Elisabetta Liguori
A new day in Naples.
Reading Valeria Parrella’s narrations.
For
a woman who writes, carpal tunnel syndrome is a tragedy. Eventually a
reason for boasting an overload of intellectual work, but still a disgrace,
most of all if in the evening at home you have to peel oranges for your
children. For Valeria Parrella the same syndrome, described in one of
her stories, found in “For favours received”, her last success
becomes the metaphor for the widespread inability to manage one’s
own existence, to take the helm, to lead its course. At the age of thirty,
more or less, we are always the ones who go adrift, who have lost our
points of reference: in the past, there was smuggling in Brindisi like
that in Naples, now no longer; once family was a like a non-movable rock,
now instead it’s a marketplace: people who come, people who go;
once drugs never healed anybody, now it provides a safe and well remunerated
work and even the rich ones, if you think about it, are no more the same
as before; and then these only sons: before there were only a few, now
they’re an army and don’t want to be only anymore, for this
reason they invent infinitely cosy and true friends; extramarital affairs
are nowadays a mere telematic imagination, no more unmade beds, coloured
by crumpled and warm silk sheets, abandoned in a rush, there’s no
body to fill them anymore. We are thirty-years old without certain points
of reference, all lost in our own city. And a young woman speaks about
us. It’s not easy to find unity in one or more collections of stories;
it’s not easy to string these little coloured beads and make a necklace
out of them. I try. Valeria’s women are women with acute vision,
but with arms cut off. Not only women, but often women. Who can watch.
And it takes an owlet’s sight to catch the most genuine and effective
action in a city like Naples, in the twilight, under debris, tiredness,
garbage; an urban space where human sight isn’t enough to give real
movement to living. When, even through the efforts for making everyday
life more transparent and clean, one moves in the fog, then the web, e-mails,
modernity become helpful. All this is Naples. Still again Naples.
And Valeria’s Naples is always dirtier. Filth has foggy colors,
opaque, changing ones. Its words are more and more alkaline. It is as
if the fundamental structure of the narration is supported by scaffolds
of metal and rust: short and rhythmic sentences, typical of short stories.
Unstable.
Luckily, there are the written words: their merciless synthesis, however
unstable, looks like the only solution. To write is necessary: it’s
not a mere exercise of style, but the expression of a metropolitan state
of necessity. To tell is like to eat: a daily and indispensable gesture.
Among her last ones, my favorite story is the one entitled “The
imagined friend”, the picture of a woman who prepares herself to
live, who’s always there choosing all of her steps, warming herself
up for the start, planning every detail, stopping the leaks in the dam
with only her little hand, sure that sooner or later the wave will end,
and in the meanwhile choosing with maniacal care her shoes, bra, bar of
soap, order and disorder while expecting that moment. At the end, this
same woman kills the child of this waiting with a very rapid abortion.
She acts: she throws a single lightning. Definitive and blatant. And this
is her only real gesture, which succeeds in carving with a scalpel upon
her resting materialness.
What’s surprising in this apparently instinctive writing, is really
the violence of its synthesis. Every sentence is self-sufficient. And,
it’s true, this is not the technique peculiar to the oral story,
but maybe it belongs to a certain Neapolitan character, it has the same
musicality: lapidary, essential, but melodic, marked by the hastiness
of thought, hardened by instantaneous seizures, by crevices that suddenly
widen before ones nose. Valeria, it’s true, mostly lets women talk,
therefore maybe it’s easier for her to be rapid, nevertheless her
tongue has hard and bristly hair, like those of certain males, wet with
sweat and badly shaven. There are also the men, indeed, they’re
there too: strong, desired, impacting. Some only passing, for one night
only, week-end men, who disperse their sperm in the air. Males provided
with that pungent and irritating odor of a hard days work, that mixes
with heavy dust and the essence of fish bones, that rot in narrow alleys,
come up suddenly, like a spit, on the made-up face of Via Toledo.
It’s this way: the described universe is made up of women, but they’re
women who want men, those they cannot possess because camorra, smoke,
and drugs take them away.
Because Parrella already knows it: women decide everything but the absence.
They decide what still can be decided: gifts for Christmas, which movie
to see at the cinema, the bottle of wine for dinner. Men become that which
women decide, even if for only a moment and, where women cannot decide,
there is left the option of not thinking about it too much and feeling
close to other similar beings, through discomfort, repression, seclusion.
Inside this apparent solidarity everyone’s small changes creep into,
with secrets and falsehood. Like an old postcard sent to prison; or a
bathroom that crashes into the floor below, taking the ground from under
one’s feet. These become for Valeria the ideal excuses to start
walking on different terrain, because most of the time life does not happen
by chance.
Parrella’s writing seems to follow the wave of this randomness with
the absolute lightness of the wind. And within this wind there are these
women that move without real objectives: they are what the events make
them become, they’re daughters to their mothers and to their votive
prayers. They have the same wishes as a walking horse with blinkers could
have: they desire what they can see and there’s really little to
be seen.
Like “Guappetella” in “Fly plus whale”, who desired
Marella’s cream coloured dresses instead of the roar of Cavalli’s
striped coats. There was no choice. There was nothing else. The most beautiful
things were the closest. Even the protagonist of “For favours received”
finds herself living halfway between her own and her mother’s dreams.
For one half like a glamorous Mina singing with Alberto Lupo and for another
half like a shop-assistant during her lunch time. What is desired is what
is closest, what is behind the corner. The other universes don’t
even exist. Desires don’t have a great imagination because desires
are in the end the fulfilling of a penalty as well, the one that most
of the heroines and heroes of the latest Parrella are paying off for somebody
else’s debts.
In this way life draws nearer, life isolates. Life resolves itself. Life
delivers it’s definitive judgment. Besides being a matter of rules
it’s also a matter of wind. We are in front of very light heroes,
who fly away with a mere breath of nothing. Without weight. They watch
their life from above, as if leaning out from the balcony while darkness
falls upon the neon signs, falling into pieces. This is why they need
a strong and genuine language and a perfect visus. It’s not easy
for any of them: everything is confused, the colours get mixed, there
are no certainties. And maybe only the pain from above seems more acceptable.
Never a confirmation coming from below, from the ground, for those newly
defeated by carpal tunnel syndrome; static conjurers, accustomed to tiny,
frequent and rapid hand movements. And it’s as clear as daylight
by this time: Parrella’s literary world is inhabited by special
people, even though an absolute normality: metropolitan superheroes. Almost
blind individuals maybe, myopic, without any doubt, but with special powers.
Within this miraculous Naples everything seems to have become possible
by a sort of natural selection of the species.
For the spirit of adaptability. Somebody more romantic, if he wants, can
tell of the ancient and legendary art of fixing-up. A stab in the back,
just to make an example doesn’t hurt that much. Naples designed
it’s way through evolution. One can learn to receive a blade without
resisting, so that the hit would be less harmful and arrive softly, without
making a noise, like a title to add to one’s own curriculum. One
can wait twenty years to get a regular job. One can obtain a degree and
a place as a shop assistant for life. It’s possible to create a
kindergarden from a rewarding Sapphic intercourse. It’s possible
to marry the senator’s son in the middle of an electoral campaign.
For favours received, one can.
One
lesson, the Neapolitan one, like another, guaranteed by certain borderline
territories constantly transforming.
The strength of all Parrella’s stories that I’ve read in only
one day? The fluid narration of confusion: of moving away and of adaptation
at the same time. The narration of those born at the dawn of the 70’s.
On the other side of an existence, daughter of a dance that’s going
to loose the right cadence, that has forgotten rhythm, that has forgotten
steps and rules; a dance that moves by fits and starts, irregular, that
leads to exhaustion, to alcoholic verbosity or to real invention. Among
its poets are the ones who invent, others who laugh at it, others who
wait, other who look back, others who amuse themselves, imagining a psychedelic
future, such as to make Verne grow pale. But all, absolutely all, need
to explain to us that life of theirs. In particular, Parrella’s
characters seem to be confused with the author. They’re made of
her same substance, they speak through her own hand. And talk, talk, talk…
All recount and all do it in order to not get lost. If it happens to you,
one day that you’re in Naples: look at the streets. They speak,
they scream, stealing ideas from the creative ones. Valeria makes order
along these streets, because writing is just for this in the end: to create
order and give weight. It outlines possible paths, tracks to be followed,
so that it’s objectively more difficult to get lost. Her women stand
like wayside-posts by the side of these roads. Her places are pointed
out with human vertical posters: they introduce pleasure like suffering,
to the scents of opened kitchen windows, to the most abstruse professions,
to daylight or nighttime hours, to the gulped down food. One road is not
alike the other: one marks time, the other asks the right questions; one
reminds us of death, the other is a place of arrival;
one at the beginning, and another at the end.
The lucid view of Valeria is fixed on the streets, catches its moles,
as it would be done for the city planning councilor. It starts with the
places and arrives at other scenes. From the places, the real life; from
the real life, desires. While the streets always change. They are the
theatre, the avant-garde and the tradition, Totò and Scarpetta
arguing; they’re the wooden boards on which always new scenes rest:
faces, movable parts, gossip, essence, neurotransmitters of joy, pregnancies.The
script is therefore only apparently purely instinctive: in fact it’s
all decided with the extreme precision of a planimetry. As if every time
Valeria would slowly unroll on a work-table the marks of a complex and
well-constructed town-planning scheme, meeting precise rules and as many
artifices. All but nihilistic. Describing what’s indescribable with
the illusion to reanimate a juvenile universe that’s hopeless by
now, although full of images.
And I, maybe because of my mood, or hunger, or maybe personal affinity,
find myself supporting this contemporary literature, with its varying
but not contradictory visual corners. With pride. To watch over the coma.
Even though our generation of mankind absolutely doesn’t count socially,
and begins only now to become aware of it. Today where one is still managing
with a rational administration of the weekly pocket money and one’s
own dreams, at almost forty years.
So to speak. A distant relation of mine, my same age, whom I saw again
yesterday after some years, said candidly to me that she wanted to find
a decent job that would allow her to make the most of her specific skills
and have all her afternoons off, so she could keep her widowed, sick mother
company. After all at thirty seven years of age she was missing only five
exams for her degree. And what ever does it mean? She went on saying that
since she was quite impatient, two kids would have been enough. I say
two! She was like Trilly, she: she still didn’t know she was near
menopause, the firefly; she still hadn’t understood that for the
labour market she never had existed, nor would she in the future. Curzio
Maltese says it as well in the last Venerdì of Repubblica: we are
old-youths, a little brainless, full of imagination and too many kilograms.
To whom tell lies, because we are able to listen and believe them, sometimes
to the extreme.
Applause: the curtain is raised again. In spite of all. And it won’t
be the last time.