might expect from a book that resembles a historical novel, but to reconstruct the absence of that character: Maraini’s book investigates and lays bare the ways in which Isolina, a young girl who was murdered in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Verona, had been willfully written out of histories—judicial, familial, and local written and oral histories. Maraini uses newspapers and documents to reconstruct not the presence of a historical character from the lower classes, the sort about which traditional history does not write, but her absence and the concerted attempts at her erasure. Maraini herself does not consider Isolina a novel so much as a “libro-documento” (book-document), 57 but by briefly untangling the roles of author, protagonist, and journalist in the story, we will explore the novelistic techniques that continue to tempt us to characterize Isolina as a novel and that constitute the power of this text. Among these techniques are the reconstruction of gendered conflicts in Verona in 1900, deployed on the axis of shame and honor, and the emersion and submersion of Isolina’s body and

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information about her disappearance, which is played out on a vertical axis. In Isolina, Maraini traces the various acts—archival, investigative, journalistic, narrative, fictional—involved in reconstructing an act of disappearance, of erasure. Both Isolina and Armida share the experience of a truncated pregnancy, and in chapter 3, these two novels briefly reappear in the deconstruction and reconstruction of maternal desire, whose trajectory begins with Maraini’s classic 1975 Donna in guerra and continues to the pregnant nun in Buio (1999), then on to a redemption of the figure and role of the mother and maternal desires through autobiography in La nave per Kobe (2001). This chapter discusses the societal impediments to a successful maternity and moves through the memory of Maraini’s own childhood in La nave per Kobe to reconstruct, to give voice to, maternal desire through the inclusion of her mother’s diary. The fourth chapter serves a transitional function, in that it takes as its starting point the autobiographical aspects of early childhood that surface in La nave per Kobe in the third chapter to explore the centrality of the child character in Maraini’s writings across several genres. The child, who functions as reader/audience and as protagonist, is linked with animals in the genre of children’s literature, such as in the 1996 collection of short stories for children, Storie di cani per una bambina. In the epistolary novel, Dolce per sé, of the same year, Flavia is both child protagonist and recipient of Vera’s letters. Both of these works usher in the playfulness that will be apparent in some of Maraini’s subsequent fiction. The epistolary novel also offers a reconstruction and reassessment of a love story, adapted for the young Flavia, to demonstrate the contemporaneous presence of the child, and childlike qualities, in the adult. These texts serve as bases for our understanding of the prize-winning collection of short stories, Buio (1999). In Buio, Maraini reconstructs and transforms contemporary newspaper crime scenes, daily tragedies, from one genre to another, from newspaper crime scenes into short stories, at least half of them with a child protagonist. Once again using newspapers, as she did in Isolina, Maraini reconstructs cronaca nera into powerful short stories in Buio, in order to transcend the numbing effects of reportage and solicit, through the characterization and dramatization of the characters’ plight, the empathy of the reader. In addition, these reconstructions allow Maraini to explore the social, psychological, and legal mechanisms and inadequacies that make these exploitations possible, to identify the conditions that can (and must) be changed to stop these exploitations, be they individual rapes and murders, or mass, government-mandated murders and genocide. Chapter 5 offers analyses of key short stories in Buio in which strategies of reconstruction figure. In one of these, Maraini also explores reconstruction as memorial process, in a collapse of time between the time of now and the time of the Holocaust.

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The final analysis of the novel Colomba (2004) in chapter 6 unites many of these new dimensions of Maraini’s work, including the ecological concerns that grow increasingly central, while the playfulness evident in some earlier works becomes in Colomba an unexpected happy ending. 58 Like many of Maraini’s earlier works, including Isolina, Colomba sets into motion the search for a missing character, but in Colomba, the missing character is patently fictional, and identified as fictional from the first pages, when a grandmother seeks out the help of a writer, la romanziera dai capelli corti (the woman novelist with the short hair), to help her find her missing granddaughter. This search becomes the background for a series of embedded and reconstructed fragments of micro and macro histories: international, national, regional, familial, and personal. In fact, the narrative reconstructions are crucial, both literally and symbolically, to the recovery of the young twentytwo-year-old woman, Colomba, who has disappeared without a trace. The hybrid novel can be read as a sort of epic of contemporary Italy. It offers a meta-narrative framework, and effects a postmodernist rupture of linear time, while interconnecting multiple histories and three separate story lines. The ecofeminist message of interconnectedness is contained in the central metaphor of the tree, configured both as genealogical family tree whose whimsical illustration appears on the first page, and the tree as the building block of the forest setting of the Abruzzi National Park. It is this forest that Zaira, Colomba’s grandmother and the stated protagonist of this metafictional novel, scours for her lost granddaughter, Colomba. For Zaira, the unlikely, would-be heroine, only the painstaking reconstruction of all of these histories and the ability to decipher the messages of the forest can enable her to save her granddaughter, whose plight serves as a metonym for an entire lost generation, and as a symbol of the many threats to Italy’s future, some of which are addressed in I giorni di Antigone. The narrative threads of Colomba join in a playful happy ending, one that also ushers in several new metafictional beginnings. In the metafictional world of Colomba, the process of reconstruction as a set of narrative strategies is embedded in the process of reconstruction in which Zaira as protagonist is engaged. Zaira must search and reorganize— yet another subsense of the word, “reconstruct,” in The New Oxford American Dictionary—her own personal and collective past of emotions, events, memories. 59 Zaira discovers that in the metafictional world of Zaira’s author, la romanziera dai capelli corti, reconstruction is the necessary and difficult road to meaning, to knowledge, to a future that can be worth living—more importantly, to a future that can be worth living together.

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NOTES 1. Maraini, Il treno dell’ultima notte, 63. All translations in this volume are mine, unless otherwise noted. 2. Maraini, “La cipolla,” Interview by Cesari, 46. 3. Maraini, “Interview with Writer Dacia Maraini,” online interview by Gaither Stewart. 4. On the success of her first novel and the critics’ ambivalence, see Sumeli Weinberg’s “Premessa,” in Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini (xi–xii). 5. In fact, in the introduction to this collection of essays, Diaconescu-Blumenfeld explores at length the complexities of canon formation and Dacia Maraini’s exclusion from the canon. She affirms that “the lack of sustained critical attention to the work of an author so widely read in Italy must be understood in its full political force. Interpretation is not merely the affectation of isolated academics and intellectuals; it is a crucial mode of either reinforcing or remaking a lived cultural canon” (3). 6. For example, a congress on Maraini’s work was held in Valencia, Spain (April 23–24, 2009), and the Proceedings were published by Miguel y Canuto. In addition, as of the writing of this manuscript, the University of Rhode Island has hosted two annual celebrations of International Women’s Day in honor of Dacia Maraini, who was designated a University of Rhode Island Distinguished International Visiting Writer (February 27–28, 2014, and March 1, 2013). Maraini was present at both of these events. 7. Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 40. 8. It is interesting to note that such discrimination is reproduced even in the most apparently progressive of digital mediums. In the spring semester 2014, I discovered that the Englishlanguage Italian Literature entry of Wikipedia did not include even one woman in the twentieth-century subsection. (Given the speed with which technology changes, it is worthwhile to note that, in the period in which I am finalizing this manuscript, Wikipedia is one of the most widely used, collectively written, open reference sources on the Internet.) I had the opportunity to point out this astonishing development to Dacia Maraini herself later that semester, when she came to speak at Wheaton College (February 28, 2014). In order to remedy this oversight, during the semester, in my course on Italian Women Writers in Translation, my students undertook the necessary research, for their final digital project, to add to that entry, and to the one on Dacia Maraini. (See Wikipedia editing history of late April–early May 2014.) Several articles came to my attention during the course of that semester that underlined the widely recognized problem of representation of women, both as subjects and as contributors to Wikipedia. See Garrison and Cembalist. Wikipedia notes some of these problems under “Systemic Bias” in its entry entitled, “Wikipedia.” (Last modified June 29, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_and_systemic_bias.) 9. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 51. 10. Ibid., 51–52. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Maraini repeats her concerns in a June 4, 2013, interview with Anna Maria Sperone that signals the boom in market success from forty to fifty thousand copies in sales to one million, in Italy and abroad, for her La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría. Under the section, “Il prezzo da pagare,” Maraini notes, “Affermarsi in una professione è sempre difficile, soprattutto per una donna. C’è una mancanza di stima in partenza. Le istituzioni sono in mano agli uomini (quando ho cominciato io più di adesso), i critici letterari sono uomini e prima di ottenere qualche riconoscimento bisogna lavorare duro” (Establishing yourself in a profession is always difficult, especially for a woman. There is always a lack of esteem from the beginning. Institutions are in the hands of men (when I started out, even more than now), the literary critics are men and before you can get some recognition you have to work really hard). 15. Cannon, “Women Writers,” 14. 16. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 45–46. 17. Sumeli Weinberg, Invito, 21.

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18. Maraini, “Riflessioni,” xxiii. For a discussion of this passage, see Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 134, as well as Blum’s clarifying note on Debenedetti’s name and comments (Rewriting the Journey, 310, note 6). Blum contrasts the “realist” label with an exploration of Maraini’s relationship to the avant-garde and to experimental elements in her poetry and prose. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., xxiv. 22. Tabucchi, “Dentro i libri,” 111–12. 23. Cruciata, “Il personaggio femminile,” 92. Some of the observations in this article can be found in Cruciata’s Dacia Maraini. 24. Cruciata, Dacia Maraini, 135. 25. Ibid., 102. 26. Cruciata, “Il personaggio femminile,” 96. 27. Ibid., 97. 28. Ibid., 100. 29. Ibid., 101. 30. See, for example, Elizabeth Wren-Owen, Postmodern Ethics: Sciascia and Tabucchi’s Re-appropriation of Committed Writing 1975–2005 (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Jennifer Burns, Fragments of Impegno: Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980–2000 (Leeds, UK: Northern Universities Press, 2001); Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug (eds.), Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009); and Monica Jansen, “Italian Literature: The Epics of Reality,” in Reconsidering the Postmodern: European Literature Beyond Relativism, ed. Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). 31. Maraini, “La cipolla,” Interview by Cesari, 30. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 49. 34. Ibid., 50. 35. Braidotti elaborates on this term in The Posthuman, 99. 36. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 48. 37. Miguel y Canuto, “Introduzione,” 12. 38. Maraini, I giorni di Antigone, 7. 39. The New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “reconstruct.” 40. Women’s capacity for civil disobedience is the inspiration of Maraini’s most recent text, Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza (2013), which addresses another form of civil disobedience enacted by a saint of the Catholic Church through uncompromising poverty. Talk at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, February 28, 2014: “Chiara di Assisi: Poverty, Anorexia and Civil Disobedience.” 41. Maraini, I giorni di Antigone, 7. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Ibid. 44. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 50. 45. See Virginia Picchietti, Relational Spaces: Daughterhood, Motherhood, and Sisterhood in Dacia Maraini’s Writings and Films, for an analysis of Maraini’s works that “chart a trajectory that reflects the evolution of the late-twentieth-century feminist discourse on the family” (15). Picchietti notes that, in this discourse, the daughter becomes the “agent of change for all women, for she holds the privileged position between the domestic and public spheres” (15). She underlines feminist philosopher, Luisa Muraro’s development of a “theory of women’s subjectivity [based] on a redefinition of the mother’s place in a woman’s life” (18). Picchietti finds that “the altered configuration of familial relationships of which sisterhood is an integral part constitutes Maraini’s ultimate answer to the problematic reality of the conventional family” (19). Our reading will reach beyond Picchietti’s illuminating view of women’s relationships as a solution to the conventional family, to incorporate the positive role of a father figure in the new configuration of family that Maraini posits in Colomba. 46. Maraini, I giorni di Antigone, 7.

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47. For a discussion of the difficulty of identifying a “children’s literature,” a discussion that problematizes the genre, see Susan Honeyman, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations of Modern Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). For a useful review of Honeyman’s book within a critical framework, see Richard Lowry, “Lowry on, ‘Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction’ and Honeyman, ‘Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction’” H-Childhood, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, July 2007, accessed June 6, 2014, https://networks.h-net.org/node/18732/ reviews/19019/lowry-elusive-childhood-impossible-representations-modern-fiction-and. Lowry frames his review with this opening statement, “It is getting on toward twenty-five years since Jacqueline Rose (1984) proposed ‘the impossibility of children’s literature.’ [. . .] By now, many scholars are at least conditionally at ease with not just the impossibility of children’s literature, but the fictionality of childhood itself. ‘Childhood,’ like children’s literature, like the floating nomenclature ‘the child,’ thrives as the product of adult presumptions and desires. To write ‘for’ children, urged Rose, is an act of veiled narcissism: a largely invented child audience serves as a pretext for the creation of an adulthood at home with a language of innocence and wholeness.” 48. Maraini, “Cani di Roma,” 146. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 148. 51. Ibid., 154. This detail is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo story, “ll coniglio velenoso,” in which Marcovaldo steals a rabbit injected with a fatal germ from an experimental lab at a hospital. Unaware that the rabbit could spread an epidemic, Marcovaldo hopes to fatten him up for a Christmas meal. As in Maraini’s short story, human beings’ relationships to the animal world are shown to be selfish, exploitative and destructive. 52. The New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “reconstruct.” 53. Maraini, “Cani di Roma,” 154. 54. Ibid., 163. 55. Cannon also notes Maria Serena Sapegno’s observations of Maraini’s opus. Cannon observes, “Sapegno characterizes the point of view constructed by all of Maraini’s texts as ‘un atteggiamento di ricerca,’” in which the reader has the impression that he/she is working with the narrating voice to put together “’i pezzi di un puzzle’” (Cannon, The Novel, 115 n4; Sapegno, “Oltre e dietro il pudore,” 42–43). 56. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 3. 57. Maraini, “Intervista a Dacia Maraini,” Interview by Simona Wright, 89. 58. As we noted, the first article in I giorni di Antigone, “Nucleare, la morte silenziosa,” deals with ecological concerns, such as the transportation of plutonium and the disposal of contaminated waste. It was originally published in 1999 in Il Messaggero. 59. The New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “reconstruct.”

Chapter One

Too Sweet for the Sweet Backward and Downward in Il treno per Helsinki

In Autoritratto di gruppo on the 1968 movement in Italy, its roots and its legacies, the historian Luisa Passerini uses autobiography, historical research, and—her area of expertise—oral testimony to examine the contradictory nature of the 1968 experience. Passerini recalls a particular inconsistency of Italian student life in one tradition that that generation did not eschew: “Godersi il buon cibo, la cucina piemontese sopraffina, i tartufi, era in felice contrasto con un’impostazione generale che negava le gratificazioni sociali, la carriera, il rispetto umano. Cucinavamo a volte per un pomeriggio intero, magari un fritto misto colossale, con tutti i pezzi richiesti dalla tradizione” (Enjoying good food, refined Piedmontese cooking, truffles, was in happy contrast to the general stance that rejected social gratifications, career, respect for others. Sometimes we cooked for an entire afternoon, perhaps a colossal fritto misto, with all the elements required by tradition). 1 In Dacia Maraini’s own backward glance at the 1968 movement, Il treno per Helsinki, one of her lesser-known works published in 1984 just a few years before Passerini’s study, 2 the young circle of intellectuals “chained” together by unrequited love—“Nico è innamorato di Dida che è innamorata di Cesare,” and so on (Nico is in love with Dida who is in love with Cesare) 3—as well as politics and friendship are also repeatedly united by la scena conviviale. 4 Yet the alimentary sign does not serve merely as a pretext for encounters, as a kitchen set for the backdrop, an additive of negligible importance; rather, food functions as the narrative, linguistic, and thematic netting that strings the novel together. Paradigmatic in this function is the potato that the narrator-protagonist Armida, significantly an aspiring playwright like Maraini herself in the 1960s, is paring Italian-style—that is, not 1

2

Chapter 1

with a potato peeler but with a knife; the potato appears in the beginning and final paragraphs as an image that props the novel up at both ends. Here, the journey of the knife over the potato resembles Armida’s own attempt in 1968 and via flashback fifteen years later to reveal the secret of the elusive personality of Miele, a political activist and her ex-lover. Yet designating the long journey backward positioned, narratively speaking, in between the potato peeling as a long “flashback” does not adequately characterize the strategies of historical and memorial reconstruction in this novel. According to M. H. Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, we can understand “flashback” as “interpolated narratives or scenes (which may be justified as a memory or a revery, or as a confession by one of the characters) which represents events that happened before the point at which the work opened.” 5 Or, to quote Lewis Turco’s more recent, The Book of Literary Terms, “flashback” is “dramatic exposition, working up to the present at the conclusion of the tale, where past and present merge.” 6 Yet neither of these characterizations of “flashback” does justice to the strategy of reconstruction undertaken in Maraini’s novel. The “zoom in” at the end of the novel, after 264 pages of narration, to the same initial image of the potato, the initial narrative moment, has a defamiliarizing function that destabilizes any believable notion of time elapsed; it is hardly believable that we could have read 264 pages during a pause in the peeling of a potato, and much less that Armida could have engaged in the remembering and reconstruction of so many events during such a pause. Maraini leaves her readers with the distorting narrative effects of remembered time, unraveled by the image of the knife pausing over the potato, a potato that “pare racchiudere per sempre il misero e nello stesso tempo grandioso mistero di Miele” (seems to enclose forever the meager and at the same time grand mystery of Miele). 7 Richer for our purposes is Mark Currie’s discussion of prolepsis in his complex narratological study, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007). Using the theories of Ricoeur, Genette, and others, Currie explores prolepsis as “the anticipation of retrospection,” 8 which he identifies as “involved in all narrative.” 9 Currie later writes, “The idea that moving forwards in time involves a backwards narration is more than just a novelistic structure, and might be thought of, with Proust, as the shape of time itself.” 10 Currie notes, “the detective and the historian share this structure of moving forwards by knowing the past.” 11 Yet, if Il treno per Helsinki offers a reconstruction of Armida’s memories of the intersection of her own life with a historical period and the effect of the contradictions of that period on her life, memory on its own, Maraini tells us, is insufficient to the process of transformation and awareness. When asked if “il recupero del passato, cioè di una parte di sé, nel cammino verso una coscienza femminile, segna, per caso, il superamento del destino di assoggettata, di un essere senza volto?” (does the recovery of the past, that is, of a part

Too Sweet for the Sweet

3

of one’s self, on the path toward the development of a woman’s consciousness, signal, by chance, the overcoming of the fate of subjugated woman, of a being without a face?), Maraini replies by saying that it’s not necessarily automatic: “Non è che tornare indietro nel passato sia fatto automaticamente e che il recupero del passato, come dici tu, porti al superamento del destino di assoggettata. [. . .] Certo, contribuisce, perché crea dei confronti; perché è un’occasione per la riflessione storica. Forse la riflessione storica comporta una visione d’insieme mentre noi, stando nel mondo in cui viviamo, vediamo i particolari, ma spesso non vediamo l’insieme” (It’s not that turning back to the past is done automatically and that the recovery of the past, as you say, results in the overcoming of the destiny of subjugated woman. [. . .] Certainly, it helps, because it creates comparisons; because it is an opportunity for historical reflection. Maybe historical reflection involves a vision of the whole while we, being in the world in which we are living, see the particulars, but often don’t see the whole). 12 Here, Mark Currie’s reflection in his analysis of a novel (The Accidental) is fruitful for our purposes: “We only have to put explicit reflection on time into a relationship with the temporality of fiction [. . .] to produce a more complicated inquiry into time, one which is no longer on the surface of language, but exists in a relationship or a tension between what a novel says and what it does. Fiction, in this sense, always has a secret about time.” 13 The “secret about time” that we can find in Il treno per Helsinki is summarized in the novel’s second paragraph, in Armida’s words, “Il passato ha la consistenza di una minestra. Anni che non percorrevo questa strada. Dalla gola alle viscere. Questo viottolo sdrucciolevole dove le sue esse scivolose mi fanno da cuscino e da ponte verso il marasma delle emozioni” (The past has the consistency of a soup. Years since I’ve been down this road. From my throat to my bowels. This slippery slope where his slick esses serve as cushion and bridge toward the chaos of my emotions). 14 While the main narrative of the past action is narrated in a linear and chronological way, we discover that the process of narrative reconstruction hinges on a reconstruction of the past—a reconstruction of the personal and political disillusion and betrayal, as well as self-betrayal, that Armida suffers—through the alimentary sign, through food, as a digestive, visceral process, internal to the protagonist, a traveling that goes downward to go backward, a merging, a collapse, of present and past in the world that is inside the 1980s (and 1960s) protagonist. This image highlights human experience as internalized coexistence of past, present, and future, while the reconstruction of, and revelations about, the past occurs by way of Armida’s digestive and gustatory system, like that of Alice in Wonderland. 15 Armida eats “il fungo di Alice” (Alice’s mushrom). 16 Maraini elaborates an intestinal reconstruction of what Armida has consumed, what she has tasted, what she has—gullibly—swallowed. Time, as history and memory, is thus embodied within Armida. If Armida

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Chapter 1

goes backward to go forward, we might add that she goes downward, to go backward. In this sense, the past is inside her. In fact, in Il treno per Helsinki, the 1980s present of the first pages of the novel is written in present tense, and the main, past action of the novel, set in the late 1960s, is also written in the present tense. A technique also used in Isolina, as we will later see, the use of the present tense testifies to the living and present impact of a past, rekindled, in Il treno, by the politician Miele’s too-familiar voice on the radio. The novel’s figuration of the past as embodied in Armida also deconstructs linear notions of humanist progress. The only intercalation in Il treno that acknowledges the gap between the historical 1960s movement of the remembered action and the 1980s of the narrator-protagonist occurs in an ironic conversation between Cesare and Miele. In stereotypical fascination of the Italian male for Scandinavian blondes, Cesare exclaims over the “belle fiche” (beautiful pussies). Miele, who will be revealed to be a womanizer, accuses him, with striking, bald-faced hypocrisy, of acting like a “provinciale” (hick). 17 Cesare explains, “Tante bionde insieme non le ho mai viste.” “Sembri un burino degli anni cinquanta.” “E ora dove siamo negli anni ottanta forse?” “Fine anni sessanta Cesare. Fra un po’ entriamo nei settanta. E non c’è più Stalin coi baffi all’insù non c’è Churchill non c’è De Gasperi. Qui tutto cambia solo tu resti sempre lo stesso.” 18 “I’ve never seen so many blondes in one place.” “You seem like a boor from the Fifties.” “And where are we now, in the Eighties maybe?” “End of the Sixties Cesare. Soon we’ll be in the Seventies. And there’s no more Stalin with his uptilted moustache there’s no Churchill there’s no De Gasperi. Here everything changes only you stay the same.”

In this exchange, Miele positions himself as a modern figure, an enlightened man who transcends stereotypes, a man always open to change and progress. Miele measures progress and contemporary history by the patriarchal figureheads of failed humanist politics. As we will see, the contradictions between Miele’s words, the image he would project of himself, and his actions exemplify the defeat of the aspirations of the 1960s movement, though not of his own thriving political career. Famously, in an earlier, well-known 1989 interview with Grazia Sumeli Weinberg, Maraini identified three stages in her literary development: alienation, political involvement, followed by writing about defeat. Maraini explains: “[N]ot my defeat, but the world’s. It is the defeat of some ideological certainties by reality. Reality is complex. We had a great dream in the ’60s:

Too Sweet for the Sweet

5

to change the world and, maybe, to change it quickly and easily. We found out that it was impossible.” 19 Il treno clearly falls into the third category, revealing the defeat inherent in the political ideals of 1968; ironically, the realization of this defeat constitutes Armida’s painful personal victory. 20 With a present day Armida, we journey backward and downward into the netherworld of the “viscere” to retrace her marriage, her miscarriage, her train ride en masse with other Italian sessantottini to Helsinki to participate in the International Students’ Festival, and her slow extrication from the most deeply rooted longings and stickiest snares for women: marriage, maternity, love. As we said, food, as metaphor of that which is ingested, digested, of that which passes through the organism, nourishes, is discarded and expelled, is a compelling motif from the first page of Il treno, as Miele’s voice on the radio descends from Armida’s ears directly into her “pancia” (belly). 21 Figuratively eating Alice in Wonderland’s mushroom, Armida descends into her own past of fifteen years ago, her own netherworld. The oral-anal image takes her back “dalla gola alle viscere” (from my throat to my bowels) so that she metaphorically journeys down into her own intestines towards her anus and comes back out into that world “cacata da me stessa” (shit out by myself). 22 Further allusions to Freudian oral and anal stages resurface shortly after on the second page in Armida’s memory of her ex-husband Paolo’s inability to “digerire” (digest) his family’s wealth, a metonym for that generation’s troubled relationship with, and challenge to, parental and patriarchal figures of authority, including, most publicly, government and the police. Later, Paolo, Armida and their friends will join the protest of the 1968 My Lai Vietnam massacre in front of the American embassy, where the violence of the faraway war is reproduced in the clash between protesters and police. In the protesters’ imagination, America assumes a cannibalistic nature, “divorando pezzo a pezzo le ossa scarne dei contadini vietnamiti” (devouring piece by piece the lean bones of the Vietnamese farmers). 23 The “visceral” motif, which in these overlapping worlds of fairy tale and psychoanalysis implies ingestion of food, also encompasses the central image of childbirth, already suggested in a feminist reading of Armida’s excretion of herself as self-creation, as Armida born from herself. Later, Armida’s failed pregnancy will be decisive for her birth as a freestanding individual, but the image of childbirth is introduced long before Armida’s pregnancy. On the second page of Il treno, in Paolo’s rebellion against the authorities, lies the uneasy guilt of being born—being expelled as product—from these very powers. Beating a primal rhythm on his drum, Paolo “piange la futura nascita. La futura vergogna di essere al mondo” (weeps for his future birth. The future shame of being in the world). 24 The unnatural horrors of war— which overturns the natural order of birth—are concretized in a photograph from the My Lai massacre, in which, between the spread legs of a young

6

Chapter 1

woman, a child of only a few months, his head obscenely contorted, attempts to “tornare lì da dove era uscito” (return there from where it had come out). 25 On a lighter note, for Nico and Paolo and Armida and Ada and Cesare and Dida and Miele, who come together in numerous “scene conviviali” (convivial scenes), the metaphor of cannibalism occasionally strikes predictably erotic tones: “La delizia di mangiare ed essere mangiati predatore e preda l’uno dell’altro accaniti nel riempirsi la bocca dei pezzi più desiderati: labbra guance palpebre orecchie lingua collo” (The delight of eating and being eaten each other’s predator and prey fierce in filling our mouths with the most desired bits: lips cheeks eyelids ears tongue neck). 26 The final image of the neck recalls the folkloristic cannibalism of Dracula: at a friend’s castle, the group is offered wine as “Un po’ di sangue con ghiaccio?” (A little blood with ice?). 27 The benefits of conviviality, however, are overshadowed by the suffocating aspects of group life, in which every experience risks becoming a collective experience. The private world of sexual intimacy, under the “new” moral codes, either moves into open, public view of the group, or is stifled out of existence. For example, Dida, the earth goddess, offers her breast to a friend while the group looks on, and Cesare takes out his penis to illustrate his ideas on sexuality. These two characters’ use of their bodies and sexuality evokes old gender patterns and stereotypes: Dido behaves like a nurturing earth mother whose body belongs more to others than to herself, while Cesare shows himself to be engaged in a literally phallogocentric discourse. The vise of the collective experience reaches its peak in the sojourn to Helsinki. For eight days, the six friends (minus Paolo) live and sleep in one small train compartment. Upon arrival, they are piled by gender in rooms of 120 beds, which reminds Armida of such anti-1968 structures as “una caserma” (a barrack) 28 or “il collegio” (the boarding school). 29 In Helsinki the group (except for Miele) is “sempre insieme” (always together) and never manages to reach beyond themselves to the city because, as Cesare says, the friends are “sempre fra di noi sempre insieme a preoccuparci del nostro ombelico” (always among ourselves always together worrying about our own bellybuttons). 30 Several times Armida and Miele cannot find a private space to make love or even dine alone. In Autoritratto di gruppo, Passerini discusses “la presa di distanza delle donne dal ’68” as “una critica della sinistra, del suo modo di pensare e fare politica” (a distancing of women from 1968 [as] a criticism of the left, of its way of thinking and doing politics). 31 The older Armida has learned the lesson of Maraini’s famous earlier novel, Donna in guerra (1975), and knows that those so-called radical political and moral ideals, like their exponents, disguised the very structures and patterns of behavior they purportedly opposed. In sum, as Sumeli Weinberg and Lazzaro-Weis have noted, business as usual. Meanwhile, the as yet unenlightened, younger Armida is

Too Sweet for the Sweet

7

caught in the viscous deceit of a reality that is contemporaneously seductive and menacing, a deceit decipherable in an analysis of the sweets motif. Significantly, the cadence of the name My Lai, center of massacre, is described as “una leccata di zucchero candito” (a lick of candy). 32 The first and most obvious traditional structure that fails to be transformed by 1968 is marriage. An apparently happy marriage to the freethinking revolutionary artist Paolo actually reveals, in a feminist litmus paper test, Armida taking care of his mentally disabled brother and preparing the meals for friends, much like the earlier Vannina in Donna in guerra, who also shares with Armida nighttime dreams of flying. Armida complains of an “eccesso di intimità matrimoniale” (an excess of marital intimacy). 33 Her sense of suffocation intensifies when she becomes pregnant and Paolo suggests that they use her studio, her creative space, as the baby’s nursery, recalling Anna Maria Mori’s observation that maternity has been premised on women’s willingness to “vivere di ‘sottrazioni’: se voglio l’amore non posso volere il lavoro; se voglio far esistere un figlio o una figlia, devo accettare di non esistere personalmente; e così via” (live by “subtractions:” if I want love I can’t want work; if I want to bring a son or daughter into existence, I have to accept that I don’t personally exist; and so on). 34 Maternity must supplant Armida’s creativity and individuality. Paola’s traditional views threaten Armida’s artistic as well as psychological survival. Pregnancy, oft-seen as a sweet, blissful state, becomes nightmarish and life-threatening when Armida is hospitalized for the full term and succumbs to the solicitude of mother-in-law, husband, and friends. 35 Yet despite the needles, the doctors, the private clinic, the vast amounts of food she must consume, she continues to hemorrhage slowly; blood seeps from her womb, her “viscere,” while everyone overwhelms her with gifts of sweets and flowers: “Il comodino carico di dolci alla mandorla di cioccolatini che non mangio di biscotti all’arancio di frutta candita di bignè alla crema” (The nightstand full of almond sweets of chocolates that I don’t eat of orange-flavored cookies of candied fruit of cream puffs). 36 Secretly, Armida trades the sweets for fresh fruit, such as fresh figs. Like an out-of-control Alice in Wonderland, she swells up: “ingrasso le braccia raddoppiate i seni colmi” (I gain weight my arms doubled in size my breasts full). 37 Eventually, Armida starts to vomit everything she eats, loses the baby, succumbs to demeaning medical treatment, then notices her face in the mirror, “gonfia di cibo maldigerito di noia e di stupida rassegnazione” (swollen with poorly digested food with boredom and with stupid resignation). 38 Paolo’s insensitive suggestion they have another baby places this revolutionary in the realm of the commonplace, as does his unreconciled bitterness over the breakdown of their marriage and sex life, and his unfounded paranoia that, after he leaves on a scholarship in Boston, Armida will some day pin another man’s child on him. And so Paolo, revealing his traditional

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nature, abandons his days in front of the American embassy to take refuge in the United States, but not without some irony on the author’s part. 39 Following the break, like Alice who has discovered the secret behind the mushroom, Armida takes on a revitalizing diet of fruits and vegetables to lose weight and shrink in size. This period should coincide with her personal liberation, as her play is accepted by an acting group and, invited to speak in her capacity as playwright at the Helsinki Festival, she travels with other young, optimistic leftists to Finland. But the director proves a condescending, two-timing chauvinist who presides over a group reading of Armida’s play that one of the actresses describes as: “la brutalità del lavoro di gruppo. Che si richiama alle regole democratiche ma in realtà è una scusa per praticare in piena libertà un rito sadico collettivo” (the brutality of group work. That recalls democratic rules but in reality is an excuse to practice with complete freedom a collective sadistic ritual). 40 On the train, the “‘nuova gioventù europea’” (“new European youth”) breaks down into recognizable social hierarchies of the privileged and the marginalized, governed by “i mafiosi.” 41 And the Helsinki experience assumes Orwellian Big Brother overtones when Armida is summoned over a loudspeaker and taken to task by one of the directors of the festival, who withdraws her funding after her “inappropriate” and too honest speech. Change is illusory around and in Armida. Like Maraini’s portrayal of the 1968 generation, Armida carries the seeds of her defeat within her. Her disengagement from her marriage, rather than transforming her into a freestanding individual, merely serves as a counterpoint to her growing devotion to Miele. Armida would like to forge a modern approach to love with Miele, one free of possession and jealousy. Unfortunately, she misjudges Miele’s character and gives in to her weakness for sweet declarations of love. Armida tells Asia, “L’amore a me piace dolce” (I like love to be sweet). 42 The complex and ambivalent nature of Armida’s attraction to Miele is revealed through the motif of sweets, symbol of the seductive coating of a threatening, cloying, and nauseating reality. An early example of Armida’s ambivalence as attraction-repulsion is the birthday cake that Miele brings a day too early for Paolo’s birthday: “una grossa torta coperta di violette di zucchero” (a big cake covered in violets made of sugar). 43 Armida says, “Ogni tanto vado a controllare la torta con le violette chiusa nel frigorifero. È sempre lì. E mi rassicura sulla sua venuta. Aspetto che mi dica qualcosa di più su di lui. Ma la glassata bianca nasconde l’interno del dolce. E quelle violette sono così brillanti così finte non dicono la verità” (Every once in a while I go check on the cake with the violets shut in the fridge. It’s still there. And it reassures me that Miele’s coming. I wait for it to tell me something more about him. But the white icing hides the cake’s interior. And those violets are so sparkling so fake they don’t tell the truth). 44

Too Sweet for the Sweet

9

Miele tests Armida’s commitment to a jealousy-free love because his repeated declarations of love and fidelity (“Ho amato solo te,” he tells her [I’ve loved only you]) are contradicted by his philandering. Armida’s suspicions on the train ride, where she sees shadows of Miele with other women around every corner, become a complete certainty when he advises her to see a doctor because he has an STD. To Armida’s challenge, Miele responds, “Te lo giuro Armida non mi credere se vuoi ma io non ho mai fatto l’amore con nessuno salvo che con te” (I swear to you Armida don’t believe me if you want but I’ve never made love with anyone but you). 45 The result is that Armida, who keeps begging that he simply tell her the truth in order to live a new and “open” idea of love, falls prey to the trite, obsessive behavior of a woman betrayed, to devouring jealousy and bouts of nausea, “the archetypal wronged female,” as Lazzaro-Weis says. 46 The answer to the mystery of Miele and the menacing nature of seduction lies in the mystery of Don Giovanni. Armida, on the verge of complete disillusionment, turns on Mozart’s famous opera: Deh vieni alla finestra o mio tesoro! . . . tu ch’hai la bocca dolce più del miele / tu che il zucchero porti in mezzo al core (italics ours). 47 Oh come to the window o my treasure! . . . you that have a mouth sweeter than honey / you that carry sugar in your heart (italics ours).

Lazzaro-Weis has rightly seen in Miele, who is at the periphery of their group culture, the political Don Juan reminiscent of Maraini’s 1976 eponymous play. 48 He is the man of politics whose unwavering commitment and pragmatic notion of political language (“La verità non esiste in politica Armida. Esistono le strategie i grandi progetti l’interesse comune la disciplina la tattica.” [The truth doesn’t exist in politics Armida. Only strategies grand projects common interest discipline tactics exist.]) 49 set him apart from the more ingenuous ideals of 1968. Miele constitutes in fact the great symbol of the defeat of the political and moral ideals of 1968, a defeat in which Armida is complicit. In Maraini’s work, “the personal is political,” and where are the roots of this vision of the world if not in the ruptures of the 1960s? The romantic and political fuse is the danger of Miele’s honeyed language. In fact, Miele’s voice on the radio in the novel’s initial scene “parla di pace come se parlasse d’amore con una intensità ardita da grande oratore” (speaks of peace as if speaking of love with the bold intensity of a great orator). 50 The existence, the success of the politician as a Don Giovanni and Don Giovanni as a politician depend on being believed, and Armida is there as believer. The inextricability of patriarchal politics from traditional, oppressive sexual and romantic patterns of behavior that is Maraini’s repeated message is

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elaborated in Il treno per Helsinki in the image of a white, sticky, semen-like trap that recurs throughout the novel. In the second chapter, Miele introduces Armida to the Daiquiri, described as “un liquore biancastro opalescente” (an opalescent whitish liquor) on which Miele comments, “E’ troppo dolce. Fa schifo. Lo bevo perché mi ricorda una donna che ho amato” (It’s too sweet. It’s disgusting. I only drink it because it reminds me of a woman I loved). 51 A few pages later, the group goes out in the middle of the night to paste up posters, but little attention is devoted in the novel to the political content of the posters. The description focuses on the escape from the police with Armida dragging a pail of glue, “schizzi di liquido appiccicoso” (spurts of sticky liquid). 52 Armida accidentally sticks her foot in the glue as their car races away to a new spot, where Armida “affonda la pennellessa nel liquido biancastro. Alla luce del lampione sembra seme umano,” “un secchio di sperma in cui ho cacciato un piede insofferente” (dips the brush in the whitish liquid. In the lamplight it looks like human semen. A pail of sperm that I’ve stuck an impatient foot into). 53 Prodded out of her dreamlike trance, she says, “Do delle grandi bracciate di seme sulle parole: Guerra Multinazionale Capitalista” (I paint big brush strokes of semen onto the words: Multinational Capitalist War). 54 When Armida breaks definitively with Paolo and goes to meet a prospective landlady at a bar, she orders a Daiquiri, although she has little taste for it, and swallows “quel liquido appiccicoso a occhi chiusi pensando a Miele” (that sticky liquid with eyes closed thinking of Miele). 55 At the end of the novel, Armida begins to realize that her complicity, her belief in his words is necessary to enable Miele to transcend the world of truth and lies and live instead in a world of “certezze e finzioni fascinazioni e sogni” (certainties and pretenses fascinations and dreams), to preserve his secret. 56 Yet instead of challenging him, she kisses his “ombelico” (belly-button) and finds the odors of “qualcosa di dolce [. . .] come l’interno un poco stucchevole di certi fiori” (something sweet [. . .] like the slightly cloying inside of certain flowers). 57 The realization of Miele’s falsity does not automatically free Armida. It is only when Armida realizes that she is involved in reproducing old models, forced into the role of Elvira by a Don Giovanni who in the end announces his marriage to another woman (but not the end of his relationship with Armida), that Armida is plunged into a violent desire for self-annihilation, a catharsis that is also her involuntary and painful parturition of herself as a freestanding individual. 58 Armida’s desire for love, for the belief in love, and the quest for a new way to live love, are the weaknesses that led her to Miele, and to the humiliating and trite role of woman scorned that ultimately she cannot stomach. As Cesare, the surliest of her group of friends, had once accused Armida, “Il mondo tu lo riduci a un mucchio di melassa” (You reduce the world to a pile of molasses). 59

Too Sweet for the Sweet

11

Let us conclude with a quotation from Alice in Wonderland, who through Maraini’s novel often serves as a point of comparison to Armida for her own transformations: “What did [. . .] [the girls] live on?” said Alice, who [like Maraini] always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking. “They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. “They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice remarked gently. “They’d have been ill.” “So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.” 60

NOTES 1. Passerini, Autoritratto, 64–65. 2. Although Bruce Merry, for example, doesn’t mention Il treno in his chapter on Maraini’s work in Women in Modern Italian Literature (Townsville, Australia: Capricornia, 1990), his later monograph on Maraini does address this novel. See Bruce Merry, Dacia Maraini and the Written Dream of Women in Italian Literature (Townsville, Australia: James Cook University of North Queensland, 1997). 3. Dacia Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 13. 4. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 13. Sumeli Weinberg explores the allusion to, and influence of, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Il treno in her critical text on Dacia Maraini. See Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1993), 87, 90–91. Sumeli Weinberg here also traces Armida to her namesake in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (89, 91, 92–93). 5. Abrams, A Glossary, 130. 6. Turco, The Book of Literary Terms, 43. 7. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 267. 8. Currie, About Time, 29. I am thankful to my former student, Marinka Swift, for bringing Currie’s study to my attention. 9. Ibid., 30–31. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Ibid. 12. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 52–53. 13. Currie, About Time, 136. 14. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 3. 15. See Judith Bryce for the importance of the Alice in Wonderland reference in Bagheria. Bryce rightly notes that Alice in Wonderland appears to be “a key text for Dacia Maraini” (Bryce, “Intimations of Patriarchy,” 226). Alice in Wonderland is indeed a recurring motif in Maraini’s texts. 16. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 3. 17. Ibid., 177. 18. Ibid., 178. 19. Dacia Maraini, “An Interview with Dacia Maraini,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 68. 20. Other critics have also been quick to note in Il treno this disillusionment of Italian feminists with the limitations of the fundamentally patriarchal ideological goals and methods of the 1960s movement. See Sumeli Weinberg (Invito 89) and Carol Lazzaro-Weis, “The Subject’s Seduction: The Experience of Don Juan in Italian Feminist Fictions” (389). Alba Amoia also reiterates this point in her Twentieth-Century Italian Women Writers: The Feminine Experience (89). 21. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 3. Maraini notes, not for the first time, that “l’ossessione per il cibo mi viene proprio dall’esperienza del campo, in cui mangiavamo solo una minuscola tazza di riso al giorno. [. . .] In seguito non ho più sofferto quel tipo di fame, anche se sono stata

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molto povera. La mia mente però è rimasta legata al mito del cibo, alla sua sacralità” (the obsession with food comes from my experience of the camp, in which we only ate a minuscule cup of rice a day. [. . .] Afterward I never again suffered that type of hunger, although I have been very poor. But my mind has remained tied to the myth of food, to its sacredness) (Maraini, “La cipolla,” 47). Another novel deeply marked by this “obsession” with food is Donna in guerra. 22. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 3. 23. Ibid., 30. 24. Ibid., 4. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Ibid., 89. 27. Ibid., 39. 28. Ibid., 180. 29. Ibid., 193. 30. Ibid., 237. 31. Passerini, Autoritratto, 205. 32. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 27. In Dizionarietto quotidiano, Maraini gives us an idea of the complexity of the motif of sweetness in her thinking. She is asked, “Lei ha scritto della dolcezza che ‘sprofonda nei pozzi dell’inquietudine.’ Cosa intendeva?” (You have written about sweetness that “falls into the wells of uneasiness.” What did you mean?) She answers, “Che la dolcezza può essere di molti tipi. C’è la dolcezza arresa, quella mascherata, quella sincera, quella disperata, quella ricattatoria, quella passiva, quella finta e quella tenerissima dello sprovveduto” (That there can be many types of sweetness. There is a sweetness of surrender, a masked sweetness, a sincere one, a desperate one, a blackmailing one, a passive one, a fake sweetness and the very tender sweetness of the unsuspecting person). 33. Ibid., 52. 34. Mori, Nel segno della madre, 11–12. 35. Maraini, too, lost a stillborn child in the early 1960s during her brief marriage. As many critics have noted, this traumatic experience resurfaces in her novels and essays. More recently, she discusses this loss in Un clandestino a bordo (17). Sumeli Weinberg in Invito (87) underlines the autobiographical nature of Il treno, which was, Maraini said in 1984, “il romanzo più autobiografico che io abbia mai scritto” (the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written) (Invito 108). However, thirty years later, Maraini might now ascribe this status to Bagheria, La nave per Kobe, or La grande festa, for example. 36. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 72. 37. Ibid., 65. 38. Ibid., 77. 39. Sumeli Weinberg underlines the subtle irony in Il treno, although she does not specifically identify Paolo as one of its targets (Invito, 89, 91). She writes, “La distanza di tempo che separa gli eventi raccontati dal momento della narrazione [. . .] raffina l’angolo della visuale e l’ironia diventa l’arma del recupero conoscitivo di Armida” (The distance of time that separates the narrated events from the narration [. . .] refines the visual angle and irony becomes Armida’s weapon for psychological recovery) (Invito, 91). 40. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 133. 41. Ibid., 165. 42. Ibid., 234. On jealousy and Armida’s disillusionment see Lazzaro-Weis, “The Subject’s,” 390–91. 43. Ibid., 12. 44. Ibid., 12–13. 45. Ibid., 249. 46. Lazzaro-Weis, “The Subject’s,” 391. 47. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 256. 48. On the motif of the Don Juan, see especially Lazzaro-Weis (“The Subject’s”). See also Sumeli Weinberg (Invito, 90). For more on the Don Juan in Maraini’s theater, see the chapter entitled, “Don Giovanni femminista” in Angelica Forti-Lewis, Maschere, libretti e libertini: Il mito di Don Giovanni nel teatro europeo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 197–208.

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49. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 206. 50. Ibid., 265. 51. Ibid., 6. 52. Ibid., 17. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 18. 55. Ibid., 94. 56. Ibid., 230. As Sumeli Weinberg points out, Maraini states that in this novel she is interested in exploring the mystery that is man (Invito, 86). 57. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 230. 58. “Recognition of this unexpected similarity to the Elvira topos is a first step toward refusing to cooperate with Miele’s seductive, objectifying discourse” (Lazzaro-Weis, “The Subject’s,” 391). 59. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 239. 60. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 48.

Chapter Two

Acts of Reconstruction Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi

Isolina, first published in 1985, is the story of Dacia Maraini’s investigation into the case of a young nineteen-year-old woman killed in Verona in January 1900. For a writer long characterized by her interest in “la questione femminile,” the subject matter of Isolina is neither unusual nor remarkable. Like other writers, critics, historians, sociologists, and philosophers who over the past fifty years or so have shaped the field of women’s studies and addressed women’s issues, Maraini has repeatedly engaged in the search for, and the recovery of, women’s place and role in history. Maraini, like them, has sought to write women into history, from which they have been absent. In a 1980 interview, the successful contemporary writer Francesca Sanvitale commented: Consider any school textbook or history of literature. When it comes to women writers, these books always affirm that it was and is a question of a “minor” literary production. [. . .] Women are given an “atemporal” value, while “history” belongs to men. In other words women are in a “limbo,” a sort of reserve. The history and culture of a nation are made by men and women intertwined in their outcome. By recovering and combining these two parts (the “history of culture” is often a history of power), we’ll find many surprises and many women who hold a singular importance in and for their times. We women need to discover this ourselves, as a reflection of our lives. 1

Among the various narrative strategies women writers have employed to recover history is the use of the genres of autobiographical fiction, as in Sanvitale’s own Madre e figlia, and historical fiction, such as Cutrufelli’s La briganta, to give just a few examples. Some genres are harder to identify, 15

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such as Maraini’s famous 1990 novel, La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría, which recounts the imagined life of an ancestress, while others involve a mix of history, fiction and biography to recreate the life of a historical female figure, whether famous or not. 2 Within this context, Isolina, based on the truncated life of a historical female figure from the lowest social classes, does not appear to be extraordinary. But such a characterization of Isolina would be both reductive and dismissive. In fact, perhaps the most novel aspect of Isolina was already implicit in the beginning sentence of this chapter: Isolina is the story of Maraini’s investigation into the case of a young nineteen-year-old woman killed in Verona in January 1900. Isolina is not the story of a young woman, but the story of the search for information about her. Although the search for documents and evidence are, arguably, a text’s usual starting point for the eventual, often chronological recreation of the life and times of a historical figure, in Isolina the search is the story. Maraini eschews both the predictable fictionalization of those parts of Isolina’s life for which we have no evidence, and the creation of a story that climaxes in the victim’s death. Maraini does not choose to transform Isolina into a vibrant, fictionalized character who eventually dies, nor does she choose to plunge her readers into a remote past that allows them to escape their modern-day present. Rather, in Brechtian fashion, Maraini ensures that at every point in the book the reader feels the writer’s frustration at the tragedy of Isolina’s gruesome death and the tragedy of her historical absence, for Isolina was literally chopped up—and chopped out of history. Isolina deals with one woman’s search for another woman’s— and consequently her own, and of course to some extent, women’s collective—past. In Isolina, Maraini is piecing together, reconstructing, painstakingly and with great difficulty, a story, at the same time that she is slowly trying to piece together, trying to reconstruct, the life and body of Isolina, who has been so successfully, so deliberately forgotten as to defy the author’s best investigative efforts. The process of recovery and the process of narration run parallel. In an Antigone-like gesture, Maraini is recomposing as she composes. Divided into sections, the structure of Isolina is decidedly schematic. The first section recreates the sensational case through citing, paraphrasing, and summarizing newspaper articles from the very first years of the 1900s. The second part focuses on Maraini’s journey to Verona as she retraces the steps of Isolina and her lover Trivulzio, in order to recover, flesh out, so to speak, more of the story. The last two sections recount segments of the ensuing court case and sentencing. The apparent simplicity of this structure has led critic JoAnn Cannon to analyze the text as a combination of detective genre and historical discourse, a “racconto inchiesta,” which, as Maraini herself has repeatedly pointed out, is not a novel. Cannon notes, “Like a detective story, Isolina is composed of two stories, the story of the crime and the story of the

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investigation.” 3 Cannon underlines Maraini’s process of historical reconstruction alongside her “inquiry into the miscarriage of justice” 4 through Roland Barthes’ “monitorial mode.” 5 In an earlier article, Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld analyzed the text within the genre of feminist historiography, in its “recuperation of lost history” and “deconstruction of the ideal of absolute objectivity.” 6 Diaconescu-Blumenfeld notes that “both of these concerns are present in Dacia Maraini’s Isolina (1992): the recovery of a lost life, and the subjectivity of narrator that problematizes the subject-object relation.” 7 As Cannon points out, Maraini from the beginning states that Isolina is not a novel, though many, including myself, (mis)took it for one. Cannon notes that “most of the early reviews of Isolina refer to the text as a novel” and as early as 1985, Maraini states in an interview with Antonio Debenedetti that Isolina is not a novel. 8 In a 1996 interview with Simona Wright, Dacia Maraini again affirms, “Isolina è cronachistico, è un libro-documento, costruito sulla lettura e l’esame di giornali e documenti dell’epoca: l’inizio del Novecento a Verona” (Isolina is chronicle-style, it’s a book-document, constructed on the reading and examination of newspapers and documents from that era: the beginning of the 1900s in Verona). 9 Maraini contrasts Isolina with her later Voci (1994), also analyzed in Cannon’s book, which is “un romanzo vero e proprio, una fiction” (a true novel, a fiction). 10 She continues, “Isolina l’ho scritta perchè mi avevano chiesto di collaborare ad una collana che rivisitasse delitti commessi tra la fine dell’Ottocento e l’inizio del Novecento. L’editore aveva chiesto a diversi narratori di raccontare questi delitti e di rivederli sotto una luce letteraria, di riscriverli, per così dire, ‘da narratore.’ Ho lavorato sui giornali, perché mancavano i documenti: ho fatto una indagine di tipo giornalistico, ho lavorato negli archivi di Verona, nelle emeroteche” (I wrote Isolina because they asked me to participate in a series that would revisit crimes committed between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. The editor had asked different narrators to recount these crimes and to look at them again in a literary light, to rewrite them, so to speak, as “a narrator.” I worked on newspapers, because the documents were missing: I undertook a sort of journalistic investigation. I worked in the archives of Verona, in the newspaper libraries). 11 As recently as 2005, in her book-length “conversazione” with young journalist, Paolo di Paolo, Ho sognato una stazione: Gli affetti, i valori, le passioni, Maraini reaffirms, “Non è un romanzo ma un racconto che si ispira al vero” (It’s not a novel but a story that is inspired by the truth). 12 This twenty-year insistence on the author’s part begs the question of the assignation of genre to Isolina. Why does Maraini repeat, I wonder, what should be obvious? Don’t Maraini’s intentions as creator, as outlined in her authorial comments and interviews, settle the issue? Yet why did I, like Isolina’s early reviewers, (mis)take Isolina for a novel? What matter if I, as

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recently as 2005, published an article in which I referred to Isolina as a novel, and have had to catch myself, in this chapter, and in this book, from (repeatedly, mistakenly) describing Isolina as a novel? Suffice it to say that Isolina demonstrates a contemporary contamination of genres from which it derives its unforgettable narrative impact. An analysis of strategies of narrative reconstruction lead to the discovery of some of the novelistic techniques from which Isolina derives its power. The first question that comes to mind is: who is reconstructing? I referred earlier to Maraini as the one “piecing together, reconstructing, painstakingly and with great difficulty, a story, at the same time that she is slowly trying to piece together, trying to reconstruct, the life and body of Isolina, who has been so successfully, so deliberately forgotten as to defy the author’s best investigative efforts.” The critics Cannon and Diaconescu-Blumenfeld see in the “I” of the text Maraini the author. Instead, I believe that there are at least three roles in the narrative framework: the living author, the journalist, and the narrator, all of whom could be (named) “Maraini.” The journalist and narrator in Isolina work to become one with the author herself: this becomes apparent in the text’s efforts to elide the division between narrator and author, starting with the author’s acknowledgments at the beginning of the book of the people who took her to archives, for example. Yet Maraini as first-person narrator also functions as archivist, excavating newspaper articles on Isolina’s case. This overlap between author and first-person narrator serves to blur the line between the two. Coupled with extensive quoting from newspapers and from primary legal sources, such as the verdict and “interrogatori” (interrogations), this concerted elision between narrator, investigative journalist, and author serves to obfuscate the narrative strategies of this “libro-documento.” In addition, the narrator becomes, in her role as journalist, also a protagonist who investigates the “miscarriage of justice.” 13 This further elision becomes clear in the first-person narrator’s report of her discussions and encounters with Isolina’s descendants and town and military officials, as we will see later. Another collapse of boundaries occurs in the oft-noted identification that occurs between Isolina and the first-person narrator. In her role as investigative journalist, the narrator’s penetration into Isolina’s life touches her, redounds upon her, draws her into the threatening circle of violence against Isolina. The contemporary narrator-protagonist’s empathy with Isolina’s victimization grows until it penetrates the narrator’s psyche, her unconscious, her dreams. When the narrator-protagonist returns to her hotel, which is on the same street, vicolo Chiodo, in which Isolina’s murder probably occurred, she writes, “Casco addormentata in pochi minuti e faccio sogni angosciosi di fiumi in piena e di corpi di donna che galleggiano alla deriva” (I fall asleep in minutes and dream anguishing dreams of flooding rivers of bodies of women who float adrift). 14 The use of the plural, “corpi di donna”

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19

(bodies of women), points to the ongoing, present-day nature of similar threats to women’s safety. As Cannon notes, “Throughout the text the reader is reminded that the past continues to intrude upon the present; the unavenged murder and miscarriage of justice in the first year of the twentieth century relates to and informs our present moment.” 15 Yet we can unravel these successful but misleading elisions between author, journalist, narrator and protagonist by briefly considering the text’s use of time. 16 Time is a central theme and structuring device in Isolina, both as it relates to women’s history and to women’s memory. 17 If we employ a narratological perspective on time, we can gain a better sense of the “who” who is reconstructing. For example, the “I” in the second section who undertakes an examination of Verona, its monuments and its archives cannot be simultaneously writing the “racconto che si ispira al vero” at her desk. The act of walking cannot coincide with the act of writing (at least not in 1985 before smart phones and tablets!), thus the time of the first-person narrator’s investigations cannot be the same time as the author’s. So also, the investigation of archives cannot coincide with the time of the writing of the text. For another example, let us go back to the moment in which the past violence against Isolina overwhelms the journalist-narrator-protagonist’s current psyche and dreams, in which she dreams of flooding rivers with women’s bodies floating adrift. The narrator-protagonist cannot ultimately be sleeping and dreaming while writing; it is with this awareness that we can deconstruct the mechanism of elision to identify a narrator-protagonist-journalist-author inside the text that Maraini, living author, is writing. Maraini as author employs such narrative strategies, to paraphrase Maraini herself, “to recount the crime and to look at it in a literary light, to write it, so to speak, as ‘a narrator.’” Isolina thus offers a number of narrative acts of reconstruction, the most obvious ones being the historical reconstruction of the “gruesome crime,” 18 “a meticulous historical construction of a notorious murder case,” 19 and the attempt to reconstruct “an accurate portrait of the victim herself.” 20 In Diaconescu-Blumenfeld’s analysis, “the reconstruction of the facts” from newspaper documents occurs alongside the “deconstruction of the ideal of absolute objectivity.” 21 Beyond these notions of historical reconstruction, Isolina can be read as a gesture of recomposition, a recomposition of the dead body, like the gesture of Maraini’s Antigone. Maraini slowly reassembles the pieces of Isolina’s cut-up body—la donna tagliata a pezzi, as the 1985 subtitle reads—while assembling her tale of how it was cut up, and reconstructing the conditions that resulted in the butchering of Isolina’s body. She weaves all these elements and direct citations from newspapers, utilizing these reportages to expose the opinions and biases of family, witnesses, journalists, and newspapers, opinions that create a dubious profile of the murdered Isolina, opinions that form the basis for “the miscarriage of justice” and work on our

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imagination. As we will see, the compelling power of the tale derives as much from the retelling of the events, the crime, and the court case, as from the sustained tension throughout the text between vertical movements of emersion and immersion/submersion. Isolina derives its impact from narrative techniques and strategies. Accounts of how Isolina’s murdered body was discovered, put together again, how her body and case surfaced are juxtaposed against Isolina’s simultaneous “disappearing,” as Cannon puts it. 22 In synchronous movement, the process of narration becomes a process of recovery, while the narration of recovery is in constant tension with the narration of erasure. HONOR AND SHAME How does Maraini the author reconstruct an absence? The narration of reconstruction can be plotted along two axes. The first axis is that of honor and shame. Along this axis we can plot the relationship and public perceptions of Isolina and Trivulzio, her lover and would-be murderer or, at very least, accomplice-to-the-murder. Honor is a motif in Isolina, recalling Gabriel García Márquez’s Croníca de una muerte anunciada, published just four years before Isolina. Honor is also the primary catalyst in the actions and decisions of Trivulzio, man of the military. Honor and its opposite, shame, are involved in a strange interplay: honor, for Trivulzio and the military, has no relationship to honesty. In fact, shame and scandal blister beneath a diaphanous layer of honor until honor and shame ultimately reflect each other’s distorted image. It is shame that besmirches the memory of Isolina, the victim, and keeps Isolina out of history. In Veronian society and time’s allotment of honor and shame, honor falls entirely on the side of the remembered and well-loved Trivulzio and shame on the side of the willfully forgotten Isolina. But perhaps the historical outcome was clear from the beginning, in that gendered double standard that Maraini exploits for its network of ironies throughout the novel. The double standard manifests itself in the incongruence between the judicial, societal, and historical treatment of Trivulzio and Isolina, which exposes injustices at all levels. This uneven treatment of Trivulzio and Isolina is founded on their unequal social standing; physical or aesthetic appeal; economic, professional, and societal status; class; level of education and use of language; and the double standard in the moral judgment of behavior of the two sexes. These standards of measure render Isolina inferior to Trivulzio and conspire to shift the burden of shame—and blame—onto her. The text slowly reconstructs their unequal position in society, and shows how this contributes, on the one hand, to the paucity of information about Isolina and,

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on the other, to the abundance and ease of access of information on Trivulzio. The narrator’s investigation reveals that Verona at the turn of the twentieth century is a military town, dotted with theaters and restaurants at which the military elite can enjoy themselves with women of “poco conto” (little significance), while well-to-do young women are barricaded in villas and venture out only when accompanied by a host of relatives and chaperones as protectors. Isolina, one of these poor women, falls in love with the young officer, Carlo Trivulzio, a boarder in her family’s house. Trivulzio, although her lover, later demonstrates his contempt for her by referring to her as a “scorpione, vacchetta, scimmia” (scorpion, little cow, monkey). 23 In these brief descriptions, Isolina is reduced to the paltry sum of her physical features. In so far as they fall short of current ideals of beauty, her value as a woman and her appeal as a victim are greatly diminished. Documents reveal that when Isolina becomes pregnant, Trivulzio wants her at all costs to have an abortion, although abortion is at the time illegal. Under no circumstance, he insists, is she to have the child in Verona; at very worst, she can go to Milan to have it. But Isolina does not want to have an abortion, as she may naively have hoped, we are told, that having the child would induce Trivulzio to marry her. So, though Trivulzio pays for some abortion powders, Isolina only pretends to take them. In one of the text’s rich ironies, the “upstanding” official of the Italian military and representative of the government, Trivulzio, seeks to procure an abortion. He in whose hands rest the preservation and enforcement of the law is breaking the law. In another criticism of the society’s hypocrisy and lack of integrity, the documents reveal that Trivulzio’s attempt at procurement goes virtually unremarked during the official investigation. The narrator reconstructs the scene of Isolina’s murder, provoked by the unwanted pregnancy, unwanted, at least, by Trivulzio. Isolina and her friend, Emma Poli, are invited to have dinner with Trivulzio and some of his military friends in the private room of a famous restaurant-inn, Il Chiodo. (Later, in another web of ironies, Emma Poli, the only civilian witness, is poisoned in the hospital and her unobtrusive death goes virtually uninvestigated.) After a bit of drinking, one of the officers laughingly asks Isolina to lie on the table and abort. A fork is inserted inside her and she starts bleeding and screaming from the pain. Immediately gagged, she thrashes around until she finally lies mortally still. Worse, in order to dispose of the body, she is cut into pieces by an expert, according to all the reports, “chirurgo” (surgeon) or “macellaio”(butcher), and thrown into the river by a servant. 24 The tragedy of Isolina’s fate is compounded when she is figuratively cut into pieces once again, by the newspapers that set themselves on the trail of the scandal as detectives. These newspapers are divided in their loyalties. Some strongly support Trivulzio, and thus the honor and integrity of the

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military, and some, like Verona del Popolo, headed by the socialist Todeschini, support Isolina’s case and mistrust the military. The narrator notes that the case grows dangerously political, with the socialists on one side and the military on the other. Thus the treatment of Isolina as a woman and as an individual, as well as the broader “questione femminile,” is subsumed by the struggles within the male-dominated political system. While the gruesome image of Isolina’s cut-up body stays to the forefront of the reader’s mind, it seems to slowly, alarmingly, fade from the entire legal proceeding, which focuses instead on the issue of Trivulzio’s— and metonymically the military’s—honor. Shocking as it may be, no court case addressing Isolina’s brutal death ever took place. The initial case against Trivulzio is dismissed because of insufficient evidence, and eighty years later, the initial “Istruttoria” (preliminary investigation) is nowhere to be found. The case that Maraini as investigative journalist unearths in the archives is Trivulzio’s suit against Todeschini for libel: Todeschini had been trying to bring the case to court by provoking Trivulzio through Todeschini’s newspaper, Verona del Popolo, and had succeeded. “Cancellare dalla vita una vita non è facile” (Erasing a life from life is not easy), we read. 25 But that is exactly what many wished, and accomplished so successfully that it almost amounts to a conspiracy. Trivulzio wished to eliminate the trouble that Isolina represented from his professional and personal life, for the benefit of his own freedom and reputation and—by extension—the reputation of the military. Her life was expendable when/as measured against his career. His friends at the inn who wished to help him also tried to erase any evidence of her existence by cutting her body into fragments and disposing of the fragments. More than eighty years later, Maraini and her narrator-journalist try to recover Isolina’s presence within legal, social, municipal, and family histories that seem to willfully conspire to erase all traces of her existence. But records of the initial “interrogatori” (interrogations) could not be located. 26 At the cemetery, Isolina Canuti is not included in the lists of the dead for the year 1900. A trip to the Polizia Mortuaria indicates that Isolina’s name is once again missing in the lists for the year 1900; what appears is the entry of the recovery of an unidentified body—an identity-less body—“cadavere sconosciuto,” “circa anni 20. Sesso femminile” (unknown corpse. Circa 20 years old. Sex female). 27 Isolina has been erased from municipal history: “Di Isolina comunque non ci sono tracce. Per i registri comunali non è mai esisita. Forse è nata, ma non è mai morta” (Of Isolina in any event there are no traces. For the town registries she never existed. Maybe she was born, but she never died). 28 In fact, Isolina seems to have been deliberately erased from the registries. The next step in the narrator’s search entails a trip to meet a descendant, Viscardo Canuti, a nephew who is the son of one of Isolina’s brothers. The

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encounter, which like much of the book is written in the language of “reportage,” reads like an interview. In fact, Viscardo relates a little about a number of family members, present and past, but says he knows nothing of Isolina. The silence that surrounds her is once again willful, as is the intent, handed down through generations of Canuti, to erase her from the family history. Viscardo says, “So che è esistita ma in famiglia non se ne parlava mai. Mia madre mi diceva: se ti chiedono di lei dì che non la conosci” (I know she existed but in my family she was never talked about. My mother used to tell me: if they ask you about her, say you don’t know her). 29 Viscardo later admits that he knows that she was a vivacious girl who got pregnant, was forced to succumb to a botched abortion and then was cut up into pieces in the attempt to hide the crime. Her absence from the family history resounds with the irony that pervades the entire account as Viscardo Canuti pulls out a book on his family’s genealogy, tracing the Canuti family back to Bologna in 1283. By implication, the reader realizes that Isolina will never be added to that book. A source of scandal and shame, she is absent—she has been excluded—from the family oral and written tradition, and from the family tree. Leaving Viscardo, Maraini as narrator notes, “Non mi chiede nemmeno cosa scriverò” (He doesn’t even ask me what I’m going to write), and the irony deepens as we realize that Maraini has written Isolina’s story. 30 The next step in the “pellegrinaggio” (pilgrimage) is the convent where Isolina had been placed immediately after her mother died when she was less than ten years old. This too proves to be a dead end, but serves to further highlight the incriminating void of Isolina’s absence. In another denial of Isolina’s existence, the Mother Superior claims to know nothing about her, and the records of the final years of the 1800s, she claims, “sono introvabili, probabilmente sono andati distrutti” (can’t be located, probably they have been destroyed). 31 Time has also conspired against Isolina’s memory. Even the Canuti house and the restaurant Il Chiodo have been supplanted. Finally: “di Isolina non ci sono ritratti” (Of Isolina there are no portraits). 32 In direct and ironic contrast, the narrator has at her disposal a whole pack of photographs of Trivulzio, mostly in military regalia, through his lifetime. Ironically, she does not even need to search for these. They reach her through a friend of Trivulzio’s. The irony resurfaces in the mere relaying of simple facts: Trivulzio dies at the age of 73; that is, unlike Isolina, he lived far past his youth. The narrator also receives several prerecorded interviews of friends of Trivulzio, who talk about the way the trial changed his life and testify to Trivulzio’s character and integrity. One says that Trivulzio has suffered unjustly: “Era un uomo onesto, coraggioso, discreto” (He was an honest, courageous, discrete man). 33 “Da tutto questo” (From all this), Maraini as narrator comments ambiguously, “viene fuori che Carlo Trivulzio era un uomo ‘d’onore’” (it comes out

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that Carlo Trivulzio was a man of “honor”). 34 Evidence of this: Tenant Trivulzio “conduce una vita allegra” (leads a merry life) and had just the night before his arrest been to a masked ball with friends. By contrast, while Isolina’s actions do not differ greatly from her lover’s, she is judged by some newspapers to be of reprehensible customs: “‘Era una ragazza insofferente del freno paterno,’ che ‘tornava tardi a casa la sera,’ che ‘aveva amiche e amici con cui andava fuori a cena, a gozzovigliare’” (“She was a girl intolerant of her father’s control,” who “returned home late at night,” who “had male and female friends with whom she went out at night, to carouse”). 35 The negative connotations of the verb gozzovigliare, “carousing,” can be plotted on the opposite side of the axis of Trivulzio’s “vita allegra.” 36 The difference in their physical appeal also contributes to Trivulzio’s monopoly of honor and Isolina’s consignment to the imminently forgettable realm of shame. Trivulzio is “‘alto di statura, di carattere gioviale’” (“tall, of jovial character”), according to the newspapers. Isolina is, according to Trivulzio in her sister’s testimony, “’una gibbosa rachitica’” (“a rachitic hunchback”), and according to the newspapers: “‘ragazza poco piacente ma di facili costumi’” (“a girl not very attractive, but of easy virtue”). 37 Her physical characteristics become an instrument of blame against her. She is “‘gobba, bassa, bruttina’” (“hunched, short, rather ugly), according to neighbors. 38 In fact, her neighbors comment that she gave herself up “‘sfrenatamente ai piaceri e poco accudiva alle faccende domestiche’” (“recklessly to pleasures and spent little time on housework”), though her father worked all day and she should have been taking care of her three motherless brothers and sisters. 39 In addition, her family’s use of dialect during the investigation and court case also appears to weaken her case in contrast to the eloquence and educated speech of Trivulzio and his supporters. An indication of Trivulzio’s ability to manipulate language to defend himself against accusations is his letter to his colonel. 40 Also significant is the survival of Trivulzio in his writing, while of Isolina very little survives. EMERSION AND SUBMERSION This first axis of honor and shame intersects with the second axis: powerful, vertical images of emersion and submersion. Isolina’s body parts continue to resurface and be submerged in repeated images throughout the text, as a gruesome reminder of Isolina’s personal and historical fate, and as examples of a narrative (novelistic) technique that constructs erasure by resisting reconstruction. The gruesome images begin on the first page and accompany the reader throughout: in Verona, in January of the year 1900, two washer women

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working on the river Adige notice a package of meat ensnared in thorns. Convinced that it is poor-quality contraband meat, they unwrap the packages to discover several pieces of a female corpse, which in the text are enumerated and depersonalized in police-style reporting taken from the newspapers: “‘La parte destra del torace con l’intera mammella avvolta in un pezzo di tela scarlatta. La parte sinistra del torace con la mammella. [. . .] La parte inferiore del ventre. [. . .] Parte delle ossa del bacino scarnificate. [. . .] Una parte della gamba sinistra avvolta in un tovagliolo. Il femore scarnificato avvolto in una mutanda da donna con merletto in fondo.’” (“The right part of the chest with the entire breast wrapped in a piece of scarlet cloth. The left part of the chest with the breast. [. . .] The lower abdomen. [. . .] Part of the pelvic bones, skinless. [. . .] A part of the left leg wrapped in a napkin. The skinless femur wrapped in a woman’s underwear, with lace at the bottom.”) 41 The first bundle is pulled to shore, and all Verona searches the river for the head, but instead a miller finds a hip: “un’anca avvolta in un pezzo di gonna” (a hip wrapped in a piece of skirt). 42 Twelve months later, the skull, presumably Isolina’s, is found: “conserva un dente e pochi capelli” (it has a tooth and a few hairs). 43 About the head, we read, “E’ stato pescato presso Rondo d’Adige un teschio”(A skull was fished out near Rondo d’Adige). 44 Some children “giocando sul fiume ne avevano tirato fuori una testa di donna con due trecce castane attaccate alla cute e l’avrebbero ributtata nell’acqua inorriditi” (playing on the river had pulled out of it the head of a woman with two brown braids attached to the skin and had thrown it back in the water, horrified). 45 The image of the “testa sfigurata” (disfigured head) that had spent twelve months in the water before it was finally “ripescata,” fished out of the river, haunts the narrator’s imagination in her own investigations in part 2. The image of Isolina’s resurfacing head is repeated later in the narrator’s own journey around the River Adige, in a sort of petrifying Medusian image, of the disfigured face with brown braids and “le orbite vicine, la mascella piccola e ben formata. Dopo avere trascorso 12 mesi a mollo dentro l’acqua del fiume” (the eye sockets close to each other, the jaw small and well-formed. After having spent 12 months soaking in river water). 46 The tension between the submersion and emersion, the fishing out, parallels the narrator’s investigations to unearth information. In part 3, a lawyer who pleas on Isolina’s behalf talks about the “scoprimento del cadavere” (the discovery of the corpse). 47 Evidence rises to the surface. A newspaper editorial “cerca di far uscire Trivulzio allo scoperto” (tries to bring Trivulzio out in the open), 48 and later we read that the witnesses, “saltano fuori come funghi” (jump out like mushrooms). 49 Yet they do not appear willingly in court, but are rather “trascinati quasi a forza” (dragged almost by force). 50 In direct contrast to the motif of Isolina’s body parts rising to the surface are repeated images of submersion and obfuscation. The first “interrogatori” for example, were lost. In a newspaper article, Todeschini accuses Trivulzo

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of being “chiuso nel vostro ostinato silenzio” (closed in your obstinate silence). 51 But the majority of images of submersion refer to the “sacco” (sack) which contained Isolina’s dismembered body. These are repeated most insistently in chapter 9, in part 3, “Il processo Todeschini,” when a witness comes forward to testify having seen two individuals: “‘[V]idi il piccolo che portava un sacco farsi avanti. [. . .] I due [. . .] si avvicinarono alla ringhiera della rampa e gettarono il sacco. Udii il tonfo nell’acqua’” (I saw the smaller one who carried a sack come forward. [. . .] The two [. . .] approached the railing and threw the sack. I heard the thud in the water”). 52 The repetition in the next paragraph is taken from a newspaper report: “‘[L]’immersione dei sacchi nell’Adige avvenne per ordine del tenente’” (“The immersion of the sacks in the Adige occurred at the lieutenant’s orders). 53 The “sacchi” reappear in testimony just a few paragraphs later, then insistently at the end of the chapter in the attendant Sitara’s confidences to an Alpine soldier, “‘[S]ono stato mì assieme con un altro attendente a portare i sacchi in Adige per ordine dei paron. [. . .] [A]nzi ad un certo momento gh’o sentio del molo su le mani. [. . .] [G]ò visto della roba di carne. Di freta di freta ghavemo butato i sacchi all’Adige’” (“It was me with another attendant who brought the sacks to the Adige at the order from the heads. [. . .] [I]n fact at a certain moment I felt something soft on my hands. [. . .] I saw some flesh. Quickly we threw the sacks into the Adige”). 54 The image of the submerged “sacco” recurs at least three more times in this account: “due uomini la notte del 12 che trasportavano un sacco che poi gettarono in fiume” (two men the night of the 12th that transported a sack that they then threw in the river); “[I] sacchi li aveva gettati lui in Adige” (It was he who had thrown the sacks into the Adige); “[Sitara] buttò in Adige i sacchi” ([Sitara] threw the sacks in the Adige). 55 Eighty-five years later, these images dominate the narrator’s imagination as she walks through Verona, a Verona that has both suffered from, and contributed to, the razing of the evidence: the bridges were blown up during World War II and the Canuti house was torn down. In an echo of Calvino’s 1972 Le città invisibili, Verona appears to the narrator “come quelle città che intere splendono capovolte e riflesse nei vapori dell’orizzonte. [. . .] Immobilità magnifica. Che cancella ogni obbrobrio, ogni delitto in una eternità vetrosa” (like those cities that shine in their entirety, upside down and reflected in the vapors of the horizon. [. . .] Magnificent immobility. That erases every opprobrium, every crime in a glassy eternity). 56 The narrator then arrives at the spot “dove è stata ritrovata la testa di Isolina. Arrancando dietro la levità delle sue tracce, raccogliendo le pietruzze che ha seminato sul suo cammino verso il mondo dei morti” (where Isolina’s head was found. Hobbling after the lightness of her traces, picking up the pebbles that she dropped on her way to the world of the dead). 57 These images exemplify the oblivion against which the narrator is struggling.

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While standing on the parapet, the narrator describes how Trivulio’s attendant, Sitara, claimed he “gettò in Adige un sacco per ordine del suo tenente” (threw the sack into the Adige at his lieutenant’s orders). 58 On that quiet January night in 1900, the narrator recounts, “il Sitara si sarebbe affrettato a scaraventare giù dalla spalletta il sacco compremettente” (Sitara presumably rushed to hurl the compromising sack from the parapet). 59 Surrendering to a fantasy that collapses time by moving from the preterite to the present tense, the narrator reimagines the evidence, “Trattenendo il fiato si può ancora sentire il tonfo che fece il sacco cadendo in acqua nel silenzio della notte. Un attimo. E il fagotto viene inghiottito dai gorghi e trascinato via dalla corrente” (If you hold your breath you can still hear the thud that the sack made falling into the water in the silence of the night. A second. And the bundle is swallowed up by the vortices and dragged away by the current). 60 It takes only a second for Isolina’s remains to be swallowed up. But how much time and effort to fish her dismembered body out of the river, to identify her assassins, to reconstruct, eighty-five years later, a body, a life, and a life story, one the illiterate Isolina could not write in even small measure? The motif of the sacks hitting the surface of the water with a thud in the narrator’s imagination, and in Maraini’s text, reveals both the lasting impact and the contemporaneity of the conditions that permitted Isolina’s personal and historical fate. For the narrator, the culpability of Verona of the early 1900s still simmers beneath the city’s “immobile” façade; the blistering injustice had not found till now an Antigonean hand. The use of the present tense produces a collapse between the past of Isolina’s murder, the time of the narrator’s voice, the time of Maraini’s writing, and the time of our reading. All of this contributes both to the historical impact of Maraini’s “libro documento” and to the recognition of similar, continuing threats to women. In conclusion, to quote from Susanne Scarparo’s critical text, Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction: “[H]istory, as Walter Benjamin writes, ‘is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].’” 61 Maraini’s creation of a narrator-investigative journalist who becomes protagonist, pilgrim on a pellegrinaggio, reveals a strategy of novelistic techniques that paradoxically constitute Maraini’s refusal to reconstruct Isolina as a fiction for us. Why? To borrow Scarparo’s comment on Artemisia Gentilischi: “The story of [. . .] [Isolina] in the present [. . .] is a reality which one should not afford losing.” 62 For the image of Isolina la donna tagliata a pezzi is literal and symbolic, a paradigm of the repeated objectification of women that is rendered literal, as well as the brutal consequences of such objectification. A paradigm that collapses historical time to make history, and its threat, present. In these powerful words from a 1900 edition of the socialist newspaper, Verona del Popolo, we hear the echo of Maraini’s own appeal: “‘Donne veronesi, spose, madri, figlie, sorelle [. . .] sappiate non dimenticare,

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sappiate ricordare’” (Veronese women, brides, mothers, daughters, sisters [. . .] know not to forget, know to remember). 63 In conclusion, the young Isolina was reduced to the sum of her female body parts, first by her lover, then by her murderers, and finally by investigators, newspapers, citizens, and descendants, in a series of progressive steps toward the erasure of her body, her life, her life story. Like a “fagotto [. . .] inghiottito dai gorghi e trascinato via dalla corrente” (bundle [. . .] swallowed up by the vortices and dragged away by the current). Nonetheless, cancellare dalla vita una vita non è facile. In Isolina, Maraini reconstructs for her readers, in an Antigone-like gesture, the story of Isolina’s erasure. NOTES 1. Sanvitale, “Ten Questions,” 33. 2. Adalgisa Giorgio notes that “women writers, both new and established, have given enormous impulse to the resurgence and renewal of the historical novel in Italy. [. . .] Their novels share [. . .] the ideological and aesthetic post-modern tenet that the present must be understood through a process of continuous critical re-interpretation of the past and recontextualisation of the self. [. . .] [T]hese writers blend history and imagination to draw parallels with the present, bringing to light women’s forgotten contribution to official history, giving voice to lesser-known historical figures, delving into their own cultural and geographical roots and reflecting on the historical process itself” (“The Novel, 1965–2000,” 230). On this point, Giorgio also draws attention to the scholarly work of Lazzaro-Weis (1993) and others (237n9). For an interesting study on the intersections between biography, autobiography, history, fiction, and life writing, see Scarparo, Elusive Subjects. 3. Cannon, The Novel, 45. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 53–54. 6. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Feminist Historiography,” 178. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Cannon, The Novel, 115n1. In fact, Cannon’s own analysis of Isolina appears in Cannon’s book entitled The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, and Antonio Tabucchi. 9. Maraini, “Intervista a Dacia Maraini,” Interview by Simona Wright, 89. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Maraini, Ho sognato, 178. 13. Cannon, The Novel, 45. Cannon seems to hint at the complexity of the narrative voice in Isolina in her own study. She notes, “Maraini becomes a central character, a real-life detective” (The Novel, 45). Also, Cannon notes, “Maraini’s insistent and very personal ‘presence’ in her historical text is in direct contrast to the absence of the author in classical histories” (The Novel, 50). And later, “The presence of the author, which might at first lead to an impression of lack of objectivity, ultimately reminds the reader that history does not write itself, that all histories are ‘constructions’” (The Novel, 55). 14. Maraini, Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 63. 15. Cannon, The Novel, 45. The judgment and handling of Isolina, whose body was discarded and whose importance was refuted because she was judged to be promiscuous, uneducated, and lower class, is a contemporary issue, as scholars of Isolina do not fail to note. And crimes against women are still exonerated by invoking the victim’s morality, as if sexual activity or pleasure-seeking by women can be used to condone criminal violence against them. In her three decades as a writer, Maraini has devoted herself to the unique implications this phenomenon of perpetuating injustice has for women’s condition. Maraini has often under-

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scored the fact that in sexual crimes against women, the victim can easily become the accused, as a woman’s behavior and morality continue to be assessed as if they could somehow justify— more, invite—violence. In the pernicious and stubborn entrenchment of the ancient notion of woman as fount of temptation, especially sexual temptation, woman’s sexuality—or any remote evidence of it—can be judged to invite punishment, even the punishment of death and “squartamento” (quartering). The image of Isolina’s literally and figuratively dissected female body, casualty of sexual violence, is both timeless and contemporary, as it reaches across the decades in variations too numerous to ignore. 16. For these observations, I am again indebted to Mark Currie’s fascinating inquiry into the possible intersections between scientific, philosophical. and literary notions of time, which is entitled, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007). 17. Maraini’s reconstructions in Isolina attempt to guarantee the forgotten Isolina a space within memory and within history. It is noteworthy that for Maraini newspaper articles fulfill a special function in the recovery and transmission of women’s memory, a constant topos of her work. In 1987, just two years after Isolina was published, Maraini published La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, a collection of her own newspaper articles from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, and a collection of her journalism “dalla parte delle donne” (on the side of women). La bionda, la bruna e l’asino is also a way for Maraini to guarantee the survival and memory of her own work. The forty-nine articles in this collection are introduced by her important essay, “Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compaesane di sesso,” later revised for DiaconescuBlumenfeld and Testaferri’s 2000 The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini. Maraini in this introduction expresses the primary motivation for her collection: “E non mi interessa tanto un libro documento quanto un discorso che metta radici nel passato ma possa riconoscersi [. . .] nella realtà di oggi” (And what interests me is not so much a book document as a discussion that can grow roots in the past but that can be recognized [. . .] in the reality of today) (v). It is interesting that this collection of newspapers, which uses the same phrase, “libro documento,” that Maraini used to describe Isolina, appeared just two years after Isolina’s publication, underlining the ongoing link between newspapers and women’s memory in Maraini’s imagination, investigative endeavors, and publications. Surely the most ephemeral of writing, the most linked to its sociohistorical moment, the most contingent in literary value, the type of writing least likely to be memorialized. Yet, for Maraini, newspaper articles become a lasting, though not unproblematic, document of women’s sociohistorical specificity, their activism, and their daily tribulations. For more on this topic, see Gabriele, “Italian Women’s Journalism and Dacia Maraini.” 18. Cannon, The Novel, 45. 19. Ibid., 58. 20. Ibid., 48. 21. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Feminist Historiography,” 178. The newspaper documents are not, contrary to Diaconescu-Blumenfeld’s statement, “the only surviving documents” (179). 22. Cannon, The Novel, 49. Cannon refers to Bruce Merry’s characterization of Isolina as “a forceful study of the invisibilization of women in Italy” (Cannon, The Novel, 116). 23. Maraini, Isolina, 35. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Ibid., 63. 26. Ibid., 148. 27. Ibid., 65. 28. Ibid., 66. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Ibid., 72. 32. Ibid., 35. 33. Ibid., 91. 34. Ibid., 97. 35. Ibid., 19. 36. That the narrator is using Isolina’s story to comment on today is evident in chapter 3 of part 2, when, taking up the image of closure, the narrator visits the “collegio” (boarding school)

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where Isolina had stayed. Isolina had been “chiusa” (closed) in collegio delle Pericolanti, which, as we saw, had no information to unearth (71). In another collapse between time periods and roles, the narrator, rendering herself protagonist in this “pellegrinaggio” (71), comments that Isolina’s “collegio” is similar to the boarding school she attended in Florence and to other boarding schools, monasteries, and the like where women have been raised for centuries (73). The narrator then creates a direct contrast to these suffocating educational structures for women by going directly to the “Circolo Ufficiale,” a social club for the military, where the narrator notes luxurious surroundings, large oil paintings from the 1700s, an elaborate chandelier, a piano (74). She comments on the overwhelming sense that these officers know they belong to “una casta eletta” (an elected caste) in that club (74). These images form a direct contrast to the timid girls she espies in the “collegio,” under the nuns’ vigilant eyes. A few pages later the two gendered codes of conduct clash in the possibilities for entertainment permissible for honorable young men in the early 1900s but not for honorable young women. She observes how the other, “insignificant” girls were lured into the officers’ exciting social lives, yet below the officers’ fine manners and dress lurked a “brutalità” (brutality) (86). 37. Maraini, Isolina, 19. 38. Ibid., 35. 39. Ibid., 19. 40. See Maraini, Isolina, 23–24. 41. Ibid., 12. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid., 55. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 78. 47. Ibid., 189. 48. Ibid., 40. 49. Ibid., 149. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 50. 52. Ibid., 146. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 147-48. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 78. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 81. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 82. 61. Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, 155. 62. Ibid., 40. 63. Maraini, Isolina, 25.

Chapter Three

The Metaphor of Arrested Maternity and the Reconstruction of Maternal Desire From Donna in guerra to La nave per Kobe

Most of Dacia Maraini’s fictional mother figures suffer a fractured, obstructed, or truncated experience of maternity, including two figures we saw in the first two chapters, Armida and Isolina. In this chapter, I discuss Vannina’s unequivocal rejection of forced pregnancy and motherhood in Donna in guerra (1975); Armida’s desired but unsuccessful pregnancy in Il treno per Helsinki (1984); Isolina’s forced and fatal abortion (1985); and the pregnant nun, suor Attanasia, from the 1999 collection of short stories, Buio, whose pregnancy ironically does reach term. With these texts, Maraini offers a deconstruction of motherhood in contemporary Italian society. In her 2001 La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre, as we will see, Maraini instead reconstructs maternal desire through an autobiographical lens. THE METAPHOR OF ARRESTED MATERNITY The critic Judith Bryce, in reviewing the negative portrayal of mothers in Voci (1994), aptly summarizes the figure of the mother in Maraini’s work as “problematic.” 1 Even a quick perusal of Maraini’s writing over the decades uncovers a host of indifferent, dominating, or dominated mothers, such as those already present, for example, in the early stories of Mio marito (1968). From this collection, we need only think of the indifferent Elda in “L’altra famiglia” or Aldo’s dominating mother in “Madre e figlio.” Figures of domi31

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nated mothers are even more plentiful. Consider, for example, the Client’s over-indulgent and abused mother in Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (1973); the devoured Basilia in Lettere a Marina (1981); the selfsacrificing mother, Marta, of Dolce per sé (1997); and the selfless Manina in La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría (1990). It can be argued, with Pauline Dagnino, that at the core of Maraini’s creation of such negative, devouring, conformist or victimized mothers is a critique of “institutionalized mothering” as defined by Adrienne Rich, which protects and perpetuates the status quo of patriarchal family rule. However, to this “bad mothering,” as Dagnino puts it, we can also add such neglectful mothering as demonstrated by Gramofono’s too-young mother in the opening story of Buio (1999). 2 Scholars to date have identified few positive configurations of mothering in Maraini’s work. 3 One of the most frequently-noted positive aspects of motherhood for Maraini is the importance of the body of the mother in writing. As Diaconescu-Blumenfeld observes: “Maraini quotes [. . .] [Roland Barthes’s] well-known idea of writing as ‘playing with the body of the mother.’” 4 Other critics, such as Dagnino, Virginia Picchietti and Sylvia Setzkorn underscore the positive symbolic mothering that occurs in the process of “affidamento” (entrustment). Yet one might consider that the many relationships of “affidamento,” which scholars have convincingly identified in Maraini’s work, serve as damning evidence of the difficulty or downright failure of biological mothers, since “affidamento” functions as a superior alternative, a positive substitute for the mothering that is rooted in blood-ties and fraught with pitfalls. Judith Bryce sees this problematic representation of motherhood as incongruent with “Maraini’s long-lasting and intense feminist commitment.” However, perhaps Maraini gives her readers such a range of configurations of mothering not “in spite” of her feminist commitment, as Bryce states, but because of it. 5 Too often, societies have touted a unidimensional view of motherhood, consonant with their sociopolitical period. On the other hand, perhaps “problematic” figures of mothers in Maraini’s writing (a writing shaped by her acute sensitivity to, and cutting portrayals of, her changing times) reflect the ambivalence of many contemporary Italian women themselves toward motherhood. Perhaps the strongest evidence of such ambivalence is the fact that Italy, a Catholic country in which the cult of the Madonna has long fueled the cult of motherhood, continues to have what some consider a problematically low birth rate. 6 This is at least in part due to complex and contradictory sociocultural attitudes and to the political and religious policies that have attempted to regulate motherhood in the twentieth century, as some articles in the excellent collection Storia della maternità edited by Marina D’Amelia, testify. For example, ideals of maternal behavior, based on the religious, social and political intersections of the notion of self-sacrifice, have contributed at once to the glorification of the mother in

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Italian culture and to the sometimes painful refusal and condemnation of motherhood on the part of women who seek some measure of autonomy. If, for example, fascist demographic policy through incentives and celibacy taxes prescribed and glorified the institution of wedded motherhood, by the 1960s, just a few decades later: “La madre era tutto ciò che non si voleva diventare nella vita” (A mother was everything one didn’t want to become in life). 7 The contradictions have not proved to be less pronounced in Italian feminist history. For first-wave feminists at the turn of the twentieth century, maternity was to be valued “come virtù civile e come nuovo modello di cittadinanza per le donne” (as a civil virtue and as a new model for citizenship for women), 8 as well as the foundation for a new society. 9 In contrast, many second-wave feminists of the 1970s viewed motherhood as incompatible with the feminist collective project. 10 It is this conviction of incompatibility that powers Vannina’s decision to abort in Maraini’s classic Donna in guerra (1975). It is worth noting, with Susan Rubin Suleiman, that “as the fairy tales about wicked stepmothers and fairy godmothers tell us, the impulse to split the maternal figure into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ personae is very old indeed.” 11 Criticisms of mothering, and judgments of “bad mothering,” often arise from social expectations for the child, or from the perspective and expectations of the child—within a feminist framework, the daughter. 12 Thus the mother is measured unfavorably against her inability to fulfill the daughter’s expectations or needs. The negative assessment leveled against the mother rises out of the daughter’s sense of entitlement, whether the daughter is a literary character or the author writing from the perspective of the daughter. Except for Virginia Picchietti, few critics of Maraini articulate a distinction between the respective views of the mother and the daughter regarding the mother’s responsibilities and failings. My study addresses mothering from the perspective of the mother, a perspective that allows a more compassionate assessment of maternal shortcomings alongside an understanding of the obstacles the mother faces. In fact, perhaps the literary paradigm that best expresses the difficulty of—or better, the poor conditions for—positive mothering in Maraini’s fiction is the motif of arrested maternity, often manifested as a pregnancy that does not reach term. In the first part of this chapter, I will briefly examine three examples of arrested maternity that reflect the persistent difficulty of mothering within a narrative framework that journeys toward a positive reevaluation of motherhood in Maraini. As I said, I will focus on Vannina’s unequivocal rejection of forced pregnancy and motherhood in Donna in guerra (1975); Armida’s desired but unsuccessful pregnancy in Il treno per Helsinki (1984); and in 1985, Isolina’s forced and fatal abortion. I will then address the story of the pregnant nun, suor Attanasia, in Buio, whose pregnancy ironically does reach term.

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Maraini’s three novels trace the evolution in contemporary Italian women’s thought from a rejection of the role of the mother during the feminist movement of the 1970s to the eventual recuperation of motherhood and the maternal body. In the 1970s, as Scattigno has noted, the devaluation of the maternal role, caused by complex factors, made motherhood for oneself an unpalatable choice. The women of the 1970s, she writes, viewed maternity as the moment of highest “‘risk’”: “possibile inizio di una temibile regressione, da un percorso di autonomia e di costruzione di sé nel tessuto delle relazioni sociali, alla figura domestica della casalinga, della ‘madre innanzitutto,’ perduta nell’etica del sacrificio e della rinuncia, complice della propria oppressione e a sua volta oppressive” (possible beginning of a fearful regression, from a trajectory of autonomy and construction of self in the fabric of social relations, to the domestic figure of the housewife, of the “mother first and foremost,” lost in the ethics of sacrifice and renunciation, complicit in her own oppression and oppressive in turn). 13 Silvia Montefoschi, in an article published in 1978, offers an exhortation against the maternal role. In tracing the Jungian road to individual autonomy through a break with the mother and father figures, she identifies the maternal role as a block to self-sufficiency, because the mother traditionally functions as “an overly indulgent satisfier of needs.” 14 She writes regarding women: “We conclude that the only road out of these dependent relationships and symbiotic chains is the one where the sacrifice of the mother in her is constantly repeated. Only by liberating herself from the grip of the maternal sentiment can she reclaim a life that would [. . .] lead to her creative liberty of expression.” 15 This ultimately unsustainable rejection of the maternal role (whether for oneself or for others) has slowly given way in Italy to feminist psychoanalytic and philosophical theory that seeks to reevaluate the figure of the mother and to reappropriate the maternal body. This development has allowed some women, like Anna Maria Mori, to admit that they looked upon the 1970s feminist rejection of motherhood as “miope, assurdo, e [. . .] autolesionistico” (myopic, absurd, and [. . .] self-hurting). 16 Mori’s project of recovery of maternity, which involves in part a series of interviews of famous women about their mothers, is inspired by the work of Luisa Muraro, whom Mori quotes in her epigraph. The now famous sociopolitical project of recovery of the mother, synthesized in Muraro’s famous theory of “l’ordine simbolico della madre” (symbolic order of the mother), promotes the idea that a daughter’s psychological, sexual, and linguistic development does not necessitate the rejection of the mother—as Freud and others posited for psychosexual development—but rather requires identification with the mother. “L’ordine simbolico,” based, as many have noted, on Irigaray’s theories and grown out of the work of feminist collectives such as Diotima in Verona, is a complex site for the elaboration of a female imaginary, and for authority and values based on the symbolic recovery of the biological mother. Muraro writes in a

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more recent article about the “necessary recognition of the woman who brought us into the world” (original italics). 17 In fact, unlike Montefoschi who rejects dependency, Muraro would like to build a politics of relations on the language of love and dependency based on the model of infancy. 18 “L’ordine simbolico della madre” encompasses a number of “maternal” recoveries, from psychoanalytic recovery of the biological mother as the site of symbolic meaning, to the personal reevaluation of one’s own mother, to the promotion of “affidamento” (entrustment) and the construction of feminist genealogies. 19 But the theory itself of “l’ordine simbolico della madre” has met with some criticism. For example, Lucia Re notes Teresa de Lauretis’s reservations regarding the theory. De Lauretis sees the regressive danger that lies in the overlap of literal and symbolic maternity. For de Lauretis, Muraro’s book “regressively collapses the symbolic mother back onto the real mother who thus becomes, in lieu of the father, the sole structural agent of linguistic and symbolic mediation in the ‘maternal continuum’ (54) that defines women’s culture.” 20 The tension between the real and the symbolic mother does raise the specter of essentialized motherhood and biology as destiny, threatening once again to turn motherhood into an imperative. For Re, it also gives rise to the conflict between a woman’s individual autonomy and maternal authority. Having very briefly outlined this rich and ongoing feminist debate, we do not here intend to tread further into the minefield between biological mothering and the symbolic mothering found, for example, in feminist genealogies and “affidamento.” However, we will note that the theory of a symbolic order of the mother has allowed a recovery of the maternal body, but once again, mostly in its importance to the infant, the child, or better, the daughter. 21 Dacia Maraini brings to this general Italian sociocultural context and feminist discourse several unique contributions, both autobiographical and philosophical, from the perspective of the mother. In her 1996 meditation on abortion and maternity, Un clandestino a bordo, Dacia Maraini demonstrates her conviction that the political, religious and sociocultural conditions for a successful maternity are contaminated by the manipulation of a woman’s reproductive system and the dehumanizing of her (maternal) body. 22 Maraini suggests that in the passage from an ancient maternal world to a paternal world order, maternal procreative powers were devalued so that, to the present day, the maternal function is reduced to being a mere “vaso,” a vessel for a man’s seed: “La madre quindi non è più all’origine della vita, ma è solo un contenitore di vita altrui. [. . .] La madre non farà che custodire e nutrire il figlio per conto terzi, fino alla nascita” (The mother is no longer at the origin of life, but is only a container for others’ lives. [. . .] The mother will only look after and nourish the child on others’ behalf, until birth). 23 Maraini observes that, in this paternal world order, legislators consider the regulation

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of human reproduction their prerogative: “Le Chiese, gli Stati, i poteri costituiti hanno sempre reclamato a sé la regolamentazione del corpo sessuato: come e quando accoppiarsi, come e quando figliare. Il controllo della riproduzione è la più antica preoccupazione di ogni legislatore” (Churches, States, powers have always claimed for themselves the regulation of the sexed body: how and when to couple, how and when to give birth. The control of reproduction is the most ancient concern of every legislator). 24 Maraini also addresses the “birth” control that is in women’s hands. She locates the responsibility for women’s inadequate use of preventive birth control, and their eventual and too frequent recourse to abortion in the male figures of authority that have taken upon themselves the education of women about women, including their religious, scientific, medical, and moral education. Using surreal and cinematic images to underscore the diffusion and deleterious impact of a self-serving patriarchal education, Maraini writes: Qui entriamo nella dolorosa questione dei rapporti che le donne hanno sempre intrattenuto con chi si è inventato controllore e guida del loro corpo, delle loro teste. Ho visto, nel mio dormiveglia, una sfilata in puro stile felliniano, di uomini di Chiesa dal passo elegante con mitrie d’oro [. . .] anelli luccicanti alle dita, intenti a impartire lezioni di comportamento alle ragazze nelle chiese, nelle scuole. Ho visto uomini di scienza vestiti di nero, gli occhi lucenti di certezze, intenti a spiegare cosa sia una donna rispetto alla scienza e alla natura; ho visto medici dal naso lungo, le mani bianche e ossute pronte a frugare dentro corpi vivi di donna come fossero cadaveri da dissezionare; ho visto gentiluomini [. . .] intenti a insegnare la morale [. . .]; ho visto professori dalle teste chine sui libri in cui si scriveva la storia delle donne; ho visto amorosi padri di famiglia intenti a stabilire cosa fosse bene e cosa male per le loro figlie bambine. 25 Here we enter into the painful question of the relationship that women have always had with the self-appointed controller and guide of their body, of their minds. I saw, in semi-sleep, a parade in pure Fellini fashion, of Church men with elegant step and miters of gold [. . .], rings shimmering on their fingers, intent on imparting lessons on behavior to girls in the churches, in the schools. I saw men of science dressed in black, their eyes shining with certainties, intent on explaining what a woman is with respect to science and nature; I saw doctors with long noses, white, bony hands ready to rummage in the living bodies of women as if they were corpses to dissect; I saw gentlemen [. . .] intent on teaching morality [. . .] ; I saw professors with heads bent over books writing the history of women; I saw loving fathers intent on establishing what was good and what bad for their young daughters.

For Maraini, the first, though not sole, condition for a successful maternal experience, is that a woman must desire maternity; the desired pregnancy is marked by a sacred intimacy between a woman and the child in her womb. The men listed above, as synecdoches of structures of power and “knowl-

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edge,” interfere in women’s (pro)creative processes in the widest sense and undermine a woman’s “autodeterminazione” (self-determination) over her sexuality and her reproductive powers. In Maraini, interference from “chi si è inventato controllore” (the self-appointed controller) often renders maternity—even a desired maternity—a painfully incomplete experience, usually arrested by “l’aborto” (abortion or miscarriage). 26 The subtitle of Un clandestino a bordo is, in fact, Le donne: La maternità negata il corpo sognato. The leitmotif of incomplete maternity also has a strongly autobiographical component: it is Maraini’s retelling of the traumatic loss of her own child in the womb in the early years of her marriage in the early 1960s, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. In Viaggiando con passo di volpe, Maraini speaks reminiscently of “covando in pancia un bambino che aveva in effetti gli occhi celesti. Me l’ha confermato il medico che l’ha tirato fuori, morto, dal mio corpo” (harboring a child that in effect had blue eyes. The doctor who pulled him out, dead, from my body, confirmed it). 27 Because of her own experience of pregnancy, Maraini links l’aborto (as both miscarriage and abortion) and maternity like “gemelli siamesi” (Siamese twins): “sarà perché per me l’aborto è stato soprattutto un esproprio, qualcosa di non voluto e non aspettato che ha spezzato in me una attesa felice, che non si è mai conclusa con un incontro” (perhaps because for me the miscarriage was an expropriation, something unwanted and unexpected that interrupted in me a happy waiting that never ended in an encounter). 28 Maraini reworks this traumatic autobiographical experience to explore the difficulties of, and interferences in, a successful maternity in contemporary Italian society. In Donna in guerra, Maraini depicts several factors that impede successful maternity. First, Vannina does not want a child. We can interpret this lack of desire as a product of her times; she cannot desire maternity, for she lives the ideological incompatibility of motherhood and personal autonomy as understood by the feminist collective project of the 1970s. In fact, Vannina’s husband attempts to impose motherhood on Vannina as a means to curtail her development as an autonomous individual. Pickering-Iazzi rightly notes that the novel begins with menstrual blood, signaling Vannina’s (and initially Giacinto’s) preferred state of childlessness. 29 But as Vannina becomes less accommodating to her husband’s wishes, Giacinto seeks to reinscribe his rebellious wife within a naturalized framework—and to return her to the traditional and therefore inequitable division of labor in their marriage—by making her pregnant. To this effect, he rapes her one night when she is asleep and not wearing her diaphragm. In this case of marital rape, the warlike atmosphere of the novel is finally waged on the territory of Vannina’s body, which is used against her own desires. Giacinto here represents the forces of compulsory heterosexuality as defined by Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig. 30 Vannina’s only way to reject the violence of those forces is to submit to an illegal abortion, which is depicted by Maraini as a further violence to her,

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and recalls “le mani bianche e ossute pronte a frugare dentro corpi vivi di donna come fossero cadaveri da dissezionare” (white, bony hands ready to rummage in the living bodies of women as if they were cadavers to dissect). Thus Giacinto first, then the legislators and doctors, interfere in Vannina’s “autodeterminazione” over her body to result in an unwanted and traumatically arrested maternity. Armida’s experience of maternity as forced bed rest and stillbirth in Il treno per Helsinki (1984) offers the most autobiographical experience of arrested maternity in Maraini’s work. This pregnancy, although unplanned, is desired and therefore brings us closer to a positive reevaluation of motherhood. Armida, like Maraini, has a difficult pregnancy and starts hemorrhaging. At this point, her husband’s family and the medical industry aggressively intervene to halt the natural course of events. For her husband, mother-inlaw, and doctors, Armida becomes a vessel for the child, as her physical and psychological health take second place to the baby’s survival. Armida tells us, for example, “Non sanno più dove infilare gli aghi per le trasfusioni a volte me li cacciano nelle caviglie a volte ai polsi a volte nel collo. La ricerca della vena che regge dura delle mezz’ore” (They don’t know where to insert the needle for the transfusions sometimes they put it in my ankles sometimes in my wrists sometimes in my neck. The search for a vein that holds up lasts for half-hours). 31 This novel foreshadows the medical industry’s attempt to appropriate the living fetus. Yet despite this interference, Armida tells us that there is “una intesa” (an understanding) between her and her son that they will always be together. 32 In fact, when the baby dies in utero, Armida almost dies from that “patto d’amore” (pact of love) because she and the baby will not be separated. 33 The doctors cannot get the dead baby boy with the blue eyes out of her, until with the anesthesia “i muscoli si allentano lasciando che il figlio venga rapito da mani professionali che senza neanche una carezza lo gettano nel secchio della spazzatura” (the muscles loosen allowing the son to be ripped away by professional hands that throw him in the garbage can without even a caress). 34 The carelessness with which the child’s dead body is handled further underlines the insensitivity to the mother and the cold-bloodedness of the medical industry. This traumatic and painfully arrested experience of maternity functions to demonstrate medical, familial, and matrimonial interferences in the natural course of the pregnancy and in Armida’s intimacy with her baby. The poor intrauterine conditions for Armida’s desired but unplanned baby symbolize the inadequate sociocultural conditions for mothering and for the child’s birth. Like Maraini, Armida will leave her husband and decide against a second pregnancy. From a rejected pregnancy and a still birth, we move to the irony of a forced abortion. As we saw, Isolina is forced to abort to preserve the honor of

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her lover, the respectable military officer Trivulzio, and the honor of the military as a whole. When Isolina decides not to follow her lover’s recommendation to abort, she is forced to abort by means of a fork inserted into her uterus. She then dies from this botched abortion and her body, reduced again to a piece of damning evidence, is cut into pieces and thrown in the river, as we have seen. Her lower-class and sociocultural status, evident for example in her untutored language, work against Isolina, especially in relation to Trivulzio’s high social position, finesse, and ability to negotiate his society. Thus socioeconomic disadvantage and the old sexual double standard conspire to determine the negative historical and political fate of Isolina. She is represented by newspapers, lawyers, and family members as unrefined and pleasure loving, while Trivulzio’s transgressions, including his pleasure seeking, his affair with her, and his recommendation for her to abort, are sanctioned. Isolina’s maternity—a desired maternity—is truncated by and for the military, and politicized by newspapers, lawyers, her family, and the greater community. In essence, her human worth is subsumed in her pregnancy, and both are brutally and simultaneously truncated. Like Isolina, the story of the pregnant suor Attanasia, from Maraini’s collection of short stories, Buio, which won the 1999 Premio Strega, explores the politicization of a controversial pregnancy out-of-wedlock. In particular, it explores the interference in, and politicization of, the maternal function and the female body by the “hostile” religious “mondo dei padri” (to coin Sumeli Weinberg’s term, the world of the fathers), a patriarchal religious order that functions as a negative counterpoint to a nurturing maternal religious order. Structured around the growing threats to the nun’s pregnancy, the short story offers perhaps the ultimate metaphor for arrested maternity. It also offers the ultimate irony, since the threats come from the very source that in Italy most strongly glorifies maternity: the Catholic Church. Thus Maraini demonstrates that, as in Isolina’s case, regulatory patriarchal institutions that have the power to make the rules also retain the prerogative to break them, surreptitiously and as needed. Suor Attanasia, protagonist of “Le galline di suor Attanasia,” lives in a convent of nuns at the border of the “pericolosa Algeria” (dangerous Algeria) where suor Attanasia has been a victim of religious fundamentalist hatred. Attacked by fundamentalists, raped and left for dead, suor Attanasia is now pregnant with her attacker’s child and at the center of a tug-of-war between her compassionate and supportive convent sisters and the unrelenting and rigid dogma of a hypocritical Catholic hierarchy. Because her superiors consider her pregnancy and her vocation to be incompatible, she is repeatedly asked to give up either motherhood or the veil. The short story opens with the tensions around which the entire story is structured: the defamiliarizing and problematic image of the pregnant nun,

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involved in sweet dialogue with her unborn baby, is followed by the dissonant, anti-Catholic recommendation of the troubled “Mother” Superior to abort, since a pregnant nun is “inammissibile” (inadmissible). 35 It is as if suor Attanasia’s vocation cancels out her body. Yet ironically, in religious and general warfare, as we regrettably continue to observe in contemporary times, any woman is first and foremost—reduced to—her (rapeable) body. Suor Attanasia’s maternity defies the Church rules that would regulate, desex, and hide her body, and renders it visible again: “quella povera pancia ormai talmente visibile che perfino le ampie gonne castigate dell’ordine non riescono a nascondere” (that poor belly now so visible that even the large modest skirts of the order can’t hide it). 36 The figure of suor Attanasia can be analyzed within a hagiographic framework, in which her saintliness functions to expose the corruption of her religious superiors. Unlike Maraini’s transgressive suor Juana (from the eponymous play of 1979), one of the novelties of suor Attanasia in the spectrum of Maraini’s protagonists is that she is an entirely non-transgressive protagonist, caught unwillingly in a transgressive pregnancy. Vannina, Armida, and Isolina, who violate the codes of chastity and conjugal fidelity, are transgressive figures, but suor Attanasia plays by the rules. Both in the conception and in the progress of her pregnancy, suor Attanasia surrenders without rebellion to her fate, and to God’s will as determined by higher authorities in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. She adheres to her vow of obedience. Her fate depends on the outcome of the struggle between the convent sisters who are her advocates, a confused Mother Superior, and the bishop to whom the Mother Superior appeals. Molding the nun in the religious tradition of St. Francis and the Madonna, Maraini offers in suor Attanasia another definition of religion—a personal, unifying, intimate religiosity that pits itself against institutionalized religion, against a religious order of the father. The resemblances to Saint Francis are implicit: her decision to be vegetarian and her references not to eat “sister” goat; her songs, conversations, and special rapport with the convent rooster and the hens, which in that war-torn area only lay eggs for her. Also, suor Attanasia directs her prayers not to God, but to the Madonna, drawing the parallel between her own unwed and innocent pregnancy and that of the Madonna. The creation of the non-transgressive, quintessentially religious suor Attanasia appears very unlike Maraini. Free of the author’s habitual irony, she in fact embodies some real virtues within Maraini’s world. For example, her vegetarianism is a virtue that Maraini herself embraces. 37 Unlike Maraini’s mystical, passionate and suicidal Caterina (from the play, I digiuni di Caterina da Siena, 1999), suor Attanasia leads a well-balanced life, in which her intellectual, spiritual, and physical sides are all active and in harmony: she works on the computerized convent archives; she balances the convent bud-

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get; she cooks like a dream; she works in the garden. Her pregnancy blends smoothly into this serene and nurturing existence. She balances activity and service to others with meditations on her memories of her rape and the slaughter of several convent sisters, and meditations on the nature of religious wars. The functions of suor Attanasia’s non-transgressive and loving nature are manifold. First, like the other unequivocally innocent victims in Buio, namely the children, which we will explore in the next chapter, suor Attanasia’s uncontaminated innocence serves to absolve her from any taint or blame for her fate, in its entirety, from the rape to her traumatic experience of arrested maternity. She is almost like a canvas inscribed by the politics of (hypocritical) religious dogmas. Second, her nurturing nature is in essence summed up in her maternity, for suor Attanasia is a bringer of life, a vehicle of growth and love, not simply Madonna-like in her serenity, but also an earth mother who will later be depicted breastfeeding her new daughter. As such, she represents the badly sheltered maternal world order, the order of the mother, which is under repeated threat by religious politics and zeal. Finally, suor Attanasia also represents a crossroads, an intersection where conflict occurs, a locus of reconciliation for incompatible worlds: in her meet the uneasy anachronism of religion and technology, Catholic dogma and a form of Islamic fundamentalism. Her pregnancy is the transformation of hatred into love and reconciliation, a love incarnate. She shares with Father Donato, the only male protagonist who does not pose a threat to the fragile shelter of the convent, her qualms about loving a child who is the product of a rape: “E’ peccato amare una creatura nata dalla violenza e dall’odio?” (Is it a sin to love a child born out of violence and hate?). 38 Despite the violent conception, suor Attanasia is enamored of the child in her womb; hers is very much a desired maternity. “L’amore non è mai peccato” (Love is never a sin), Padre Donato reassures her. 39 Enveloped in a secrecy that grows with the pregnancy, Attanasia fosters her growing bond with her baby. Through the womb-like image of concentric circles, Maraini succeeds in creating an intimacy protected by a series of concentric walls: the baby is protected by the walls of the womb of suor Attanasia who is sheltered, in turn, by the convent and the walls of protection the supportive nuns form around the pregnant nun: “Le sorelle della Carità in Cristo si sono chiuse a riccio per proteggere la piccola Attanasia e il suo segreto. Nessuno entra od esce dal convento senza che lo sappia suor Orsola, la madre superiora. E ogni volta molte porte vengono sprangate, altre tenute aperte giusto il tempo necessario. Ci sono delle zone del convento a cui nessuno ha accesso, salvo le sorelle più fidate” (The sisters of Charity in Christ close up to protect the small Attanasia and her secret. Nobody enters or leaves the convent without the knowledge of suor Orsola, the Mother Superior. And each time many doors are bolted, others kept open just the

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necessary time. There are areas of the convent that no one has access to, except the most trusted sisters). 40 Unfortunately, the layers of protection that preserve the secret pregnancy, a pregnancy in which the hatred passing through Attanasia’s (like Christ’s) body becomes love, are predictably insufficient. Suor Attanasia plays by all the rules. Yet despite her saintliness and her innocence, she is nonetheless caught in the inevitable double bind, in a dilemma that pits her body against her heart and her way of life. The first threat comes when the Bishop recommends that Attanasia be sent home—a home she doesn’t have—so that she can decide what to do with “gli effetti davvero indesiderabili di quella violenza” (the truly undesirable effects of that violence). 41 When the sisters decide to defy this command, Attanasia is wrapped in “un segreto ancora più completo” (an even more complete secret). 42 The coup de grace, as senseless as it is hypocritical, finally occurs after Maria Concepita Innocente, the baby, is born. The baby is nursing and visited every moment by the sisters who continue the St. Francis motif. The nuns echo “Il cantico di Frate Sole” as they praise the child’s beauty, “lodando le guance rotonde, i piedini gonfi” (praising the round cheeks, the puffy little feet). 43 The Bishop’s order, which neither the nuns nor, characteristically, suor Attanasia dares to defy, dictates that the child be sent to an orphanage in Rome. In order to retain her way of life, suor Attanasia must give up her child. All the sisters’ attempts to raise the baby in their community of women are obviated by “due energumeni vestiti di bianco [che] vengono a prendere la bambina che, tutta infagottata com’è, viene caricata su un fuoristrada inzaccherato di fango con una croce bianca dipinta sul fianco” (two brutes dressed in white [who] come to take the baby girl that—just as she is, all bundled up—is loaded onto a mud-splashed all-terrain vehicle with a white cross painted on the side). 44 The horrifying and heartrending image of the newborn baby, helpless and vulnerable, literally ripped from her mother’s breast and a loving but penetrable womb-like environment by these two men leaves the reader wondering how they will take care of her, what they know about taking care of her, and what will happen to her in the orphanage. Thus the tiny little girl passes from “l’ordine simbolico della madre” to the hostile world of the father. But perhaps neither suor Attanasia nor her baby have ever been rooted in the symbolic order of the mother, since the convent structure is subsumed, as the story often reminds us, in the superstructure of the religious order of the father. Already in 1986, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum underlined Maraini’s “continuing concern about the role of the catholic church and women,” a concern that reaches into her most recent literature, for example, in her recent 2013 novel, Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza. 45 Birnbaum writes, “Maraini stresses that a woman in traditional catholic culture could find autonomy only by choosing the religious life. But autonomy within the

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church, in Maraini’s view, is double-edged: autonomy in a religious order is premised on accepting subordination to the Church.” 46 In the end, suor Attanasia’s heart, locked in her maternity, dies; her body is found lifeless on a rock in the henhouse—this death her only rebellion, a rebellion that consumes the woman who enacts it. Emblematic of Maraini’s narrative journey toward a positive reevaluation of the maternal role, suor Attanasia also simultaneously offers the ultimate metaphor of arrested maternity. The end of suor Attanasia’s singing, in the final lines, is mourned in the “amaro e squillante canto di dolore [del gallo]” (shrill, bitter song of pain [of the rooster]). 47 A desired maternity. A prohibited maternity. One and the same. At the end of the introduction to her collection of poetry, Viaggiando con passo di volpe, Maraini writes, “Da bambina, a Sapporo, una piccola donna [. . .] mi raccontava di volpi bianche, gentili e trepide che venivano fuori nelle notti di luna per andare a sedersi sull’orlo dei pozzi. Nelle favole giapponesi la volpe non è altro che una donna che ha subito incantamento, che è stata trasformata in animale per un suo proibito innamoramento o per una sua proibita maternità” (As a child, in Sapporo, a small woman [. . .] told me stories of white foxes, kind and anxious, that came out during moon-lit nights to go sit at the edge of wells. In Japanese fables the fox is none other than a woman who has undergone an enchantment, who has been transformed into an animal because of a forbidden love or a forbidden maternity). 48 “Un proibito innamoramento o una proibita maternità,” which, in the wrenching case of suor Attanasia, are one and the same. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MATERNAL DESIRE: LA NAVE PER KOBE La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), published just two years after suor Attanasia’s story appeared in Buio, offers Maraini’s most concerted effort to date to reevaluate the role of the mother and to reconstruct maternal desire. As is well known, Dacia Maraini’s parents, Topazia Alliata and Fosco Maraini, departed for Japan in 1938 because her young father, Fosco, who was to become a recognized ethnographer, had received a research grant to study the disappearing Ainu population of Japan. Dacia Maraini was not quite two years old when they embarked from Brindisi. In La nave per Kobe, Maraini traces that first formative journey through a dialogue with her mother’s diaries from that period. In the process, Maraini recovers her mother’s voice and reconstructs through the autobiographical lens of early childhood the maternal desire that we saw fractured and obstructed in the three earlier novels addressed in this chapter, and in many of Maraini’s fictions of the previous four decades. 49 By maternal desire, I mean both the

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mother’s desire to be a mother and the mother’s desire for subjectivity, agency, and voice. Italian Studies scholar, Teresa Picarazzi, tells us: “Expression of maternal desire is the articulation of voice, the appropriation of an ‘I,’ the act of writing (or of telling one’s life story) itself.” 50 In her critique of a daughter-centered evaluation of motherhood, Susan Rubin Suleiman, a mother herself, comments, “Mothers don’t write; they are written.” 51 Noting the historical barriers to mothers’ writing, Suleiman critiques the “underlying assumption” in some psychoanalytic theories by Freud and others, such as D. W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein. 52 Suleiman summarizes the weakness of these theories by noting, “Just as motherhood is ultimately the child’s drama, so is artistic creation.” 53 Does the writer, Suleiman asks, even if a mother, write only from the subject position of the daughter? Suleiman points out, with Julia Kristeva, that “we know very little about the inner discourse of a mother” and “we shall continue in our ignorance” if we continue to focus “on the-mother-as-she-is-written” rather than on “the-mother-as-she-writes.” 54 In La nave per Kobe, Maraini privileges the inner discourse of her mother in her mother’s own writing. 55 This happens already at the level of the tripartite structure of La nave per Kobe. The first part consists of a counterpoint between excerpts from Topazia’s Japanese diaries of 1938–1941, and Maraini’s observations or comments. Maraini’s voice intertwines with that of her young mother through memory and her mother’s writing, thereby revaluating Topazia’s role as mother, as witness of World War II events, and as agent in history, both political and literary. 56 In so doing, Maraini’s text reconstructs and vindicates her mother’s subject position. The second section of the book includes, in framed, cream-colored pages to offset it from Maraini’s writing, reproductions of a portion of her mother’s diaries. In this section, the mother’s voice reaches us unmediated by the daughter. The book then ends with photographs from the family archives, a family both integrated and displaced in Japanese society on the verge of World War II, collective survivors of internment. In La nave per Kobe, Maraini celebrates her mother’s role in their collective survival in a Japanese concentration camp for antifascists, and her mother’s courage in contemporaneously standing up for her individual political beliefs, and demonstrating her social “libertà” (liberty). 57 If the writing of these diaries can constitute the articulation of Topazia’s voice, the appropriation of an “I” as woman/ mother/writer, then Maraini’s framing of excerpts from these diaries into a publication is the daughter’s validation of the mother as writer and artist. 58 Strangely enough, the first line of La nave is, “Mio padre un giorno mi ha regalato questi quaderni, dicendo ‘Ti riguardano, prendili’” (My father one day gave me these notebooks as gifts, saying, ‘They concern you, take them’”). 59 Such a beginning immediately acknowledges both the catalytic and mediating role of the father in this particular literary enterprise and in the

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early relationship between mother and first-born daughter. Her father’s research, in fact, took them to Japan, and their stay famously coincided with World War II, both parents’ refusal to pledge allegiance to fascism while in Japan, and the family’s resulting internment in a Japanese concentration camp. At the same time, it is his gift of his ex-wife’s notebooks that sanctions and opens the door for the writing daughter to reconstruct her own earliest childhood years and the origins of her relationship with her mother, and to explore her young mother’s subjectivity and agency. The father as mediator or bridge between mother and daughter symbolically reflects the patriarchal power that intervenes, for good or bad, in the mother-daughter relationship. 60 By acknowledging the father’s continued role in this triangle, Maraini eschews a simplistic approach to the reconstruction of maternal desire. In the topos of the triangle in Maraini’s narratives, the idealization of the father creates in the daughter a disparagement toward the mother. In her earlier autobiographical text, Bagheria (1993), Maraini writes of a love for her father so overwhelming that it edged out her mother, even in her mother’s biological, birth-giving role: “Io, per me, mi consideravo nata dalla testa di mio padre, come una novella Minerva, armata di penna e carta” (I considered myself born from the head of my father, like a new Minerva, armed with paper and pen). 61 In this section of Bagheria, she recalls both of her parents’ rejection of her mother’s aristocratic Sicilian ancestors while attributing her literary vocation as a writer as inherited from her father. Earlier in Bagheria she had confessed, “L’ho amato molto questo mio padre, più di quanto sia lecito amare un padre, con uno struggimento doloroso, come anticipando in cuor mio la distanza che poi ci avrebbe separati” (I loved this father of mine a lot, more than it is allowed to love a father, with a painful longing, as if anticipating in my heart the distance that would have then separated us). 62 This paternal attachment is made more acute by another motif in Maraini’s narratives: a primitive, visceral fear of paternal abandonment. Readers familiar with Maraini’s work know that Maraini’s parents separated during her early years, so the pain of parental loss thus conditions Maraini’s narratives from their start. The father’s abandonment is foreshadowed in La nave per Kobe in the distances between Fosco and his family during the young ethnographer’s travels. In the earlier Bagheria we read, “Poi, tutto si è guastato, non so come, non so perché. Lui è sparito lasciandosi dietro un cuore di bambina innamorato e molti pensieri gravi. E mia madre da sola ha dovuto ‘crescere le bimbe’ in mezzo a cumuli di debiti e di cambiali che regolarmente scadevano togliendoci il sonno e l’appetito” (Then everything was spoiled, I don’t know how, I don’t know why. He disappeared leaving behind a little girl’s heart in love and many grave thoughts. And my mother had to “raise the girls” alone in the midst of piles of debt and loans that regularly expired depriving us of sleep and appetite). 63

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In a revealing interview with Anna Maria Mori, published in 1992 just one year before Bagheria, Maraini discusses her relationship with her mother and her mother’s influence in her life and writing, in the positive example that her mother set: “Importantissimo l’esempio di mia madre: una donna libera, che ha sempre fatto quello che pensava, che sentiva di fare” (My mother’s example was very important: a free woman, who has always done what she thought, what she felt like doing). 64 In enumerating her mother’s virtues and positive influences on her, Maraini acknowledges, E nonostante tutto, per molto tempo, l’ho rifiutata. Perché ero innamorata di mio padre, affascinata da lui, perché lui rappresentava l’esotico, la fuga, il diverso, l’avventura, il viaggio. . . Lui veniva a casa ogni tanto, e lei era la vita quotidiana: la scuola, la rottura di scatole dei compiti, la vita di tutti i giorni. E questo me la faceva sentire sempre troppo ovvia, quotidiana: prevedibile. Solo molto tempo dopo ho capito che lei, poveretta, si è fatta carico dell’educazione delle tre figlie, e mio padre se l’è squagliata [. . .] Eppure, da bambina, la rifiutavo: perché mi sembrava piccola. E lui, mio padre, grandissimo, con i suoi viaggi interminabili, e le bellissime storie che ne riportava. Lui faceva quello che avrei voluto fare io. Mia madre invece era i piatti, la casa, la cucina: che pure lei viveva benissimo, gioiosamente [. . .] Ho cominiciato a capire come realmente stavano le cose parecchio tempo dopo: quando ho visto i terribili problemi economici in cui mia madre si dibatteva da sola, quando ho capito l’egoismo di mio padre. . . I debiti. 65 And despite everything, for a long time, I refused her. Because I was in love with my father, fascinated by him, because he represented the exotic, the escape, the different, adventure, travel. . . . He came home every once in a while, and she was everyday life: school, the pain in the neck of homework, the life of every day. And this made her seem too obvious, too mundane: predictable. Only much later did I understand that she, poor thing, had taken upon herself the education of her three daughters, while my father had skipped out [. . .] Yet, as a child, I refused her: she seemed small to me. And he, my father, so big, with his interminable trips, the beautiful stories he brought back. He was doing what I would have wanted to do. My mother instead was the dishes, the house, the kitchen, which she nonetheless lived well, joyously. [. . .] I began to understand how things really were a long time later: when I saw the terrible financial problems that my mother struggled to handle by herself, when I understood my father’s egotism. . . . The debts.

Almost ten years later, in La nave, Maraini offers a redemption of the maternal role. The maternal figure that Maraini describes in La nave blazes a path for a successful and satisfying maternal role through the fulfillment of maternal desire, defined as both the mother’s desire to be a mother and the moth-

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er’s desire for subjectivity, agency, and voice as a woman. The first of these, the mother’s desire to be a mother, thwarted for Armida, Isolina, and Attanasia, is realized as a balance between Topazia’s devotion to her daughters and her own maternal duties, and her desire for social liberty—that is, the desire not to have her individuality as a woman be annulled by her maternity. Much work has been done and continues to be done in the fields of Italian women’s studies and women’s studies more broadly on relationships of entrustment between women, and on its dangers, as well as on the dangers of essentialist views of mothering. 66 Nonetheless, in recovering her relationship with her mother in this autobiographical work, Maraini emphasizes the biological bond that characterizes moments of physical contact and affection between mother and daughter. In one example of this, Maraini comments on the entry in her mother’s diary regarding mother-daughter separation. Her mother is frustrated over her toddler, Dacia’s refusal to separate from her mother, even for an instant when her mother needs to go to the bathroom, and her refusal to go to sleep without her mother. Maraini offers this reflection on her mother’s words, and thereby transcends the perspective of the daughter: “Questa dipendenza corporea mi intenerisce. [. . .] C’è una fisicità nel rapporto madre-figlia che nulla al mondo potrà modificare e lega i due corpi [. . .] in un abbraccio naturale, anche quando sono lontani e non si vedono, e ripete simbolicamente il primo tepore di una abitazione buia, primordiale” (This corporeal dependence makes me feel tender. [. . .] There’s a physicalness in the mother-daughter rapport that nothing in the world can modify and that links the two bodies [. . .] in a natural embrace, even when they are far away and don’t see each other, and it symbolically repeats the early warmth of a dark, primordial habitation). 67 Such physical and psychological intimacy and dependence surface in the photograph of mother and daughter on the front cover. In her reflection, Maraini acknowledges the child’s attachment to the biological mother in its most literal terms, as physical dependence of the womb, an acknowledgment that takes the form of a written response to her mother’s diary entry, a dialogue between daughter as writer and mother as writer. In another example, Maraini comments on her mother’s March 16 entry on Dacia’s struggle with tonsillitis and fever, and a night spent with her mother’s hand on her daughter’s aching ear, a reaffirmation of a physical affection. Maraini writes with nostalgia about this act of maternal sacrifice: “Questa imagine di una giovane madre che tiene la mano sull’orecchio dolente della figlia, per tutta la notte, esce morbida dalle notturne acque della memoria solo ora, a leggere le parole secche, rapide del diario. Evidentemente non era consapevole del sacrificio che faceva. Nessuno glielo chiedeva e perciò era tanto più generoso. Una madre e una figlia, legate insieme dal dolore, si potranno mai cancellare dalle segrete stanze della reminiscenza familiare?” (This image of a young mother who holds her hand over her

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daughter’s aching ear for the whole night rises, soft, from the nocturnal waters of memory, only now in reading the dry, rapid words of the diary. Evidently she was not aware of the sacrifice she was making. Nobody asked it of her and so it was that much more generous. Can a mother and a daughter, linked by pain, ever be erased from the secret rooms of family memory?) 68 This description of maternal devotion is notable as a description of an act of love rather than an act of sacrifice. There are numerous other instances of maternal devotion throughout the diary, for example, in Topazia’s entry in July, 1940 on Yuki, her second daughter’s, first words. 69 All function as examples of fulfilled and fulfilling maternal desire, resulting in/from Topazia’s devotion and close attention to her daughters, but the intimate and personal image of her mother transcends Maraini’s own family story. Maraini’s reconfiguration of the maternal role transcends autobiography to reach out to readers of the third millennium. In fact, just ten pages before, Maraini had been focused on her meditations, familiar to her readers, on women and freedom, on infibulation, repression of sexual desire, and the control of reproduction so elaborately explicated in Un clandestino a bordo (1996). Maraini says of her mother, “Mia madre di libertà se ne intendeva. Aveva mantenuta la sua nonostante le ingiunzioni delle suore che in un collegio palermitano pretendevano facesse il bagno, nella vasca piena d’acqua, avvolta in una camicia lunga fino ai piedi” (My mother understood freedom. She had kept hers despite the orders of the nuns in the boarding school in Palermo who expected her to bathe, in a tub full of water, wrapped in a gown down to her feet). 70 The freedom that her mother maintained nonetheless did not include working as a painter, an artist, though Maraini judges her mother’s artistic talent, in two of her mother’s self-portraits, as proof of her potential to become “una buona pittrice” (a good painter). 71 Topazia’s liberty did not extend, in those days, Maraini tells us, to having a career, though her mother shows none of the frustration or rage of her own mother, Sonia, whose career as an opera singer was thwarted by marriage, and who lived in the perennial rage of artistic frustration. Of Topazia, whose patience and attention seems to be constructed in direct and painstaking contrast to her own mother Sonia’s poor mothering, Maraini comments, “Non si è mai lamentata di questa interruzione del suo lavoro. Ha rinunciato con l’entusiasmo che questi quaderni dimostrano [. . .] Non avrebbe potuto continuare a dipingere e nello stesso tempo occuparsi delle figlie? Evidentemente no” (She never complained about this interruption to her work. She gave it up with the enthusiasm that these notebooks demonstrate. [. . .] Couldn’t she have continued to paint and at the same time take care of her daughters? Evidently not). 72 Lest readers assume that this discussion is limited to Topazia or to her time, 1936, when Dacia was born and Topazia gave up her career, we have only to read the preceding section to understand that Maraini considers the conflict between work and mothering to be crucial,

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contemporary, and ongoing. 73 The word, “career,” itself has become “inservibile” (useless) for a woman, Maraini considers, as she remarks that hundreds of short stories, novels, films, jokes, and theater productions have shown “quanto possa essere ridicola o perversa una donna che si dedica alla ‘carriera’” (how ridiculous and perverse is a woman who dedicates herself to her “career”). 74 The balance between motherhood and personal liberty surely continues to constitute one of the biggest challenges for mothering today, almost seventy years after the writing of the diaries. 75 Although she offers a positive portrayal of her mother, Maraini’s reconstruction of her mother’s balanced and fulfilling path to motherhood resounds with some exhortation for the new millennium. Thus even her mother’s positive example, which transcends her time and her society, cannot completely bridge the chasm between mothering and freedom. Then and now, society’s disapproval of, and its ensuing barriers for, a woman who tries to create an equilibrium between mothering and career erode the possibilities for fulfillment of the mother’s desire for subjectivity, agency, and voice, for individuality. However, through Maraini’s publication of her mother’s diary, her dialogue with it, and her interweaving of both of these with literary and political histories, Maraini validates the diary as an artistic creation, which to some extent fills this vacuum and calls for a redirection of attention away from the needs of the separating daughter and toward “the-mother-as-she-writes.” Maraini weaves her mother’s writing into literary and political history, as is evident in the very brief first diary entry about Aden, their ship’s first stop, and a highly allusive geographical name. Importantly, Topazia steps off the boat for the afternoon, leaving husband and daughter on board, a sign of her independence. That Aden has the ring of the biblical garden, Eden, is evident both in Maraini’s description of the youthful and pristine state of her small family at the time, as well as Maraini’s experience of Aden years later as a garden turned to dangerous jungle. Similarities with the biblical Edenic state of innocence, before danger, decay, and collapse, surface in the comments: “Eppure la famigliola era nel momento più gioioso della sua esistenza” (And yet the little family was in the most joyous moment of its existence). 76 The danger of the later Aden acts, early in this text, as an ominous harbinger of World War II as waged with the atomic bombs that will hit Japan while the Maraini family is there, a foreshadowing of horrors that alternates in the entire text with a tone of indulgent nostalgia for, and affection toward, Maraini’s memory of her ideal/idealized family of three. If this first step in the journey is the most joyous moment, it is, like the cloud of parental loss, already conditioned by the dissipating of this paradisiacal joy as the journey (and Topazia’s diaries, and Maraini’s book, and family and world events) move inexorably forward.

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In a narrative strategy repeated through the text, Maraini supplements her mother’s entries with her own memories, linking two different past moments to show the decay that time has wrought, as in the metonym of her own body, “sciupato, offeso dal tempo e dalle esperienze” (worn out, damaged by time and experiences) as contrasted to that of the young child on the front cover. 77 The Aden Maraini actually remembers does not belong to the early joyous phase of her family life, but is “una Aden disfatta dal calore, molti anni dopo” (an Aden undone by heat, many years later). 78 She remembers waking to the sound of hyenas outside her window at night scavenging in garbage cans, and vultures circling overhead. The bird traditionally serves as a bad omen, and the primal garden of innocence and first memories becomes overlaid with danger, ferocity and decay. The last paragraph of Maraini’s comments reconnects her own memories, and her own writing of Aden to another writer, Paul Nizan, who writes in Aden-Arabia, “Ogni cosa rappresenta una minacccia per il giovane” (Everything represents a threat for the young man). 79 In this way, the notion in La nave of the threat of time, a future that conditions the book from the start, is made explicit. At the same time, in interweaving her later memories of Aden in her own written observations and her mother’s diary writing to Paul Nizan’s, Maraini is also threading her mother, as she does throughout the book, to a literary tradition, a literary history, both national and international, to which Maraini as a writer belongs. Not surprisingly, in the next entry on Bombay, she evokes a story about her travels to Bombay with her two dear illustrious Italian friends: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, her partner for many years. 80 Through the entry on Singapore, Maraini connects her mother’s journey to those of the travels of one of her favorite authors, Joseph Conrad. Maraini does not remember nor does her mother write of the days spent in Singapore. So Maraini supplements the entry with history and information about the area, and since she has not since returned to Singapore, with images of the Singapore she knows through other writers: “Le colline azzurrate di Conrad, le foreste pietrificate di Stevenson, i fiumi impetuosi di Jules Verne, le città misteriose di Green” (Conrad’s blue-colored hills, Stevenson’s petrified forests, Jules Verne’s violent rivers, Green’s mysterious cities). 81 The Singapore she continues to be fascinated by is the Singapore of the American films of her childhood. Thus she links her mother’s diary entry to literature and cinema, where the place name, Singapore, is, again like Calvino’s Le città invisibili, so much more than just a place, where her mother’s diary serves as another link to Maraini’s imaginary symbolic. Topazia’s diaries stop in 1942, as the climate in Japan grows more repressive: “1942. Il diario di mia madre è ormai muto” (1942. My mother’s diary is by now silent). 82 Yet Topazia’s voice is not silenced. A current-day Topazia then appears in La nave per Kobe, to respond to her daughter. The

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dialogue between Maraini’s comments and her mother’s diaries is replaced by a present-day dialogue, a dialogue that fills in the details that an atmosphere of suspicion and censorship had silenced. Topazia’s voice dominates in most of the final dozen pages of the first part of La nave per Kobe, as she responds to her daughter’s questions about that time, about what they knew back then about the Holocaust, and about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The dialogue, supplemented by historical information from Maraini, becomes almost a sort of interview in which Topazia offers a testimonial of her direct and indirect witnessing and participation in some of the most harrowing events of World War II. Topazia recalls Moriokasan, their nurse-maid, for example, the only person who dared to visit them in the concentration camp, and who consequently earned a beating and was forbidden from approaching them again. Topazia also relays Moriokasan’s husband’s stories about being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped, and about the black rain that the residents did not know to defend themselves from. Topazia also talks about her family’s struggle against hunger in the camp, especially for the children. In the final pages, Topazia carves out a historical, political and literary space for herself as she directs her daughter in the writing of La nave, “‘Ricordati di raccontare che non sono andata in campo di concentramento giusto per seguire un marito amato. [. . .] Io, da parte mia dissi che il nazifascismo non concordava con le mie idee, che non mi piaceva il razzismo’” (“Remember to say that I didn’t go into the concentration camp just to follow a much loved husband. [. . .] I, on my own said that Nazi-Fascism didn’t agree with my ideas, that I didn’t like racism”). 83 In this act of courage, Topazia makes a choice as a political dissenter, unafraid to take risks in the most dangerous times, and retains and asserts her personal and political beliefs, her place in World War II history. She asserts her autonomy both from her husband and the ruling fascist governments. In her conversation with her daughter, Topazia approves a written testament to her act of courage and contemporaneously affirms the importance of her maternal role: “‘Da principio’” (“From the beginning”), Topazia recounts, “volevano dividerci. [. . .] Chissà cosa sarebbe successo se vi avessero chiuse in un collegio per figli di ‘traditori.’ [. . .] La moglie del sindaco di Nagoya disse: ‘Ma no, lasciateli insieme, non potete separare la madre dai suoi figli’” (“they wanted to divide us. [. . .] Who knows what would have happened if they had put you in a boarding school for children of ‘traitors.’ [. . .] The wife of the mayor of Nagoya said, ‘But no, let them be together, you can’t separate a mother from her children’”). 84 To conclude: La nave’s reconstruction of maternal desire pits loss against survival. Topazia’s final story, like La nave per Kobe, hovers at the threshold of the concentration camp experience, and is followed by the appearance of death in the text’s concluding fairy tale motif, in Maraini’s nightmare of the

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cart-man without a face. But this end is not the end, just as the end of the diaries was not the end of her mother’s voice. When Maraini’s text ends, the cream-colored pages of the diaries begin, and they in turn are followed by family photographs of their time in Japan, including some final concentration camp photographs. The book finally ends with a white page containing the reproduction of the plain brown back cover of her mother’s diaries, and a note by Maraini in a final assignment of credit that is both literal and symbolic: “Il disegno del percorso di viaggio verso il Giappone, che troviamo nei risguardi del libro, proviene sempre dai diari ed è di mano di Topazia” (The drawing of the voyage toward Japan that we find in the flyleaves of this book also comes from the diaries and is in Topazia’s hand). 85 Thus, the chaos, destruction, censorship and violence that hovers ominously at the edges of Maraini’s story of her early childhood, until it finally comes to the center, is overcome by Topazia’s creative (artistic, maternal) hand, symbolized by her map of their initial journey to Japan. This map, part of her original diaries, is reproduced in the inside front and back covers of the book. The map closes and encloses the text, symbolizing Topazia’s role as guide toward a collective political and ethical survival. NOTES 1. Bryce, “The Perfect Crime,” 217. 2. Dagnino, “Fra madre,” 187. 3. Amantagelo’s recent article is an exception. Amantangelo builds a portrait of Marianna Ucrìa as an example of Adrienne Rich’s notion of “courageous mothering,” cited by Maraini in “Proserpina divisa fra madre e marito” (Amantangelo, 240 and 252n2; “Proserpina,” 87). Amantangelo considers mothering a form of self-actualization for Marianna Ucrìa. Along similar lines, Grazia Sumeli Weinberg sees Storia di Piera and Lettere a Marina as journeys toward the mother. However, her analysis reveals a recovery of the importance of the mother, but not positive mothering figures, per se, since Piera degli Esposti identifies her unconventional mother as a “tragic” figure (Invito, 75). See Picchietti’s book for more analyses of the mother figure. 4. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Introduction,” 13. She is quoting from Maraini’s essay, “Reflections” (29), which is a revision of Maraini’s important article by the same title, “Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compagne di sesso” in La bionda, la bruna e l’asino. 5. Bryce, “The Perfect Crime,” 217. 6. Amoia in No Mothers We! investigates the historical, cultural and religious roots of the resistance to maternity, especially in the literary production of Italian women writers. However, it would be misleading to attribute the birth rate only to women’s ambivalence toward mothering; it may reflect many other factors, including men’s ambivalence toward becoming fathers and parenting. 7. Scattigno, “La figura materna,” 283. 8. D’Amelia here is summarizing Scattigno’s views (D’Amelia, “Introduzione,” vii). 9. Scattigno, “La figura materna,” 282. 10. Ibid., 290. 11. Suleiman, Risking, 39. 12. Suleiman offers some very interesting insights into Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto’s ‘myth of maternal omnipotence’” (Risking, 42). For Suleiman, this myth is one of the cores of maternal splitting, which has its roots in many social discourses. For example,

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critiquing psychoanalysis, she writes, “It is as if, for psychoanalysis, the only self worth worrying about in the mother-child relationship were that of the child” (Risking, 16). In Suleiman’s discourse, the “myth of maternal omnipotence” is replaced by “the maternal fantasy” of “‘maternal responsibility,’ which suggests not so much a feeling of power [. . .] as the feeling that what happens to the child is ultimately attributable to the mother—hence the cultural ‘blame Mom’ syndrome, but also the mother’s own potential sense of guilt or self-blame” (Risking, 43). The term “maternal responsibility” was suggested to her by Sara Ruddick. In fact, for Suleiman, the maternal splitting can occur “by the mother” (Risking, 42, original italics). Thus, the mother herself can be part of the social fabric that generates and sustains the notion of ultimate maternal responsibility for her child’s physical and psychological health. 13. Scattigno, “La figura materna,” 286. Scattigno also identifies sociopolitical elements that worked as disincentives for parenting in general, such as the refusal of the 1968 generation to become parents—that is, the refusal of the family, understood as a source of reproduction of alienating and oppressive relationships (286–87). Regarding disincentives for women, Scattigno writes, “Un mondo di diseguaglianze e di sopraffazione, di rapporti violenti come quelli che regolavano la vita sociale e politica in Italia negli anni Settanta, non pareva alle giovani donne un mondo in cui fare figli” (A world of inequalities and of abuse of power, of violent relationships like those that governed the political and social life of Italy in the Seventies, did not seem to young women a world in which to have children) (287). 14. Montefoschi, “Maternal Role,” 104. 15. Ibid., 106. For a different perspective, see Picchietti, who feels that “Maraini’s examination of the complexity of the maternal discourse parallels the emergence of women’s movements” (Picchietti, “Symbolic Mediation,” 102). See also Picchietti’s chapter on “Motherhood.” 16. Mori, Nel segno della madre, 3. 17. Muraro, “The Passion,” 82. 18. Ibid. 19. Critiques of these relationships have also arisen. See, for example, Lazzaro-Weis (“The Concept,” 34–35) and Re (“Diotima’s Dilemmas,” 59) on “affidamento.” Lazzaro-Weis’s explanation and portrayal of feminist genealogies offer another example of Suleiman’s “maternal splitting,” in what Lazzaro-Weis terms “the honorable tradition of ‘killing off the Mother’” (“The Concept,” 35). For example, Lazzaro-Weis writes that “Braidotti revisits Beauvoir as a good and bad mother” (“The Concept,” 36). For a critique of Diotima, see Renate Holub’s article. 20. De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, 181n12. Lucia Re directs us to de Lauretis’s observations in Re’s article, “Diotima’s Dilemmas,” 61. 21. A new study by Patrizia Sambuco, Corporeal Bonds: The Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth-Century Italian Women’s Writing, focuses explicitly, as the book’s title indicates by privileging the term “daughter,” on narratives that have the daughter’s point of view. Patrizia explains in her introduction, “I have therefore concentrated my analysis on the relationship between the daughter’s expression of her sense of identity and the development of a discourse of corporeality, which emerges in the re-imagining of the relationship with the mother. By corporeality I indicate a system of linguistic and literary imagery, which investigates the body both in its representation in patriarchy and in the opportunities that the body offers for a non-linguistic communication, outside the Symbolic” (6). 22. For a discussion of “the politics of choice” in Maraini’s work, see Lucamante, A Multitude of Women, 186. 23. Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo, 31. Saraceno has also made this point about maternity and hi-tech methods of maintaining fetal life, even when the mother is comatose, in the section of her article entitled, “Diventare madri con le tecnologie riproduttive” (349). 24. Maraini, Un clandestino, 29. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. On the control of the experience of pregnancy, birth, and nursing, see Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions. 27. Maraini, Viaggiando, 17. 28. Maraini, Un clandestino, 20.

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29. Pickering-Iazzi underlines Vannina’s “onset of menstruation” at the beginning of the novel as “the protagonist’s desired freedom from pregnancy” (“Designing Mothers,” 334). Pickering-Iazzi also feels that in this novel, Maraini “refut[es] [. . .] the notion of maternity as a gratifying means for self-expression” (335). 30. Gabriele, “From Prostitution to Transsexuality,” 244–45. See this article for more on gender and the forces of compulsory heterosexuality in Donna in guerra. 31. Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki, 70. 32. Ibid., 71. 33. Ibid., 74. 34. Ibid. 35. Maraini, Buio, 41. 36. Ibid., 51. 37. Maraini mentioned her struggle to become a vegetarian during a personal conversation with me in April 1998. Examples of her advocacy for a humane treatment of animals recur in her work, as we will see in the next chapter. In La nave per Kobe, for example, Maraini condemns hunting “in un mondo che già schiavizza gli animali” (in a world that already enslaves animals). (28). 38. Maraini, Buio, 49. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 43. 41. Ibid., 50. 42. Ibid., 51. 43. Ibid., 52. 44. Ibid. 45. Birnbaum, Liberazione, 180. 46. Ibid. This leads to the broader question: How can women build upon a symbolic order of the mother if the structures within which women work—whether the university, the psychoanalytic world, politics, or medicine—are still patriarchal institutions? 47. Maraini, Buio, 53. My thanks to Professor Leo Cabranes-Grant for his comments at the reading of an earlier version of this paper at the 2000 MLA Convention in Washington, D.C., and for his later suggestion that suor Attanasia’s plight resembles that of Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica. Both suor Attanasia’s arrested maternity and her singing recall Puccini’s “Suor Angelica,” who was also punished for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Suor Angelica was forced into a convent without being allowed ever to see her baby, and in the course of the opera she was told that her baby had died two years earlier. Mosco Carner’s comment which links “Suor Angelica” and Madame Butterfly can also be applied to suor Attanasia: “the chief motive for the heroines’ suicide [or in Attanasia’s case, death] is the cruel frustration of a mother’s love of her child” (435). Allusions to opera are common in the work of Maraini, who likes opera (Maraini, Dizionarietto quotidiano, 57). For example, there are references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the end of Dolce per sé and, as we saw, in Il treno per Helsinki. 48. Maraini, Viaggiando, 20–21. 49. For a discussion Maraini’s “creative use of conventional genres” in La nave, see Cinzia Sartini Blum’s Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress (161–62). Blum considers the book “a hybrid text,” and, borrowing Liz Stanley’s words, an ‘auto/biography’” (162). Blum goes on to explore this feminist approach to conventional autobiography and concludes that “Maraini’s auto/biographical approach” is “an example of the feminist tendency to revise generic conventions in order to challenge conventional parameters of self-representation” (163). 50. Picarazzi, Maternal Desire, 18. 51. Suleiman, Risking, 17. 52. Ibid., 18. It is interesting that Suleiman also targets Barthes in this criticism, and refers to the famous quote, which Maraini herself quotes: A writer, says Roland Barthes, is “someone who plays with the body of his mother” (Suleiman, Risking, 18). 53. Suleiman, Risking, 17. 54. Ibid., 18. For more on the importance of the mother’s voice and maternal discourse, see Marianne Hirsch’s classic, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis and Femi-

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nism (1989). Hirsch notes, “One of the barriers to a theory and a practice of maternal discourse is the feminist reliance on psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and on the psychoanalytic construction of mothering” (Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 167). She critiques both Kristeva’s analysis of motherhood and object-relations theory for their focus on maternity as metaphor and function, respectively, and points to Suleiman’s important work, which shows that “mothers do write as mothers” (Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 173–74, original italics). 55. Ursula Fanning traces the recovery of the mother in the trajectory from La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa to Bagheria to La nave per Kobe. She also briefly discusses the predominance of the daughter’s perspective and voice in the return to the mother, which has marked much of contemporary Italian women’s writing (Fanning, “Some Segments,” 122). Of La nave per Kobe, Fanning says that Maraini “has succeeded in constructing a narrative which gives the mother a voice, albeit one that is still subordinate to that of the daughter” (Fanning, “Some Segments,” 131). 56. Blum finds that, in La nave, in the elevation of “personal matters into ‘matter for collective, political reflection,’ that is, by placing familial stories into historical perspective,” Maraini “negotiates the narcissistic pitfalls of the autobiographical journey” (168). 57. While my own analysis devotes itself briefly to this reading of La nave per Kobe, this triple-layered autobiographical text merits further study of the intersections of primary source (the mother’s diary), Maraini’s commentary, and the family photographs. 58. It is noteworthy that, according to Dacia Maraini, her mother Topazia Alliata did not want her name to appear as coauthor of La nave per Kobe (presentation by Maraini, Distinguished International Visiting Scholar at University of Rhode Island International Women’s Day Panel, March 1, 2013). 59. Maraini, La nave, 7. 60. In his article, “Il romanzo familiare di Dacia Maraini,” Juan Carlos de Miguel y Canuto draws some parallels between La nave per Kobe and Il gioco dell’universo, the latter cowritten with her father, Fosco Maraini. De Miguel y Canuto writes, “Sia La nave per Kobe sia Il gioco dell’universo presentano la particolarità di partire da spunti di scrittura, rispettivamente materna e paterna, ovvero, più precisamente, da alcuni quaderni di note che Dacia pubblica e glossa ampiamente; difatti i rispettivi titoli—o piuttosto i sottotitoli—rispecchiano bene questa condizione: La nave per Kobe include i Diari giapponesi di mia madre e Il gioco dell’universo contiene i Dialoghi immaginari tra un padre e una figlia (in questi ultimi addirittura figurano come autori “Dacia e Fosco Maraini”)” (Both La nave per Kobe and Il gioco dell’universo present the peculiarity of starting from writing prompts, respectively maternal and paternal, or rather, more precisely, from some notebooks of notes that Dacia publishes and liberally glosses. In fact, the respective titles—or rather, subtitles—reflect this state: La nave per Kobe includes My Mother’s Japanese diaries and Il gioco dell’universo contains Imaginary Diaries between a Father and a Daughter [in this latter “Dacia and Fosco Maraini” even figure as authors]) (Miguel y Canuto, “Il romanzo,” 75–76). Cinzia Sartini Blum reads La nave “as a response to one specific instance of male self-representation, the autobiographical novel Case, amori, universi (1999, Houses, Loves, Universes), written by Maraini’s father” (Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 163). 61. Maraini, Bagheria, 127. 62. Ibid., 43. 63. Ibid., 31. 64. Maraini, “Dacia Maraini,” Interview by Anna Maria Mori, 125. 65. Ibid., 129–30. 66. See, for example, the work of Holub and Lucia Re. 67. Maraini, La nave, 63–64. Fanning also highlights this passage in noting the “corporeal aspect” of the mother-daughter relationship in La nave per Kobe (Fanning, “Some Segments,” 128). Drawing a parallel between Maraini and Irigaray’s perspectives, Fanning notes that, in La nave per Kobe, “The implication [. . .] is that the mother’s body is not, in fact, replaceable” (Fanning, “Some Segments,” 129). 68. Maraini, La nave, 116. 69. For a different reading, see Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 165–66. 70. Maraini, La nave, 106.

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71. Ibid., 118. 72. Ibid. 73. Topazia’s sacrifice of “her artistic talent,” according to Blum, “is indicative of women’s historical condition” (165). 74. Maraini, La nave, 117–18. 75. Many books continue to address this struggle, most notably Lean In, the 2013 best seller by Sheryl Sandberg, currently chief operating officer of Facebook, now a very popular social media website. 76. Maraini, La nave, 17. 77. Ibid., 7. 78. Ibid., 17. 79. Ibid., 18. 80. Maraini often retells favorite stories. This story reappears in a different version in her latest book of short stories, La ragazza di via Maqueda (Rizzoli, 2009), as “Il poeta-regista e la meravigliosa soprano.” 81. Maraini, La nave, 30. 82. Ibid., 165. 83. Ibid., 176. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 261.

Chapter Four

The Child Protagonist Crossing Genres in Dolce per sé and Storie di cani per una bambina

This short chapter serves as a transitional or foundational chapter for the final two chapters, which focus, respectively, on the collection of short stories Buio (1999) and on the novel Colomba (2004). Although I take up the theme of a double reconstruction briefly in my analysis of the novel Dolce per sé (1997), this chapter’s primary function is to explore the textual roots of Maraini’s converging interests in children as protagonists, characters, and readers in her work across several genres from the 1990s and beyond, and to identify the narrative potential and effects of this new direction in Maraini’s work. The turn to children and childhood opens up possibilities that have a lasting impact on Maraini’s subsequent narratives, many of which focus on childhood as an important, broadly formative period (for example, her 2008 novel, Il treno dell’ultima notte, which blends wistful memories and a truncation of childhood with the aftermath of the Holocaust). My analyses also reveal the coherence of Maraini’s work and the recurrence of familiar themes in her so-called children’s stories that surface repeatedly in other genres. 1 Among these is her concern for the ways in which the traditional or nuclear family fails children, its most vulnerable members, which we see in Buio and in Colomba. In fact, domestic child abuse is a recurring motif in two other texts from the 1990s, La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría (1990) and Voci (1994). Alongside a grimmer treatment of childhood and threats to children’s survival, whether by the family or other structures or forces in society, Maraini also offers lighter and more playful versions of the same concerns in her fiction and her writing of children’s literature. The attention to children and 57

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childhood and her forays into children’s literature produce the narrative effect of an unexpected lightness and playfulness of tone and rhythm in some of her subsequent novels. This chapter thus serves as a foundation to the next chapters on Buio and Colomba, both of which address children as victims of abuse, while, at the same time, it textually grounds the lightness and playfulness of rhythm that set the stage for Colomba. In a 1984 interview with Serena Anderlini published in 1991, Dacia Maraini asserted: “There are a lot of adolescents in my books, few children.” 2 Yet, from the early 1990s, children as readers and as characters, and childhood itself as narrative theme, seem to capture Maraini’s immaginario poetico (poetic imaginary) more strongly. In fact, the recovery of the mother in Maraini’s narrative, and the concomitant recovery of maternal subjectivity, agency, and desire discussed in the previous chapter, run parallel to her elaboration of childhood and child figures. As Maraini’s fictions deconstruct and reconstruct maternal desire, children begin to take center stage in her work. Maraini’s own comment reminds us that adolescents were at the center of Maraini’s earliest novels, La vacanza and L’eta del malessere. So the focus on representations of children and childhood is rather unexpected. Recently, critics have begun to move beyond the confines of well-mined territories, such as women’s condition and female figures, to draw attention to the figures of children in Maraini’s work. In 2007, Christina Siggers Manson found that, “[Maraini] is well known for [. . .] her attempts to expose injustice with regard to the treatment of women, children and animals.” 3 Claudio Magris notes that “due categorie particolarmente esposte alla violenza” (two categories particularly exposed to violence) attract Maraini’s attention: “le donne e i bambini” (women and children). 4 Yet scholarly analyses rarely go beyond the treatment of women, and repeated scholarly mention of children as victims of injustice obscures the more whimsical dimensions of Maraini’s writing, which bring playfulness and magic to her storytelling and to her treatment of some child characters. We can pinpoint the beginning of this playful new narrative direction, with its attention to whimsy, children, magic, and animals, to Maraini’s autobiographical recovery of her own childhood in Bagheria in 1993, followed shortly thereafter by the creation of the child protagonist, Flavia, in the epistolary novel, Dolce per sé (1997). The overtly autobiographical current suggests that Maraini’s interest in childhood is deeply linked to, and likely impelled by, Maraini’s interest and exploration of her own early childhood. In the rich, interlacing paths of autobiographical recovery through the 1990s, Maraini travels backward in memory and time until she reaches her own beginnings and recovers—and reconstructs—her own earliest childhood. From Bagheria in 1993 through Dolce per sé in 1997 and La nave per Kobe in 2001, Maraini’s child protagonist grows ever younger. In Bagheria,

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the child is an autobiographical younger self in the difficult years spanning Japanese concentration camp experiences of extreme hunger and deprivation, and later poverty, hunger, and cultural marginalization in Sicily, both experiences marked, as we saw in our introduction, as threats to survival. Bagheria, as the name suggests, focuses primarily on Maraini’s return from Japan to Sicily after World War II when she was nine or ten. The text rather deliberately hovers at the edges of the concentration camp memories. Maraini writes that she promised to leave the enterprise of recounting the concentration camp experiences to her sister, the writer Toni Maraini, as we read at the end of La nave per Kobe. Yet Dacia Maraini also asserts, “Da anni ho in mente un libro sul campo” (I’ve had a book on the camp in mind for years). 5 In La nave per Kobe, as we have seen, Maraini explores and reflects, through excerpts from her mother’s diary, upon her earliest, most remote, preconscious years of childhood, from infancy through toddlerhood. Dolce per sé, published in the interval between these two autobiographical novels, highlights the child character, Flavia, who is six years old at the beginning of the novel and thirteen, an adolescent, by the end. The protagonist, Vera, a playwright in her fifties, is another of Maraini’s many autobiographically inspired women protagonists whose profession is writing. In this epistolary novel, Flavia functions both as child protagonist and as reader/ recipient of Vera’s letters. In Dolce per sé, the child protagonist is the addressee, a character who, like the autobiographical persona, is filtered through the lens of nostalgia, one of the topos of Dolce per sé. During this decade, Maraini also creates child protagonists and animal characters in other genres besides the novel, such as the short story and children’s literature. In fact, Maraini produces several collections in the genre of children’s literature, such as Storie di cani per una bambina in 1996 and La pecora Dolly in 2001, to which we might add Mulino, Orlov e il gatto che si crede pantera in 1994 and Silvia in 1995. Maraini’s forays into the complex and much-debated genre of children’s literature ushers in many new narrative possibilities for Maraini, such as the use of fantastical, non-verisimilar stories in the form of fairy tales; the use of magic, such as in the creation of the folletto in Dolce per sé; the animation/personification of inanimate objects and animals; and a playful narrative rhythm and tone, like that interwoven in the story of the two canine friends from our introduction, Telemaco and Blob. These elements resurface in the novel, Colomba (2004), with its surprising happy ending. 6 Yet a closer look at Maraini’s earliest years as a writer reveals that Maraini’s narratives were already interwoven with fairy tales and incredible or non-verisimilar storytelling, such as the stories Tota and Giottina tell in Donna in guerra (1975), the stories Basilia tells Bianca in Lettere a Marina (1981), and the grim fairy tales identified by critics such as Christina Siggers Manson. 7 However, Maraini’s decision to write in the genre of children’s literature permits such magical storytelling to take center

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stage, and influences her narrative, which sometimes takes on whimsical, playful dimensions. Maraini herself traces her forays into the genre of children’s literature to her interest in animals, in their mistreatment, in their suffering, in the joys and sorrows they bring to humans. Maraini’s attention to animals signals, as we will see in our last chapter, Maraini’s growing commitment to ecofeminism, which Salsini identifies in Dolce per sé. 8 However, Maraini’s attention to animals appears at least as early as Donna in guerra (1975), a novel in diary form, in which Rosa, whose home in Rome serves as a refuge for the main character, Vannina, lives with many unusual rescued pets, including a crow, tortoises, and a goat. Rosa’s eccentricity in caring for these injured animals in her apartment offers a nonconformist and nurturing contrast, an antidote, to the fishing in the novel, represented as the hunting, killing, and eating of fish, which occupies Vannina’s husband, Giacinto, and others in the novel. In her 7 dicembre entry, Vannina writes that after her abortion, “non sono tornata a casa. Sono andata da Rosa che mi ha fatto posto nel suo letto, assieme col gatto” (I didn’t go home. I went to Rosa’s who made a place for me in her bed, with the cat). 9 Maraini’s first book of short stories on animals, Mulino, Orlov e il gatto che si crede pantera, appeared in 1994, one year after Bagheria was published. Maraini’s brief explanatory note expresses her own surprise at this new direction in her work and the motivations that have driven her to write about animals: “Chissà perché questa voglia di parlare di animali. L’altro giorno ho visto un asino legato, ritto in piedi sotto il sole e sono stata male per una giornata intera pensando alla sua schiavitù, alla sua solitudine. Mi sono messa subito a scrivere. Per liberarmene? per trasferire, raccontandolo, il fardello al lettore? per costruire un piccolo ritratto riparatore? ma riparare da che? e può la scrittura riparare di qualcosa?” (Who knows why this desire to talk about animals. The other day I saw a donkey tied up, standing under the sun and I felt sick for a whole day thinking about his enslavement, his loneliness. I quickly set to writing. To free myself? To shift, by telling his story, the burden to the reader? To construct a small reparative portrait? But shelter from what? And can writing fix anything?). 10 Maraini notes that she has rewritten these stories numerous times, “in varie versioni, rielaborandoli, cambiando angolatura e tono di voce” (in various versions, re-elaborating them, changing angle and tone). 11 This rewriting is indication, she writes, of “un dolore che non riesco a fare morire: il dolore di una perdita senza rimedio” (a pain that I cannot ease: the pain of a loss with no relief). 12 Writing about the pain of losing beloved domestic pets, she observes, “Scrivere di loro, per me, significa mettere in moto quel complicato e fragile meccanismo che è la memoria: perché l’inchiostro conservi quello che la carne tende crudelmente a perdere” (To write about them means, for me, to put into

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motion that fragile and complicated mechanism that is memory: so that ink may preserve that which the flesh cruelly tends to lose). 13 Maraini here explains her puzzling desire to write about animals as a remedy to her own pained and painful response to the miserable conditions of the donkey, a metonym for the deplorable treatment of animals in society, and to the pain of losing her own pets, with which many readers can empathize. Bringing together these two examples, of the suffering caused to and by animals, Maraini attempts to extend readers’ personal attachments to pets to an empathy for the exploited condition of animals (we meet) in the world. At the same time, this introductory quote underscores the ethical considerations that subtend her work. In the use of the word “riparare” to refer to literature, Maraini offers a number of questions about literature’s possibilities to reach beyond itself. The playful use of variations of “riparatore,” “riparare da” and “riparare di” conflate the denotations: “repair,” “shelter” and “to redress” and “to make amends.” 14 The donkey had no shelter from the sun. Can literature offer shelter from loss and pain? Can it make amends? Can it fix anything? Can ink stand in for flesh? Can it preserve? Can writing, Maraini asks, free her from the pain? Maraini calls attention to the fact that she has rewritten some of these stories, as a response to a pain that she cannot far morire, that she cannot make die. Writing, we must surmise, offers only a temporary respite. The insertion of these stories into other texts shows that, like the story of Alice in Wonderland or the myth of Don Juan or la cornacchia (the crow), the stories of the plights of animals have taken hold of the author’s imagination, and have become an integral part, a central part, of her imaginary world and her drive to retell. 15 For example, Mulino the dog first appeared in Maraini’s famous 1987 collection of articles, La bionda la bruna (p. xx) as a beloved, deceased pet. Re-elaborated in Mulino, Orlov e il gatto che si crede pantera (1994), Mulino the dog and Orlov the horse reappear in a third iteration in Maraini’s first collection of “racconti per bambini,” Storie di cani per una bambina (1996), winner of the 1994 prize, Premio Andersen, Il Mondo Dell’Infanzia. Orlov the horse, renamed Romano, appears again in Dolce per sé alongside a re-elaborated story of the donkey from the introductory note to Mulino quoted above. 16 These re-elaborations underline how figures of Maraini’s immaginario poetico cut across, unite, and blend genres—the short story, children’s literature, and the epistolary novel—in further evidence of the centrality of animals and children in Maraini’s most recent work. That animals lead her to children, Maraini tells us herself, discussing her oft-republished Storie di cani per una bambina, Io amo molto gli animali in generale e i cani in particolare. E mi è venuto naturale di raccontare queste storie rivolgendomi ai bambini, perché penso che i bambini siano molto sensibili a questi problemi. Poi il tono era quello: il tono

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Chapter 4 di un racconto fatto a un bambino. [. . .] Non mi piace il manierismo del linguaggio per bambini, non bisogna parlargli in maniera stupida, in maniera riduttiva. Rivolgersi alla loro intelligenza di bambini è rivolgersi ad un’intelligenza complessa, anche ardita alle volte. La chiarezza non è riduttiva. 17 I really love animals in general and dogs in particular. And it came naturally to me to tell these stories addressing myself to children, because I think children are very sensitive to these problems. Further, the tone was that: the tone of a story made for a child. [. . .] I don’t like the mannerism of language for children. One mustn’t speak to them in a stupid way, in a reductive way. To address their intelligence as children is to address a complex and sometimes even bold intelligence. Clarity is not reductive.

This comment reveals Maraini’s view that language is so complex that clarity should not be misinterpreted as simplistic and reductive. Equally importantly, children should not be underestimated. Thus Maraini cautions against naive and condescending approaches to language and children, to language for children. So far, we have traced how delving into her own childhood and her love of animals inspire Maraini to develop child protagonists and explore childhood in her texts. Yet the children in her life have also led her to animals. In her conversation with journalist Paolo di Paolo, Maraini reverses the order of inspiration somewhat and elevates “la favola,” which can be translated into English as both fairy tale and fable, to a genre that can say a lot about reality: Un amico mi aveva affidato la figlia per qualche giorno. La bambina mi chiedeva in continuazione delle storie. Una volta raccontate tutte le favole che conoscevo, ho cominciato a inventarle. Prima ho narrato le storie dei miei cani; la storia di un cavallo da circo regalatomi da un’amica acrobata; poi ho cominciato a ispirarmi anche a fatti di attualità, mescolandoli all’immaginazione, alla fantasia. Alcune di queste favole nate per caso, le ho raccolte in due libri dedicati non solo ai bambini ma anche agli adulti, come un invito gentile alla riflessione attraverso il fiabesco. Credo che le favole, con il gioco e la metafora, possano dire molto sulla realtà. 18 A friend had entrusted me with his daughter for a few days. The little girl begged constantly for stories. Once I told all the fairy tales I knew, I started inventing them. First I narrated the stories of my dogs; the story of a circus horse given to me by an acrobat friend of mine; then I started to take inspiration from current events, blending fantasy and imagination in with them. I collected some of these fairy tales, created by chance, in two books dedicated not only to children but also to adults, as an open invitation to reflect through fairy tales. I think fairy tales, with their games and metaphors, can say a lot about reality.

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Children and animals offer Maraini a double inspiration for playful and whimsical writing of fairy tales and fables that address “reality.” This double inspiration moves firmly to the forefront of her narrative in the 1990s, and crosses genres. For example, the little girl protagonist and inspiration of Storie di cani per una bambina reappears as Flavia in Dolce per sé. 19 To Flavia, Vera the sender writes, with an autobiographical as well as a literary allusion, “Ti ho dedicato un libro di racconti sui cani, lo sapevi? Si chiama Storie di cani per una bambina. Quella bambina sei tu” (Did you know I dedicated a book about dogs to you? It’s called Storie di cani per una bambina. You’re that little girl). 20 As Salsini points out, Flavia devotes herself to animals, inheriting Vera’s “inclusionary politics,” which embrace “the ideas of ecofeminism, which argues that animals are as deserving of liberation from repressive social, cultural, legal, and political institutions as women and other oppressed groups.” 21 Another similarity between these two texts from different genres is that, like the little girl in Storie di cani, Flavia in Dolce per sé functions both as intended recipient of the text and letters, and as a character. She is the inspiring reader inside the fictionalized texts, and, presumably, from what Maraini tells us, the inspiring reader outside the text, metonym for other readers, both adult and children. In fact, in her quote above, Maraini does not differentiate between adult and children genres; she says her two children’s books are for both audiences. The letters of Dolce per sé are full of meditations about childhood, and underline playful and childlike characteristics in adults. Syvia Setzkorn notes that we have the impression that “through [. . .] [the letters, Vera] also communicates with her own self of the past.” 22 As an adult who is writing to a child, Vera’s letters are certainly instructional and educational, as both Salsini and Setzkorn note. For Salsini, Flavia is inheritor of Vera’s inclusionary politics. For Setzkorn, Vera establishes a feminist relationship of affidamento (as entrustment) with Flavia, while Maraini establishes a relationship of affidamento with her female readers. 23 However, Vera’s letters are also nostalgic. Nostalgia is a dominant theme in Dolce per sé, one that Vera invokes directly. In the novel, nostalgia serves as the filter through which we see Vera’s past. It is through nostalgia that we view the memories, stories and photos, and motifs in the novel. The magical quality of this filter, which creates several dimensions of reality layered upon one another, is enhanced by the inclusion of elements characteristic of the genre of children’s literature, such as the folletto that Vera creates for Flavia, and the anthropomorphization of animals. The figure of Flavia is magically multiplied in Vera’s perceptions in Dolce per sé: “Quella bambina sei tu. Ma è una bambina magicamente imprigionata nel suo passato, assieme con un’altra bambina misteriosa che conosco soprattutto attraverso le fotografie” (That little girl is you. But it’s a little girl magically imprisoned in her past, together with another mysterious little girl whom I know mainly through photographs). 24

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This filter, the nostalgia made possible by memories, accompanied by the attenuating filter of children’s literature, allows Maraini to indulge in a sentimental tone that she had previously eschewed. In 1995, Maraini published an important interview in a book called, Il piacere di scrivere, in which she asserts that one writes out of the pleasure of doing so. In the excellent essay following it, Maria Serena Sapegno signals a transition in Maraini’s work from il pudore in which “l’urlo va soffocato” (the scream must be smothered) to a surrendering to il piacere di scrivere (the pleasure of writing). 25 The concept of “il pudore” (a sense of reserve or modesty) does not refer here to the usual meaning of a modesty regarding sexual and erotic detail or subject matter, for Maraini’s texts are well known for their direct and controversial representation of explicit subject matter that is often considered taboo, as she acknowledges in her introduction to La bionda, la bruna e l’asino. Sapegno instead is talking about “un pudore dei sentimenti, una disciplina rigorissima che fa filtrare [. . .] soltanto elementi controllati: l’urlo va soffocato” (an emotional reserve, a very rigorous discipline that allows only controlled elements to filter through: the scream must be smothered). 26 Sapegno posits various possibilities for this pudore: Il pudore, la delicatezza, forse la timidezza, possono naturalmente essere cifre di rapporto con il reale che si trasmettono dalla vita alla scrittura, possono caratterizzare così profondamente il proprio occhio sul mondo [. . .] Può anche essere che si avverta una dissonanza tra le proprie emozioni e l’idea che ci è stata trasmessa di forma letteraria, oppure che ci si sia convinte che entrando nelle elegantissime stanze della letteratura sia bene non far troppo rumore, in particolare un certo tipo di “rumore femminile”, a maggior ragione se si è una donna. E’ anche possibile così che il proprio senso di inadeguatezza, il non sentirsi fino in fondo davvero legittimate, proietti sulla forma letteraria un eccesso di “auctoritas”, determinando una sorta di paralisi espressiva dei sentimenti. Nelle ultime opere di Maraini, al contrario, si avverte una pienezza narrativa legata in qualche modo all’allentarsi di una costrizione, all’ammorbidirsi di una sorte di codice interno di comportamento, nell’indugiare sul racconto con il piacere di farlo. 27 (original italics) Reserve, delicacy, even timidity, can naturally be elements of a relationship with the real that are transmitted from life to writing. They can deeply characterize one’s view of the world. [. . .] It can also be that one notices a dissonance between one’s own emotions and the idea of literary form that has been transmitted to us, or that one has become convinced that in entering the very elegant rooms of literature, it’s best not to make too much noise, in particular a certain type of “female noise,” especially if one is a woman. It’s also possible that one’s own sense of inadequacy, of not feeling truly validated, projects onto the literary form an excess of “auctoritas,” determining a sort of paralysis of the expression of emotion.

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In Maraini’s most recent works, on the contrary, one notices a narrative fullness linked in some way to the loosening of a constriction, to the softening of an internal code of behavior, to the dwelling on the story for the pleasure of doing so.

Sapegno rightly underlines the presence of this pleasure in Maraini’s work from the 1990s, although perhaps the paralysis she refers to is not so much a limitation of the author, but another stylistic tool, a narrative strategy that Maraini used to express the lack of emotion of her early and most alienated female characters. 28 Sapegno is correct in noting a growing exploration of sentiment in Maraini’s work. We see this through Maraini’s autobiographical journey backward into her childhood and, also, perhaps in the writing of children’s books. The right to explore emotions, to look back on emotions, is vindicated explicitly in Vera’s comments, and enacted in nostalgic mode in Dolce per sé. One of the most captivating and provocative images of the dangers of the backward glance in Dolce per sé is that of Lot’s nameless wife, invoked in Vera’s very first letter. According to “Genesis” in the Bible, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt because she did not obey the angels’ decree and instead turned back to gaze upon the burning and condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Vera reclaims Lot’s wife’s right to curiosity. Salsini interprets Vera’s meditations on the biblical story as “an interpretation that obliquely challenges the authority of the original text,” another element of Maraini’s “revisionary and inclusionary strategy.” 29 Setzkorn instead finds that “the pillar of salt illustrates the female condition since classical antiquity. The woman is paralysed.” 30 Vera’s invocation of Lot’s wife vindicates the right to remember, to look back, to feel. Nonetheless, this biblical figure still exemplifies the petrifying danger of looking backward, being trapped by/in the past. Dolce per sé navigates these paradoxes of memory and inner life: the necessity of looking back, of savoring good memories, of learning from the (mistakes of the) past is juxtaposed to the petrifying pain of confronting loss. Loss, we might say, is the very essence of memory, for both the best and worst experiences of our past are indeed lost to us, except through memory. Of Vera’s letters, we might ask, with Maraini, “Può l’inchiostro conservare quello che la carne tende crudelmente a perdere?”(Can ink preserve that which the flesh cruelly tends to lose?). For Vera, the danger in looking back lies in the petrifying nature of pain at the loss of her sister (an autobiographical reference to the premature death of Maraini’s sister Yuki) and at the betrayal by her lover, Edoardo. Dolce per sé, in fact, offers a double reconstruction of the relationship between Vera and her lover, Edoardo. The first occurs in the letters that reconstruct the relationship for his young niece, Flavia, and the second after

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an interval of silence in which certain points of the relationship are reconstructed with a different, exhortatory message for Flavia. We note the delicacy employed in Vera’s concluding letter as Vera undermines the entire love story that she has just told Flavia (and us) by gently implying that Edoardo was a Don Juan, in yet another example of the Don Juan motif that runs through some of Maraini’s novels and plays. The instructiveness for Flavia lies in the discrepancy between Vera’s attempt to tell the truth, as critics have noted that the name “Vera” implies, and Vera’s revelation that Flavia’s uncle, Vera’s ex-lover, refuses to do so: “Dopo due anni di silenzio [Edoardo] ha ripreso a cercarmi e gli piace venire a trovarmi in montagna, raccontarmi di sé, dei suoi concerti, delle sue nuove conquiste. Il suo forse è anche un sentimento della equità affettiva che lo porta a dividersi con magnanima imparzialità fra le ‘sue donne,’ che siano amate in quel momento o che lo siano state nel passato più o meno remoto” (After two years of silence [Edoardo] has started to seek me out again and he likes to visit me in the mountains, to tell me about himself, his concerts, his new conquests. It is also perhaps a sentiment of emotional fairness that brings him to divide himself with magnanimous impartiality between “his women,” whether they are loved in that moment or whether they have been loved in the more or less remote past). 31 After this, Vera offers some tongue-in-cheek comments about Edoardo’s many women, comparing the numbers to Don Giovanni’s multitude of conquests by quoting Leporello’s famous “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s opera. Then Vera wonders, “Non so se tu, Flavia, hai mai conosciuto tutte le ‘belle” del tuo amato zio” (I don’t know if you, Flavia, have ever met all the “beauties” of your much loved uncle). 32 Vera’s gentle tone reveals that he is a lying, two timing lover: “Ma quel ramo su cui avevamo amoreggiato, si era improvvisamente popolato e io sentivo che non avrebbe retto. [. . .] Ma soprattutto erano le dolcissime menzogne del magico pifferaio che mi inquietavano” (But that branch we had flirted on had suddenly become crowded and I could feel that it would not hold. [. . .] But above all it was the sweet lies of the magic piper that unsettled me). 33 In mocking reference to her own vulnerabilities, Vera talks about the “dolore di ritorno” (pain of return) as a “dolore stucchevole” (cloying pain), recalling the motif of cloying sweetness in Il treno per Helsinki and in Miele’s name, as well as the Don Juan motif: “Insomma perché tanta passione per il Don Giovanni? mi chiederai tu” (So why so much passion for the Don Giovanni? you might ask me). 34 Vera had earlier mused about the pitfalls of nostalgia: “Tutto è fisso, immobile, cristallino nelle fotografie e mentre la memoria ricostruisce, attutisce, seleziona e oscura, quei quadratini di carta lucida sono lì come delle punizioni della carne a farsi guardare da te suggerendoti insistentemente l’idea mistificante della immortalità. Per non parlare di quella cosa stupida e bastarda che è la nostalgia, da nóstos e algía come a dire ‘dolore del ritorno.’ Ma si tratta di un dolore stucchevole che ti appiccica i pensieri e le dita”

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(Everything is fixed, immobile, crystalline in the photographs and while memory reconstructs, muffles, selects and dims, those little square pieces of tracing paper are there to be looked at like punishments to your flesh, insistently suggesting to you the mystifying idea of immortality. Not to mention that stupid spurious thing, nostalgia, from nóstos and algía, as if to say, “the pain of return.” But it’s a cloying pain that makes your thoughts and fingers sticky). 35 Vera’s double reconstruction of her relationship with Edoardo reveals both the story of a love affair and the revelation of the illusions on which that love was based. Yet Vera’s wisdom, which alludes to the cloying and destructive sweetness we studied in Il treno per Helsinki in our first chapter, far transcends Armida’s crisis in Il treno per Helsinki. In Dolce per sé, Vera resists the dismissal, the cancellation, the denigration of her experience of love and her relationship with Edoardo, however mired in illusion she discovered it, in second retrospect, to be. Her letters to Flavia validate the experience and memories of love—even a love lived in illusion—and memories of betrayal, memories of the pain of loss and death, memories layered on memories that both reveal our aging and guarantee our eternal youth. In the final paragraphs of Vera’s last letter, we read, “C’è un quadro, nel museo del Prado, se ricordo bene, che si chiama La fontana della eterna giovinezza. [. . .] La memoria ha le virtù di quella fontana. Chi vi si immerge ne esce rivitalizzato.” (There is a painting in the Prado Museum, if I remember correctly, that’s called The Fountain of Eternal Youth. [. . .] Memory has the virtue of that fountain. Whoever immerses oneself comes out revitalized). 36 Vera writes, “[L]e storie, i romanzi sono fatti di quell’acqua miracolosa che ci permette di ringiovanire. Scriverli, ma anche leggerli” (Stories, novels are made of that miraculous water that permits us to become young again. Writing them, but also reading them). 37 Nostalgia in Dolce per sé is the filter by which Maraini allows Vera to indulge in the past; it also brings the worlds of adults and children together, as Vera and Flavia cross over, through Vera’s letters, into each other’s worlds. So, as Salsini says, Vera helps Flavia “navigate the rocky shoals of womanhood.” 38 So also does Vera not disdain to step into the child’s magical world, to create a folletto, to write the stories of animals so dear to Maraini. In exploring childhood and the relationship between child and adult, Dolce per sé allows, thanks to the six-year-old addressee at the novel’s opening, for the entry of magic in a mix of seriousness and a lightheartedness in large part absent in Maraini’s work before the 1990s. An example, perhaps, of “il piacere di scrivere” that we can identify in one of the “racconti per bambini” we analyze next, before we move on to the more sinister world and grimmer fairy tale elements of Buio.

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“SPIL, FIGLIA DI NANI” If child protagonists in Maraini’s work have often drawn little scholarly attention, except as victims of violence and injustice, it is not surprising that limited critical attention has been paid to date to Maraini’s “racconti per bambini.” In this section, we will consider just one, “Spil, figlia di nani,” in Maraini’s 2001 children’s book La pecora Dolly e altre storie per bambini. We hope this analysis will demonstrate that Maraini’s children’s stories open another window into Maraini’s literary world. They are worthy of study, and not merely because they reflect the same ethical values and “feminist inclusionary politics,” as Salsini so aptly describes them, that we can find in Maraini’s other writings. “Spil, figlia di nani” takes up Maraini’s concerns regarding children’s plight in the “traditional” nuclear family—that is, consisting of mother, father, and children. “Spil, figlia di nani” also addresses some of the issues regarding representation and perception of girls’ and women’s bodies, girls’ and women’s body image, and their relationship to food. The text hints at eating disorders (which Maraini will address directly from a contemporary, religious, and historical perspective in her 2013 Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della Disobbidienza). But Spil’s story takes shape in an atmosphere that fuses elements of contemporary biotechnology with the picaresque adventures of a homeless young girl protagonist. If Dolce per sé reveals some of the social prejudices against women because of their age, whether like Vera they are considerably older than their lovers or like Flavia they are too young to be noticed by their fathers, then “Spil” takes up the discrimination women are subjected to because of their size. 39 Both texts challenge traditional notions of family as a discreet entity originating and rooted in heterosexual marriage. In Dolce per sé, that challenge comes in the form of Vera’s independence, as Salsini indicates, and in the casual mention of the lesbianism of Vera’s friend Marion, who always falls in love with the wrong woman. 40 Most significantly, it comes in Vera’s own affirmation at the end of the novel, which invokes a more fluid and inclusive sense of familial belonging, a different configuration of family: “Ricordati ogni tanto, cara Flavia, che siamo state amiche, anche se di età così diverse e abbiamo appartenuto, per un tempo breve ma intenso, alla stessa stravagante famiglia” (Remember every once in a while, dear Flavia, that we were friends, even if we were of such different ages and we belonged, for a brief but intense period, to the same odd family). 41 It is precisely this sense of belonging to family that is at stake in the story of “Spil, figlia di nani.” In an oblique feminist revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling fairy tale, “Spil, figlia di nani” takes up the travails of a young girl rejected by her family, and the discrimination girls and women are subjected to because of their size. In this story, both food and

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body size, burning contemporary women’s (but not only women’s) issues in modern culture, and women’s self-esteem in relation to body image, are deflected onto a fairy tale background. Spil, short for Spilunga (a play on “spilungone,” the Italian word for a very tall and thin person), is born to two dwarves who have taken medication in order to produce a taller child; this detail touches lightly on the modern ethical problem of eugenics and genetics, as well as reproductive and other biotechnologies, issues currently taken up by theorists of the posthuman such as Rosi Braidotti. (The title of the collection refers to the cloned Dolly the Sheep.) Spil turns out to be much larger than the family of dwarves had bargained for, and the short story playfully indulges in the exhausting and complicated logistics of feeding and housing the enormous girl child. When the expense becomes too great, the two dwarves decide to sell Spil off. So begins twelve-year-old Spil’s reluctant picaresque adventures with a vendor, a circus, and a widow. In the latter two adventures, Spil is exploited and underfed, giving rise to the topos of hunger, which marked Maraini’s own childhood experience in the Japanese internment camp and figures, in our modern anxieties regarding excessive or inadequate food consumption, as the problem of obesity, anorexia, and other disorders that dominate contemporary headlines. Demonstrating her own loving and needy state, Spil uses her pay from the circus to help her family of dwarves until, comically fired from the circus, she returns to her family only to be sent away due to her size. Indeed, she gives her own mother a fright. Socially marginalized, her labor exploited because of her size, Spil’s plight is rather ironically summarized in her treatment by the widow who takes her in: “La vedova la guardava e dentro la testa faceva progetti per lei che ormai considerava una cosa sua, a metà fra la schiava e la figlia che non aveva mai avuto” (The widow looked at her and inside her head she was hatching plans for her because she already considered her a possession, half-way between a slave and the daughter she had never had). 42 Spil, like many children worldwide, becomes exploitable labor, as dehumanized “cosa.” In addition, the juxtaposition of “slave” and “daughter” brings to mind the age-old and worldwide oppression of girls and women through the exploitation of their labor, while the ideal of the nuclear family is satirized as self-interested, opportunistic, unable to accept or transcend radical differences among its members. Escaping a marriage arranged by the widow, Spil spends three days in the forest, until on the third night she is amazed to discover a house with furniture that is the right size for her. There, a young man, Lazzaro, of her size, falls in love with her and invites her to stay. Although this happy-ever-after seems dissonant to Maraini’s world—but not to her world of children’s stories—the subtext offers a social critique of love as possible only between those who look alike. In fact, even the young man had been rejected by women because of his size. “Non lo vedi che siamo fatti l’uno per l’altra?”

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(Can’t you see that we are made for each other?), Lazzaro asks Spil, hugging her. 43 The play on the word fatti, “made,” alludes to the biotechnological elements of Spil’s conception and Dolly’s cloning. Are only those, the story taunts, made like each other, made for each other? Thus Maraini reworks the familiar social critiques of heterosexual presumption and traditional nuclear family with emerging biotechnologies through the genre of “racconti per bambini.” NOTES 1. For a brief discussion of the some of the controversies surrounding the genre of children’s literature, see note 47 in my introduction for this book. 2. Maraini, “Prolegomena,” Interview by Anderlini, 148. 3. Manson, “What’s Hell?,” 79. Blum, Rewriting the Journey, also briefly notes Maraini’s interest in animals (315n23). For an in-depth discussion of Maraini’s “naturale propensione verso gli animali,” see Ho sognato una stazione, pp. 20 and 17–25. 4. Magris, “A Dacia,” 14. 5. Maraini, “La cipolla,” Interview by Cesari, 46. 6. For one discussion of the genre of children’s literature, see Susan Honeyman, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 7. See Manson’s article, “In Love.” For a discussion of Tota and Giottina, see Paula Dagnino, “Revolution in the Laundry” and Giancarlo Lombardi, Rooms with a View (96–104). 8. Salsini, “Maraini Addresses Tamaro,” 365n9. 9. Maraini, Donna in guerra, 267. 10. Maraini, Mulino, 5. The playful repetition of forms of “riparare” cannot be adequately rendered in English. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Dizionari Garzanti Linguistica, s.v. “riparare,” accessed July 28, 2014, http://www. garzantilinguistica.it/ricerca/?q=riparare%201. My thanks to my colleague, Stella Cantini, for her help with the translation of this word play. 15. See Manson on the crow (“In Love”). 16. The story of the donkey, exposed to the snowy elements this time, appears in Dolce per sé (81), as does Romano. Significantly, Vera writes, “Poi un giorno è morto e di questo dolore non mi sono ancora consolata” (Then one day he died and I have not yet recovered from that pain) (124). 17. This is an excerpt from Avvenimenti, republished in Gotti et al.’s Romanzi, racconti, storie, poesie, filastrocche _ : Voci contemporanee femminili per ragazzi, which lists Dacia Maraini as a writer of children’s literature (18). 18. Maraini, Ho sognato, Interview by Paolo di Paolo, 16. 19. For an excellent study on Dolce per sé in the genre of the epistolary novel as a “disobedient text,” see Salsini, “Maraini Addresses Tamaro.” 20. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 168. 21. Salsini, “Maraini Addresses Tamaro,” 365n9. 22. Setzkorn, “Gender Differences,” 210. Many thanks to Stephanie Groenke with her help in translating this text. 23. Ibid., 211. 24. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 168. 25. Sapegno, “Oltre,” 54. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 55.

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28. It is interesting that the critics Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Testaferri take up the idea of pleasure by including it in the title for their collection of essays, The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini (2000). For further reflection on this notion in Maraini’s work, see Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 147. 29. Salsini, “Maraini Addresses Tamaro,” 361. 30. Setzkorn, “Gender Differences,” 212. 31. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 130. 32. Ibid., 131. 33. Ibid., 174. 34. Ibid., 181. 35. Ibid., 77. 36. Ibid., 184–85. 37. Ibid., 185. 38. Salsini, “Maraini Addresses Tamaro,” 354. 39. Vera addresses the disapproval generated by the age difference between herself and Edoardo (121). Yet, the reverse, older men with much younger women, is common, socially permissible, and even aspirational in many countries, including Italy, as we can see from former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s recent escapades. Regarding Flavia, Setzkorn notes that Flavia’s father thinks little girls should be silent (212). For Maraini’s reflection on the uncharted territory of girls’ desire, see Un clandestino a bordo, published the year before Dolce per sé. We will explore this notion further in the next chapter. 40. See Maraini, Dolce per sé, 126. 41. Ibid., 185. 42. Maraini, “Spil,” 131. 43. Ibid., 139.

Chapter Five

The Reconstruction of Cronaca Nera Buio

Although Buio won the prestigious 1999 Premio Strega, it has generated few critical analyses to date. Yet Buio’s complexity calls for close readings that will both situate it within Maraini’s opus and signal new directions in Maraini’s work. In this section, we will seek to reframe Buio through an analysis of some of the stories that reveal the importance of the theme of childhood in this text, a common thread, as we have seen, in Maraini’s work through the 1990s. To say that Buio is a collection of short stories about victims whose survival is threatened or who often do not, in fact, survive, is to say nothing new about Maraini’s work. Over the decades, Maraini has given her readers a veritable legacy of memorable victims, from Isolina to Marianna Ucría to Angela to Angelica to Colomba, not victims of natural causes or terminal illness, but of preventable human acts of violence triggered by social and psychological mechanisms that Maraini continues to explore and condemn in her work. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld describes Buio as “a collection of short stories inspired by acts of violence against women in the new, multi-ethnic Italian society.” 1 Cannon characterizes Buio as “a volume composed of twelve stories of sexual violence against women and children that takes its departure from recent news reports.” 2 Yet the volume does not limit itself to women and children, as it includes several male protagonists among its victims (Paolo Gentile, Ahmed) and a number of adolescents. Nor does every story include instances of sexual violence (for example, “Muri di notte,” “Numeri sul braccio,” and “Chi ha ucciso Paolo Gentile?”). Yet our long trajectory of feminist or gender-based scholarship on Maraini, and the book jacket itself, continues to condition and limit our critical perspectives. For 73

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example, Sumeli Weinberg characterizes Buio as “una raccolta di dodici storie di bambini ed adolescenti” (a collection of twelve short stories about children and adolescents), while in fact only about half of the twelve stories focus on children or adolescents. 3 Blum too notes that it deals with “the issue of violence against children, especially the kind that is ordinarily perpetrated within the supposedly sheltering bosom of the domestic walls.” 4 And the book jacket itself leads us astray: “Dodici storie che raccontano della violenza sull’infanzia e sull’adolescenza” (Twelve stories that recount violence in childhood and adolescence). Other visual framing devices from the book jacket further contribute to this misapprehension. The reproduction on the front cover is from Georges de La Tour’s painting, Le jeune chanteur, and Francis Bacon’s quote on the back cover reads, “Gli uomini temono la morte come i bambini temono il buio” (Men fear death as children fear the darkness). The first stories are about children, and all serve indeed to increase our impression, as we read through the collection, that we have entered the world of childhood, the new terrain in Maraini’s fictional world. In this chapter, we will focus on those stories that deal with children and on the connection between children and adults that we also saw in Dolce per sé. 5 While each story of Buio deserves analysis, we will limit our study to seven of the stories: “Il Bambino Grammofono e l’Uomo Piccione,” “Viollca la bambina albanese,” “Alicetta,” “Ha undici anni, si chiama Tano,” “Il pastore Ahmed e le tre ragazze nel bosco,” and “Un numero sul braccio” and “Ombre.” It will be useful to our study to understand how representations and narrative functions of children that we studied in the previous chapter differ from representations in Buio, and how Buio differs from Maraini’s previous works. Buio, as we have said, stretches the borders of Maraini’s narrative world by including exploited male figures, and identifying the victimization of oppressed male populations, namely migrants and homosexuals. Significantly, Buio begins with a short story about a little boy, rather than a little girl, thus expanding the gendered borders within which scholars have often enclosed analysis of Maraini’s writing. In addition, Buio is the reconstruction of “fatti di cronaca vera” (crime news) into “libera narrazione” (free narration) (inside front of 1999 hardcover book jacket). 6 Maraini tells us, “In Buio [. . .] sono partita da uno scarnissimo fatto di cronaca. ‘Una nonna porta la nipotina di sei anni a prostituirsi.’ La notizia era così, povera e nuda. Meglio per me che ho potuto fare partire l’immaginazione” (In Buio [. . .] I started from a bare bones crime fact. “A grandmother brings her little sixyear-old granddaughter to prostitute herself.” The news item was just like that, scanty and bare. Better for me because I could give my imagination free reign). 7 As in Isolina, Maraini reconstructs these stories by transposing news into narrative genre, thereby promoting empathy through genre transition, by humanizing and adding depth and range to the victims of tragedies like those that we routinely read or hear about in the news. Frequent and routine occur-

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rences and daily reporting of these tragedies anaesthetize readers to the horror by repeated exposure. The fait accompli aspect of news reporting also contributes to viewers’ complacent perception of such horrors as inevitable and unpreventable acts of human violence, as tragedy that cannot be remedied. In Buio, Maraini exposes the complex social lacunae and attitudes that help to create these tragedies. She highlights, through suspense and dramatic irony, the spaces, the opportunities, in which action could and should have been taken, and, by extension, the steps that can be taken in future to prevent such tragedies. As always, Maraini is interested in how social and criminal mechanisms of neglect and abuse work, and how they can be stopped or deflected—in short, the mechanisms that threaten survival. Unlike the representations of children in her children’s stories and in Dolce per sé, in Buio there is a jarring absence of filters that could serve as buffers between the reader and the protagonist’s plight. That is, these tragedies, taken from “fatti di cronaca nera,” cannot be conveniently and comfortably relegated to the presumably unreal and magical dimension of fairy tale or children’s literature. Nor are these events seen through the filters of memory and nostalgia as in Dolce per sé. Buio offers a jarring and harsh narrative reconstruction of real-life events. The language, we are told in the front inside of the book jacket, is “scarna, sobria, essenziale” (spare, sober, basic). It portrays the fate of marginalized children in Italian society, a fate that reveals the hypocrisy of a predominantly Italian Catholic society whose values are avowedly rooted in the importance of family and children. Unlike the distancing mechanism of cronaca nera reportage, in Buio violent events and exploitation of children strike the reader, yet again, with the immediacy and impact of present tense, a tense in which each act is imagined to be happening at the time in which the reader is reading. The violence is further highlighted by the specific profile and vulnerabilities of the child character of Buio. We can best identify the characteristics of Buio’s child protagonist by contrasting them to images of children in Maraini’s work before the 1990s. Although Maraini herself admitted in 1984 that there were few children in her writing, children were not entirely absent from Maraini’s earlier work. Yet they serve very different narrative functions than the figures of children we have studied so far. In Maraini’s earlier work, children serve primarily as canvases of social conditioning, simultaneously victims of an unjust society and socialized, uncritical future perpetrators of these very injustices. This function is epitomized in a famous episode in Maraini’s 1975 Donna in guerra, in which five of the children in the protagonist Vannina’s classroom of forty eight-year-olds imitate a gang rape, turning it into comic theater for the others. That the rape scene takes place in a classroom targets Italy’s educational system as a compromised social structure that fosters the reproduction and diffusion of mechanisms of class and gender injustices against society’s weakest members. While Vannina’s class looks on in amusement,

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four boys straddle the smallest girl, who is also one of the poorest children in the class: “Al centro dell’arena, sdraiata per terra, c’era Maria Stella, e sopra di lei quattro ragazzini urlanti [. . .] Poi improvvisamante ho capito: mimavano uno stupro” (At the center of the arena, lying on the ground, was Maria Stella, and on top of her four screaming little boys. [. . .] Then suddenly I understood: they were miming a rape). 8 Yet Maria Stella seems flattered by her star role. The scene, coming as it does after Vannina’s many adventures, serves to prod Vannina into action, to openly confront and discuss the incident with the children, rather than passively ignore it, as she might have done before her transformative experiences. This is one example of how children in Maraini’s earlier works function to reveal the conditioning and corrupting process of socialization. A few years later, in 1981, Lettere a Marina presents brief images of two devouring little boys. Their mother, Basilia, knows “[che] sono egoisti fino all’omicidio che vogliono succhiarla e pestarla. [. . .] Anzi quasi se ne compiace: ieri sera Mauruccio mi ha tirato una bottiglia in faccia” ([that] they are egotistical to the point of homicide that they want to suck her dry and beat her. [. . .] In fact she is almost gratified: last night Mauruccio hurled a bottle at my face). 9 Even the first images, almost a decade later, in La lunga vita di Marianna Ucría of the public hanging, show us a little girl, very much a victim, yet simultaneously co-opted by the privileges of her social class, her innocence contaminated by her jealousy of her father’s attentions toward the young criminal. MARAINI’S BUIO: THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF INNOCENCE Innocence is the figurative mark of childhood. This can appear both trite and, culturally speaking, true. In the arts, the connection between innocence and childhood enjoys a long tradition. In Italian poetry, Giovanni Pascoli, who developed a poetica del fanciullino, and Giuseppe Ungaretti, who laments the death of his son in Il dolore (1947), are two of the most famous contemporary Italian writers to have elaborated childhood innocence as a poetic topos. Innocence, most readers would agree, is dramatically absent in Maraini’s work. Her characters of all ages are in some way complicit with society’s oppressions. Even the little Flavia, in Dolce per sé. Vera writes, “A Flavia non piace che sua madre si dedichi a qualcosa che non sia lei, anche questo può sembrare egoista. Vedo da come la guardi, tua madre, che sei abitata dall’ansia del possesso” (Flavia doesn’t like her mother to devote herself to something that is not her, and even this can seem egotistical. I see how you watch her, your mother, that you are inhabited by the urge to possess). 10 But

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innocence is the novelty of Buio, created through the figure of the child (as well as the idealized Suor Attanasia we analyzed in an earlier chapter). As Sumeli Weinberg notes, in Buio, the young suffer greatly from abuse, yet “nonostante la degradazione, non perdono mai la loro innocenza” (despite the degradation, they never lose their innocence). 11 This overarching innocence allows the character development of a victim who is quintessentially vulnerable and defenseless, young and uncorrupted, at the mercy of corrupt or faulty social, religious, legal, and political structures that are responsible for his/her protection. By creating sympathetic and vulnerable characters, seen in some stories through the eyes of the compassionate and sensible commissioner from Voci, Adele Sòfia, Maraini shortens the Brechtian distance usually wedged between her readers and her characters to create a poignant collection of explicit emotional charge. Buio’s quintessential victims—Grammofono, Alice, Agatina—are injured or destroyed by the neglect or violence of the people and social structures responsible for protecting them. Innocent children thus provide an excellent canvas on which to track the social mechanisms in the perpetuation of abuse, destruction, and violence, as well as the internal, psychological mechanisms of self-destructive behavior that make children trust abusive adults, for love, acceptance, or survival. In Buio’s children, we see the repercussions of an unjust or indifferent social order. Let’s begin by considering the construction of innocence in the opening story, a particularly memorable one about a little boy named Gram. The first paragraphs immediately depict Gram’s vulnerability through descriptions of his youth, his size, and his isolation. Gram is seven, small for his age, and his loving but too young mother, who is only twenty-three, sometimes playfully trips him, the first warning bell for readers that Gram lives in an unsafe environment. Although Gram’s father is never home, the tenderness with which both his neglectful parents treat him sharpens our perception of his vulnerability and lovability. We further learn that his parents leave him alone for hours and that he is allowed to sit on the balcony but is forbidden to leave the house. On the balcony, acutely lonely, he watches and becomes deeply invested in the plight of the pigeons in the street that manage to fly away before the cars can run them over. The balcony is both enclosure and exposure for Gram. On the one hand, he is trapped on the balcony. On the other hand, he is exposed to public view, with no adults to supervise him. His absent parents, his solitude and his fascination with the pigeons he watches from the balcony enable him to transform, as if in a fairy tale, the sinister stranger who throws pebbles onto Gram’s balcony to get Gram’s attention into a pigeon man. Yet in the harsh reality of a cronaca nera–inspired narrative, in the absence of magic, no transformation is possible. The young boy’s imagination, his inability to separate reality from his own fantasy, and his inability to recognize danger,

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all serve to intensify the drama of his vulnerability and his trusting nature. Every day the boy goes out to the balcony to see the pigeon man, until finally the stranger’s pigeon-like come-hither gesture has the boy running outside to join him. Predictably, violence, rape, and homicide ensue. The image of the balcony can be expanded into a metaphor of the social structures that enclose and that therefore should protect the little boy. The family is, of course, always the first, easy target of a failed social structure, treated in contemporary society as if it were an all-powerful structure. Within the family unit, the majority of the blame for the child would fall on the mother. However, given that Gram’s mother was herself only a child when she had Gram, this family unit, like most of the family structures in Buio and in much of Maraini’s work, will prove inadequate to protect Gram. The toolate involvement of the baker calls into question the role of the neighborhood, il quartiere, as the responsibility shifts to larger surrounding social structures or communities. The baker is aware of the parents’ neglect of Gram and the boy’s vulnerability, but resists the temptation to get involved and call the police. What, we wonder, about the school system? Why isn’t Gram in school? The circle of neglect widens incriminatingly. The police investigators draw up a list of culprits based on the baker’s information about the criminal’s car. Ironically, the police rule out, despite the evidence, the social worker who is working on Gram’s case, a social worker who, chillingly, also works with children with Down syndrome, the very social worker, Paolo Crinale, who is responsible for Gram’s abduction, rape, and death. Only at Adele Sòfia’s insistence is Crinale questioned and caught. A deeper reading of this apparently simple but grim fairy tale–like short story reveals narrative patterns common to subsequent stories. In these stories, the social structures—family, school, neighborhood, police and social services, national and international legal systems—meant to protect children fail miserably to do so. They fail so badly that innocent young imaginative children like Gram sit exposed to danger on a balcony. The social structures meant to protect children, educate them, cure them, instead harbor insidious threats. The children’s helplessness and guileless innocence serve, in contrast, to highlight the social structures’ inadequacies and corruptions. Finally, often, as in Gram’s case, an animal or toy animal functions simultaneously as the child’s talisman and safety blanket, and the vehicle for the solution of the crime, as in the cases of Gram’s pigeon, Viollca’s teddy bear Malek, Alicetta’s ochetta di legno, and Agatina’s cerchietto di papere. Favorite toys or animals emblematize childhood innocence, and the tragedy of its untimely loss, and fire the imagination. For the children in Buio, these emblems of childhood innocence effect a stark and poignant contrast to the violence, sexual abuse, and exploitation they suffer at the hands of adults,

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and to their bodies’ and minds’ immaturity and unpreparedness for the imposition of adult sexual relations. Viollca is a case in point. In “Viollca la bambina albanese,” Maraini condemns the international relations that contribute to illegal border crossings, which in turn permit the illegal trafficking in child prostitution, or, more accurately, child sexual slavery and the rape of the child’s body. This short story takes up several long-standing concerns in Maraini’s narrative and essays: prostitution; the desire of girls; and the destructiveness of maternal, caretaking figures co-opted by self-interest, advanced in this short story by women’s collaboration with international underground criminal organizations. Maraini’s studies in prostitution date at least as far back as the 1970s and enduring essays on the problems and legalization of prostitution can be found in La bionda, la bruna e l’asino. Prostitution also figures in one of Maraini’s most famous and produced plays, the internationally renowned Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (1973). 12 Maraini also writes about prostitution, including legalized prostitution, in Un clandestino a bordo, in the section entitled, “Corpo in vetrina,” in which “quella merce vivente” (that living merchandise) stands in a shop window in Amsterdam. 13 Maraini asks, leaving the reader to read irony or straight talking into her words, “Ma cosa ci faceva quella ragazza in vetrina nel centro di una città evoluta come Amsterdam, in mezzo a persone che si considerano, a ragione, fra le più avanzate all’interno del grande progetto democratico europeo?” (But what was that girl doing in a shop window in the downtown of a city as evolved as Amsterdam, among people who rightly consider themselves among the most advanced within the grand European democratic project?). 14 In this essay, Maraini points out how prostitutes must put “‘a dormire il cervello’” (“their brain to sleep”), 15 and, in the end, Maraini takes a position against prostitution and its legalization, not out of moral judgment but because of their limiting effect on a discovery and elaboration of the most profound desires of the female body and of an erotic language not imposed by others: “Certamente è stato molto importante per il femminismo teorizzare la liceità della prostituzione [. . .] Ma a questo punto viene fatto di chiederci: veramente ci dobbiamo accontentare della normalizzazione del male? Non potremmo volere qualcosa di più ambizioso che riguardi i desideri più profondi del corpo femminile tornando ad elaborare un eros dalla capacità mitopoietica non imposta da altri, dal linguaggio carnale elaborato in proprio?” 16 (It has certainly been very important for the feminist movement to argue for the legality of prostitution. [. . .] But at this point we must ask ourselves: should we really be satisfied with the normalization of evil? Couldn’t we ask for something more ambitious that takes into account the most profound desires of the female body by rethinking an Eros that is characterized by the capacity of

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creating myths not imposed by others, by a carnal language which we ourselves have constructed?) 17 However debatable the freedom of adult prostitutes to choose their line of work, in the case of child prostitutes, choice is a moot point. In I giorni di Antigone: Quaderno di cinque anni, in the article, “Bimbe violate e vendute: lo scandalo sono le leggi inapplicate,” Maraini discusses the plight of girls sold into sexual slavery. She condemns the facile, fatalistic and resigned attitudes buttressing public tolerance of prostitution, rooted in (false) assumptions of its endemic social nature and inevitability, and offers a brief synopsis of the 1968 battles for the right of adult women to work as prostitutes. Maraini then moves on to decry the proliferation of child prostitution, or more precisely, child slavery. The story of Viollca in Buio dramatizes the condition decried in this article, in which “queste baby-prostitute [. . .] si vendono sfacciatamente davanti a forze dell’ordine e politici, nelle strade più frequentate delle nostre città” (these baby-prostitutes [. . .] shamelessly sell themselves in front of law enforcement officers and politicians, on the busiest streets of our cities). 18 Maraini decries the lack of enforcement of the international laws protecting minors. Viollca’s case also dramatizes the many cases of very young immigrant prostitutes inveigled into Italy from Albania and Romania and then trapped by prostitution rings. Such reports constantly make the headlines and their frequency can serve to numb the public to the human plight and condition of these victims. Maraini’s narrative reconstruction attempts to dramatize their condition as a way to mobilize public opinion against their exploitation. Readers first see Viollca, who has not yet turned twelve, in her home in Albania, as her parents are about to send her off to make money for items such as, ironically, her eventual marriage, and the roof on their house. That they are aware of her final destination is clear in the “minigonna” (mini-skirt) she wears, and the unfamiliar, high-heeled shoes that her mother buys her. That parents receive money in exchange for their daughters (like Spil’s dwarf parents) becomes clear in the later beating of her roommate, Cate, whose accuser claims to have paid “tre milioni” (three million, in lira, Italy’s preEuro currency) to her father. 19 This level of desperation and poverty raises a number of questions, such as: What are our responsibilities toward countries in such dire poverty and desperation? What are the responsibilities of the bordering “progressive” countries that prey on the misfortunes of their desperate neighbors, and provide a sex slave market for their children? The sexual exploitation and abuse of young girls is a recurrent theme in Maraini’s work through the 1990s and beyond, for example, in Voci (1994) and later, in 2004, in Colomba. Another story of migrant child prostitution gives title to Maraini’s 2009 collection, La ragazza di via Maqueda, underlining what is for Maraini an imperative concern. This concern may be in part

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fueled by some autobiographical experiences, which appear in the first pages of Bagheria, when Maraini as narrator recounts her return to Italy after the concentration camp experiences in Japan. She is about ten years old. Maraini writes, tongue in cheek, “Ero molto amata dai marines americani, ricordavo loro le figlie bambine lasciate a casa. [. . .] Uno di loro mi amò al punto da portarmi in camera sua [. . .] dopo avermi mostrato le fotografie della figlia di sei anni, cominciò a toccarmi le ginocchia” (I was much loved by the American marines. I reminded them of their little daughters left behind at home. [. . .] One of them loved me to the point of bringing me to his room [. . .] after having shown me the photos of his six-year-old daughter, he started touching my knees). 20 Later in the novel, Maraini returns to the issue of child sexual molestation 21 as remembered through second-wave feminist consciousness-raising practices. The issue arises again in several stories of long-term incestuous child abuse. 22 Child molestation is taken up more directly by Maraini in her chapter, “Corpo di bambina, un” in clandestino a bordo. Abandoning narrative filters for essay, Maraini here recounts, “Ricordo le molte volte che mani di ragazzi, di uomini, mani anche amiche, hanno cercato di sollevare, scoprire, carezzare, carpire qualcosa del mio piccolo corpo di bambina facendomi capire in modo più o meno esplicito che se c’era un desiderio che contava non era certo il mio. [. . .] Ma le bambine sono dotate di desiderio sessuale”? 23 (I remember the many times that hands, hands of boys, hands of men, even friendly hands, tried to expose, to uncover, to caress, to snatch something of my child’s body, giving me to understand, more or less overtly, that if a dominant desire existed, it certainly wasn’t mine. [. . .] But are little girls endowed with sexual desire?) 24 And later: Se esiste un desiderio delle bambine nessuno si è mai curato di dare ad esso un nome. Per le scrittrici del passato, le sole che avrebbero potuto raccontare questo desiderio, la sessualità era un tabù letterario. Oggi la sessualità infantile femminile è diventata un tale oggetto di commercio da tenere lontane le interessate. D’altronde, se si parte dal presupposto che una donna è portatrice di una sessualità passiva, cosa possiamo pensare di una bambina? sarà l’assenza stessa di ogni eros, il vuoto di un corpo cavo, pronto solo a riempirsi del malcapitato e infelice desiderio altrui. 25 If little girls do indeed feel desire, no one has ever bothered to give it a name. For the few women writers of the past, the only ones who could have written about this desire, sexuality was a literary taboo. Nowadays early female sexuality has become so commercially exploited that it keeps those interested at a distance. However, if we start from the assumption that a woman is the bearer of passive sexuality, what are we to think of a little girl? She will represent the

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In the short story of Viollca, Maraini offers a narrative dramatization of this phenomenon, dramatizing the cronaca nera of international trafficking in children, the sexual slavery and daily rape of illegal child migrants, and the Italian sociocultural context that makes this trade possible. Viollca’s story shows the dehumanizing effects of this contemporary international problem by humanizing Viollca, the migrant other, thereby accentuating the horrors that she is subjected to, and soliciting empathy from her readers. 27 Though not mute like Marianna Ucría, Viollca is, like her, virtually silent throughout the short story. She does not speak until she is freed at the very end. Her voicelessness symbolizes adults’ disregard for her desires and developing subjectivity. We hear instead the voices of her parents as she is leaving Albania, of her traffickers, of the violent leaders of the prostitution ring, of the two women in charge of her, of her roommate Cate, and of Viollca’s clients. Yet, ironically, though Viollca remains silent, we enter Viollca’s world through language, the Albanian language that is translated into Italian in the story’s dialogues, thus making her plight more vivid to the reader. All of these speakers serve to create for the reader both Viollca’s native Albanian and clandestine foreign (Italian) sociopsychological contexts, while the young protagonist is relegated to a state of extreme passivity, denied or stripped of any agency, entirely acted upon. One might conjecture that Viollca’s mother might have taken her place if the Italian sex market had not clamored for young girls. As Peppino Pizzocane in Donna in guerra (1975) says about the foreign tourists’ need for Italian male prostitutes: “Porco diavolo, se non c’era la domanda non ci stasse l’offerta no?” (Hell, if there was no demand there’d be no supply, right?). 28 Invoking the law of supply and demand, Pizzocane blames the buyer for the prostitution of the male islanders, ironically calling the foreign female tourists, “puttane” (whores), unaware that the same supply-demand implications hold for centuries-old female prostitution. If there were no demand, there would be no supply. In the previously mentioned article in I giorni di Antigone, published thirty years after Donna in guerra, with many articles and much research on prostitution in the intervening years, Maraini determines, regarding child prostitution, “A questo punto il discorso non può che spostarsi sul cliente” (At this point the discussions cannot but move to the client). 29 She asks why “buoni padri di famiglia” (good fathers) take advantage of this “prostituzione minorile” (prostitution of minors). She asserts, “Bisogna che l’intero Paese e soprattutto i clienti si prendano carico di questo problema essenzialmente etico. Non si può diventare complici dello stupro quotidiano di bambine messe nell’incapacità di reagire o di difendersi” (It’s necessary that the whole country and especially the clients take

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charge of this essentially ethical problem. We can’t become accomplices to the daily rape of little girls put in the position of being unable to react or defend themselves). 30 Viollca is caught from the very beginning in this market for little girl prostitutes (“baby prostitutes”), sold to men who do not care to ask and prefer not to wonder how underage foreign girls are made sexually available to them. Reflecting the larger theme of border crossing, Viollca’s drama is summarized in her fragile liminal position between childhood and adulthood, as exemplified in her own psychological and physical condition as she teeters on her unfamiliar high heels on the border between childhood and puberty, and in the double fantasy of child and prostitute that she must fulfill for the market into which she is sold. Viollca’s liminal position is exemplified in the initial image of Viollca still at home in Albania: she is holding her favorite teddy bear, Malek, and wearing the high-heeled shoes her mother bought her. The shoes reveal her mother’s efforts in preparing Viollca for her future role and indicate her mother and father’s complicity; her mother promises her she will be rich. 31 When Viollca climbs into the car that will transport her, she slips off her heels, only to be told, “non sei più una bambina [. . .] sei una signorina elegante, in minigonna, coi tacchi alti” (you are no longer a little girl [. . .] you are an elegant young woman, in a mini-skirt, in high-heeled shoes). 32 In the car, she is told to say that she is seventeen, but shortly afterward, child terminology reminds the reader of her youth, “Avrebbe voglia di fare pipì” (She would like to pee). 33 Once Mà, the madam, dresses the two girls up, Viollca does not recognize herself, but sees a “donnina buffa” (a funny little woman) and she and her roommate, Cate, look like “due personaggi di fumetto porn” (two characters from a porn cartoon). 34 The marginalized position of these girls is further exemplified in the beautifully lit streets of Rome in winter, shop windows decorated for Christmas, which they see from the car that takes them to the bordello. The scene simultaneously reinforces the girls’ exclusion from society, from this season of magic for children, and reminds the reader of their stolen childhood. The indifference of the world to their plight is there also in the blockade that the car seamlessly passes through, for “I poliziotti [. . .] non rivolgono nemmeno uno sguardo alla macchina con le due bambine” (The policemen [. . .] don’t even spare a glance at the car carrying the two little girls). 35 When the ringleaders realize they cannot pry Malek from her, they claim, “E poi non è detto che non piaccia di più così, attaccata al suo giocattolo. Fa più bambina” (And it’s possible that she will be more appealing like this, attached to her toy. It makes her more of a child). 36 In fact, to the clients, Viollca is supposed to say that she is ten. Her first client, in fact, calls her, “la mia bambina” (my little girl). 37

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As Sumeli Weinberg has noted, the children in Buio, including Viollca, certainly never lose their innocence, evidenced in their child-like perspective. Her first client’s penis looks to her like a “salsiccia” (sausage), while sperm is “qualcosa di bianco che le sporca le calze” (something white that dirties her pantyhose). 38 With every encounter, her teddy bear ends up symbolically under the bed, but after each act Viollca simply picks him up, dusts him off, kisses him, sings to him the lullaby, poignantly, that her mother sang to her. Malek alone can keep her from crying, thus symbolizing the effort that it costs her to suppress her reactions, her emotions, her desires. When one client pays 700,000 lire for her virginity, he screams, “vieni” (come), which prompts her to think, “Ma dove?” (But where?). 39 The sexual connotation of the word is lost to her, and this underlines the absurdity of his demand for her sexual climax in his role as her rapist. The scene we are called to witness is an unadorned, unglamorized, traumatic rape. The trauma is further compounded by the fact that Viollca is too young to process sexual experiences, to understand them, and therefore to participate in them; she is too young to have them. In fact, because of the pain she experiences, Viollca “si fa di sasso” (turns to stone). 40 Her pain is intense. Her legs grow cold, “il ventre pure è gelato e di sasso” (her belly is also frozen and turned to stone). 41 Her experiences produce a growing numbness, alienation and distance from the events happening to her and around her. They serve to petrify, to arrest, her psychosexual development, as metaphorically summarized in the stones, like a growing weight she must heave around with her. While Cate, the fourteenyear-old, deadens her senses with pills and whisky, Viollca cuts off her senses. When Cate cries after having been brutally beaten, “Viollca si tappa le orecchie con il palmo delle mani e sprofonda in un gelido sonno minerale” (Viollca plugs her ears with the palms of her hands and falls into a frozen mineral sleep). 42 Viollca has been brutally shown that her desire does not matter; it has not been allowed to develop. Her numbed puzzlement continues until the very end when an undercover agent frees the girls, and Viollca wonders, “Per andare dove? e con chi? e di Cate che ne sarà? ma non osa fare domande” (To go where? And with whom? And what will become of Cate? But she doesn’t dare ask questions). 43 When the commissioner, Adele Sòfia, who appears frequently in Buio’s criminal cases, caresses her head, promising “Quei due li prenderemo” (We’re going to catch those two), the reader is left with a vivid understanding of the damage that international criminal organizations and sex markets have wrought on the individual through Maraini’s re-elaboration of a common occurrence of cronaca nera. The recurrent motif of the sexual abuse of little girls is taken up again in the third story about children, the fifth story in Buio, “Alicetta.” This story resumes the critique of mental health institutions taken up by Maraini in other earlier works, such as the plays, Zena (1974) and Stravaganza (1987). Alicetta is a nine-year-old girl, orphaned when her parents die in an automo-

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bile accident, who lives with her grandfather. In Alicetta, Viollca’s muteness is accentuated, for Alicetta’s grandfather brings her to the clinic because she cannot talk. As in the previous stories, Maraini manipulates the story through the narrator’s perspective, for we hear Alicetta’s story through the first-person testimony of one of her nurses, Mirta, who in fact sees and cares for her every day, but never realizes that the little girl is being sexually abused. We the readers don’t realize the extent of the abuse and neglect that Alicetta has undergone until we finally realize that we have read the testimony of someone, Mirta, who was “al buio” (in the dark). The beginning of the story effectively draws the reader into this point of view, making him/her a blind participant, like Mirta herself, exemplifying how abuse can take place yet remain unseen, undetected, unsuspected. This narrative strategy of retrospective realization makes the reader, as well as Mirta and Alicetta’s grandfather, feel responsible by the end of the story. It extends beyond the narrative to implicate the reader. Ironically, the only ones who hint at Alicetta’s abuse are the inmates, who use suggestive metaphors to refer to the abuse she suffered. In fact, Adele Sòfia’s investigation reveals that Alicetta was pumped with sedatives; that she died of starvation because she was too drugged to eat; that she was never really examined by a psychologist; and that she was repeatedly sexually abused by two men who brought her to take her baths, even though clinic regulations prohibited male nurses from taking female patients to the bath. All these are indications that Alicetta, especially in the few months her grandfather could not visit her due to a back injury, fell through the cracks. She was neglected and abused, marginalized by the mental health structure that should have protected her and helped her regain her health and her speech. Alicetta’s toy, her talisman, the ochetta di legno, found in possession of one of the two criminals, reveals the identity of the perpetrators, who are initially condemned and then absolved, and who deny until the end their wrongdoing. “Bastava una parola, Mirta, una sola parola e Alicetta sarebbe ancora viva” (One word, Mirta, just one word, and Alicetta would be alive today), says Alicetta’s grandfather. 44 BUIO AND THE PRESUMPTIONS THAT BLIND In this host of characters who demonstrate deliberate or involuntary ignorance of the abuse around them, no character more powerfully dramatizes both types of ignorance as the mother of four children abused by their own father in “Ha undici anni, si chiama Tano.” If, in this mix of willful and involuntary blindness, il stare al buio, the baker in “Il Bambino Grammofono e l’Uomo Piccione” told herself, “Non ti impicciare” (don’t get in-

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volved); 45 if Viollca and Cate’s parents claimed to know nothing of their daughters’ plight when contacted by the authorities at the end of the story; if Mirta judges herself to be “sorda e cieca” (deaf and blind) 46 to Alicetta’s plight, no protagonist is more culpable in this regard than Signora Giuseppe Tognetto, who cannot and will not see what is happening in her own home in front of her very eyes. This story is reminiscent of the complicity and incestuous rapes in Voci. Tano’s story is the longest short story in Buio, covering forty pages. The story reads like a cross between diary and police log, with its dated and timed entries, and the investigative narrative of Inspector Marra, colleague of Commissioner Adele Sòfia (from Voci) who appears in many of the stories in Buio to propel the investigations and solutions to the crimes. In Tano’s story, the length of the fabula increases the verisimilitude of the plot (syuzhet) which covers almost three years. It also increases the story’s suspense, pitting the threat of the imminent risks to the survival of the criminal’s children against the agonizingly long wait for justice, a justice that does not take place until one of the youngest children, predictably, is murdered by the father. While Marra and Sòfia investigate the crime, the narration reveals both the psychological mechanisms of self-protection and the social prejudices that hinder the discovery of the truth, obstruct the investigation, and interfere in the protection of the children by the structures that are meant to protect them: the legal system, social services, and so on. The story explores the individual mechanisms and social presumptions—that is, the psychosocial context—that allows the perpetration and perpetuation of abuse, incestuous pedophilia, and paternal filicide. The young Tano files a complaint of sexual violence against his father. Initially, his revelations are met with skepticism by Inspector Marra, whose teenage son is going through a rebellious stage and whose sympathies immediately fall, in a blinding stroke of over-identification, with Tano’s father. Marra considers that his own son, given his current “stato d’animo sarebbe perfino capace di andare a denunciarlo, non importa di cosa, pur di dargli fastidio” (state of mind he would be capable of going to denounce him, for whatever, just to annoy him). 47 Marra’s personal problems diminish his professional clarity. Then the social workers discredit both Tano and his siblings’ accusations because the social workers are seduced by the father’s good looks and charm and his stated concern for his children’s well-being. The charm of the criminal is a recurrent motif in Buio and recalls l’affascinante mondo dei padri coined by Sumeli Weinberg in her 1993 monograph on Maraini. Tano’s father is so successful that the social workers unquestioningly blame the children for the sexual precocity that the father accuses them of. In fact, Clementina’s testimony is discredited by both a male and female social worker, because of her precocious and suggestive dress, which displays the

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entrenched gender prejudices that equate a woman’s dress with her morality and respectability. Both social workers say she dresses and acts like “una puttana” (a whore), 48 “una prostituta.” 49 The oldest brother is discredited because he is an alcoholic. The attempts to further discredit Tano’s courageous truth and testimony occur on the level of dramatic irony. The social workers and inspector are willing to swallow whole what the reader knows is false. Marra suggests that it’s books that have “infiammato il cervello [di Tano]” (inflamed [Tano’s] brain), 50 a tongue-in-cheek reference to a long Italian tradition of il libro galeotto that ranges from Dante’s Canto V of the Inferno to Boccaccio’s Decameron to Foscolo’s Le ultime lettere di Iacopo Ortis to Maria Messina’s La casa nel vicolo and beyond. Tano declares that, on the contrary, books have given him clarity and courage. The reader, like Tano, also identifies as an outlandish lie his father’s sly, obfuscatory strategy of accusing his accuser—his son—of the crimes of which he himself has been accused. Within the family, the method by which Luigi Bacalone controls his family is fear. This is enabled by Italian society, as represented in Marra and the social workers’ recommendation and approval of corporal punishment of children. The license to hit the children allows Luigi to intimidate them with threatening evidence of his capacity to kill them. All, including his thin, fragile wife, are terrified of him. In addition, Tano’s siblings do not denounce their father, because he is the family’s sole breadwinner. Complicit, whether deliberately or not, is his wife, who, according to her older daughter, pretends not to see her husband abusing Clementina. However, Giuseppa’s incredulity, her blindness, rests entirely on the fact that she cannot believe her husband is a “finocchio” (fag), an argument that he also uses to absolve himself. She uses the fact that he makes love with her nightly as proof of his innocence. Both Giuseppa and her husband consider it more acceptable for him to take advantage of his five-year-old daughter, rather than have sex with boys. Even after Giuseppa is entirely convinced of her husband’s culpability, she claims that for him to molest his daughter “è più normale” (is more normal). 51 Adele Sòfia asks, pointing to the deep set social prejudice against homosexuality, “Per questo lo proteggi, contro ogni evidenza? per non ammettere che è un finocchio? ma è più grave ammazzare il proprio figlio o essere considerato un finocchio?” (Is that why you protect him, against all evidence? In order not to admit he’s a fag? But is it worse to kill your own son or to be considered a fag?). 52 DARKNESS SAVES ME Ahmed’s story, “Il pastore Ahmed e le tre ragazze nel bosco,” takes up the dismantling of deeply imbedded social prejudices, specifically prejudices

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against migrants in Italy, while offering an interesting twist to the leitmotif of darkness. Maraini’s strategy in this story is one of progressive straniamento (defamiliarization); that is, the narration leads us down a comfortable, predictable path, which we discover to be a false path, as in the case of Alicetta’s story, which initially “seen” through Mirta’s eyes must later be retrospectively reconstructed by the reader for accuracy. This sleight of hand—or rather, perspective—requires the manipulation of readers’ possible preconceptions, cultural assumptions, and prejudices about illegal Arab migrants; it plays with the reader’s tendency to other. 53 While the title might lead us to expect the migrant to be the criminal, the first paragraph surprises the reader with a sketch of an idyllic, pastoral Arcadian refuge of simplicity and innocence: “Un giovane pastore dalle dita unte di grasso se ne sta seduto sotto il fico a mangiare pane cipolla e cacio. Vicino a lui un gruppo di pecore si sta difendendo dal caldo all’ombra di un carrubo. Il silenzio avvolge i rari rumori e li isola in un mare di felpa” (A young pastor with greasy fingers sits under a fig tree eating bread onion and cheese. Near him a group of sheep have found shelter from the heat under the shade of a carob tree. The silence envelops the occasional noise, isolating it in a sea of fleece). 54 The incongruity of such a peaceful beginning within Buio’s framework of everyday crime alerts us that the peace and tranquility cannot but be short lived. In fact, the scene acts as a parody of itself, for we know that it cannot but contain the seeds of the crime. We know that it is likely the scene for the crime. At the same time, on a cultural level, the initial vision offers us a stereotype of a poor shepherd from a developing country, another parody of itself, as we realize that he is a “lavoratore clandestino” (illegal worker) “[che] teme le voci umane” (who fears human voices) thus conferring further significance on the silence that is soon to be broken by an unusual noise. 55 Ahmed is afraid of thieves, but also of people who wish to use him to “sindacare sulla sua condizione di lavoratore clandestino” (criticize his condition as illegal worker). 56 He is the victim of both well-wishers and wrongdoers. Any attempt to uncover his identity poses a threat to him, as does the gender and cultural confusion he feels when he glimpses three girls, two with shaved heads and one with a pony tail, in hiking gear. Ahmed begs “Allah perché non gli faccia vedere ciò che sta vedendo” (Allah not to let him see what he is seeing). 57 Although “ciò” (what) can be interpreted as the state of (as perceived by Ahmed) brazen undress of these girls, its ambiguity lends mystery, since the reader cannot be sure “ciò” that Ahmed sees. The word becomes invested with double meaning as the story unfolds to be retold finally at the end by one of the survivors. Ahmed’s vision of the girls ends with, “E come per incantesimo, i suoi occhi, sebben spalancati, non distinguono più lo spessore degli oggetti ma fissano ciechi e vuoti il buio davanti a sé” (And as if by magic, his eyes, though wide open, no longer distinguish

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the thickness of objects but stare blind and empty into the darkness before him). 58 Ahmed is the obvious suspect, all his denials notwithstanding, when two of the teenage girls are raped and killed. Donatella Lumi, the only girl who escapes, suffers from short-term memory loss and cannot remember what happened. Over the course of the investigation, the toy talisman, one of Donatella’s missing silver teddy bear earrings, sheds some light on the crime, though not enough to convict the criminal. Adele Sòfia finds the missing earring in the home of Ahmed’s employer, the lawyer Tronci. Both the clandestine worker and his employer are released after two months due to lack of evidence. Finally, six months later, Donatella recovers her memory and identifies the lawyer Tronci as the rapist and killer. The initial silence of the pastoral scene, interrupted first by an unusual sound and then by the visual shock for Ahmed of the three girls, includes no mention of the lawyer. Thus Maraini sets the reader up by playing on cultural prejudices against migrants, only to deploy a ray of irony against the Italian lawyer who commits the crimes. The first of these ironies is that it is a lawyer, the keeper of justice, who is corrupt, which, by metonymic extension, implicates the system of justice he represents. Tronci flouts laws to employ “un lavoratore clandestino” whom he then accuses of the crimes he himself committed by appealing to social prejudices and stereotypes and calling him “un vagabondo, un selvaggio” (a vagabond, a savage). 59 Secondly, this Italian lawyer, though apparently modern with his “capelli lunghi dietro le orecchie, il corpo atletico” (his long hair behind his ears, his athletic body) shows a prejudice toward the girls’ dress and behavior that becomes violence, and that he attributes, convincingly, to Ahmed. 60 Tronci claims, “D’altronde, quelle ragazze andavano in giro sole, mezze nude, con quelle magliettine scollate, senza reggiseno. . . . Un uomo che sta sempre solo, a digiuno, in mezzo alle pecore, che cosa può fare?” (After all, those girls were going around by themselves, naked, with those low-cut little T-shirts, braless. . . . What can a man alone, without food, surrounded by sheep, do?). 61 And later he refers to “quel tipo di ragazze alla moda, che si rapano i capelli, che si vestono da uomo e, appunto, non portano reggiseno, non mi stupirei che se la facessero fra di loro” (those kinds of trendy girls, who shave their head, who dress like a man, and, in fact, don’t wear bras, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting it on with each other). 62 These prejudices against what Tronci perceives as the girls’ gender bending and disruptive sexuality show that the most entrenched and most old-fashioned attitudes toward women, as well as anti-gay prejudices, are held by a modern, athletic, educated Italian professional man, with hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. Thus, the protective buio of Donatella’s trauma-induced short-term amnesia becomes the protective darkness that saves the young Ahmed’s life, the

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black shadows in front of his eyes. Both young protagonists were victims of the trauma and both narrowly escaped—survived—with their lives intact. Ahmed is victim of the national and international conditions that induce his migration; of the miserable and isolating conditions of his (pastoral) work environment; of the prejudices of his host society; of a prejudiced system of social justice; of a false accusation; and of the (witnessed?) rapes and homicides that cause, for him, perhaps the same amnesia Donatella suffered from. The story ends, “Quindi era vero quello che aveva detto Ahmed Zhusi: Allah lo aveva reso temporaneamente cieco per salvargli la vita” (So what Ahmed Zhusi said was true. Allah had rendered him temporarily blind to save his life). 63 THE CHILD IN THE ADULT As we noted in the introduction, Maraini affirms in a 2003 interview, “il mio discorso va a tutto il mondo che sta ai margini” (I address the whole world that is at the margins). 64 The victims in Buio are at the margins of society. Gram inhabits a fringe space, symbolized by the balcony, in his community, his family, his society. Alicetta is put in a clinic. The clandestine Moroccan migrant worker is relegated to the woods. At the same time, characters like Ahmed, Viollca, and Suor Attanasia (who was analyzed in an earlier chapter) also reluctantly find themselves at the center of a dangerous and contested physical, religious, cultural, and legal crossroad. Like the girls in Ahmed’s story and Paolo Gentile, they live at the juncture where codes regarding social, gender, and sexual behavior or religious and political beliefs clash. Crossing borders into others’ territory is often fraught with danger; this dark juncture is where crimes are committed in the dark. (For a literal darkness, see the short story, “Muri di notte.”) If crossing of borders is a theme in some of these short stories, we can identify a positive example of it in the fluid way in which many adults in Buio exhibit endearing childlike tendencies. Gram’s mother, we are told, “sembrava la sorella del bimbo, vestita come una tredicenne” (seemed like the little boy’s sister, dressed like a thirteen-year-old). 65 The commissioner Adele Sòfia has a predilection for licorice and has a “provvista di liquorizia per bambini” (supply of children’s licorice). 66 Donatella’s silver earring is in the shape of a teddy bear in “Il pastore Ahmed e le tre ragazze nel bosco.” Beyond the endearing characteristics, what do these parallels or similarities between child protagonists and childlike behavior in Buio’s adult protagonists imply? For one, in many of the stories, the adults demonstrate the same inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact as the children. Gram’s mother, for example, dismisses Gram’s story about the pigeon man as a fantasy. The social workers and inspectors are hoodwinked by Tano’s father.

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We can find more clues about the overlap, the fluid movement, between adult and children’s behaviors in Dolce per sé. One pertinent example in Dolce per sé alludes to the future Buio: Vera’s comments about the relationship between Vera’s lover Edoardo and Flavia’s father Arduino, who are brothers. Vera explains in a letter to Flavia about the brothers’ secret language as children, in an exploration of what it means to be brothers, sisters, family. “Quando sono insieme tornano bambini” (When they are together, they become children again), Vera explains, and later adds, “Non hanno dimenticato le notti in cui hanno dormito abbracciati, da bambini, per la paura del buio” (They haven’t forgotten the nights as small children in which they slept in each other’s arms, for fear of the darkness) (italics ours). 67 This ability to “tornare bambini” (become children again) provides a contrast to the topos of aging, while both themes are connected in Vera’s penultimate letter to Flavia: “In ogni donna fa capolino una bambina che cocciutamente vuole rimanere tale. [. . .] La pelle può anche mettere su le grinze, può diventare tanto sgualcita da ‘dare la voglia di stirarla’ come hai detto tu una volta parlando della tua bisnonna. Ma la bambina continuerà ad occhieggiare sotto maglie, camicie, sottovesti, collane di vetro. Quella bambina che si stupisce, che sorride timida, che spia preoccupata, che si meraviglia dolcemente di quello che vede” (In every woman peeks the little girl who stubbornly wants to remain so. [. . .] The skin may develop wrinkles, it may become so creased that it may “make you want to stretch it” as you once said about your great-grandmother. But the little girl will continue to peep out under sweaters, shirts, slips, glass necklaces. That little girl who is amazed, who smiles timidly, who worriedly spies, who marvels sweetly at what she sees). 68 In the last pages of Dolce per sé, Vera writes, in an extension of the narrative “I” in which Flavia and the writer become fused, Tu stai crescendo con una tale rapidità, Flavia, che io non so più a chi sto parlando. Non so nemmeno se quella bambina sia semplicemente una parte di me che si aggancia timidamente ai bordi della memoria di un corpo che invecchia. Noi appariamo agli altri con una sola immagine, limitativa e parziale. Mentre nel nostro corpo le varie età convivono senza ordine, la bambina con l’anziana, il giovinetto con l’uomo maturo. Siamo una folla, come diceva Pessoa, e un solo nome ci sta stretto. 69 You are growing up so fast, Flavia, that I no longer know who I’m talking to. I don’t even know if that little girl is simply just a part of me that grabs timidly onto the edges of memory of an aging body. We appear to others as a single image, limiting and partial. While in our body the various ages live without order, the little girl with the elderly woman, the lad with the mature man. We are a crowd, as Pessoa used to say, and a sole name fits us too tightly.

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The motif of the coexistence of past and present that lives in our present (and past and future) self already surfaced in Il treno per Helsinki and Isolina. This motif, as the coexistence of all stages of human development, sets the stage for the two final analyses of Buio, but also, as we will see in the final chapter, for the postmodern chronological fragmentation in the fabula of the novel, Colomba (2004). In Buio, two stories offer an intriguing interplay between adult and child characters: “Ombre” and “Un numero sul braccio.” “Un numero sul braccio” is set in Argentina and tells the story of an encounter, fifty years after the Holocaust, between a survivor of Auschwitz and her “carnefice” (persecutor). A professional woman and an Italian, Mara Grado arrives in Argentina to help her daughter, who is about to deliver her third child. While in Argentina, Mara meets a shopkeeper whom she recognizes as Hans Kurtmann, the SS officer from Auschwitz, where Mara was imprisoned when she was fifteen. This coincidental encounter gives rise to a number of horrifying flashbacks, in which Mara reexperiences her past as both victim and witness. Maraini’s own childhood suffering in a concentration camp for antifascists in Japan during World War II has helped fuel Maraini’s interest in concentration camp experiences. Auschwitz will resurface tangentially five years after Buio in Colomba (2004), where a character visits Auschwitz looking for a dear childhood friend who was deported by S.S. soldiers. Once there, the best that she can do is “rinunciare a qualsiasi parola, qualsiasi gesto” (renounce every word, every gesture). 70 (This “disappeared” person is reminiscent of los desaparecidos of Argentina, the setting for “Un numero sul braccio.”) Regarding the fate of her beloved childhood friend, “Sandra non lo sa. E nemmeno l’autrice” (Sandra has no idea. And neither does the author). 71 The theme of the Nazi concentration camp will take center stage a few years after Colomba in Maraini’s novel, Il treno dell’ultima notte (2008). Unsurprisingly, in these works, Maraini focuses on childhood suffering and how it marks adulthood. “Un numero sul braccio,” an apparently simple short story, is structured around complex narrative structures and strategies. Maraini distorts time as she offsets the Holocaust as historical phenomenon against Mara’s personal experience of the Holocaust. Through the dramatic affect of this paradigm, Maraini addresses ways in which the past encroaches upon and conditions the present and future. The story is organized around the technique of sdoppiamento, the doubling common to Maraini’s fiction. 72 In this short story, sdoppiamento occurs both within characters and between characters, and increases the interplay between adult and child. So Mara the grandmother is set against her own younger self, as well as her murdered friend Marlene, while the former S.S. soldier is set against his own disguises, his duplicity, and a little boy he led to the gas chambers.

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Mara’s two grandchildren and the third who is about to be born exist in the dimension of her present and her future. It is the voice of Hans Kurtmann, disguised as Georgy Ricciotto the shopkeeper, which propels her backward into the past and generates terrifying flashbacks even before she recognizes him. Paradoxically for the reader, it is Georgy’s kindly voice that works like a whip against her legs, recalling for Mara the cut of his whip, fifty years before, against her mouth, which Mara relives with vivid clarity. Georgy/ Kurtmann’s voice triggers memories of his past brutality, while its false kindliness reminds her of his duplicity in the camp. Knowledge of his capacity for duplicity fuels Mara’s renewed, present terror of him. Mara recalls his murder of two victims who function as Mara and Kurtmann’s narrative doubles. The first, Marlene, her only friend in the concentration camp, was, significantly, the same age as Mara. Kurtmann killed Marlene before Mara’s eyes, subjecting Marlene to an incomplete, agonizing death. Mara reminds him now, “tu le hai sparato un colpo in testa. Ti ricordi come moveva le gambe? Non riusciva a morire. E tu non hai voluto nemmeno sprecare una seconda pallottola. Hai continuato l’appello mentre lei agonizzava lì per terra davanti a tutti noi terrorizzati” (you shot her in the head. Do you remember how she moved her legs? She couldn’t die. And you didn’t want to waste a second bullet. You continued the roll call while she agonized on the ground in front of all of us, who were terror-stricken). 73 This traumatizing sight rendered Mara a victim through her role as witness, and symbolically marks a brutal killing of a part of Mara herself. The brutal murder of her fifteen-year-old friend is a moment frozen in time—a moment in which a life stopped—for Mara, while Mara’s own children and present and future grandchildren contrast with, and thus further underscore, the loss of her friend’s future. Mara’s flashback of a little boy named Hans whom Kurtmann gently led from the train to the gas chambers reveals Kurtmann’s treacherous duplicity and the source of Mara’s present fears, as if fifty years had not passed. Kurtmann’s duplicity, evident in his voice, “la stessa voce gentile” (the same kind voice) of Georgy Ricciotto, hides an underlying, disguisable brutality: “Hans Kurtmann dopo avere consolato il bambino, lo accompagna, sempre tenendolo per il polso, ai bagni” (Hans Kurtmann, after having consoled the child, takes him, holding his wrist, to the baths). 74 The use of the present tense also underlines the Holocaust’s ubiquitous presence in time. 75 Lo sdoppiamento of Kurtmann and Hans, the innocent child, surfaces in Mara’s telling and reconstruction of her memories, which become the testimony of the witness, a testimony that also functions as a face-to-face confrontation, and as accusation. Mara confronts Kurtmann with his crimes, denouncing his duplicity: “‘Hans.’ ‘Come me,’ hai detto. E l’hai portato per mano verso le docce” (“Hans.” “Like me,” you said. And you led him by the hand toward the showers). 76 Mara’s flashbacks compel the reader to bridge time and

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witness the killing of the individual child Hans within the collective gaschamber killing of children. We can ask, as Susan Rubin Suleiman does when analyzing Marcel Ophüls’s film, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie: “is the parallelism ironic[?],” given that one Hans grew to a ripe old age, and the other was killed as a child by the former. 77 At the same time, we are left with the provocative idea that Hans Kurtmann leads to the gas chamber and destroys, with each child, the Hans in himself. To quote an earlier work by Suleiman, who in turn quotes Wayne Booth, “‘You—you loyalist torturer—are actually destroying your own self. Since selves overlap—not just metaphorically but literally—it is clear that you are destroying not just the life drama of the tortured one but of your own soul as well.” 78 In yet another sdoppiamento, time circles back and Mara the adult struggles not to succumb to the memories of herself as the young Mara, helpless victim, and thus to her redoubled fear of being killed by Kurtmann now and of being sucked back into the past: “Aveva fatto di tutto [. . .] per non farsi divorare da quel sinistro passato [. . .] il ricordo si fa drago [. . .] si fa lupo e la insegue impietoso” (She had done everything she could [. . .] not to be devoured by that sinister past [. . .] the memory becomes a dragon [. . .] it becomes a wolf and chases her pitilessly). 79 Regaining composure, Mara finds the courage to tell Kurtmann about her role in bringing war criminals to justice and confronts him with their efforts to find him after the war. Georgy Ricciotto, however, refuses to acknowledge his past identity as Hans Kurtmann, S.S. officer. He exploits the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon, relegating it to the other side of the intervening half century, to a remote past, in order to reinvent himself and his identity, in dramatic contrast to Mara’s own vivid and menacing reexperiencing. Only when Mara reveals her number tattoo does Kurtmann acknowledge his identity, but then only to separate from it. He refuses to acknowledge the way that past, and his crimes in it, have conditioned Mara’s memories, her psychological well-being, as well as his own life of many disguises and interrupted futures. The ongoing individual and collective catastrophe of the Holocaust is tattooed into her skin. The final dialogue between Georgy/Hans and Mara brings to the fore many ethical issues, which have surfaced in Buio and are quickly debated here by the two protagonists. In particular, “Un numero sul braccio” debates the ethical dilemmas of responsibility, guilt, regret and forgiveness, as well as the ethical tensions between military and moral duty. That these issues were in the air around the time of Buio’s publication is evidenced by several factors. One is that in 1998, in Rome, which has been Maraini’s residence for many years (although she does much of her writing in her home in the Abruzzi mountains), at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, a UN conference took place that gave rise to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which established an internation-

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al court in Hague that has jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. In 2002, several years after the publication of Buio, the PMLA published an issue in which its “Theories and Methodologies” section was devoted precisely to forgiveness, an issue that I found illuminating as I considered my analysis of the stories in Buio and the responsibilities that fall on citizens to prevent, report, or punish crime. 80 In conducting further research for my analysis, I discovered that Susan Rubin Suleiman at the end of her 2006 Crises of Memory and the Second World War takes up, elaborates, and expands upon the fascinating discussion in the March 2002 PMLA in ways that are illuminating to Mara and Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann’s dialogue. Claiming that he has changed, Georgy/Hans asks Mara, “Perché non cerca di dimenticare anche lei?” (Why don’t you try to forget too?). 81 Suleiman, tracing some of the arguments that arise around the late 1990s in texts by such French thinkers as Augé and Ricoeur regarding the necessity of forgetting, delves into the dilemma: Why, then, is the injunction to forget problematic? More exactly, under what circumstances is it—or does it become—problematic, or even reprehensible? One such circumstance is juridical. [. . .] Another circumstance is ethical: the moral authority of an injunction to forget depends on who is pronouncing the injunction. It is one thing if a disinterested party declares the value of moving forward, of not letting the past paralyze one; it is quite another thing if the perpetrator does so. [. . .] The injunction to forget a crime becomes absurd as well as reprehensible when it is uttered by—or on behalf of—the perpetrator. 82

Moving from forgetting to forgiveness, Georgy/Hans asks Mara, after she insists that she wants to see him in prison, “Non sa perdonare ad un povero vecchio malato?” (Can’t you forgive a sick old man?), 83 thereby conflating the personal and political realms involved in the expiation of punishment for crimes. In order to avoid being denounced and punished, Georgy/Hans, shamelessly hypocritical, begs Mara to consider his illness, his old age, his blameless children. At which point Mara demands to know what blame the child Hans had had. The criminals, the assassins, in Buio never once say they are sorry, never once show the regret that some of the thinkers in the PMLA issue and the thinkers that Suleiman discusses consider to be a sign of moral, ethical and psychological growth and good judgment. Suleiman notes that both Kristeva and Arendt share “the notion that in order for forgiveness to occur a change of heart must have taken place.” 84 Nor can healing or transformation occur unless guilt is acknowledged. Like all the criminals in Buio, Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann’s responses to Mara’s interrogation demonstrate that he does not admit his guilt, his culpability; he refuses to take personal respon-

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sibility for his actions. According to Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann, killing the little Dutch boy Hans was his duty, his defense against communist aggression. His justification raises the question of the reasonable limits of military duty. Underlining the fact that he has not changed, Mara accuses him, “Quindi l’ufficiale Hans Kurtmann è invecchiato, ha cambiato nome, ha cambiato paese, ha cambiato lingua, ha cambiato mestiere, e non ha imparato proprio niente, nemmeno a dirsi la verità una volta tanto” (So officer Hans Kurtmann has grown old, he has changed his name, he has changed his country, he has changed his language, he has changed his job, and he has learned absolutely nothing, not even to tell himself the truth every once in a while). 85 Again, like all the criminals in Buio, Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann has never once said “I’m sorry,” as Mara points out to him. Untransformed, unrepentant, Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann responds: “a ciascuno il suo destino” (to each his destiny), 86 claiming that even if she denounces him “nella polizia e nell’esercito molti la pensano come me” (in the police and the army a lot of people think like me). 87 By consigning history to fate, he continues to absolve himself of his responsibility in the fate of the murdered and the fate of those he murdered. He continues to absolve himself of his part in the Holocaust, in Mara’s psychological trauma, while reasserting his own right to carve out for himself—to the very end of his life—new identities, a new life, a future, children, and the right to compassion. Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann’s arrogance, narcissism, lack of repentance, and lack of self-awareness show us that, most frighteningly, he has not changed, merely aged. In this short story, Maraini contributes to the idea that the Holocaust is an irreparable rift in human history, an insurmountable historical phenomenon, still operating today, in Mara’s memory, in her life and imagination, and in Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann’s unchanged convictions. The remoteness of history is here challenged by the enduring present/presence of trauma. Maraini shows how the horrors of World War II Nazism live menacingly on, in different ways, in Mara and in Georgy/Hans, fusing past, present, and future, operating unendingly in Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann’s lack of remorse, in Mara’s memory of Marlene, of little Hans being led to the gas chambers. However, during the confrontation, Mara’s courage grows, from the moment that she confronts Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann with his crimes and her efforts to find him. Her courage grows as their dialogue puts him in a defensive position, as it becomes interrogation, an inquiry into his past and present motives. So, although Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann, as Mara has said, has not changed, Mara herself, through this encounter, has. Mara’s dignified exit comes after these concluding thoughts, “Una pietà orribile per sé, per quel bambino che si chiamava Hans, per questo uomo stupido e arrogante le stringe il cuore in una morsa. Non ci sono parole possibili fra

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carnefici e vittime, pensa, anche dopo cinquanta anni di vita” (A terrible pity for herself, for that little boy named Hans, for this stupid and arrogant man grips her heart like a vise. There are no words possible between victims and persecutors, she thinks, even after fifty years of life). 88 Her ability to seize the moral and psychological upper hand is synthesized in her final gesture, a gesture whose importance is made clear in the level of detail that Maraini provides, a gesture that signals the moment of reversal, of triumph, for Mara. The mouth that he whipped spits at him: “Raccoglie la saliva in bocca e lancia contro il vecchio nazista uno sputo pieno di disprezzo, poi si avvia, dignitosa, verso la porta” (She gathers the saliva in her mouth and hurls spittle full of contempt toward the old Nazi, then directs herself with dignity toward the door). 89 Although Georgy Ricciotto/Hans Kurtmann is still the Nazi he was, merely fifty years older, Mara Grado has conquered, to some extent quite literally, her torturer, by facing down her past in her present. With the triumph of irrepressible human spirit, she expresses her contempt for “il vecchio nazista” (the old Nazi). Thus “Un numero sul braccio,” an apparently simple short story, encapsulates through complex narrative strategies of reconstruction the major ethical dilemmas in Buio: duty, responsibility, regret, guilt, forgiveness and punishment. Suleiman’s question seems pertinent: “are some past histories and memories, whether individual or collective, too painful, too troubling, too present to let go of, to finish mourning for, to forget? And to forgive?” 90 (original italics). The tensions around responsibility, histories, past traumas and memories surface in the final story of Buio, our final analysis of the illuminating interplay between adult and child in Buio. The image of another adult purposefully and purposely leading a child by the hand toward a site of danger, also marked by death, recurs in the opening scene of the last story of Buio, “Ombre,” which shares with “Un numero sul braccio” the techniques of sdoppiamento and overlapping timelines. Grandmother Agata dresses her eight-year-old granddaughter Agatina like a five-year-old and prostitutes her to an elderly client who was once Agata’s own lover. Familiar narrative patterns surface. Like other adults in Buio, the grandmother uses her superior physical strength to kick and pull the reluctant little girl to her destination. The neighbors who greet Agata and Agatina, like the neighbors in Gram’s story, presumably observe them and know or at least suspect the truth but do not intervene. And Agatina, like the children in the other stories, has a little animal talisman, il cerchietto delle papere, which ultimately helps commissioner Adele Sòfia identify both victim and criminal. That the prostitution of children is not merely a modern-day problem becomes clear in Agata’s own memories of her mother taking her in the same way to “guadagnarsi il pane” (earn her bread). 91 So each time Agata leads her granddaughter down the same path she had been led down, she contem-

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poraneously relives her own past child abuse, while passing down this family legacy. Past, present, and future walk down that sidewalk with Agata. This simple image gives rise to many questions: How to break that cycle, the internalized mechanisms of destruction and self-destruction, the cycle of abuse that perpetuates itself through generations, that reproduces itself? Who is responsible? One answer, of course, is the client, as we saw in our analysis of Viollca and in Maraini’s own essays. Interestingly enough, in “Ombre,” Maraini effects the strategy of eliminating the elderly client, who dies in bed, leaving an all-female cast of characters: the grandmother, granddaughter, and later, Adele Sófia. Devoid of a client on which to pin all blame, who then is responsible? Is it the grandmother who cold-bloodedly extracts the 200,000 lire she is owed from his wallet, leaving the collapsed client, once ex-lover, on the floor? Beforehand, she levels an unexpected slap at her granddaughter’s eye, as if in warning not to speak about what she has witnessed. The ending of “Ombre” offers an intriguing ending for the entire collection. At the police station, at the end of the story, at the end of the book, three female characters sit in one room: the commissioner, the grandmother, the child. Strangely, as in the novel Colomba, whose analysis follows in the next chapter, the mother (and father) is missing. Interestingly, the commissioner and the grandmother are about the same age as Maraini herself. It is as if a generation of women is missing. So, in “Ombre,” it is left to the commissioner to break the link, to break the cycle. Convinced of Agata’s guilt through the identification of the symbolic cerchietto con le papere that Agatina left on the client’s bed, Adele Sòfia has Agata arrested. Only to hear Agatina’s heart-wrenching and poignant scream, in the closing line of Buio, “voglio la mia nonna!” (I want my grandmother!). 92 MILLENNIAL EXHORTATIONS To conclude: Buio, published in 1999, is positioned as a millennial exhortation, if we consider its children as classic augurs and symbols of the future. In its focus on children and the child that lives contemporaneously alongside/ inside the adult, Maraini uncovers the social and internal mechanisms that threaten our survival, our future, and advocates for a society in which all, including the weakest and most vulnerable, the marginalized, can live in dignity. As we saw in Buio, the responsibility for society’s ills does not rest solely with the perpetrators of those ills. Society itself, broken down into the many communities in Buio, stubbornly remains “al buio.” It refuses to see and intervene, and so allows, for one, the market for the purchase and sexual exploitation of the child’s body, a sexual exploitation that cannot be consid-

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ered prostitution but, as Maraini’s article in I giorni di Antigone indicates, must be considered, in each act, a rape. 93 Child sexual slavery, as we see in the stories of the Albanian girl, Viollca, and of Agatina, can begin in the family, but is then sanctioned by the communities—the many communities in Buio—that see, but do not speak and do not intervene. These communities’ self-serving apathy—whether indifference, complacency, self-interest, fear, egoism, a lack of civic values, the menefreghismo of “il farmi i fatti miei” (minding my own business)—allows abuse to occur. At the same time, the innocence, guilelessness, and vulnerability that Maraini has inscribed onto Buio’s child-protagonists—rare qualities in Maraini’s protagonists—highlight the destruction of these very characteristics in children and in adults themselves, by adults. Thus the abuse, violence, and sexual exploitation wreaked upon these children is one that each complicit adult, each criminal, is simultaneously wreaking, in psychological if not in physical terms, on him or herself and, by extension, on the entire community. All are impoverished and maimed when the community’s members cannot uphold and sustain a society that can defend the basic rights of its most vulnerable members: the child that may not have the opportunity to grow into the adult, the dead children that Hans and Mara carry inside themselves, the humiliated younger self that lives in Agata. The quote on the back cover by Francis Bacon leads to further reflection on the writer’s role in the promotion of a better future. Maraini said, “Purtroppo, non credo nemmeno che si tratti di cattiveria [. . .] ma di assoluta insensibilità, ovvero di assoluta mancanza di immaginazione. La gente non è crudele per istinto, ma lo è perché non è educata a immaginare la sofferenza altrui” (Unfortunately, I don’t even think it’s meanness [. . .] but absolute insensitivity, or rather, an absolute lack of imagination. People are not cruel by instinct, but because they are not taught to imagine the suffering of others). 94 It is by activating the imagination that the writer intervenes, the imagination necessary to imagine another’s suffering. It is by taking the current event news story, and reconstructing it, re-elaborating it to dramatize the individual’s plight and tie that individual’s plight to the self, to the community. Later in Ho sognato una stazione, Maraini says, “Farsi accompagnare in questo viaggio [“dentro paesi lontani, veri o inventati”] dal personaggio di un romanzo, significa vivere nella sua pelle, vedere con i suoi occhi, sentire con le sue orecchie, toccare con le sue mani, camminare con le sue gambe, e godere e soffrire con lui lungo un percorso che trasforma lui e noi” (To allow oneself to be accompanied on this journey [“inside faraway countries, true or invented”] by a character in a novel means to live in his skin, to see with his eyes, to hear with his ears, to touch with his hands, to walk with his legs, to enjoy and suffer with him along a journey that transforms him and us). 95 So Maraini underlines the importance of reading, of writing, of literature, in the cultivation of an imagination that can generate compassion and empa-

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thy. Francis Bacon’s quote on the back cover of Buio reads, “Gli uomini temono la morte come i bambini temono il buio” (Men fear death as children fear the darkness). Taken from the first line of Bacon’s essay, “Of Death,” the complete sentence reads: “Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.” For Maraini, stories open the eyes and activate the senses. At the end of Dolce per sé, Vera writes, “Solo attraverso la lettura riesco a ‘vedere.’” (Only through reading am I able “to see.”). 96 NOTES 1. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Introduction,” 7. 2. Cannon, The Novel, 59. 3. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 48. Shortly afterward, Sumeli Weinberg refines her characterization, noting that Buio deals with “la vita degli emarginati, degli extracomunitari, dei derelitti, donne quasi sempre” (the life of the marginalized, immigrants to Europe, the destitute, almost always women) (Maraini, “Il femminismo,” 50). 4. Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 315, note 23. 5. I have analyzed several stories about adults in other articles. Chapter 3 of this book included an analysis of Suor Attanasia’s story previously published in my article “The Pregnant Nun.” An analysis of the story on transsexuality and homosexuality, on alternative sexualities, in “Chi ha ucciso Paolo Gentile?” appear in my article, “From Prostitution to Transsexuality.” An analysis of “Oggi è oggi è oggi” appears in “Italian Women’s Journalism and Dacia Maraini.” 6. For more on the importance of newspapers in Maraini’s work, see chapter 2 on Isolina. 7. Maraini, “La cipolla,” Interview by Cesari, 44. 8. Maraini, Donna in guerra, 255. 9. Maraini, Lettera a Marina, 160. 10. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 25. 11. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 48. 12. Of this famous play, Maraini writes, “Dialogo è uno dei miei testi più tradotti: è stato messo in scena in una quindicina di paesi e continua a essere rappresentato ogni anno qua e là per il mondo” (Dialogo is one of my most translated texts: it’s been put on in about fifteen countries and it continues to be put on every year here and there in the world) (Fare teatro 236). The play was recently performed in 2006 in Eastenders Repertory Company’s Six Annual Festival: 100 Years of Sex Acts) http://www.sfbaytimes.com/index.php?sec=article&article_ id=4734. I offer some observations on gender and prostitution in this play in my article, “From Prostitution to Transsexuality.” 13. Maraini, Un clandestino, 72. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 79–80. 17. Translation by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto, Stowaway on Board, 52. 18. Maraini, “Bimbe violate,” 158. 19. Maraini, Buio, 35. 20. Maraini, Bagheria, 8. 21. Ibid., 47. 22. Ibid., 144. 23. Maraini, Un clandestino, 47. 24. Translation by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto, Stowaway on Board, 31. 25. Maraini, Un clandestino, 49-50. 26. Translation by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto, Stowaway on Board, 32.

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27. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld elaborates an analysis of Maraini’s writing that is based on a complex solicitation of empathy through imagination: “Maraini configures in language not the dispersion of self, but a self attuned to others. On the one hand, she produces a phenomenology of immersion, articulating identification as experience and interrogating its dangers and its powers. Not only descriptive, however, her meditation on immedesimazione has normative implications, functioning as ethical injunction against violence: if you experience the world in a certain way, if you experience a body as a life, as lived subjectivity, violence becomes impossible. And it is through the act of writing that the experience of embodiment described by Maraini is negotiated. Writing becomes a moral paradigm of empathy and individuation. All of Maraini’s writing is an indictment of the failure of imagination that creates violence as a mode of mediating difference” (“Body as Will,” 210, original italics). We saw in the preceding chapter that Maraini’s empathy extends beyond humans to animals, too. Regarding people’s blind cruelty toward the suffering of animals, see Ho sognato, 21. Blum sheds more light on the nature of empathy in her consideration of “the role of affectivity in contemporary feminist thought” (Rewriting the Journey, 148). Underlining Diaconescu-Blumenfeld’s notion of “immedesimazione” in Maraini’s work, Blum also notes that empathy has “intellectual and imaginative components as well as ethical implications” (148). 28. Maraini, Donna in guerra, 33. 29. Maraini, “Bimbe violate,” 158. 30. Ibid. 31. See Picchietti on mothers’ roles in socializing daughters. In the short story, the woman who prepares them is called “Mà” and Gabriella, the madam of the bordello, looks, to Viollca, like her mother, and she is tempted to hug her. 32. Maraini, Buio, 24. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. Ibid., 30. 35. Ibid., 31. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 33. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 34. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 35. 42. Ibid., 36. 43. Ibid., 38. 44. Ibid., 84. 45. Ibid., 18. 46. Ibid., 83. 47. Ibid., 96. 48. Ibid., 102. 49. Ibid., 113. 50. Ibid., 103. 51. Ibid., 133. 52. Ibid., 129. 53. Maraini has explored the notion of the Other and the Elsewhere in the introduction of her newest collection, La seduzione dell’altrove (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010). The term “to other” has its roots in postcolonial and feminist discourses. 54. Maraini, Buio, 185. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 186. 58. Ibid., 186-87. 59. Ibid., 195. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 196. 62. Ibid.

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63. Ibid., 201. 64. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 50. 65. Maraini, Buio, 17. 66. Ibid., 131. 67. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 58. 68. Ibid., 168. 69. Ibid., 184. 70. Maraini, Colomba, 64. 71. Ibid. 72. See Testaferri, “De-tecting Voci.” See also Cannon, The Novel. 73. Maraini, Buio, 142. 74. Ibid., 140. 75. In her study of catastrophe, Miriam Fuchs underlines the ubiquity of the Holocaust by quoting the work of Lyotard, and Lawrence L. Langer to underline the fact that “the Holocaust remains perpetually immediate” (8). 76. Maraini, Buio, 142. 77. Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 86. 78. Suleiman, Risking, 241–42. 79. Maraini, Buio, 142. 80. Forgiveness and reconciliation continue to be ongoing issues of international proportions and concern, such as, to name a few instances, in the context of South African Apartheid, and in the Darfur genocidal war of the Hutu against the Tutsi. In that PMLA discussion, Kluger comments, “But in the case of major crimes, such as the Holocaust, there is no way to repay. [. . .] Where the crime surpasses a certain magnitude, we can’t handle it, not with retribution, not with forgiveness” (Kluger, “Forgiving and Remembering,” 312). Along the same lines, Weigel writes, “The last fifty years of history have shown that the events of World War II and of the Shoah will not let themselves be absorbed into the established forms of legal, political, literary, and historiographic treatment, so that a normalization is neither possible nor desirable” (Weigel, “Secularization and Sacralization,” 322). Weigel sees, “The forgiving of the unforgivable as an interruption of the usual, historical necessary forgiveness” (322). 81. Maraini, Buio, 143. 82. Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 225. 83. Maraini, Buio, 144. 84. Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 229. 85. Maraini, Buio, 144. On Maraini’s rejection of revisionism, see her interview with Paulicelli and Ward. Suleiman prefers the word, “negationism.” 86. Maraini, Buio, 144. 87. Ibid., 144–45. 88. Ibid., 145. 89. Ibid. 90. Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 227. 91. Maraini, Buio, 207. 92. Ibid., 215. 93. In 2003, Maraini comments, “Assistiamo ad una crescita incredibile di prostituzione infantile, abusi sul corpo di bambini, sia in famiglia che fuori.” (We are seeing a growth in child prostitution, abuses of children’s bodies, inside the family and out) (“Il femminismo,” 57). For more on the international problem of child prostitution/sex slavery, see her comments in the interview “Il femminismo” (Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 57), and Ho sognato una stazione (Maraini, 101–6). 94. Maraini, Ho sognato, 21. 95. Ibid., 122. 96. Maraini, Dolce per sé, 185.

Chapter Six

Postmodern Reconstructions Individual and Collective Survival in Colomba

A POSTMODERN NOVEL Colomba, published in 2004, is arguably Dacia Maraini’s most postmodern novel. Maraini’s work, such as Il treno per Helsinki, with its dismantling of the illusions of the 1968 movements, and Isolina, with its criticism of the complicities between legal and military systems, demonstrates one of postmodernism’s oft-cited characteristics, Lyotard’s “critique of grand narratives.” Ben Agger explains, “Lyotard argues that the grand narratives or large stories of history and society told by Marxists and others who derive from the Enlightenment need to be abandoned in a postmodern, plural, polyvocal world.” 1 Maraini’s point of view is in these texts deeply informed by her experiences of second-wave feminism and by a feminist perspective, which brings us to the knotty and vexed relationship between postmodernism and feminism. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, discusses the tensions between the primarily parodic nature of postmodern aesthetics and the interventionism that characterizes feminist politics: While it is certainly demonstrable that both feminisms and postmodernism are part of the same general crisis of cultural authority (Owens 1983: 57) as well as part of a more specific challenge to the notion of representation and its address, there is a major difference of orientation between the two that cannot be ignored: we have seen that postmodernism is politically ambivalent for it is doubly coded—both complicitous with and contesting of the cultural dominants within which it operates; but on the other side, feminisms have distinct, unambiguous political agendas of resistance.” 2

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Hutcheon here captures an oppositional tension that in Italy in the past fifteen years has pitted postmodernism against the Italian debate on impegno, a concept that can be translated as commitment or engagement. This debate, whose origins critics have been located in the postwar writings of Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, and, later, Pier Paolo Pasolini, involve discussions on the intersections between art and society and has most recently included such postmodern writers as Antonio Tabucchi. Impegno can be understood, very generally, as the writer, artist, and intellectual’s responsibilities for transforming—changing, improving—society, his/her interventions in society, which was a particularly urgent issue in post-fascist Italy. Elizabeth Wren-Owens begins her recent book on postmodernism and committed writing in the works of Tabucchi and Sciascia by touching on these tensions: In La fine del postmoderno, Romano Luperini argues that recent events, such as the two Gulf Wars, the destruction of the Twin Towers and mass immigration into Italy, require a response from a new type of writer-intellectual, able to use intellectual debate as a means of addressing contemporary issues. [. . .] Luperini suggests that such discourses have been absent since the mid 1970s, with 1972–73 marking “la progressiva scomparsa della figura dello scrittoreintellettuale” [(the progressive disappearance of the figure of the writer-intellectual)]. [. . .] Luperini [. . .] laments the growth of the new generation of writers such as Antonio Tabucchi, “nati dal culto postmoderno dall’intertestualità e dal citazionismo colto” [(born from the postmodern cult from intertextuality and from erudite citationism)]. [. . .] Luperini’s assertion that a new breed of intellectuals is required to confront the contemporary socio-political climate underscores a belief that from the mid 1970s until 2005, writers have failed to offer a sustained engagement with society. 3

These observations leave us to wonder how some discussions of impegno somehow sidestep or discount the legal, social and political contributions of the second-wave Italian feminist movement and Italian women’s experimental writing. However, Jennifer Burns addresses the impegno debate from the early postwar era and includes women writers such as Fabrizia Ramondino. Burns claims that Ramondino “is not a feminist writer, and as I have said, there is no coherent feminist tradition in post-war Italian literature.” 4 Considering Ramondino as “only broadly representative,” Burns concludes that Italian women writers do have “a specific contribution to make to the notion of impegno.” 5 Roberto Bertoni addresses some “politically engaged” novels from the 1990s in his brief analysis of impegno and “the change in literary attitudes to politics in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s.” 6 He includes Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa in his analysis and notes that “ideological commitment survived in feminist narrative.” 7 Maraini is aware of this debate in contemporary society, as her following words testify. Meditating on the complex relationship between evil and responsibility, and the effects of

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crimes on their victims, she says, “una cosa è la punizione e un’altra l’osservazione di quelle zone sotterranee della sensibilità umana in cui il dolore prende le forme più varie e complicate. Che responsabilità ha lo scrittore in tutto questo? si chiede qualcuno. L’impegno consiste solo in un semplice atto di testimonianza o gli si chiede qualcosa di più? E’ difficile dirlo. Non ho risposte sicure. Ma per me scrivere ha sempre significato anche testimoniare e prendere posizione.” (Punishment is one thing, and quite another is the observation of the subterranean areas of human sensitivity in which pain takes on the most varied and complicated shapes. What is the writer’s responsibility in all this? some ask themselves. Does commitment consist of just the simple act of bearing witness or is even more asked of the writer? It’s hard to say. I don’t have any sure answers. But for me writing has always meant bearing witness and taking a position) (italics ours). 8 Blum identifies a way out of the “definitive impasse” of postmodernism’s “demystifying the assumptions of all value-systems and ultimately undermining the basis for constructive political agency” through a focus on “vital tensions:” Most notably, these tensions are between postmodernist approaches, which would seem to preclude any move toward change, and approaches such as the identity politics of feminism and postcolonialism, which have adopted postmodernist strategies (e.g., the interrogation of the politics of representation) to reconfigure the postmodern landscape and infuse it with constructive energies, thereby affirming the value of experience and exploring the inextricable links between individual stories and collective history. 9

In fact, Colomba fuses Maraini’s impegno with postmodern aesthetic techniques; she fuses her attention to “the real” and to “denunciations” of social problems, to use again Cruciata’s characterizations, with a playful rendering of metafictional discourse and history. Colomba fuses Italy’s collective histories, in which the “grand narrative” is critiqued and deconstructed through the postmodern technique of fracturing and fragmentation, with stories of individual characters affected by those many histories, by their fracturing and by their legacies of failure. Mary Klages explains the “critique of grand narratives” in this way in her Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed: “Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors ‘mini-narratives,’ stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern ‘mini-narratives’ are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.” 10 In Colomba, Maraini in fact shows us the collision between the damaging and failed illusions of the “grand narratives” of history and the “mini-narratives” it has spawned. Yet we might also say that with Colomba, Dacia Maraini, informed by her feminist perspective, writes a postmodern novel in the form of a national

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epic that is immediately deconstructed and stripped of any pretensions of “grand narratives” from the very first page of the novel by its meta-narrative framework, one in which the author is visited by an imploring character-inneed-of-an-author to find her missing granddaughter. With this encounter, Maraini, as we will see, parodies some (male) Italian literary giants, like twentieth-century author and playwright, Luigi Pirandello and Renaissance writer, Ludovico Ariosto, whose epic poem, Orlando furioso, is quoted often in her novel. In addition, by reworking and subverting the theme of the quest in Orlando furioso, in which the unrequited lover Orlando combs the forest for Angelica, Maraini also parodies and reworks the genre of the epic story. In Colomba, the quest through the forest for the missing Colomba, Angelica’s daughter, is undertaken by Colomba’s grandmother, Zaira. As we will see, Maraini also incorporates the interwoven storylines and magical figures characteristic of the epic genre into her novel. Let us move now to an analysis of the multiple stories of Colomba, in which the reader must reassemble, reconstruct with Antigone’s ethical gesture, a postmodern epic novel of fragments and mosaics of history and time. THE MISSING CHARACTER This monographic study, whose second chapter was dedicated to an analysis of Isolina, the story of the search for a missing woman, ends full-circle, with an analysis of the story of the search for a missing woman in Colomba, published about twenty years after Isolina. In Colomba, Maraini circles back, after twenty years, to offer a new narrative slant on the leitmotif of the missing person/missing character in her work. Published after a decade of novels and short stories on maternal and childhood narratives and themes, and several collections of children’s stories, Colomba marks a lighter, more whimsical and self-referential direction in Maraini’s narrative trajectory, one that is, notwithstanding its lighter tones, no less ethical in its scope. Isolina and Colomba share many similarities. Both works bear the title of their missing female character, and both characters are young women, one nineteen years old and one twenty-two, whose societies enable their exploitation by the men these women love. Both texts are structured around the search for the missing character, and thus, around an absence. The plots retrace the unique path that leads to the characters’ disappearance, as “Cani di Roma” traces the unique path undertaken in Telemaco the dog’s search, through smell and sight, for his missing friend, Blob. Or better, the plots of Isolina and Colomba reconstruct the unique path that pieces together both the profile and the plight of the missing character, from what is left of her, as in Voci. Yet that path, as we saw in Isolina and as we will see in Colomba, does not merely retrace disappearance and recovery. It also reveals the injustices,

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prejudices, and blindness that enable or cause the disappearance, the mechanisms that threaten survival. Both texts investigate the social, legal, historical, and familial contexts—or better, the gaps and insufficiencies—that enable the characters’ disappearance, while reconstructing that path to locate the (body of the) title-giving character, to reconstruct what we (don’t) know about her life. The differences between the two texts are more marked than their many similarities. In the case of Isolina, the missing character is historical, someone who lived and died, however ephemeral the traces of her brief existence. In the case of Colomba, the missing character is an avowedly fictional one who functions as a metaphor for the human and ecological crises of Italy’s present and future, and represents the mystery behind such human disappearances. The two texts also differ in their endings, which condition the entire story: in Isolina the character has been dead for almost eighty-five years, killed brutally, and the ending reveals the injustice of the sentencing that exonerated her murderers in order to preserve the military’s honor. Colomba, on the other hand, is found alive at the end of the novel, prompting the autobiographical author-narrator-character to query in surprise, “Un lieto fine? E’ una sorpresa inaspettata.” (A happy ending? It’s an unexpected surprise). 11 Yet the precursors of a happy ending, another example of the new “pleasure of writing” for Maraini, are there from the very first sentences, as we will later see. Colomba reworks and transforms several other aspects of the earlier Isolina. As we saw in chapter 2, the journalist who is also the first person narrator in Isolina fuses with Maraini herself. In an autobiographical stroke, the text obscures the boundaries between the roles of journalist, narrator, author-ascharacter, and Maraini the living author. They collapse into one and the same character, one who undertakes the search for Isolina; becomes an investigative journalist; uses investigative journalism to inform the text she will write and to shape its hybrid genre; reconstructs the initial investigation; and exposes the mechanisms of gender and class biases as well as the political wrangling that corrupt the legal system and newspaper reporting and result in the willful erasure of Isolina. In Colomba, instead, Dacia Maraini creates a third-person novelist, referred to by an epithet in the style of the epic poem, la romanziera (or la donna) dai capelli corti, whose presence throughout the novel anchors the reader to the relentlessly meta-narrative framework of the novel. (Throughout this chapter, we will generally refer to this author-as-character as la romanziera.) La romanziera dai capelli corti also demonstrates many autobiographical overlaps with Maraini, including her short hair and the fact that she, like Maraini, is ostensibly writing this very novel, as in Isolina. A further autobiographical reference is la romanziera’s father calling la romanziera by Dacia’s family nickname, Cina (23). 12 Most importantly, the meta-

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narrative framework is both reinforced and transcended as la romanziera positions Colomba within her own recent writing and career trajectory, which is recognizably Maraini’s. In fact, la romanziera broods over her languishing, unfinished novel about the story of a young woman (here named Sandra) in search of her childhood Jewish friend who disappeared in 1944 and may have died in a concentration camp. This is the plot of the subsequent Il treno dell’ultima notte (2008). La romanziera also discusses her writer’s block and the distractions and interruptions to her ongoing project on the Holocaust. Among these interruptions are her novel on her mother’s diaries (a reference to La nave per Kobe); her dialogue with a famous actress (a reference to Piera e gli assassini); and the temptations of writing theater, for which Maraini the author is occasionally commissioned. And now, la romanziera tells us, she is trying to resist this new interruption: the character, Zaira, who is Colomba’s grandmother, and the inspiration that will lead la romanziera to write the novel we are presumably reading, Colomba (20). All Maraini’s literary accomplishments are here framed as interruptions to the narrative project of Il treno dell’ultima notte, a novel that is, once again, about a missing (presumably fictitious) character. These postmodern novelistic techniques, which work to collapse the boundaries between the author-as-character and the living author, point the reader to the act of writing, to the meta-narrative dimension in which the novel takes place, while simultaneously referring the reader outside the narrative framework to the ongoing career of internationally renowned, bestselling author Dacia Maraini herself. In addition to autobiographical references, the novel’s use of time also contributes to this collapse, as we saw in Isolina, because the time of the writing often seems to coincide with the time of the author-as-narrator-and-character, la romanziera, who follows her main character, Zaira, in her own imagination. In fact, la romanziera “osserva apprensiva il suo personaggio [Zaira]” (apprehensively observes her character [Zaira]) 13 as if the act of seeing and writing were one, as if she is writing as she is seeing. Furthering the illusion of this overlap/collapse of time, we imagine Maraini and la romanziera together—as two, as one?—at their computer as we read, “Le dita si posano rapide sui tasti del computer. La macchina fa sentire in sordina la sua presenza elettrica con uno sfrigolio fastidioso. Gli occhi, solo gli occhi, hanno le ali [. . .] volano attraversano i vetri e vanno incontro alla foresta che respira inquietante” (My fingers settle, rapid, on the computer keys. The machine transmits the dampened sounds of its electrical presence with an annoying hiss. The eyes, only the eyes, have wings [. . .] they fly through the windows and head for the forest that breathes, disquieting). 14 The national forest here refers to the mountains in the Abruzzo region of Italy, where the novel is set, where Maraini has a home, and where she often prefers these days to write. Yet the apparent overlap between the time of writing of the novel we are reading, Colomba, and the time of la roman-

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ziera’s writing, which contributes to the illusion that Maraini and la romanziera are one, comes into question just a few pages later as la romanziera “chiude gli occhi. Non vorrebbe assistere a un combattimento feroce” (she shuts her eyes. She doesn’t want to watch a ferocious battle). 15 Here she is referring to an ancient battle, which took place in this forest outside her window in 295 BC, yet which she is seeing—or trying to resist seeing—in her imagination. Although her eyes are closed, it takes place “davanti ai suoi occhi” (in front of her eyes). 16 The sounds of the battle reach her as she wonders where her feverish imagination and her “smania di entrare nei libri di storia e non saperne più uscire” (compulsion to enter into history books and not know how to get out) will take her. 17 The passage swings between seeing and not seeing, until battle’s end: “Quando riapre gli occhi è tutto finito: l’esercito safin è stato sbaragliato” (When she reopens her eyes everything is finished: the Safineis army has been routed). 18 In a clear reestablishment of the boundary between the time of fiction and the time of writing, la romanziera struggles with the direction of her imagination while Maraini writes about her character’s struggle. This tension echoes a seminal essay by the Nobel Prize–winning writer and playwright, Luigi Pirandello, whose influences are evident in Colomba. In “L’Umorismo” (1908, expanded in 1920), Pirandello writes, “E c’è l’illusione che il poeta crea a noi, e talvolta anche a sé stesso, immedesimandosi nel giuoco fino ad abbandonarvisi tutto. Ah, quel giuoco tanto gli par bello, che bramerebbe crederlo realtà: non è, pur troppo!” (And there is the illusion that the poet creates in us, and sometimes even in himself, immersing himself in the game until he has completely abandoned himself in it. Ah, that game seems so wonderful to him that he would like to think it’s reality; but alas, it is not!). 19 Maraini’s narrative use of time can both advance the illusion of this collapse, and reinforce the division between Maraini and la romanziera. Such a use of time also occurs in the love scene between la romanziera and her lover, referred to by the epithet, l’uomo dalla faccia etrusca, where la romanziera clearly assumes the dimensions of a character, however autobiographical, written by Maraini, because the time of lovemaking and the time of writing must diverge. 20 The illusion of fluidity, of a porous border, between the inside and the outside of the narrative framework advances the relentlessly meta-narrative framework of the novel, in which the novel refers to itself as written, as well as to its writer, la romanziera, who then directs us outside the novel to Maraini, to her career, to well-known biographical details about her personal life and family. This fluidity invites readers to engage in an acrobatics of the imagination in which they are reminded that this is a story, this is many stories, these stories are part history (like the battle), part autobiography (Maraini’s life), and part invention (Zaira’s story), which is no less powerful or pertinent for being invented. The text continuously points to the nature of the writer’s imagination, and challenges the reader to accept the power of

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that imagination, the power of imagination, and by extension the power of literature, of fiction. Colomba’s complexity requires readers to activate and engage their own imagination. One of the meta-narrative themes of Colomba is thus an exploration of the nature of Maraini’s imagination, which provides insight into her art and craft of writing. Episodes like those of the battle reveal the intricacies of the writer’s imagination, its compulsive and obsessive qualities, its ability to override and crowd out the present, to evadere. The risks and benefits of evasione into fantasy, imagination, will resurface in the climax at the end of the novel, in the overlapping fates of Colomba and the “daughter,” who is addicted to storytelling. Their combined fates represent caveats for the reader. Imagination, as Blum has pointed out and as Maraini indicates in Ho sognato, her long conversation with Di Paolo, is the source of empathy. It can be the source, therefore, of ethical development and decision making. Yet it also involves the risk of escapism—evasione. For readers, the imperative to activate and engage the imagination becomes necessary in order to draw together the apparently discontinuous threads of the novel and make meaning of it. In fact, the novel is constructed around a strategy of interruption, which interlaces at least three distinct narrative threads that make use of three distinctive uses of time. One is the story of la romanziera and Zaira, which is a time both fictional and autobiographical; another is the personal, regional, national, and international effect of history on Zaira’s family, which is set in historical time; the last one is the timeless, repetitive circle of oral storytelling, in which a mother creates stories to satisfy her daughter’s demands and thirst for more and more of them. Although the technique of interruptions deploys a postmodern use of narrative fragmentation, the interwoven stories in fact challenge the reader to active engagement: to find the continuity within the discontinuity, to reconstruct the story in order to find meaning, to imagine a network that ties it all together. Like a tree of the national forest evoked throughout the novel, each branch is connected. In fact, in the first appearance of the mother telling stories to her daughter, the first lines are “‘Racconta, ma’.’ Sembra che il filo si sia spezzato” (“Tell the story, ma. It seems the thread is broken).” 21 In this “sembra” (seems) lies the crux of the novel, its ethical bent and its character’s dilemma. The “filo” is not broken, and it is up to the reader to follow, like Theseus, Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth of fragmentation. So we must reconstruct the links to make sense of this world, for in Maraini’s world there is never a nihilistic renunciation of meaning. 22 Fragmentation, interruption, discontinuity may be characteristics of our contemporary and technological world, but Maraini asks us to reconstruct what we have deconstructed, so that transformation, positive change, and, indeed, survival—our own, our fellow citizens’, our planet’s, in sum, collective survival—can become possible. The absence of meaning is an end, a threat, to survival.

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Consequently, while this novel takes up the classic literary tension between illusion versus reality so integral to Pirandello’s world, the novel does not renounce meaning or relegate it to the relativistic dimension—to quote the title of one of Pirandello’s plays—of così è se vi pare. As critics have noted, Pirandello’s influence appears in the very first line of Colomba, in which the reader immediately enters a self-reflective fictional world, one in which fiction and the imagination are fundamental themes. In the first line, la romanziera explains how one of her novels is born: “Quando le chiedono come nasce un suo romanzo, la donna dai capelli corti risponde che tutto comincia con un personaggio che bussa alla sua porta” (When they ask her how one of her novels is born, the woman with the short hair answers that everything starts with a character who knocks on her door). 23 Like many of Pirandello’s works, the novel constructs and draws attention to its own fictive framework, and points to its own self-reflective, self-referential discourse, speaking about itself as it reaches beyond itself. At the same time, la romanziera is explaining her own process of writing and the relationship between writing and inspiration, between imagination and artistic production. Her novels, she explains, spring and radiate from, are propelled by, a character. Maraini’s unmistakable allusion to Pirandello in the character who knocks on the writer’s door, seeking entrance, seeking an author, shows that she wishes to position herself and Colomba within Italian literary history and tradition in dialogue with these traditions. The image of the desperate, insistent, authorless character recalls Pirandello’s famous preface to his masterpiece, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921). Zaira steps inside la romanziera’s house, begging that la romanziera help her find her granddaughter, Colomba: “E dopo aver provato tante strade, le è venuto in mente di chiedere aiuto a una romanziera per rinvenire le tracce della nipote perduta” (And after having tried many roads, it occurred to her to ask the woman author to find the traces of her lost granddaughter). 24 The playful Pirandellian echoes continue in la romanziera’s initial rejection of Zaira’s request, reiterating Pirandello’s preface in offering as the reason for refusal the unappealing banality of Zaira’s drama: “La narratrice le spiega con garbo che non se la sente di raccontare la vicenda, molto comune a dire il vero, di questa Colomba che è scomparsa di casa. [. . .] Che se ne torni a casa, Zaira [. . .] dice la donna dai capelli corti un poco bruscamente, spingendo il personaggio fuori dalla porta” (The writer politely explains that she doesn’t feel like telling the story, quite commonplace, to tell the truth, of this Colomba who has disappeared from her house. [. . .] Go home, Zaira [. . .] says the woman with the short hair a little brusquely, pushing the character out the door). 25 (It is noteworthy that Pirandello takes up the theme of the missing character in his 1904 novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal.) The playfulness of the beginning both guarantees and prefigures Colomba’s happy ending and differentiates the novel from Pirandello’s tragicome-

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dy; from Isolina of twenty years earlier; from the investigative narratives, such as Voci and Buio, that have appeared in the interim; as well as from the later and much darker Il treno dell’ultima notte. As we saw in an earlier chapter, a childlike playfulness had been gaining momentum in Maraini’s writing, taking hold especially through the growing body of children’s literature that Maraini has published over the past two decades. This playfulness, rarely identified by her critics, comes to the fore in Colomba and allows Maraini to interweave magical elements of fantasy with historical and realistic detail. A light, whimsical atmosphere pervades the first paragraph of Colomba in the gastronomic image of the special apricot marmalade, another creation (albeit, not literary!) of la romanziera, which la romanziera offers to hopeful, visiting characters; in the coffee or tea she serves; and in the convivial and hospitable atmosphere that she creates as she awaits their story. In Colomba, the motif of sweet foods, what in the United States we today call “comfort foods,” and homey smells are integral to this playfulness. The initial image of tea and marmalade will later be followed by Zaira’s muchprized cookies and bread, as food imagery permeates the novel, evoking the smells of comfort and the haven of a fragrant kitchen that both Zaira (and her readers) take refuge in when tired from her peregrinations. These interludes offer respite from the pursuit but also serve to lengthen the time of the plot and attenuate the suspense. The comic and magical elements common to children’s literature include the magical presence of Zaira’s “angelo custode” (guardian angel), who functions as Zaira’s conscience, a parodic sort of Superego, and accompanies her on her searches, in the form of a whinging angel with wings so long they drag on the ground. Maraini also includes a comical dog named Fungo, another parodic sort, but this time of a Freudian id that steals her food. In addition, his name, meaning mushroom, alludes again to the transformations in Alice in Wonderland and Dolce per sé, a motif in Maraini’s novels. In Colomba mushrooms appear at the beginning of the novel in the reference to a mycologist (father of Pitrucc’s fiancée) and, later, in a sly allusion to Colomba’s mushroom-gathering activities in the forest by the antagonist, Sal. Like Pirandello in his preface, la romanziera will eventually, if reluctantly, accept Zaira’s request to investigate the absence of her missing granddaughter, Colomba. Yet Maraini appropriates and transforms Pirandello’s formidable and inspiring legacy in various ways. Cinzia Sartini Blum comments that, while Maraini alludes to Pirandello’s relationship with his characters, likening his experience of their insistence to her own, Blum finds that Pirandello’s persona can be “authoritative and aloof toward the characters that haunt his imagination, like a professional dealing with his clients’ problems. Maraini speaks instead of a relationship ‘a tu per tu’ (‘face to face’), the kind of close and personal connection one has with a friend or with one’s

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child.” 26 Blum identifies this bond as “intimate,” as we saw in the beginning of Colomba in the homey tea and homemade apricot marmalade that la romanziera offers hopeful, aspiring characters. 27 In the autobiographical figure of la romanziera Maraini fuses women’s traditional unvalued creative domestic work with a professional writing career. As Blum also notes, “Dacia argues that woman is a specialist of daily life and of the life of ‘feelings.’” 28 Pirandello’s sober and inhospitable stance toward his characters is replaced by a new tradition, an attitude of hospitality and comforting everyday smells in Colomba. Maraini transforms the male literary tradition represented by Pirandello by transforming Pirandello’s Italian male literary persona, thus creating a break in tradition to make space for a different subjectivity. Another important difference is that, in Sei personaggi, the characters know their own drama, for they are the story that they wish the author to write, the story they wish to represent on the stage. In Colomba, Zaira implores the writer to find the missing character. Zaira’s request gives the writer agency and power, and elevates fiction and the power of the imagination as effective and valuable interventions into entrenched social problems. Indeed, if in Isolina the investigation was undertaken by an author-journalist, here the investigation is tackled by a writer of fiction, a novelist, la romanziera. Of course, since Colomba herself is fictive, then the employment of la romanziera to find her is indeed logical—especially given Maraini’s expertise in investigative and detective fiction! And so la romanziera follows Zaira as Zaira searches and follows—reconstructs—the traces of her missing granddaughter, Colomba. And so the reader follows the journey of an author following a character, defined as a character from the first pages, who in turn is following the traces of a missing character in the forest. In this chain, they resemble the characters of one of Italy’s most famous Renaissance epic poems, the afore-mentioned Orlando furioso, by Ariosto, an author discussed by Pirandello in “L’Umorismo” and, as we have said, another important literary motif throughout Colomba. (RE)CONSTRUCTION, OR THE PATH TO KNOWLEDGE IS THE PATH TO SURVIVAL Invoking the imagination, Pirandello tells us in his preface that the six characters tapping at the door are ushered in by la Fantasia, a servant. While Maraini, significantly, eschews the image of the female servant, preferring to offer tea herself, readers of both texts are asked to believe that the characters existed before entering la romanziera’s house and Pirandello’s studio, that the character is thus in some undetermined and unimaginable way autonomous from the author, and that la romanziera (and Maraini’s) creation of the protagonist is in fact a journey of discovery of the complexities of that

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character. It is as if artistic creation and discovery are simultaneous, the former assigning full authority to the writer, the latter assigning autonomy to the character. In this way, artistic creation is reconfigured as (re)construction: la romanziera portrays (and creates) Zaira as she discovers her. The journey undertaken by la romanziera for a fuller understanding of Zaira, her protagonist, parallel’s Zaira’s own search for a novelist who will help her to search for—and to gain a fuller understanding of—her granddaughter, Colomba. Unlike the relatives in Isolina or Voci, the devoted Zaira distinguishes herself by her sheer determination to find Colomba alive. So the reader follows Maraini who follows la romanziera who follows her protagonist, Zaira, as she scours the forests of the Abruzzo National Park where Zaira and her granddaughter live together in a small village and Zaira earns a modest living as a translator. By choosing Zaira as her heroine instead of Colomba, about which little is known, Maraini deliberately reverses some genre conventions, and makes her readers aware of this through a selfreflexive comment. La romanziera notes that Zaira is an unlikely protagonist because she is “superata l’età delle protagoniste da romanzo” (past the age of heroines of novels). 29 The conventional protagonist of a novel would be the young Colomba herself, and the narrative theme would be love. Yet for Maraini the Muse takes a different form. The adventure here is Zaira’s, a frugal, fiercely independent, no longer young, ecologically bicycle-riding, ever more physically fit protagonist who becomes an intrepid explorer. “Servendosi di strategie da esploratrice commissaria” (using the strategies of a scouting commissioner), 30 Zaira searches for traces in the Abruzzi mountains she knows so well, no matter what the weather, going so far as to rent snow shoes when she can’t walk in the snow. As the novel resists and reverses the conventions of the aging female, a theme we saw explored in Dolce per sé, Zaira’s fitness level continues to rise throughout the novel along with her youthfulness, so that at one point her old friend Cesidio comments that she looks like a little girl with her freckles. Her determination and independence make of Zaira an exceedingly resilient, almost Olympic, or Amazonian, heroine. Unlike Zaira’s mother Antonietta, Zaira’s daughter Angelica, and, as we will see at the end, Zaira’s granddaughter Colomba, Zaira is indeed never destroyed or felled by love. Zaira’s mother, Antonietta, is abandoned by her lover, also Zaira’s father, Pitrucc’ i pelus’, who emigrates to Australia to escape fascism. Pregnant with Zaira, Antonietta agrees to marry the besotted Cignalitt’, Zaira’s stepfather, only to literally waste away during her marriage. Zaira’s daughter, Angelica, the 1970s rebel, is consumed by her love for her husband, “l’uomo su cui ha puntato tutto” (the man on whom she has bet everything) 31 showing, like Antonietta, a lack of independence and a fragile sense of self. Zaira’s granddaughter, Colomba, as we will see, is also trapped in an abusive relationship that she calls love. In contrast, Zaira, who

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has two love affairs, both with pianists, is very resilient. 32 Zaira’s resilience is rendered in the novel by the contrast between the time of the fabula and the time of the syuzhet of Zaira’s love affair. The pain of the break up with her second lover, we read, lasts for months: “Era stata male per mesi” (She had been ill for months). 33 Yet, the story of Zaira’s pain and disillusionment is limited to but one paragraph. Unlike the other women in her family, Zaira is neither entirely defined by romantic love nor paralyzed by it. Nor is the novel taken up with her love story. Zaira’s ability to live by herself, autonomously, fiercely independent, resilient, determined despite every discouragement, makes her the strong character needed for the investigation. Through her, as we said, Maraini transforms generic conventions. Yet Zaira’s status as heroine is not unproblematic, and the novel indeed traces the story of Zaira’s own transformation and development. For if Zaira resembles in age, courage, and independence the commissaria Adele Sòfia of Voci and Buio, she lacks entirely Sòfia’s wisdom, insight, and knowledge. In fact, Zaira’s search, her wandering—like Ariosto, like Dante—in the woods is a novel-long metaphor for her quest for knowledge about her granddaughter—that is, her discovery of who her granddaughter really is. What is indeed most striking and most ironic in Zaira’s account of Colomba’s disappearance is how very little Zaira knows about Colomba, how little she can tell the police investigators and readers about her. Although she has taken care of Colomba since Colomba was a little girl oft neglected by her estranged parents, all that Zaira seems to know about Colomba is that she is very orderly, unlike her mother Angelica. Colomba kept a clean room, an organized wardrobe, a predictable daily routine. This is the sum of Zaira’s superficial knowledge and superficial relationship with Colomba, as if such an orderly surface could be a reassuring indication of Colomba’s tranquil and satisfied psychological state. More glaringly, Zaira does not know that she does not know; she is not aware of her own ignorance about her granddaughter’s life, friends, and values, and thus, is unaware of her granddaughter’s estrangement and the breach between them. Zaira’s response to the local newspaper’s questions about Colomba demonstrates her limited and superficial knowledge of her granddaughter: “Colomba aveva un fidanzato?” “No, che io sappia.” “Colomba aveva delle amiche? “Non molte [. . .]” [. . .] “Che lei sappia, aveva avuto dei brutti incontri recentemente?” “Non mi ha detto niente.” 34 “Did Colomba have a boyfriend?” “Not that I know of.”

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Unsurprisingly, Colomba’s disappearance comes as a complete shock to Zaira, and the possible motives behind her disappearance remain a mystery. But the real mystery for Zaira is Colomba herself, and we see that Zaira, though well-intentioned and compassionate, is in fact blind to the true nature of the people around her, including those she lived with: her mother, her stepfather, her daughter, her granddaughter. Consequently, she is singularly unprepared to help them, unable to fulfill her familial—to borrow the term Virginia Picchietti uses, her relational—roles. So the novel traces Zaira’s slow acquisition of sight, of insight, of coming out of il buio, so that she can fulfill her responsibilities toward Colomba, who had been, from childhood, entrusted to her grandmother’s care. Maraini’s work is often imbedded with subtle irony, and Colomba is no exception. In Colomba, Maraini presents Zaira as an appealing, strong, and adventurous character to the reader and to la romanziera who cannot resist the temptation of her story or the adventures she undertakes. She is, as we have seen, a heroine. Yet a subtle irony is woven into the description of Zaira’s appealing personality and adventures, an irony embedded in the stories of the main plot. In Zaira, as in many of her characters, Maraini is asking the reader to look beyond the surface; looking beyond the surface becomes paramount for Zaira, too, if she is to find her granddaughter. One story that illuminates the mystery of Colomba’s disappearance is the TV broadcast of the case of the missing housewife, Carmela S., whose story forms an ironic parallel to Zaira’s own quest. The husband’s description of Carmela S.—“Era brava, cucinava bene, lavava, stirava tutto alla perfezione” (she was talented, she cooked well, she washed, she ironed everything perfectly)—is followed, as if in counterpoint, by a comment that could reflect Zaira’s own thoughts: “Ne parla come se fosse una domestica attenta e capace nel compiere il suo dovere” (He talks about her as if she were a maid, careful and capable in doing her job). 35 The son then assures, “Mia madre non usciva quasi mai. [. . .] Mia madre non voleva vedere nessuno. Era contenta di stare in casa” (My mother almost never went out. [. . .] My mother didn’t want to see anyone. She was happy staying at home). 36 The dramatic irony apparent to the reader and to Zaira escapes the father and son, who cannot imagine any dissatisfaction on the part of the wife and mother with such a tedious life. Carmela’s isolated existence strikes us as disturbingly anachronistic and recalls the enclosed life of previous generations of Italian women. “I colori sbiaditi” (the faded colors) in the photograph they show

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of Carmela symbolically reflect her colorless life. 37 What these family members share with Zaira is their own blindness, their ignorance and indifference to the inner life of Carmela S., whose self-worth and humanity—whose identity—is reduced to her homemaking skills. Unlike her own daughter, Angelica, whose revolutionary exploits were quickly reabsorbed in the most humiliating version of housewifeliness and her youth consumed, Zaira, who has never been a homemaker in the traditional sense, notes that Colomba was very orderly: “una ragazza così diligente e disciplinata” (such a diligent and disciplined girl). 38 Earlier in the novel, that same irony was directed at Zaira by Sal, who ironically functions as Zaira’s informant and, as we will later learn, Colomba’s lover, drug dealer, pimp, and jailer. Zaira asks him, “La conoscevi Colomba?” (Did you know Colomba?). Implying that Colomba is alive by the use of present tense, Sal responds rather derisively: “Sì e no. [. . .] La conosco ma non la conosco” (Yes and no [. . .] I know her and I don’t). 39 This comment summarizes Zaira’s own superficial knowledge of her granddaughter, and the rest of the dialogue reveals Zaira’s rather willful blindness. Sal’s cautionary earlier words, “Ma posso dirle che Colomba non era come lei credeva” (But I can tell you that Colomba was not what you thought) provoke Zaira into revealing her stubborn and superficial initial approach to the search for (information about) her granddaughter. 40 Her responses to Sal appear imprudent, shutting the door on a possible path of illumination through someone else’s knowledge of a side of Colomba that Zaira does not (want to) know. In fact, Zaira responds defensively and somewhat irrationally, “Sono venuta per sapere qualcosa della sua scomparsa, non del suo carattere” (I’ve come to find out something about her disappearance, not her character). With his response, Sal clearly underlines Zaira’s unknowingness: “Ma forse è scomparsa per via delle cose che lei non sa” (But perhaps she disappeared because of the things you don’t know). 41 The dialogue continues as Sal confirms that Colomba in the woods “prendeva funghi” (picked mushrooms), “ma c’è dell’altro” (but there’s more) 42—a hint that she is hooked on drugs. Zaira will not discover until the very end of the novel that it is Sal himself who is supplying the drugs and keeping Colomba hooked. “Essere al buio”—to be in the dark—“delle cose come sono” (of things as they are) was a condition of many adult characters in Buio, a condition rendered literal by the dark shadows, dark nights, and dark corners of the homes in the stories. This condition recurs as a literal and symbolic motif in Colomba. The location of Zaira’s initial meeting with Sal, a bar and hang-out called “Il Rombo” frequented by her granddaughter’s generation, is immediately characterized by its darkness. Zaira’s uncertain forays into this darkness reveal Zaira’s unpreparedness in dealing with young people of her granddaughter’s generation. Zaira has never entered the bar, and when she does it is predictably “buio” and she cannot make out the features or recognize the

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young people from her small mountain town. She is disoriented by their odd haircuts, changing hair color, and tattoos. Her feeling out of place also hints at her inability to decipher or address the crises of today’s youth, and the problems of the present generation. The motif of “il buio” will gradually give way, as Zaira comes ever closer to finding her granddaughter, to literal and blinding light in the climactic discovery of Colomba in the bright white of Sal’s snowy, mountain hideaway. 43 The novel alternates the metaphor of darkness with Zaira’s new insights and quest for knowledge. Zaira’s first foray into the bar brings two insights, two suspicions that all was not well with her granddaughter, as she reconstructs her own memories and images, her own experience of her granddaughter: “Solo ora si rende conto, a posteriori, che i silenzi di ‘Mbina si erano fatti più acerbi e dilaganti, che a volte restava ferma a fissare il vuoto, quasi dormisse a occhi aperti” (Only now does she realize, after the fact, that ‘Mbina’s silences had grown more frequent and more bitter, that sometimes she would sit staring into the void, as if sleeping with her eyes open). 44 And a few sentences later: “Cercando di rammentare i gesti di Colomba prima della scomparsa, le viene in mente l’abitudine che aveva di portarsi un pugno chiuso alla tempia come se fosse trafitta da un improvviso dolore al capo” (Trying to remember Colomba’s gestures before her disappearance, she thought of her habit of bringing her closed fist to her temple, as if she were suddenly pierced with a sudden pain in her head). 45 Zaira’s process of discovery and self-discovery is a long one, for during the same bar scene we witness the ironic height of Zaira’s blindness: when Sal assures her that her granddaughter is alive and a prisoner in the woods, it does not occur to her that he is Colomba’s jailer. Unable to recognize the truth, she slips him the 1,000 euros he requested for the information. FROM ANGELICA TO COLOMBA For Zaira, the key to Colomba’s fate lies in the literary allusions to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, in the verses that refer to Angelica interwoven through the novel. In memory of Ariosto’s verses read to Zaira by the parish priest when she was little—and, in another mirroring, read to la romanziera by her mother—Zaira decides to name her daughter Angelica. Angelica is the other absence around which the novel is structured, as we see in these lines loosely taken from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (Canto XII, 61): “Inseguir Angelica che appar e dispar come baleno. . . Per lei tutta cercò l’alta foresta” (Pursuing Angelica who appears and disappears like a flash . . . For her he searched the high forest). 46 Similarly to Ariosto’s questing characters, Zaira’s forays into the forest are both literal, for they impel narrative movement, and metaphorical. Zaira’s blindness, which is slowly revealed to the reader, is not limited to

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Colomba, but extends to others she has loved and lived with, such as her pianist-lover, who even the priest could tell was lying to her. But Zaira’s most egregious blindness occurred, poignantly, in the case of her deceased daughter, Angelica. In order to find her granddaughter Colomba, Zaira must be able to see, to know, to understand, to reconstruct for herself the brief life and the many problems of her daughter, Angelica. Zaira must reconstruct her memories, her experiences, and the stories that will lead her to the true condition and imprisonment of Colomba, and she must recognize her own blindness in order to remedy it. To save Colomba, Zaira must discover how and why she lost Angelica, who symbolizes an entire lost generation of the 1970s in Italy. In fact, the great majority of the novel reconstructs the life and story of Angelica, not Colomba; the true center of the novel is Angelica, whose troubled story takes up, intermittently, over one hundred fifty pages (154–307) of the three-hundred-fifty-plus-paged novel. Perhaps there is even a connection between the guardian angel (l’angelo custode) and Angelica; perhaps Zaira’s conscience is connected to the ever present, ever unresolved mystery of her daughter’s fate. It is only through an understanding of her own failures toward her daughter that Zaira can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past with her granddaughter. Zaira’s journey through the forest is both a course of action and a metaphor for her growth and enlightenment through reconstructions of personal and family histories. Zaira’s story also includes the reconstruction of many other (his)stories: religious history and legend, and regional, national, and even international histories that have formed the sociohistorical and familial context for the tragic loss of Angelica’s life, and have placed Angelica’s daughter’s life at risk. In her inquiry, Zaira reaches beyond Angelica’s short tragic life, back to her own family tree and its intersections with national and international historical events. A few examples include the story of the Alpine fighters, the story of the contadini, Pitrucc’ i pelus’s escape from fascism to Australia, and his experience of the Russian gulag. The interweaving of these local, national and international histories provides the novel’s epic background, and gives the fragmented narrative an epic scope. I would venture to say that Colomba represents Maraini’s ambition to write a postmodern national epic from a woman’s perspective. 47 The tension between past and future in Zaira’s life is symbolized by her two friends, Cesidio and Menica. Cesidio, we are told, is entirely caught up in the past, in the regional history of the land, and his oral stories full of religious history and legend are compellingly wrought for Zaira, who is riveted by them, despite the impossibility of verifying their accuracy. Cesidio, like Maraini, creates hybrid tales in which history, fiction, and legend are all intertwined. Menica, on the other hand, is a midwife, and therefore in charge of bringing future generations into the light of day. The future passes through Menica’s hands, as she safeguards the lives of children born into the

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world with enormous care for mother and child, having lost only a few lives in thirty years. Zaira, drawing from their strengths, must symbolically become strong enough to understand the past’s relationship to the future, in order to navigate the present and future, as symbolized by her granddaughter. To become a successful heroine and save Colomba, she must face her responsibilities and her own failures. In the novel, an epiphanic moment occurs, in which the shocking depths of Zaira’s blindness are revealed both to Zaira and the reader. It is a moment stripped of dramatic irony, almost unforeseen, an epiphanic moment when Zaira realizes that she must reconstruct and revise the memory of her own childhood and relationship with the past. It is through this moment that the reader realizes that, though well intentioned, Zaira is unprepared and unknowledgeable—clueless, as we would say today—about the world around her. She is unable to read and decipher the present. This moment comes when Angelica reveals to her mother, Zaira, that she had been sexually abused by Zaira’s adored stepfather, Cignalitt’. Angelica realizes that with these words she has destroyed her mother’s memories of her mother’s idyllic childhood with Cignalitt’. This disillusionment requires Zaira as mother to reconstruct her own and her daughter’s relationship with her idealized and deceased stepfather, as we see in Zaira’s long, guilt-laden interior monologue that follows this revelation: “Era la sua cecità che la sorprendeva, come un Edipo sciocco e petulante che cerca le colpe fuori dalla città mentre era lì dentro, nella sua città, nella sua casa che cominciavano tutte le responsabilità” (It was her own blindness that surprised her, like a foolish, insistent Oedipus that looks for the blame outside the city while all long it was there, in his own city, in his own house, that all the responsibilities began) (italics ours). 48 From this moment, Zaira proceeds to revise the past, her own and her daughter’s, remembering the telltale signs of Angelica’s reluctance to stay with her step-grandfather alone. Zaira recalls that Angelica had tried to warn her. “Mi fidavo ciecamente” (I trusted you blindly), 49 Zaira confesses in another interior monologue addressed to her dead stepfather at the cemetery on November 2, All Souls’ Day, of an unidentified year. Yet the evidence, the reader realizes, was there perhaps from the very beginning of the family history, for Cignalitt’, desperately in love with Zaira’s beautiful mother, Antonina, took advantage of her unwed pregnant state. Cignalitt’ married Zaira’s mother who was pregnant by Pitricc’ i pelus’ who had gone to Australia to escape fascist reprisal. Zaira had blamed her own mother: “E anche se vedevo che Antonina ti schifava” (And even if I saw that Antonina was disgusted by you), she addresses her stepfather while beside his grave, “pensavo: la colpa è sua” (I thought: the blame is hers). 50 Zaira had not understood her mother’s slow decline, as she pined for the man she loved, and had not understood the sexual impositions her own mother might have suffered. The wings of Zaira’s guardian angel, Angelica her conscience,

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remind her of “un vestito da sposa troppo ampio. [. . .] Sua madre Antonina quando si è sposata indossava un abito simile, dentro cui certamente si è sentita prigioniera” (a bridal gown that was too large. [. . .] Her mother Antonina had worn a similar dress when she got married, in which she must surely have felt a prisoner). 51 Zaira’s feelings of guilt extend from her daughter backward now to her mother. The too-tight wedding dress symbolizes in this revised past Antonina’s imprisonment in marriage with Cignalitt’, whom Angelica called, in her stubborn insistence on the use of dialect, “ne porch’” (a pig). 52 At the cemetery, during recollections in which time is scrambled, Zaira belatedly wishes that her mother and her stepfather had not been buried together. With this painful epiphany, Zaira joins the long list of mothers in Maraini’s world who do not wish to accept their daughter’s truth, or see their father’s and husband’s lies. 53 Yet unlike these mothers, Zaira begins to understand her own complicity in the anorexia of her young daughter, and some of the roots of her 1970s daughter’s contempt and lack of respect for her mother. She wonders, “Ma la colpa, la colpa di chi era? Quanto di quel peso spettava a lei, al suo buio mentale: non aveva saputo vedere, non aveva saputo intuire né capire. Possibile che non avesse sospettato niente? Ora, ripensandoci, ricordava improvvisamente.” (But the blame, whose blame was it? How much of that burden was hers, due to her mental darkness: she had not been able to see, she had not been able to intuit or understand. Is it possible that she had suspected nothing? Now, thinking about it again, she suddenly remembered) (italics ours). 54 This self-reflective interior monologue about Angelica leads Zaira closer to Colomba, as we can see in the scene immediately following. After her long foray into family history, followed by the November 2 Old Souls’ Day visit to the cemetery, Zaira returns home, presumably after her visit to the cemetery, during a storm and finds that she is locked out. During the flashes of lightning, another symbol of brief illumination, she can discern two figures in the house who resemble Colomba and Sal. Once again, literally and symbolically, Zaira is surrounded by “il buio” in “la cucina buia” (the dark kitchen) 55 with only an occasional burst of lightning to illuminate her vision. In the end she doubts her own eyes and attributes the vision of Colomba and Sal to her feverish state from a virus that hits her. The family history outlined in this chapter further underlines, both for Zaira and for the reader, Zaira’s blindness and helplessness in fulfilling her own role in the family as a fundamental dimension of Zaira’s character. At the same time, it also brings Zaira one step closer to the solution of the mystery of Colomba.

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A LEGACY OF FAILED REVOLUTIONS Zaira’s reconstruction of Angelica’s life reveals a tranquil infant and child who soon becomes contrary, uncommunicative, and obstreperous, presumably in response to Cignalitt’s molestation and Zaira’s blindness to it. However, in Angelica, Maraini also offers us another reconstruction of the 1968 legacy we saw in Il treno per Helsinki. Zaira recounts that Angelica became a revolutionary who fell in love with her sessantottino high school teacher. (A sessantottino was an activist in the 1968 protest movement.) While Zaira was born in 1940, Angelica was born, according to the whimsical family tree illustration opposite the first page of the 2004 hardcover edition, in 1959. Angelica’s adolescent struggles are historically positioned in the post-1968 era. Given that Zaira lives in a small mountain town, her daughter’s political activism shows the reach of the long arm of history and of political turmoil and upheaval. Angelica participated in the student movement against the status quo, a movement marked by its opposition to institutional forms of authority, like the government, the educational system, and the family. She joined other youngsters in occupying her high school. She embraced the free love movement, as we can see in the episode of Zaira’s visit to her daughter’s high school. In addition, Angelica steadfastly refused her whole life to use standard Italian, and favored Abruzzese dialect. Angelica’s comment about her step-grandfather Cignalitt’ also demonstrates a degree of feminist awareness that positions her in the era of the 1970s Italian Feminist Movement: “I padre só accuscì: vonne tutte cose e se credene ca le fimmene dela casa só tutte per ssé” (Fathers are like that: they want everything and they think the women of the house are all theirs). 56 Christina Siggers Manson, in her article “In Love with Cecchino,” focuses on the mystery of women’s masochism—“why women appear to submit to violence so willingly”—in Maraini’s work, a theme that reappears in the motif of Cecchino’s fairy tale. 57 “‘La cornacchia del Canadà’ [The Canadian crow] tells of a crow that spurns the love of another bird because she is in love with a hunter called Cecchino. The crow desperately seeks Cecchino’s attention until, inevitably, he shoots her.” 58 Manson locates the roots of women’s masochism in a predominantly psychoanalytic analysis, in which women would rather submit to abuse than face the loss of the person on whom they are dependent. Men abuse women out of their own insecurities, according to Manson, and Angelica’s death comes from her “inability to overcome the abuse she suffered,” specifically, the child molestation. 59 Yet Angelica’s plight is more than an individual or family story of abuse or neglect, and more than a story about patriarchal oppression. Angelica is the symbol of an entire generation, and of a series of failed revolutions. She is the failed daughter of a failed revolution, or better, of the combined revolutions of the 1968 and Italian Feminist Movements, which proved too brief,

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too ephemeral, too superficial, or too idealistic, as Maraini and other Italian women writers contend, to bring about the lasting changes necessary for her growth as an independent, freestanding woman. 60 We see in Angelica the problem of the revolutionary whose ideological function was exhausted in her rebellion against school and family authority, and against the bourgeois values of virginity or monogamy. Yet the spirit of rebellion, the rejection of patriarchal institutions, leaves in her a void with nothing to replace it. Ironically, in a reactionary turn of events, Angelica finds herself in the traditional role of the young mother, virtually sole caretaker of her young daughter. In fact, her sessantottino husband gradually betrays the values they shared and leaves her to her fate, that of an increasingly dependent and careworn housewife, exemplar here of the failures of the 1968 legacies, which came with sexual freedom for women but with little change or equity in gender or sex roles. To quote Zaira: “la massaia che sei diventata dopo essere stata una girovaga, una ribelle, una rivoluzionaria” (the housewife you became after having been a wanderer, a rebel, a revolutionary). 61 In fact, townspeople suggest that Angelica’s car accident was a suicide. Angelica’s position as a dependent housewife with no job or career cements her own lack of selfesteem and autonomy as well as the failure of society to bring about the changes necessary to sustain her. This legacy of failed revolutions will be the legacy Angelica’s own daughter, Colomba, inherits. The importance of revolutions is further underlined in the novel by the many interwoven stories of Italy’s involvement in national and international revolutionary movements, which begin before Zaira’s birth with her father’s escape to Australia for antifascist activity. Zaira’s reconstruction of Colomba’s fate depends not only on Zaira’s reconstruction of her daughter Angelica’s personal and family history but also on her—and the reader’s—reconstruction of a sort of postmodern jigsaw of the national and international histories in which Zaira’s family participates, more or less directly. Maraini offers as the key to Angelica’s failed revolution, and to the bleak future— legacy of those failures—of Colomba’s endangered generation one particular episode from a different narrative thread in the novel: the mother-daughter storytelling cycles. In this episode, the mother is reciting poetry and talking about history. The key to the revolutions that failed Angelica is contained in an apparent historical digression, which acts rather as another piece of the jigsaw, into the history of Stalin’s communism, and the recorded sufferings of two other women, the poets Anna Achmatova and Marina Cvetaeva, who suffered in that failed revolution. The impact the communist promise had on Italy’s utopian dream of social justice in pre- and postwar Italy, as well as in the 1960s and 1970s, is well known. The storytelling mother remembers her own “giovani amici [che] alzavano il braccio col pugno chiuso negli anni in cui Stalin era considerato un salvatore” (young friends [who] raised their arms with closed fist in the years in which Stalin was considered a savior). 62

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The women poets’ bitter suffering had taught her, we might say, about the importance of mini-narratives that uncover the illusions imbedded in grand narratives, something history books had failed to teach her: “Proprio quando il pensiero di un mondo nuovo e giusto si era affacciato nella sua mente come la promessa esaltante di un futuro uguale per tutti, le tragedie private delle due poetesse russe l’avevano risvegliata precocemente da un sonno che abitava nella mente di tanti suoi amici e conosciuti. Era la Russia dei remoti miti politici di redenzione” (Just as the idea of a new and just world had come to her mind like the exciting promise of a future that is equal for all, the private tragedies of the two Russian women poets had awoken her from a sleep that inhabited the minds of many of her friends and acquaintances. It was the Russia of the remote political myths of redemption). 63 Immediately after follows a dialogue that mimics a 1960s ideological debate, in which someone is talking to a “cara compagna,” (to be understood here as “a comrade”), tellingly, about “l’uomo,” the universal man who “una volta uscito dall’ingranaggio odioso dello sfruttamento capitalistico, diventerà generoso e sapiente” (once he has left the odious apparatus of capitalist exploitation, will become generous and wise). 64 “Non ci saranno più guerre, né assassinii” (There will be no more wars, nor murders), she is told, as woman is here subsumed in the figure of universalized “man” in this utopian, and failed, Marxist dream. The speaker continues, “Solo più tardi, una volta raggiunta l’uguaglianza economica, si troverà anche l’uguaglianza sociale e politica, quella culturale seguirà” (Only later, once we have reached economic equality, will we find social and political equality, and the cultural one will follow). 65 The young woman asks, “E quella fra i sessi, fra uomo e donna?” (And that between the sexes, between man and woman?) His response: “Verrà appresso anche quella, una volta sancita l’uguaglianza fra le classi” (It will come later, once the equality between classes is established). 66 His is a classic Marxist response, a response of deferred expectations, deferred equality, emblem of the grand narratives and unitary male humanist subject that postmodernism and feminism critiques. This dialogue captures the disillusionment of Italian women with Marxist thought, a disillusionment that propelled the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s. In the subsequent dialogue the young woman questions the interlocutor, known by the epithet, l’uomo dai baffi lunghi (the man with the long moustache), regarding the use of violence, which he justifies. Italian women’s history tells us that Italian women’s continued dissatisfactions with the inadequate progress made in Italian society regarding women’s rights eventually exploded into the Italian feminist movement, with a subsequent rejection of the use of violence. 67 The episode continues: “Innamorarsi di una idea tonda come la luna, morbida come una pesca matura, succosa come un chicco d’uva, potente come la radice di una quercia” (Falling in love with an idea

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as round as the moon, as soft as a ripe peach, as juicy as a grape, as powerful as the root of an oak) had mobilized that youth in their utopian dream. “L’esempio” (The example), we are told, “veniva dalle terre fredde e lontane che avevano conosciuto i rigori di una rivoluzione riuscita. O che per lo meno si dava per riuscita, prima che fossero noti gli orrori dello stalinismo” (came from the cold faraway lands that had known the rigors of a successful revolution. Or at least, it was presumed to be successful, before the horrors of Stalinism became known). 68 Near the end of the two chapters dedicated to Angelica’s life story, just before the final chapter reveals Colomba’s whereabouts, Zaira enters a church for the first time since Angelica’s death, and the event triggers her memory of her daughter’s death. Zaira remembers mourning over Angelica’s dead body in the hospital. A long interior monologue follows, in which she is able to face and reconstruct her daughter’s anger toward her: “Forse non mi perdonavi di non avere capito di Cignalitt’. E’ questo che non mi hai mai perdonato, vero?” (Maybe you did not forgive me for not having understood about Cignalitt’. That’s what you never forgave me, right?). 69 Zaira then moves on to tell the story of their family, which “appassionava” (impassioned) Angelica, the story of her biological grandfather, Pitrucc’ i pelus’, his communist history, and Italy’s fascist past. In this transmission of history is the importance of knowing history: “Il paese si trovò in trappola senza neanche saperlo, bambina mia, e mi dispiace che nessuno te l’abbia mai raccontata questa storia, nemmeno tuo marito Valdo che pure era un sessantottino con le bandiere in testa. O forse eri tu che assieme alla lingua italiana, rifiutavi la storia del nostro paese” (The country found itself in a trap without even knowing it, my little girl, and I’m sorry that no one every told you that story, not even your husband Valdo who was a real activist in the 1968 protest movement. Or maybe it was you who refused the history of our country, along with the Italian language). 70 According to Maraini, remembering by itself does not bring transformation. For Maraini, remembering must be accompanied by historical reflection, as we saw in Il treno per Helsinki. She affirms, “Forse la riflessione storica comporta una visione d’insieme mentre noi, stando nel mondo in cui viviamo, vediamo i particolari, ma spesso non vediamo l’insieme” (Maybe historical reflection involves a vision of the whole while we, being in the world in which we are living, see the particulars, but often don’t see the whole). 71 In a 1996 interview with Eugenia Paulicelli and David Ward, Dacia Maraini makes explicit the importance of history. The interviewers comment that “le nuove generazioni ignorano la storia sia nazionale che europea” (the new generations know neither national nor European history) and Maraini agrees, “Le nuove generazioni non sanno o hanno dimenticato la storia” (The new generations either don’t know or have forgotten history). 72 She faults the Italian school system, cites the necessity of reading, and complains that

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young people today don’t read. “Sui libri” (In books), she says, “attraverso i giornali, ci dev’essere questa presenza della storia nella cultura odierna” (through newspapers, there must be a presence of history in our culture today). 73 The interviewers rightly conclude the interview, “Infatti, i Suoi libri possono contribuire a questo. Revisioni del passato, della storia, parlando del Sud d’Italia, introducendo nuovi personaggi che magari erano stati esclusi da altre narrazioni storiche in modo accessibile, rendendo il passato attraente, a un pubblico generale” (In fact, your books can contribute to this. Revisions of the past, of history, talking about the South of Italy, introducing new characters who perhaps had been excluded from other historical narrations in an accessible way, making the past appealing, to the general public), to which Maraini responds, “Io ci provo, almeno” (I try, at least). 74 Earlier she had said, “E’ la memoria storica che conta” (It’s historical memory that counts) 75 and “è la memoria che non si può cancellare” (memory can’t be erased). 76 In Zaira’s interior monologue, with its fragments, interrupted stories, its various overlapping dimensions of time, the threads—personal, familial, historical, international, political—fuse into the multiple histories she is telling her dead daughter, Angelica. Such a postmodern technique of “mini-narratives,” as Kluges described them, can be considered an example of something that, according to Hutcheon, “feminisms have brought to postmodernism:” “the paradox of the inevitable distortions of recording history and yet the pressing drive to record nevertheless.” 77 Zaira’s transmission of her family histories, so connected to Italy’s military, political, and rural (contadino) histories, remedies her daughter’s lack of knowledge. This transmission also has a didactic function. Maraini here teaches Italian readers about their own multiple histories, and by extension, given Maraini’s international reputation and the speed with which her works are translated into foreign languages, all her readers. HISTORY AND THE IMAGINATION Yet, in Colomba, the reconstruction of history alone cannot bring success to Zaira’s journeys of discovery and self-discovery. It is the integral role of the imagination that harnesses and dramatizes historical information and imbues it with life and meaning that helps lead Zaira to the solution of the mystery of Colomba. This brief section offers just one instance of how a seemingly disconnected piece of history, when it fires the imagination, advances the plot and Zaira’s discovery of Colomba’s character and her whereabouts. As in the earlier scene of the vision of the battle that ignited la romanziera’s imagination, Zaira’s imagination takes flight after a visit to the old tombs of the Sanniti (Samnites), an episode that follows la romanziera’s archeological

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tour in the rain of the recently uncovered tombs of this people that was vanquished by the Romans in 290 BCE. In the novel, the image of the tomb is a motif that reflects Zaira’s relationship to death, as evidenced in her visit to the cemetery, her inability to gaze upon Angelica’s dead body, her fear that Colomba is dead, and the dream of Colomba’s tomb at the end of the novel. As Zaira visits the tombs that la romanziera just visited in her archeological tour, history is transformed by imagination, as Zaira, whose head is “tanto carica di visioni da pesare come un cocomero zuccherino” (so full of visions that it weighs as much as a sugary watermelon) wanders around the same tombs in the rain. 78 The overlapping of images, such as that of the tomb with the skeleton of the baby, and the alternating between Zaira and la romanziera’s experiences of the tomb, contribute to a strangely contemporaneous experience that unites la romanziera and her protagonist. In addition, an autobiographical reference to Maraini’s life reminds us of the world outside the novel. In an allusion to Maraini’s deceased sister, Yuki, whose struggles with rheumatoid arthritis were described in Dolce per sé (1997), la romanziera in this scene is accompanied by her brother-in-law on the archeological tour. Her brother-in-law, she knows, is thinking of the tomb of his wife, la romanziera’s sister. The pre-Christian Samnite history leads Zaira to sit in her kitchen, contemplating the figure of a man with a “fardello sulla schiena” (load on his back) on a ceramic cup. The cup originally belonged to Zaira’s grandmother, Pina, the prostitute who was her grandfather’s lover and the mother of Zaira’s father, Pitricc’ i pelus’. Zaira muses about the history of the cup after the episode with the tomb. This leads her to wonder about Colomba’s travails, as she reconstructs what she remembers of Colomba, as her memories take on new significance: Una ragazza così diligente e disciplinata, non si sarebbe sentita in dovere di avvertire, se avesse voluto sparire per un certo tempo? Zaira continua a fissare l’uomo misterioso dal fardello sulla schiena [. . .] e si chiede se anche Colomba non portasse un fardello troppo pesante. Un fardello misterioso e insospettato. Le pesava la perdita del padre e della madre? Le pesava la vicinanza un poco troppo occhiuta e pettegola del paese? Le pesava la compagnia di una nonna che parlava poco e stentava a guadagnare i soldi per terminare il mese? 79 Wouldn’t such a diligent and disciplined girl feel the need to let someone know, if she felt like disappearing for a certain amount of time? Zara continues to stare at the mysterious man with the load on his back [. . .] and asks herself if Colomba might not also be carrying too heavy a load. A mysterious and unsuspected load. Did the loss of her mother and father weigh on her? Did the proximity of the town, a little too watchful and gossipy, weigh on her? Did the company of her grandmother, who talked little and barely made ends meet by the end of the month, weigh on her?

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These thoughts lead her to wonder whether Colomba had indeed left voluntarily, as Colomba had told Zaira when Zaira was too sick with fever to understand whether she was hallucinating: “Non mi aspettare, Zà. E non mi cercare. [. . .] Io sto bene. Non mi cercare, ciao” (Don’t wait for me, Zà. And don’t look for me. [. . .] I’m fine. Don’t look for me. ‘Bye). 80 But Zaira remains undeterred. Zaira’s mental and physical wanderings will lead Zaira to redeem her daughter’s life by saving her granddaughter’s. And to save her granddaughter’s life by redeeming the life of her daughter. A NETWORK OF NARRATIVE THREADS The final chapter of Colomba reaches resolution, only to give way to narrative aperture and a storytelling poised to begin again. The narrative resolution of Colomba’s plight occurs through the ever-tighter interweaving of its three narrative threads, while ultimate narrative aperture is guaranteed by the disentangling of these very threads in the last pages of the novel. At the end of the penultimate chapter, Zaira’s chronological relating of her daughter’s story, which parallels Zaira’s growing understanding of the many layers of history that made up Angelica’s sociopsychological context and Zaira’s deepening understanding of Angelica within that context, suddenly takes an atemporal turn. Time is scrambled; it collapses, like block time, when Zaira’s impassioned and lengthy monologue—which originated with Zaira’s presence at her daughter’s deathbed in the hospital, an event that occurred before the beginning of this novel—gives way to the current plot of the novel, “Dove sarà andata tua figlia, Angelica?” (Where could your daughter have gone, Angelica?). 81 Both Zaira’s question and her crucible of histories prepare us for the resolutions of the final chapter, and the unexpected and felicitous arrival of Zaira’s long-lost father, Pitrucc’ i pelus’, whom Zaira meets for the first time in her life. (Having lived the early dreams of communism, it will be one of Pitrucc’s functions to relate to Zaira—and the reader—the story of his stay in the Soviet Union and his consignment to a gulag.) Yet, notably, between Zaira’s question, “Dove sarà andata tua figlia, Angelica?” at the end of the chapter and the arrival of Zaira’s father from Australia at the beginning of the next and final chapter is interposed a storytelling mother-daughter break in which the daughter asks specifically about Colomba’s fate. Consequently, in the final chapter, the frequent narrative intersections and character overlap between Zaira and la romanziera expand to include intersections between the storytelling mother and la romanziera, while the daughter’s illness and recovery, in the final pages, is imbricated with Colomba’s.

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In sum, the three narrative threads, with their different narrative functions and temporal dimensions, fuse in the last chapter. First, Zaira’s narrative, like a fishing line cast into the past, draws together Zaira’s family origins and her reflection on her family’s participation in Italy’s histories, and moves the novel chronologically forward, in linear time, in Zaira’s search for Colomba. Zaira’s narrative is frequently interrupted by the meta-narrative time of la romanziera. On a narrative level, the occasional intercalation of la romanziera’s less-than-omniscient presence—for example, she loses track of Zaira in the woods and asks herself, “Dove si sarà inoltrata?” (Where did she get to?) 82—allows Maraini an exploration of the relationship between artistic inspiration, imagination, writing, and historical research. In addition, Zaira’s story is also interrupted by the cyclical time of the storytelling motherdaughter episodes, in which the mother and daughter’s ages vary from young to old and back again (for example, a non-verisimilar 130-year-old mother and an aging daughter who refuses to leave her mother). The storytelling mother-daughter interludes, which serve as allusions to women’s vital role in oral storytelling traditions, self-reflexively reinforce the fictive nature of the narrative framework. The cyclical dimension of nonlinear time—going both backward and forward in time—of the mother-daughter relationship serves throughout the novel to slow the action and heighten the suspense. In addition, the mother and daughter’s closeness serves as a counterpoint to the distance between Zaira and her own daughter, a distance bridged only by the reflective interior monologue provoked by Angelica’s death, or rather, by the backward movement into histories and forward movement into the forest for Colomba. “Solo le storie fermano il tempo” (Only stories stop time), we read at the end of one of the storytelling mother-daughter interludes. 83 In the final chapter, the three threads come deliberately together as is clear in the intercalation of la romanziera: “La donna dai capelli corti osserva quella madre e quella figlia che forse si sono saziate di storie, ne hanno fatto una scorpacciata, fino ad ammalarsi. Adesso cosa rimane? Il suo sguardo fa fatica a separarsi dai due corpi, quello materno e quello filiale che scoprono insieme l’arte del racconto, mentre la curiosità insegue su un altro sentiero narrativo, una nonna e una nipote che apprendono insieme la difficile arte della convivenza” (The woman with the short hair observes that mother and that daughter who have perhaps had enough of stories, have binged on them to the point of getting sick. What’s left? Her gaze struggles to detach itself from the two bodies, the maternal one and the filial one that together discover the art of storytelling, while her curiosity chases another narrative path, a grandmother and a granddaughter who together learn the difficult art of living together). 84

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“LA DIFFICILE ARTE DELLA CONVIVENZA” The final chapter offers a new, promising configuration of the family unit, of convivenza, and, at the same time, an ecofeminist message of convivenza as collective survival connected to the life of the forest. The key to this survival arrives on the first page of the final chapter in the guise of Zaira’s long-lost father, Pitrucc’ i pelus’, from Australia. Pitrucc’ i pelus’ is the narrative fulfillment of the Marainian topos of the problematic, elusive, absent, much-longed-for and much-adored father of her previous narratives and autobiographical works. With the figure of this Italian-Australian immigrant, Maraini redresses her loss. Pitricc’ i pelus’ embodies both the myth of the return of the father and that of the returning epic hero, Odysseus. And, of course, Pitrucc’ emerges as the antidote to Cignalitt’, Valdo and Sal. Maraini, in preparation for Colomba’s happy ending, creates in him a type of fulfilling father figure and hero, who overturns the gender constructions of more traditional, albeit younger, men, like Valdo Mitta, Angelica’s husband, and Sal, Colomba’s lover/jailer. In Maraini’s gender reconstruction, Pitrucc’ happily undertakes traditional female tasks, and thereby proves to be a gracious and welcome guest: “Partecipa ai lavori casalinghi, cucina, gli piace soprattutto trafficare coi fornelli, rifà i letti, va a fare la spesa” (He participates in housework, he cooks, he especially likes to bustle around the stove, he remakes the beds, he goes food shopping). 85 Pitrucc’ i pelus’s high-minded communist ideals, his opposition to fascism, his hardships as an immigrant, and his survivorship—like Maraini, of a concentration camp, although in Pitrucc’s case, a Siberian gulag—contribute to his heroic stature, while his age, feebleness, and scrambled speech challenge the genre conventions of male heroes. In a light touch, Maraini attributes to him a comical combination of dialect from the Abruzzi with Italian and English words that mimics the slippage in languages common to immigrant speech. Yet Pitrucc’s long-standing commitment to ethical behavior resurfaces when he tells Zaira to report the deer-killing, and later, when he insists that Sal must go to jail. He is one who is used to beginning life over and over again in a different country, first in Australia, then in Russia, then in Australia again, and now, in Touta, Italy, his hometown, where he says he has come to die. Yet he seems, like Zaira over the course of the novel, to get ever younger and stronger, and builds himself a room in the barn. He is industrious, solicitous. Pitrucc’s determination, and his ability to build and then to rebuild, keys to his own survival, become the strategies in the novel for collective survival. He epitomizes resiliency and a willingness to ricominciare. In Maraini’s assignation of gender traits, Pitrucc’ provides a direct contrast, a feminist solution, to Colomba’s captor, Sal, and his two friends. Sal and his friends are poachers, criminals who kill deer in the protected

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areas of the Abruzzo National Forest. In addition, just as Sal sells the deer, Sal acts as a pimp, selling Colomba’s body to his two friends, and never even sharing the money with her. His exploitation of the land extends to his exploitation of her. That Colomba’s captivity is wrought by the same young men who kill the deer reveals their selfish and criminal exploitation, the arrogant and violent attitude of an untransformed, unprogressive thinking, of a new generation of young men that holds no promise, a (self)destructive generation no different than that of Cignalitt’ and men before him. Their arrogance is juxtaposed with the mild-mannered and respectful approach to la convivenza that Pitrucc’ demonstrates. Finally, Sal is Colomba’s drug provider, keeping her hooked on drugs and dependent on him, allowing her to become ever feebler, and leaving her to wallow in squalid, subhuman conditions in a trailer. This type of convivenza threatens Colomba’s very life, yet Colomba does not want to leave her prison, she is so hooked on drugs. Zaira’s determination, her reconstruction of many (his)stories, her year spent scouring the snowy forests of the Abruzzi National Park, lead her to find her missing granddaughter. Not surprisingly, this discovery occurs when Zaira’s father returns, with his resolute ethos of starting anew and his secondhand car. With his help, Zaira finally finds Colomba, albeit in critical condition that will warrant weeks in hospital during an uncertain fate and then weeks of nursing back to good health. In fact, it is while Zaira is showing Pitrucc’ a photo of Colomba that Zaira sees for the first time that Sal is in the photo, even though it dates back to Colomba’s college days in Florence (312). Zaira’s blindness is lifted, significantly, not when she can see in the darkness, but when she can discern Colomba’s white trailer in the camouflaging bright light of a snowy landscape, when she can discern the danger that is, and always has been, right before her very eyes: “Ma mentre prende le misure e cerca di capire quanto disti quel bosco dalle cime del Capo Randagio, vede in lontananza fra gli alberi una forma che le sembra irreale in quel posto: una roulotte dai finestrini sprangati. Verniciata di bianco, si mimetizza perfettamente contro il bianco della neve. Per questo non l’aveva vista prima” (But while she measures the distances and tries to understand how far those woods are from the top of Capo Randagio, she sees in the distance between the trees a form that seems unreal in that place: a trailer with its windows bolted shut. Painted white, it’s perfectly camouflaged against the white of the snow. That’s why she hadn’t seen it before). 86 The dangerous atmosphere generated by deer killings persists and swirls insidiously close to Zaira and Colomba during Zaira’s rescue. The bloody violence of the illegal hunting of gentle animals of the forest increases the suspense of the narrative, as it increases the threat of danger surrounding Colomba and Zaira herself. Suspense continues to build as Colomba’s rescue coincides with the storytelling mother’s surreal fairy tale (or fable) of a

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hunter and a father deer that lost his mate to another hunter, and has been left with nursing fawns to feed. In an ominous reversal, the deer will warn the hunter that his own family is now in jeopardy, signifying, in an ecofeminist message, that the violence of illegal animal hunting is akin to the violence of homicide. The storytelling mother’s tale of the deer coincides with the discovery of Colomba. When the daughter asks the mother what happens to Zaira and her granddaughter Colomba (on page 294) and then again what happens to Zaira and the trailer (on page 347), the two stories become imbricated, and the reader wonders who is telling the story now. Zaira? La romanziera? The storytelling mother? At the culminating moment, as we saw, la romanziera had drawn the parallel between Colomba and the daughter for us with her shifting gaze (see note 86 below), differentiating between the art of storytelling and the art of living together. The intersection of these two narrative threads lies in the illness of an addiction—storytelling for the daughter, injected illegal drugs for Colomba—and an ethical exhortation against the excesses of evasione (escapism). The recovery for both will be long. It will take weeks for the daughter to come out of her fever, and for Colomba to turn the corner in the hospital and then be nursed back to health. Excesses of fantasy, through storytelling or drugs, produce a seductive, addictive high, but the hallucinogenic thrill tempts one to withdraw from life: to ignore the needs of the body, the commitments of the present. Evasione produces a prolonged, feverish illness for the daughter, a life-threatening condition for Colomba. But la romanziera’s shifting gaze also creates another parallel, between l’arte del racconto and l’arte della convivenza. In the final pages, both Colomba and the daughter recover. Colomba returns home to a more functional family: a promising, multigenerational configuration of family in which the members are committed and attuned to each other. This configuration functions as a positive alternative to the damaging family unit that Zaira had created with her abusive stepfather, Cignalit’, and unhappy daughter, Angelica, as well as the small family unit of two estranged members, a granddaughter and grandmother, that she had unwittingly created for Colomba. It is also in contrast to the dangerous cohabitation of Colomba and Sal, and to Sal and his friends’ violent relationship with the protected natural environment and animals of the Abruzzi National Park. Here, then, is Maraini’s ecofeminist message. Here is the resolution that hinges, finally, on the figure of Zaira’s returning father. Here is the key to individual, familial, social and ecological survival: il ricominciare (beginning again). Yet Colomba has in fact always also been about the art of telling stories. The power of stories to re-create, re-construct, bring understanding and enlightenment, transform, console, promote survival. This novel has in fact always been about the power of literature, and about itself. We notice this in Zaira’s own relationship, as a translator, to literature, and the power it has to

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console her after Angelica’s death. The power of storytelling becomes the power of literature, to heal, to console, to inspire, to (re)construct. Zaira, at her daughter’s deathbed, “pensava che non ce l’avrebbe mai fatta a restare ferma davanti al cadavere di Angelica, in quella anonima stanza di ospedale. Ma le parole di Calderón l’avevano soccorsa: Credo che i miei occhi siano idropici, perché anche se il bere significa morte, i miei occhi bevono sempre di più e così vedendo che il guardarti mi uccide, muoio dal desiderio di vederti” (thought she would never have managed to be still in front of the corpse of her daughter, in that anonymous hospital room. But the words of Calderón had come to her aid: I think that my eyes are hydropic, because even if drinking means death, my eyes drink more and more, and so seeing that looking at you kills me, I die from the desire to see you) (original italics). 87 In the final pages of the novel, la romanziera realizes that the conclusion of Zaira’s story is not a conclusion, but rather Zaira’s efforts to wash her hands of la romanziera, in an unexpected happy ending that Zaira as character has willed: “Un lieto fine? E’ una sorpresa inaspettata” (A happy ending? It’s an unexpected surprise). 88 Almost as if Zaira had willed la romanziera into existence—as if indeed the character existed autonomously from the writer—and, when she is no longer needed, has willed her back out of existence. Having in the meanwhile created a small utopia, a workable family nucleus. In Maraini’s classic 1970s novel, Donna in guerra, the last line of the novel reads, “Ora sono sola e ho tutto da ricominciare” (Now I am alone and must begin everything again). 89 Vannina’s solitude, the breakup of her marriage, signal painful ruptures that become necessary for her survival, and for her rebirth. Yet the sentence groans with Vannina’s exhaustion, her disillusionment. In Colomba, instead, the novel concludes with an energizing happy ending, so surprising in Maraini’s texts, and most importantly, with narrative aperture. The concluding episode is that of the storytelling mother and her daughter. The daughter has recovered from the fever, months seem to have passed, the snow has melted into spring, flowers are blooming, time is uncertain. The last paragraph of the novel reads, “Alle spalle sente la voce fresca della figlia che dice: ‘Raccontami una storia, ma’.’ E la madre, ravviandosi i capelli, si accinge a ricominciare” (At her shoulders she hears the fresh voice of her daughter that says, “Tell me a story, Ma.” And the mother, tidying her hair, gets ready to begin again). 90 In this symbolic final image, Maraini underlines the importance of “il ricominciare” from a meta-narrative perspective. She reminds her reader that this is a novel. At the same time, it is as if, having warned us about the excesses of fiction through Colomba and the daughter’s dramatic overdose crises, Maraini in the last lines reinstates the vital role of storytelling, as maternal regeneration, as rebirth, as life impetus/catalyst.

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Unlike the much earlier Donna in guerra, the novel Colomba ends with the (re)construction of a convivenza that can guarantee individual and collective survival, in a story that imbricates l’arte del raccontare with l’arte della convivenza. NOTES 1. Agger, Critical Social Theories, 37. 2. Hutcheon, The Politics, 138. 3. Wren-Owens, Postmodern Ethics, 2. The inadequacies of postmodernism have been further highlighted by challenges from Wu Ming 1 in an elaboration of the “New Italian Epic.” For a thorough discussion of the debates about postmodernism in Italy, see Monica Jansen, Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia. See also Jansen’s, “Italian Literature: The Epics of Reality” in Reconsidering the Postmodern: European Literature Beyond Relativism. On postmodernism and impegno, see editors Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug, Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. 4. Burns, Fragments, 97. 5. Ibid. 6. Bertoni, “Political and Social Commitment,” 9. 7. Ibid., 18. 8. Maraini, “La cipolla,” 42. The relationship between postmodern theories and feminisms is far too complex to be adequately addressed here. Hutcheon, for example, notes in her epilogue to her The Politics of Postmodernism, that the 1990s revealed to her “how much both postmodern theory and practice had remained caught in that earlier paradigm of not only maleness but American-ness (171, original italics). (She adds, “it was also predominantly white” (172).) For more on the tensions between Italian feminism, postmodernism and impegno, see Ronchetti, Alessia. “Postmodernismo e pensiero italiano della differenza sessuale: Una questione politica.” Some Italian feminists insist on the centrality of the body and reject postmodern theory, for one, because of its dissolution of the subject. As Rosi Braidotti notes, both feminists and race theorists “are suspicious of deconstructing a subject-position, which historically they never gained a right to” (Braidotti, The Posthuman, 47). As we noted in the Introduction, there are many feminisms, including postmodern feminisms. For an interesting discussion, see Braidotti’s article, “A Critical Cartography of Feminist Post-Postmodernism.” 9. Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 260n4. 10. Klages, Literary Theory, 169. 11. Maraini, Colomba (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004), 365. 12. For several other autobiographical allusions, see Manson (“In Love” 100n1). 13. Maraini, Colomba, 109. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. Ibid., 113. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. The connections between Pirandello’s famous essay and Maraini’s novel merit further study, as Pirandello and Maraini both inquire into the nature of poetic imagination. In addition, Pirandello also mentions Ariosto, often alluded to in Colomba, in his essay. 20. Maraini, Colomba, 55–57. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. For example, in her first chapter, significantly entitled, “Beyond the End of the Journey,” Blum explores the “end-of-the-journey mentality” and “negative approach to history” (17). Blum starts her argument, “Western intellectual history can be described as a progression of totalizing systems of thought, built on mythical, theological, and philosophical foundations. In the wake of the modern crisis of reason, such a progression seems to have dead-ended in an impasse, which postmodern literature expresses in terms of disconnection between writing and

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historical significance” (11). She finds that “Calvino linked a constructive notion of crisis specifically with women’s new roles in the cultural realm. [. . .] In the second half of the past century, a remarkable flourishing of women’s writing contributed to a reshaping of the Italian cultural landscape, thereby turning the breakdown of phallogocentric ‘universals’ into a condition fruitful for exploring new experiences, concerns, and resources. The Italian intellectual establishment has not adequately recognized these contributions” (40). Blum identifies Dacia Maraini’s itinerary, among others, as “pointing a way out of critical melancholia” (42). 23. Maraini, Colomba, 9. The idea of the character that knocks on the door returns at the beginning of Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza (2013), in a self-referential allusion to Colomba in the young Chiara Mandalà’s insistence that the author write about Chiara di Assisi. 24. Maraini, Colomba, 11. 25. Ibid. 26. Blum, Rewriting the Journey, 152. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 165. 29. Maraini, Colomba, 10. 30. Ibid., 201. 31. Ibid., 270. 32. We recall that Edoardo in Dolce per sé was a violinist. 33. Ibid., 169. 34. Ibid., 71. 35. Ibid., 192. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 211. 39. Ibid., 93. 40. Ibid., 81. 41. Ibid., 81. 42. Ibid. 43. When Zaira reenters il Rombo, a place that repels and intrigues her at the same time, her eyes symbolically adjust to the darkness: “Il buio sembra totale e irremediabile. [. . .] Finalmente i suoi occhi si abituano al buio e cominciano a distinguere qualcosa” (The darkness seems total and impenetrable. [. . .] Finally her eyes get used to the darkness and begin to distinguish something) (196). Shortly afterward, Zaira will jump on her blue-and-white bike to head into the mountain, like Ariosto, to undertake a “sciocca, disperata caccia alla verità” (foolish, desperate search for the truth), a truth that she could not decipher when Colomba lived with her and it was near at hand, a truth whose discovery she must earn (201). 44. Maraini, Colomba, 80. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 201. 47. We have already noted the use of epithets, typical of epic poems like the Odyssey, to refer to characters, such as la donna dai capelli corti and her lover, l’uomo dalla faccia etrusca (the man with the Etruscan face) (55). Blum describes Colomba as “a coral, epic novel that seamlessly interweaves the author’s private story, her imaginative journey into the characters’ stories, and public history” (161). 48. Maraini, Colomba, 175. 49. Ibid., 178. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 90. 52. Ibid., 176. 53. On this point, see Picchietti, Relational Spaces, as well as Maraini’s La grande festa (2011). 54. Maraini, Colomba, 175. 55. Ibid., 184 and 186, respectively.

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56. Ibid., 176. Brief glossaries of Sicilian and Abruzzese dialects appear at the end of the novel. 57. Manson, “In Love,” 91. Manson identifies a number of other fairy tale references in Colomba, which “lend the story a mythical air” (“In Love” 94). In Manson’s analysis, these contribute to the sinister and dangerous atmosphere of the novel, rather than to the more playful rhythm that we identify in Colomba. For example, the common fairy tale locations, such as “mountains, gardens and woods all play an important role in the novel, as the mysterious, beautiful, yet dangerous locations in which the characters move” (“In Love” 94). In fact, for Manson, “fairy tales become almost a template for the domination of women” (“In Love” 94). 58. Ibid., 92. 59. Ibid., 99. 60. See on this point, Maraini (“Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg) and the contemporary writer, Clara Sereni (“Interview”). 61. Maraini, Colomba, 299. 62. Ibid., 277. 63. Ibid., 276–77. 64. Ibid., 277. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. See Passerini, Autoritratto di gruppo. Maraini takes up the relationship between violence and justice in La grande festa, where she asks, “Si può uccidere per fare giustizia?” (Can one kill to do justice?) (105). 68. Maraini, Colomba, 279. 69. Ibid., 300. 70. Ibid., 303–4. 71. Maraini, “Il femminismo,” Interview by Sumeli Weinberg, 52–53. 72. Maraini, “Intervista,” Interview by Paulicelli and Ward, 81. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 82. 75. Ibid., 80. 76. Ibid., 79. 77. Hutcheon, The Politics, 163. 78. Maraini, Colomba, 208. 79. Ibid., 211. 80. Ibid., 188. 81. Ibid., 307. 82. Ibid., 320. 83. Ibid., 294. 84. Ibid., 355. 85. Ibid., 341. 86. Ibid., 323. 87. Ibid., 299. 88. Ibid., 365. 89. Maraini, Donna in guerra, 269. 90. Maraini, Colomba, 365.

Conclusion

Beyond Survival

The contemporary philosopher and feminist theorist, Rosi Braidotti, begins her book, The Posthuman (2013), by asserting that “not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history.” 1 In her first chapter, she elaborates on this point: The human is a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative, just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination. The human norm [. . .] functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalized format of humanity. This standard is posited as categorically and qualitatively distinct from the sexualized, racialized, naturalized others and also in opposition to the technological artifact. (original italics) 2

Braidotti’s observations prove enlightening for our work on Maraini’s narratives of survival, which focus on the “sexualized, racialized, naturalized others” who have always, and continue to be, excluded from the category of the human, as Braidotti describes it. The human, for Braidotti, is the Cartesian subject, Kantian being, or, “‘in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on.’” 3 Those others, then, become, “disposable bodies.” 4 These, in Maraini’s terms, would be all those “at the margins,” the marginalized who become the focus of her work. In fact, we might say that Maraini’s texts reveal that it is the less-than-human status and condition of her protagonists that make them vulnerable to attack, exploitation, violence, and abuse. We need only consider the sexualized others we have studied in the previous chapters, such as Armida, Suor Attanasia, 137

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and Colomba, but we can also include the majority of Maraini’s women characters, as well as characters such as Paolo Gentile, who loves a transsexual (or in current terms, transgender) in Buio. To this list we can add Isolina, whose treatment as less than human, as we saw, was both gender and class based, and Ahmed, whose inhumane treatment was rooted in his illegal migrant status and diasporic condition. In addition, the threats to survival of Buio’s many child protagonists, we might say, are based on their less-thanhuman status rooted in their reduced rights as under-age noncitizens, which, in some cases, is aggravated by their differently abled status (Alicetta, for example). We can also include the many animal figures in Maraini’s work, who belong, for Braidotti, along with “the environment” or “earth,” in the category of the “naturalized other.” 5 Finally, Braidotti discusses at length the role of science, biotechnology, and technology in her elaboration of a posthuman theory, calling Dolly the cloned sheep, “Dolly my sister,” in her elaboration of a philosophy that wishes to break down the barriers between forms of life and planetary existence. 6 We don’t wish to overstate the connections between Braidotti’s theories and Maraini’s narratives, especially because the former is a theorist and philosopher and the latter a novelist, poet, playwright, and journalist who eschews labels. However, it is interesting that Maraini takes up similar issues, as we saw in our brief study of the giant Spil in her children’s book, La pecora Dolly e altre storie per bambini. Braidotti goes on to critique negative politics, which in her view take many forms, such as necro-politics and necro-technologies. For example, she criticizes the response to catastrophe, which is often anxiety that produces “the socially enforced aim [. . .] not to change, but conservation or survival.” 7 She rejects Agamben’s view in which, in Braidotti’s reading, life is “the constitutive vulnerability of the human subject, which sovereign power can kill.” 8 She rejects the paralyzing grief and anxieties of communities held together “negatively by shared vulnerability.” 9 Braidotti instead, in dispensing with the human as convention and with humanism, and elaborating a theory of the posthuman, promotes a life-centered, or as she puts it, a “zoecentered egalitarianism” and a vitalist approach. 10 Hers is the declaration of “affirmative politics” through a notion of hope that is “grounded in a sense of responsibility and inter-generational accountability,” as she explains: “Hope is a way of dreaming up possible futures: an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded not only in projects that aim at reconstructing the social imaginary, but also in the political economy of desires, affects and creativity that underscore it.” 11 Such hope, we might contend, underlies Maraini’s impegno, the ethical core in her fiction and narratives. Maraini’s writing explores the historical, political, legal, social and psychological mechanisms underpinning the threats to survival of the not-human or not-quite-human enough. Yet her

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work is exhortatory, never apocalyptic. It identifies responsibility and guilt at the level of the individual, rather than throwing up its hands at the systemic, global, and systematic perpetration of abuse. Indeed, it deconstructs systemic and systematic abuses of power by revealing the role of the individual: the violent lover, the exploitative parent, the indifferent neighbor, the criminal social worker, the corrupt employer, the sex trafficker, the Nazi. She also explores the psychological construct of victim and perpetrator. As her more than fifty years of writing show, Maraini is committed to change and believes in the power of the word, of literature, to transform “the social imaginary” through the imagination, which, as we have seen, can foster education through empathy. As we hope we have shown through our analysis of her key texts from 1984 to 2004 through the paradigm of reconstruction, Maraini’s writing is not confined to unsmiling, serious narratives of “denuncia.” Maraini employs an innovative use of traditional and hybrid genres; a variety of tones, including the playful and humorous; and a wide array of literary and novelistic techniques, whether in works of fiction, autobiographical novels, or the “libro-documento.” All these are a testament to her skills as a consummate storyteller. Although the motif of survival pervades much of Maraini’s work, she also offers its antidote: la convivenza. Colomba is the novel that offers perhaps the most hopeful happy ending of convivenza. As we saw by following the complex web of narrative reconstructions in this fragmentary postmodern novel, Zaira reconstructs for la romanziera dai capelli corti their rural (contadino) history and their involvement in World War I, World War II, and the 1960s movements. These provide both background and setting for an understanding of the crisis and drug addiction of her granddaughter, Colomba, and, as importantly, the emotional collapse, alcohol addiction, and premature death of her daughter, Angelica. Zaira’s reconstruction of these stories, her storytelling that blends with the telling of la romanziera and of the storytelling mother, are a necessary condition to remedy the blindness with which Zaira has conducted her family life, the distractedness with which she has lived her relationships, first as daughter and stepdaughter, then as mother, and finally, as grandmother. It is only by discovering her own blindness, through reflective reconstruction, that Zaira can save Colomba. Physical and metaphorical journeys become one, for Zaira’s own development as a character depends upon her ability to reconstruct her involvement in the (collective) past. It is perhaps ironic that this fragmentary postmodern novel demands reconstruction as a necessary condition for its cultural reception and the making of meaning. The reader must in fact put together again the pieces of the puzzle (“i pezzi di un puzzle”), 12 in order to engage in a deep reading of this complex novel of epic scope that renders the “unsustainability,” as we would say today, of Italy’s and our own contemporary condition. Only by piecing

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the mosaic together will the reader resist the temptation to relegate Zaira unthinkingly to the category of heroines “superata l’età delle protagoniste da romanzo” (past the age of heroines of novels) and see Zaira as at least partially responsible for the crises in her family, in her insensitivity to the emotional plights and suffering of the women in her family. 13 Analyzing Colomba through the lens of reconstruction points us beyond individual and collective survival in the figure and life story of Pitrucc’ i pelus’, Zaira’s biological father, whom she finally meets for the first time just before she rescues Colomba. An immigrant who escaped fascism to live in Australia, Pitrucc’ i pelus’ tells Zaira about his time in a gulag in the Soviet Union, his return to Australia to marry and have children, and finally, as an elderly widower, his decision to return to his hometown of Touta to die. Yet Pitrucc’ i pelus’, as Zaira tells us, seems to have no intention of dying. Rather, he represents the stamina and resourcefulness, the skill to rebuild, to keep reconstructing his life, no matter his age. He encapsulates Maraini’s message: rebuilding as key to individual and collective survival. His work as a carpenter, and his ability, even at an advanced age, to build himself a room near the barn once Colomba is well enough to return home to Zaira’s house, are metaphors of his ability to create and recreate family, in different countries and at different times, and to create and recreate a space for himself in that family. In addition, his ability to cook, clean, and care for Zaira crosses rigid gender borders on domestic labor that consign household chores to women; Pitrucc’ i pelus’ thus offers an antidote to the violence and exploitative behavior of other male figures in the novel. In his ability to reconstruct lies his ability to start from scratch, to be reborn, in a new place, in a different time. Colomba ends with the optimism, the hope, that underlies Maraini’s ethos, which is to effect social change by raising her readers’ awareness through words, in the hope of guaranteeing liberty and dignity, as in the famous gesture of Antigone, as in Blob and Telemaco’s journeys to freedom. Explaining the interplay between defeat and optimism in her work and in her life, Maraini says: Looking back on it I feel that I’ve always been drawn toward a rebellious character who loves liberty. This is a projection because I’m like that too, and I feel that this quality is being lost in a society that doesn’t love liberty. But with these experiences of loss, of defeat, I keep on going because every defeat teaches me something. So they’re not final defeats, just partial ones. A critic once said to me, “It’s obvious that you’re a woman, because women today are more optimistic than men. Your books always end with the promise of something else.” For example, Woman at War ends by saying that now everything will start all over again. In Lettters to Marina she concludes, “Now I’ll leave this place and begin to write again, to live.” Train for Helsinki is the same. Once a negative experience, a defeat, pain, has been lived through, you go on,

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because there’s something else. That same critic said to me, “A man would have destroyed that experience, he would have closed in on himself. You as a woman still feel yourself impelled towards the future with a somewhat optimistic vision.” There’s never a “conclusion”—there’s a promise. I think that I identify with a person who won’t tolerate restraints, locks, restrictions, norms, laws. And I feel this person is a loser. Teresa, Enrica, Bianca. I live their defeats because they are not final; they don’t destroy the person but make her stronger. I have a tendency to make my characters get reborn.” 14

In Colomba, both Pitrucc’ i pelus’ and Zaira are determined to put their defeats, their losses, their pain, behind them, to begin again, and to insist that Colomba, metonym of a youth that has inherited a legacy of failures, join them in the reconstruction of a more successful convivenza, a more successful and sustainable configuration of family. At the end of Colomba, Zaira, triumphant, dispenses with la romanziera as soon as she gets her happy ending. But, as we saw, the meta-narrative Colomba ends not with the closure of Zaira’s happy ending, but with the openness of the figure of the storytelling mother who, at her daughter’s request, “si accinge a ricominciare.” 15 And so, the topos of reconstruction leads us beyond artistic survival to rebirth. Not merely for the character, but for the author, Maraini, who will (re)construct for us another story. So we can begin again. With all the possibilities that opens before us. NOTES 1. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 1. 2. Ibid., 26. 3. Ibid., 1. Braidotti here quotes Cary Wolfe at http://www.carywolfe.com/post_about. html. This post is not retrievable as of July 2, 2015. 4. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 15. 5. Ibid., 27. It is important to note that, while Maraini’s narratives offer an anthropomorphization of animals, Braidotti rejects such a representation as very problematic. In fact, Braidotti views it as one of the roots of animal exploitation and considers that animals have been in “a sort of zoo-proletariat” since ancient times (The Posthuman, 70). 6. Ibid., 195. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid., 120. 9. Ibid., 101. 10. Ibid., 60. 11. Ibid., 192. 12. Sapegno, “Oltre,” 42–43. 13. Maraini, Colomba, 10. 14. Maraini, “Prolegomena,” Interview by Anderlini, 149. 15. Maraini, Colomba, 365.

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Index

1960s, xx, xxvi, xxvii, 1, 3–4, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 11n20, 12n35, 32, 37, 53n13, 80, 103, 122, 122–124, 125, 139 1960s movements. See 1960s. 1968. See 1960s.

Cannon, JoAnn, xvi, xxvi, xxxiin55, 16–17, 18, 19, 20, 28n13, 29n22, 73 canon, women writers and, xiv–xvi, xix, xxxn5, xxxn8, xxxn14, 15 Catholic Church, xxxin40, 36, 39, 39–40, 42 commitment. See impegno compulsory heterosexuality, 37 concentration camp, xiii, xix, xxvii, 44, 45, 51–52, 59, 81, 92, 93, 108, 130 Cruciata, Maria Antonietta, xvii, 105 Currie, Mark: prolepsis, 2; time and narration, 3, 29n16

affidamento , 32, 35, 53n19, 63 Alice in Wonderland, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 11n15, 61, 112 Alliata, Topazia (Maraini’s mother), xxiv, 43, 55n58 Amantangelo, Susan, 52n3 Amoia, Alba, 11n20, 52n6 Ariosto, Ludovico, 105, 113, 115, 118, 134n19, 135n43 Barthes, Roland, 17, 32, 54n52 Bertoni, Roberto, 104 Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola, 42 Blum, Cinzia Sartini, xiv, xxxin18, 54n49, 55n56, 55n60, 55n69, 56n73, 70n3, 71n28, 74, 101n27, 105, 110, 112, 134n22, 135n47 Braidotti, Rosi, xxxin35, 53n19, 69, 134n8, 137–138, 141n5 Bryce, Judith, 11n15, 31, 32 Burns, Jennifer, 104 Calvino, Italo, xxxiin51, 26, 50, 104, 134n22

Debenedetti, Antonio, xvi–xvii, xxxin18, 17 de Lauretis, Teresa, 35 Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Rodica, xxxn5, 17, 18, 19, 29n21, 32, 71n28, 73, 101n27 Don Giovanni motif, 9, 10, 12n48, 54n47, 65 Don Juan motif. See Don Giovanni motif engagement. See impegno entrustment. See affidamento epic, xxix, 105, 107, 113, 119, 130, 135n47, 139 fairy tale, xxiv, 5, 33, 51, 59, 62–63, 67, 68, 69, 75, 77, 78, 122, 131, 136n57

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150

Index

Fanning, Ursula, 55n55, 55n67 feminism, xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxxin45, 5, 7, 11n20, 17, 32–33, 53n19, 54n49, 54n54, 63, 68, 73, 79, 90, 101n27, 101n53, 130, 137; ecofeminism, xxi, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, 60, 63, 130, 132; Italian, 33, 34, 35, 37, 122, 124; postmodernism and, xx, 103–105, 124, 126, 134n8 feminisms, xviii, 103, 126, 134n8. See also feminism flashback, 1–2, 92, 93 García Márquez, Gabriel, 20 Giorgio, Adalgisa, 28n2 Hirsch, Marianne, 54n54 Hutcheon, Linda, 103–104, 126, 134n8 impegno, xvii, xxiii, 104–105, 134n3, 134n8, 138 Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, 6, 9, 12n42, 12n48, 13n58, 28n2, 53n19 Luperini, Romano, 104 Magris, Claudio, 58 Manson, Christina Siggers, 58, 59, 70n15, 122, 134n12, 136n57 Maraini, Dacia: Bagheria, xiii, xvii, xxvi, 11n15, 12n35, 45–46, 55n55, 58, 60, 81; La bionda, la bruna e l’asino, 29n17, 61, 64, 79; Buio, xiv, xx, xxiii, xxviii, 31, 32, 33, 39, 41, 43, 57, 67, 73–99, 100n3, 111, 115, 117, 138; “Cani di Roma”, xxiv–xxvi, 106; Chiara di Assisi , xxxin40, 42, 68, 135n23; Clandestino a bordo , 12n35, 35–36, 48, 71n39, 79, 81; Colomba , xvii, xix, xx, xxiii, xxix, xxxin45, 57, 59, 80, 92, 98, 103–133, 139, 140, 141; Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente , 32, 79; I digiuni di Caterina da Siena , 40; Dizionarietto quotidiano, 12n32, 54n47; Dolce per sé , xviii, xx, xxiii, xxviii, 32, 54n47, 57–67, 68, 70n16, 70n19, 74–75, 76, 91, 99, 112, 114, 115, 135n32; Donna in guerra, xxviii, 6, 7, 11n21, 31, 33, 37, 54n30,

59, 60, 75, 82, 133; L’età del malessere, xiv, 58; “Le galline di suor Attanasia”, 39–43; I giorni di Antigone, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxix, 80, 82, 99; La grande festa, 12n35, 135n53, 136n67; Isolina, xvi, xx, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, 4, 15–28, 28n8, 28n13, 28n15, 29n17, 29n22, 29n36, 31, 33, 38–39, 40; Letter a Marina , xvii, 32, 52n3, 59, 76; La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa , xiv, xvii, xxxn14, 16, 32, 55n55, 57, 76, 104; Mio marito, 31; Mulino, Orlov e il gatto che si crede pantera , 59, 60, 61; La nave per Kobe , xiii, xx, xxiv, xxviii, 31, 43–52, 54n37, 55n55, 55n58, 55n60, 55n67, 59, 108; Le pecora Dolly e altre storie per bambini, xviii, xxiv, 59, 68, 138; La ragazza di via Maqueda, 56n80, 80; “Spil, figlia di nani”, 68–69, 80, 138; Storie di cani per una bambina, xxviii, 59, 61, 63; Stravaganza, 84; Il treno dell’ultima notte, xiii, 57, 92, 108, 111; Il treno per Helsinki, xx, xxvi, 1–11, 11n4, 31, 33, 38, 54n47, 65–67, 92, 103, 125; La vacanza , xiv, 58; Viaggiando con passo di volpe, 37, 43; Voci, xvii, 17, 31, 57, 77, 80, 86, 107, 111, 114, 115; Zena, 84 Maraini, Fosco (Maraini’s father), 43, 45, 55n60 Merry, Bruce, 11n2, 29n22 meta-narrative elements, xxix, 105, 107–110, 133, 141 migration, xxiii, 89, 104 Miguel y Canuto, Juan Carlos de, xx, 55n60 Montefoschi, Silvia, 34 Mori, Anna Maria, 7, 34, 46 Muraro, Luisa, xxiii, 34–35 Passerini, Luisa, 1, 6 Picarazzi, Teresa, 43 Picchietti, Virginia, xxxin45, 32, 33, 52n3, 53n15, 101n31, 116, 135n53 Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, 37, 54n29 Pirandello, Luigi, 105, 109, 110–111, 112–113, 134n19 posthuman theory, 69, 137–138, 141n5

Index postmodernism, xvii–xviii, xix, xx, xxvi, xxix, 92, 103–105, 108, 110, 119, 123, 124, 126, 134n3, 134n8, 134n22, 139. See also feminism prostitution, 74, 75, 127; child, 79–80, 80, 82–83, 97, 99, 102n93; child sexual slavery and, 80, 82, 83, 99 Re, Lucia, 35 Rich, Adrienne, 32, 37, 52n3 Salsini, Laura, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70n19 Sambuco, Patrizia, 53n21 Sanvitale, Francesca, 15 Sapegno, Maria Serena, xxxiin55, 64–65

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Scarparo, Susanne, 27, 28n2 Scattigno, Anna, 34, 53n13 sdoppiamento , 92, 93–94, 97 Setzkorn, Sylvia, 32, 63, 65, 71n39 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 33, 44, 52n12, 53n19, 54n52, 55n55, 94, 95, 97, 102n85 Sumeli Weinberg, Grazia, xv, xvi, xviii, xxxn4, 6, 11n4, 12n35, 12n39, 13n56, 39, 52n3, 74, 77, 84, 86, 100n3 Tabucchi, Antonio, xvii, 104 Wittig, Monique, 37 Wren-Owens, Elizabeth, 104

About the Author

Tommasina Gabriele is professor of Italian Studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

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