The one in the title is a classic set phrase; it translates like this: My Mother (is a very good cook). I found it in an old Italian-Esperanto dictionary. What remains, the little that remains, of my mother. Two or three photographs. One in particular is dear to me: she is very young, perhaps in her twenties. I don't know, I will never know. There are no documents, no memories handed down. In that photograph she is very beautiful. I never saw her like that. Perhaps it was taken during her Sicilian captivity. She was the youngest in the family, and shortly before the racial laws were enacted she was sent to Sicily, to friends. For scaramanzia, she said, though I think she misunderstood the exact meaning of the word. It was the family of a doctor, a friend and colleague of my grandfather, and my mother, as she used to tell it, worked as the assistant of the doctor whose lover, I have no proof, but I am certain of it, she became. When she returned to Trieste, in '46, there was no one waiting for her. Perhaps it was the Risiera, perhaps some other camp, it makes no difference. There was no one left. Now, when I say she was mad, I may be exaggerating, but even if it were true she had every reason to be. I do not recall from her, or if you prefer of her, a single affectionate gesture. She could not even nurse me: she developed (did she bring it on herself?) a mastitis that cost her the removal of a breast and gave me a newborn's jaundice that made me spend the first three months of my life in isolation, at the Burlo Garofalo. Ours was a relationship at a distance, from the very beginning.
There was another photograph, though I don't know where it ended up, that portrayed all four of us on the day of my confirmation (she had rechristened it barmizzau): my mother looms in the foreground holding my little sister in her arms, beside her my father, who barely reaches her shoulders (sottoscaio, as we used to say), and finally me, thin and embarrassed, trying to show off my watch, a cheap fake, received as a gift. In a pipita suit (in Italian pepita, since pipita is an avian disease) with short trousers. I had cried over those trousers: my schoolmates had all been given long ones, and I felt ridiculous with my skinny little legs and my drooping socks. I who at catechism had been the best, who had been given the honour of reading two poems from the pulpit, the only one in the class able to read every double consonant (in our dialect double consonants do not exist), to observe the punctuation and to let the pauses be heard. But there was nothing to be done: she was unshakeable: it was too soon for long trousers. It was cold and there was the bora that took your breath away, and she, smiling, would tell me to put stones in my pockets, otherwise siora bora would carry me off.
In the evening, in winter, we went to bed early; we were all in one room – there was only one room, our poverty was black, and real – and so, huddled together for warmth, we listened to the radio. I remember my mother crying, seated in front of the radio; it was the first days of November '56. The Soviet tanks had invaded Hungary and she was afraid, they could reach anywhere. Perhaps we would have to flee once more. It was not necessary.
At home, like everyone we knew, we spoke in dialect; at school they taught us to speak in the standard tongue, but when the conversation between my parents turned to matters we children were not meant to understand, then the language they used was a strange mixture of Lower Austrian German larded with Slovene, Yiddish and Serbo-Croatian words, all of dialectal origin, pronounced in a distorted way and bound together in a wholly idiosyncratic and unrepeatable syntax. Tartaifel was my nickname. It took me some time to discover that it was the family version of Der Teufel.
I dreamed of her only once, and it was not a good dream. For that matter I dreamed only once of my father too, wretched, and that truly was a nightmare. I will not describe those dreams; I keep them to myself, they are part of my reserve of fears.
My mother dabbled in Esperantism. She cooked fish very well, though she never ate it. In old age she had softened a little; at times she cried. Only a moment, two tears, and at once she would draw back. Then she would fill the pockets of her overcoat with the leftovers from supper and go off to feed the stray cats.

I am not a collector (and I can hardly bear the collecting mania).
On the wall beside my worktable hangs an old photographic reproduction, in black and white of course, of a celebrated painting by Franz von Stuck, Die Sünde, The Sin. It depicts a young woman, Eve naturally (I like to think of her/him as a hermaphrodite), wearing an enormous serpent like a stole. No apple. Only her bare breast, her eyes and those of the serpent. I also own a lithograph by Arturo Carmassi, I bought it many years ago; it is the profile of a youth, and of him I am certain that he is a hermaphrodite. I bought it for that very reason. A drawing, the work of a friend I have not seen in over thirty years, a captive gull with crooked wings, sad, desperate and despairing. Two woodcuts that tell the beginning of a love story that lasted fourteen years. In truth they were not fourteen years of love; there was everything in them, love included. The woodcuts she made herself and gave to me. Two tiny prints, found on a stall in Munich: the first shows Faust at his worktable, grave and pensive, and facing him Mephistopheles, equally grave, watching him. The second shows us a gentleman in seventeenth-century dress, standing in the middle of a clearing in the wood, the shadow he casts on the ground stretching out behind him, rising toward the sky and framing, like a border, the image of a naked young woman. The title is Geist und Schönheit, spirit and beauty; thus Walter Helfenbein (Dresden, 1893-1984) symbolises Neo-humanism. A mixed-media work, from the series Frammenti, by my friend Alessandro Rossi, hangs in the bedroom. Two little old views of Venice and a copy of a Magritte, La Reproduction interdite (beside the bathroom mirror, by way of a memento), complete the pictorial material I have gathered so far. It is enough for me. Certainly I would like, on waking in the morning, to find before my sleepy eyes a vase of roses by Giorgio Morandi, or a flying goat by Chagall, or a portrait of Annetta Giacometti made by her son. Not to mention the enchantment of Vermeer's The Milkmaid, or to rise to the image of a Pollock, any one at all. But I know well that merely to wish for it is folly.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; I don't know who said it, but I believe it only in part. To finish: the house is in any case full of images, photographs of the children, of the grandparents, prints, drawings and watercolours made by my youngest son. My wife loves to gather everything and keeps everything, hangs it, catalogues it, fills albums with photographs. A family is made of this too. But it is not collecting: it is memory, shared affections, a struggle against the time that consumes all. Nor would I rule out a vein, underground but not entirely repressed, of attraction to the hermaphrodite.

A homecoming. In spite of myself.
I do not like returning to the windy city. Too many memories. Too much suffering. Sometimes, though, it is truly necessary. That time in particular it was a matter of an inheritance. Trifles in economic terms, but the notary who had summoned me had been unshakeable: had I not gone, not even my sister's share would have been released. And she cared about it, in order to honour, as she told me, the memory of our mother. I went, and with the notary we settled everything very quickly. The first thing I thought of was to leave again at once, but the autumn afternoon was truly magnificent. The clear sky, the Karst beginning to redden and the sea a myriad of glints. It was really too inviting. I got off the bus at the Railway Station, but instead of going to the ticket office I set off toward the seafront. In my heart I hoped to meet no one, or, even if I did, given the many years that had passed, I still had the hope of not being recognised. Since I had left I had cut off every tie. Those of childhood had ended when we went to live in an ugly outlying district, but those of adolescence, and above all those of my youth still weighed on me like the risk of having to relive times and places and events that I had swept from memory as unwelcome. I sat down on one of the little flights of steps of the Molo Audace. I smoked with my legs dangling and my head wandering in a pleasant, restful emptiness. The beauty of sunset over the sea has something incomparable about it; I have seen many, but none resembles this one, for when it is about to end you turn toward the square with the buildings set ablaze by the last reddish glimmers. There is no ekphrastic construction that can do it justice. And in a photograph, however faithful it may be, an essential component is missing: the smell. Sometimes a scent of salt spray, other times the stench of rotting seaweed. Easy to lose oneself in the most reckless fancies. That time, though, I had no chance. A joyful little cry, Giginooo!, my name is not Luigi, as one would obviously think from the pet name, but she had always called me that. We were almost relatives. For a time, not even a very short one, I had been engaged to her sister. She had always been very affectionate with me and I was truly fond of her. But when the affair with her sister ended I, as is my habit, had cut off relations with the whole family. She was, at the time, a very beautiful girl, sunny, uninhibited, much courted and much talked about, as is inevitable in a city that, though it boasts of being multiethnic, a seaport, the third capital of the empire (after Vienna and Prague, but even the fourth if we also count Budapest, where my grandfather was born), is nonetheless still a provincial town. We embraced, as they say, with great warmth. I was astonished at how glad I was to see her. Had it been her sister I don't know how I would have felt, certainly not so serenely happy. I was holding her like that when I saw two tears running down her cheeks. I was moved too; I am a false cynic but a true sentimentalist. Instinctively I held her tighter, perhaps too tight. I heard a moan, almost a whisper, but unmistakable. We loosened our embrace and looked at each other for a long time. Only then did I notice that her silhouette had something irregular about it. She was pregnant. Five months, she told me, and so saying she took my cheeks in her hands and gave me a long kiss, sweet and desperate. I stood there mute and motionless (a dressed-up, browbeaten fool, my mother used to say when I was left dumbfounded by her sudden changes of mood), and now she was really crying, calmly, without a sob, great tears, and she did nothing to dry them, much less to hold them back. A few words, and we soon came to the child on the way. The pregnancy was giving her some trouble, pains in her back, her breast, naturally ample, growing larger still and a real weight to carry, a touch of phlebitis that forced her to lie for hours with her legs raised. Nothing serious, bearable little aches, one way or another all women go through it. I asked her what she would call him; it's the sort of thing one does. If a boy, if a girl. The lottery of names. She started to laugh, she laughed loudly, and meanwhile it had grown dark. We were both seated on the little steps, some passers-by casting us a curious glance. Ah, the name. The name. Well, listen, Gigino, the name won't be a problem. The real problem, the trouble we might call it, will be the surname. And she began again to laugh at the top of her voice. It did not seem a laugh of frank cheerfulness.