Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

Italian Memoir

Original title –  Dove Non Mi Hai Portata

Translator- Antonella Lettieri

Source – Personal copy

I saw Foundry editions online and ordered their first three books as they appealed to me. They are doing books from around the Mediterranean as reflected in each of the cover designs for each book reflects some from each country’s culture. This book is from the Italian writer Maria Grazia Calandrone. An Italian poet, journalist and tv host. She also works with prisoners and schoolchildren doing poetry workshops. This is her fist book to be translated to English, The book was a huge hit when it came out in Italuy and won prizes and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. In a way this is a book about those poor woman in Italy that haven’t ever had a voice people like Maria own Birth mother this is her story and how as a baby at 8 months she was abandon at the Vila Borghese by her mother. She was adopted and has written another book about her adoptive mother, but this is the story of Lucia and what brought her to abandon and then take her own life.

Of my mother, I only have two black and white photo-graphs.

Apart, of course, from my own life and some biological memories that I’m not sure I can tell apart from suggestion and myth.

I am writing this book so that my mother might become real.

I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought – so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.

I am starting from what I have, the two photographs that portray her, in the order in which they appeared in my life.

The first

was taken on her wedding day, Saturday, 17 January

1959. Lucia is twenty-two, she is dressed all in white and she is not smiling.

The starting point is two old b&w pictures of her Mother

Maria sets about trying to find out more about her mother and her birth father to piece together the bits. What she does is build up a tale in little vignettes of how Lucia, her mother. A woman did something not many women did in those years as it was illegal. Divorce was illegal. Even leaving the marital home would have meant she was sent to Jasil, so she left her parents-in-law when she did all this. Her marital bed was separated from the in-laws bed by a white cotton sheet. This is a hard rural side of Italy, where the world hadn’t changed, and Lucia had left and fallen for an older married man. Although imperfect, everything is broken when this Builder, Guiseppe, has to go to Africa as Il Duce fought for his piece of Africa. So she finds her self on the run with a child a partner hundreds of m, miles away. She tried to defy all around them by setting up a home together, but with him gone, the world around her fell apart. It is almost as if Maria looked at her mother and those times. The doors were all closed as her world dropped into despair. Shwe uncovers the fallen woman’s story of the country that hid or, just like this, let these women suffer and die.

When they betroth her, Lucia runs away. Luigi, her fiancé, is the village buffoon; they call him Gino or Centolire: like the emigrant in that old song, he too is infected with a childish American dream, even though he is a thirty-one-year-old bachelor lost in his inner world. Who knows what kind of elsewhere Luigi dreams of, what kind of life inconceivable here… He certainly has no interest in women, he is the laughing stock of the village children:

“You’re not a real man!”

However, he owns the piece of land next to the Galantes.

Tall and lanky to the point that, when he rides his donkey, his feet drag on the ground, he is a handsome man with sharp features and a chiselled jaw. Gino went to school until the end of third year and rumour has it that he is completely henpecked by his mother and sister

Her Husband Luigi and his family were to much for her

I absolutely loved this book; it is heartwrenching and opening and follows Maria’s journey to discover their mother. She never knew her Father and didn’t know how they met her mother’s life in the village. It is also an account of other women like her mother who have no one to tell their stories of being marginalized in a country where divorce is banned and even living separate lives isn’t allowed. This is a perfect example of why I like small presses. Yes, this was a best seller in Italy, but it had not been picked up by a relatable story. We heard of many an abandoned baby many years ago. This fills in what happened after but also what can lead a parent to do that act. Then take their own life, she drowns; Maria seven finds out how she’d looked after this and how the body blows up with gas in the water. I like the vignette style of the book as she pieced the stories of her family bit by bit over time, and everyone she met told her a little more from the pictures in the book as well. Have you ever read a book about an abandoned baby or their mother?