When shadows grow longer

By Rita Salvadori

A journey of self-discovery, love, and awareness in the shadow of the beautiful italian hills. Can Irène discover more of herself through Maddalena's moving story?

Irène, Maddalena, Jonathan, and Marcello are united by their desire to go beyond appearances, beyond the traditional rules that reduce life to the simple and dry quest for survival.
A life that consists of little more than a series of mechanical gestures, emotions, and thoughts. Irène, the star of the story, discovers a new way of life thanks to her encounter with Maddalena, a fairytale writer, who becomes a sort of spiritual guide for her.
It will be Maddalena who teaches her the importance of seeing the world through glasses with colored lenses and who teaches her the importance of self-observation in achieving greater awareness and presence. Maddalena will finally take Irène by the hand in a journey of self-discovery, with the aid of a mysterious manuscript that was left unfinished and hidden in a medieval church in the hills of the Marche.Unfinished because it is waiting for a special person to continue the story that was started many years before.

This novel is a love story between four souls that chase each other endlessly and lose themselves only to reunite at a higher level, in a temporal dimension in which the boundaries between the past, present, and future are magically obliterated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rita Salvadori
• Release date: Jul 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9788828348740

Book preview

Rita Salvadori

WHEN SHADOWS GROW LONGER

© 2018 Rita Salvadori

www.ritasalvadori.com

For my dear father Ciani, a smiling angel.

The meeting

I met her in Paris, in a crowded bookshop. Accidentally bumping into her, I hurriedly turned to apologize. Assuming I would be confronted by the usual anonymous face, I babbled a distracted and confused sorry. My thoughts and movements would have quickly moved on, had her magnetic gaze not paralyzed the passing of time around us.

Instead, my eyes remained glued to hers in an eternal moment full of depth. Who was this woman smiling at me with such a maternal and reassuring expression?

The words stuck in my throat as she continued to hold me in her childish gaze, which was perfectly fine with me. Her hands were holding a book with a colorful cover, fairytales probably. She wore a very odd, cream-colored, velvet hat, and a jacket with a soft, lilac fabric that hugged her hips perfectly. Light trousers covered well-sculpted legs. Brown wavy hair in a bob cut framed a rather square, but sweet, face. A nice nose and a mouth that looked as though it was created specifically for a welcoming smile. As well as kissing, of course. Welcoming those who, like me, were looking for answers...

She was the one who broke the ice, if what was between us can even be called ice.

Aren’t fairytales simply fascinating? I have no one to read them to, but I’ve never given up the pleasure of immersing myself in fantastic worlds and getting lost in daydreams. And these books carry such messages of hope! I really do love them. They help keep my imagination alive; they help me to remember that life is magical every day. Reading fairytales is like choosing a pair of glasses to wear: dark lenses or clear and colored lenses?

She spoke candidly, much more intimately then I had become accustomed to in my role as an established professional, where I had learned to never give anything away, to never make mistakes, especially in personal relationships. You should never reveal too much of yourself to someone you’ve just met, a voice said within me. Nevertheless, this woman facing me, a perfect stranger, instantly touched my heart, and as I later discovered, this was because the heart was always her aim, bypassing all the social barriers imposed by family, school, and the good manners of society.

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Irène, and you are?

As I said my name, I saw a strange light in her eyes.

My name is Maddalena. My dear Irène, in the end, I will remember neither your name nor your age nor your profession. Nor will you remember my name. In the end, we will only remember what we have learned from each other. Only moments of love will remain engraved on our souls. Nothing else. My name is Maddalena, but I'm not just Maddalena. I could have a thousand names and recite a thousand scripts. I can hold a thousand loves. Tell me Irène, what glasses have you decided to wear? Dark or colored lenses?

Her statement puzzled me. My name is Irène and I'm Irène, I thought with conviction. Or am I?

I’ve never asked myself which glasses I wear, I replied to Maddalena.

Perhaps you have never given yourself the chance to choose.

True! It was hard to admit, but she was right about the color of lenses I was wearing. Dark lenses for a life that was generally monotonous and predictable and which, despite the comforts of wealth, I was getting used to over the years.

You know Irène, it's not so much about discovering what color your lenses are, as it is realizing at a certain point that our sight isn’t at all authentic or direct, but conditioned by something external that no longer belongs to us. Is there something old and moldy in your life that hasn’t actually belonged to you for years and which prevents you from seeing the world through your own colors and listening to music through your own notes?

Maddalena's words were at once sweet and urgent; they were disarmingly simple and at the same time complicated. They took me by the hand just to throw me to the ground.

Her every word literally swept away my old and dusty convictions.

Sorry Maddalena, but now I really must go. It's late. Sorry again.

I have good news for you, Irène. When we are together, there is no need to apologize for anything. What is there to apologize for? I know you can’t feel otherwise just now. Never justify yourself for what you are, nor for what you want, with anyone, not at any cost! Au revoir, ma chère Irène.

How strange, I thought, her accent had an Italian lilt. As she spoke to me, she never shifted her gaze from mine. When she realized I was leaving, she smiled at me, holding out the fairytale book clasped in her beautiful hands.

Resting on the shelves were all the novels I should have bought that day other than that book of children's stories. I smiled at Maddalena, the woman who loved fairy tales, and I left with the certainty that I would never see her again.

Never again...

Before, I thought I had a power over the course of events and absolute control over my life. Before, I believed in the certainty of my convictions. I firmly felt that I was the absolute master of myself. Indeed, coming out of that bookshop, I was sure that I would never want to meet Maddalena and her bizarre ideas again.

Before, I believed that it was enough to maintain my balance simply by avoiding any situations, things, or people that might cause me trouble. And so I did, but not for much longer!

Days passed, and I finally found my dear old balance again.

Yes, my dear old balance! Such stability in it! But also how gray! I felt so protected I heard almost nothing from the outside. The voices of the world no longer reached me. Everything I was close to was within a hand’s reach: security and stability.

Security, stability, and deadly boredom. Boredom in the fixed immobility of my actions and emotions.

The days passed and everything around me changed, while I remained motionless in my dear old equilibrium. It was not at all pleasant to feel life flow everywhere outside, nearby, but without ever touching me.

It was a feeling of suffocating loneliness.

I needed answers about life, or rather, I needed life. And love? And passion? And fire? And Maddalena?

I had buried them under a sea of habitual ordinariness.

One day, looking at myself in the mirror, I felt kidnapped by my own reflection, as if it were someone else's face. Who was this unknown person watching me mysteriously? I no longer recognized my gaze and I feared I might go mad beneath the blows of my own awareness, which now seemed to stumble and melt in a thousand streams. Desperately clinging to the convictions I had worked so hard to build, I felt the futility and vanity of all the effort I had put into settling my existence in well-organized and compact sectors. For a moment, I managed to put the puzzle back together, but in the next moment I again lost the defining boundaries of my being. Fear and dismay were now under my skin and, in the absolute confusion of my thoughts I could not help but abandon myself and ask for help...

Abandoning myself was like falling from a very high cliff where I could not see the bottom.

Someone, please help me! A powerful voice shouted inside me, one I had never heard before. I closed my eyes, looking beyond sight for an answer... I kept falling into a frightening void, dark and cold. I did not have the courage to let myself fade completely into nothingness. I opened my eyes again but the darkness still stretched out all around me, as if I were wearing glasses with thick black lenses.

I remembered those words and a shiver went through me: Maddalena.

I absolutely had to see her.

I knocked on her door one spring morning, transformed through the warm rays of sunshine after a whole night of travel. She lived in Concarneau, a quiet village on the Atlantic coast, in Brittany. A lovely little house with the scent of the sea and a garden full of colorful flowers. Nothing seemed to make any sense. No trace of the order that is usually expected in any self-respecting garden...

Order does not exist, Irène. It is an illusory creation of the human mind. Is it not a marvelously attractive and authentic chaos?

Once again, Maddalena caught me unawares, leaving me no time to rearrange my now faltering ideas into a thought that would at least appear sensible. This was her strength: undermining the logical categories of the speaker in order to put them in the ideal condition to show their true essence, even if only for a moment.

Chaos, which I loathed and saw as the archenemy to my ordered and rational life, a source of all things annoying and inappropriate, now actually began to appear to me as anything but. The mess of that garden actually made sense. The flowers, the plants, the blades of grass, the stones, the earth, and the wind were happily holding hands in a carnival of colors, scents, and sounds never before seen.

"It's like a dance, don’t you think? You should join in yourself Irène...

Try to let go of your limitations and jump, without fear or hesitation, into the sea of life... You have nothing to lose."

From the moment of my arrival, more than six hours of absolute silence had passed, but the precious and delicate thread that united us never seemed to break. It was simply a pending discourse waiting to be completed.

Entering Maddalena's house was like passing through all the colors of the rainbow; she had painted each wall in a different color, regardless of canonical color combinations. The strength of the red warmed me, the vivacity of the yellow gave me joy, the intensity of the violet helped me to look within myself. The green ceiling of the living room looked like a meadow in spring, a world turned upside down. The upside-down world of Maddalena.

In the midst of this whirlwind of sensations, I finally felt at home.

We sat on a very soft couch

Reviews for When shadows grow longer

[shweta81_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cuckold was my first experience with "historical" fiction. And, I found it pretty amazing. Set in the Mewar kingdom, the book delves deep into the life and character of an otherwise unknown king, the husband of famous saint Meera. The character is developed slowly into a person who is intelligent, a little stubborn, and prone to misunderstandings. He is the heir apparent, surrounded by conspiracies to deny him the kingdom, and to top it all, his wife is always lost in thoughts of his beloved - the blue god. Cuckold is a story of his struggles, his idiosyncracies, and ultimately, his tragedy.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We were that rarest of couples. Even after years of marriage we were madly in love. I with her and she with somebody else.Cuckold is set in early sixteenth-century Mewar, one of the many smallish kingdoms occupying the area of what's now Rajasthan state, in northwest India. Frankly you could tell me anything about sixteenth-century Mewar and I would have no reason to disbelieve you; my complete ignorance of the period and place is one of the things that made reading this book such a fascinating experience for me. Nevertheless, within India the story being told here is familiar – it fictionalises the circumstances of Meerabai, a princess-bhakta who, after marrying into the royal family, ignored her husband and claimed to be married to Krishna; she is still much-loved and her devotional songs and poetry much enjoyed today.So you can think of Cuckold as a kind of Indian Wolf Hall, which is, from a narrative point of view, its contemporary. (Hey, HarperCollins, feel free to use that if you ever deign to publish the thing outside India.) Our narrator is Meera's earthly husband, the Maharaj Kumar (i.e. crown prince). He is intelligent and witty, amused, thoughtful, more sinned against than sinning – overall a very charming person to spend time with, which is of no small importance in a book of more than six hundred pages.He is also tearing his hair out with desire for his wife, who refused him marital relations on their wedding night and has continued to do so ever since. Despite our narrative point of view, Nagarkar allows us to sympathise with The Princess, who after all has been dragged from her home and married off to someone she's never met. The final visit she makes to her maika, or maternal village, before leaving forever, is described very movingly (something that also struck me, in a completely different context, when I read [book:The Kalevala|400869] – someone should do an anthology of this stuff):…ŧhe sound of the school bell and the sound of a sandstorm and of rain hissing into the sand, her aunt beating the water out of her hair with a thin towel, the bucket at the well hitting the water some hundred feet below. And the smell of the sun burning the sand, of dry kachra frying in oil and spices, the powdery, bleached smell of her father's armpit when he came back from a long day of surveying their lands, the fierce smell of the kevda leaves in their garden. All these she must etch on her memory.Still, it's hard not to feel for our poor narrator, too, who is placed at the centre of a series of studies in sexual desire and sexual frustration running throughout the book. The passages later in the novel, where he dyes his body blue with indigo and sidles into her room playing the flute in an attempt to seduce her, manage to be sexy, funny, and unsettling all at the same time.Cuckold interleaves these sultry scenes of palace intrigue with a parallel political narrative. Mewar is a kingdom of Rajputs – that is, Hindus, with a few Jains – but they are surrounded by Muslim states, namely the kingdoms of Gujarat and Malwa and the sultanate of Delhi. Political tensions become identified with interfaith tensions, in a process that has clear parallels with later Indian history down to the present. The Maharaj Kumar worries about this a lot, and puzzles over the links between violence and religion:Why did Mahavir, who founded Jainism, and Buddha find Hinduism inadequate and look to other ways for moksha or nirvana as Buddha would call it? Why did they reject violence so totally? Did it not amount to denying one of our deepest human impulses? Was that one of the reasons why Hinduism has reasserted itself in our land and squeezed Buddhism till there's only one drop of it left in Sri Lanka? Jainism, it is true, survives but only in a marginal way…I compared this earlier to Wolf Hall, but it's worth saying that the approach is very different. I happen to dislike Hilary Mantel's slavish adherence to historical fact, and so I was happy to see that Nagarkar is more concerned with his novel as fiction than as history. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was write a book of historical veracity,’ he says in his Afterword. ‘I was willing to invent geography and climate, rework the pedigrees and origins of gods and goddesses, start revolts and epidemics, improvise anecdotes and economic conditions and fiddle with dates.’ Hear, hear! Similarly, he does not try to reproduce sixteenth-century language, and happily adopts a modern idiom for the novel, which I can see has annoyed some other reviewers. Personally I thought it worked well (though one reference to ‘the time-space continuum’ did jump out).Of more interest to me was how very Indian the narrative voice felt. It was not just the different usages I was already familiar with, like ‘quantum’ for ‘quantity’, which is so common in the papers here but hasn't been current in English English since the days of Fielding and Sterne. It was also the general garrulousness of the sentence structure, a willingness to mix metaphors, to choose exuberance over concision, to take the first half of a phrase from one source and the second half from another. (Nagarkar talks, for instance, of ‘advantages and demerits’.) This sense of changing horses in midstream extends even to tenses, sometimes with jarring effect: ‘We are face to face finally. He embraced me…’.But most of all, my sense of pleasant dépaysement came from the huge – really huge – number of words that were completely new to me. This is something that doesn't happen to me much any more and I loved it. On page 44 alone, I had to look up ‘bajot’, ‘mandap’, ‘saat phere’, ‘odhani’, ‘siropa’ and ‘mogra’, only one of which was in the OED; and these terms are not italicised as foreign borrowings but unmarked and natural elements of Nagarkar's Indian English. To me (and I realise this is a naïve response) it was fantastically exhilarating.This sense that there's a shared pool of insider references is also reflected in the plot. Meera herself is never referred to by name in the book, so without prior knowledge or some research you have no chance. Similarly Babur, who emerges as a major antagonist towards the end of the novel, was unknown to me, but if you have a better grasp of subcontinental history you will recognise this very famous figure as the founder of the whole Mughal dynasty. A lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony sailed over my head.The result was that this felt more Indian than any other Indian novel I've ever read; it seemed not to be aimed at me, and this is a feeling I enjoy and respect. Perhaps that's why it hasn't, as far as I can tell, been published outside India yet, despite how popular it was in its home market. It's a shame, because it really deserves a wider audience; everyone can enjoy the skewed love story, the politics is desperately relevant, and although Nagarkar is relating a tragedy he does it with such admirable wit and humour that it's impossible not to get behind his narrator's central, world-weary philosophical conclusion:Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.