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house, I proudly show him Mamma’s things, but he doesn’t like them and says that they’re a whole load of nonsense.
    Papà once said that the only scandal is if we let God disappear from our words and our actions. There’s no scandal in my story.
    I’m just learning to endure. To resist even desire itself. He’s made me a chastity belt out of sailor’s rope. Part of the rope is tight around my waist and the other lightly strokes my pussy. When I move it’s as though he’s stroking me with his fingers. The instructions are that I even have to go to school like this, until he decides to screw me. Nor am I allowed to masturbate, I have to exercise patience and learn to endure uncertainty, because he might never screw me again.
    My friends think it’s strange that I don’t have a boyfriend, now that I look better – thinner and without hair falling in my eyes – and when a group of us go out to a pizzeria and all the little couples are kissing, I admit it’s difficult.
    Then I lock myself in the toilet and stroke the rope that ties me and torments me. I lift up my skirt in front of the mirror and look at all the bruises I have on my bottom. And I think to myself that I have my own secret, and that consoles me.
    One time I asked him, ‘Do you treat me so badly because I’m crap, a piece of shit?’
    ‘No. It’s because I love you. The greatest proof of love you can give a human being is to kill them.’

14
The postcard sea
    One day I discovered that Papà sells Mamma’s paintings to his one-night stands and makes them donate to his Third World volunteer project of the moment. They buy them without batting an eyelid. I yelled at him, ‘You make me sick!’ But I didn’t really think that.
    ‘What do you want from me?’ he started yelling too. ‘Your mother’s been able to quit work and devote herself to shades of colour. Dozens of starving people can eat thanks to the money from her paintings. And she believed she was a painter. For years I watched her ominous skies as I tried to make her laugh. Have you ever wondered whether I was enjoying myself? You always just explained it away as “Papà’s a strange guy.” Fucked if I’m a strange guy.’
    Mamma collects postcards. Our favourites are Punta Is Molentis and the long series of the beaches of Chia. But even though they’re nearby, we can’t go there because we don’t know the way.
    We imagine the broom on the rocks, or the sea stock with the water as a backdrop. Or those yellows and purples all velvety and mossy in the silence. We imagine what it must be like to moor at a wooden pier and walk along the path to the lighthouse, with that strip of light passing across you over and over again like a caress on your wounds.
    And they’re all things that God has made for us, so that we can enjoy them.

15
Nonna would have preferred Mauro De Cortes
    Zia has said that she can’t understand how it can be that each one of Mauro’s houses is simpler and yet lovelier than the last. Because he’s been married twice and had children from the first and the second wife, when he’s separated he’s always had to cut back a bit in order to maintain them as well as possible. He’s also lived with girlfriends and he’s always been the one to move out, sorting something else out for himself and leaving behind all his things, as a gift. These ever smaller houses have made him into a bigger man, and Zia says that it’s not as though he has anything really amazing, but the things he has work perfectly: for instance, the winter duvets are warm, the saucepans have the right lids – those ones with a hole in them – and the food comes out perfectly. She talks about them enchanted, and Mamma rushes out straight away to copy everything, but we can’t find duvets that are warm but don’t cost a fortune, or saucepan lids that don’t jump around when the water boils. Speaking of Mauro’s house, Zia said that one time, after a discussion of the latest world events