Material things can reach, at some point, the significance of the most vivid memory. Melancholy, longing or love can impregnate with their aroma those garments that occupied the bodies that are no longer there.
And this happens in a very different way for each person. For Eleonora, many of her garments, kept safe from mothballs, make up a past covered in guilt and disappointment. Many of these blouses, skirts or dresses occupy the closets of an apartment in Florence, where Eleonora spent much of her existence.
Now it is her daughter, Corinne, who lives in Italy, in part seeking physical and emotional distance from her mother. Their secrets, their pending debts and their mutual faults hide the way to reconciliation.
But a mother never gives in to the loss of a daughter. To justify herself, her garments from Florence become transmitters of her truth, of the vital drives that led her from defeat to defeat.
For Corinne, understanding that her mother Eleonora is the way she is and that she was the way she was is an emotional and rational abyss. The disparity of characters makes this empathy impossible, always more difficult among those united by familiarity.
The understanding may perhaps come. At some point, among the old garments of her mother's past, perhaps Corinne can find a positive message, a real love in the way that her mother could and can love.
In the end, this unique relationship, completely full of edges, becomes very ours. Love is complex, the idea of family always supposes, at some point, a necessary rupture where love and individual freedom are hardly balanced.
You can buy the book The map of the clothes I loved, Elvira Seminara's great novel, here: