Il pozzo vale più del tempo

Eight-year-old Dalia spends many days in a hospital that is not a hospital because the world is no longer the world; she is discharged, returns home, and finds the house empty, probably because everyone has died. During her hospital stay, Dalia meets two children who have also had accidents: the drowsy boy who cannot speak and Morena, who cannot move well but can write. After leaving the hospital, Dalia hears nothing about these children for a long time. Without a family, without money and without a home, Dalia is taken in by old Fioranna, who was a teacher, knows how to teach and knows how to defend herself. Fioranna teaches Dalia two things: that the world as human beings knew it still exists but is hidden in the mountains, and how to bury a body. So Dalia, from the valley tyrannised by the Boscarato family, the long-standing masters – because the world is no longer the same, but those who are masters remain so – ascends the mountain and arrives at the Village of Wells. Knowing how to care for and bury, Dalia knows how to treat living and dead bodies, even non-human ones. This is how she becomes the assistant to the butcher Biagio and the companion to the eccentric Orsola. If, as a child in hospital, Dalia’s companions were the sleepy boy and the girl with the pen, in her mature years they are precisely the same: Biagio, the gruff butcher haunted by a white cat, and Orsola, the woman of stories, who lives alone in a disused hotel where, as everywhere else, a crime has been committed. The temperature of the world fluctuates around fifty degrees, crops are struggling, livestock is dying, there is water in the mountains but no weapons or medicines, and in the plains there are both weapons and medicines but no water or food. It is natural that the Boscaratos, as masters always do, try to consume all the resources. But when the outside temperature is so high, human capital is the only resource left, and eating no longer has such a metaphorical meaning. If Agota Kristof, in The Trilogy of the City of K., wrote that one is truly capable of killing when one kills something that one does not need to eat, if Cormac McCarthy, in The Road, described human beings as food reserves for other human beings, Ginevra Lamberti narrates how mass production changes the story of man eating man. In a powerful novel, in terms of both writing and imagination, in which tenderness is first and foremost an abyss, or rather a ditch, in which prostitutes sell gestures and words of care and not those of seduction – assuming there is a difference – and where Veneto is a Wild West and Venice has ceased to be a fish because the lagoon no longer exists, Ginevra Lamberti establishes the mythology of climate change, of respect for the dead without worship, of legends that repeat themselves and curse with ever-new curses because ever-new are the sins; she establishes the mythology of love that, after having moved the sun and the other stars for centuries, now causes them to implode.