Maybe because Emanuela had a quick, active, constantly vigilant intuitive faculty: which revealed and illuminated, in those who approached her, only the aspect of the self capable of inspiring a mutual sympathy. So each saw her own image reflected, as in a mirror; and although the mirror had many faces, it projected only the one that it animated.

Our parents shouldn’t send us to the city; afterward, even if we return, we’re bad daughters, bad wives. Who can forget having been master of herself? And in our villages a woman who’s lived alone in the city is a fallen woman. Those who remained, who passed from the father’s authority to the husband’s, can’t forgive us for having had the key to

“I shouldn’t worry about it, really. But when we reach the point of being indifferent to the approval of others, it’s a sign that many things for us have faded. When we’re no longer afflicted by defeats, it’s a sign that we no longer believe in victories: that life runs over us without doing us good or ill.”

She calmed herself by thinking that at worst she could jump off the bridge one day and everything would be resolved. But she didn’t really imagine herself dead, only that her anguish would die with that act, if, in the attempt to punish herself, she found the courage to jump in. Then she would climb back onto the shore and resume her life, free of

“Sit down, calm down, there must be some recourse, they’ll let you stay till March.” Xenia shook her head: “It’s impossible, they don’t have any money, not a cent. In order for me to study my father mortgaged the vineyard. ‘Well worth it!’ they’ll say in the village, and laugh. But I’m not going back, I won’t give them the satisfaction.” She

The conversation was over, Emanuela thought, over. For this, then, she had fought for months, years. I should have brought some candy, she said to herself: certainly everything depends on candy, it’s my fault. But she felt like crying. She picked up her daughter and sat her on her lap, caressed her hair, looked in her eyes, which were hard,

The woman with a past couldn’t be her: twenty-five years old, low-heeled shoes, boarder at the Grimaldi institute. Yet she realized that nothing can destroy the past: you conceal it, you hide it, no one knows it apart from you, and you’ll never talk about it. But one day you will talk about it: you yourself will dig it up, you’ll realize that it’s

“She did wrong, maybe,” Silvia said, “but not because it’s a sin. Because, maybe, outside of here there’s nothing. Xenia believed there was something, she always said ‘I’ll never go back to Veroli.’ She’s gone beyond what we know. Like those who die.” “But they don’t come back,” Emanuela observed. “Xenia won’t return, either, to tell us what’s on

So I thought: you leave the job at the end of the month—yes, yes, a week’s notice is enough … and you take a week off before starting at the cement company. Tom will look after my affairs—he’s not a genius, Tom, but for a few days he’ll do very well—and the two of us will go to the Riviera, to San Remo, maybe Nice and Cannes. Do you have a