un forgotten episode of our history, the strike and the occupation, in 1968, of the tobacco factory in Lanciano: for 40 days the workers, the tobacco workers, cross their arms and sleep in the factory, supporting each other in an unequal fight against the Italian Tobacco Company which has announced 400 redundancies. In the end, the whole city supports them and after clashes with the police, the company suspends the project.
Simona Baldelli was born in Pesaro and lives in Rome. Among her most recent books, “La neve fino cade” and “Alfonsina and the road” (photo by Mirco Toniolo / Errebi / AGF)
In this story Simona Baldelli weaves the story of Nina, raised in the chilling evil of an orphanage, where she distinguishes between foundlings and orphans, the former treated even worse than the latter on the basis of an absurd scale of values. A leaden atmosphere of pain, beatings, poor food, denied love. But in this touching bildungsroman, which slips back and forth in an Italy punctuated by news and songs, a fragile and stubborn feminine shines through. Until a light appears, which is turned on by opening one’s heart to others.
How did the idea of intertwining Nina’s story with a forgotten women’s revolt come about?
Very little was known about that incredible event: forty days of occupation and the whole city mobilized. I was struck by the bewilderment of the workers, their difficulty in feeling inserted in a context. The same estrangement of the children of an orphanage in the story I had already begun to write. Children, like Nina, who doubt they count for anything. The battle of the tobaccos seemed to me the natural evolution of this fragility, of this not understanding why one has been called into the world and what to do with one’s life as an individual.
The workers were mothers, grandmothers, widows: they all supported the family.
They reflected an unusual, at the time, economic society founded on women’s work: on the 27th of the month the women received their salary and the men lived on it, all of Lanciano lived on it.
Was there political awareness?
The trade unionists were in the factory but the workers weren’t politicized: they did ’68 without knowing it, entering those issues by right, discovering the strength of the community and of fighting together.
However, they weren’t very popular…
They were isolated. Lanciano relied on the manufacturing related industries, but despised the tobacconists: they were too casual, they smoked, they worked night shifts. They were a scandal. And they stank: the smell of the curing of the leaves was very strong. The daughter of one of them told me that there was a special train for commuters that everyone kept away from.
“The well of the dolls” by Simona Baldelli, Sellerio, 410 pages, €16
From the first pages we discover that Nina will end up in the factory: we know her as a child in the orphanage and immediately twenty years old. Why this choice?
Life isn’t so linear, it’s made up of flashbacks, things that come back to you. Of course, there is the chronology of the days but we are not always moved by what happens to us during the day. Maybe emotionally we recover something experienced 10 years before that makes us face a situation in a given way. In addition, the fragmentation between past and present makes reading more captivating. Like an elbow that prevents you from falling asleep…
Is the orphanage where Nina grows up real or made up?
I gathered certain testimonies of those events from people very close to me and the orphanage I’m talking about was in another region. The well is an invention, but there were girls who went to give birth in the nuns’ infirmary. It all happened, the wickedness, the exhausting work of even small children, the underpants lowered for an inspection of the body that would certify who knows how the purity, the days of the exhibition so that the couples could choose, like at the market, the most nice to take home.
Terrible mortifications.
Those were years in which vocations weren’t always so spontaneous and when you lead the life you don’t want, you vent on whoever you have at hand and who is weaker than you.
However, there is a particular character, Sister Immacolata. What does he interpret?
I have the presumption that someone like you sees herself in the so-called street religious, who do things that come outside of orthodoxy but are perhaps closest to the true meaning of Christianity. Sister Immacolata does not want rewards because she has been good, she is not interested in being privileged and sitting at her father’s right hand, but she wants to sit among the others, alleviate their pain. Hers is a real idea of hospitality.
Nina has notebooks full of words that she has been collecting since she was a child: why are words important?
The words we have at our disposal define our thinking which is the basis of our actions and also give the measure of the imagination we have of ourselves and of the world. Those who think badly act badly, a disorientation that is also the basis of the novel, at least in the construction of this institution in which orphans and foundlings are distinguished, treating one better than the other. In recent years, it happens to me to perceive myself as outside my time because I hear reality told in words that I don’t recognize and behind which there are thoughts that produce an imaginary world in which I don’t find myself. Having the words in your pocket to define a vision and therefore also a future and a possibility is fundamental in my opinion. It is certified how much people, especially teenagers, have lost in terms of vocabulary knowledge of the language, halved compared to 20 or 30 years ago. But if you don’t have words to define reality, you can’t change it.
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