I don’t know if any of you have a chest or trunk where you keep your memories. Sometimes the door of the past opens and many things related to our childhood come out. I opened the trunk of my memory and what I found is beautiful. My grandmother had this trunk, which was actually a chest, which served as a coat rack and bag storage, on which we children sat and imagined driving a carriage, complete with a simulation of the noise of the horses’ hooves, beating the timed heels on dark wooden board. This trunk, however, escaped its textbook location because it was in the corridor and did nothing but feed our curiosity as city children looking for new pastimes with which to pleasantly fill the long afternoons spent at grandmother’s house, slippers with heels and television on those TV programs that she called “useless things”. Although curious, we were not used to approaching the trunk in the corridor too frequently because we felt a sort of awe, most likely infused us by our parents, since inside there were “grandmother’s things that if you touch them she realizes and gets angry “. But one day I took courage and asked my grandmother to show me what was hidden in the trunk. She opened it and in the midst of letters, my grandfather’s military clothes, old newspapers and strange objects, photos of her past came out. I looked at that world in black and white and I wondered what colors the clothes and eyes of those people who unconsciously stared at me immortal from the photo cards had had. I asked my grandmother for the names of multitudes of objects unknown to me, information on their function, on what they had done, if the iron was really as comfortable as it seemed from the relaxed expression of a relative portrayed in the moment of starching a shirt. squares with an indecipherable color. And my grandmother promptly answered all my questions, standing, elbows resting on a round table now full of photographs; she seemed younger to me and it was easy for me to see in her the signs of that girl who survived the war.
I have not seen “Life is beautiful”. And I have not seen “The boy in the striped pajamas”. Do you know why? After seeing “Shindler’s List” I was sick for 3 months. I was in Palermo. I went to Zen and left there all my books, my jewels, my paintings, my clothes, everything I owned. I’ve never told anyone. I managed to get into Zen because I was dressed like a gypsy (they control everything). When I was a little girl and I saw a movie “Amazonia” during the break I went out of the cinema, went to a shop, bought some make-up, went back to the cinema, went to the bathroom and put on my make-up like an Indios. At the end of the film everyone was looking at me as if they had seen an alien. I lay badly for months and months. I wrote desperate letters to the president of Brazil, I wrote to the Pope, many letters that have never been answered. Certain films, about certain truths, make me snap something, and I risk my life. I do absurd things. After seeing “American Sniper” I bought a ticket for Iraq and had to leave. Except that I have health problems and my doctor told me that I would go to die without my drugs. I cannot know of some suffering otherwise I feel too bad and do unthinkable things. When I was 4 they abused me for a long time, and so I know what it feels like when you get great pain. It’s not up to me, I can’t get rid of it.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 