How much pain flows in the pages of this first narrative work, admittedly autobiographical, of one of the main Italian powers, Maria Grazia Calandrone: “Shine like life” is the title, published by Ponte alle Grazie (222 pp., € 15,50 ), on the cover the photo of Calandrone herself, little more than a newborn, in the arms of her adoptive mother, both smiling.
The narration is all here, we could say, all centered on the sense of an embrace, given or not given, found, lost, finally perhaps rediscovered even if perhaps only in absence; and on the meaning, more generally, by extension, of the hugs between us and our parents or between us and our children, on the destinies of life that depend on them, on the meaning of our lives which in turn from the meaning of these hugs, given or not given, much depend, beyond the meaning that our lives then take on as the fruit of so much more – of what we are, of the encounters we have, of what we deserve or do not deserve, for better or for worse.
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The story of oneself
The story of herself that Maria Grazia Calandrone tells is a story that the chronicles of the sixties had spoken about: Maria Grazia, only eight months old, had been abandoned on a lawn in Villa Borghese, in Rome, by her mother, Lucia, a young Sicilian girl from whom she was born in a clandestine relationship with a man older than her. At the time there was no divorce, and that gesture of abandonment was above all a gesture of love and pity: mother and father had committed suicide immediately afterwards, throwing themselves into the Tiber, in the hope that others would raise that child.
Maria Grazia was adopted by Giacomo Calandrone, who was a well-known Communist leader, and by his wife Ione, a school teacher, of Sicilian origins like her birth mother. Giacomo and Ione were already in their fifties, and Giacomo would have died when Maria Grazia was only eleven years old.
A book about mothers
But “Shine as Life” is a book about mothers, not fathers, and here there are two mothers: the birth mother and the adoptive mother. The mutual love between Maria Grazia and the adoptive mother is total, in the first years, until Ione reveals the truth to her daughter. Maria Grazia is only four years old, and she is not in a position to elaborate it, but Ione’s had been “an anticipatory decision, of anxious love: she had read the news of the suicide in the newspaper … her marriage, she discovered that she had been adopted and had taken herself out of life ”.