Pietrantonio Donatella Di

> My mother from the sea died on the top bunk, on one of those nights. Looking at her, she did not seem ill, perhaps just a little greyer than usual. (...) At the funeral, the other mother accompanied me. PoorAdalgisa poorAdalgisa, she repeated, wringing her hands. But then they threw her out; her nylon stockings were all laddered and she couldn't attend the service in that state. This dream haunts the nights of the Arminuta, the “girl returned”: a thirteen-year-old sent back to her family of origin, to the “mother by necessity,” after spending her childhood with an aunt, the “mother from the sea.” Raised as an only child in an orderly, quiet home, she finds herself catapulted into a large, impoverished family, with uncouth and seemingly indifferent parents, loud brothers always ready for crude jokes, a slightly backward little brother, and an invasive younger sister, already adept at housework, who still wets herself. > Toward evening the older boys came home; one greeted me with a whistle, another didn’t even notice me. They rushed into the kitchen, elbowing their way through (...). They filled their plates amid splatters of sauce; at my corner, only a spongy meatball over a bit of sauce arrived. (...) My first parents remembered after dinner that there wasn't a bed for me in the house. Tonight you'll sleep with your sister, you're both skinny anyway, the father said . What nostalgia for her former life, for the “mother from the sea,” and what shame for such an ignorant, neglectful, and destitute family! Yet what remains inexplicable to the Arminuta are the reasons why she was sent back to her parents “by necessity,” and so hastily. Could the mother from the sea be ill? What if she had died in the meantime? With a troubled soul steeped in melancholy, the Arminuta ventures into a world unknown to her: she finds support in her eldest brother (her first love?), learns to help around the house, and, through subtle signs, discovers a gruff maternal love, even if she cannot accept it. > I had felt my mother's hand move across my back and come to a firm rest on my shoulder blade. I had drawn my head between my shoulders, like a fearful dog pleased by the first caress after a long abandonment. Yet soon I pulled away with an abrupt movement and stepped back a little. I was ashamed of her, of her chapped fingers, the faded mourning clothes she wore, the ignorance that escaped her lips with every word. I never ceased to be ashamed of her language, of that dialect that turned ridiculous whenever she made an effort to speak properly . It is her sister Adriana (“she wore skimpy clothes, dirty shoes, greasy hair”) who shatters the Arminuta’s bourgeois solitude, leading her to understand the emotional wealth born of sisterhood, of a friendship that draws strength from shared habit, from being cast into the world together, from saving each other through complicity. And it could only be Adriana who bluntly tells her the truth: the Arminuta was abandoned by the mother from the sea because the latter was expecting a child and there was no longer room for her, having been wanted only because they had been unable to conceive a child of their own. At the end of the novel, the Arminuta meets the mother from the sea once more, and from that encounter comes to understand herself: > like an improbable flower, grown in a small clod of earth clinging to the rock . There is one word that encapsulates this short novel: authenticity. One is genuine if one does not view the world through forms, rules, and appearances, but seeks deep feelings; one is genuine if culture, education, books, and knowledge acquired at school do not serve as a shield, but as a means to immerse oneself more fully into real life, to seek a mutual sense of humanity beyond divisions of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender; one is genuine if one is not ashamed of one's own language, yet refuses to retreat into a parochial and folkloric dimension. This echoes the theme already explored in Elena Ferrante’s novel (*My Brilliant Friend*), though here the pursuit of an authentic life unfolds within the family, in the relationship between daughter and mother, and among sisters. The question one might ask is this: why, in recent years, is there such a pressing need to return to the primordial wellsprings of Italian society—family and friendship? Why do we feel that culture is insufficient to teach us “resistance”? The plot is slender, and the characters are merely sketched rather than fully explored, beginning with the Arminuta, an improbable narrator. Its fundamental merit lies in the writing: banality and the style of television dramas are finally abandoned in favor of forging a new language, built on short yet unsplintered sentences, a measured blend of standard Italian with dialectal and regional terms, carrying ancient resonances deftly woven into modern syntax. Why read it? An engaging story, even if only sketched; writing that is both intriguing and pleasurable.