In Farthest Seas

It was Silvia – she had discovered him before I did – who told me: “Look at his hands while he talks.”

He was standing there, his legs slightly apart (with hiking boots, we were in the mountains); he was telling a story, one hand held against his chest, the other raised. His hands were big and long, his fingers kept together, extended; and his gesturing, almost hieratic. Maybe the story was one to laugh at, a declaration along the lines of: “My sisters are two boneheads.”

For our tastes at the time – mine and Silvia’s – that stylization of the gesture and hands, clearly spontaneous, was attractive, exciting. And he, immediately different from our usual companions on those hikes, who were so uninspiring.

The information Gigi had given my parents – they hadn’t asked him for any – was the following: our new hiking companion came from Milan, he was already earning nine hundred lire a month and was the son of the Colonel of the Carabinieri.

All three pieces of information bore no interest for me. Only, I was somewhat put off by the presence of a colonel. On the Alpine Club excursions there were girls who always wanted to walk in front of everyone because “the daughters of colonels have to be first”.

As far as Milan was concerned, it must have been important then, too, because it set the fashion trends. He wore a hat with a bright coloured ribbon (everyone else’s was black) and the rascals in the street jeered at him. To tell the truth, on this point I sided with Cuneo’s street kids, who were provincial and conservative.

I had even been bothered by his white cloth cap, round with a turned-up brim like in the American Navy, when I saw him for the first time on the tram for Demonte. On top of that, he was playing a kind of harmonica. How young he was! I felt old and rotten.

The first signs that he had of our existence had been rather comical. Gigi, who had a sense of humor but was still one of Cuneo’s right-minded citizens, had started warning him: “The Romano girls will be there. We’ll have to behave.”

And another little incident had given him a curious idea about our family. The usual friends were going up – I wasn’t there – the Stura Valley, and just outside Demonte he noticed with surprise a little hill left partially wild and partially cultivated, encircled by an imposing wall formed by lots of concrete balusters, and on the hilltop a kind of terrace resting on four pillars adorned with vines. “Why, who could all that belong to?” he asked. “It’s ours,” Silvia said; and he thought that she wanted to be funny. But Gigi confirmed it. In fact, the strange hill was “the Estate” for us, and that little terrace was “the Pinnacle”. Up there, my father had dreamed of building a villa.

He had discovered them, before really discovering me. After a hike, we were returning on the tram from Demonte, and they had come down from Boves to wait for us at the Borgo station. He, through the tram window, saw them and was struck. “Who in the world are those two people?” “They’re the Romano girls’ parents.”

He was shocked, he told me later, actually indignant that such extraordinary people could be named so nonchalantly, almost with disregard.

They were standing there, still, and smiling in silence. Her eyes, bright and deep, made her beauty mysterious; and Papà, who was older, with his handlebar mustache, certainly had a festive and indulgent air about him. They were smiling as though out of a sort of altruistic happiness, naïve and at the same time noble. They seemed great people to him, like royals, and yet simple, kind.

Their unchanged presence – sudden and dizzying – appeared to him a long time after. They had been dead for years. It was once again an apparition: a dream. He told it to me right away – at night – still in the grip of fear and joy: “The doorbell rings, and I go to answer. It’s them, smiling as always, but soaking from the rain. ‘Come in,’ I say ‘come in and dry yourselves.’ They say, ‘No, we have to go. We just want to tell you that everything is okay now. We’re together.’ I don’t know the exact words now, but that’s more or less what they said. And I felt a great sense of peace, of security. Even if it was very sad that they didn’t want to come in, and I understood that I wouldn’t see them again.”

On the hikes, I was the favorite of the leader, the small (in stature), energetic and amusing Gigi. And so I was invited – I alone – to climb the famous Meja with the boys.

There’s a little photograph. I’m crouched down between the two sides of a couloir, my braids hanging down over my white shirt. While I was there, he (we called him Monti) handed me two tiny edelweiss flowers: “These are for the signorina.”

Years later he told me that I’d looked like Minnehaha. I was still flattered by it. Minnehaha was the daughter of an Indian chief, and it hadn’t been all that many years since we’d grown out of Salgari’s books.


The first conversation was in Boves, on the road called “of the Madonna”, because it led to the church Madonna dei Boschi. Silvia walked in front of us with Detto, who was courting her a bit; he had come to accompany Detto, his friend at the time. They had been to Venice together for the Biennale, and they showed us photos in which a girl appeared. I was always annoyed when other girls were referenced in my presence, and this time, too, their trip immediately lost all interest for me.

So, walking after dinner on that road, he spoke of Modigliani. Everyone talked about him in those days, and everyone (the foolish ones, which is to say almost everyone) acted outraged: the long necks, the flat colors, etcetera. I loved Modigliani deeply then; but he couldn’t have known this, he didn’t know anything about me. I mean that the topic didn’t have the aim of pleasing me. He spoke of Modigliani with admiration, in a grave, serious tone: and he didn’t know that “admiring Modigliani” (what that meant) was truly what mattered in life, for me.

Maybe this first real exchange was somewhat similar to that other fateful one with Giovanni. But Modigliani was much more important to me than Kant had been then.

The road – the woods on one side, on the other the meadows – would have been dark, had it not been for the moon. On the way back (the two of us ahead) we had before us, unfurled in the sky, the plough of the Great Bear. For my whole life since then it has helped me to gauge my personal situation in the cosmos.

I was unfearing, on the bicycle. That bicycle was our habitual means of transportation. Once again the road was called “of the Madonna of the woods”, after the Madonna dei Boschi.

There sleeps, encircled by dreaming woods, a far-off city began an unwritten poem.

I was near another village that was still under the shadow of the Bisalta, Cuneo’s mountain; it wasn’t really a road, so much as a stony mule track. On my way back, the descent kept becoming steeper and steeper, and I kept rolling faster down: the brakes weren’t working. At a sharp turn I became frightened, and I suddenly decided to throw myself to the ground. I don’t know if he was the one to lift me up; I know that he was standing there, and I, panting, leaned against his chest – sturdy but not rigid, warm and at the same time fresh. I could feel his heart beating.

The next month in Paris I had a big round bruise on my arm. My dark red dress was made of silk veil, very low cut, with drooping points at the bottom and shoulders. The color of the mark matched my dress. I was at the Café de Paris with Lionello Venturi; the tall and gallant violinist came over to ask me what I wanted to hear, and I suggested Veracini’s Largo (the musical choice had to do with Boves).

Back from Paris, I had – seemingly out of necessity – an excuse to see him. That he worked in a bank was supremely indifferent to me; if anything, slightly comical.

I laid on the counter – it was the first time I’d set foot in a bank – my French bills, and the coins too. My unconstraint was unawareness; a grouch of a man – whom I judged “the manager” – irritably pushed back the coins: you couldn’t exchange those. I nonetheless had the gall to ask for him. Now I know that my assuredness was not so much for the importance I gave to my being retour de Paris, as for the electrifying expectation of astonishing him, of witnessing his emotion. He appeared, pale, and astonished, yes, but, it seemed to me, painfully so. What I noticed right away, and it made him seem infinitely pitiable to me, was, on the lapel of his jacket – not one of his usual ones, but grey, a bit shabby – a few pointed pins. Almost as though his job were humble, servile, like a shop boy, a tailor’s apprentice. But once I was outside, my cruel jubilance immediately stamped out that pity. I murmured to myself, as I crossed the piazza, the words of a little song, heard who knows when: “you’re pale, you’re pale, you’re pale for me…”


I was crossing the piazza, alone, and I saw him from afar, with someone. When I was a few paces from him he broke away and came towards me. He said that they would be going – he and Gigi – to the Pagarì, if I wanted to join them. It was even better than a declaration of love: I was considered equal, and surely they hadn’t forgotten that I was a woman. It had already been that way for the Meja; but this time, whose idea had it been?

The Pagarì Refuge, legendary for us, was a tiny cabin at a three-thousand-meter altitude, held there with steel cables. (“You mountaineers in the Maritime Alps, you put your cabins up on the peaks,” the great Mezzalama had said.)

It was November, we needed to light the wood stove. He chopped wood in a little clearing and he grew warm from this exertion, such that, despite the cold, his shirt gleamed white in the twilight. There was something at once adventurous, exotic (in the sense of far-off countries) and intimate, in that image, as though already lived (or dreamed). It matched, or rather expressed all the risk and mystery there was in that cold light, in that solitude. In the stories by Lawrence that I had just read, I had found this; and for a moment I felt an attraction for him that was violent, secret, but I believe already tenaciously deep. It wasn’t an idea, it was a sensation: head-spinning, but not unsettling. Rather, familiar.

That night, each bundled up in thorny military blankets like three giant newborns or dead sailors to lower into the sea, we lay in a row – I in the middle – on the higher floor, I suppose to receive a little residual warmth. From a small window some feeble light entered. In the wild wind the walls, the steel cables, everything vibrated, whistled, hissed. Motionless on their backs, my two companions had lowered their wool brims all the way down to their noses and were sleeping: or were pretending to. I could make out, in the glimmering trail of light, his profile, which looked funny to me. I laughed silently to myself. I was – who knows why – happy.