[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_84

The Sea Does not Wet Naples, 1953, Anna Maria Ortese

Ermanno Rea, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca, Domenico Starnone: I collected many novels, essays, and articles by Neapolitan authors about Naples before discovering, by pure chance, the colossal figure of Anna Maria Ortese.

The first story I read by Ortese was about a little girl and her new glasses. I found the PDF online and read it with a bit of know-it-all laziness, the kind that comes when you are convinced you have already read everything worthy about Neapolitan literature. But after a few lines, it was impossible for me to remain indifferent to it, much less forget the strong impression it left on me. The story was titled "A Pair of Glasses" and was the opening text of "The Sea Does Not Wet Naples." I bought the short novels the day after, and when I finished them, I was left with the strange feeling of having seen and not read the stories inside, a peculiar sense of closeness to the city of Naples. This city had always seemed distant, different, almost opposite to everything I knew and was used to. The contrast of light and shadow that Ortese used to draw the complex profile of the districts, the polyphony of the voices that the author united in a heartbreaking litany, and the bittersweet flavor behind each of her stories had something incredibly familiar.

They reminded me of many childhood stories, of friends and relatives, of many lives that followed one another in the faded villages of eastern Veneto where I grew up, and of many lives that disappeared just as they had appeared in a tragic and senseless way. They reminded me of Aunt Olga and Uncle Sergei. In a manner of speaking, Uncle Sergei was my uncle; he was related to someone who was related to me in some way. He arrived at retirement without having any great passions or interests. Once his children were married, and so were his grandchildren, he developed a hobby of funerals. It sounds like the plot of “Harold and Maude,” but it's reality: Uncle Sergej followed two to three funerals a day; he didn't know all the deceased, which sometimes displeased him because "you experience the ritual more intensely if you know the dead person," he used to say. My family thought it was a sort of mystical crisis linked to advancing years, to the inevitable confrontation with the meaning of one's life and with death. But Uncle Sergei didn't care much about God or the place his soul would occupy in the afterlife. Uncle Sergej liked to feel part of something, experience emotions, and have something to tell (because at funerals, there was always interesting gossip).

Once the ceremony was finished, Sergei took a fetish of the experience: the photograph of the person who had died. At funerals in Northern Italy, it was traditional to print many pictures of the deceased in passport photo format and make them available so that anyone who wanted could keep the memory in their wallet. So, once the funeral was over, Uncle Sergej took the passport photo to his sister Olga, who was waiting for him to heat the day's leftover coffee. Never go to Aunt Olga's to drink coffee! This was the family warning. She never made you fresh coffee, not because she didn't have any, but because she drank the good coffee herself and instead gave the guests what she had left over, heating it in an old, chipped tin pot. To be honest, it was never a good idea to accept anything from Aunt Olga because if she offered it to you, it meant it wasn't good.

Aunt Olga was an older woman who could neither read nor write because her father had sent only the sons to primary school and not the daughters. Still, she compensated by buying tabloid magazines on the lives of Italian VIPs, which she scrutinized with great attention. She buried both her drunken husband and her only son, a drunkard like his father, and she too developed a hobby of her own, that of collecting all the photographs of the town’s dead. It is not known whether her passion was born from the need to do something with the passport photos that her brother Sergej brought home or if hers was a previous cult and her brother collected the photos to please her. On the entrance table, she set up a sort of miniature cemetery, where instead of headstones, the small and shiny passport photos of the dead stood out, held up by pebbles, toothpicks, and bottle caps. The table's perimeter was outlined by processions of plastic angels, electric candles, and dried flowers, with all the disturbing nuances of a ritual altar. Sergej and Olga's afternoons passed like this, in the shadow of death, forgetting their own, like many of Ortese's characters.