2

WHEN I RECALL our house, I see it suspended in the light of dawn. It’s still autumn, because the ground starts to smoke and fog rises in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. Like a bird in flight, I always look down at the house from above and far off; then I slowly draw nearer, observe the windows – how many are open, how many closed – and check the garden, the clothesline, the rust on the gate. I’m in no hurry to come down – it’s as if I want to make sure that the house is really my house and the story my story.

It seems that migratory birds behave in the same way; they cover thousands of kilometres purposefully, yielding to no distraction, and then, when they reach the area where they were hatched the previous year, they start to check it out. Is the horse chestnut tree with the white flowers still there? And the green car? And the nice lady who always steps outside and shakes the crumbs off her tablecloth? They observe everything meticulously, because for months, in the African deserts, the images of that lady and that car have stayed in their minds. But there are plenty of nice ladies and green cars in the world, so what’s the determining factor?

It’s not a sight, but a smell, the combination of the smells that filled the air in the vicinity of their nests: if the scents of the lilac and the linden overlap for an instant, there it is, that’s the house, we’ve come to the right place.

On the other hand, the odour that assailed me upon my return from the States was the smell of wet leaves that wouldn’t burn; by then it was mid-morning, and our neighbour had made a big pile of them and was trying in vain to set it alight, filling the air with heavy white smoke.

And then you emerged from the smoke, perhaps just a bit thinner than I remembered.

Convinced that I’d be able to free myself from you if I put an ocean between us, I’d travelled for months, seen many things, and met many people, but all that distance had produced exactly the opposite effect.

I still hated you as much as ever. I felt like a fox with a great bushy tail: I’d inadvertently brushed against the fire, and it followed me everywhere; wherever I was, rage was in my heart, and pain, and the desire to escape the flames, which were always burning behind me, always bigger and more destructive. When I put the key into the gate, my tail was ablaze, crackling and sparking like a sheaf of dry hay, its brisk burning punctuated by sinister flares.

You were in the driveway, with a broom in your hands.

‘It’s you!’ you exclaimed, dropping the broom. The wooden handle struck the paving stone with a hard, sharp sound.

‘Obviously,’ I replied, and without saying anything else, I went to my room, followed by Buck, who was yelping with joy.

In the course of the following weeks, our rituals of everyday ferocity went back into effect – I hated you, and you tried to avoid my hatred. On the days when you felt strong, you tried to blunt it, but your gestures were feeble, like an out-of-shape boxer’s, and they succeeded only in irritating me further. ‘What do you want?’ I’d scream at you. ‘Disappear!’ I called you ‘Old Woman’; I kicked doors while repeating, like a mantra, ‘Drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead . . .’

It’s hard to understand how such hatred had taken shape in me. As with all complex emotions, it wasn’t possible to attribute it to a single cause; it was due instead to a sequence of events that combined unfavourably with some innate predispositions.

When the first flashes of adolescence appeared what had been a tranquil stream in my early girlhood started changing into a rain-swollen river; the water was no longer green, it was yellow, and it roared around every obstacle. All sorts of refuse washed up in its inlets – hunks of polystyrene, small plastic bags, punctured soccer balls, naked doll torsos, torn branches, dead cats with bloated bellies – and everything bobbed about and collided weakly with everything else, impotent, resentful, unable to free itself. Since childhood, so many things had accumulated under the surface that neither of us was capable of seeing them: as the years passed, a word said or unsaid, one glare too many, an omitted embrace – the normal misunderstandings that form a part of any mutual relationship – had turned into two stores of gunpowder, one inside each of us.

‘Us,’ I said, but actually I should have said ‘me’, because you tried with all your might to avoid any explosion whatsoever.

You kept quiet if you thought that might work, you tried talking if you decided talking would be more effective, but both your silences and your words were always out of place. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ I’d shout, irritated by some sign of inattention. ‘Why don’t you keep your mouth shut?’ I’d roar, certain that what you were saying was intended only to provoke me.

Every so often, I’d have a crisis. Electricity invaded my brain; aggressive termites scurried around inside my skull. They turned off the lights, their little jaws chewed through the cables, and everything slipped into darkness. And then out of darkness and into calm at last, calm regained. Suddenly, there was no longer a river inside of me, but a lake, a little mountain lake. Fat trout moved sinuously in its depths, and the dawning light turned the surrounding peaks pink.

Yes, everything could really begin again, just as every day emerges from the night. The windows opened, and fresh air invaded the house; light entered with the air, and it seemed there were no more dark corners. We baked a pie together. We went shopping together or visited the library to choose some new books.

‘Why not try taking your pills?’ you said, and for two or three weeks, I obeyed you.

The weeks of tranquillity.

It was beautiful, during those weeks, to be able to breathe, walk, and look around without always hearing the fuse sizzling behind me; it was comforting to sleep and get up without the fear of exploding.

But like all beautiful things, it didn’t last.

Suddenly, one morning, I opened my eyes, and the tedium of peace oppressed me. That linear, responsible life was no longer mine, and neither was the world of good sense, where actions followed one another as blithely as children playing ring-a-ring o’ roses.

I needed pain in order to feel alive; it had to run through my veins like haemoglobin. It was the only way to a real existence. I knew it was acid, poisonous, a toxic cloud; I saw intuitively that it would corrupt my insides and everything I came into contact with; but I couldn’t give it up. Kindness and rationality didn’t have as much energy. They were limp, monotonous emotions without any real direction.

What was the use of being good? Of living a puppet’s life, an existence like a sack of potatoes, inert victims of a more powerful will?

Besides, goodness, what was that, exactly? An indistinct sequence of innocent actions, the treacle that had to be waded through in order to attain some form of recompense, the odious chatter of afternoon talk shows. What could I do with such shoddy material? Nothing, nothing at all.

From dawn to sunset, I moved about as if I were an ambulatory volcanic cone. There was direct contact between my heart and the molten core, without the relief of meanders or vents or blind alleys; the incandescent magma heaved inside me, rising and falling in an irregular rhythm and sometimes spilling over, like water from a brimming container.

When I was ten or eleven or twelve years old, I could still sit beside you on the sofa and read a book, but by the time I was thirteen, my impatience started to show, and at fourteen the only story I really wanted to know anything about was my own.

On one of those very afternoons when we were reading together – it was April, and a cold rain was battering the garden – another person suddenly erupted from inside me. Our text was one of your favourites, The Arabian Nights. All at once, I stood up and snorted, ‘I can’t take this bullshit any more!’

Incredulous, you put the book down and said, ‘Is that any way to talk?’

‘I’ll talk however I want,’ I replied. Then I turned and left the room, slamming the door behind me.

Throughout my childhood, while other kids my age were soaking up TV programmes, you filled my life with tales and poems and fantastic stories. You loved books, and you wanted to transfer your passion to me – or maybe you were convinced that being nourished on beautiful things would constitute an antidote to horror.

From my first memory of our life in common there had always been a book between us. That was your way of conducting relationships; it was your world, the one you grew up in, the world of the Jewish bourgeoisie, who had abandoned the study of the Torah for the reading of novels. Books help us understand life better, you always said; through literature, we can comprehend emotions in depth.

Was that what I was rebelling against? Against your pretension of understanding things? Despite the great number of immortal personages who trod the territory of my dreams with daily regularity, I was becoming more and more restless, not more and more sensible. Was I rebelling against that? Why, instead of feeling emotions in depth, did I perceive their falsity?

It was as if, as the years passed, the scaffolding of our relationship had been built up by unskilled hands. In the beginning, the framework seemed solid, but then, as it grew taller, its defects began to show; a little wind was enough to make it sway. A great many characters had climbed up the scaffolding with me: Oliver Twist and Michael Strogoff, Aladdin and the Little Prince, the Little Mermaid and the Ugly Duckling, the Golem, and Hansel and Gretel’s witch, White Fang’s dog packs, Martin Eden, Urashima, and the benignly enormous deity Ganesh, who danced a wild dance with dybbuks and made the floor creak ominously. They were all there between you and me, some of them seated, others on their feet; their faces were superimposed on ours, and their bodies cast shadows on our story where I wanted light, the light of sincerity, the light of clarity.

The light that would allow me to gaze upon the only faces I really wanted to see: my parents’.

Yes, the period of my great agitation coincided with the reappearance of my mother. Up until then, her presence had remained discreetly in the background. There were only the two of us, you and me, and we were – or thought we were – self-sufficient in our relationship: no disagreements, no indiscreet questions, and the days slipping by like a fogbound train. Everything was muffled, deprived of any real depth; the constraint of the rails assured our peace.

Then, one May morning, I woke up and realised for the first time that there wasn’t a single photograph of her in the whole house: not in the living room, not in the kitchen, no trace of her in your room, and you hadn’t even had the good taste to put a picture of her in mine. To remind me of what she looked like, all I had was my memory, but I was little then, and as the years passed, her features started to fade like a drawing too long exposed to the light. They merged with other people’s faces, other fragments of stories.

Who was my mother?

I knew only two things about her: she died after crashing her car, and she attended the university in Padua but never got a degree.

That morning, I burst into the kitchen. You’d already heated the milk, and you were turning off the hob.

‘We don’t have any pictures of her!’ I exclaimed.

‘Pictures of whom?’

I heard a noise inside me that sounded like ice cracking underfoot. My throat trembled for an instant before I managed to say, ‘Of Mamma.’

Two days later, a small picture frame appeared on my night table, and inside it there was a black-and-white photograph of a child dressed in a pretty little waffle-weave dress. She was sitting on a seesaw, the same seesaw with the red handles that was still standing outside in the yard. I picked up the picture and went to find you in the garden.

‘I don’t want your daughter,’ I told you. ‘I want my mother.’

Before I tore up the photograph, I had the time to read what was written on the back: Ilaria, 11 yrs. old.

After that, a Polaroid snapshot in uncertain colours appeared in my room. It showed a young woman in a smoke-filled nightclub. She was supporting her chin with one hand and seemed to be listening to someone.