Saturday: Risotto alla Milanese

1

They say she died at seven-thirty in the morning, just as my plane was landing at Leonardo da Vinci. The pilot had circled over Rome for almost an hour trying to find his way in the autumn storm that was raging over the city. Eventually he made his way through the clouds and let the plane drop like a stone in a well. When the wheels touched the runway I let go of the armrests and looked at my watch: seven-thirty, exactly.

I could put together a lecture for you students from all this, beginning just at that point, because more than once, in the days that followed, I thought about my arriving the moment she was departing, puzzled by some although indecipherable implication of destiny's perfect timing.

Let's begin there, from my landing at Leonardo da Vinci, after my sister Carmelina's urgent call.

Racing along the endless people-movers in the airport terminal, I barely made it to the connecting DC8 that took me on a bumpy climb back over the storm clouds. Thirty-five minutes to fly to Pisa, another thirty-five for a taxi to take me to Nugola Vecchia, where my mother was already laid out in her black dress, her hands folded over her missal, her face shiny smooth, her nostrils transparent like one of the wax saints in the churches of our native Lucania.

Carmelina stood by the coffin, she too dressed in black, flanked by her husband and her two sisters-in-law. The four of them were stiff and solemn, like carabinieri standing guard at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. She stepped forward and embraced me, her chest heaving with sighs of disapproval.

"She asked about you right till the last...she hoped to see just once more," she said.

" I hoped the same," I replied.

My sister Carmelina - Milly now - speaks with a strained Tuscan accent that in nature doesn’t exist. She aspirates her C’s so hard that she's had to be operated on twice for polyps on her vocal chords. Out of respect for our Lucania, I make an effort when I'm talking to her to bring back an echo of our native accent, as unnatural as hers by now.

My sister was born when our family had already moved to Nugola. She married a dentist and now lives in Livorno. She's lost touch with the past. She doesn't know anything about Lucania, because she hasn't been back to the South except for a few Christmases many years ago. Though I'm older, I can't remember those visits very clearly either. But it's as if she had never even breathed that special air that my parents had brought with them from Lucania and that permeated our house. It wasn't just the southern accent that they both retained until they died, it was more the Christmas and Easter customs, the food, certain kitchen utensils, the way bread and preserves were made.

What never came up were facts about the past. One in particular I would need a few hours after my mother's death, one only she could provide. That's why I find that whim of fate so puzzlingly meaningful: why let me get there just as she departed, she who had probably been the start of it all?

2

The coffin had been set up in the dining room. There was a humble smell of cleanliness - furniture polish, laundry soap, floor wax. The shutters were closed in mourning, but the sounds of traffic from the highway in the valley below could be heard through the open windows. People came, mostly Carmelina's friends, who embraced us, stood a moment before the coffin, and then left. "She looks as if she were sleeping," they all said. It wasn't true, fortunately. Mamma's face had the beauty and incomparable dignity of death, as was proper. I once went to a funeral parlor in New York to pay my respects to an old colleague's dead wife. I remember that when I saw her so tarted-up I couldn't help thinking that poor Mrs. Garrison looked as if she were about to step out of her coffin and go hit the streets. Looking at my beautiful mamma, I thanked heaven that my country hadn't yet adopted the American practice of putting make-up on the dead.

The wreaths began to arrive and soon converted the clean smell of the house into something stagnant and sickly sweet. I let myself be embraced by many callers I didn't know until I couldn’t stand it.

"I'm going out to stretch my legs," I finally I said to Carmelina. Then I added, "I've been in a plane all night," but she shrugged her shoulders without a word to forgive my desertion.

I hadn't been to Nugola Vecchia in years. Usually my mother came to see me in America. Whenever I went over to spend Christmas in Tuscany, we would all go to my sister's in Livorno. And the few times I went to Italy on summer holidays we would rent a house together a few kilometers south, along the rocky coast of Castiglioncello. Although Nugola, where I was raised and where my sister was born, is only a half-hour drive from either Livorno or Castiglioncello, I hadn't made the trip back in a very long time.

It was unrecognizable, defaced by an ugly bunch of houses that had been built on the hill called Poggio di Mezzo, the Treasure Island of my childhood. Back then it has been only a huge sand dune covered with dense woods of oaks and hornbeam, and here and there a few pines, holm oaks, laurels and arbutus that kept their green leaves all winter. That's what I miss in Central Park, so bleak from Thanksgiving till spring.

Students, I'm talking about over thirty years ago. I know how you figure time at your age. Thirty years for you is like a tunnel dug into the past where one gets immediately lost in a darkness of immeasurable length. And I actually had the same feeling myself as I tried to remember the dune as it has been - a perfect dome covered with trees with a chunk missing on the north side where earlier on they used to excavate sand.

On that yellow, creamy slope, the bee-eaters had dug their nests and would come back every year in April, bringing with them the enchantment of their brilliant tropical coloring. Their churring could be heard from afar. One morning in spring I'd wake up and hear them coming back.

There was another small area, right on the hilltop, where trees and bushes didn't grow. Perfectly round, it was carpeted with blackish moss forming a magic circle - perhaps the site of a charcoal cone long ago - surrounded by a dense Mediterranean thicket. That was the Elephants' Ballroom.

Every day I would go to my Treasure Island. Beneath the tangle of heather, I would find mushrooms, which my mother would dry and sell, and wild asparagus. I would pick arbutus berries for my father to make illegal grappa, or look for other treasures, like sharp white and black ringed hedgehog quills, 30 to 35 centimeters long, or fossil shells millions of years old, going back to a time when Nugola was covered by the sea.

All this had now disappeared. I walked across the village from one end to the other as far as the cemetery and back again to what once had been Poggio di Mezzo. The dune had been leveled and squared off, the Elephants' Ballroom no longer recognizable. Which one of the parking lots occupied the area that used to be carpeted with blackish moss? I didn't have a point of reference because all the trees had been ripped out and replaced mostly by cement, or by straggly hedges of an obnoxious blue evergreen, or by even more incongruous forsythia bushes at the entrance of the desolate condos. There was an unbelievably ugly pizzeria where the sand pit used to be, and not a sign of the bee-eaters.

I stayed on in Nugola for two days, putting my mother's things away or wandering aimlessly about the countryside. The village had become a squalid suburb. The farmers from Lucania, who came north soon after us, had now left or died. Others from the South and those few genuine Tuscans who hadn't been citified before our arrival were all changed, like my hill, Poggio di Mezzo. When Carmelina came over to help me pack our mother's things, or when we spoke on the phone, I tried to remind her of the Elephants' Ballroom, the mushrooms, the bee-eaters. But I understood perfectly that she only pretended to remember, not to disappoint me by admitting that her memory and mine had selected our recollections in opposite ways, erasing what we had in common and turning us into strangers. I've already mentioned her forced, overdone Tuscan accent that de-southerned her. But then, with the death of our mother, even the memory of Nugola, where we had been poor farmers, had become a cumbersome link to a past she no longer needed. I realized that from then on, family to her meant the tribe of her husband's blondish sisters. So enthusiastically had she been mingling with them year after year that even her alien dark eyes and hair had blended in, become domesticated. That's how she is. Some people have to forget in order to move on - like some Italian-Americans who can't speak the language of their forebears, and who name their children Dexter, Savile, Sean, Kenneth.

My eyes will always be black and my hair will go grey but never yellow. I was a year old when we left Potenza - and yet I don't feel I'd be myself without the memories of Lucania that my mother had passed on to me. Then there are the memories of Tuscany, the Tuscan colours of Treasure Island, the cafeteria at the Stanic refinery, the sea cliffs of Calafuria, the University of Pisa, and lastly the memories of New York when I had just arrived - when helicopters used to land on the roof of the Pan Am Building and the gays were holding their first big demonstrations in Central Park. They are fragments that form a system, a language I talk to myself in. A language without words, if it's true that words are used to share one's thoughts with other people. Mr. Ceccarelli, the manager of the Stanic cafeteria, and Dr. Paoletti, the retired director, possess some scattered fragments of this language, but so few that when they utter them they sound like a scratched record, stuck for eternity on the same notes.

3

They were both at the cemetery, Mr. Ceccarelli and Dr. Paoletti, but with so many people there, I didn't have the time to talk to them as I would have liked.

So the next day, driving my mother's old Fiat, I went to Stagno to visit Mr. Ceccarelli, who had given me work in the cafeteria from the day my father died until I went back to school. He was older and more deaf.

"How's America?" he asked.

"So, so," I answered. Every time I go to see him, he asks the same question and I give him the same answer. He emerged from his kitchen, drying his hands on a white teatowel, and we went to sit at a table in the empty cafeteria.

"Is your work going well?" I asked.

"I'm satisfied," he said. "I have two Filipino girls now who do what you and your mother did. They're slow but very thorough. And you? When will you be returning to Italy?"

"To do what?"

"What you do there. Don't we have universities in this country? Haven't you been away from home long enough?" Even this was part of the script, like the last thing he said as I was leaving: "Have you been to see Dr. Paoletti?"

"I'm on my way there now."

Dr. Paoletti, for thirty years the executive director of the Stanic oil refinery and now retired, had been in his day a fanatic of haute cuisine. Unmarried and perhaps a homosexual, he had a house all draped in velvet and paved with marble; he held legendary dinner parties there for his friends. It was he who made it possible for me to go back to high school and later to university, paying my tuition fees, buying my books and, at Mr. Ceccarelli's suggestion, offering to take me on as his personal chef de rang. The work was fun for me and didn't interfere with my classes.

He still lived in town in the same eighteenth-century house with a dock on the canal and a great arched carriage entrance framed in pietra serena. It took me a half hour to drive through the beastly traffic from Stagno to Livorno, and another half hour to find a parking space. I walked up the D'Azeglio wharves for a hundred meters and thus fulfilled my pilgrimage of gratitude.

"Have you been to see Mr. Ceccarelli?" he asked.

"I've just come from there."

"I don't give dinner parties anymore. My few friends who aren't dead have problems with triglycerides, or cholesterol, or diabetes, or high blood pressure. I'm all right but everything tastes the same to me. How ironic: I cultivated the love of good food as one of the very few vices I could still enjoy in my old age. Mr. Ceccarelli sends one of his girls over every so often; they bring me small meals to put in the freezer. But not one of them is as intelligent as you were." That too is something he repeats every time. He had shrunk to a mere shadow. His voice too had changed.

"Maybe it's because I'm old and don't really desire anything anymore, but I think I'll never be keen on helping young people - male or female - get on with their studies. These days too many of them go to college anyway. The dumbest jackasses get a degree and then don't know what to do with it." That's what he told me and I'm afraid he was right. Then he added, "But you were something else. It was worth it, and you've proved that."

Before leaving, I dashed down to buy the ingredients I needed to prepare him a perfect risotto alla milanese - with beef marrow, onion, saffron, butter, parsley and lemon zest - cooked to just the right creaminess. I set the little table he always uses now, since he eats alone; but I moved it to the window, facing toward the sunset on the sea. The day was clear and the island of Gorgona was visible on the horizon. I used his splendid silver, his family crystal and china. I arranged the yellow roses I had bought in a Limoges vase. I sat him at the table and kissed him good-bye.

"You'll see, you'll enjoy this," I said, but I didn't believe it myself. I walked along the canal, thinking that maybe the next time I came to Italy Dr. Paoletti wouldn't be around anymore.

I stayed on for two days in those desolate rooms that had been my mother's home. It wasn’t the farm house I had been brought up in; this was smaller, modern and dull. She had moved her things and herself there without much enthusiasm. The preserves she had continued to put up every summer were loaded into the Fiat and taken directly up to the eleventh floor of an anonymous high-rise apartment building in the city where my sister lived. There they stood, incongruously lined up on the shelves of her Scavolini kitchen in purple Formica: the sun-dried tomatoes, the bottle of olive oil with garlic cloves and hot peppers, the aubergine marinade, the pickled red onions.

In Mamma’s house everything was clean and in perfect order, and yet those four rooms seemed never to have been lived in. I thought that perhaps my mother hadn’t lived anywhere for years, from the time I had left for America and my sister had married. From that time her heart was not with her anymore, but half with me and half with Carmelina and her children.

I didn't even unpack the small bag I had brought with me. It was there sitting on a chair, as if I were staying in a hotel. From the window I couldn't see the country I remembered, but only the dismal suburbs that were gradually cementing together the beautiful old Tuscan cities and villages. I missed my New York apartment. I even missed all of you. I missed the Machine that was waiting for me on its cart next to my bed.

There was nothing left for me to do in Nugola. I had arrived too late to hold my mother's hand while she was dying. It was too late for everything. I called Alitalia to change to an earlier flight to New York.

Some play solitaire; for years I've played bridge by myself, every morning before going to work. I deal out the cards and play all the four players’ hands, forcing each one not to remember his partner's or the opponents’ cards.

The evening of the funeral, as I wandered unhappily from one room to another, I remembered I hadn't brought cards for my solitary morning bridge game. So before going to bed I went out to buy a deck at the local caffz.

That too had changed for the worst: plastic everywhere; new, indifferent owners; no one playing tresette at the tables. Only one thing was the same as in the old days: the cards they sold were not the bridge cards I always use, but the narrow ones they use to play tresette, made of cheap coated paper with grey backs. The numbers were not marked at the four corners, but just at the upper left and lower right.

I paid for the cards, walked around for a bit, and went home. I made myself a cheese omelette and went to bed early. From the open window I could hear the bitchy voice of a TV talk-show hostess.

She was saying, "What counts is keeping up your capacity for indignation."

She didn't need to be concerned. All her guests were indignant at each other and argued in very loud voices until the end of the show. Then a western came on and I finally fell asleep, lulled by the peaceful crackling of the Winchester 73s.

The morning after, I got up to make myself coffee and took it back to bed. When I opened North's hand to begin my morning bridge game, I couldn't see the numbers, because each upper left corner, except the last, was hidden by the overlapping card. That was strange, unless it was a faulty deck that had been printed in reverse. I thought about this later, while I was in the phone with Mr. Ceccarelli. I remembered that he kept the same kind of cards under the cash register at the cafeteria for the workers who played tresette during lunch break. I asked him to check out a deck.

"Upper left and lower right," he said. "There's nothing wrong with them. You're just holding them the wrong way."

That was when the question came to my mind, one that my mother more than anybody else could have answered. The telephone, same as in the old house, was in the kitchen: on the same sideboard, set at the same angle on the same neatly pressed doily, along with a picture of Pope John and the sewing basket. I recalled the day I brought home the first dress I had bought with my own money - pink linen with a square neckline. I was trying it on in front of the mirror in the bedroom I shared with Carmelina. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed reading Mickey Mouse comics.

"It's too big in the waist," she declared. She was right.

I got the sewing basket and tried to alter the dress on my own without asking my mother for help. We used to split household chores among us. I helped mother with the cooking and pickling, and I also took care of the garden and the chickens, did small carpenter jobs, and was the house electrician besides. But I had never done the laundry, the ironing, or the sewing. Even little Carmelina was better at all that than I was.

She had stopped reading and was looking at me with a critical eye. At a certain point she remarked, "You'll never get it right. It's taken you half an hour just to thread the needle because you're doing it backwards. And you are even sewing backwards."

So the thirty-year-old incident came back to me. A kind of symmetry of mind. I always try to instill in you a certain esprit de geometrie, as you know, and this is the right moment to apply it. The dicotyledonous theory - let's call it that - surfaces here and is immediately confirmed.

I said good-bye to Mr. Ceccarelli, hung up the phone, picked up the cards, and fanned them out so I could read the numbers. But it wasn't natural for me to hold them that way. So I tried holding the cards in my right hand and playing with my left; this way I could read the numbers, but it didn't work; it was as if my fingers were tied by invisible strings.

I called my sister to tell her I was leaving earlier. She didn't object.

"I say," I ventured.

It was useless, but I had to try.

"As far as you know, was I left-handed when I was small?"

"I can’t tell, really. I wasn't around when you were small. I have no idea."

"But would you say Mamma was the kind of person who would force me to use my right hand...to correct me if I were left-handed?"

That was a stupid question and Carmelina laughed.

"Would she? My dear, she was a peasant. She dressed in black. She went to mass every morning. She was the Rule personified. The quintessence of discipline and conformism. For her there was only one way to do things right, and any other way was wrong. You know that. You do the laundry on Mondays, you bake your bread on Fridays, you eat with your right, you write with your right, you cross yourself with your right, you cook eel for Christmas Eve and lamb for Easter. My Riccardo is left-handed, and I had a job trying to stop Mamma from tying his left hand into a bag so that he'd have to use his right."

"You mean Riccardo is left-handed?"

"Yes, and even the little one, I think. Right now, the only thing he knows how to do is suck his thumb, and he sucks his left one."

I thought this very significant.

"Isn't being left-handed an inherited trait?"

"I don't know. What's got into you, Martina?"

"Who would know whether I was left-handed or not?"

"Why is it so important to you?"

I didn't expect Carmelina to understand. She's cut all ties to her own childhood, let alone being interested in mine. But I insisted. "Come on, try to remember. Who could I ask?"

"No one. Our neighbors from those days are dead, except the Scheluccis. You might try to find them, they must be somewhere in America.

The Scheluccis, right. Marta Schelucci and her son Costantino. Keep them in mind because they're going to pop up again later.

What Carmelina said sounded incredible, almost sinister: I'm barely forty-two, and yet all the older ones are dead, apart from the Scheluccis, who are somewhere in America, but who knows where. To think that my mother asked them to find me an apartment in New York when I decided to leave Italy. When the building manager met me to hand over the keys, he also gave me their phone number. I didn't know area codes then, but thinking back, I believe it was a Long Island number. I remember calling right away to thank them. Mrs. Schelucci answered. I knew her husband had been killed in an accident at work a few years before. I was disappointed to learn that Costantino didn't live with her anymore. I imagined that he had got married, but I didn't want to ask. I called again a few times and promised to go see her, but I never did. It was one of those things you think about every once in a while but always keep putting off. Then I must have misplaced her number. If I had really wanted to find her in those first few years, I could have asked my mother. She had kept in touch with her for some time, but then, who knows. Some letters might have been returned...I don't know. Where to look for her? She could be dead. And Costantino, who knows where he wound up.

I packed the only thing that had a shadow of a memory about it, a terracotta jar with two small opposing handles. The shape isn't Tuscan, and I've only seen it in our house, or in the houses of the other farmers who came from Lucania. Carmelina drove me to the airport. "Have you been to see Signor Ceccarelli and Dr. Paoletti?"

"Of course."

"They always talk about you. They're so proud of having helped a poor girl become a professor in an American university."

"They're two good souls." Thanks to them I hadn't become a professional cook, but instead one of the many Europeans stranded on the shores of numberless American universities. Usually in a teaching post where it's hard to get ahead, but where it only takes a single wave to knock you back, because that's America, and there they don't stand on ceremony. When the biggest customers - you tuition-paying students - lose interest, a course and sometimes a whole department can be eliminated, just like that.

4

I asked for an aisle seat. I could hear behind me the chatter of the other passengers and could easily figure out which were the occasional tourists - Americans on their way back from a European vacation, and Italians on a three-week, all-expenses-paid tour package, Disneyland and Niagara Falls included.

Then there were the commuters like me, dividing their time and their hearts. For some, both time and heart were split in half, as in my case; for others, perhaps doubled. Doubled because certain voices, certain faces - especially the ones I had seen in first class - seemed to belong to men and women who lived two perfectly functioning lives, one for each side of the Atlantic. I thought that very rich people had to get themselves at least two lives, to be lived in parallel, in order to enjoy all their belongings. Or maybe only one life, but boundlessly wide.

They were on a plane ferrying them outside the six-hour time difference, as if they were merely walking from the terrace of their apartment on Via Giulia (with a view of the Tiber) to the sunken living room of their penthouse on Central Park South, without actually leaving the premises of their sacred property. As if the two locations were next to each other, unified by the sole fact of belonging to them, connected through the two opposite traffic flows: one illegal and westbound in dried porcini and the other legal and eastbound in miraculous vitamins in their giant white jars. As if they were granted extra time that allows them to shift instantly from Europe to America and from yacht to log cabin, from wife to mistress, from big-game hunting in Uganda to a health farm at Marbella.

Call me Robinson. Given that in life we go from one shipwreck to the other, losing most or all of our possessions, each time forced to give up most or all of our privileges, habits, affections, and so on, I take some consolation - in both the small and big shipwrecks of life - in examining what I have left and seeing what can be made of it.

That's what happened when my handsome father, who used to play his guitar for us in the evenings and farm during the day, was crushed by his tractor. We were left on our own, with Carmelina barely ten and me just finishing grammar school.

My mother had begun wearing black from the time my father had taken us, her and me, just born, away from Lucania after our house was destroyed in one of the many earthquakes that strike that region. So when we buried Papa, she went to the cemetery dressed in her usual dress. After the funeral she sat down with us at the kitchen table and spoke to both of us, even to Carmelina who was only ten, in her usual tone of voice, just a little wearier, her face just a shade paler than usual. "Children," she said, "we'll have to figure something out."

We came up with an idea, she and I together, under Carmelina’s tearful gaze. And when we tried it, it worked. We gave up running the farm because we knew that without Papa we'd never make it. Mamma wrote to the Scheluccis, in Lucania, friends of ours who had lost their house in a recent quake. We turned over half the house and the whole farm to them, keeping only a small vegetable garden and the chicken yard for ourselves.

Mamma got a job in the cafeteria at the Stanic oil refinery and convinced the manager, Signor Ceccarelli, to hire me as cook's helper even though I was only thirteen and a half. For two years we went down on foot to the highway every morning, even in cold weather, to catch the bus; and every day, even when the sun was beating down mercilessly, we'd walk home uphill from the bus stop.

Then, when Mamma could afford it, she bought a small Fiat and learned how to drive it. After that we'd go to work - we said - like two Americans. I liked that life. We had our wages, our car, our vegetable garden, our chickens, our house. The Scheluccis supplied us with potatoes, wheat and fruit, as if they were tenant farmers, even though we didn't have a written agreement and everything was based on our word. They even used to watch Carmelina when we were at work, in the traditional solidarity that has enabled so many poor Italians to make their way better than others.

So call me Robinson. I almost like being shipwrecked so that I'll be forced to build myself a hut on a desert island. The present shipwreck was nothing; the only thing I missed was a bed to sleep in on my flight from Rome to New York. Luckily the two seats next to mine were empty, each with its neatly folded blanket and white pillow, sterilized and sealed in their plastic wrappers.

I pulled up both armrests and made a bed, first by padding the window side where I'd be laying my head. I used the three cushions, plus two of the blankets, and then wrapped myself in the third, like a tramp in Central Park. I fell into a sleep filled with the jumbled images of Nugola as it had been: the jars of artichoke hearts in oil lined up on the shelves I built for Mamma's pantry, the mulberry trees in the church square, the village doctor's house - a two-storey cottage that was like an outpost overlooking the desolate landscape of Nugola Nuova, where begin the hills of solid gray clay that, unfertilized, won't nourish a tree, a bush, or even a single blade of grass. Only when doggedly cultivated will it yield - as far as the eye can see - fields of garlic plants as gray and dull as the soil they grow in.

On that side it gets beastly hot in summer, several degrees hotter than in Nugola Vecchia, a difference that can be felt immediately on crossing the borderline. Just one step beyond the doctor's house, a matter of two feet, and everything changes - or used to change.

On our side of Nugola, the side favored by nature, there was Poggio di Mezzo with mushrooms growing in clusters under the shrubs of heather, the multicolor flash of the bee-eaters as they cut across the patches of sky one could see through the branches of the dense oaks. And Costantino Schelucci, two years older than me, with his long, tanned gypsy legs. He would pop out from the arbutus thicket, and without saying a word lift my short red skirt and begin my sexual education: a three-year course that lasted until he moved with his family to America.

Random, wandering images, useless for my work - which I couldn't do anyway without the help of the Machine, the quiet of my apartment, and the comfort of my bed.

With my legs and neck bent at ninety-degree angles, I lie there asleep for nine hours, immersed in chaotic dreams. Costantino comes back, this time sitting like an Arab with his legs crossed on the blackish moss of the Elephant's Ballroom, while I sit in the same position facing him, indifferent to the white panties outlining, under my red skirt, the dark bay between my thighs.

We're sharing a snack. There is the same intimacy and trust between us as there was when we made love a moment earlier; the same as there will be when we make love a moment later. When we stand facing each other in the middle of the clearing and begin to undress, we're awed by a new discovery each time, grateful for the pleasure each enjoys and sure of the pleasure each will give back. He teaches me about his body and I teach him about mine, what little we know. We explore each other with our eyes, fingers, and tongues, but he solemnly agrees to 'respect' me, as we used to say with an expression already obsolete in those days. The meaning was that he had to refrain from trespassing on that sacred hymen, the location of which neither of us knew exactly. We both looked for it all the time, carefully, delicately, so as not to damage anything and to protect it from any careless move. But maybe something did happen we weren't aware of.

In fact, many years later, when I decided to offer that ultimate gift to the right man, the one I had saved it for, I didn't experience any of the phenomena I expected. Not the immense pain, not the sublime joy, not the bloody sheet, not the profound, immediate, and permanent transformation that was supposed to take place in my body and soul.

Unfortunately I can’t insert this in a lecture, dear boys - and girls, especially. But then, I guess you know more than I do about the subject.

Anyway, this happened, or rather failed to happen - after Costantino had already moved to America - on the torrid August day when Cesare and I decided to put an end to what changing social mores now deemed an embarrassing condition for a twenty-two-year-old girl. I felt neither pain nor pleasure. Trying not to be noticed, I kept peeking under the sheets but didn't see any blood stains. As to the transformation that would make a woman of me, it simply didn't happen. I would look in the mirror and keep seeing the same black-haired girl - a girl and not a woman - during our engagement and the two fruitless years of our marriage.

Between one dream and another I slept until the flight attendant woke me with the usual steaming white face cloth. Below me lay the incomparable beauty of Manhattan.

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