The days of agitated cries of What-did-you-bring-me associated with those bags were over for me. Now, smiling silently, my heart in tumult, I walked hand in hand between my older cousins as we headed towards the small green iron table surrounded by tall wooden chairs, these also green and dotted with hard little bubbles of paint, ready to drink our tea under the Cedar of Lebanon. My mother came down, having recently awoken, wearing a violet kimono and carrying two or three pillows, a yellow-rose print on their thick cotton cases. Kisses and minor exclamations ensued: ‘But why have you come down so soon?’ ‘Goodness, I’ve been up for over an hour.’ ‘Didn’t you sleep?’ ‘And yet how beautiful you are, a rose.’ ‘Oh, but you needn’t say so, I hardly sleep any more.’ ‘But what a splendid afternoon.’ ‘Oh, yes, it seems like a dream to be here once again.’ Then my mother would see me, a smile slipping across her lips, and on the round table, amidst polite laughter, the beautiful bags opened up like corollas beneath glowing faces. Two of those faces, my mother’s and Maria Sofia’s, were velvet-smooth and peach-brown and they looked identical, even though Maria Sofia was younger. Zarina’s face, covered in golden freckles, had a Japanese look. Her real name was Maria Cesarina, but she had called herself Zarina in honour of the unfortunate Russian empress. And in the silence, thick with midday heat and cicadas, small objects emerged from the bags and were placed in a circle on the table.

It is, perhaps, perverse, but maybe also useful, for a child to be brought up among people who are older than she is by at least twenty or thirty years. It is certain, in any case, that my childhood, in many ways already asymmetrical, was, in an indescribably peaceful manner, superimposed upon by another, already lived – that of my older cousins and their brothers, the last children to wear straw hats with wide blue ribbons, the last children whose childhoods hadn’t, in fact, been stolen from them. I do not want to dwell excessively on those austere and bewitching toys I was in the process of inheriting on those afternoons – the dark walnut dolls’ house, its rooms so warm and sweet and solemn; the bed with the ornate headboard; the stout little rocking chair; the goblet-flower basin with the tiny blue jug in the shape of a closed flower bud. And the minuscule green wool carpets, the quilted bedspreads and that incongruous bench, sturdy on its corrugated legs, which belonged to the dolls’ house, but evoked those long periods outdoors when I had been inspired to create a string of miniature vegetable patches in the darkest corners of the garden, patiently girding them with twigs from the spirea shrubs. These toys had made it through a war, having crossed, with a heroic and immeasurable leap, the abyss that had split apart the century, in order to come to rest on the fragile edge of the last ridge where we still endured – but for how long? The last toys, the dying proof of an era when, in relationship to childhood, the wink did not yet exist, a time when play was both a prophecy of, and a preparation for, that singular and always insufficient répétition générale de la vie, which is, in fact, childhood: the carriage which is only a smaller carriage, the wooden horse a miniature of a real horse, the doll who is a little woman or girl – but never an ambiguous, symbolic puppet. Just like the three-year-old toddler in jewels and ribbons holding a rose, framed on a wall in my bedroom, looked more like a plump little grandmother, and was, in any case, the only creature I yearned for in that adult-filled childhood of mine. (‘It’s an old portrait of the Princess of Linguaglossa, the daughter of Prime Minister Crispi. Poor thing, she is no longer of this world,’ I heard it said, enigmatically, at home.)