“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Then I burst into tears. Then one always bursts into tears, I thought.”
Telling life by talking about death: this is what Aglaja Veteranyi does for one hundred and twenty-nine poignant, poetic pages.
The life of circus performers has always had a contradictory charm that combines the freedom of wandering with the lability of relationships; a life made of magic tricks and escapes, amazements and disappearances. Different rules, a twirling in space and time that bewitches and terrifies at the same time. We enter the circus not from the splendor of the tent but from the dust of the booths: the bond with the land of origin becomes mythological, the family history is scattered, the search for roots an elusive chimera but tenaciously pursued.
The story of the aunt’s death is a mosaic of gestures, faces and memories that is composed along the pages without ever being able to say it is complete. The narrator’s emotions appear as surreal physical modifications, body metaphors of crushing precision – “My arms came loose from their joints and fell to the ground, next to the dark blue shoes with silver stars.” – or as dreams, paradoxical oneiric events that settle into the course of events without interruption, like paintings or windows, and that belong to life no less than the other characters: “The man took a knife out of his mouth, cut a cloud from the sky and placed it on the table.”
The circle of lands that Veteranyi traverses has a centripetal force that regroups the meaning in the nucleus of the family and in an adoptive homeland, Switzerland, which we would perhaps ill-match with the glittering madness of a circus. An equal and opposite motion made of words and cemeteries pulls the souls towards Romania, its suffering, its bizarre sentimental geography.
Knowing that the author took her own life a few days before the release of this book casts a melancholic reverberation on our reading, somehow intensifies the weight of words and bonds, just as death itself does with the passing of our little days. In 1999, a few years earlier, “Perché il bambino cuoce nella polenta” (Italian edition Keller, 2019) was published: we wonder if even in those pages, still to be read, we will find the same incongruous elegance, the same dichotomy between majesty and fragility that haunts every appearance in the book as if, once the exuberance of the show was over, each character became a person again; as if, with the spotlights off, the last sequins fell to the ground, in a moment of perplexed silence, a silencing of things but immediately afterwards, proudly, she resumed that life of strange compromises, in which the only sad photos are those taken at weddings and the tears, no longer universal, fall in different languages.
Reading the words of Aglaja Veteranyi means learning a new alphabet of feelings, acquiring a different way of describing the unlikely complexity that inhabits us, a way that is perhaps fragmented and incomplete but, ultimately, luminous and no longer just enlightened.
Written by Delis
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Aglaja Veteranyi, Lo scaffale degli ultimi respiri, Keller, Rovereto, 2011
Original edition: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, 2014