Federica Cabras's "Dannata"

As we now know, the favorite genres of the Ogliastra writer Federica Cabras are the lively and conversational chicklit and the dark and tormented horror. “Damned”, her latest effort for O.D.E. Edizioni, belongs to the latter canon.

Maddalena Sirigu is beautiful, dynamic and with a good job. She has recently separated from a childish husband, married only because she was pregnant, who, however, cheated on her. She has a two-year-old daughter who is the apple of her eye, whom she madly loved since conception. During her little girl’s birthday party, thechild, temporarily entrusted to her paternal grandmother, swallows a sausage canapé and chokes. She dies in an instant, without anyone being able to do anything to save her. Before, she was there, now, she is no longer there, before, she smiled, she pouted, she ran on her chubby legs and now she lies decomposing in a coffin.

Devastated by a superhuman and unnatural pain, Maddalena no longer has any reason to continue breathing and letting her heart beat, unless… unless she manages to get back what she has lost, to bring the deceased child back to life. To do so, to no longer feel her excruciating suffering and monstrous emptiness, she is willing to do anything, even to follow the darkest and most horrid path, to come to terms with absolute Evil.

How much evil is there in each of us, even in the simplest and most respectable person? How easy is it for Satan to breach our defenses, our remorse, our feelings of guilt, our desires, and lead us to carry out unthinkable acts?

Is there a redemption from all this? Maybe yes, once again in love. The protagonist’s attitude towards Satan in the novel is a bit “manner” and, in fact, does not bear comparison with maternal love, with that atavistic and primordial feeling that is being a mother, the one that makes you give up even your life in favor of your own flesh and blood.

Without revealing the ending, I can say that Maddalena and her relationship with the devil also embody the contrast between maternal love and sexual love, how often a woman prefers motherhood to a relationship with a man, how she can subtly feel guilty and torn in both cases.

Cabras manages, as usual, to make you feel all the desolate desperation of mourning, which she is very good at, but also the frightening progression towards horror and evil. So disturbing, realistic and engaging in her writing that, when rereading the text to review it, I had to stop and take breaks so as not to succumb to anguish.

In this horror there are all the tropes of the genre: the killer doll-style girl, the blood pact, the coupling with the supernatural being. But there are also, well represented, the psychological implications of a terrible situation such as the loss of a child. We go through every stage of mourning, from disbelief, to the removal of the sense of guilt by attributing it to others, to the search for a way out, for a remedy that cannot and must not exist.

In short, the author teaches us, it is better to leave the dead where they are.