Pink ballerina

As a little girl, I was the mildest lamb ever: goodmanners and smiles were my daily bread. Not enough for the sisters at my convent school, which opened its greedy "portone" on the timid slope of Saint Sebastianello, opposite - in philosophy and shape - to the grand staircases of Piazza di Spagna, that were at a stonethrow, yet as near as heaven to hell...
Sister Saint Thomas, a silvery beauty, with haunted black eyes that never smiled, was the principal. She tamed us, the pupils, in misery and humility and kept the school going thanks to her firm grip. I never liked her cold ways, her boxing looks, and even her bautiful face and smart, slim body, scorned me. All the opposite, in my memory, Sister Francis: she was round and white and sweet and had pockets that sung in mistery. I would have given two bars of chocolate to my worst enemy, the Strada girl, to know what was in those dingling, dangling, dancing holes, silver bells hidden under the black and blue habit... Sister Francis tought us english. Long poems, and never ending bits of pure shakesperian poetry. She fought against the italian way of saying "de" instead of "the" and "dis" instead of "This" and had eyes only for one of us who had had her father, long before, in the school and had left his shadow in her heart.

When Sister Saint Thomas entered the classroom, we all stood up and firm and said: "Goodmorning sister!", as chorus line girls. One day, she opened the door, came in, everybody except me (I was lost in my bumble bee thoughts...), jumped on the seat and up in the sky. She glanced around, spotted  me and said, pointing and index finger that stang: "You are superb!". That day I went home crying. My mother had no ears for me. her stern glance told me that life was hard and one had to survive and no crying please. Only my brother Marco asked me what had happened. I burst into tears and said: "What does superb mean?" But he too did not know.

My little white Christmas

There was no  Christmas tree dressed in lights and gold, in the Ponti family, no jingle bells to sing in the snow, and above all, certainly, no red nosed, plumpy, Father Christmas, flowing in his white beard, to come down from the unexistent chimney of our household! Not at all. My mother, who was married to pure style, considered an armful of ill mannered and consumistic junk all the bric a brac shopping of the 25th of december which was, to her,  nothing else but the day, as clear as water, the Child was born. So, in our house, only the crib sat, from the eight of december, full of shepheds and sheep on a dark table. A candle shone bright in front of the Virgin and her spouse, but the manger stood empty for many a days to come. At night, when I was about to go to bed, I could see, from a distance, the little flickering fire drawing shadows on the good and on the evil and I do not know why I felt cold and shivered...
Because we did not have our polar present express, of course it was baby Jesus in blood and bones who came down from heaven only to bestow on us, the lucky ones (God knows why...) his holy gifts: a doll for little me, a pack of Airfix soldiers for my brother Marco and who knows what else for the rest of the family. To thank the dear baby for taking a trip to earth, we left in exchange (but I do not reckon it was convenient for hime...) some nuts (with no nut cracker which made me wonder) and a glass of hot milk which was to become icy cold as the night ate up her dancing hours. On Christmas eve the family gathered around the crib and I had the honor to put the baby in his poor throne and to set the table (nuts and milk) for his nightly supper.

On the 25th of on of these crib Christmas, I woke up with the white fingers of dawn creeping through my shutters. I was up in a dash and silently crept downstairs to see if  baby Jesus had eaten his nuts and drunk his milk. All I saw was my mother, busy in front of the crib, putting away milk and nuts...

The little mermaid

English, to me, had the sunny face of Jane. She arrived, straight from Sydney, on a silver winter morning. I loved her red fluffy hair and her milk white skin spread with golden freckles. Jane, a mother to me. English, my mother tongue...

Together with Jane, another australian girl, her name wa Sheila, came overseas. From Oz with love, and landed in my cousins home, where my uncle - who was a satyr and a doctor -  chased her ruby beauty from one room to the other during long sleepless evenings. She stayed for a couple of months, I don't know what happened between her and him, I only know that, one day, she packed her bags and went, in between the sobs of my cousin Betta. She then returned to her dear homeland and to  her loving mother who only loved her dead son... Her mother had no place in her wounded heart for the wounded girl that Sheila was. So Sheila, without the deep roots of maternal love, started afresh a new life. A life that she made up day by day, in rain or shine. A life that she could boast about with indifferent strangers. Every year she got the chance to chit and chat on her lovable  life during a cruise that skimmed truth and waves. She had two kids, the pigeon couple, she had a lovely husband, did someone want to see the pics? Here is Rosie and John, isn't he just gorgeous? She said she was a psycologist and a mother and a wife. But she was only a lonely woman. When the cruise was over, she was back in the sepulcral flare of her dark mother. "You are back", the old woman would say. And then the days rolled  on like clouds galopping in a winter sky. One day, during her cruise, Sheila, with a smile on her face, threw herself in the waters. No more lies. A woman said that she had turned into a mermaid...

The God of old dolls

On the wake of Christmas, in the magenta french car that belonged to  my father, off went the Ponti family to San Giuliano, where my mother's mother, my nonna, had a pink house lost in the shapeless, ironed, grey countryside of Friuli,. Ours was a long, everlasting drive that started in fresh morning, with the dogs barking hello, and ended when the night had spread its black mantle on the blue sky in front of the green gate that led to what appeared to me as a dreamland: the "casale" of San Giuliano. It was, as I said, a pink beauty, with porches in the front that looked  like bridges of eternity, and  a lovely solar clock painted ib tio of the front door, a clock that, believe me, was  as useless as it was lovely.... My grandmother, nonna Stella, wore sugar candy hair the colour of lilac and she fussed around our arrival, all dressed in pure black and grey, as we took out our bags and luggage. The garden, that was silver and silent when we arrived, seemed to wake up in the flurry of our voices and shouts. We, the five Ponti children, flew here and there and everywhere. Each one of us seeking our personal magic things and places. I, for one, run for my doll, my celluloyd doll, old and battered, dressed in a shattered pinnkish frock, with hair that looked like the tail of a mouse. She clicked her weary eyes in the delight of seeing me... One sad evening, on arriving to San Giuliano, I found my doll missing. I run to my granmother, in dismay. A new doll, a Furga doll, in her brand new striped dress looked at me with her stupid, twinkling smile. And I... I started to cry. "God would loose his patience with you, Ester!", my mother snapped.

My Leopard

We used to have two watch dogs in the villa, to guard us from the unknown world outsine, a couple of alsatians that lived their little life either closed in a cage  (when we had visitors) or in and about the big green garden, best friends of us, the little ones. I loved them all, beacause I could speak to them the language of real life, that has no words or grammar, but most of all beacause they had fluffy ears that I could curl and shake. But Iago, let me say it, Iago big, blond, grand in his doggy way, was the king of them all. He   borrowed his name from a shakespirian play and was to share it, many a years after, with the newborn of one of my brothers...

Iago was fierce and noble and beautiful and he did bite many a person, uncaring if prince or butcher. He bit them all, as democratic as death. One fine may morning, with the sky as blue as a chinese painting, while I was still, cosy, in bed (being it a sunday morning) I heard, out of the blue, the clitter clatter of tragedy and discontent. My mother shouting, someone else running along the entrance lane. "Iago, Iago", yelled one of my brothers. I wa up and awake in a twinkle, and I dashed, in my white and pink nightgown, down the lane, towards the entrance gate that was red and a bit rusty. There I saw a big man, with a jolly face, white curls pasted on his powerful head,a nose made out of dough. I recognised him on the spot: as being Luchino, a real sicilian prince, nourished in pure  blue blood. I walked slowly closer and he said, with a big, pink smile: "Hello Ester, Iago has tasted me". I turned around because I heard yells and shouts, but that smile, how can I ever forget it...