QThe aunts are like. Maybe they were ladies “of a certain age”. Perhaps, if you could see from outside the room of their last breath, you would understand that they are the things of life and you would free the pain from the laces of nostalgia that keep it still, on the ground.
Because the aunts remain, forever, the alternative you saw as a child. A different combination of the traits of your mother, genes and epigenetics together, a possibility for you too to take and go to another part, without betraying.
Another fold of the skin that changes the smile, that same foulard put in a way that makes them pirate and not young ladies, the words that can be removed by rereading the facts you know and you don’t know anymore, a lightness that can grant you thanks to the attenuated responsibility that they have towards you and that open spaces on the world.
Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Vangeri Gilbert).
In my gaze, they are the girls who took their lives in the sixties and then the former girls who became great in groups, in four, Live sisterhood, their unreachable beauty in the movies by the sea. The 500 percentibles, the miniskirts, the sudden hair of very blonde in an Italy that exploded. The summer lunches where at the table had a fixed place according to an inner map that materialized every time the same. Who is in front of those who, next to whom.
The photo in the garden in the days of the first large mourning, contained in the perimeter of a crowded family, each in its shade of black and white, like a keyboard of stories stuck in each other. And then those secrets that they never shared with us, who came laterbecause they had been established that they would have raised, in silence, the load of the broken promises.
I wanted to know more. Of my mother, as it was, as they all were. Before. Before entering the silver frames of weddings, baptisms, anniversaries. There are, yes, the shots on the sidelines, those where they “laughed and did not look”, as in Rimmel by De Gregori, and where you can scrutinize a time that has dispersed.
Is there something of your mother’s youth, of his family, who continues today? Write us to [email protected]
All articles by Barbara Stefanelli