In “We, the Caserta Family” Aurora Venturini tells the journey of a grotesque and disturbing heroine. Rightly so, the Argentine author is being rediscovered.
She was a Chaplinesque child, Chela says at one point: clumsy and funny. However, no one in her family finds this endearing. Chela grows up in a “kingdom of bitterness.”
It is an attic above the “Casa do Povo” where the Argentine girl voluntarily spends her childhood. The only people who keep him company are Bartoldo, a domesticated owl, and later the turtle Bertha. And his disabled little brother, who no one in the family wants. There is her father who calls her a “bad little devil” and in whose presence Chela cannot make a sound. There is the cold, absent mother who calls her “Deibelkopf” and who is only interested in the well-adjusted middle daughter.
As this life review makes clear, Chela was never a conformist. The girl is gifted and, according to her own diagnosis, autistic. At the age of five, when her nanny forgets her birthday, Chela announces her “intellectual attitude, my insensitive nature towards people, I despise them, that's what I was taught”. Still, she drinks mouthwash with suicidal intent.
Was Aurora Venturini a close friend of Evita Perón?
She finds belonging in literature, in Rimbaud's poems and, later, in science. As soon as she is old enough, Chela leaves her parents' estate, runs away first to university, and falls in love with an older man who is unavailable. Then to the writers around Pablo Neruda in Chile, and then to Paris before, inspired by a discovery on her native estate, she sets out in search of her family's roots. She finds them in the form of her last living relative, a great-aunt who lives on an estate full of wondrous artifacts in Sicily.