“We exist in as much as the others interpret us”

In spite of having always been in poor health Maria Lai, at almost one hundred years of age, keeps writing and producing works of art.

When I get to the house in the heart of Sardinia where she lives with her sister, I have a very high curiosity to ask her what her secret is. But it is enough for me to see her curious eyes and how she bends her own body to laugh, just like a child, that I understand it myself. Maria Lai is a child for whom life is a big play that, if she could, would play over again, “better  though”, for another century.

“Everybody asks me ‘at your age, why don’t you give up working?’ and I answer ‘why don’t you give up breathing?’ I am really lucky for having always played and keep doing it. All my plays have been a thrust to daydream, to tell lies. Only afterwards did I realize they called it art”.

She informs me right away that she doesn’t like to be interviewed “because I’m not important and in the end it’s always about gossiping”. I ask her how we can do it to avoid it. “First of all let us forget it is an interview”. We try it, sitting at the wooden table of the big house looking at the mountains where she has spent most of her childhood until the war, when she left the island to study art, first in Rome and then at the academy of art in Venice.

“When I got to Venice I was 23 years old but I looked like 13 with my short hair and 1.40 meters height”. Sardinia was considered to be the third world and she, therefore, a savage.  She was the only woman in her course. “I was such a surprise that everyone expected me to leave soon, but I kept attending class everyday, even if Arturo Martini, my professor, used to humiliate me, often talking dirty to make me run away. He belonged to a generation that didn’t admit women in art”.

She did not pay attention to it and even pretended she did not understand. “I was aware I was not worth it but I was also aware that I could not live without his words”, she remembers. “I was not looking for his friendship, I wanted to understand”.

Notwithstanding the drama of the war, the bombings, the far away family she did not have news of, in Venice she felt peaceful and “despite everything I also felt I was in the right place, as I always do when entering unknown dimensions”, she says. “To me it was a great occasion to rummage through myself until I found the ball of thread”.

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