Among Gladys Vucetich’s books there was one slightly more modern than Fairy Nix and it was illustrated by a brilliant artist who drew his characters’ eyes without eyelids, leaving in those empty orbs a watery and funereal light so that they resembled the eyes of a mermaid or statue. The very presence of Gladys Vucetich, whose eyes were so light as to appear empty, was laden with new mysteries, as was her appellation of ‘Godmother’ – ‘Who is Gladys Vucetich, Mama?’ ‘She is your godmother.’ This nomenclature immediately evoked that horoscopic baptismal scene, occurring so often in fairy tales, in which each of the twelve fairies – indeed, the Fairy Godmother – brings her gift to the cradle of the newborn princess. However, the gift alluded to by the fairy tale was not, of course, the dolls given to me by Gladys Vucetich, but rather to be found within certain surprising phrases that escaped her while her watery eyes stared at me without batting an eyelash, her cane clearing the street like the Fairy Gambero’s wand in the magic forest Brocéliande on the night of the Secular Council: ‘You know you were born on a Sunday? You will see many things that others don’t.’ And placing a hard finger on the tiny blue vein that was still visible between my eyes, she said: ‘You are lucky, my little one. You have Solomon’s knot.’

There were scenes, however, from fairy tales that, according to those illustrations, took place under the immense vaults of a crypt, decorated with palms and drapes, but they were really too monumental for me to remember any particular figure. Inserted behind these images, like a second slide in a magic lantern, was the great town, the great walled-in territory of the Certosa, the metropolitan cemetery to which I had been taken for several years on All Saints’ Day. It was an impressive landscape of graves, and the fact that it had once been a vast seventeenth-century monastery made it a cemetery like no other. The sombre structure encompassed great porticoes, corridors and courtyards, suggesting a scene out of a Spanish tragedy during the era of Alfieri – all romantic madness dedicated to exquisite malice, forbidden loves and redemptive wars, but for me it was eternally and exclusively a gloomy fairy palace.

In the great noble chapels flanked by porticoes, in the immense covered passages stretching from cloister to cloister, wing to wing, pleading marble hands reached out from sepulchral monuments, their garlands still deteriorating, their flowers still dying. The hands of pale, crying women gripped truncated columns and stone medallions, their heads veiled by their arms or by the corner of a shroud. Oh, how I knew those hands. Palms lifted in prohibition: ‘Never sit on the edge of a fountain, don’t ever buy condemned meat …’ – fingers that sealed lips – ‘And you shouldn’t speak or laugh for seven years, seven months, and seven days …’ Tall figures stooped over, often holding a child, bringing the child reluctantly, shielding the child with great wings, like the unknown figure with the yellow headband – Fairy Nix, the godmother, leading the child, the little neophyte, fascinated and terrified, towards arcane places, her eyes empty, like those of Gladys Vucetich.