Here too, however, one was not supposed to stop or ask questions. My mother was always in a hurry, speeding through the arches of the portico, through the pure winter air, shiny with hoarfrost and blue – the only colour in that world of greys. Her veil fell on to the collar of her fur coat, and she whispered to the bouquet of tea roses clutched in her hands: ‘Soon, in this place, we will be at the end, on the far side of the last cloister.’ It was impossible to understand those words exactly. All that was clear was that our destination was somewhere else, at the end of something, beyond the vaults and the gardens, beyond the great mossy arches and the distant relatives whom I never knew, each renowned in the sciences, literature and the military. They lay beneath enormous sepulchral statues – ‘Grief’ with her cracked zither; the ‘Ululaters’ who were pure wail wrapped in drapery; black ‘Time’, with his raised hourglass (like the Wizard of Latemar who lifted his fatal lantern to one’s face) – some of these statues having been sculpted by my relatives themselves.

At a certain point, we would meet up with my older cousins, their lively little noses, Zarina’s laughing Japanese eyes, their kisses and perfume mixing oddly with the smell of fresh coffee, a smell everyone seemed to carry about them in that city. All of it was woven into an even more agonizing intrigue in that realm of dark angels, that enormous stony horror with its icy breath, and the marvellous gaiety of a morning beyond the city, the fragrance exuding from their bouquets of white carnations, the recollection of the large, shadowy rooms from which they had come and to which we would return for breakfast, with a charming table covered with flowers, where cupids dived into small silver bowls, and the deep walnut cupboards surely still contained treasures … My mother, arm in arm with my older cousins, forgot I was there. And the great hurry we had been in to get there, also forgotten.

Every so often we passed a particularly large tomb and we stopped for a minute to read the inscription – Laudomiae Rizzoli, spe lachrymata; Federicus Comes Isolani sibe ipse et suis aedificavit: Vale, cara anima! – which inspired neither greater or lesser dread than other harrowing recitatives and declamations:

Farewell, Falada, who ascends,

Farewell, Queen, who descends,

If your mother were to know

Her pain would be her end …

or:

I wait, I wait in the night’s dark,

And open the door if one knocks,

Good luck follows bad,

And comes without art …

And everything took on terrifying life in the brief comments around me, behind the veils and furs: ‘Anna Pepoli, poor unhappy thing! How much suffering she endured for that scoundrel …’ Or: ‘Fabrizio and Bianca … a tragedy for the entire family, a moment of insanity’, and before my eyes spread abstract visions of classic massacres – Bluebeard, his seven wives immersed in their own blood, and Anna, sister Anna, who scans the horizon from the tower sadly and in vain.