Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro Read Free Book Online

because this extraordinary organ (a valuable legacy from our distant ancestors) never errs, and the only mood it knows is the imperative: Do this, do that, make sure your line will continue into the future, shining like a star.
    So do we follow our nose, or fate?
    Is the improvement of the species the main factor, or is it the fragility of human beings, with their inexhaustible and inexplicable need for love?

    The only image I have of my father in his youth – of the father I was able to track down after you died – is in a group photograph. He’s standing behind my mother. They’re holding cans of beer, as if they’re making a toast – the occasion is a meeting or a party, it’s hard to tell – and she’s looking up at him with the devotion of a dog watching its master. The smoke from her cigarette mingles with the other smoke hanging in a pall over the room. On the back of the photo, a date in pencil: March 1970.
    This photograph was one of many family pictures mingled together in a large cardboard suitcase, which I found in the attic, buried under a couple of carpets. I also found many letters, some of them bound together with ribbons of various colours, others tossed confusedly into plastic bags along with postcards from Salsomaggiore, from Cortina d’Ampezzo, from the earth pyramids in the South Tyrol, and from Porretta Terme, as well as train tickets, museum tickets, wedding invitations, birth announcements, messages of condolence, and, at the bottom of the suitcase, four or five notebooks, which, judging from their covers, dated from different periods.
    In addition, for reasons only you could fathom, you had saved two boxes of pins (one held safety pins and the other dress-making pins with coloured heads), a broken pair of scissors, an old caramel box containing buttons of every shape and size, an eraser, a tube of dried-up glue, a box of safety matches, a brochure from the Society of Dilettante Latinists, a train schedule from just after the war, a few recipes clipped out of newspapers, and a Bible whose cover had been removed by time, or mice.
    Judging from the dust, that suitcase hadn’t been opened for years; surely a good while had passed since your last venture into the attic, and I’d never even considered it. The desire to turn back and explore the past comes only when life changes for some unforeseen or terrible reason, such as an illness or a sudden void. Then, for example, a girl fetches a ladder and ratchets up her courage, because she needs to climb up and get all dusty and open the suitcase. And inside she finds repressed, unspoken words, deeds never done, and people never met; a tiny impact is all that’s needed to liberate the ghosts.
    The first ghost I came across wasn’t my father’s (although back then I wouldn’t have been able to recognise him) but my mother’s. I spotted it by surprise – it was hidden under a diary, a packet of letters, and a few scattered photographs.
    I gathered up everything very carefully and went down to the living room. I didn’t want to stay up in the attic , in
their
territory; I felt too vulnerable. By way of pretending that I wasn’t alone, I switched on the television set and sat down in the armchair.
    The pages of the diary were of Florentine paper with little lilies printed on it. On the first page, someone had drawn cubical letters in red ink with a felt-tipped pen: REBELLION. The word was underlined three times and followed by an indeterminate number of exclamation points.
    14 September, 1969
    Holy Cross Day
    What’s so uplifting about a cross? Bah! The only uplifting thing I can think of is that today’s my first day of freedom! Farewell to the noxious exhalations of Trieste; farewell to the prison of my family
.
    Making her accept my choice wasn’t easy. I could take the same courses in Trieste, so why incur the expense of moving to another city?
    The Mummy gave in before I thought she would. The magic word was ‘autonomy’: ‘I want to