By Vittoria Pasquini, English version by Gino Moliterno
The idea of writing “The Legend of Busby” came to me immediately after having sold my beautiful house, or rather “the sand castle” as we used to call it in admiration of its thick sandstone walls.
In part out of nostalgia, because I was sorry to have left it and I didn’t want to forget it; in part it was out of regret, I already thought I had made a mistake in selling it and I wanted to try, pen in hand, to understand what had happened, what had led me to that decision.
It took several years to bring this memoir to fruition, more than ten years with various interruptions, the most tragic and glaring being the death of my son, Valerio. For him I coordinated the publication of his two diaries; for him I created a non-profit association; for him I despaired and so, clearly, no longer concerned myself with my memoir, considering it irrelevant in the face of the drama I was experiencing.
With the arrival of Covid, time had passed and a lot of time and solitude were available to me to rethink myself and my life. So The Legend of Busby magically resurrected itself from the drawers in which I had confined it. Having dusted it off, I began to reread the little I had written, to think about it and to try to start writing again.
At that point, however, the enormity of what had happened, namely the death of my son, weighed like a boulder on my memory, obfuscating it. I couldn’t remember what had happened before the annus horribilis; my life at Busby seemed shrouded in a heavy blanket of fog, everything seemed insignificant compared to the Great Tragedy.
It took a lot for me to reconnect with the Vittoria who was living, working, feeling and writing before the disappearance of her beloved son. It was a long process, and yet, the attempt to remember, among other things, the time when Valerio was still small, then a teenager and finally a young man, the wonderful and unforgettable time when he was still alive, became a process of treating and healing my broken heart. Little by little, year after year, the memoir took shape and I re-embraced my past, the memories giving me joy and enthusiasm for writing.
That’s how the Legend of Busby was born.
The book moves through various intersecting levels (I love complications):
the main character is the castle, which is described in all its smallest details: each place has a different energy, each place evokes memories of something else.
In the first part of the book the castle falls to pieces. It should have been renovated but the sudden unexpected lack of money forces the inhabitants to live there as it is; charm and decadence remaining its major characteristics. In the second part the castle is renovated and is again described in all its new features.
The second level is the story of the family who begins to live in Busby when the man/father is already gravely ill. This is the short Prologue, followed immediately after by The Return: mother and son leave Canberra, where she worked for six years at the Australian National University after the premature death of her husband, and return to Sydney where her daughter has remained in the castle with a family friend. The daughter’s boyfriend joins them shortly after.
Thus begins the life together of this small group, a sort of community linked by affection.
The third level consists of the “Voices Off “, the numerous friends and acquaintances who come and go from the house, some stopping for a coffee or a meal, others staying for a weekend, others for longer.
This chorus of multiple voices appears four times in the book and narrates the desires, the dreams and the reasons why many Italian expatriates decided to settle in Australia in the early 1980s, the ups and downs of their sojourn Down Under and the influence that the politics of the time had on their decisions to stay or return to their homeland.
The last level is that of memory, a sort of “stream of consciousness” that emerges here and there in connection with various situations, images, some odours, the particular light of a room. Memories of the narrator’s (the woman/the mother/she) other lives in Rome, her political activity, her feminist involvement, her other work as a photographer, the other houses in which she lived in Kenya, in the USA, in Algeria.
The book is written in the third person, I have always written like this, I find that this choice allows me to distance myself from myself and in this way I can be quite objective.
The woman describes what happens in the house, in the family, inside her, her many mistakes, her insecurities, her difficulties in being a good mother with two children and two absent fathers. At the beginning of the memoir she carries out a lot of self-criticism, then, little by little, as she deepens her reflections, she begins to understand herself and understands the reasons for being who she is, and in the end she is able to look at herself with a certain tenderness.
The style of the memoir alternates concise descriptions of what happens in the house and in the lives of the main characters with flows of emotions, memories, dreams and thoughts, in long paragraphs with minimal punctuation to give the reader space to choose when to stop and catch her breath.
