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Marina di Malombra ( protagonist of Malombra, novel written by Antonio
Fogazzaro, 1881 ) is a young, beautiful lady who lives in an ancient, gloomy
palace on the shores of a lake. She has moved there when she was twenty
abandoning Milan’s fashionable life, obliged to accept hospitality by an old,
surly uncle after her father’s death. Marina, who has water even in her name,
adoring waves and storms chosen a room next to the lake. This lake soon becomes
central in Marina’s lonesome existence: she always gazes at it, she always
listens to it. One sweet April evening, while she is gliding on her beloved lake
with her little boat, a sharp reminiscence strikes her. Upset, she returns back
to her room to discover by chance a strange letter written many years before by
Cecilia Varrega, a Marina’s relative buried alive in that very room! Who will
read this letter will be me reincarnated, the letter says. Soon Marina convinces
herself of being the reincarnation of Cecilia and consequently she becomes
certain of being destined to perpetrate an awful revenge on her relatives.
Lake’s waters only will give hospitality to her at last: Marina, water’s
creature, in a water’s grave will find her perfect existential dimension. In dry
land, human common sense was a choking embankment which entrapped her fluid
soul. Her soul’s water, rioting against that insufferable constriction, became
more and more muddy mixing silts of past lives and ever - lasting pains.
Breaking embankments by breaking lives has been the way of Marina to join her
true family: deep waters. |
