Maddalena Ferat

In a Lombard villa where chandeliers drip like frozen tears, Maddalena Ferat—married, immaculate, and incandescent with boredom—locks eyes across a ballroom with Jacques, the lover she once abandoned for a ring and a surname. The air thickens; waltzes curdle; every candelabra becomes a silent witness to a resurrection of skin memory. What follows is not a tryst but a slow crucifixion: by day she plays the porcelain wife to a husband who catalogues his silkworms with more tenderness than her pulse; by night she unpicks herself, letter by letter, in letters never sent, ink pooling like coagulated longing. Jacques, equal parts magnet and abyss, drifts through drawing-rooms and hedge-mazes, a cigarette forever half-lit, half-extinguished—an ember that mirrors the half-life of their recollection. Each encounter scrapes another layer of varnish from Maddalena’s composure; her laughter fractures into porcelain shards, her gaze grows lunar, tidal, deranged. The husband, initially blinded by the glare of his own respectability, begins to hear the house itself breathing in another man’s cadence; wallpaper patterns twist into snakes; ancestral portraits sweat. When Maddalena, draped in a nightgown the colour of unwatered blood, finally wades into the lake she once sailed as a child, the water does not engulf her so much as the frame freezes—an iris shot collapsing into a pinpoint of mute complicity. The husband, left clutching a soaked monogrammed handkerchief, laughs himself into a strait-waistcoat, while Jacques, untouched, exits stage-left through a corridor of cypress shadows, already forgetting the perfume of the woman who rewrote her own anatomy into tragedy.