Our mother had warned us, or, better still: she had all but terrified us. Those people were not even to be approached. As for keeping company with them, that was out of the question, not even to be thought of.

We were little more than children, and naturally the ban had no other effect than to sharpen our curiosity and our desire to get to know them. At school, to be exact, it was a boarding school run by the Ursulines, everyone avoided them, the teacher included, one might say, and they, for their part, did nothing to draw closer to the others. At first sight what most astonished us, and therefore made them hard to approach, were their clothes: colourful, strange, and showy; their hairstyles of braids and dangling ringlets; their shoes, which were not shoes but elaborate sandals with leather straps that climbed to the knee for him, and little embroidered slippers adorned with beads and pendants for her.

There was one exception, though: Sister Dorotea. She was the storekeeper nun, in charge of the provisions; she was as big as a tenement block and could carry a sack of almonds on her shoulders, holding it with a single hand. With the other hand she held the hand of Kevork, who was the smallest, and he in turn held the hand of his sister, Anouch, only a little older than he. Anouch always wore gloves; the summer ones were often of black openwork lace and covered her to the elbow. None of us had ever seen her hands. She wrote with her left hand, and when she ate, and they always ate a little apart from the others, she held the spoon in her left hand; and if fork and knife had to be used, which happened rarely, since with the nuns one ate really very little meat, her right hand would appear over the plate like a kind of flash, perform the necessary task, and vanish at once into her lap among the folds of her pinafore. Sister Dorotea was also the only one who spoke with them a language different from the one we all spoke and wrote at school.

True, there were various languages to be caught during recess, but those we more or less all knew, from German to Serbo-Croatian, from Slovenian to French to English. The babel is explained by the fact that the neighbourhood was home to several consulates and the city was still administered by the GMA. Italians, yes, but for the moment not entirely so.

I, at school but also outside it, since my parents worked, had to look after my little sister. At school, moreover, I was betrothed to Micol, who really was Italian, one of the few, and I cared about her a great deal. Her father, a friend of my parents’, was the doctor who treated us when we were ill.

I made several attempts to approach them, clumsy ones probably, since they never led to any result. What held me back most was my sister; the fear they instilled in her was so plain that

they would draw back at once, the moment they caught the faintest hint of an approach.

Some years had to pass before we found each other again; we were youngsters by then, on to middle school. Inevitably separated from our younger brothers and sisters, we ended up in the same class. They were mixed classes, for the reason that we were so few that making a class of boys only would have meant a class of five, perhaps six, pupils. With Anouch we became friends out of mutual interest, or perhaps necessity. I was good at Italian, Latin, history, and geography; she was unbeatable at mathematics and German. People still read and wrote in Gothic characters. An aside within the aside: reading and writing in Gothic we had learned from the nuns, by the express wish of Sister Celeste, the headmistress, who besides Gothic had another passion, the anthem of the Empire; and so, on official occasions, we never sang the sadly heroic Fratelli d’Italia, but the beautiful Serbi Dio l’austriaco regno (whence the saga of Serbidiola), which among us, in more current language, was rendered Salvi Iddio dell’Austria il regno; the anthem was set to music by F.J. Haydn, later taken up by the Weimar Republic in ’22, with the text altered into that Deutschland, Deutschland über alles that the Germans still sing today.

And so, inevitably, Anouch and I found ourselves, little by little, becoming inseparable. We always did our homework together, and almost always at her house. I could bring my little sister along; she had stopped being afraid of them and now played quite happily with Kevork, who would be, more or less, the Armenian version of Giorgio. They were Armenians, then, and since I excelled at history and geography, I set about studying in earnest the history of her country and her people. In the library of their home there were many books on the subject, but the two that drew me in most were Four Years Beneath the Crescent by Nogales Mendez and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel.

The first is a fairly objective account by an eyewitness, and one complicit in the events that took place; the second, a fictionalized epic of the genocide of the Armenian people perpetrated by the Turks between 1915 and 1916. A million and a half dead. Of course the history of Armenia does not come down to this, but for them it was still the most vivid and terrible memory.

Now I must say two things about Anouch: first, that she was very beautiful and kind, and second, that she always wore gloves because on her right hand she had one finger too many. She had six fingers, and one day, without my even having to insist all that much, she showed me that hand and told me, rather casually, the story, almost a legend, handed down in the family about her monstrousness.

Monster: in teratology, a branch of embryology, living beings that present deformities of structure with respect to the regularities of the species to which they belong. So someone born with six fingers is a monster from the biomedical point of view. Then there are the mythological monsters, and the imaginary ones such as unicorns, Medusa, and so forth, but those are another category.

It was known that the deformity ran in the family, but it was not clear at what rhythm or frequency this happened; it seemed to be two generations yes and one no. It was certain that it passed down the female line, but sometimes it appeared in the males as well, who, however, were soon relieved of the excrescence by amputation, also because, rather than a finger, in the males it was often a sort of dangling piece of flesh, without bones and without cartilage. In the females that extra finger, usually perfectly functional, was kept, and those endowed with it, in their homeland, were credited with a certain magical, thaumaturgic power.

Perhaps this is what explains my mother’s attitude. She was not wicked, but she was certainly a concentrate of superstitions and phobias, many of which were, if not exactly contradictory, then at least unimaginable inside a single head. From the cult of Padre Pio to that of Saint Rita; from a fear of uniforms, whatever they might be, carabinieri, American soldiers, worse still if they were Black, and there were plenty of those, even on the tram into the centre of town, to a revulsion for cassocks and friars’ habits: not the nuns’ ones, of course, but priests and friars she simply could not abide (and yet among her relics she kept a scrap of Padre Pio’s habit!). My mother voted Socialist, but she had an ill-concealed sympathy for the monarchists, though she well knew the King’s responsibility in allowing Mussolini to seize power and then to issue the racial laws that the Duce announced in our very city, in September of ’38, and that brought such joy to our family. I break off here, but the list could go on for a long while.

Probably my mother knew something of this business of the fingers, and so she feared that our possible contact, my sister’s and mine, with the monsters might bring some kind of evil eye into our house. Even though the little boy was no monster: his hands had five fingers each, and that is how he had been born, as Anouch told me.

A million and a half dead is no small thing for a small people, which on that occasion came close to vanishing from the earth and from history. Only a quarter, to be sure, by what by now seemed an established figure, of what had befallen, in more recent times, the people to whom my mother belonged. That people has not vanished from history, but it has vanished from a part of the earth where it had lived for centuries.

This fact, the extermination, in some way bound us together, even if there were differences; but over the differences we never once set about arguing. They were simply there; it was only a matter of taking them for what they were: usages, customs, habits, traditions. Some could be shared, others not, that was all.

To live with the constant fear of being attacked, deported, and perhaps massacred, is not the best way to live, and so they had decided to leave. Ties of kinship with a family of shipowners who had lived for more than a century in our city had made the thing not too difficult, despite the dark times we were living through. To tell the truth, my parents too would have liked to leave, for Australia. Paradise on earth. Everyone was going there; within a few years the city had halved, and once a month we would go to wave off the ship as it left laden with emigrants. But owing to a problem of, I believe, a political nature, my father was repeatedly denied an entry visa, and so I did not have the good fortune to grow up among the kangaroos.

Of great help to me in not remaining a slave to prejudice and superstition, the common currency of my own home, were Anouch’s parents. Cultured, kind, and intellectually generous. Their house was frequented by the most disparate people: merchants and entrepreneurs, professors and musicians. At first, when I began going there, I would sometimes stand a little dumbfounded amid rather extravagant scenes, because, even though we had all the sheltered space we needed to study and do our homework, it might happen that, going out into the garden, say (which was in truth almost a park), one found oneself in the midst of a group of adults deep in discussion, and discussing in at least two different languages, though there might be three or four languages in play; and among those who spoke them there were often guests dressed in exotic fashion, exotic like some of the languages they spoke, of which I understood not a word. And Anouch’s mother would be at the piano, and someone beside her playing a violin, or else a thin, elderly gentleman playing a kind of fife, which I later learned was called a duduk, and when he played everyone fell silent and listened. Accustomed as I was to a petty, very petty, bourgeois family routine, made of chatter, bigotry, and platitudes, my head would sometimes spin if I reflected even a little on what the history and geography of books were, and how little they knew of the history and geography of the lived world. The world seen and heard and smelled, because smells too, from perfumes to stenches in their enormous variety, are part of the world and give it its character. The smells that pervaded that house, and the people who passed through it and those who lived there, together with the sounds of voices and of music, were very probably the deepest stimuli, and the ones that worked in me most continuously, and that in the end have brought me to be what I am and to do the little that, for better or worse, I manage to do.

Then they left, and we stayed. We exchanged a few letters. Few.

There remains only a handful of memories, one deep-rooted conviction, and a few negligible regrets.