Plebeian Nymph
Title of the original version reviewed: «Ninfa Plebea»
AI Translation Notice: This review was translated from the original Italian using artificial intelligence. Book quotes and excerpts are translated interpretations and will not match the author's original English phrasing or official published translations.
I have a daughter, fair and coquettish,/an unwed maiden, fresh as a rose;/ever close, since she was a tot,/I’ve held her fast by my skirt.
. Thus Nunziata would sing of her little girl, Miluzza, while picking lice from her head. And Miluzza was truly beautiful, and all the men in town
studied the slender ankles of a racehorse, the breasts budding like a posy of flowers, the dark charm of her fourteen-year-old head
. What they wanted, Miluzza knew “by prenatal memory,” and also because she had been born and raised in a destitute family of the bassi: a crippled, impotent, and cuckolded father; a mother notorious for giving herself to every passing soldier, doing so with joy and passion like Fabrizio De André's Bocca di Rosa. Daughter of the neighborhood whore, Miluzza becomes acquainted with sex while still a child: whether with her playmate or the old shopkeeper, or instead the parish priest and the austere schoolmaster. It is not true carnal intercourse, but lascivious explorations of her young vagina; on the other hand, “one doesn’t walk around with such bare legs and without knickers.” It is possible that Miluzza would have met the same fate as her mother Nunziata, a whore tolerated by the small provincial town, had not the death of her parents (and the consequent collapse of the modest tailor's shop on which they lived) and her employment as a factory hand in a local cardboard manufacturer radically altered Miluzza's life. The factory owner becomes infatuated with the girl and shamelessly makes her his mistress. Hoping to conceal the affair and to dazzle Miluzza, he whisks her away to Naples, lodging her in grand hotels and taking her to the finest restaurants. Yet it is precisely the elegant life in the big city that leads Miluzza to realize her condition as a kept woman, as “Sisina, elegant Sisina, (...) and for a lira she does the zuchetuzù,” as an insolent vaudeville performer recites. Listening to him amid the general laughter,
Miluzza gave a cold laugh. (... The Neapolitan world, so unbuttoned, was the opposite of her mood
. For her, sex is a natural, melancholy, understated, and delicate affair to be consummated in a discreet setting, among the neighborhood folk, without offending anyone. Indeed, Miluzza risks being engulfed by scandal, forced to shutter herself at home amid general reprobation, or compelled to leave the small town where she has always lived. To save her comes the war, and, like the angel of the Resurrection, a deserting soldier arrives.
The happy ending clashes with the overall tone of the tale—precious and effervescent, yet ever steeped in a disconsolate pessimism. The life of the poor is and always will be thus: carving out spaces for survival and simple diversion amidst daily misery and toil. But is such a life truly so sorrowful, or does one instead forge ahead, serene and confident, as part of an exuberant and festive humanity? It is no coincidence that it takes the big city to lay bare the squalor, which previously went unnoticed within one’s own milieu.
The writing is the story’s primary merit. Rea forges a new idiom, a blend of Italian and Neapolitan; in doing so, he lends brio and evocative power to the entire narrative, demonstrating as well how one can employ the “language of the speakers” without turning it into a coquettish gimmick or, worse still, a protected species.
Why read it? Spirited and captivating.