I never wrote anything about myself and, after this, will never do it again. I dedicate some of my time to it now, maybe only for myself in order to untangle the knot that was my life, but also as justification of my work, in the very improbable case anybody would be interested.
I was born unwanted into a reasonably wealthy family. My earliest recollection is of a day when my belly ached. Curious to understand why I went to the garden to poop. The thing swarmed with thick, long, whitish worms. I wondered if I should tell Mom, then decided not to. You'll see, they will take advantage of it to kill you, I said to myself. After a couple of days the long, whitish and thick worms disappeared, replaced by many small and thin ones. Then those too vanished, along with the pain.
I was three years old.
I see little summer cotton dresses printed with small flowers of all colors, honeycomb curlings, matching panties. Uncle Renzo compared their length with that of his jacket. Mine were shorter, so for those days slightly sinful. But my mom was American and I didn't give a damn.
A few years later my brother Filippo arrived. He was an exceedingly bonny baby and everyone cuddled him and showered him with kisses, while no one had ever even bothered to touch me.
"Why do you love him and not me?" I asked my mom.
"Because he is the fruit of my love and you are not." she replied.
I went to my room and vented my despair for this injustice by drawing the story on the wall. The usual yells followed
Another memory is that of the First Communion shoes. I was a little over seven and one day on the street I met a friend of my mum's. She was the wife of a renowned notary and had three beautiful, very elegant and much loved daughters more or less of my age.
"What's on your feet?" she asked.
I looked down and saw them completely deformed inside my First Communion little shoes, no longer white and now more than a year old, wearing which I had probably spent the winter, snow, rain, mud and all the rest of it. I'd never noticed them, I'd never paid attention, I wasn't interested. My feet, unable to grow lengthwise, were deformed by the width. Since then I’ve always walked awkwardly, and still do.
My mother was a great ski champion. She had finished only fourth at the Cortina Olympic Games of 1940 because she had crashed, but she had wanted to win. That caused her a trauma from which she never recovered. She spent the rest of her life trying again to conquer that podium, even if those Olympics were long since gone, and the more the years passed, the further away her goal slipped. However, she couldn't take care of me because she had to train and to compete, so she dumped me on her mother, who was even less in the mood to do it than she.
I spent my childhood in her fifteenth-century villa in Moià, where the only categorical imperative was to keep out of the way, which was fine with me. I occupied my days with the peasant kids grazing the cows, picking fruit from the trees, interpreting the shapes of the clouds stretched out on the grass. In the afternoon while my grandmother took a siesta, I sneaked up to the forbidden attic where they kept the hay. One day in a corner I discovered a trunk full of empty jewelry boxes. I opened them one by one to see if by chance in any of them maybe somebody hadn't forgotten something. Alas in vain. Only the names were left, printed inside on velvet or silk: Cartier, La Cloche, Tiffany... Many years later when the film Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn was released, I recognized an old friend.
Here and there on the floor among the haystacks there were more trunks, half opened. From them hung very dashing old clothes from America, but old-fashioned, out of place for a country life. I stole a long black silk skirt to protect my legs from flies, and a black felt hat with a black rose under a wide brim that I smashed it over my head and never took off again. From that day on I became, though it was a secret that I never revealed anyone, my real self: the Black Corsair. Probably exhausted by the unbearable boredom of looking after me, my grandmother had no strength left to flog me with the oxen whip, as she usually did in order to teach me some good manners. That time, since I avoided her very cautiously, I got away with it.
Her husband, my grandfather Pier Carlo Lange, whose name I am infinitely grateful for having been awarded, was born in Torino and made a large fortune in America. He had landed there without a cent, because in the port of Genoa before leaving he had gambled at poker all his money, and lost it. His only possible profession, beside rowing of which he had been Italian champion a couple of times, was horse riding, having served as officer in the Savoia Cavalry together with Senator Agnelli, the founder of Fiat. Soon he left for California to be a cowboy. In Santa Barbara he shared a room with a Polynesian migrant, wretched like himself. One morning he found his pal hanged at the window. Like Picasso who, traumatized by a similar experience with Casagemas began to paint in blue, grandfather had enough of poverty and decided to try something else. He left for the East Coast, where he went to work on the assembly line at Ford. Maybe the interest in automobiles had been with him since the days in the military, when he might have discussed the argument with Agnelli. The moment he understood the production systems, he managed to borrow some money and set up his own factory.
He begun by assembling American models, many of which now disappeared, then added European ones such as Renault and Fiat, under license from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Later in Mexico City he founded his own brand, the Lange Motor Company. Later he expanded to La Havana, Cuba. He used to compete at the wheel of his racing models. In the entrance of my aunt Lumo’s flat in Milan there stood a gigantic silver cup with his name and that of his company engraved on it, won on the Indianapolis circuit in 1916. He moved his headquarters to La Havana where he lived in a finca with wife and four daughters, of which my mother was the eldest. I keep copies of the documents attesting to his possession of an oil well and a copper mine in Cuba, plus the project for a railway across Mexico from Atlantic to Pacific, prior to the cutting of the Panama isthmus realized a few years later by the Trentino engineer Luigi Negrelli. Maybe his life had been too fast, too stressful, because soon he fell ill, and to cure him grandmother brought him back to Italy together with their daughters. Then came the war. By the time it ended of all the American properties remained only few trunks: that with the empty jewelry boxes and those with the old-fashioned clothes.
These events weighed beyond repair on my mother's character. Having been very rich as a child, she never managed to adapt to what for the rest of us is normality, and remained forever a misfit. Actually it's not that she was poor, because her mother was wealthy on her own, but the era of the American pomps was gone forever. The distant echo of a paradise lost has been on the background of my childhood too.
In the period of the obese cows they had bought Moretta, an eighteenth-century villa on a hill above the small town of Pergine, comprehensive of the fields down to the valley and the woods up to the Cimirlo Pass. We used to spend our summer there. There too I grazed the cows, picked fruits, philosophized, contemplated the clouds with the farmers' children. During grandmother's siesta I had managed to sneak into the very forbidden turret. One climbed up in the darkness on the worm-eaten steps of a stair that ended in front of a heavy locked door. Rummaging in the wall I had found a hole with the key. It opened on a bright small room of about three meters by three containing a white porcelain sink, a toilet and a bidet. Over them, inside and out, an angelic hand had created butterflies, roses and parrots of all colors. I opened the window looking over the valley and a thick forest of chestnut trees. Caressed by the wind they rustled and enveloped the world in their scent. When it rained it became intoxicating. I spent many afternoons there, absorbing the magics of my surroundings with every cell. That cubby symbolized for the rest of my life the quintessence of luxury.
Many years later in a documentary on the Bagrations, the royal family family who for almost two millennia ruled over the Caucasus, in a villa of their French descendants in Fontainebleau, with a cry of surprise I saw again the toilet of the Moretta's turret, leaning like a trophy against the library wall.
Another recollection of Moretta are the long vertical strips of multicolored glass placed vertically between the steps of the staircase leading to the bedrooms. Below there was a hall where the family gathered after dinner. After a while I was sent to bed without turning on the switch upstairs. I climbed in the dark while my feet, floating over garlands of flowers lit from below, led me to heaven.
Then the war ended. In the summer of 1945 we went to the seaside at Tre Porti, near Venice: my mother, my two-year-old brother and myself.
We left the village on a bicycle that sank into the sand. In the last stretch the wheels got stuck and we had to get down and push. No living being moved on the endless beach, only the sea rolled lazily over the shore shy little waves with white manes. As usual my mother stripped naked. Those days just to show your knees was a mortal sin. After a while a sailboat appeared and my mom got aboard with the baby. They moved off and vanished, leaving me alone for the rest of the day on that deserted beach without food, without water, without a rag over my head. I sat there studying the shapes and colors of the beautiful shells scattered around. In the evening the boat popped up again, my mother got down with my brother in her arms and we went back to the village, laboriously pushing the bike into the sand. The story repeated itself a few times, then the boat was never be seen again and my mother remained with us on the lonely shore. Slowly even that holiday came to an end.
That autumn I was sent to boarding school by the Marcelline in Bolzano. The nuns were adorable. They gave me to eat, to sleep, they kept me warm and when I studied they rejoiced. In Trento Over our clothes we wore a white and perfectly ironed apron that was changed very morning, with a large silk ruff of colorful stripes, each grade a different pattern, at the top of our collars. I loved our uniform and wore it with great pride. Since I was a good student they praised me. Andreina Ardizzone and I competed to be the best and wrote little articles in the class paper. I did also the drawings, the chestnut trees of Moretta often in the background. Happiness ruled.
Maybe that's exactly why after the eighth grade they took me out and put me in the Prati high school in Trento.
My father lived at his factory and was no longer to be seen. My mother was never at home. She disappeared for months to who knows where with who knows whom. My brother was at Filippin in Possagno. I was always alone, without food, without heating. Our house, a fine example of modern architecture, was surrounded by fields. Being the only one with a swimming pool, during the war it had been requisitioned first by the German military command, then by the Allies. When they left not a single door or window worked. I couldn’t lock myself inside. During the day a mongoloid boy hung around outside the garden fence fondling his todger. I screamed:
“Go away! Go away!”
But he didn’t, and I had no idea of how to explain him that his behavior scared me. At night I was terrified. For three years I could not sleep.
The first few months at Prati I wore with great pride my white college apron with the Scottish silk bow. I was the only student in a smock. Since nobody washed it or ironed it, after a couple of months turned brown, began to stink, fell apart and had to be thrown away together with the bow. The same happened to the uniform. Now my winter attire consisted of a shiny, threadbare black gabardine skirt, an old pullover of my mother, my father's gray coat turned inside out, a pair of striped socks knitted with leftover wools of many colors, and a pair of brown crêpe-soled shoes. I sewed my own Sommer garments out of discarded frocks that I washed and ironed. My mother would never have done that: she was a lady. Result: I was dirty, ragged, smelly. Prati was the most prestigious school in town and the other kids were very dressy. I felt that nobody would have wasted his waste to throw it at me. I just could die of shame. Crime number one: I looked revolting. Crime number two: I was 'rich'. Although, as my boss in Ravenna used to say, the species of the rich without money doesn't exist.
Once that the embarrassment for my appearance prevailed over my courage to face it, I skipped school. Instead of crossing the bridge over the Fersina and go to Prati, I turned right towards the Gocciadoro park. It was November. A thin drizzle fell mixed with rain, slush was all over. There being no better shelter I climbed a pine tree, sat on a branch, opened my umbrella over my head and spent the rest of the morning reading a treatise on bees.
In the evening around dinner time my father, who normally was never to be seen, strangely showed up. I was already in my nightgown.
"Did you go to school today?"
"Yes."
“No! You didn’t! Liar! Whore! Bitch!"
And started beating me. I knew very well that I had skipped school, so I accepted the punishment and took it standing straight in front of him looking into his eyes. When he started punching my breasts and between my legs it seemed to me that those areas of my body had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t gone to school, so I turned around and rushed out of the house. In the meantime the rain had turned to snow and accumulated over the ground. I spent the night on a mound of earth under the vines, half naked. At dawn I noticed that my mother (she was the one who had reported me) hadn't closed the door properly, so I sneaked back to my room.
Since my mother didn't leave me any money and my father lived elsewhere, to eat I used to go to Grazia. She was very poor, her father had been a delivery boy at a grocery store, then had fallen ill. I have no idea of what ailment he was suffering, I know only that he was stuck in bed. They survived on his meager pension, so sharing their bread with me was an act of heroism. Sometimes my father left to my mother some money for me, but she kept it. When he handed it directly to me we bought 10 Nazionali cigarettes and a jar with MUSTARD written on the label. It was a novelty just arrived from the United States and was very different from the Senape Orco we put on our frankfurters. It tasted of distant Californias and of victory.
"What did you eat it with?" asked my daughter.
"With a spoon or a teaspoon. Sometimes with the finger."
"No: TOGETHER with what?"
“Together with nothing."
For us it was a feast.
Once one of her aunts who had a garden brought a basket of fresh peas, and they invited me for lunch. Rice with peas. A banquet.
For my birthday she gave me an altar boy's shirt stolen from God knows what church, or maybe simply discarded because of the holes. The hem was a very high embroidered lace and with it I stitched the most elegant petticoat in town.
Grazia had a monstrous brain. She became my guide, my teacher. At times we skipped school together because we felt that there we wasted our time. Although it was not really skipping, because the teacher, as soon as he crossed the door said:
“Graffer out!”
I spent various mornings in the corridor, then I understood that he just didn’t want me in his class, so I decided not to go to school any more, and Grazia, out of friendship, stopped going too. We studied our own way. My home library was full of books: classics, novels, biographies, history, economics, travels, poetry… We read them aloud, or rather she read them, then taught me. Listen to the sound of this word... have you found its Greek, Latin root? Repeat it out loud. How does it relate to the following one? Do you sense the rhythm? The sound? Is it appropriate? Could you improve it? Is the adjective necessary? What is the meaning of the sentence? Could you rewrite it better? How? What is the point of the narrative? Does it make sense?
Then she would point her finger to my nose and say,
"How can you be so stupid?".
We sat on her stained bed without mattress, or sheets, or blankets. I put my feet under her butt because it was cold. But not freezing, since below her apartment there was a very busy pub, and some of the heat went up through the floor. We smoked Nazionali, one puff each until, in order not to burn our fingers, we had to stick a pin into the stub. We talked about our dreams, and our dreams turned to reality and we were princesses dressed in mesmeric silks studded with gems, we danced in halls sparkling with gold-framed mirrors, we dwelt in turreted castles perched on inaccessible mountains, we were fought over by heroic and adventurous knights, and sometimes we fought over them ourselves. Her mother brought us a very sweet coffee. It was wonderful.
The only cloud in that blue sky were my chilblains, that swelled and split my fingers and toes. I still bear the scars.
Those days my mother's house stood alone surrounded by fields. No one saw me, no one knew, I didn't bother anyone and no one bothered me. I slept with the French window wide open. In winter, since there was no heating, the temperature didn't drop, on the contrary. When it snowed, I dragged my bed out onto the terrace that surrounded three quarters of the house. I curled up under two or three duvets and enjoyed the soft stings of the crystal flakes melting on my face. In the morning I woke up happy under 10 or 20 centimeters of snow. If the sky was clear from my bed I could see all the way down the valley, the black arches of the railway viaduct silhouetted against a dim light. In the silence every now and then the tiny railcar to Pergine rattled by. In summer the moon was a pirate galleon sailing mighty and serene from one cluster to the other of the wisteria twisted around the railing of the terrace. Playing with its own reflections on the pool it sent me encrypted messages of love.
My second love letter was by Cesare. His sister delivered it at Marcelline in Milan by hand, since it had not been possible to send it by mail, because the nuns read everything before handing it over, and anything that had to do with males was no no no.
The words were enchanted.
I had met him the previous summer in Brenta. They were shooting a documentary about an ascent to Campanil Basso. Leading actors were some noted Trentini climbers, including of course my mother. Since she hadn't found anyone on whom to unload me, I too became part of the troupe, I had never even brushed a rock with a finger in my life. I was just out of hospital, where I had been treated for a slash in the head following a dive against a rock on Lake Garda. I hid my shaved skull under a scarf and wore sky-blu cotton trousers, that had ripped open at the first contact with the rocks. Lacking of anything better, they had been patched up with the green stripe of the Italian flag that until recently had flown proudly over the Pedrotti hut.
They tied me to Caesare. Rolly Marchi was in the roped party ahead of us, his boots constantly in front of my nose. I still hear his stentorian voice shouting to the Dolomites his latest entrepreneurial venture:
"Rolly shoes hold everything!"
The weakening echo bounced the advertisement from peak to peak.
At the top the weather changed and we had to get down fast. Double rope was the name of the game. I had never heard that expression, hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was, nor of how it was supposed to be performed.
"Jump out and let yourself go." urged my mother.
Ah, no. It’s true that I'm stupid, but you jump out and you let yourself go! Below there were several hundred meters of void. At the end they tied me to a rope and lowered me down bit by bit. My name is still written on the summit notebook of that year: the youngest person ever to climb Campanil Basso, congratulations Piera. Luckily there is no trace of how I got up, nor of how I got down.
I found Cesare again in Bondone on top of Montesel during the Christmas holidays. I didn't know how to ski, but my mom was a champion and my dad owned the lifts. Everyone made fun of me, so I had to learn.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I'm learning how to ski."
"Then follow me.”
and flung himself straight down along the almost vertical track of the ‘slittone’, the big sledge tied to a rope that carried the skiers up the hill. I followed, soon to explode head first into the fresh snow in a crash that sucked me out of my boots. Grope around for your boots, grope around for your skis and poles, put them on, down again, tumble again, start again, on to the sledge, up again, down again… At lunch time we were sitting in Tita’s kitchen begging for a bowl of soup. Tita’s was the proletarian inn. The classy one belonged to may grandmother and I was supposed to have my meals there, but I hated it from the depth of my heart. Tita’s kitchen was nice and warm, on the stove gurgled a few pots full of delicacies. There I shook out of my hair the snow that wrapped it like a turban and dried it up. We sat in dark, cozy, little a corner and spoke, spoke, spoke. He came from a family of actors and had tried that carrier too but unsuccessfully. Then he had worked as butler for a rich man in Rome, but the chap had tried to seduce him and he run away. He had tried many jobs, including defusing second world war’s bombs, but didn’t intend to spend like this the rest of his life. Now at last he had decided: he was going to be a climber. The best ever. He wanted to conquer the most important, the most difficult mountains of the planet. He realized that his goal was extremely hard and difficult to achieve, but he was ready to face any effort, any hardship in order to reach it. He knew it could cost him his life, but had no fears.
Soon the news of my escape to Tita’s with Cesare reached my grandmother's ears.
"Sleep with an adventurer! You're the disgrace to the family! Shame on you! Whore! Bitch!”
and on and on, the usual litany. It was so unfair, so offensive, so mean, so awful, so unbearable. This time she had really crushed me. I wanted to die. I run away and sat on the beautiful diamond snow at the top of the beginners’ slope. It was cold. I waited for it to slowly take possession of my body, crystallize the blood in my veins, harden my flesh, take me away. The purple of the evening faded into the velvety blue of the night. Under my feet the valley opened like a treasure chest. The lights of human activity sparkled, mirroring the stars. So many. So wonderful. There was Orion’s Belt and the Pleiades, there was Venus, the Ursa Major.... She’s over there, look, she's the brightest of them all… It really does have the shape of a cart... no, it has the shape of a pram... yes, of a baby stroller... I looked closer and inside I saw some toddlers. They laughed, they cried, they played with each other, they called me: mom, mom! They were my children, waiting to come down to earth. And wrap their little arms around my neck, and kiss me with their milky lips, and love me.
I got up and went back to my grandmother. How many times since that night those babies gave me trust and courage even before getting off the Big Dipper! When they finally arrived I named each one after a star.
Later Cesare became famous. From Patagonia, where he climbed as first the Cerro Torre, he sent my grandmother a postcard where he wrote “Best regards from a poor adventurer”. I left for my roamings around the world and our paths separated, but I've always kept him in my heart. I even defended him against the attacks of Messner, because I know how great he had been.
My first love letter came from the cherry tree.
When the school year at Marcelline in Bolzano ended, I spent the summer in my mother's house in town. When she was home she played tennis or sunbathed stark staring naked by the pool, while creepy shades milled around outside the fence. I read, stretched out over a branch of the small cherry tree. Up there, embraced and protected by its branches nobody could reach me, nor their yells bothered me. Soon gratefulness turned to love. I really fell in love with it. On the bark of the trunk I discovered a ridge that looked like a mouth and I kissed it passionately. The small cherry tree opened for me a treasure box of dreams.
Actually the cherry trees were two, but to get up the big one I had to take a leap, grab some leaves with one hand, pull them towards me, stretch the other hand higher, grab their stems, pull my legs up, grasp the branch a little higher with my toes like a monkey, and draw myself up. Feasible but complicated. I preferred the small one, that could be scaled easily from the fence.
When my mother was away I climbed down. I made little drawings of how I would have liked my life to be and once, since I couldn’t afford colors, with a charred twig, half a bottle of blu ink and the smoke of a candle I painted on the ceiling of my mother’s bedroom various eyes full of tears. Their task was to look at her reproachfully. I have no idea if they succeeded, because she never commented. Often Guido and Claudio would come (girls were not permitted to play with me) and we would swim, dive crazily from the terrace into the pool (the champion was my brother), duel with the nettles gathered at the bottom of the garden, gamble at poker, play catch leaping from branch to branch on the small cherry tree like monkeys. At times I was Sandokan, the great pirate. Standing tall on the highest branch appointed deck of my praho, I shouted my defiance to the waves, to the storms, to the entire universe.
“Come to me! Come to me! I dare you!”
I failed the fourth gymnasium at Prati and was sent back to Marcelline, this time in Milan.
Sometimes, when we went for our walks three by three, I happened to notice a cherry leaf on the ground. It was my tree who had sent me a letter. On it was written: I love you. Since then, when I see somewhere a cherry leaf I know it’s a letter for me, I know who wrote it and I know its message. Since then my cherry trees have been chopped off long ago and, like Federico Garcia Lorca used to say: I am no more I, and my house is no more my house.
My teacher was Sister Carla, who had been my mother's best friend while boarding at that same school. In the evening she used to pass by my bed and caress me gently on the cheek.
April came and she called me:
"Aren't you here to make two years in one?"
"Absolutely not."
She scrutinized me for a while, then said:
“No. Now you'll do the fifth grade."
"Excuse me, but how can I do the fifth grade in two months, when it took me two years to do the fourth?"
“You'll do it for me."
"For you I jump into fire."
She provided me with a small private room and special teachers. At the final exams the external commission passed me with an average of eight. The year was over. Sister Carla summoned me in the garden.
"You can't come back next year." she said.
"Why?"
"Because you nurse revolutionary ideas."
I never nursed any revolutionary idea, but that was it. I cried. I would miss her caress in the evening. She cried also. Maybe she too would have missed an almost-daughter to caress on the cheek lightly before going to bed.
I went back to Prati in Trento. As usual during the winter mother wasn't at home. I was always alone in that run-down house, with no heating, no food and no money. I had joined a ski team and on Sundays we competed. Gian Carlo raced as well, though not in my team. He was very sweet and kind: he waxed my skis, coached me, protected me, took care of me. Since he came from Bologna after some time I invited him to sleep in my house to save the hotel money, and also to keep me company.
One night he raped me.
Years later there was a ring at my flat in Milano. I opened the door and Gian Carlo stood there, bearing a meter wide basked of violets. He must have scooped out all the florists in town.
“I came to beg you to forgive me.” He said.
I asked him in and we spoke. After a while he jumped on me and raped me again. As soon as I managed to disentangle myself I run to the kitchen, took a big knife and stuck it into his back. Not so deep as to kill him, since I didn’t want to go to jail because of him, but deep enough to make him understand that I didn’t appreciate his way of making love.
In summer my aunt Lumo used to invite me. With uncle Franco they had rented the wing of a grand villa in Brianza (a Lombardy district). They worked during the day, she as psychiatrist in the Mombello mental hospital, he as engineer at Breda. I played with the two marquises of about my age, or hid with a book on the top of a giant Lebanon cedar when I felt like to be alone. Their father had been a polar explorer and once they decided to spend the night in his tent. They had it pitched in the park and invited me. Dinner was brought to us on a silver tray by a butler in medieval livery. Later the heat became unbearable, mosquitoes ate us alive and we all run back to our beds. This has been the only tent experience of my life.
During their holidays we toured Italy in their convertible Mercedes called Biancona, uncle at the wheel, aunty reading the Baedeker aloud and I riding spread out over the folded capote, in the wind. Enchanted woods, sunny fields, turreted castles, and cathedrals, and churches, and villages, and towns passed by. We saw museums, and frescoes, and paintings, and statues, and mosaics…we swam in the sea.
Thank you. Thank you so very much. Thank you infinitely for taking care of me, for the teachings, the discussions, the love you gave me.
At the high school Sommer exams I was rejected in three subjects. In October I passed.
Then I run away. From my life, from my family, from Italy, from everything, like many other wretched would-be buccaneers did before me.
Because, as Elon Musk said, it doesn’t matter if the rocket blew up, what matters is what that explosion taught me.