Too many years passed, now:
more than seventy, and, in those dark times,
the money wa mostly needed
to have a roof over one's head,
and the little that remained
was used to pout something into the belly.
and so, on the rare occasions that
it was possible to go to spend
our holidays up to the mountains,
we took the train and not the car,
that at those times few people owned.
it was too beautiful: I enjoyed
completely my father's attentions
and, for me, this fact was something
which, alone, filled me with joy.
to go to Bolzano there was an express
that left Rome at twenty o,clock,
and the emotion that the jerk of departure
caused in the wagons, was immense
in a eight-years-old child. It was like
leaving the old world for a new life.
in the compartment of the wagon,
all wood and velvets, at late evening
by mutual agreement the white light
was turned off, and we turned on
a dark blue light, almost a Woods lamp,
but more natural, even if more rareful:
i felt like I were a spectator
of the first moments of the creation,
when the immense voice of God the Father
still thundered after having said:
"Let there be the light!", and the light divine,
walked her first steps as a child,
radiant firstborn of God, and I
speechles, was left adoring her,
while the little closed worlad around
turned dark blu like a moonless night,
until, overwhelmed by emotions,
i fell into a dreamless sleep.
how fine it was, early in ythe morning,
to get off at the Bolzano station,
still aching for the many wounds
received in the years of the war.
but, how different the whole world was:
everything was clean, there wasn't
a single piece of waste paper
on the ground, everything lokked new,
as it was freshly stuccoed and repainted,
and, coming from Rome, this looked
like a magic: after a short time
we took a local train to Chiusa, and there
we got on a little narrow gauge train
that carried us to Plan di Val Gardena,
driving at such a reduced speed
that one could get off the train
and pick the mountain flowers in the grass,
and then get back on the moving convoy.
the narrow gauige railway was built
in one thousand nine hundred and sixteen,
to bring the infamous ogives to the front,
to be fired on our infantrymen:
but, how beautiful were the hills
where it seemed that God the Father
had passed with the lawnmower,
and looking at them gave peace and joy.
once we arrived, a little outside the village,
there was a farm, where the Kraut owner
rented for a pittance a little room,
as clean as the shirt of Saint Michael.
the house was all in wood, and smelled
of good and eternally alive things.
there, I met Christine, the youngest daughter
of the landlord: she was eight-years old,
just like me, and had a blond hair
and blue eyes, of the same color
of the lakes enclosed among the peaks.
i cannot tell you why, but when I was
close to her, I felt older and happy
deep down in the depths of my child's heart:
we played at jumping from the loft
of the barn, down onto the haystacks,
and Life very kindly promised
great future joys: what a liar!
lying to a eight-years old child!
then we separated, but still now,
i remember her blue eyes and blond hair,
like the ripe wheat at the valley's bottom,
and, when a tourist passes by,
with ther blue eyes and blond long hair,
a throbbing of joy, barely noticeable,
stirrs in the depths of my heart,
like the wick of a candle
in front of the statue of a saint,
when the wax is finally worn out.