“My mother is a news story”: a final act of love before committing suicide together

Monday 25th November 2024 03:31 AM

Inside the head of Ilaria, eight years old, victim of parental kidnapping

If Marie Grazia Calandrone says nothing here about the circumstances in which she learned of his story or the way in which she lived with it, she describes to us step by step the meticulous investigation into which she embarked on the trace of his parents. And to report their journey, nourished by the frequentation of places, archives and medical files. The text she devotes to them brings them back to life, from the dizziness of suppositions and possible scenarios to the establishment of facts as precise as possible. “This book is intended to be a work of transcription and testimony to the indelible energy that things possess. The truth lies in the facts, freed from our point of view.” This is how the author advances: not being satisfied with the emotional argument, she confronts “the sound of the bone of reality”.

Act in broad daylight

If it is catchy, the title chosen by Maria Grazia Calandrone, My mother is a news item, is above all reductive: a news item, certainly, but only from the point of view of others, because what her daughter discovers shows that this mother is above all a free woman, determined despite the suffering she endured, who had only love as her guide. Because Lucia “acts in broad daylight, she experiences what she experiences in full view of everyone. Not in indifference, but resolute and conscious of her own will and the natural right of her love”. Maria Grazia is the daughter of a mother who was in control of herself, even in her own disappearance.

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Only facts tell who we are, they tell us first and foremost to ourselves. We, who are our surprise.

With writing that combines poignant poetry with frank determination, even implacability, Maria Grazia Calandrone traces an extraordinary story, combining testimonies, memories, traces, objects, press clippings and official documents. From this investigation launched without knowing what it was going to give, the journalist, teacher and poet gives us results which also outline an era where social violence is rife as well as an absence of pity. Which painfully accentuates Lucia’s solitude, a solitude that we easily imagine common to many women in the corseted Italian society of the time.

Before Annie Ernaux, there was Tove Ditlevsen

Recognized only by her mother, little Maria Grazia was an illegitimate child, even in the eyes of her own family, who refused to take her in. However, she received the most precious thing that a father and mother can bequeath: immeasurable love. Thanks to the “complex architecture” of this abandonment which reveals “an intelligent project”, other parents would soon take over, sealing a future. In the photo of Lucia taken at primary school, Maria Grazia Calandrone found certain features of her own daughter. Surrender can also be a gift.