Traduzione a cura di Cristina Sansone e Luigi Tumbiolo
Chapter I
Tall. Gaunt. Dressed in black, the garb long almost to her toes.
And that singular
expression: her mouth that widened from check to check, long like she was
constantly smiling.
Her bare arms were
small, slender; her fingers long and thin. You could see her bones, visible through her
garments, as she was emaciated.
Glasses
so dark that they hid her eyes, protecting them from the rays of the sun. In
the end, her quick steps were always accompanied by that tiny, short-haired dog
tied to his leash.
Everyone in town has
seen her at least once, they’ve watched her walking through the streets, but nobody
ever seemed to really know her.
In another time you
would have thought that she was a dame hiding a mysterious secret, that she
might have been a witch or a woman of the night. But she was nothing of the sort. I knew that
she had no relation to any of these things and I wanted to know who she
actually was, to find the secret of her imitable life, of her unusual and
hypnotic image.
One year ago, I was still not yet a journalist and I became
interested in her, curious about her persona. I started to search for some
information and not too long after I learned that she was an artist, a painter.
She was known as Francesca Lastname. She was French.
When I went to go speak
to Ms. Maria, her neighbor, I asked her what kind of work she did, what did she
do to pay the rent.
“She paints” exclaimed
the old lady who lived across the street in response to my questions.
“The landlord doesn’t
ask her for rent money, he wants her paintings. Once he confessed to me that
one day they will be worth a lot. So she paints”
“And what does she
paint?” I asked, fascinated. They must have been rare pieces to allow her to
not pay the rent.
“ I haven’t had the
pleasure of seeing one of her paintings” answered the old woman with a sad
tone. She watched me intensely and I realized that she too has wished for a
long time to know more about that mysterious woman. I exchanged the look. She was
a good lady, she was a high school teacher in the city many years ago; now she
is 80, small pink stains colored her face and at this point her hair was all
white. I wished her goodbye, returning to my walk towards home.
