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Rating: A Flush of Red, published in 1959, is the first novel by Domenico Rea (1921-1994), a writer born in Naples but raised in Nocera Inferiore, the capital of the Nocera-Sarnese agri-area. Known thanks to a novel by Silvio Perrella (Giùnapoli), Domenico Rea is part of that group of Neapolitan literati, novelists, and intellectuals from the mid-fifties, like Raffaele La Capria, Ermanno Rea, Michele Prisco, Luigi Incoronato, Mario Pomilio, Luigi Compagnone.
Rea's literary career begins when he was not even twenty - in 1939 he participated, with the story È nato, in a competition organized by the literary magazine Omnibus - for a long time he professes himself as a writer of short stories, so much so that Mondadori, after having published the writer's first collections, demands a real novel this time. We are in the second half of the '50s and Rea decides to satisfy the publishing house by producing a family tragedy, centered on the agony of a terrible disease. A Flush of Red did not receive the expected success, neither critically nor publicly, and from this unfortunate event arises Rea's literary silence, who will continue to write over the years, but will publish his second novel only in 1992, when he brings out Ninfa plebea, which won the Strega Prize in 1993 and was also adapted into a film by Lina Wertmuller.
The story of A Flush of Red revolves around the Rigo di Nofi family, the imaginative Nocera Inferiore painted by Rea in many of his stories. At the center of the Rigo's family tragedy is Assuero, the head of the family, a former carabinieri married to Rita, a midwife known throughout Nofi and much loved by the population, but who for sixty-eight days has been bedridden, struck by an unnamed mysterious illness, which is all too clear to be a tumor in its terminal state, with the body already metastasized.
It wasn't just the drama of losing such an important family member, Assuero's concerns are primarily economic: having left the Carabinieri Force young, Assuero first married another midwife in Barletta, who also left him prematurely, and since then the young Rigo lived on his wife's work, managing her commitments and income, acting as accountant and employer at the same time.
The same situation is repeated with Rita, until the illness comes into play, which is however minimized by Assuero for fear of losing the small amount left in the "canterano", the chest where he stores the midwife's earnings. Comforted by compliant doctors, who in good faith do not wish to scare the family, Assuero's life and that of his children Beppe and Maria continue with the hope of seeing Rita up and about soon, because after all, it is nothing but a "visceral embarrassment", nothing serious. The earnings are safe.
In this complicated family situation, the personal stories of the children also radiate: Maria, the eldest, is a voluptuous twenty-nine-year-old girl doomed to spinsterhood. Maria is the classic village girl, who did not continue her studies and is deeply affected by the rivalry with her cousin Chiara, the daughter of Assuero's sister married to Luca, a good man who, before making his fortune, was welcomed into Assuero and Rita's family, but was forced to endure the Rigo's lectures and reproaches. Chiara is a girl who studies, goes to university, attends parties and society, in short, knows how to cope with the world and is engaged to Altieri, a young heir of a wealthy family. Maria, on the other hand, is ignorant, coarse, not accustomed to parties and social life, but above all, she has been a victim of seduction by Il Salernitano, a reckless young man pretending to be rich, who continually asks her for loans, before robbing her of her virginity and then disappearing. Maria's only real suitor is Scida, a poor worker who made his fortune in Algeria, but who is repeatedly rejected by the shrewish Rigo because he is the son of a convict, thereby infuriating Assuero who already envisioned other possibilities for income and a comfortable life.
Beppe is the younger son. He is a reckless twenty-five-year-old, neither fond of hard work nor studies, constantly searching for romantic adventures and always in conflicts with his father, whom he persistently asks for money to sustain his dissolute life. Beppe's love life will undergo a dramatic turn when he begins an affair with Chele, a nun-like woman from Melfi with a mysterious past, who lives downstairs from the Rigos and frequents the house to give injections when Rita is struck by her pains. Of the family members, perhaps Beppe is the only one to realize the real situation of his mother, although experiencing it with "modern" detachment.
Rea uses a dry and direct style of writing, although in several situations he omits directly talking about Rita's illness, just as he only hints at some more disgraceful situations. The most interesting aspect of Rea's writing is the use of what we now call flashbacks: the narrative during the novel makes room for Assuero's youthful memories, the stories of Beppe and Maria, until, at the end of the novel, the memories of Rita herself and her arduous life alongside her husband.
The character of Assuero is naturally controversial: by his own admission, he married Rita because he initially considered it a good deal, but then genuinely proves to be in love with his wife, with whom he shared forty years of married life. Assuero's obsession with money doesn't stem from greed but out of concern for the future, because reaching the age of seventy, with a spinster daughter and an unemployed son, without his wife's earnings he doesn't know how he will carry on. The clarification about Rita and Assuero's love will occur only in the final passages of the novel, thanks to the memories of sister-in-law Cristina (Assuero's sister), where it becomes clear that Rita was never burdened by having to work and that Assuero was a fundamental figure in her life, because he would wait for her in the morning when she returned from a night delivery and prepare her breakfast, as he organized her working day precisely, as he handled the accounts and management of the estate, things that Rita would never have been able to do.
From her bed, Rita will never rise again. On the fateful day, as often happens, she seems to show signs of improvement and here the life of Assuero becomes rosy, and he, in good spirits, heads down to town to shop, reassuring the villagers about his wife's health, until he has a huge quarrel with a butcher, who for years - and aware that the wife's death is now a certainty - can't wait to express what he truly thinks of Assuero, that he is an exploiter, a parasite, maintained by his wife. Assuero's mood changes radically, until, when he gets home accompanied by the hated and envied brother-in-law Luca, he receives the fatal news.
The final lines of the novel show us an Assuero destroyed by his wife's loss and a Beppe, instead, resolute, determined to turn his life and that of his loved ones around, but even in the most dramatic moment, having initially overcome the terrible loss, Assuero, with the register in hand, realizes he is owed several compensations and begins once again to make his calculations for the future.
What I discovered, to my utmost disappointment, is that no cinematic adaptation of A Flush of Red has been made, and I regret it because this novel certainly deserves to be known to the general public. Far from being a neorealist work, furthermore, Rea himself always refused this label, A Flush of Red rather represents, in a dramatic and intense way, the family vicissitudes of Rea himself. As Francesco Durante, editor of the Mondadori Meridiano dedicated to Rea, explained at the time, it is "quite easy to identify between Rita and Lucia Scermino, the writer's mother; between Chele - the "domestic nun" - and Teresa Rea, Domenico's sister; between Assuero, whose past as a carabiniere is retraced, and the father, Giuseppe Rea." Rita and her illness become nothing more than a pretext to allow the writer a dive into the past, into his origins, for a courageous and passionate face-to-face with family ghosts.
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