That day in 1973, the sirens had told him “don’t go, Antonino, don’t go”, instead he had gone and his life as a young anti-system had changed. His personal sirens tried to warn him, the ones that only he hears and that usually push him, but he didn’t want to listen to them. And he had felt others, penetrating, getting closer every moment, falling on him. A beautiful discovery Antonino, a hard and pure protagonist, fragile and shaken, cynical and hypersensitive, irreducible and consumed by remorse. I am the narrator of a short, very intense novel, The Day of the Mermaids (Graus Editore, Naples, February 2024, Gli mirrors of Narciso series, 80 pages), by the Piedmontese Wilma Advanceda great discovery too, a highly motivated writer from Chivasso.
Born in 1968, she has taught in primary school for thirty years. You have cultivated a passion for books since adolescence, with commitment and dedication. She has placed first in several literary competitions and has held creative writing seminars in Universities of the Third Age.
1973 was one of the years of lead, between the massacre in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969 and those in Brescia and the Italicus train in 1974. In ’68 youth protest had flared up, the following year workers’ unionism had unleashed the hot autumn of strikes. While national politics was divided between conservation and dialogue, someone had the idea of encouraging an authoritarian turn in the country, exploiting the opposing extremisms, with the strategy of tension. The youth school and high school movements radicalized into armed groups, the Red Brigades were born on one side and the Revolutionary Armed Nuclei on the other, with all the minor acronyms of the right-wing and left-wing terrorist galaxy, in a country governed with many problems by the jagged but hegemonic Christian Democracy, aligned with the Western bloc in the US-USSR cold war and secretly controlled by the clandestine paramilitary structure Gladio.
Years of lead, of P38 bullets and bombs set off to push public opinion to demand or accept a strong government. Gray years, or rather black and white. It was an Italy without colour, especially in the North, muffled for months by fog and populated by an industrious working class imported from the South, the workforce for the companies of the northern industrial triangle and the economic boom of the early Sixties. A country crushed by the contradictions of very rapid development, which civil society at the time struggled to process, described perfectly by Wilma Avanzato.
In the South, there were colors (the sun, the sea, the land), but there was a lack of work. It wasn’t enough for everyone, as always since the national unity of 1861.
Antonino’s family had also emigrated from the south to Piedmont. He was seven years old, now he is a student, he shares the plan of an entire generation to turn everything upside down. It’s a utopia, but it seemed achievable to young people across the Western world.”and above all right” in the seventies, to change society, modernize customs and get out of an existence that suddenly appeared without prospects, too similar to that of those who had preceded them. Contesting the immovable social traditions of home-work-church, students occupied schools and universities, demanding an education open to all, without class selection. Study had to become a right guaranteed by the State, not a privilege of the few.
Perhaps, Wilma writes, the attack on the Milan bank on 12 December 1969 swept away the confidence in the future that had characterized the years of the economic boom. Moving on from the “screamers”, the thousand blue bubbles, the fins, rifle and glasses, in the show the melodic “beautiful voices” were giving way to the committed songs of the singer-songwriters. Ordinary people suffered and got by in large industrial cities, between the illusion of progress and the harsh realities of life.
Antonino is a boy from the South, a son of the sea transplanted to grey, cold and foggy Turin. The sea is there”the factory”, but it does not lull with the murmur of the waves, it does not show rocks where the Sirens sing, who tempted Ulysses and who he too has begun to hear.
While he studies comfortably at home, his father and the other workers break their backs and return from the factory angrily, ugly in soul and body. Even the older brother, who doesn’t understand how some colleagues manage to attend night school. At dinner, his eyes close, work on the assembly line sucks his energy and the will to live: always welding the same piece of a car engine, hundreds of times a day. It’s like a punishment.
The author naturally denounces the problems of the time. Difficult to find a home for “southerners”, honest people, workers forced to beg for decent housing. Antonino and Giuseppe sleep in a bedroom smaller than a cell. For her sister Assunta not even that, just a closet. No education for her, once her obligation is over, her father wants to deny it to her daughter. He went and shouted it blatantly at school. Grumpy and short-tempered, he made a scene.
The following day, having put on her party dress, the wife approached the teacher to apologize and also to announce that Assunta will continue her studies, at all costs, according to her mother.
The mother dies suddenly, of a heart attack, at just forty-two years old, in the gentlemen’s house where she cleans. This is a beautiful novel but it has no mercy for its readers, just as that society had no mercy for the weakest: the penultimate, not just the last.
