Luck, like the wind, is changeable, and we are aching reeds

The maxim by Blaise Pascal is well known, asserting that “man is a reed, the weakest in nature, but a thinking reed” (and woman too, of course). The reed is an element of great symbolic utility: it seems, indeed, very weak, because it bends easily under the onslaught of the wind, which makes it sway. But it turns out to be less fragile than one might think, seeing its thinness. It remains upright. Reed (or cane), and the wind of life everywhere, lashing it. W.B. Yeats published The wind among the reeds in 1899, and Josep Carner, The Wind Among the Reeds in 1920. In between, in 1913, this beautiful novel by Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was published, Reeds in the Wind, which Adesiara is recovering after having released, seventeen years ago, The Mother, by the same author.

In a Sardinia with customs very much indebted to the 19th century, near the city of Nuoro, the Pintor sisters (Ruth, Ester, Noemi and Lia) live under the inflexible authority of their father, on an estate that is becoming increasingly impoverished, within a mansion that is degrading without anyone doing anything about it: “From the worm-eaten wood fell a grey dust like ash”, “nettles grew on the steps”. And it is not only the house of the Pintor family, an example of neglect, but its entire surroundings, which invite hopelessness: “The cathedral was falling to pieces; everything was grey, damp and dusty”. For this reason, Lia, the youngest sister –the most lucid and daring– decides to flee the hearth, and shortly after the father dies under strange circumstances. The other three sisters live in a lamentable state of lethargy: ladies that they are, they are bone idle. However, like everyone else, they need something to eat and to continue living, even if they are, all of them, very little of life...

A story where pain and misfortune are inescapable

The central figure of the story, however, is not any of these women, but the house servant, Efix. A mature man, he would let himself be killed for his mistresses, to whom he professes unwavering loyalty. Years after the younger sister's flight, a letter arrives from the son she had, a young good-for-nothing, Giacinto. His arrival at the Pintor house, far from alleviating the family's misery, only makes it deeper: “He gave the impression of a rock hurled from the mountain to destroy the house”. Efix, who has not received from his mistresses much more consideration than one would reserve for a dog, one day also runs away, but, after some time, he returns, convinced that, if it were not for him, those sisters eaten away by resentment and handcuffed by inaction would end up even worse off. The novel presents, with great subtlety, the sexual tension of one of the sisters, Noemi, towards her nephew. All of this forms a naturalistic story, in which destiny seems written from the first page, and pain and misfortune would seem to be unavoidable, inherent to a small village surrounded by wild, harsh nature.

Grazia Deledda received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, and it is no wonder, because her works – implacable and rigorous – are written with a portentous command of expressive resources. Notice, for instance, the various phrases I have cited, which serve the purpose of describing a moral state based on elements of the dynamics of nature. The character of her figures seems sculpted in marble by a chisel that does not allow itself to be bent by the hardness of the stone. The lyricism of the Sardinian author never cloys, and always presents the necessary proportions. The allegory of the reeds runs through the narrative. Efix, the most moving character, says: “We are just like reeds in the wind, Signora Ester. That is it! We are reeds, and fate is the wind”. Aching reeds, mind you, because they think and feel. And the fact is that fate, like the wind, is changeable, but the one that blows through the paths of the novel destroys more than it guides.