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man, well dressed, and when I met them he made me a slight bow. She, however, turned the other way and said an ugly word to me.”
    “Maybe you misunderstood.”
    “I understood very well. She had developed a mania for saying the worst words, out loud, even when she was alone. And then she would start laughing. I heard her from here, in my kitchen.”
    “My mother never said bad words.”
    “She did, she did . . . At a certain age, one should have some restraint.”
    “It’s true,” I said. And there returned to my mind the suitcase and purse in the doorway of the apartment. They seemed to me objects that, because of the journey they must have taken, had lost the dignity of things belonging to Amalia. I wanted to try to restore it to them. But the old woman, encouraged by my submissive tones, undid the chain from the door, and stepped into the doorway.
    “In any case,” she said, “at this hour I’m not going to go back to sleep.”
    I was afraid that she wanted to come into the house and withdrew quickly toward my mother’s apartment.
    “I, on the other hand, am going to try to sleep a little,” I said.
    Signora De Riso darkened and immediately stopped following me. She put the chain back on the door with contempt.
    “Amalia, too, always wanted to come to my house and never asked me into hers,” she muttered. Then she closed the door in my face.

8.
    I sat down on the floor and started with the suitcase. I opened it but found nothing that I could recognize as belonging to my mother. Everything was brand-new: a pair of pink slippers, a robe of ivory satin, two dresses that had never been worn, one of a rusty red too tight for her and too youthful, one quieter, blue, but quite short, five pairs of expensive underpants, a brown leather beauty case full of perfumes, deodorants, creams, makeup, cleansers—she had never used makeup in her life.
    I went on to the purse. The first thing I took out was a pair of white lace underpants. I was convinced immediately by the three “V”s clearly visible on the right and from the stylish design that they were the companion of the bra that Amalia was wearing when she drowned. I examined them carefully: they had a little tear on the left side, as if they had been put on even though they were clearly a size too small. I felt my stomach contract and I held my breath. Then I rummaged in the purse again, looking first for the house keys. Naturally I didn’t find them. I found instead her reading glasses, nine telephone tokens, and her wallet. In the wallet were two hundred and twenty thousand lire (a sizable amount for her: she lived on the little money that we three sisters sent her every month), the receipt for the electricity bill, her identity card in a plastic case, an old photograph of my sisters and me with our father. The photograph was ruined. Those images of us from so long ago were yellowed, cracked, like the figures of winged demons in certain altarpieces that the faithful have defaced with pointed objects.
    I left the photograph on the floor and got up, fighting a growing nausea. I looked through the house for a telephone book and, when I found it, turned quickly to Caserta. I didn’t want to telephone him: I wanted the address. When I discovered that there were three densely printed pages of Casertas I realized that I didn’t even know what his name was: no one, in the course of my childhood, had ever called him anything but Caserta. So I threw the phone book in a corner and went into the bathroom. I couldn’t hold back the retching, and for a few seconds I was afraid that my whole body would be unleashed against me, with a self-destructive fury that as a child I had always feared and, growing up, had tried to control. Then I calmed down. I rinsed out my mouth and washed my face carefully. Seeing it pale and un-made-up in the mirror tilted over the sink I decided to put on makeup.
    It was an unusual reaction. I didn’t wear makeup often or willingly. I had