“And Bomb or No Bomb, We, We Will Get to Rome”: In the Margins of Two Sessions with Lulu

At first glance, it is easy to see that the structure of the text the author has given us follows Aristotelian rules. The rhetoric that unfolds in the narrative seems to obey the tripartite rhythm that for Aristotle characterizes the literary function: peripeteia (peripatheia) or the tragic passage of the protagonist from a positive to a negative state, suffering (pathos), and recognition (agnorisis). Let’s see.

Lulu’s family photo, as it emerges from the anamnestic history, is as if torn into several pieces. The pieces were then reassembled in the frame of a display, but without hiding the lines of fracture. They are held together by the pressure of the glass, which itself is cracked in several places. As in a dramatic play of mirrors, the cuts Lulu makes on her skin perhaps serve to symbolize and thus bring to light those cuts that would otherwise remain in the darkness of the unknown and unspoken, condemned to incurability. From this point of view, one’s own emotional body (i.e., the whole fabric of affective relations that make it up) and the emotional body of the family are in a metonymic relationship (i.e., part for the whole).

The sociocultural differences between the parents (“different sociopolitical spheres” and “economic disparities”) and the tensions associated with them represent one cut; the division between the families of origin represent another cut; the “racial conflict” reflected in the attention to the

nuances of skin color, a third cut; the migration from South America to the United States at the age of 4, another cut; the quarrels over the quinceañera: still more cuts.

In the background, then, is the pandemic, which I would read not only as a fact of reality that has atomized relationships between people (hence the need for video sessions during the first year), but also as a figure of the emotional situatio