And suddenly, that world of arcane sayings, of petrifying acts that froze the heart (those acts that, I knew, if one day we had really gone to the end, in silence, without ever turning back, we might have been able to undo, thus freeing the entire place from its spell, making it into a huge illuminated ballroom), that world opened abruptly, turned a corner and in a well-lit courtyard, and then in the semicircle of a chapel closed off by a wrought-iron gate, and then on a white wall, blind and conclusive like the end of a horizon – there, a miracle happened. Suddenly substituted upon the delicate marble in the place of encoded names, of hieroglyphic inscriptions, were their names – and my very own, those which I myself had worn around my neck since birth on Gladys Vucetich’s gold pendant: Vittoria, Maria Angelica, Marcella, Cristina … That little chapel where the carnations and the roses added a freshness that was still more dazzling, like adding morning to morning, that was the true and only enigma, the crux of everything, not only of the great Certosa, but of everything – of the damsel led by the shoulders to the secret ball; of the room that transformed into a canal; of the empty eyes, the serpent ring, the underground caves; and of the blood, the silence and the prohibition. Of the girl with the rose in whom childhood and old age silently entwined their shared secret …

My mother uttered her soft, habitual, bloodcurdling words: ‘There is Grandmother, and over there is Grandfather, pray for them …’ and I read, under the name of she whom I had seen so defenceless in her portrait as a girl – the great, heavy drapes ready to let monstrous love creep in, to let the Divine Prince force his way in to her – I read under her name, which was also mine, Maria Angelica, two words: ‘suavis anima’ and next to that, under the name of my grandfather, Marcello, a name which was also mine: ‘anima fortis’. ‘Pray for them,’ my mother repeated, with the look of someone compelled simply by the force of her heart to liberate the imprisoned couple, the heroic, bewitched love. And at those abstract and reverential words, the great velvet curtain of filial compassion closed over me too, a cloud of tears obscuring my eyes. That was the fairy tale, terrible and radiant, resolved one moment and unresolvable: the eternal, ever-returning in dreams, the provisions for a pilgrimage, the golden nut to conserve in your mouth, to crack between your teeth in a moment of extreme danger. I looked for my small handkerchief and muffled my sobs while my mother, her eyes remote, placed her gloved hand on the back of my neck.

‘La noce d’oro’

Submitted for the Teramo Prize in 1964. Posthumously published in Sotto falso nome (Adelphi, 1998).