The Ladies’ Commandments

The Almighty delivered – or perhaps dictated, it is not certain – the Ten Commandments, engraved on two wooden tablets, to Moses on Mount Sinai. To a man, not a woman. After all, He is called the Lord of Hosts, not the Lord of Kitchens. And do you really think He could have said to a woman in such distant and formative times: ‘Do not commit acts of impurity’ or ‘Do not covet another man’s wife’? Unthinkable. Hence the highly intriguing idea, conceived by Gloria Giorgianni for Rizzoli, of asking ten female writers today to interpret freely – each in a short novel – one of those laws, which seemed not to concern their gender, surely because the men of the household were already keeping them in line; there was no need for a god to get involved. So, from Dacia Maraini to Lidia Ravera, who open and close the series, via Camilla Baresani, Federica Bosco, Veronica Raimo, Viola Di Grado, Jennifer Guerra, Ilaria Gaspari, Gabriella Genisi and Ritanna Armeni, the collection offers a comprehensive range of female perspectives on commandments that, with humour or bitterness, are reinterpreted and analysed—not without a degree of severity, even towards women themselves.

Unfortunately, the layout—with its garish, childish colours and scenes straight out of books ‘for young ladies’ (what we’d call Young Adult today)—appeals to entirely the wrong audience, suggesting trivial, romantic and simplistic pop stories. Instead, these are profound, well-reasoned stories that take women’s engagement with the commandment in question very seriously, whilst often straying considerably from the biblical text and giving rise to narratives that are not always easy to unpick in the light of the commandment they illustrate. There is, however, one notable exception: Federica Bosco, whose contribution on “remember to keep holy the Sabbath” strikes a light-hearted tone somewhere between a crime thriller and a romance, pitting three young protagonists—two brothers and a sister by different fathers—against a witch-like grandmother, a wealthy businesswoman, whom they would like to see dead soon so they can pocket her inheritance. Her story is entitled "Nostra signora che sei nell'attico", and on Sundays these grandchildren do not go to Mass, but instead attend a weekly lunch at which they are mocked and mistreated by the terrible old woman and only rarely given a little of the money they so desperately need. After all, does not the Creator too bestow favours upon believers and non-believers alike in a reckless manner, without regard for whether the reward is deserved or not, and whether the sign of the cross, for example, is made with faith and honesty rather than insincerely to elicit sympathy?

Right from the first two commandments – the most difficult ones from which to draw inspiration – Maraini and Baresani choose arduous and contrarian paths. “Thou shalt have no other God but me,” begins the Our Father who art in heaven, and Maraini transforms him into a bizarre winged little girl with a neck as long as a Modigliani figure, who appears at the foot of the bed of a woodcraftswoman, Sara, capable of creating marvellous dolls and puppets but who is perhaps not very accustomed to looking within herself. The child recounts ancient biblical stories and puts her in touch with that mysterious, superior being who, however, it turns out, never answers any of her questions; in short, the child has to fend for herself. Because he has grown disillusioned with his creation: “too much squabbling, too many fights, too many intrigues…”. ‘Well, well,’ Sara reflects, ‘wasn’t it actually he who did all those wicked things?’ There is no answer, and the only god we can turn to is none other than ourselves (this is the little girl’s unwitting lesson); nor is it even a question of women and men, because everyone – absolutely everyone – can rely only on their own inner self. Some readers may note that women are granted an additional opportunity, given that the winged child appeared to a woman and not to a man.

The most challenging task, however, was entrusted to Camilla Baresani: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”. As a child, I used to rack my brains over this second commandment. But what did it mean? Not to swear? Not only that: we really had to be careful not to bring the Creator into the conversation inappropriately, not to drag him into our insignificant difficulties. Yet I also wondered whether we could not even call upon Him when we were sad and a classmate had taken our snack at school. “God will punish you,” I would have liked to say menacingly to the little thief. Yet no: do not utter that name, for heaven’s sake. The Unnameable One could not care less about my snack; He has far more pressing matters to attend to, such as fanning the flames of wars that engulf the planet in order to test the wicked, who remain wicked nonetheless, while the virtuous continue to suffer. Although I may not have used those precise words to myself, something very similar eroded my faith in that Divine Being who did not wish to be disturbed. Returning to the Rizzoli series, how does Baresani navigate this challenging commandment? She handles it skillfully, suggesting that since the King of the World—or rather, of the Worlds—chooses not to be drawn into human affairs, readers might as well leave him alone and instead portray him as a lazy, domineering figure, an opportunistic male of the worst sort. ‘Jasmine Wants It All’ is the title of the story, but the one who truly wants it all without sacrificing anything is the charming Sergio Lenzi, who claims to be in love with her. The one who is madly in love, however, is the beautiful twenty-year-old Jasmine, a pedicurist for the wealthy Mrs Simona Colombo, Sergio’s wife, who has been dazzled by the luxury of the Lenzi household and the admiration shown to her by the master of the house. She soon becomes his mistress—more than a mistress, a slave treated in the finest possible way, confined to a stunning house yet left there for hours on end on her own, buried under designer gifts and various other pleasantries. Her god is Sergio—or rather, Sergio Giovanni (as he insists she call him)—who, however, has made her swear never to mention his name; in short, never to speak to anyone—and I mean absolutely no one—about that relationship. It might seem like the usual ménage à trois found in so many similar stories we’ve heard time and again, but here the perspective is original: it is the girl’s, with her bewildered naivety and her ridiculous yet genuine innocence, which then becomes Simona’s perspective. In fact, it will be the betrayed wife who opens her eyes to the true nature of the man who believed himself to be a god, and Sergio Giovanni Lenzi – or simply Sergio – will thus be torn to shreds. I’ve added that vaudeville-style excess myself, because the story, in reality, is capable of plunging a bloodied knife both into Jasmine’s deprived circumstances – which lead her to dream of her Prince Charming – and into Simona’s seemingly enviable social position, as she throws herself wholeheartedly into her work to protect herself from the collapse of the financial stability she achieved through marriage, yet of which she alone bears the burden, paying for her choice with devastating gloom.

Veronica Raimo’s Sabbie mobili represents an even more unexpected plunge into tragedy, honouring – in its own way – the fourth commandment, ‘honour thy father and thy mother’; or perhaps, in fact, dishonouring it. The mother she portrays is a deranged woman, unworthy of her role yet too unwell to realise it, and she risks ruining her only son, aged nine, who, fatherless, is trying to find his own way in the world. The plot is stripped down to the bare minimum: a tale of unspoken truths, of disorientation, of pain verging on the unbearable, which the writer conveys between the lines with rare mastery and a secret wisdom.

It is the unsettling portrait of a man, Guido Pacher – a Freudian psychoanalyst who seems to understand little about himself and, above all, about women – that Viola Di Grado chooses to use to illustrate the fundamental commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in her book Questo mondo non è casa. She does not affirm the law but instead adopts a vengeful stance against male power and against men’s inability to truly ‘see’ into a woman’s heart. One must not kill, yet in some cases, in killing, one glimpses a justice that does not come from the Most High, and in this short novel there is great skill in refraining from taking a stance. It is left to the reader to do so, whilst also learning something about the complexity of human nature, both male and female. It is interesting to note that in Italian we have only one word for ‘solitude’, whereas English has two, ‘loneliness’ and ‘solitude’: the endured, excruciating loneliness, and the chosen, positive and wise solitude. It is Pacher who reflects on a line by Marianne Moore: ‘the cure for loneliness is solitude’. In Italian, this is simplified as follows: the cure for loneliness is solitude. Yet it ought to be rendered more complex: the cure for a loneliness one suffers from is a solitude we choose to experience or in which to settle. Yet this is precisely what none of the characters can manage – neither Pacher, nor the wife who left him for another man, nor his rebellious patient. And in this inability to embrace solitude lies the seed of so much human violence.

The most feminist story in the collection, however, is that of thirty-year-old Jennifer Guerra, who is, after all, one of the most interesting theorists of new feminism. Yet she does not write about the present day. Her story is set on the eve of the legendary ‘68, and Jennifer had not yet been born. Her protagonist is a shy girl from the provinces, Carla, who moves to Padua on her own to work as a secretary in a factory. The book is in fact titled La fabbrica dei bottoni and is inspired by the sixth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not commit impure acts.’ She has never undone any buttons – at least not those sewn onto men’s trousers – because she feels awkward and timid in her dealings with the opposite sex. She thinks only of defending herself. Then she encounters a group of proto-feminist schoolgirls practising ‘self-help’ – that is, teaching one another about their own bodies, especially the most intimate parts – because only by ‘knowing themselves’ can they wrest control from others, both physically and morally. After thorough psychological preparation, this involves sitting on the floor without knickers, spreading one’s legs in front of a mirror and scrutinising oneself carefully under the guidance of a more experienced woman who recites the names of the various parts of the vagina and what lies within. A decidedly impure act, especially for a religion that could never have imagined such a transgression. The experience marks a rebirth for Carla, who begins to open up not only to herself but to the world; her shame transforms into liberating joy. The narrative recalls the joyful feminist revolution of the 1970s on university campuses and, indeed, the transgressive self-help practices that we believed we were pioneering: could such approaches already have been in vogue in Italy almost a decade earlier?

The mood is quite different with “Thou shalt not steal” – a subtly ironic atmosphere that evokes the claustrophobic ambience of Agatha Christie’s many novels, in which the murderer is sought in a hotel, a house or on a ship… In the Hotel of Lost Time, however, there is no murderer; instead, the grave sin is robbing oneself of the time to understand and to comprehend, deceiving oneself and becoming lost in an incurable discontent that only finds the thread of life when it is too late. The narrative flow is beautiful, as is the choice of so many different characters and situations, yet all are in a bind – and the worst part is that this predicament is of their own making. There is no light-heartedness, however, in Come la rosa by Gabriella Genisi, which explores the grave consequences of failing to observe the eighth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’. And how could there be any light-heartedness when the subject here is femicide? Genisi drives the narrative forward with relentless clarity. She delves deep into unacceptable feelings and aberrant motivations without complacency or sentimentality. She knows how to reveal a character simply by describing their actions: ‘He wiped the plate clean with a crumb of bread, poured himself another couple of glasses of wine, belched contentedly and went off to sleep’. The avowedly feminist trio among the ten books—all of which are truly worth reading, and which men would do well to read—concludes with Ritanna Armeni and her Sono mia. The commandment is the penultimate one, “thou shalt not covet another man’s wife”, in which the young Tommaso, obsessed with his love for Francesca—who does indeed love him in return—is terrified of losing her, of being betrayed. And so no man must desire Francesca, for she is his alone, nor must she desire other men in the name of her own autonomy. This possessive and misguided love is undoubtedly a dangerous and inevitably violent escalation. Here, as in other stories in this series that address the theme in a more veiled manner, the man’s delusion of superiority is brought to the fore, along with his need for tyrannical control, which finds ready support in the woman’s understanding attitude (‘this is what his love for me has come to’, is the troubling thought, the extremely dangerous conviction that leads to forgiveness rather than immediate escape whilst there is still time).

I have already written in this newspaper on 10 October last year about Lidia Ravera’s Più dell’amore, which brings the series to a close with a highly critical re-examination of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods’ – at a time when many titles in the series were still missing from the list. I shall not repeat myself, except to say that this is a story capable of striking a discordant chord, one of the finest by the Turin-based writer. I shall simply recall that it contrasts a poor girl, who falls in love with a painting, with a very rich and very generous man who, however, would never part with that painting. And the fundamental question the author indirectly poses is: who is more to blame? The one who is so rich as to feel no burden in being generous, or the one who has nothing and takes something from the one who has everything?

Let posterity be the judge, with one regret: the disorganisation and the gaps between them with which these short books were published – books that take on greater significance when read in sequence. The significance of a female perspective that is never taken for granted and rich in insights, for everyone: women, men and non-binary people.