The night before, in the hotel lobby, she saw ice axes, ropes, crampons. They needed to leave before dawn. Around four o’clock in the morning, the lady thought she heard a car. After an hour, since she couldn’t get back to sleep, she got out of bed, thinking she’d go up the mountain on her own. But she found everyone in the lobby, with the ropes and crampons. No one said hello. The car that was supposed to take them up to the cable car hadn’t come, and now they were waiting for the milk truck.

The hotel manager surveyed the street and called them after half an hour. The milk truck was enormous, without side rails, and was already crammed with people sitting on milk canisters. The lady nodded yes when the guide called her, and this was how she let herself be hoisted on to the truck.

Keeping balance on the truck was extremely difficult: the road snaked uphill, and as the truck rounded each turn, it would veer to one side. The villagers, with their baskets, were anchored to the vehicle, but the gentlemen, including the guide, were an endangered bunch, and they clutched the shoulders of older women who seemed to be made of stone. The lady, seated on a basket between two canisters, was the most stable, and she was already starting to forget about herself and about her affliction. She was intent on drinking in, at every turn, apparitions of the tall white mountain, continually swallowed up by the dark pine forests. But she was aware that the gentleman was close to her, looking uncomfortable, because he was searching with one hand for something to hold on to. She was quick to grab the hand. She glanced at him and saw, through the wind, that he, a bit embarrassed, was thanking her.

As soon as she made contact with his hand, the lady experienced intense pleasure. The hand was smooth, dry and warm, and it clasped her own only as a means of support, that was all. The lady knew he could give her nothing more. But rather than feeling the usual humiliation, she felt a calm sense of possession.

That clasp, untethered from the ground, in the middle of the whirlwind of jolts, sharp turns and the ghostly backdrop of the unfurling mountains, was closer to the deceptive intimacy of their encounters in her dreams, as opposed to real contact. But even though, as in those dreams, it contained a precariousness and, above all, a sense of solitude, the warmth it gave off was real and comforting, almost familiar.

When it was time to step down from the truck, she sensed that the gentleman hurried to pull back his hand. She had already dismissed him, in any case. A car accompanied her back to the hotel, where she found a telegram from her husband. She had just enough time to pack her bags, and left on the afternoon coach.

‘La signora’

Written in 1948, first published in the collection La villeggiante (Einaudi, 1975).