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This isn’t our home and we won’t all be here next year. It’s as if we’re on a bridge. We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears. Some lean too far out, for a better view of the

Sometimes she imagined returning to the village with Dino, the silver fox over her shoulders, to demonstrate to her mother how comfortable she was in the big car, listening to the radio while it sped along the highways: returning to make her old friends envious, see the poplars, eat pizza rustica, and leave again.

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

The lay sisters arrived with white cloths, basins, water; Sister Prudenzina opened the closet, looking for a white dress, stockings. Milly’s possessions were already the dominion of all, possessions that no longer had a possessor.

As children we were always in love: with our teacher, with a friend, with a tree, maybe. I wrote the name of one classmate, Bellita, with a pin on the skin of one arm. I never told her.”

In her place, two characters played each her own part: the girl who lived in a residence for students, the mother who visited her daughter’s boarding school. Was Stefania really her daughter? “In reality,” she thought, “what belongs to us is only what life, and people, recognize in us. If we have a million under the mattress and we don’t spend it

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

Valentina resumed: “I would know if he loves me.” “How?” “If he loves you, he marries you.” “Really? And if he loved me and married the one his parents want? I have nothing and, if I go on studying like this, I don’t promise to earn much.” “And is Sol rich?” “How should I know? Who knows her? Of course she must be. When do parents ever like a poor

“Sister Lorenza, you’ll say to the girls that she went home because her mother’s sick. It shouldn’t be known that here, at the Grimaldi, a girl ran away.” “They’ll all know it,” Sister Prudenzina said coldly. “These are things that can’t be hidden.” Sister Lorenza nodded. “Yes. And of course we know it.”