A charismatic and non-conformist interpreter of the cultural panorama of her era, the Italian-Argentine artist Adelaida Gigli did not observe the world from the four walls of a room all to herself. On the contrary, her existence was punctuated by moves and departures, until her escape to Italy, from Buenos Aires to Recanati, where she was born in 1927 and where she decided to return at the end of the Seventies, after having lived in Latin America in the decades of turmoil and repression.
He was not yet thirty years old when, together with the Viñas brothers, Ismael and David, he founded the magazine in 1954 Side, today an object of worship among scholars of Spanish-American literature attentive to the history of militant literary criticism. This is the era in which Gigli inaugurates her personal intellectual trajectory, characterized by political commitment and forays into different expressive fields: she was the author of critical interventions, wrote poems and short stories, and dedicated herself to the plastic arts. Yet she did not leave much of herself or of her work, or, to put it another way, no one until today had taken steps to reconstruct the traces of her work to bring them to the attention of others in the form of a story and of shared memory.
Adrián N did it. Well done with Adelaida (Nutriments, 2024). The book is, above all, the entire story of a friendship, which Bravi chooses to represent by putting himself directly on the line. The author meets Gigli in Recanati, also thanks to the common migratory experience that brought them to Italy from Argentina. The reasons for expatriation are different, yet the relationship is consolidated through the discovery of a network of people with whom both have been familiar. Despite belonging to different generations, Adrián and Adelaida recognize themselves as close in sharing affections and ideas; from the interaction between the two voices a layered narrative is born that unites them. The uniqueness and specificity of this encounter produces a crossing of the boundaries established by the role of the narrator and that of the narrated; the result is a writing that holds together historical reconstruction and emotional strength.
The unequivocal adherence of the narrator’s ego to that of the author – “I met Adelaida Gigli in October 1988, when she was sixty-one years old” – corresponds in this case to a strong sense of responsibility towards the readers. Bravi shows himself to them as an imperfect chronicler and spokesperson who takes obstacles into account as he narrates, unraveling the irregular succession of Adelaida’s memories: “Why, I asked myself, have I never recorded it? I should have asked her more about her life, taken notes, learned more details about her.”
But the omissions, silences and resistances of the protagonist, who “did not like to talk about herself”, contribute to her characterization, making the character’s reluctance, shaped by pain but intolerant of the nostalgic rhetoric of the exile, the strong point of the narrative : “After all, our life is nothing more than an endless array of holes.”
Adelaida’s biographical events are adventurous and tragic. The girl was four years old when, in 1931, her father Lorenzo – a painter already known and appreciated both in Italy and Argentina at the time – decided to move to Buenos Aires to escape from fascism: “dictatorships have always been the main motive of Adelaida’s movements”, from the arrival of the Gigli family in Argentina, a few months after General Uriburu’s coup d’état, up to the Videla regime, “which forces her into exile, after the disappearance of her daughter Mini and, subsequently, of his son Lorenzo Ismael”. The father of the two boys, the writer and scholar David Viñas, already outside Argentina, moved first to Spain then to Mexico, while Adelaida found refuge in Italy, where her illness and death occurred in 2010.
Videla’s dictatorship, with its persecutory delirium, is the backdrop to the story of Mini and Lorenzo Ismael Gigli. Adelaida’s children, together with other young people montoneros, are the protagonists of Bravi’s narrative thrust in the seventies. In the pages dedicated to them, literature and history combine to tell the story of resistance and the clandestine struggle against subjugation to manifest arrogance and underground violence. The result is a story of great testimonial and literary value, with which the author enters the impervious territory of trauma, repression and resurfacing.
Adrián N. Bravi combines invention and direct testimony; intends historical investigation as a driving force for literary fiction and makes use of different types of materials: interviews, photographs, postcards, letters, to which he places alongside the verses that Gigli herself left on paper and which she never published, ” like almost all of his things.” These materials help to give shape to a figure that acquires, page after page, the intensity of the emblem: Bravi’s Adelaide is a woman who understood History as an airy place open to change, but brought its scars and contradictions. In the story of her life, she echoes the intention of dealing with finiteness to make the events of the individual something greater, which coincides with the human universal and which for this reason concerns everyone: “we are determined by many stories which, upon closer inspection, are ours”, Bravi states in the interview with the writer Angelo Ferracuti which appeared on 15 March on Seven (Corriere della Sera).
From the care in recovering and restoring the reasons of those who preceded us emerges, with Adelaidathe ethical value of writing, which makes the conflicts of an era the material for a novelistic word aimed at those who know how to read something more inside the stories than the fate of the dead.
