The Penumbra

The sweetness of the present made past happiness sting less.

I felt uneasy, as if I had been split in two, in fact almost as if I were outside myself, and I had a painful feeling of being at odds with myself.

There were low beamed ceilings and a diffused half-light. The atmosphere made such an impression on me that I still dream about that loft.

It was fear, the horror of metamorphosis, but above all it was the sadness of an irrevocable goodbye.

Once he picked an ear of corn and freed a plump grain from its sheath. 'Look,' he said, 'it's the same shape as a little bread roll.' It made me happy because it was true.

For me fear was a void which could open up before me at any moment. I had it in myself - I believed physically - the possibility of being swallowed up, destroyed. It was not suffering I feared, but disappearing.

But in the choirs and processions, I felt myself growing lighter, calmer, I was no longer afraid of difficulties. I even felt a sense - new and all-consuming - of devotion.

There was just one of them on which I had based my whole religion. That was 'God in heaven, on earth and in every place'. I often repeated it to myself and it gave me a feeling of enormous security and sweetness, almost bliss, even if it did not always seem true to me.

But that comforted me. I dream about the immutability which constitutes its real existence: mine.

I secretly felt compassion for many creatures: for old people, the poor, for dogs and children who were beaten, even for flowers trampled underfoot; but compassion for a creature so close was almost unbearable to me.

When she went to the Nursery, she would talk constantly about it. Everything was of such importance: her basket, her egg, the pastille the headmistress gave her.

She did not love beautiful things, but she admired certain fleeting moments in nature. Mamma's gaze was very different from papà's - it was rapid. Afterwards, she would seem happy. She would lower her eyes as if she had seen something that other people did not see.

The names of those mountains, with their strange and mysterious sounds as in an unknown language, accompanied these expeditions with their echoes. They were called Tinibras, Nibius, Ischiator and evoked solemn and desolate arctic landscapes.

The dominant feeling was that of having arrived too late, when the most important things had already happened. The marvellous period had been 'the earlier one'.