Teresa Manzoni, the woman who loved too much

How can you not be curious about this Teresa? The majority of biographers speak little of it, with ill-concealed contempt. Even Natalia Ginzsburg, in that masterpiece that is The Manzoni familyhe treats her very badly. He doesn’t know and doesn’t understand her, he aligns with hearsay with the majority gossip who shoots at zero. Because everyone, not just family friends, like the Trotti sisters, not just contemporaries, like Tommaseo, Cantù and even the patriotic hero Confalonieri, they absolutely would not have wanted Manzoni to remarry. What the hell, he wasn’t a kid when Enrichetta died, he was almost fifty years old (in the first half of the 19th century, therefore a good age): he could also be satisfied and live on memories and poetry, haloed by suffering nostalgia. But no, he can’t be alone, his mother Donna Giulia Beccaria also says so that he is an eternal son who must be cared for; so he remarries this widow so different from Enrichetta. And here begins another story.

His second wife is his “fan”

This second marriage, a winter wedding in every sense, celebrated between two widowers in the humble form in vesperis in the usual church of San Fedele, tells us so much about him: and I left from here. Indeed, a little earlier: from passion of an admirer. Of a fan, as we would say today. Because Teresa Borri is above all a fan of the writer. You become one when you read the 1827 edition of the Betrothedwho immediately likes it crazy. If the posters had already existed, one of Manzoni would have stuck to the wall, near the bed. She dreams of him, she even “stalks” him a little. She arrives as far as her house in via del Morone and then goes back, prevented by a minimum of decorum. Very modern as a thing, thinking about it: Teresa knows Alessandro by reading his novel and does not hold back, she writes words of fire to her mother. She says that she likes the man very much, that he is made suivant mon coeur, “as my heart desires”. That man, not that book. When Teresa, taken from the pages of the novel, writes those passionate words, Alessandro is still married to his first wife, Enrichetta. Teresa, on the other hand, has been the widow for many years of her first husband, the rich Count Decio Stampa, who died of tuberculosis in her arms when he was very young. And soon Alessandro too will be a widower: the woman he married when she was sixteen, the blonde, docile and tender Genevan, closes her eyes after fifteen pregnancies that wear out that little body already undermined by tuberculosis. Alessandro, a good Catholic and very virile husband, certainly does not give up the nuptial bed, and then it will be what God wills. He is a passionate man, like all those of his paternal family, the Boars. Yes, because Manzoni (by now it is something taken for granted by the majority of scholars) is not the son of Don Pietro Manzoni: his mother Giulia, daughter of Cesare Beccaria, had it from the cavalier Giovanni Verri, the most fascinating of the Enlightenment brothers.

Love at first sight at La Scala

And here we begin to understand how this era that seemed so starched and respectable to us was instead very broad-minded: everyone knows, but that’s okay. Therefore, dead Enrichetta, mother Giulia has to find another wife for her Alessandro. Certainly he is not a man to live in chastity in the memory of a dead woman. And the years go by, she, Giulia, is getting old: she needs a new Vestal Virgin to celebrate the cult of that increasingly famous son. Teresa seems to her a splendid possibility. An evening at La Scala during which the two have their first meeting celebrates love at first sight.

Teresa at first touches the sky with a finger: she has finally married the man she has loved in silence for years. Only now that all spiritual and intellectual love is transformed into daily coexistence, into the reality of a family that today we would define as profoundly dysfunctional. Her mother-in-law Giulia can’t bear to be supplanted by her daughter-in-law Teresa, who is not the docile Enrichetta: Giulia is used to being the mistress of the house, kissing her son goodnight, having everything and everyone at their disposal. The rivalry between the two women is terrible and Manzoni is careful not to take sides. The presence of Enrichetta’s ghost is palpable and no matter what Teresa does, she finds herself compared to her. Eight of Henrietta’s children survived her. The girls are all sick, weakened by the same disease as their mother. One after the other Giulietta, Cristina and Sofia will end up in the cemetery of Brusuglio, cut short around the age of 25: they get married, become pregnant, give birth to a few children and die. The youngest, Matilde, is not even able to get married, she dies first. Boys, on the other hand, have a soul ache like children of a famous parent: the eldest Peter drinks too much, the younger Henry and Philip do not find their waythey venture into pharaonic and bankruptcy economic enterprises, they continually ask their father for money, they end up in prison.

Teresa becomes a hypochondriac

And he, Alessandro is an unloved child who has turned into an affective adultunable to be a husband out of the sheets, to make decisions, to take responsibility, to be a father. He stutters, has panic attacks, is a compulsive walker, agoraphobic and demophobic (fear of the crowd, ed.), who while his daughters are dying denies the evidence of their illness right up to the last moment, due to his total incapacity to bear the suffering of loss. They are characters of formidable modernity, these who follow one another on the stage of a very lively nineteenth-century Milan, populated by famous names, from Balzac to Radetzky, from Rosmini to Cattaneo, from Cavour to d’Azeglio. Teresa, who is not as naïve as Enrichetta, although aware of having fallen into Alessandro’s velvet trap, she will remain there until her death, first as an imaginary patient (hypochondria will become his way of defending himself from reality) and then tragically affected by a very authentic neurological syndrome that will kill her, long ahead of her eldest consort who will outlive anything and everything. How do I make Teresa say about her by her mother Marianna in the novel: «Because we women are so silly at times. We allow our hearts to devour us. May our loves become poisonous.” Then as now, out of time and history.

A preview of the book for you

The new novel by Marina Marazza, signed by iO Donna, “The two wives of Manzoni” (opposite, just released in bookstores), gives voice to Teresa Borri, who tells her story and offers an intimate portrait of Manzoni, unveiled in a new light, with its tenderness, neuroses and miseries. Only for iO Donna readers, it is possible to receive a preview of some particularly significant passages of the book. To read them just click on the site marimara.it/le-due-mogli-dimanzoni and leave your email: the file with a particular “taste” will be sent to you. And if after reading the novel you want to let the author know what you think, write them directly to: [email protected].

iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED