Of Paolo Lago
Emiliano Dominici, Maria Malva. She burns the day for me, effequ, Florence, 2024, pp. 304, euro 18.00.
To talk about Maria Malvaa novel by Emiliano Dominici recently published by effequ, I would like to start from these verses by Eugenio Montale taken from The opportunities: “It seemed like an easy game / to turn the space / that was open to me into nothing, your certain fire into tedium / uncertain”1, also recalling the final quatrain of the same poem: “The life that gives glimpses / is the one that only you glimpse. / You lean towards her from this / window that doesn’t light up”2. Tedium, in Montale’s poetry, spreads its black wings over the daily repetition of existence almost like Baudelaire’s “Ennui”, the “Boredom” that attacks any corner of human life. The places and environments of Maria Malva they are pervaded everywhere by a tedium very similar to that described by the Ligurian poet. Dominici, in fact, is truly a great painter of environments and atmospheres, and knows how to perfectly move his characters within the spaces that he creates, like pawns on the tedious and inconsistent chessboard of life. Everything flows, everything passes profoundly marked by an unstoppable taedium vitae: the character of Maria Malva appears as the perfect fulcrum of this enveloping spleen, a figure who lets herself be dragged by life as if by a current that allows no way out, which it doesn’t allow you to swim against it. Space is nothing and “your certain fire”, in the narration, also becomes a “tedium” because it is generated by that “shocking gesture” (as we read in the synopsis of the book and about which I do not want to reveal more) performed by the character.
Maria Malva and the other characters move against an almost inconsistent background, almost metaphysical one might dare, where the indeterminacy of the places gives them greater authenticity, spaces lost in the excruciating journey of a daily life wonderfully described by the author. But the place where the gesture is made, an anonymous little square with trees and a fountain in an equally anonymous city, will captivate all the characters present. Because, ultimately, the same protagonist character – in a cruel metamorphosis – will change in place, in space, and it is precisely there that the others will converge to try to resolve the heartbreaking anguish that has crept into them. The places and environments are encapsulated by the writer’s pen within a “film of the impossible”, to use an expression coined by Carlo Cassola through which the writer from Grosseto refers to the desire to shape his stories as if animated a print, a painting, and made all his characters move3.
Anonymous, faceless streets and squares unroll like a carpet in front of the nomadic gait of the protagonist who almost seems to be trying to merge with the environments in total anonymity and who walks sideways to the waist with a grace as light as snow. Along with the streets and squares we encounter equally anonymous and equally unforgettable shops, bars, cinemas and, above all, interiors of apartments, both those rented by the protagonist when she travels and the vacant ones where Maria meets with an ambiguous real estate agent. The houses and domestic spaces seem to tell their own lives, also inserted into a disproportionate millstone, and they do so after having lost any semblance of domestic warmth. We will never find welcoming interiors in the novel, we will never find truly comfortable spaces: they appear as the metaphysical and foggy background in which the anguish of the characters is chased. A metaphysical background yes, but also capable of leaving an indelible mark on the reader: the more anonymous and uncertain, funereally indefinite they are, the more unforgettable they are, the more their description envelops us and makes them extremely interesting.
Against a background of this type, the narration of Maria Malva it moves like a detective story, like a subtle investigation with noir and detective features which, in certain aspects, could recall the Gaddian “mess”. A narrative that finds its center of gravity in the various characters who support the protagonist and who will be indelibly marked by the gesture made by Maria Malva: the real estate agent Giorgio and the stationer Gemma, the solitary Martelli, the young YouTuber Paolo, the maid Milagros and the little girl Anna, suffering from behavioral disorders, as well as the latter’s parents. Among these characters, the young YouTuber student seems to stand out who, finding himself in front of the protagonist at the moment in which she makes her desperate gesture, instead of helping her, finds nothing better than filming her with a cell phone. In fact, the character appears to be completely engulfed by the contemporary digitalisation of existence as well as by the hyperbolic iconisation of reality: any situation (be it constituted by a landscape or by one or more people interacting), rather than being truly experienced and known, seems to be made only to be photographed or filmed and exhibited online, in a sort of exasperated exhibitionistic ‘touristization’ of everyday life. As if he were filming a concert, a show, a game or a dish served at a restaurant, Paolo seems so inserted into his own digital universe that he films the protagonist all the way until the fatal outcome. It would almost seem like a digital rereading of the ‘modern’ and early twentieth-century character of “Serafino Gubbio operator”, belonging to the novel of the same name by Luigi Pirandello (1925); while, during the filming of a film, a scene with a tiger is being shot, an actor kills an actress with a gunshot and is mauled by the tiger: Serafino Gubbio remains impassive and continues filming as if nothing had happened. If Pirandello’s novel, in 1925, wants to denounce the character’s condition of ‘man-machine’, a mechanized and dehumanized human being, one might think that in 2024 the character of Paolo, who continues his filming impassively, instead represents a sort of a digital and digitized man.
It will be a fascinating and surprising journey to follow each of these characters and also follow the flashback that occupies the central chapter, dedicated to the unraveling of the protagonist’s life through its vicissitudes. An immersion in a languid and realistic reality, metaphysical and as if lost in a placid fog; it will then be a pleasure to cross the streets and squares of indefinite cities together with the characters and find yourself at an unspecified corner, perhaps near the Diabolique cinema, an evocative place with a beautiful name, which smacks of noir and comics, of the Sixties and pop culture, and let yourself be completely swallowed up.
