Gianna sat down in front of the dressing table mirror, glanced at her reflection, and thought that, for a middle-aged lady, she wasn't doing badly at all. But then her gaze fell on her neck and all her good humor went out the window. Her relaxed, not to mention withered, skin revealed her fifty-five years in full. As Nora Ephron, sophisticated author of comedies for the cinema but also of novels, claimed, her neck, together with her hands, is a ruthless detector of a woman's age
The New York writer had just published a booklet titled The neck drives me crazy. Torments and bliss of being a woman. Gianna hadn't read it, but she had read the interview with Nora Ephron in a magazine. She the author declared, with a certain nonchalance, that she needed eight hours a week for the necessary "maintenance", a bit like her for a car that she has accumulated several kilometres.
Gianna began to mentally calculate the time she dedicated to taking care of herself. When she got to ten hours—she'd never thought it would take that long—she shrugged irritably and muttered, "What nonsense!" she spreads the cream on her face and neck, an essential operation before applying the foundation. At the same time she glanced at the chiffon dress lying on the bed, an impalpable little thing in pastel colors, which had cost her a fortune, but which fit her perfectly.
"It looks like a little girl," the salesgirl had told her when she tried it on.
Of course! Hers was a generation that refused to age and, either because life expectancy had lengthened, or because of the improved standard of living compared to her parents' era, at her age a woman not only looked like a girl, but he could still hope to cook. Not that that was the case with her. She was married, very married for thirty-three years, a troglodyte in terms of marriage, from the "till death do you part" series, like that hilarious fiction they broadcast on Sky.
"You're still on the high seas, I see," Fabio considered, looking out the bedroom door.
"There's time, isn't there?" she answered absently.
"You've been spending forever getting ready lately," observed her husband, who was already shaved, dressed, and perfumed. An almost sixty-year-old in excellent shape. As impatient and snappy as when he was thirty, and he paced the hallway with his car keys in his hand, waiting for her. While she, she realized, she was getting slower and slower.
"I'm going to get gas," he informed her.
Gianna was grateful to him for that idea. At least she wouldn't have him around for a while.
As she swiped on her mascara, she couldn't help but think about what awaited her today: a wedding after three funerals that had followed each other at a gruesome distance. She wasn't superstitious but in those months, six months to be exact, she had begun to lose some of her sanity, rather rational, lingering morbidly on those strange coincidences of hers. Up to that moment she hadn't been familiar with death nor had she thought about it much, relegating it to the back of her mind, as a remote possibility. Her parents, although elderly, enjoyed moderate health and, apart from her grandparents, who died when she was a child, she had not been touched by any mourning.
It all started with a phone call from Luciana, a childhood friend, on the grayest day of a rainy November. After a few pleasantries, she had informed her that Dario, her first boyfriend, had died. Gianna had been so shocked as not to grasp, at the moment, her paradox. In other words, that she was the very one who had once taken him away to give her the terrible news.
"When is the funeral?" he had asked, not surprisingly, even before inquiring how he was dead. She was terrified by the ritual of the funeral, by the atmosphere that breathed it, by the mourners and, yes, also by the body exposed as if it were a dressed up mannequin.
"We don't know yet: in case of suicide it takes a long time."
"Suicide?" she had replied like an idiot.
"Dario committed suicide with carbon monoxide, locking himself in the car," Luciana had told her, bluntly, but also without a minimum of sensitivity.
"But he wasn't the type to do that!" he cried.
"I know. He was a superficial and irresponsible person, but he was a positive man. After all, people change» commented Luciana.
"Do you know why he did it?" Gianna had asked imagining a murky and unfortunate love story.
Luciana confided that she had heard from her brother that Dario had recently taken to gambling and owed a lot of money to a moneylender. That was probably the cause.
"I can't believe it," she muttered, increasingly confused.
"Me neither. And since yesterday I've been thinking about him, about how we were» concluded Luciana.
That was exactly what Gianna did after the phone call. A leap into the past, to "the way we were": a generation that dreamed of changing the world but which, at least in the reality of the provincial city in which they lived, put romantic love before the universal one they talked about so much.
Dario had appeared in his clique of friends one summer afternoon. Blond, with features marked on the verge of vulgarity, he immediately made himself noticed for his tight ocher trousers, black lace shirt open on his tanned chest, and Mick Jagger-esque lips. As soon as he uttered the first words, revealing a childish but embarrassing stutter, his sexy image of him was greatly reduced. Apparently he didn't care, and when anyone asked him why he stammered he brought up some mysterious childhood trauma, the details of which he never disclosed. His gossipers claimed that he probably started stammering after the birth of the brother he was jealous of. Nothing so mysterious or fascinating, then, but just a trivial reaction to an emotional problem that affected almost all children. In any case, that handicap and the consequent vulnerability that came with it gripped the girls almost as much as his sensuality, partly innate, partly constructed.
Gianna fell in love with him from the first moment and Dario, whose antennas picked up the female vibrations even before they manifested themselves, one evening when they had lingered in the garden below the house, kissed her in a way that stirred her all up. However, he didn't ask her to be her girlfriend, not in a formal way, even if that kiss meant much more to Gianna than the words he could barely pronounce. And she found herself, like a Penelope without a canvas, waiting for him to show up in the garden to invite her out of her or just to give her some attention. Not a foregone conclusion, since Dario wandered from one to the other of his friends with the nonchalance of a seasoned play boy. In the end, only she and Luciana, his friend-enemy, remained to contend for the trophy.
Gianna didn't remember how the feud between the two of them had started, thinking about it there hadn't even been a triggering reason other than the fact that Gianna was a soap and water girl while Luciana, with exaggerated makeup like miniskirts, looked like a groupie looking for a band.
It ended up that Dario, in order not to offend anyone, divided himself equally between both, playing the role of good boy with Gianna and likeable villain with Luciana. But Dario kissed so well that he didn't have the strength to give him an ultimatum or leave him. Besides, he hoped that he would somehow be able to defeat her frenemy friend who, according to her, was all appearance and no substance, with her ever-shrinking skirts and thigh-high boots.
Only much later did she realize that those two were made for each other, and that Dario's strong sensual charge was the fruit of an animal instinct, behind which there was nothingness. But at sixteen the parameters with which he measured his feelings and his hormones in turmoil were quite different. Although he kept her on the ropes, or perhaps precisely because of this, Dario occupied her thoughts and her heart in such a visceral way that she would never have felt such intense emotions again, not even with Fabio, the boy she fell in love with at the age of twenty. years and ended up marrying. She filled the pages of the diary of the Peanuts writing his name, he composed naive verses alla Prévert that he would never let anyone read and, having no photographs of his beloved, he pasted all the snapshots of Mick Jagger, cutting them out of magazines. He listened Lady Jane of the Rolling Stones dreaming that instead of the rock star there was Dario singing, with that low and sexy voice, just for her. When he sang he didn't stammer and after all there wasn't much difference between Jane and Gianna.
In the following two years she jumped on that rope together with Luciana with many sighs and a few tears, interspersed with the unforgettable moments that he dedicated to her. Because when he was with her, Dario repaid her for all of her frustration and uncertainty. He could be tender, protective and he respected her, as if from a cliché that, after all, had not yet been replaced by sexual freedom.
So, to conquer him and definitively undermine her rival, Gianna decided to play her only precious card: that of virginity. One afternoon when Dario had a fever and there was nobody in her house, she curled up on the bed next to him. Soon she was overwhelmed by her feverish embraces starting to tremble and burn her, so much so that she flashed the suspicion that the virus from which she had been affected had infected her instantly. That was partly true, only that the virus wasn't the flu but a disease called infatuation or, as Gianna believed, love.
Dario began to undress her and Gianna let him do it. She wouldn't have resisted even later if he hadn't been overwhelmed by a coughing fit at some point. Evidently the time it took him to cough, drink some water and take a pill also served him to take stock of the situation and decide not to go through with it.
When the coughing finally stopped, Gianna picked up where they left off, putting in all the innocent sensuality she was capable of. But he stopped her by remarking: "It's better not, you're too young for these things." So he started kissing her again in that way as sweet as it was exciting of hers that he sent her into orbit but then left her there to wander, confused, in space.
After that time they were never alone again. And a month later, at one of the many parties attended by the whole clique, Dario didn't spare her a glance to dance all the time tied up with Luciana, breaking her heart. Since she was not devoted to victimhood, she stepped aside from that group of friends for other, newer and more congenial company.
Subsequently she met Fabio, a boy who was certainly more intelligent and stimulating than Dario. Whose horizons were not limited to the garden under the house or to the latest conquest, but ranged over various fields, involving her in her curiosities and in the desire to explore the world. In short, the right guy to grow up with. And if she sometimes happened to dream of Dario, when she woke up she chased away her nostalgia with the relief of having escaped well!
Over time, the garden was no longer a meeting place, however in the summer she often happened to run into Dario in the city's bathing establishment, where she went for lunch. For several years she had seen him in the company of a pretty brunette who was to become her wife and then young children, a boy and a girl. They seemed like a happy family, although Dario couldn't hide a certain impatience with the role of pater familias.
At forty he still had the same physique as when he was a boy, even if the vulgarity, once tempered by his youth, was fully manifesting itself in the features of his face. Otherwise, he was always similar to himself. When he was in front of a woman he liked, he stood in line and sniffed the prey, despite the presence of his wife.
That day in July, Gianna, stretched out on a towel, was about to fall asleep when the sun had suddenly darkened. She had opened her eyes and found him in front of her.
"Why all alone?" he had asked her.
"And you?" she had turned the question on to him, not seeing the brunette or the children who must have grown up by now.
"I am not alone, I am free. It's different."
Gianna had sat up asking him to explain himself better. Dario had taken a seat next to her and had told her that he was about to separate from her wife.
"I'm sorry," Gianna replied.
“I wasn't cut out for marriage,” he had pointed out. Then he'd looked deep into her eyes and whispered how the years had been kind to her. She was much more beautiful now than as a girl.
For a moment Gianna had felt a slight shiver that had taken her back twenty years. Dario, whose radar was always ready to seize the slightest opportunity, immediately went on the attack. He had made her realize how nice it would be, after so long, to finish what they had started. She had thought about it sometimes. Not her?
Gianna had told him that she was happily married and had no intention of cheating on her husband.
"Oh," he replied slyly, "they all say that."
It was his arrogance, in the end, that made her react. “Well, I'm not all and I'd like to sunbathe in peace, if you don't mind.'
Dario had taken the blow and, after having caressed her cheek with an affectionate gesture, had disappeared.
Around this time, as he'd warned her, he'd separated from his wife, who had been entrusted with their two teenage children, and had started flicking back and forth from one girl to another, all younger than him. Naturally, it was Luciana who had informed her, and whenever they met, she would update her on their common lost love. "The age of his girlfriends is inversely proportional to hers, so much so that it borders on the ridiculous," she had commented one day.
Gianna had seen him in a downtown store a few months before her suicide. Her face looked heavy, as if she were drinking or something, while her body was always dry. She was wearing a rocker leather jacket over skinny jeans. Her mouth was still Mick Jagger's, but her lines resembled Keith Richards'. “Two Rolling Stones in one” she had thought as she greeted him.
They had talked a little about this and that, and at a certain point a girl had approached, who up to that moment had been busy looking at the items of clothing. She took his arm and whispered something in her ear. She was too loving to be her daughter, but young enough to be her mate. In fact, he had presented her to her as such. She couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-two years old.
At the funeral, which Gianna had finally attended with the support of two anti-anxiety pills, he hadn't seen her. Instead, besides the parents and brother, there were his wife and children, their old friends and many people she didn't know.
And, of course, Luciana.
They had kept to themselves the whole time, after having conveyed condolences to their parents and a last farewell to the mannequin composed in the coffin. A vision worthy of an eighties gothic film. They had dressed him in a dark gray suit, clothing that Dario hadn't even worn on his wedding day, preferring a white tunic and a pair of black trousers. She had revealed it to him Luciana, who only then had told her that he had attended her wedding, together with her boyfriend.
"It's not him," Gianna said to herself, rejecting her disappointment at not having been invited to the wedding and forcing herself to look at the body. She was fifty-four years old and the time had come to face death. That man with the ashen face and hard features was the simulacrum of Dario and never as on that occasion had Gianna asked herself the reason for that rite, that exhibition. While realizing that she was dealing with ancient and deep religious traditions, she had reinforced the belief that it was a somewhat barbaric and nonsensical practice. She did not understand what comfort she could offer the exposure of the body to her relatives. Gianna she believed in the survival of the soul after death, she believed in the divine and subtle energy that leaves the body for another dimension that she, she hoped, was one of peace, light and serenity. However, her rationality prevented her from believing in God, in the conventional sense. So she saw herself as a seeker of faith and sometimes she envied those who had been kissed by it.
Dario had certainly not been one of these. He who knows what darkness he had entered to decide to end his life, and he who knows what had been going through his mind in the last moments. Was his act of courage or cowardice? Knowing Dario and his love for life, he was certainly the first. At that thought, he felt like crying.
"What a waste!" she thought, walking out of the chapel because he desperately needed a breath of fresh air.
"Everything OK?" Luciana asked, reaching her.
«Yes, well» replied Gianna «I was thinking about the meaning of all this, I mean, doesn't it seem strange to you that the first dead person I see in my life is Dario?».
Luciana, who had never been particularly sensitive or mystical, looked at her as if she were out of her mind. She shook her head and replied, "The service is about to begin."
In church, while she was afraid of fainting from the fumes of the incense, Gianna dwelt on that question for a long time. Was it perhaps a sign of her destiny? If she was like that she couldn't get it. The solemn function that followed of her, however, made her understand that there are moments in which one must let go of rational thoughts and abandon oneself, heart and mind, to the mystery.
That was one of those moments.
He joined in the prayers, let himself be carried away by the atmosphere, finding in it, on the whole, a certain comfort.
Later, following the coffin with Luciana, she realized that she was finally saying goodbye to her youth. A period that had lasted for a long time compared to his biological age.
In the following days she returned to her usual life: work, family, a thousand commitments, but she felt different, as if something was missing. Since she didn't know how to interpret that feeling, she figured she had a physical impairment such as missing her little toe. Nothing serious or disabling, just a nuisance, an occasional twinge that reminded her of the shortness of life and the end of her dreams. But as the days went by and the routine returned to her she began to forget about Dario and her death.
Until one morning… She had just entered the office when the phone rang. She picked up the phone, more annoyed than curious. She hated those who called in the early morning, at dawn, as she used to say.
"Janna..."
The familiar, masculine voice trailed off after he said her name.
"Maximum?" she replied uncertainly.
Massimo started talking and crying at the same time making confused sounds. However Gianna understood, she understood something that she would never have thought could happen. Of her She slumped back in her office chair with the phone in her hand, her blood draining from her head and everything spinning around her. She now she saw nothing, only pitch darkness, from which she hoped never to emerge again.
But it emerged. With the feeling that someone had ripped out her heart and was still chewing it before spitting it out.
She grabbed her bag, let Marina, the colleague who looked at her stunned, say that she had to go and rushed to the hospital hoping she had misunderstood, hoping that…
When she saw Massimo slumped in an armchair in the emergency room waiting room and Fausta, Giuliana's mother crying desperately next to him, she understood that there was no more hope.
Giuliana, her best friend, her alter ego, the best part of herself, was gone forever. From then on and in the days to come, Gianna would never associate Giuliana with her death but with her departure, always saying her words when he spoke of her: "she's gone."
Astonished and without tears, she embraced Massimo and then Fausta, and sat next to them, waiting for them to put her friend's body back together before letting her family in.
On that bench she experienced moments of absolute emptiness, estranging herself from the present and from the people who were there with her. Until the thought of her husband emerged from the darkness that enveloped her, and she found the strength to call him. Fabio arrived immediately, hugged her in silence and Gianna felt, perceived her strength and solidity, a fixed point in a world that was crumbling under her feet.
"But how did it happen?" he asked her.
Gianna looked at him confused, her eyes filled with tears that couldn't decide to let them go.
Massimo, after embracing Fabio, seemed to perk up: «This morning I couldn't wake her up, I thought she'd taken a sleeping pill, she's been suffering from insomnia lately. I shook her, but she didn't answer me and… the doctors told me that she was probably already in a coma ». He finished the sentence in bits and pieces, still managing to provide a fairly complete picture of what had happened. According to a first, hasty diagnosis, he may have had a stroke, given his right side was completely paralyzed and his mouth was grimacing.
"He didn't suffer from hypertension or any other risky disease," Gianna murmured. And she kept telling herself that, as she was faced with what was left of her best friend with mounting guilt. Simply due to the fact that she, despite her agony, was alive.
She had entered together with Fabio, her legs in jelly and a tremor all over her body. Her husband held her hand in a warm and comforting grip and gradually her heartbeat had subsided and her legs had stopped shaking. At a certain point, however, he, who had an even more refractory attitude towards her death than hers, had vanished, leaving her alone.
"How could you do this to me?" whispered Gianna, who at that moment perceived Giuliana's presence in the room. A presence that had nothing to do with that rigid body wrapped in a sheet or with that mocking grimace.
"Well, you really screwed me up this time," she said, realizing that Massimo and Fausta had gone out to leave them alone. Like when they were at one or the other's house and anyone who entered the room was considered an intruder.
The sensation that Giuliana could hear her strengthened and so she continued: «You have always been too sensitive, too vulnerable to pass unscathed through the wounds of life, which have engraved deep furrows in your soul. I thought you had overcome the great pain that had hit you, but it wasn't like that ».
Friends since high school, they had often claimed that their friendship had saved them from the psychoanalyst's couch. They had always told each other everything, from the most intimate thoughts to their dreams. When Giuliana had lost her child that she was expecting from her, in the sixth month of pregnancy, Gianna had remained close to her trying to console her in every way, to alleviate the terrible pain of no longer being able to become her mother. She advising her to adopt a child. But Massimo didn't want to hear about it and then adoptions were extremely difficult and frustrating paths. She who was devoted to being a mother, had been condemned not to be able to become one. But she over time she seemed to have made peace with fate. She had gotten back on her feet, but evidently something inside her had broken, letting the lump of pain wander around her body like a time bomb, until it exploded.
Gianna wondered if she had done everything she could for her friend and she answered yes. She had loved her with all her heart, had made her laugh when she was sad, and had offered her a substitute for that child she so much wanted, naming her aunt in name and in fact of Camilla, her only daughter her.
Giuliana and Dario hardly knew each other, they belonged to two parallel universes in which Gianna had walked in alternating phases of her adolescence. Two worlds that, while not colliding, had imploded a short distance from each other, putting an end to her youth and leaving a great void inside her.
Fabio's voice broke into her memories while, after finishing the make-up phase, she was putting on her dress.
"It's half an hour before the ceremony begins," he reminded her.
"I'm ready," Gianna replied. She was prepared to face the second part of her life, a transitional period that would have taken her to old age, provided she got there.
With Giuliana's disappearance, the uncertainty of tomorrow, of which he had only a vague inkling before, had become a constant in his thoughts. After her friend's funeral, where she had at least been spared paying homage to her body because Massimo had decided to close the coffin, she had been attacked by an obsessive thought: 'There's no two without three '. What did she have more than Dario and Giuliana to guarantee herself the privilege of continuing to live? Sure, Dario had been the architect of his own end, while Giuliana hadn't had a choice. However Gianna wasn't sure she was really like that. Both, albeit in different ways, had been affected by the same serious pathology: the death of the soul.
Cursed her eagerness to seek an explanation for everything, which led her to enter a labyrinth as vast as it is dark, and in some ways very distressing. That is to say, each of us is responsible for our own life and death. In any case, one thing was certain: she desperately wanted to live. She loved everything about life, everything except old age and death.
However, the hypothesis that it could now be her turn created such tension in her that she began to prepare herself spiritually for the visit of the old and abominable Lady with rather serious consequences on her balance. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep, she was tense like a spring and she treated everyone badly, Fabio in the lead.
And when the intolerable idea that her husband might have died before her entered her delusions, she realized that old age was a lesser tragedy than death, and she resolved to invoke it. However, if she had the choice she would have preferred to leave before him, and she imagined herself on her deathbed with Fabio beside her, holding her hand.
Chance or fate put an end to his torment on a windy March morning.
Once again the news was given to her by telephone, a coincidence she resolved by simply attributing it to technology.
“Gianna, darling, I'm sorry to break this news to you. Uncle Ottavio is dead », Linda, her mother's sister, informed her.
"When, how? And does Mommy know?” she snapped in one breath so as not to betray the sense of relief that had pervaded her.
Aunt Linda told her that he had preferred to tell her first. So she told her that that morning she had gone to her brother's to bring him fresh bread and newspapers, as she usually did. She had rung, but he hadn't opened for her. She then she had entered with her key thinking she was sleeping. She had felt it the night before and was fine.
"He was in bed, he seemed to be asleep, but he wasn't asleep," she continued in a broken voice. "Anyway, he slipped away softly in his sleep."
Uncle Ottavio, the eldest of his mother's brothers, was eighty-six years old, had lived a full and rich life and had died in a way that anyone in their prime of mind would have subscribed to.
But the most important thing, and what would have made her jump for joy, had it not been for her sorrow, was that his death, being the third in the series, closed that perverse chain.
"Why so thoughtful?" Fabio asked her.
They were in the car, and it was almost time to arrive near the church, where the ceremony would take place.
Gianna shook her husband's hand, replying: «I'm not thoughtful, I'm happy».
"Not even if Camilla got married," he joked.
"Oh, you don't care," he replied. And she couldn't help but consider the bizarreness of the situation. Her daughter was twenty-seven years old and getting married was the least of her thoughts. Like all young people today, she had other plans, other priorities. Her career, above all, which in Camilla's case was not aimed at reaching a position of prominence or power, but at doing the job she loved: the costume designer. She had attended DAMS graduating with honors, and now she was about to go to Rome, where she would take her first steps in the cinema and television environment.
As she saw her gesticulating on the grassy clearing in front of the church, Giuliana's words came back to her mind: «Camilla is the most vanished creature on the face of the earth. But she is also the truest ». Yes, her daughter was an authentic, generous, sincere, outspoken woman. Gianna hoped that those qualities would not turn into defects in the artistic environment.
Camilla and Giuliana loved each other very much. Perhaps because they recognized each other in the same love for the truth, at the cost of being brutal. While she, Gianna, was more diplomatic, less drastic, and she always tried to observe situations from multiple points of view. Gianna could never forget Camilla's desperate and heartbreaking tears when she gave her the terrible news about her. They had hugged each other tightly to form a shield against that unbearable pain that had made them feel united like never before.
She noticed immediately that the hem of her daughter's dress was undone, while a thread dangled down her leg. The fact that she was fond of dresses and costumes did not safeguard her from sloppiness. Indeed, Camilla cared little or nothing about her clothing, somewhat like doctors who neglect their health.
They kissed and embraced then, tactfully, Gianna advised her to remedy the accident.
Camilla got into her car, a small car so old as to be considered vintage, where she kept the tools of the trade, and got to work. Gianna followed with her eyes the dexterous hands of her daughter who moved nimbly around the fabric of the skirt and wondered who on earth she had gotten that dexterity from. She could barely sew on a button.
She looked up just in time to see a white car arrive which, unlike her daughter's, had all the numbers to be considered vintage. The car stopped in front of the churchyard and, after a while, the bride got out.
Gianna held her breath: she was beautiful! She had a regal bearing and the light she radiated had nothing to do with her platinum-blonde hair, whose strands protruded from her light-colored, wide-brimmed hat. Even her dress, Gianna considered, was perfect but only because it was worn by a seventy-year-old woman who dared to defy her old age by getting married for the first time in her life in a brown dress with beige polka dots. Her knee-length dress was accompanied by a beige sash and a silk rose of the same color, pinned to her chest. The bride wore a pair of matching high-heeled satin shoes and held a bouquet of yellow roses with ribbons of the same color in her hand.
The man who extended his arm to walk her down the aisle was an octogenarian with familiar features, still fit if a little stooped.
Aunt Linda smiled and held on to it.
Seeing her father advancing towards the church with her, and her mother following them at a safe distance ahead of the procession of relatives, Gianna's eyes filled with emotion.
Later, when all was done, washed down with tears, joy and smiles, the guests moved on to a fine hotel for lunch, which would last well into the evening and perhaps into the wee hours.
There was also an orchestra, in the best tradition. Because Aunt Linda and Carlo, her husband, loved to dance. In fact, they had met and fallen in love in a dance class.
The party was truly one that would be remembered for a long time, in the family. First of all for the age of the spouses, seventy she and sixty he, a fact that had caused quite a stir. And then for Aunt Linda's sensational capitulation to her, who had sworn and sworn all her life that she would never marry.
«Marriage is a practice against nature» he used to say, letting go of his typical Argentinian laugh, and one day he had specified to her: «In the past it was different. Between the wars, the deaths in childbirth and the various diseases it was destined to last little. Furthermore, the company at the time did not allow for alternatives. If you weren't married you were a spinster, good only to nurse grandchildren or old people. I'm thankful I was born in an age in which certain formalities are no longer attended to,” she continued, undeterred.
Gianna was very fond of that slightly eccentric aunt who, since she was a child, had introduced her to the fascinating world of clothes, make-up and a thousand female artifices. Her home was a mysterious and fascinating place, where every object came from an exotic place and disturbing scents emanated from every room.
Linda was a free and absolutely independent woman who had always worked, traveled and loved a lot. She looked a lot like Uncle Ottavio, with the difference that he had raised a beautiful and large family. But it was easier for a man, Aunt Linda always maintained. "Behind a man there is always a woman, but behind a woman you will hardly find a man" was one of her maxims. So when she had announced her intention to get married, for her Gianna had been the collapse of a myth.
Seeing her now, twirling lightly in Carlo's arms, she remembered that afternoon, at his house, a month earlier, over a cup of coffee, when Aunt Linda had opened up to her as never before. “I fell in love, that's all. It will be that with age we become more fragile and in need of a stable affection, it will be that before and despite all my lovers, I have never been, but I feel the need to have a man next to me. Carlo and I won't have the time of a normal couple to slip into habit, into indifference or, worse, to discover that we hate each other.»
"It's not always a matter of time," observed Gianna, "there are couples who begin to hate each other after their honeymoon."
"I know, I know, but you see, I think I'm wise enough not to fear that possibility, and in any case I will have no regrets."
Then, as if he were revealing a great secret, he whispered: "Carlo is younger than me and I sure hope that when my day comes, he will stay by my side until the end."
Well done Aunt Linda, Gianna thought as she watched her dance, for solving the problem without much maceration.
Aunt Linda and Carlo, who had started the dance, were joined by his mother and father, he eighty-three years old, she seventy-eight, in graceful, almost symbiotic movements. After almost sixty years of marriage, and despite quarrels and bad feelings they were a solid and exemplary entity.
Gradually all the guests poured onto the dance floor, their eyes lit up by the libations they had just consumed, but also by the joy of celebrating that party. They danced carefree, as if there was no tomorrow, as if, despite their age and ailments, they still had their whole life ahead of them.
Given the peculiarity of that marriage, the average age of the dancers was around seventy and the only young people, including Camilla and a young man who had sprung from who knows where, seemed out of place.
"Will you grant me this dance?" Fabio invited her, holding out his hand.
Gianna got up and followed her husband on the trail.
Twirling lightly in his arms, she couldn't help but reflect on the paradox of life and death. About the fact that people like Giuliana and Dario, who would still have many years ahead of them, had suddenly left. On her young people as her daughter for whom marriage was the least of her thoughts, and on a septuagenarian still in top shape that she had fallen in love with as a young girl. In other words: the young who stepped aside and the old who enjoyed it.
And she? Which of these categories did she belong to?
The orchestra struck up a waltz and the dancers began to move in sync, all turning in the same direction.
Gianna, in Fabio's safe arms, followed the current, her feet light, her head spinning and the music inside, thinking that it didn't matter after all.
As far as she was concerned, she would have danced and danced, to the tune of that waltz, as if there were no tomorrow.
Laura Schiavini was born in Trieste, where she lives and works. You published the monograph All I want is U2 (Campanotto Editore) and is the author of several short stories. Among her novels: Luck is a talent (Robin Editions, 2007), Some like it sweet (Newton Compton, 2014), It's all about yoga (Newton Compton, 2015), Where the heart beats (goWare, 2018).
