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matter, even when you were still there? And, in general, what was the significance of all human life? Why did people always repeat the same gestures? Out of habit, out of boredom, out of an inability to imagine anything different or to question themselves? Or perhaps out of fear, because it’s easier to follow a trail that’s already marked.
    Pushing my trolley down the aisles of the supermarket, I looked at the pallid faces under the neon lights and asked myself: What life has meaning? And what’s the meaning of life? Eating? Surviving? Reproducing? Animals do all that, too. Then why do we have two legs to walk on and two hands to use? Why do we write poetry, paint pictures, compose symphonies? Only so our bellies can be full and we can copulate enough to guarantee ourselves descendants?
    No human being desires to come into the world. One fine day, without being consulted, we find ourselves shoved out on to the stage; some of us are given leading roles, others are mere extras, and still others exit the scene before the end of the act or prefer to climb down from the stage and enjoy the show from the stalls – to laugh, weep, or grow bored, according to the day’s programme.
    In spite of this brutal start, once born into the world, no one wants to leave it. It seemed paradoxical to me: I don’t ask to come here, but once I’m here, I don’t ever want to leave. What’s the meaning of individual responsibility, then? Am I the one who chooses, or am I chosen?
    Is the real act of free will, therefore – the one that differentiates men from animals – the decision to leave for good? I didn’t choose to come into the world, but I can choose when to bid it farewell; I didn’t come down here of my own free will, but I can go back up whenever I want.
    But come down from where? Go back up where? Is there an above and a below? Or just an absolute pneumatic void?

    After your death, whenever I thought about the house, the image that came into my mind was the image of a seashell. When I was a little girl, not yet six years old, you bought me one from an old fisherman in Grado. I can still hear your voice as you put the shell over my ear and said, ‘You hear that? It’s the sound of the sea.’
    I listened for a while, and then I suddenly burst into one of those intense, unstoppable fits of weeping that irritated and frightened you at the same time. You kept saying, ‘Why are you crying? What’s wrong?’
    I couldn’t answer you. I couldn’t tell you that the sound inside the shell wasn’t the roar of the sea but the groans of the dead, that the strange howling I heard was their voice. I couldn’t say that it poured itself into our ears with all the violence of the unspoken, and that from there it went to the heart, crushing it until it exploded. Once upon a time, that seashell had housed a gastropod (just as, for many decades, the house on the Kras Plateau had been our family’s protective shell) which some crab or starfish had then devoured, leaving its calcium carbonate exoskeleton empty. The water, entering every recess of the shell, had smoothed and polished it until it shone like mother-of-pearl, and now, deep in its gleaming insides, that sound reverberated endlessly.
    The inhabitants of our house had undergone the same fate: They were all dead, and the wind had smoothed down every memory of them. Alone, I wandered through the chambers and spirals, and sometimes I seemed to be lost in a labyrinth. At other times, however, I realised that only by staying in there, only by searching and digging and listening, would I be able to find a way of anchoring myself.
    The wind was a voice, too; it carried the sighs of the dead, the sound of their steps, the things that were never said between them.

    As I was there alone, in that house whose walls kept getting thinner, more transparent, I began to think about the young woman in the photograph, enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I tried to remember the sound of her voice, the