Ashtrays, school reports, and a bereavement to come to terms with

At last, all the objects longed for, desired and denied a thousand times during childhood become available. One need only reach out towards a shelf or open a drawer to take possession of them. Yet the desire to possess suddenly fades, negating years and years of complaints. Each of those objects now seems, in fact, to represent nothing but mourning – that farewell to her parents which became starkly apparent to Lydia Flem, an established psychoanalyst and author of scholarly essays on Freud and Casanova, at the moment when, following her mother’s death, all that remained for her to do was to clear out the house where she had spent her childhood and adolescence. The place where she was a daughter before leaving her parents to pursue a life entirely her own. Come ho svuotato la casa dei miei genitori (published in France in 2004 and now reissued by Saggiatore in a translation by Edda Melon with a foreword by Vittorio Lingiardi) recounts a transition that is often underestimated, a sort of reverse move. It is a movement from a state of stillness which, rather than heralding a farewell and a new beginning, merely celebrates an end – the closing of an existential cycle. One is no longer a child, and probably, at that very moment, one is no longer a parent either: because one’s own parents have died and one’s own children are leaving home.

The author thus finds herself caught between two generations, between two instances of abandonment that mark an ending she had never given much thought to before. And so every desire fades away: no object is capable of generating possibilities any longer, but only a sense of heaviness – that of a melancholy which turns into nostalgia. Rummaging through shelves and boxes, the author rediscovers documents from a previous life—that of her parents, of course, but also her own childhood, as evidenced by school reports and photographs. A life that now remains anchored to that house to be cleared out and to that time that lives on only in memories: ‘Who would want these tape recorders with round reels, these slide projectors, the cocktail shakers, the compartmentalised plates for peanuts, the countless pepper mills, the collections of sugar cubes in old-fashioned sweet tins?’. There is also no shortage of ashtrays—objects that have almost entirely disappeared from every home—and Cinzano trays, both of which hail directly from an era when drinking and smoking were two activities carried out in unison.

Thus, these objects leave behind the impression of a moment (as Guccini put it), the semblance of a time that has passed so swiftly as to leave such innocuous objects to guard a hypothetical eternity. They owe this to the durability of their plastics, to modern chemistry which, long before AI, had guaranteed an infinite future for nut bowls and coffee pots, but not for the human beings who were meant to use them. We empty the outside to make room inside, Lingiardi observes in the preface, whilst not far away sacks pile up, ready for recycling and for those mass graves that are increasingly filled with everything that had seemed necessary, useful and desirable to us.