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[...] I settled myself almost on the threshold, so that I would feel only the cool air, and tried to get my nerves under control.

What had I done that was so terrible, in the end. Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed,…

But my anxieties didn’t disappear. I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy. Bianca, I sometimes thought, is unlikable, and I suffered for her. Then I discovered that she was much loved, she had girl and boy frie…

Yet I began to pay more attention to myself, as if I wanted to keep the body I was accustomed to, put off its departure. When my daughters’ boyfriends came to the house, I tried to make myself more attractive to receive them. I barely saw them, when they entered, when they left, saying goodbye to m…

I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehe…

I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, …