Relationships, the province, the patriarchy. The objects that tell the truth, those that contain memory and the fatal coincidence, sometimes, between care and possession, medicine and poison. The urgency to remain silent, the impossibility of the existence of absolute truths and, often, of really knowing who we have next to us. There are many themes dear to Chiara Valerio that recur in the detective novel Chi dice e chi tace (Sellerio), selected for the dozen of the 2024 Strega Prize.
Her book is set in Rome and Scauri, the place where she grew up. Inside Scauri there is Constantinople, the communal house symbol of freedom, and inside it Victoria, the enigma from which the characters’ stories unfold. It looks like a Chinese box mechanism…
“It seems to me that this story needed a series of speakers to be told, or as he says, Chinese boxes. I have never succumbed to the seduction of the difference between form and content. It’s all inside Lea. Scauri, Roma, Vittoria, Maria , Silvia and Giulia, the railway workers, Filomena. We know everything and only what Lea thinks, listens, says, supposes. We follow her and she leads us, stumbling, to a place that until Vittoria’s death seemed to be unknown to exist. And this place, vaguely, uncertainly, but definitively is desire.”
The task of opening the boxes and putting the pieces together falls to Lea Russo, whose balance is put to the test by Vittoria’s death and the discoveries she will make. What shocks Lea the most?
“Of having walked next to another human being, a woman, for twenty years and not knowing anything about it. Of having had another life at hand and not having understood it. Of being satisfied, satisfied, happy in her life and to feel the impulse to want to go elsewhere anyway, to see what’s there, also sensing that perhaps she won’t go back. The courage she didn’t know she had shocks her.
Scauri is “a town that resembles a plant, with invisible roots underground”: there is immobility and prejudice, Barbie, the Postal Market and the recurrence of behaviors attributable to patriarchy. Is it a portrait of the province of the 90s or of society in general?
“I hope it is a reliable portrait of the province of the nineties, which are the years of my adolescence, and I trust it says something about this time. Now that I am among those who read Who says and who is silent and I am no longer the person who wrote it , it seems to me that he says that bodies, their limitations, hesitations, uncertainties and imperfections, are what will allow us to keep alive the memory of the fact that the other is irreducible and unassimilable to us. What a relief the body is.”
Perhaps the predominant reflection in the novel is that of truth. In Mathematics is Politics you wrote: “Mathematics was my apprenticeship to the revolution, where by revolution I mean the impossibility of adhering to any logical, normative, cultural and sentimental system in which absolute truth exists…”. Do mathematics and writing allow a freedom that does not care about absolute truths?
“I hope so. But I hope it’s living, making a living, falling in love, falling out of love, working, commanding, obeying, being in relationships, reacting, eating this or that, making love, wishing that we get used to not being interested in absolute truths. Of course, reading accustoms you to being alone, to not being entertained, to deciding how long a book lasts and where to read it, to managing time and space, which were important concepts even before Kant. Reading, an action that in itself brings together many things, teaches you not to care about absolute truths”.
Vittoria tells the truth without saying anything, Lea looks for her and in the end is more confused than before. Is Chiara Valerio telling the truth or does she leave this task to the reader?
“I don’t know if Vittoria is telling the truth and I don’t know if Lea is looking for the truth. In retrospect it seems to me to be a book about how the truth is overrated in relationships, sentimental and otherwise. Everyone seeks their own, everyone has their own and the exercise , if one wants to do it, it is to try to connect one truth to another, even when they are contradictory truths. I am a passionate and voracious, eager reader, and I always hope that in the books that one reads, and also in this one that I have written. myself, there is space for those who read to see what they want, even a truth”.
“Shut up, or rather speak”, wrote Carla Lonzi: is it better to remain silent or better to speak?
“It depends. There is no general answer. If I were Stendhal’s Count Mosca, or when I am, I will be able to answer: Shut up, better shut up. Now I’m not ready yet.”
“I wanted to tell you that care and possession have the same gestures: they are poison and medicine, they depend on the proportion”, he said. Can one kill in an attempt to cure?
“Think of children’s dolls. The favorite dolls. The most pampered dolls. Soft toys with alopecia, without eyes, burned, without a limb.”
In your novel, inner investigation seems to predominate. Is the choice of yellow an expedient to investigate emotions and situations?
“Yes, I don’t trust novels that tell essentially internal adventures, and Lea’s is, so I thought the classic mystery structure would support me in revealing nature.”
In the book you touch on the theme of freedom of choice at the end of life.
“I think that, up to a certain point, or so it was for all my grandparents, in the hospital they said, take him home. Which means: we can’t do anything anymore. And I think that “take him home” is a great relief when a living being manages to leave without too much pain. I also think that when there is pain, it is right for a body that is suffering to decide to stop suffering. The mythology of suffering has never convinced me at a certain point he says it in the novel, we are not made to suffer, we must not condescend to suffering”.
