TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Franca Mancinelli been able to go through them. With the same certainty, I would stare at someone or something heading toward me as if they were passing under an ancient stone arch, a semicircle of air guarded for centuries at the town gates; I was that air and that stone, worn down, standing there to signal a passageway. I was digging into myself, carving myself, waiting for a sign, a mark that would reveal my identity. And the more I realized that no one was following my bloody tracks, the more I let myself fall with all my weight on awls and splinters. Such was, I sensed, the road that would take me to myself. One day the great destruction took place and I stopped, a step away from death, astonished, my eyes like shattered glass, thinking that it was all over now. However, it was only my adolescence that was over. I understood this when I slowly emerged from the ruins. My hut made of windows and straw, in the uninhabited lands, had been completely shaken, but it had resisted. From that day on, I would learn to come out of all this in a different way, without running away, and to stay ever longer within its shadowy walls, writing my story. But now we are already at the end; instead, I would like to go back to the beginning, to the time when I was taking my first airy steps. Back then, one night before falling asleep, while I was staring at the ceiling, I was thinking about what I would grow up to be: a firewoman, a doctor, a veterinarian, a woman who plants trees. . . It was unclear to me where the heart of the world was beating, where I should bend down and listen. But I was sure that I would understand and that I would head to wherever I was beckoned, wherever my gestures would be necessary, like water for plants. I remember a day when I was wandering around the rooms of the empty home, with the strange but precise feeling of having 126