Now that death has given her the distance she needs, Federica Sgaggio speaks to her mother and tells her story to us. Rosa Sammarco emerges powerfully from the fragments of a past laden with everything life can inflict — a woman of "ruthless, violent, and primitive intuition" — and the marks she leaves as inheritance in the present.
Rosa was an intense woman, who immigrated from Avellino to the Veneto, never quite fully integrated into 1950s Verona. She followed her husband, with whom she had a difficult relationship and from whom she separated for a time, only to take him back when he fell ill and alone. A mother to be proud of, Sgaggio writes, even in moments of humiliation — a woman who loved her children "with an intensity so maternal and passionate it became almost masculine." Yet the bond was so strong that at times it seemed unbearable, pushing her into moments of withdrawal. Of Francesco, her second son, Rosa would one day confide to her daughter: "He taught me everything I know. I would have preferred not to learn it, but I would not want to be the woman I would have been without him."
Rosa, an aesthete in form and substance ("for her, form has always been substance… an awareness of what respect consists of, recognition of the other, and also of what is right and beautiful") always showed a particular passion for the collective dimension. Her son's severe disability, caused by medical negligence in the hospital ward after his birth, directed her activities toward political engagement (in the most original sense of the term — concern for the common good) and transformed what was purely private, domestic tragedy into a search for social, cultural, and political answers that had until then been ignored. The years Francesco grew up were years of the first major laws advancing integration in Italy, and Rosa was acutely aware of this, an active participant through AIAS. Not that it was always easy relating to other parents… "the hierarchies among the disadvantaged were a torment for her." But many answers came far too late, and Rosa eventually found herself forced to place Francesco in an institution when her own health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer care for him herself. And, above all, wanting to spare her daughter the weight of such a decision.
The intimate dimension of the mother-daughter relationship, with all its potential, limits, and contradictions, emerges in striking chiaroscuro as the main thread of L'eredità dei vivi (Marsilio Editore), and the supporting characters who cross this woman's life are equally convincing: the gallery of home-care assistants — varied humanity whom Rosa received with the courtesy due to guests and whom she nearly adopted, capable of easing many heavy situations — stands in stark contrast to the few compassionless volunteers, nominally Catholic, who occasionally appeared in this family's life. It is impossible not to think of the experiences unfolding in those same years for other parents — those known, for instance, through Fede e Luce — who, by forming community with friends, sought a place in society and especially in the Church that honored everyone's dignity. Perhaps the most striking absence in reading this novel is precisely that of community — something different from family, whether close or extended, but also different from political collective life.
A vital and stimulating read from many angles, powerful above all for the painful clarity with which it describes certain dimensions of disability, or the doctor-patient relationship, things usually left unsaid. In the brief, taut chapters where we listen to Sgaggio's memories, the narrative — apparently scattered across time — reveals itself to be emotionally capable of a deep introspection that drives the blade home and tends the wound. It traverses and mirrors, in its tensions, the complicated history of postwar Italy, inevitably divided between north and south. Tensions that surface in individuals, in families, in society itself.