It was the first time Silvia was among other children in a camp and not alone, as usual, with her grandfather and the maid with whom she lived year round. Her grandfather had brought her there on the crossbar of his bike, which had a seat just for her. He was dressed, as always, in black: a black alpaca cape, floppy bow tie, big black hat and tall boots, also black, made of goatskin, with buttons up the side. He had entrusted her to the nuns, who seemed quite happy to receive her, treating her like a special guest.

The great discovery for Silvia during her stay at the camp were the smells: she could clearly detect, in the meadows, the smells of various herbs and plants, without knowing the names of one from the other: wild mint, sage, rosemary or else simple weeds, dandelion or fern or crab grass or other weeds that stank instead, which the boys stuck under her nose on purpose. The grove of fir and larch trees at the crest of the hill, where they went in the afternoons, contained other, entirely different smells: pine cones, pine nuts, pine needles and certain bell-shaped berries that Silvia called ‘The Dead’, much to the children’s delight.

Even the insects had a distinct smell: the grasshoppers Silvia expertly caught smelled of verbena, while certain bugs or stag beetles smelled of celluloid, or emanated this scent once trapped in little cages that one of the nuns had taught them to make from strands of grass. One of Silvia’s favourites was the smell of her bed and of the sheets that saturated the whole dormitory: it smelled like a thunderstorm, and mixed up with it at times was a faint smell of baby sweat and pee that she liked a great deal.

Silvia thought of her grandfather now and then, but in a fleeting way, and she didn’t think she missed him. She thought of him in the late afternoons right after dinner, after the rosary in the small chapel when, still seated outside on the grass, she looked and, most of all, listened to the swallows who cried and flew quite low over their heads and over the camp while the oldest of the children sounded the bell. At dusk the swallows stood out sharply against the sky which was pale purple and yellow on the horizon, while a faint smell of incense emerged from the chapel door, and this, together with the damp smell that rose from the fields of tall grass just at the base of the chapel, aroused in Silvia an emotion she’d never felt and didn’t know what to call. And it was clear that this emotion, aroused by those smells rendered chilly at dusk, closed up her throat and made her want to cry.

Silvia asked a nun if she could dress like all the others: in the grey canvas smock and red rubber sandals. But the nun, to Silvia’s astonishment, said No.

‘Did somebody say something to you about your clothes or your toys?’ the Mother Superior asked her. ‘Did they tease you, or scold you?’ Silvia said No. No one had said a thing, but without knowing how to explain it to the nun (she was only seven years old), Silvia felt estranged from the others, and in some sense she was ashamed of her dolls and toys as well as her clothes: in fact, she let the others take her toys, she didn’t care about them. Silvia felt estranged: but this didn’t mean that the other children treated her differently or excluded her from their games. No, on the contrary, she was always invited or coaxed or urged to do something, to play some role, even an important one, in their games and in building their little huts. Silvia didn’t feel estranged on account of her family – maybe precisely because, apart from her grandfather, she had no family – but on account of her birth. The other children were utterly amazed to hear this and, instead of considering her different, as she thought they would, they were filled with curiosity and questions that Silvia couldn’t answer.