Escape. Forced and necessary marriages. Sisterhood lost in pain. Healing music. The marble-like norms of the bourgeoisie. The mysterious thread that ties a life to many places and to no one. Trieste, Italy, and Egypt. Disillusionments. The inexorability of history. The great wars. Being women in the twentieth century.
These are the luminous centers around which The Four Wieselberger Girls revolves, a moving memoir and a cruelly sincere tale that draws on all the leitmotifs of Cialentine’s narrative. Winner of the Strega Prize in 1976, this book narrates the author’s personal experiences through the voices of her aunts Alice, Alba, Adele, and Elsa, the four cardinal points of a compass that seems to have broken: that of History.
The initial panorama is represented by Habsburg Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century, a city in a deep identity crisis, besieged by irredentism and a crossroads of languages, traditions, and illusions. Here, between the strong Bora wind and a high-society Trieste home, the tragic fates of the four Wieselberger sisters unfold, reflecting the uneasiness of an era and a family teetering on the brink of disintegration. A brink that Cialente masterfully treads on tiptoe, an attentive witness but never a protagonist, continuing the narrative to the “dolce vivere” of the years spent in Alexandria, Egypt.
But more than for her impeccable chronicler of events, Cialente is striking for the power of her memory. The author’s writing has something of the musical scores so beloved by her maternal grandfather: through memory, she composes and recomposes figures of women, including herself, forced into a life of silent resistance. In particular, almost as if creating a perfect score, Cialente evokes the story of her mother Elsa – and, therefore, of her family of origin. Through the calculated risk of narrating first in the third person and then in the first, the author brings to life a mother already defeated by the cruelty of coincidences. I wondered if this wasn’t perhaps the strongest act of love a daughter can show her mother: saving her through storytelling, filling with writing the words, tears, and gestures she’d held back. Elsa – silent, sacrificed, a nomad out of necessity for her husband – finds her “room of her own” in the words of her daughter Fausta.
The final scene captures four generations of women: we’re on a beach in Kuwait, a symbolic place where the author’s escape is finally halted. It’s Cialente herself who watches her daughter and two granddaughters run toward the sea, while feeling the watchful gaze of her now-deceased mother. An all-female chain, where identity, pain, past, and future merge. Cialente teaches us the power of memory in rewriting one’s own story, and that it’s never too late to change it.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Fausta Cialente, Le quattro ragazze di Wieselberger,Milano, Baldini+Castoldi, 2018 (first edition Mondadori, 1976)