Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Nothe garden that survives, behind its luxuriant past and of us who have left, a plant has become enormous. It’s a yucca, born suddenly – says those who observed it appear years ago – leaning against the surrounding wall. Strange exotic vision at the end of the now mown lawn.
There remain trees dotted with oranges and lemons, but they have fruits shrunken by time. There are also a stunted prickly pear, the last little roses, and some wild bushes.
And, in the front part, overlooking the town street, the sentinel magnolias that at a certain point – yeah, which one? – took the place of the two very tall pines with stone-breaking roots. They had begun to invade the sidewalk, beyond the gate, and were replaced.
When the decision was made, losing meters of identity pride, I must have already been lost. As if that hadn’t been my perfect rectangle in the world, a block of comfort and starting point.
Now I go hunting for “heirlooms” in family homes. And I am indulged, even if – who knows – aunts and cousins will tease me a little, sweetly. “Here she is, passing by, this time too she will try to steal a couple of furnishings”.
They would do very well to make fun of me, because it’s as if I were always restlessly imagining I was resurrecting involuntary memories“my madeleines”, I repeat, to give myself a tone and surround a primitive hunger for memory with a literary aura. Proustian moments in search of an evidently happy lost time.
A privilege, I tell myself to authorize myself for new expeditionsthinking of those who instead hide cliffs in the mists of childhood – because faith in the three Freudian planes of Id/Ego/Superego has now fallen and yet no one denies how much in the season of origin we gamble who we will be, above all how we will feel.
So, with joy and anxiety, I did it again. In the garage, where we once secretly played greengrocer, I found a cata Carthusian, who slipped out of a wardrobe filled with old blankets and rocketed out through a small window whose net he had torn.
Precious family memories to preserve
In a box under the stairs, among spools of thread and thimbles of various sizes, there was the prototype of a crochet flower destined to multiply to become the texture of a blanket: now that ecru-colored number zero, certainly attributable to my maternal grandmother, it is in my wallet including credit cards, cards, badges. And it fits very well, it fills a void that was not visible but flashed.
Family memories are precious (illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini).
By unwrapping and questioning, an unpublished story emerged. Of that morning that my grandfather, with other hunting relatives, went into the countryside to look for woodcock. Incredibly, for a South with mild winters, it had snowed during the night. The birds were stunned, they came out without precautions, prey to be shot in a dizzying sequence.
He, head of the family and unanimously leader of the expedition as the best marksman, called a halt to the trembling company. “Come on, let’s go.” You can’t just shoot it, you can’t do it, it’s too easy, it’s not right.
It’s clear that I wish they hadn’t even gone out, on that whitewashed morning at the beginning of the 1960s and even after, never again, in the name of all the woodcocks, even the most skilled and skilled at escaping the shot of rifles. But imagining the scene – the arm raised and turning back, back home – finally satisfied me. Like a Christmas story, of a distant Sunday, of a family you don’t want to let go.
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