Stephen Gray
VOICES by Dacia Maraini (Serpent’s Tail, R86)
ONE of Italy’s more famous women writers, Dacia Maraini, has now produced this little shocker, Voices, which appears in an English translation three years after it became a Euroseller. Maraini is known in South Africa, for the fine feminist works, The Silent Duchess and Isolina.
Although she has long been her own woman, Maraini’s publicity still includes the juicy detail that she was once the lover of that old goat, the late Alberto Moravia – as if literary skills were transfused in bed, and as if as a penance she has not been writing against the drift of his arrogant chauvinism ever since.
In Voices Maraini moves, as she says, into Patricia Highsmith territory, with a clear, clinical gaze at the world of crime. Not the famous Mafia or the Parliament, which is where the boys tend to commit themselves, but the arena of domestic crime, particularly family crimes against women. A lone girlish tenant has removed her blue tennis shoes, neatly placed her clothes on a chair, and in the privacy of her own flat been stabbed to death 20 times. This is the type of crime in that murky country which is the least solved of all – only a 35% success rate.
The recording angel who investigates this particular horror is the rather timid woman in the flat opposite, a radio-journalist logging up the tapes of evidence for an expos of such happenings. Predictably, once the full dirt has surfaced, the documentary is canned. She decides to bring the matter to book, and hence Maraini’s astounding and memorable indictment.
It must also be said that Voices is a bit amateurish, too programmed for its own good. South Africans may greet rather tepidly what in Rome is obviously the red- hot revelation: one family murder reported in the entire nation almost every day, one case of forced incest.
Nor in South Africa are we likely to be much enheartened by a robust police-chief always cooking up her witnesses a soft- boiled, motherly pasta. Here you’re lucky if you can get the police even to answer the phone.
Over there, when a key suspect, the poor psychotic prostitute, hangs herself in her cell out of shame on the cord of her dressing-gown, the entire police force of Rome turns out to mourn her at the funeral they all chip in for. Try suggesting such a gesture at John Vorster Square.
Maraini’s valiant, persistent narrator has a boyfriend off-stage in Angola. To her it is simply unimaginable why he should be quietly going out of his mind there. Maybe he has decided that, for all its rising homely atrocities, Italy is still the safer place.