Two Spanish nuns, religious of Mary Immaculate, who live and work in Milan invite me to the first Milanese screening of a 2023 film dedicated to the founder of their religious institute, Saint Vicenta María López y Vicuña (Cascante1847-Madrid1890).
A little curious I decide to see La Sirvienta by Pablo Moreno in a parish hall[1]. The narrative of Vicenta Maria’s true story is intertwined with that of three women today. A coming and going in time: scenes set in nineteenth-century Spain alternate with those shot in our present. The sad background is common, i.e. exploitation of female work, abuse and violence on the bodies of young women.
It is precisely this reality that Vicenta Maria, the beloved daughter of a Spanish lawyer, was aware of as a teenager, born in Cascante, in Navarra, and educated in Madrid by wealthy, affectionate and religious relatives with very concrete social initiatives. The young woman’s gaze notices the discomfort of peers who seek work as maids in noble houses in Madrid, exposing themselves to abuse and oppressive behaviour. It is a nobility now in decline and incapable of abandoning centuries-old privileges that displays arrogance towards the weakest.
Vicenta Maria is part of it but soon shifts her vision from welcoming and well-furnished domestic spaces to the dynamics of those who clean prestigious homes. From the windows of the carriage in which she travels, she sees those who are at the edge of the road, walking on foot. And right at those feet she decides to lower herself. The scene of the washing of a maid’s feet – shown in the film’s poster – is the most eloquent visual commentary on the young woman’s existential and religious story. She will in fact decide to consecrate herself, despite the obvious reluctance of her parents and to create – with the approval of the bishop – a Congregation to protect young women who worked in domestic service. Congregation still active and widely spread today[2].
That movement towards the ground, a sign of an apparent servile inclination, is also present in the stories of the other three women that the director chooses to tell. A Ukrainian maid and two prostitutes who meet by chance at a police station in a modern metropolis. There they talk to each other and listen to each other: stories that intersect the present with the past and slowly allow original, new and creative perspectives to mature. What happened, if reread starting from current events – precisely in its precariousness and low condition – can take on new and unpredictable forms. The miserable conditions of those who are victims of injustice can be revisited and redeemed. Vicenta Maria’s eyes also become ours.
When the lights in the room come back on I can see the people present more clearly. They are mostly South American women and among these I recognize some people to whom I teach Italian language in the institute of Sister Rita and Sister Mari Carmen, the nuns who invited me to the screening. They belong to the Congregation founded by the young Spaniard who lived in times when even in Italy there was no shortage of courageous and enterprising women founders of religious orders devoted to female education and social assistance.
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Today the nuns of Maria Immacolata who live in Milan run a boarding school for students and workers and offer Italian language, IT, cooking and first aid courses to South American immigrants. In the rooms of the Institute, sometimes on Sunday afternoons we have a snack and play “bingo”, an opportunity for a pleasant meeting between isolated people in the Lombard metropolis. The organization of some affordable trips enriches the book of proposals mostly managed by volunteers.
At home I pick up a novel I read with pleasure years ago: Mary (Einaudi, 1953) by Lalla Romano. It is the story of a service woman of peasant origin told in first person by her “mistress” who observes her intensely, sharing her visions and affections.
Mary’s poverty and religiosity are not objects of study or social denunciation, but rather are captured in their surprising essentiality. We find neither realism nor lyrical sketches.
The master-servant relationship here maintains a dialectical and transformative force but it is poetry and not just concepts that capture the truth. The peasant culture, burdened by humiliations and pain, is described with shared attention, revealing what healthy things it can communicate. Mary’s world manifests itself in the care of the home and childhood; in the relationships that she knows how to weave with simplicity and profound humanity.
The “lady” – displaced from Turin with her child during the bombings of the Second World War – will be hosted in the housekeeper’s peasant house and will live for a few months in the Piedmont countryside getting to know the entire family group, the bizarre friends, the unfortunate events of some . The “lady” will then be able to describe them with sober, intense and emotionally involved language.
Regarding the cover of the book read in the 1965 Einaudi edition. An engraving by Felice Casorati (of whom, among other things, the writer was a student) depicts a sleeping young woman, with her head reclined and leaning on a support. Her body, without shoes, is almost on the ground and, behind her, another female figure silently watches her. The incipit of the novel surprises me: “When we entered our house, Maria was already there”. The “little people” – as Anna Maria Ortese would say – are Already present in your home. The important thing is to see them. And life can change.
[1] La Sirvienta (Spain, 2023) by Pablo Moreno won the award for best film at the 15th edition of the Catholic Film Festival (February 2024). Festival born under the High Patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture, today Dicastery for Culture and Education.
[2] The Congregation was founded in Madrid on 11 June 1876 with the name of “Sisters of the Domestic Service of the Immaculate Conception”; the date of approval of the Institute dates back to 13 January 1899 and in September 1904 the Constitutions were approved. The name of the Congregation was changed to “Religious of Mary Immaculate” on January 7, 1971, and this is how they are known today (https://religiousasmariainmaculada.org/it/).
