The midday thread marks the second stage of the Autobiography of Contradictions, the monumental interior journey in five stations in which the Italian author Goliarda Sapienza lays herself bare. A descent into the underworld of identity, where each page is a step towards dissolution and rebirth, in the never-ending attempt to contain an uncontrollable life.
In this second volume, Sapienza narrates the delicate and tormented path of psychoanalysis undertaken with Dr. Majore following her first suicide attempt. In the spring of 1962, in fact, the actress and writer had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of a Roman hospital and, as was the norm (especially for women), she was subjected to several electroshock sessions that caused her to temporarily but completely lose her memory. Keeping her anchored to the possibility of a return were Dr. Majore’s “wild analysis” – a promise of cure, perhaps of salvation – and the stubborn love of Citto Maselli, her partner at the time. Together, they become the mirrors through which Goliarda tries to recompose the lost image of her own face.
The novel develops as a vivid and restless account of those three years of analysis, up to the inevitable moment of separation from the therapist, in 1964. It is precisely at that moment, left alone again, that Sapienza finds herself holding the scattered fragments of her identity in her hands, parts of a complex puzzle that has yet to be recomposed.
However, the feeling of loneliness is, since childhood, something with which Goliarda has always been familiar, and this book fully reflects it, from beginning to end, as do all her works. An author who is not only political, profound, a master of words, but also a person of flesh and blood, who descends from the Olympus of unreachable writers to get close to the ear of her readers and whisper that they are not alone. I felt welcomed in a silent and judgment-free embrace, the kind that makes you feel that “it’s okay like this”.
The impressive intimacy of Sapienza’s narration continues throughout the pages of the novel, which contrasts the memories of her Catania childhood with the dialogues with the psychoanalyst so beloved by the Roman elite. Sapienza alternates states of great lucidity with pages suffocated by madness, the language digs, tears, opens glimpses, with disturbing and blurred images. The boundary between care and manipulation becomes increasingly blurred, and writing becomes the author’s only instrument of salvation.
In fact, Dr. Majore, and this becomes clear very soon, tries to impose his truth on Goliarda, refusing to truly see the emotional complexity of his patient. As Angelo Pellegrino points out in the preface to the edition of La nave di Teseo: “what the analyst said was natural was in reality also purely cultural.”
Trust me, madam, you will see that we will unravel this tangled mess of confused feelings and emotions that you believe to be love. Love does not exist. Trust me.
But trust, in its purest form, requires listening, delicacy, respect. Qualities that Majore does not possess, as Sapienza herself denounces in the last, powerful page of the novel:
I understood that that doctor, in taking me apart piece by piece, had brought to light old wounds healed by compensations, as he would have said, and had reopened them by rummaging inside with scalpels and pliers and that he had not been able to heal… I remembered that rush, how much rush to close, to sew up those wounds as best as possible… and in that spastic rush he had forgotten some pliers inside.
Resisting to write, writing to resist: Goliarda Sapienza for me is THE writer. Writer of survival, of fracture, of the refusal of any normalization. A thin thread, that of midday, stretched between darkness and light, between death and (re)birth. A thread that, even today, passes through our hands. And calls us. Holds us. Saves us.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Goliarda Sapienza, Il filo di mezzogiorno, Garzanti, Milano, 1969