Dimmi che sei stata felice

Aurora carries the joys and torments of all the women in her family, like a silent map engraved on her skin. Until, at almost fifty years of age, she meets Viola by the sea in Nuova Ostia: a ray of light in the armour that has always kept her at a distance from the world. If for Viola love is a promise of the future, for Aurora it is a desperate attempt to repair the past. Maria Grazia Calandrone addresses the reader of this novel right from the title: “Tell me you were happy” is an invocation, a hope. A story in which passion goes hand in hand with destiny. As happens to those who, at least once in their lives, have loved forever. Aurora is born in a council flat in southern Rome, while the country is preparing to go through the 1970s and their decline in the “strategy of tension”. From an early age, she accepts the fate of a mother marked by abandonment and the emptiness of a father she never knew. After all, the past seems to have been working for her since before she was born: her grandmother, with whom Aurora has a deep and privileged relationship, miraculously escaped the bombing of San Lorenzo. Aurora also believes she is alive thanks to her mother’s strength. All around, meanwhile, the city breathes like an organism: it embraces, betrays and intertwines destinies without revealing them. So much so that, by one of those coincidences that life sometimes reserves for us, one day Aurora briefly finds her father and, shortly afterwards, falls in love with a young poet who has come from afar. In search of peace, Aurora moves to Nuova Ostia, a place that can also be fierce. Yet it is there that she encounters the magnificence of the sea and Viola. The two women are almost the same age, and an instinctive naturalness brings them together. Their story is all-encompassing, but where Viola abandons herself, Aurora withdraws. Feelings, however, are a land that can only be inhabited without defences. Maria Grazia Calandrone once again delves into the living matter of memory and history, leading to a dizzyingly lyrical conclusion. This time, the author’s smooth and direct voice finds the words to say that being true to ourselves can be too restrictive. This is especially true for women, who in Calandrone’s books always find themselves faced with a choice from which there is no turning back.