The Italian writer tells the story of a woman secretly in love with a man.
They don't lead the world here. We find neither money, nor sex, nor power at the heart of “Si peu” by the Italian writer Marco Lodoli. The heroine is the janitor of a high school in the suburbs of Rome. We gradually discover some tangible elements about her life: a period of unimportant sleeping, a rape, an abortion, a friendship, a passing lover. The author of “Pretenders” (2011) is interested in the marginalized and the lonely. In a tenuous and sustained manner, with a rare economy of means in style and plot, it asks questions inherent to all life: time, meaning, traces. The novelist and journalist, born in Rome in 1956, taught Italian in a vocational high school on the outskirts for forty years. The plot of “Si peu” essentially takes place in the teaching world.
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Devotion and sacrifice. We think of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1922), by Stefan Zweig. The question is the same: will the two destinies end up colliding in reality? In “Si peu”, the janitor works in an uneventful school. His modest accommodation is located 300 meters from his workplace. A very small world. Then he appears. The young Matteo Romoli is a new literature teacher. At 25, the guardian falls madly and silently in love with the young teacher. His life becomes her life. She protects him, spies on him, watches him. Will he know one day? Matteo is ambitious and vain: recognition, women, the world. The teacher wants to know glory with his novels. His selfishness is visible. Matteo calls her “Caterina” one day. She is happy to be called that, even if her first name is not “Caterina”. Every crumb fills it up.
A poetic look at the world
The love story, platonic and unequivocal, will last for forty years. Is the inner life worth less than the outer life? The novel can be read as the development of a verse by the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): “I have so much to say that I can say nothing except a grain of sand of love. » Is the concierge someone extraordinary who led an ordinary life or someone ordinary who led an extraordinary life? We don't know what dominates her, passion or fear. Everything is seemingly tiny. She plants flowers on the lawn behind the establishment; she is overwhelmed by a crisis of incredible violence; she sees strange creatures; she goes to church. But his daily life mainly consists of informing the students, cleaning the toilets, mopping the classrooms, emptying the trash cans. The concierge will go abroad, but to follow the professor.
Her obsession with purity has undoubtedly lost her. But one certainty: she experienced passion. Marco Lodoli takes a poetic look at the world. Mystical questions, elegant style, mysterious beings. Its heroine remains an enigma. There are so many holes in his journey. She led a monastic existence, made of hope and renunciation. His god is love. Has she missed out on her life? If life is about the traces we leave, “Caterina” has remained invisible to others. His death will be a breath. For his part, Matteo has experienced success, marriage, children, divorce, works, failures. But all the existential beauty of “Si peu” does not lie in a clash between romanticism and realism. The two states suffocate the infinity of possibilities. There is no dream life versus real life. It's something else. Man, insignificant; the woman, incandescent. The most concrete part of his existence was indeed his love for her.
“So little”, by Marco Lodoli, ed. POL, 144 pages, 18 euros.
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