Sublime

The rooms are very small, but maybe for that reason it seemed to me that they embraced us more closely, gathered us into a single shell. I’d always thought, too, that in many ways—the most important ones—our family was more fortunate than others. In all these years Michele and I have never fought seriously, he has always worked, I found a job when

It was a beautiful day, warm, though it was late autumn. I felt a childish pleasure walking along the streets, on the sunny side, and seeing the trees still green and people happy as they always seem to be on holidays. So I decided to take a short stroll and go to the tobacco shop in the square. Along the way I saw that a lot of people were stoppin

Enzo and Pasquale. Especially Pasquale, who was the more sociable, and was treated with great friendliness. He was a worker who—although he carried a Communist Party card, and was the head of a section—had chosen to bring his experience

I also liked it because it allowed me to justify the impulse of tenderness roused in me by Michele’s manner, which has remained candid and ingenuous, even now that he’s almost fifty. When he calls me “mamma” I respond in a tone that’s severe yet loving, the same I used with Riccardo when he was a child. But now I see that it was a mistake; he was t

Ma è già molto, e la vita non è stata troppo crudele con lui, con loro. Grazie ai diritti dell’Uomo dei dadi hanno potuto comprare questa bella casa nel paese dei loro avi, e possono invecchiarvi serenamente, lui scrivendo, lei dipingendo, prendendosi insieme cura del figlio adulto e malato, e preoccupati soltanto dall’idea di morire prima di lui.