Childhood is an island. In some cases, almost literally: the Neapolitan writer Fabrizia Ramondino (Naples, 1936-Gaeta, 2008), daughter of a diplomat, arrived in Mallorca just a few months after her birth, while the civil war was in full swing. The woman who rented the house to the family, in fact, accustomed to traveling the world since she had lost her companion, had not even wanted to get off the boat on her last return as soon as she had learned of the massacre that took place there. had taken place. in August. Or at least that’s how Ramondino tells it. However, his family remained until 1944. He remembers it in Childhood and Spanish War (2001; Asteroid Books, 2024, trans. Celia Filipetto).
A late writer, Ramondino lived in many countries, had a cosmopolitan education and dedicated herself to teaching and social activism, an area in which it is worth highlighting not only her commitment to children and families poor people of Italy, but also towards the Sahrawi people. with whom he got involved to the point of spending a month in the desert tents with the filmmaker Mario Martone (responsible, among other things, for an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s first novel, boring lovein 1995), experience from which the book was born Polisario. A spaceship sized in the desert (2000). She also studied women’s experiences in mental health centers, when no one paid attention to problems such as alcoholism or depression as they affected them.
He didn’t debut until 1981, with Althenopisa novel about the awakening of a young girl which won the Naples Prize and the Lombardi-Satriani Prize, and which received applause from Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante. It is no coincidence that these writers played the role of godmothers: reading this Childhood and Spanish Warit is inevitable to remember Family glossary (1963): like Ginzburg, Ramondino also draws on his memories, even if in this case they are limited to his childhood, to this Majorca seen through the eyes of a young girl. All of his work is characterized by this tenuous border between memory and story, always nourished by reflections. He also cultivates poetry, theater, screenwriting and travel books.
It is not surprising that this work is considered one of his most important titles: between memoir and novel, this imposing book of five hundred pages is an example of the high levels that literature can reach through this exercise that Marcel developed to dig. in memory and pull on this thread, coloring it with reveries. It is much more than a testimony: the poetic style, meticulous and rich in evocative descriptions, denotes the craft of an accomplished writer, a voice that writes with maturity, and therefore with calm, to look back and rebuild, without nostalgia , this universe. lost and yet still present in her.
Children’s Days in Mallorca
“Perhaps childhood is longer than life,” said Ana María Matute, and the detail with which Ramondino talks about his experiences undoubtedly corroborates this. Following chronological order, in the first chapters he recreates the place that receives him: the people, the environment, the exuberant flora, the languages. There is a war, but she, a girl from a privileged family, arrives on an island where spring is expected: “When we arrived on the island, at the end of February, the almond trees were already in bloom” , she said. said, while his people are protected from poverty and bullets in their caseplón, a mirage of what is perceived as the landscape of an innocence that will be lost alongside the destruction of the island.
She writes with the childish gaze of an adult who remembers, with an astonishing vivacity which reflects the way of being in the world of the curious, alert and imaginative young girl. He has an extraordinary ability to tell this point of view which, unlike other memoirs, retains its sensitivity to wonder, to fascinated revelation in a place where adults only see routine. The country, and then the world, are at war, but she is safe within the city limits, a refuge for her people. Childhood appears as a suspended and eternal time; and remember The happy days of summer (1976), by Fulco di Verdura, and A garden in Bruges (1996), by Charles Bertin.
The evocation, the memory predominates over the story; the portrait of environments confronted with adventure. The incident creeps in subtly, slowly, always small, halfway between reality and the inner life rich in daydreams. He does not intend (nor could) to tell everything as it was, but rather to reconstruct this being in the world of someone who has not yet been perverted by him and who discovers it one day day after day, in every corner, now fixing her gaze on him. a dress, now heard hidden behind the door. Find the magic in the grain of dust, magnify the tiny, amplify every gesture. The girl, because she is a child, is more of a spectator than an agent; By observing, by allowing himself to be guided by adults, he learns to orient himself in life.
His ability to describe is so exceptional that the novel seems from another era: an enveloping, elegant, suggestive writing, with long sentences that move willingly through the twists and turns of the language. A novel of slow cooking and slow digestion, which clashes with the contemporary trend towards expressive minimalism, short chapters and action. hectic; certainly not suitable for impatient readers. It can only be written from maturity, when this art of living called patience is mastered. It has many similarities with another recent cover, Balcony with a view of the Atlantic (year), by María Luz Morales, another mature work that revisits childhood, in Galicia in her case.
Growing up in a privileged family
It also stands out, compared to the current story, for the attention paid to the other even from the perspective of oneself: it draws a detailed portrait of the characters, which it reveals, physically and psychologically, with a simple gesture, an illuminating phrase, such as “it seemed as if two women coexisted in the lady of Son Batle: the girl she had been and the great woman she was”. With this lady, the owner, the story opens, the first pages which already predict an exuberant story, with fine wit and powerful images, which is not afraid to call misfortune by its name, abuse or death. Because any recreation of childhood is of course linked to the loss of innocence.
In family relationships, the complicity with her older brother, Carlito, her playmate, stands out, to whom she, with the intuition of someone who does not know but absorbs the environment, begs not to become a soldier, never to go to war. . He is jealous of the little girl Anita; monopolizes the nurse’s attention. She adores her father’s tenderness and appreciates the visits of her Neapolitan grandmother, with these gifts that connect her to what will one day be her land. This grandmother who “did not speak to me in monosyllables, did not childishly distort words for me, did not give me orders, did not pamper me, but spoke to me as if I were a friend. Maybe because I couldn’t talk to anyone else.
With the mother, of course, the understanding is more complex – a constant in all of Ramondino’s work; The rigidity of the upper class, the finesse of its receptions are no match for the indomitable spirit of a creature. She prefers to escape into the world of servants. The Dida, or nanny, who takes care of her almost all the time; or the other servants, among whom he detects hierarchies, power relationships. And life outside the manor, which, because it is forbidden to him, seems more attractive to him. Like the seamstress and her unfortunate story, or the soldiers in front of whom the mother avoids ostentation.
Fascination for the other
Like the child who, overwhelmed by the abundance of toys, entertains himself with a box, the protagonist is fascinated by the world of the poor. This is the mystery for her, in what she only accesses in secret, but which breathes more truth than the imposture of those around her; there is perhaps the seed that he later cultivated thanks to his social commitment. The garden, all in nature, also enchants him: its harmony, its opulence, its disturbing life cycle. Descriptions of flora and fauna as we no longer do them, rich and expressive imagery, full of metaphors and delicacy, with the latent tension between the protection of the home and the seductive threat of the unknown beyond. beyond its limits.
Languages are another key to his training: with his family and his environment, he speaks Italian and Spanish; with the servants and the humble Majorcans; the story is peppered with this language. And this is not anecdotal: with the nuances of each language, she discovers another reality and becomes aware of the class difference (she is linked to Anna Maria Ortese, another voice linked to Naples who x-rayed social contrasts). Their linguistic ear is accentuated by nursery rhymes, which, beneath an apparent lightness, tell authentic perversions, like stories. These feed their imagination of witches, gnomes and mermaids, and Pinocchiothe Italian classic par excellence, which teaches you the game of metamorphosis.
And the war? It’s another mystery, a backdrop that creeps into the adults’ comments, into the little girl’s observations. Apparently, she lives in safety, she has a peaceful childhood; However, despite the cliché that associates this stage with happiness, and even with its capacity to marvel, there is something bitter in everyday life that shatters its innocence. Without being a hungry and dirty girl in the rubble, she experiences her first experiences with cruelty, lack of communication, illness and rejection. Without going any further, noting the abysmal differences between one and the other is violence in itself; here is the formation of a conscience.
It brings hope, for literature and for humanity, that a work like Childhood and Spanish Warfor its undeniable value as a memory, but also for its literary depth, which no longer requires attention, but total immersion. And time, time and calm, to delight in this hypnotic prose which renounces neither beauty nor tenderness even if it leaves a bittersweet residue. This is how the young girl opens up to the world, and this is how the reader rediscovers, even for a moment, this way of looking, amazed and curious, that he left with his childhood.
