Chi dice e chi tace

Along the promenade, the beach resorts gleamed in the golden light of sunset. (...) Young couples walked linked together, two women, both wearing chenille tracksuits, walked briskly...(...) The plaster on the houses struggled against the sea salt, danceable music drifted from the Bussola, and men smoked and drank beer, cradling their bellies. (...) Affixed to the walls of the railway workers' club were a faded photograph of Gramsci, a reconstructed portrait of Berlinguer, the front page of the inaugural issue of l'Unità... It is in this insignificant and sleepy town on the Lazio coast that Vittoria takes up residence, living in a villa with a young woman.

Eyes not light in color but filled with light, she wore a straw hat that had seen better days, loose trousers, a white cable-knit sweater, (...) Vittoria looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of Oggi. (...) She looked like an Arab princess on a Tuscan country estate. Who was Vittoria? Lia seeks to answer this question when the woman's lifeless body is found in the house’s bathtub. In an indifferent and gossipy environment, Lia seems the only one concerned with the causes of death (suicide or murder?) and, above all, with who Vittoria truly was: why she had abandoned Rome and why she was cohabiting with a young woman who certainly could not have been her daughter. And Lia discovers that Vittoria is like

Greek; she had left few traces, and to arrive at a meaning—assuming there was one—one had to proceed by recombining the elements, conscious that a margin for interpretation would always remain or, in the worst-case scenario, that none of the combinations would make sense. It is clear that Chiara Valerio has deeply loved and endured ancient Greek! Beneath the veneer of a noir story, Lia ventures into the labyrinth of that mystery residing within us all—indecipherable, yet one we endeavor to bring order to. To this inner conflict that animates literature, as Ungaretti used to say, the author attempts to provide a resolution through an overly rational approach, turning it into a philosophical or mathematical puzzle that conceals the fear of straying from well-defined and reassuring prevailing values. And what if Lia had been romantically attracted to Vittoria? Along a promenade that is not that of Scauri, perhaps on the banks of the Nile or in a desert oasis,

I saw Vittoria. (...) I drew closer and asked her. Why? Vittoria smiled, (...) took my face in her hands, kissed me. I even closed my eyes. In the dream, I was happy. Another sound, a voice, two voices. I broke my lips away from Vittoria’s and looked around. My daughters were running toward me....