Telling women’s stories to pull themselves out of the funnel of pain with a string of words.
Elianda Cazzorla, Lilith e Lola, Iacobelli, 2024
Review by Claudia Mazzilli
Lilith, the archetypal and certainly challenging name of Adam’s first wife. Lola, a pop and somewhat frivolous name: two mutually offsetting names that are well suited to the lightness of a smiling pen and the depth of the themes, feelings and moments rendered in short, sparkling narratives.
For those who love to read stories, and especially female stories, I can only recommend the latest book by Elianda Cazzorla, Lilith e Lola (Iacobelli, 2024), which collects “eighteen stories for a story”. Slim, delicate and strong stories, both dramatic and hilarious, cut out in everyday life, sewn together with the thread of irony (and good writing) and entrusted to a mobile narrator: Anna, Lucia, Marina, Arianna, Mimma, Luisa, Emma, Zoe, Lilith herself…
They are women born in the fifties, in an era of existential certainties not yet broken (but already showing many cracks) in terms of women’s expectations, dreams, desires. In short, the famous and infamous stereotypes. And then there are their daughters and their sons: lesbian daughters, queer daughters, daughters who do not want to peel potatoes and do not want a typical girl’s life; and then the macho son or the larva son…
Women who have gone from the straightforward desire of the Prince Charming to the Hamlet-like, but rather practical doubt, whether to be a naughty girl or not to be one (let’s be naughty!).
And she abandoned herself and… he went into that oyster slot to catch the pearl. And he caught it. Vivid light in the sky. Thunder roared in the sea.
– Oh my God, what did you do? – she screamed.
He didn’t answer. And as they dressed, Juliet came to the balcony and to that balcony she clung.
– Do you love me? I know you’ll say yes, and I’ll believe you… O kind Romeo, if you love me, really tell me…
– Of course, Anna, what were you thinking? (p. 41)
And so, we go from phone calls on landlines – that piece of archaeology with the numbers to be dialled on the wheel, overcoming the filter of parents and sisters who answered instead of the person with whom we wanted to talk – to the most disenchanted search for an occasional partner through social media, including nicknames, skirmishes and well-chosen photos.
Women stigmatized as adulterers who divorce and fear losing custody of their children. Women who know the disease in its various forms; women who have learned on their skin, in their wombs, what motherhood is, that it is not a status or a vade mecum of bottles, baby food and punctual lullabies. But it’s relationship.
You’ll see what it’s like to have a child! Mrs. Laura, you have to be a mother to understand it, when Marina was born there was not all this stuff, stiches, suction cups, skin markers, she gave birth at home and it was a whirlwind of hot water basins and linen cloths to change, it gave me a hard time, you know! Thank goodness there was Mrs. Stella, the mother of the country, she delivered so many babies, now… …And the words are far away, more and more distant and muffled as if there were someone else listening to them… I smile, mention some yeses and fall asleep. Someone shakes me. What are you doing, sleeping? Listen. I was told to buy: four glass bottles, the hot sterilizer, teats, soothing protection pasta, diapers. Everything must be ready upon return. I have to bring the baby monitor, a cover and a full change of clothes. I hope I don’t forget anything. Ah! By the way, your friend, Mimma, called and said hello. She told me to tell you to be calm and to think that all the other women did it. Yes, all! All. All. All. I repeat. (p. 58)
Then there is the emancipation from the traditional wedding chest full of tablecloths to be washed and ironed and folded. Long live plastic tablecloths!
It’s eleven o’clock, I stop at the sewing shop and buy fifty-four buttons for the pillowcases in the wedding chest. They have been waiting twenty years for them to be sewn. My mother says. Twenty. And the pillowcases are still new and you even have twenty-four tablecloths. When will you use them? (p. 119)
And still hesitant men, diaphanous presences in the stories, men straddling the second and third millennia who struggle to find an identity, or even just a courtship etiquette (like that of the characters Teflon and Quasar: Don’t send whiny sentences. Keep spaces of secrecy. Don’t always answer right away, and so on…).
Nine protagonists within an original narrative frame: Lilith, who feels the need to rediscover authentic human relationships, meets Lola, a bit of a fortune teller and a bit of a witch, a woman with a top hat and a boa of blue ostrich feathers around her neck, sitting in front of a pink coffee table. Lola, in a double card game, Paso doble, encourages Lilith to retrieve the stories of her high school classmates, whose tracks she has lost in the continuous race of daily life, in the loneliness she has carved out, somewhat inclined to depression. Lola says to Lilith:
Paso doble. You will focus on the friend you wish to contact, you will pronounce her name and based on the two cards that will come out of the deck you will know the fragments of the lives of Anna, Marina, Lucia, Zoe, Ariadne, Emma, Luisa, Mimma. But first you must come out of solitude with determination (p. 17).
Two stories are dedicated to each of the nine protagonists: but each diptych illuminates an entire existence and is a potential novel, which does not need to be told in its entirety but is built by subtraction, or expands by expansion. Like concentric circles that widen little by little in a body of water, and allow glimpses of movements gradually further or deeper.
The lake shows itself to her eyes, it has uneven banks, at the bottom a reed bed. Fish-scale ripples shimmering and then concentric circles, small whirlpools that seem to echo inner movements, just below the surface. She imagines invisible creatures in motion, as seven small ducks guided by a larger one enter her observation cone, in single file. The mother is apex of the triangle of water that widens behind her tail. The folds of the lake multiply when four more ducks arrive, solitary boats, from different points. And new triangles of water are created beside the concentric circles. The green mirror becomes a blackboard for geometric exercises. (p. 91)
Without disturbing Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron…), or Italo Calvino (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler), the structure of the work is not only used to package the stories in a beautiful compositional architecture. It tells us a lot about an era, a generation of women, music that spans decades (on 7” records, at home parties under the supervision of a semi-wakeful father, then in nightclubs… and finally in the folk dance classes of women who above all seek opportunities for friendship and sisterhood…). And it tells us so much about the diaspora that is the existence of all of us. Each of us, with our classmates, scattered around the world like a handful of seeds.
Or like a deck of cards that are neither the Neapolitan nor the tarot: a deck of dozens and dozens of frames that are opened, shuffled and remixed, in an uninterrupted recombination, which gives the opportunity to reconnect, for a couple of snapshots, nine lives embodied in the contingent, nine stories that have the flavour of truth. A metaphor that adheres to life, to its continuous mixing, to the randomness of encounters and to the desires of the returns that we cannot always govern.
But, as Elianda writes, it is always possible “to get me out of the funnel of my pain with a long string of words”. And every story is a tightrope, holding women’s lives together.
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