CHRISTINE BALINT A Single Witness. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Christine Balint’s fourth novel takes inspiration from the courage of a teenage girl in a real-life criminal case in 18th-century Italy.

‘It takes seven women to make a single witness.’ Old Venetian Proverb.

Anna Maria did not have seven women to turn to for proof, and her grandmother, to whom she eventually tells the terrible truth, refuses to believe her.

In 1757, in the imposing Town Hall of Schio in the province of Vincenza, Anna Maria is being interrogated. She is just 13 years old.

A man draped in black addresses her from behind the desk. Only his face is visible. It is white, spectral. ‘The statement you made on 20 June – can you confirm it is true?’ His voice echoes against stone. …

‘Anna Maria. The statement that you were raped. Is it correct?’

Already, we know what has happened to her, but the whole situation is revealed only slowly as Anna Maria struggles to be believed and to resist the pressures put on her to deny the truth. Her world, her dilemma, and her subsequent actions are the core of this story, which is based on historical records.

Anna Maria lives with her father and grandmother, Cattarina, in the mountain village of Piovene, not far from Venice. Their lives are hard and they have few possessions in the old stone house where she shares a bed with Cattarina. Food is basic and sparse; Anna Maria wears clothes that had belonged to her mother, who died shortly after her baby sister had died; her older friend, Helena, gives her cast-off clothes, but Helena is soon to be married and their friendship will suffer. At home, Anna Maria raises silkworms, and daily she works in the local mill, carding wool for other women to spin into fine threads. She is good at this, and although the nails on the carding machine can be dangerous, she finds the swing of the pendulum soothing. The mill manager, Bianchin, values her careful work and treats her kindly, and she knows from the stories her grandmother tells her as they fall asleep that as a younger man, he and Cattarina ‘almost married’. Now, he tells her:

‘Anna Maria … You know you can always come to me. If you need help of any kind, I am here. I am, after all, your father’s godfather. We are family.’

When she does need help, he is the only one to believe her, but he can do little more than tell her that there are laws and procedures, and that there are people in Venice who receive complaints and are there to protect her.

It is clear that Anna Maria’s father, Giacomo Bunon, is violent and that she tries her best to avoid him. Her grandmother excuses his drunken rages because she remembers his great distress when his wife and child died, and she saw, then, how he adored Anna Maria. She does not see how this changes as the child grows into a woman.

Even when Giacomo hits Cattarina in a drunken rage and tells her to get out of the house, leaving him alone with Anna Maria, she is blind to the result. Neighbours suspect what is going on, and report it to the priest, but are too afraid of Bunon to intervene.

The priest, too, is afraid of damage to his reputation as ‘moral guardian of the village’ and will not acknowledge the reality of the situation. He summons Anna Maria to his house to interview her, but when she tells him that her father made her do things she didn’t want to do, he tells her that ‘rape is a mortal sin’, and her father would ‘burn in hell’ if he does not repent:

‘You can push him away.’

A fury rises in her chest. She stands from the chair. ‘He is stronger than me. He fells trees.’

‘Your voice will save you, child.’

Her voice does not save her.

‘If the neighbours hear you screaming, they will come to your aid.’

He does not hear her words in the same way that the neighbours do not hear her scream. How can he think she doesn’t scream?

Anna Maria runs from the house into the mountains believing ‘she has sinned but it is not her fault’. A further incident with her father, when he takes her from work into the mountains and they do not return to the house that night, worries Cattarina, but she hears from Bianchin that Anna Maria is with Giacomo and believes that he had taken her for lunch as a treat; that he will look after her and she ‘does not have to worry’.

When Giacomo is arrested after he pulls a knife in a fight, Cattarina insists that she and Anna Maria go to Vincenza to try and get him released from prison. On the way there, Anna Maria tells Cattarina about the rapes, but her grandmother is furious:

‘For shame … You are a disgusting child to imagine such a thing. I am ashamed of you.’

Cattarina is getting old and frail. She senses something, ‘out of the corner of her eye, in the world beyond sight’, and she knows her son is violent, but she chooses to ignore this, and she knows that they cannot live in the house alone and need a man to protect them.

At the prison, Anna Maria sees a man on the stairs; he is in a dark cloak and is illuminated by a flaming torch, and she wonders if he is a ghost. He tells her that he knows her father takes her to his bed and ‘If you do not report such an offence you will be imprisoned.’

To see the Justice, she and Cattarina may have to wait days. They find refuge at a convent, and a nun befriends Anna Maria, listens to her plight, and tells her ‘God sees everything’ and that she must tell the truth. So, when the Justice asks Anna Maria if her father is violent at home, she tells him of the rapes. As a result she must be internally examined by midwives, a terrifying experience for the young girl, but they confirm that she has been ‘made a woman’.

Called to Vincenza, Father Antonio prevaricates. To his sister, he says, ‘I cannot sacrifice everything for this’; and he determines that he ‘will lie if he must’.

Cattarina decides that ‘she will try and convince the girl to save her father. She will fight for her son.’ She tells the Justice that her son raping Anna Maria is ‘something I could never imagine’. And later she demands that Anna Maria go back and tell the Justice that she was lying.

Anna Maria stays and works for a while at the convent. She learns that she could become a novice, not in Vicenza, but in a convent in Venice that works for the Incurabilli – women who for various reasons are sick.

The last chapters of the book tell of the way Anna Maria deals with her dilemma: should she yield to the pressure to say she lied? What might she do to get away from her violent father if he is released? How can she live independently and face the dangers of being a woman alone in the world?

She has always run to escape. It is a long habit, from childhood, and it has always worked. She has perfected hiding and not being found.

Cattarina, too, must move on, and Bianchi arranges refuge and work for both of them on the estate farm belonging to the local land-owner.

Time passes. Many things change.

Distressing as Anna Maria’s situation is, not everything in Christine Balint’s novel is grim. There are happy childhood memories, moments of natural beauty, village events, and calm places where Anna Maria becomes one with the animals and with the land around her. Parts I and II of the book are described as ‘The First Transformation’ and ‘The Second Transformation’, and Italian proverbs (in Italian and English) suggest the changes that will happen. Many chapter headings, too, offer Italian words charting the life cycle of the silkworms Anna Maria cultivates, and suggest parallels with her life. Anna Maria, Cattarina, and Father Antonio are strongly drawn, understandable characters, living at a time when the lives of women, especially in small Italian communities, were governed by social and cultural expectations, and a man’s control over his family was unquestioned.

It took strong character, determination and courage to challenge this, but trial records, housed in the State Archive of Venice, and used by Christine Balint to construct her story, suggest that Anna Maria successfully did so. A Single Witness is a work of fiction, some characters are fictional and events are imaginatively brought to life, but the main characters did exist. Given the way Father Antonio behaves in the book, it is disturbing to read that he really was parish priest of Piovene at that time and that he remained in this position for 20 years after these events, but Christine Balint had only his evidence at the trial and the religious conventions of the time from which to create his character.

Christine Balint A Single Witness Spinifex 2026 PB 310pp $34.95

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: 18th-century legal cases, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, historical fiction, Italy, Venice, Vincenza