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The rooms were empty, immersed in silence like a theatre after the performance: no more shuffling, no more footsteps, no more coughing fits.
    The part of me that should have abandoned itself to mourning had been prematurely used up, burned away by exasperation and by your brutally abrupt decline. I’d welcomed your passing with a feeling of relief, grateful that your sufferings were finally over.
    Only the passage of time allowed your image to re-emerge in my memory, so that I could again see the person who had been so important in my life.
    Once all the bureaucratic requirements had been dealt with, I didn’t know what to do. Your illness had drained away all my energy; I could feel no grief, just immense dismay.
    Who are you? I asked myself. What will you be when you grow up?
    I didn’t have the slightest idea.
    The bora blew with extraordinary intensity all January long. It snowed a few times as well – the deer even invaded the garden, looking for shoots to eat.
    I stayed curled up in the armchair in front of the fire, beside the table with our books (by then covered with dust), and I could hear your voice telling me the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. ‘“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in,” the wolf bellowed though the door.’
    ‘No wolf can get in here,’ you’d say to reassure me. ‘This is a solid brick house, built not on sand but on the hard rock of the Carso.’
    Then you’d add that foundations and roots are in a way the same thing, because they both make it possible to stand firm and not yield to the violence of the wind. In order to give a house stability, you have to dig deep foundations, down and down, just the way the roots of a tree do, year after year, in the darkness of the earth. In America, however – you went on – they set houses directly on the ground, like tents, and that was why a wolf’s huffing and puffing would be enough to eradicate entire cities over there.
    Alone in the silence of the house, I wasn’t so sure about your words any more. I had the impression that the wind was hissing through fissures in the window frame, repeating
It’s over, it’s ooooover
, like when I was a little girl and the spinning washing machine would whisper,
Everything’s useless, everything’s doomed
.
    In the middle of the night, the front door groaned under the blows of the bora; it really sounded as though someone were outside, shouting
Gestapo!
    By day, instead of protecting myself from the wind, I went out to confront it, running against its gusts like Don Quixote charging the windmills.
Kill me, purify me, ravish me, carry me far away, away from here, rip me out of my life
. In my heart, I ceaselessly repeated these words.
    I slept little, I ate even less, I saw no one, I had no projects; I felt like a boxer alone in the middle of the ring. I’d warmed up for years, worked on my jab and my uppercut, and skipped rope to prepare myself for the final bout, and then my opponent had suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn. I kept on hopping about, of course, but the only adversary I faced was my shadow.
    Without any opportunities for conflict, my life was like a carrier bag at the mercy of the wind; my movements were determined by its capricious gusts, not by my own will.
    I’d never thought about my future.
    As a little girl, I’d had a few unfocused dreams about what I wanted to be – a stationmaster (complete with signal paddle and red cap) or a ship’s captain, a circus acrobat or a dog trainer – but they were just that, only dreams, without any practical connection to reality. From the beginning of my teenage years on, I’d had but one occupation: attacking you. Now that you’d abandoned the field in one brilliant move, I walked around the house like Pavlov’s dog, pulling at my chain and baring my teeth, but the bell I so longed to hear never rang.
    What meaning did the days of my life have, now that I was alone in the world? Or, for that