My skin turned transparent. All of a sudden all my pores opened up until my body became a single great pore. My body like glass. My face, too. My veins, my arteries, my capillaries. I can see everything. The red and purple highways crisscross to form a beautiful cobalt blue. My ovaries are two little chickpeas suspended in midair. One is bigger and lower than the other, because of my period, which is due any minute. Inside, a red and lumpy pulp churns around like juice in a juicer. My kidneys are two beans, just as I imagined them when our teacher tried to explain their shape to us in primary school. I’m starting to think of my body as a vegetable garden. My lungs are coated with black moss, here and there, and the white splashes are rare now, rare but very beautiful.

My heart. My heart pulses, veiled by a nylon stocking, like the ones bandits wear. A little condom with life inside it. A bandit on the run from death but also from love and the extremity of pain. Because too much death has lain in wait for him, too much pain has buried him, too much love is strangling him.

My brain. My brain. My brain. Nothing but dreams. Many photographs and no sound.

When I was in the car with you and Dad, lots of things came into my head. I loved the car journeys we took; I liked driving all around the coast of Sicily, admiring the landscape that passed alongside us while infinite quantities of thought-molecules wrought havoc in my little brain. It was surprising how the coastline changed over a distance of only a few kilometers: from sand to cliffs, from cliffs to rock pools, to sand again and then, unexpectedly, to hills. A big, green hill ending in a sheer drop to the sea.

I woke first and we set off early in the morning. I couldn’t bear you waking me up, I didn’t want to get in your way. So I got up and washed and by the time you woke up you found me clean and neatly dressed. It was quite normal for you to find me already up and ready—you never paid me any special compliments. Perhaps if I had a child I would praise him, every now and again, just to make sure he didn’t feel unwanted … to avoid making him feel incompetent—that’s it. While Dad never even noticed what I was wearing, you studied me for minutes at a time.

“Why did you put on that skirt? It doesn’t suit you, it needs washing.” “What are you doing with those shoes? Going dancing? Put on a pair of sneakers … wear the ones from last year, the dirty ones. We’re going to the seaside, to Grandma’s. We’re going to spend Easter there.”