Seen through the eyes of Ginevra Barbetti
So off I went, with two half-price bought colourful costumes that will stay in my suitcase.
“November of sunshine is the best month” they said. Better to understand that Rimini and I, today, have a compatible melancholy.
At the Gran Café Margherita there are few tourists and a few old people, wearing clothes borrowed from autumn. The decadent charm of this place asks me every time to stay. I say yes, and with a double coffee in my hands I warm up and observe. The promenade has something that reminds me of my mother, when she would come home at night, tired, from work. She had finished but was actually starting, because she had to think about us. Only afterwards could she think about herself. She would take off her shoes, her make-up, the day off. He would tie up his hair. She would go to the balcony and light a cigarette, finally free of the day. I could see her reflection in the glass door of the kitchen. She was enchantingly simple, more so than when she was getting all dressed up to go out. She looked disarmed, and disarming in all her surrendered sensuality.
Romagna is now like her. Arriving in the evening, after the tiring days of summer, she stands still and lets herself be seen. Without the pretense of liking it, leaving others to know that it is even more beautiful. On my itinerant journey, which runs as fast as those dense clouds, through the high heart of Italy, passing through Ravenna.
I decide to say goodbye to an old friend, stationed in Reggio Emilia. Like other women who have come into my life, she is an important presence of affection and warmth. Her name is Jacqueline Crotti, for everyone Jackie, like the Kennedy, whose nickname carries with it an unquestionable charm of the past. To paint her would require the warm tones of the sun, when it kisses the sand and the earth burns. Instead, her eyes are magnetic and pitch-black, with a background of light melancholy in them.
I return to her Borgo, which is now home for me too, two or three times a year, and there I stay to write as much as I can, in the embrace of her always frank and jovial welcome. She cannot be said to be a great storyteller, she does not seek comfort in words, but always listens with a sincere heart. I find her lying on the sofa, her head under the pillow. On the floor, an empty biscuit tin, the umpteenth stolen from the larder when no one is looking, without the permission of those who try in vain to control her diet, and left there, making coloured paper. Useless to tell her what to do or not to do, she remains a lady but she responds by pulling out her very white teeth, with the ferocity of a wolf. And by now, at her age, when habits have taken root, the idea of change is pure utopia. As soon as she notices my presence, she runs towards me, while she stretches and continues yawning.
Then he pulls me into a long embrace. “Jackie, you put on another love handle.”, I tell her. She looks away, haughty, into the greenery of the winter garden shimmering with rain, squeezed into the frame of the closed window. “Jackie, I'm talking to you!” I repeat, raising my voice. But nothing, she goes back to the sofa and settles down comfortably, her long tail on the springy cushion, beating out a rhythm, like Tullio de Piscopo on the drum cymbals.
