It might be nice to listen to a fado in the background, perhaps the «Fado corrido» by the great Amália Rodrigues while reading the beautiful stories of María Judite de Carvalho, Portuguese writer, painter, translator and editor (Lisbon 1921-1998), former columnist and caricaturist for various newspapers, lived for a long time in Belgium and France, in particular during the Salazar dictatorship.
Enlightened in Paris by the thoughts of greats such as Camus and de Beauvoir, she began to be interested in a conscious feminism that called into question, against the “certainties” of the time, our stories as women. An existential research which converged in her first collection of short stories, «Tanta gente, Mariana» from 1959, now published by Sellerio in the translation by Vincenzo Barca (reproduction of the painting by María Judite de Carvalho on the cover), which makes us rediscover this “forgotten” author ” although appreciated by critics in the past and above all supported by her husband, the writer and critic Urbano Tavares Rodrigues, who had recognized her talent as a writer.
«We are all alone, Mariana. Alone and with lots of people around. So many people, Mariana”, is what the father repeats to Mariana, the protagonist of the first story that gives the collection its title. A loneliness that is a condemnation but also an absolution, in the words of the father, who sees loneliness as a condition for everyone, writes Giulia Caminito in her beautiful note at the end of the volume. But is that enough? observes Caminito, also a writer. No, because there are people who are loner than others, like Mariana, an ordinary girl who, after having come close to good fortune by marrying a brilliant and good young man, sees everything vanish and experiences abandonment: her husband falls in love with someone else and gives birth to the child she lost due to a miscarriage after an accident. And at thirty-six, Mariana feels old, useless, like “liquid and scattered, weak, sick of myself” invisible to everyone.
Like the other women (but also other men) in the stories, Arminda, Clara, Emília, Luísa (and Adérito and Marcelino), characters who see life happening elsewhere, colorless lives devoured by impossibility, consumed by malaise for every minimal event of everyday life, voices drained by resentment, by the betrayal of life (and you can also be a poor woman betrayed by a faithful husband who, although married, finds herself alone in the world), darkened by boredom, by the awareness of having lost forever what could have been , the opportunity to finally live.
Mariana is a «ball of yarn woman who cannot find her head, writes Caminito, «overcome by the “shatter” that Elena Ferrante talks about in “The Days of Abandonment”». We talk about the female condition of the 50s and 60s, in difficult times like those experienced in Portugal, together with other countries, but if everything has really changed, the writer asks in the note, why do these stories seem so current? And he adds: «A life like Mariana’s, without work, without family, even today would be considered in disarray, desperate, without a future». Desperate, yes, and in fact «there are many things we don’t think about due to lack of time! – says Mariana when talking about herself – To hope for example, to hope…».