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January 21 - February 9, 2025
unnerved by the slap he had had to give her.
Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?
We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.
it’s always the same story: inside something small there’s something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there’s always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. I’m going to cook.”
it’s not true, he’s handsome, his eyes sparkle, and I’m sorry you don’t realize it, because a boy like that doesn’t exist in the movies or on television or even in novels, and I’m happy that I’ve loved him since I was little, and even if he’s out of my reach, even if I’m going to marry Antonio and spend my life pumping gas, I will love him more than myself, I’ll love him forever.
suddenly it was as if we saw ourselves from the outside, both of us in trouble with our men, standing there on the threshold, actors in a recital of women, and we started laughing.
They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness.
Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.
her children would have to make an effort to recall their mother’s surname, and that her grandchildren would be completely ignorant of their grandmother’s surname?
Did he know how to look with imagination?
I was afraid that, whatever she wore, her beauty would explode like a star and everyone would be eager to grab a fragment of it.
He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don’t have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and it’s the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor and not you theirs.
she had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation.
Christian Democrats who behave as if cement were mixed in Heaven, and God himself, with an enormous trowel, were throwing blocks of it on the hills, on the coasts.”
What drove me to act like that? Did I keep my feelings muted because I was frightened by the violence with which, in fact, in my innermost self, I wanted things, people, praise, triumphs?
She tells me how much she desires the person I’ve desired forever, and she does so convinced that I—through insensitivity, through a less acute vision, through incapacity to grasp what she, instead, is able to grasp—have never truly understood that same person, never realized his qualities.
I’ve changed not in appearance but deep inside. The appearance will come soon and it won’t be just appearance.
I feared that she would point out Nino’s features in little Gennaro to remind me that the toy that was supposed to be mine had fallen to her.
the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.
When I returned to the professor I was listened to, yes, I was praised, but without seriousness, as if my struggle were only a game well played. I soon grasped that Pietro Airota had a future and I didn’t.
