Maria Vittoria Masserotti, "Racconti per una canzone"

Once upon a time there were short stories published in the most famous magazines, even writers of a certain depth, such as Scerbanenco, signed them. The stories of Maria Vittoria Masserotti remind me of those. Short stories that are read one at a time for the blessed, sacrosanct, pure and simple desire to read, for the now unobtainable and outdated joy of discovering an atmosphere and a plot.

If a good story revolves around an original idea, a particular situation and moves from point A to point B, through a dynamic evolution, Masserotti’s stories perform all these tasks. Each has a plot to tell, each has a character to frame and a particular setting.

We are struck by the geography of events that crosses all of Italy, from Lazio to Tuscany, from little villages to towns, from the mainland to the islands. The protagonists are all, with a few exceptions, mature people, often struggling with the rediscovered and extended time of retirement. Everyone faces a different problem, from the devastating encounter with illness, to love revisited in all its facets, understood as a new contact, but also as a relationship worn out by time and clandestinity, or sweet marital complicity. The characters are varied: the lonely and obese girl, the man with too many parallel sentimental stories, the lover tired of her secondary role, the woman who has undergone the total removal of the reproductive system.

I seem to grasp, however, in every story — and especially in my favorite “November” — an overwhelming hope, the feeling that nothing really ends, that, around the corner, there is always a surprise, a new possibility, that old age is not decrepitude but, if anything, wisdom and freedom from commitments, time recovered for oneself, in a regained solitude, or in a chosen and not suffered sharing. Love and sex, in this vision, still have a lot of space and are experienced as a luxuriance of the senses and warmth of feeling. Loneliness, defeat, apathy and boredom “Life at twenty seemed full of promise. Now it’s just a routine with no ideas, no goals. She sighs and opens the fridge” in reality do not exist, they are just our mental shape.

On the contrary, there is always the possibility of a strong push: “Giulia’s right hand reaches out to caress her father’s grave, up there, she touches the small marble balustrade without reaching the photo, she points her feet to get there and feels her body lift. She is standing”. It is the renewal, the resurrection that becomes above all awareness of what one already has, awareness and re-evaluation of the past in view of the future.

“That has always been a magical moment, full of waiting, when the profile of time still has to be drawn, where everything is still and always possible.”

From this point of view, everything regains value, even the company of a dog is no longer a symbol of lack and isolation but, on the contrary, of completeness and affection. The void suddenly becomes full.

“One thing is certain — since she was born — life has somehow won. She gets up to go and call Marilena, today she needs to see her dog again.”

The stories bear the name of the months of the year and this circularity also ensures that there is an implicit sense of rebirth, of “new life”. Time, on the other hand, is what the author has dealt with professionally, having done computer research for the CNR on space-time reasoning.

The greatest merit, the greatest effort of this collection, in my opinion, is the lack of autobiography, so rare to find. How many times do we hear a writer say: “I started with a novel that talks about my life”, and, faced with statements like these, I am always prejudiced. Here, however, each story differs from the other in plot, development and setting: there is the man disputed between too many women, there is the heir killed by greedy relatives, there is the journalist involved in a story of mafia and deviated secret services, there is even Josè Saramago.

Obviously, Masserotti, like any other writer, always puts a little of herself in every character: whether it is a husband worried about his wife’s mental health or a Mossad agent, that will still be the author’s vision, those will be “her” husband and “her” agent. And, mixed with the events and scenes, there are, of course, the things that the author loves and knows, her readings — from Saramago to Tolkien — her favorite places, salty and marine, her music.

The title and the verses placed at the beginning of each story, in fact, are taken from “Song of the twelve months” by Guccini, and this juxtaposition, once again, recalls the need to live the flow of time without denying one’s bases but, indeed, recovering them. In the preface, Lamberto Picconi states that: “In a historical context like that of the 70s, in which many wanted to make a clean sweep of the past and start from scratch, the Modenese singer took a decidedly opposite direction, turning his gaze, not without nostalgia, to his roots.”

This is, after all, the purpose of writing, to make us clearer to ourselves and, at the same time, to free ourselves, to fathom and illuminate our unconscious motivations, to make us discover otherness, the new and the possible, beyond the recovery of what we have been.