Aldo Di Mauro, In the shadows. Essential stories of common people, Preface by Tiuna Notarbartolo, Introduction by Giuseppe Giorgio, Giannini Editore, Naples 2024, pp. 89
The truth of these essential stories of ordinary people can be seen in the last pages of Aldo Di Mauro, through the story, or rather the silhouette, of Pietro Sarno, who «on the first floor of via Tribunali... timidly sticks his head out a little to listen the life that echoes outside" (p. 85). Peter's is precisely "a life in the shadows" (ibidem), as only sometimes does he "exit his shadow", and then immediately re-enter it: a shadow "in which he decided to live surrounded by books, notebooks, sheets of paper on which he jots down thoughts destined to be thrown away after his death" (ibidem).
And in this way, in every single story narrated, the reader grasps the very meaning of these micro-stories of couples, individuals, adults and children.
In the places narrated in these agile and essential pages, there are not only PCs and new media, but also recorder tapes (p. 28), radios that are turned on with the knobs (p. 29), lights that they illuminate but, above all, they are lowered to create darkness, or rather to generate the right atmosphere of twilight (p. 51).
And in each story, here is the essential daily life, made up of women and men, of adults and children, especially of couple relationships, in which the emancipated woman could cause anxiety and depression in her partner, or in which the man could rediscover of having been too busy with the external aspects of the partner and of having, thus, lost the soul of the woman and, above all, of his own woman. This is what happens to Enrico, who cynically imagines what life will be like in the afterlife without her, who meanwhile betrays him here on earth: «You know how happy the soul will be of those who witness how their woman is having fun ? While she, the heartbroken widow, is happy with your achieved spirituality, you verify what kind of slut you have lived with for so many years"
In the dim light, the features of faces and intimate depths appear, or rather flash, of little ones, of young people, of women and men, who delve into themselves before our eyes, not in an imaginary "psychoanalytic session" (p. 40) , but rather to grasp, beyond the differences of classes and classes, temperaments and clichés, the very truth of the human person.