2016 – On Christmas Eve there are 18 degrees and blows a warm and fragrant wind that makes all electric, full of expectations, as if around the corner there was summer and not the long winter months. The neighbors' dog points up and sniffs, and you too. You know that this anomalous heat could be the prelude to an environmental catastrophe – the end of the world is the fear of the moment. Instead of worrying you walk in the sun, whistling.
The Christmas of the only children are solitary, but not for this sad. From you, at midnight on the 24th, every year a little sprite passed by, knocking at the window and delivering gifts, just those you had talked about a few days before with your parents. Midnight was an unthinkable time for you, every eve you kept your ears outstretched, but then around nine o'clock you fell asleep with your face flattened against the star-shaped pillowcase. Patience: the morning in the living room you found the same many colored packages full of the wonders you wanted. Among all, the favorite gift was the wooden buildings: even now it would not be bad to spend a few hours pulling on magical castles and drawbridges, sitting on the carpet.
Today's Christmas are convulsive, time seems not enough, clean the kitchen while you write down the recipes and think about the gifts you still have to do. You and Omar, your partner, at Christmas you want to give you only beautiful things, but sometimes you are taken by a strange frenzy. You read about some village chiefs in remote parts of Central Africa: one makes a magnificent gift to the other, which in turn reciprocates, with an even bigger and more expensive gift – a little bit of a nice gesture, a little 'of the will to reiterate its status and power – and then the former is obliged to pay homage to him with an even more majestic gift, as long as both, and their respective villages, fall into ruin. So far, neither you nor Omar have ever given yourself an antelope or a golden idol with a jaguar head.
On the morning of the 25th, your mother and grandmother practiced the autopsy at a capon: you watched fascinated while the beheaded bird was opened, gutted, filled again with a mysterious filling and stitched up with string. The worst gifts you could imagine were all kinds of scarves, gloves or hats. When a package was soft to the touch, you would freeze.
The best advice was given to you by a psychologist whom you asked when you thought you were the only adult human without a family: "At Christmas, do only what you like". As for him, he would have barricaded himself in the studio with a bottle of whiskey and the complete collection of Tex Willer comics. The best Christmas is that of the 25 years, when at a party you did not even want to attend meetings friends that you fit perfectly: at first you look at each other with a little 'diffidence, but it takes little to understand. You missed the worst Christmas. The best Christmases are the ones you still have to live.

2015 – In the pockets, you have crumpled and rolled up sheets, scrolls in miniatures, shopping lists with which you could go back to the dinners of a month before. Milk, bread, chocolate please with pistachios, what is missing and what is about to end. Your partner, who is able to hold long business meetings, travels 500 kilometers by car to visit his parents and every morning he puts his feet in the right shoe, the right to the right and the left to the left, without exchanging them, to the supermarket, Without your detailed list, after a long wander through all those merchandise, it would probably end up at the cash desk with the empty cart.

2014 – You liked the job at the publishing house, until your new head fell in love, platonically, of the twenty-year-old gay intern. They call you from the direction of the staff. The director has a big, maternal smile. "A chocolate candy, Silvia? A slice of cake, a cup of coffee? " The company offers you a new opportunity, from the point of view of maintaining your job (it's just like that, like the computer on board an alien spacecraft): a scrawl on the far right, and swap your dignity with a little safety. Are there black crows flitting around the window, or do you just imagine them? Thanks to the new opportunity in optics, etc., now enter a numeric code in a database, creating other numeric codes that transcribe on invoices, cataloging them. When they ask you what work you do, you say that you give the numbers, literally.

2012 – On the subway, a girl you do not know curls her mouth in a strange way, maybe she has a tic? It takes you a while to understand: it smiles at you! Poveretta, you think, it's probably new, around here. The elderly ladies, if you make the mistake, staring at them for a moment too tightly clutch the purse to your chest. The fear of the moment is to be afraid of everything.

2005 – Live for a while with a cat, a nameless stray that you found on the side of the road. Call it as it happens: pussy, thief, crazy tail. With her you share everything: the sofa, the bed, the arm of the armchair in front of the TV. When you come back you rub on your legs to make you understand that you belong to it. He walks hovering on the outer edge of the sill and then with a silent leap lands on the floor, with the grace of a tightrope walker that concludes a perfect number. The chicken you forgot in the kitchen: which part will you taste? Entering the room in the evening you discover the table that dips a paw in the cup of your tea, if the lick satisfied, dips again. She throws her stomach up to be scratched, when she is tired she makes you understand giving you a sudden bite on the hand. You pick her up: she looks at you slyly and yawns, her warm breath tastes like tuna and mint. Take note: you have a lot of things to learn from her.

2002 – When you come back to your place, you can drive your car under the old apartment. Nobody lives there now, the owner has not sold it or rented it. Look up, slowing down, the shutters are closed, there are only shadows: your father who smokes at the bottom of the balcony, peers into the sea, tries to guess what the weather will do tomorrow. Stop the car and you approached cautiously to the door, the surname on the bell, however, is another. You do not live there anymore.

2001 – The day before the move, you took all the dishes and dishes from the good services, wedding gifts and anniversaries, crystal glasses, saucepans and white ceramic tureens. You washed them one by one, lined up on the kitchen table: polished for a flea market to make the joy of some elderly lady. Standing alone in the room, it seems to you that the energy of everyone you loved, and hated, is there, among those objects. Is it self-suggestion? Maybe, but that energy puts you in a good mood for days, even if you've just given away the memories of a lifetime, before closing the door behind you forever.

2000 – Things and people have changed, you have distracted a moment and you do not recognize them anymore. They all look thin, toned, self-confident. Even the young shop assistant in the cutting pizzeria asks: "You want it with the holive?. " The word has a strange aspiration, how do you speak? Is he flirting with you? Bite your piece of pizza, you wonder if there is someone, an occult Grand Mogul, who gives directions, tells everyone – except you – how to move, talk, how to be seductive on the bus at seven in the morning. At any moment you expect to start an internship in a publishing house, in the city where your mother was born. A call must arrive. Keep your suitcase always ready like a primipara about to give birth.

1999 – When you're 30, men fall in love with you, at least for the time to tell you how cute you are when you slip your shirt, sitting astride above them. Your hair is coppery and smooth, you get it behind you, longer than it will ever be. The world without barriers is a paradise from which you can choose: your book of the moment is Hunting and fishing manual for girls. If there's one thing your lovers have in common, it's the sea: the seafood of your region pales in comparison to the giant crabs of Scandinavia, the giant tuna from Portugal, the giant shrimps of Sri Lanka! Journeys, like loves, do not last. Get airplanes and trains but surprises are not always welcome: sometimes you encounter hard looks like soles. The big fear of this year is the Millennium Bug, an alien bug that will make all PCs disappear at midnight on the dot of the new millennium.

1995 – After a certain number of lyophilized risottos, prepared by adding too much water, your father at sixty – newly a widower – discovers the inclination as a cook. Experiment with regional dishes: the cassoeula!, is pleased, here is the fricchiò! «If the ingredients are good, a dish can not succeed. This pearl becomes his motto, and the ingredients are excellent, of course, grown in the garden to which he dedicates all afternoons. Antesign of the bio, does not use herbicides or fertilizers, no insecticides: only Nature. To taste a courgette or a fruit of its vegetable garden is like biting a plate, sticking a handful of grass into your mouth, you would not know how else to define that flavor. After a while you can not get more than those, secretly you get tinned tuna cans and work hard at the last exams and at the thesis, sitting at the big table in the room for hours until they tingle your arms, you feel a painful jolt along the legs.

1994 – Your father tells you when in Portonovo docked with the small motorboat on the shore and dumped the buckets full of fish, while the few foreign tourists of the time made a capannello around, hungry especially of folklore. Then with his companions of fish organized a barbeque remediated, roasting the fish on old cans to eat it all together, able to express themselves, with strangers, only smiles and gestures. Imagine cooking for everyone, passing a plate around like the father of those children not his, Aryan children with burned skin and freckles, with young mothers so different from yours, sun-bleached hair that smells of sun oil; and eat the fish by holding it with your hands, like roasting corn on the cob, spitting out bones on the ground, with discretion and a little embarrassment. The images also remember suddenly that it is late, it is out of hours, at home they are waiting for it, loads the barrels and other tools and salt on thethe blue panda, he arrives already sleepy, nervous, without appetite.

1993 – It's the days of the bombs. «Silvia, what's happening to Italy? Asks your mother with her eyes lost, after seeing the news on the hospital TV. The visits are too short to tell you everything about the university, your projects and the nearby beach umbrella. You brought her a book: Girls in marital happiness. She really likes it, you do not know it's the last one she'll read. "Those two nuts!" He says, of the protagonists. She comes out of the bedroom in a nightgown and takes you in the elevator to the door below, hugs her, then she watches you from behind the window as you move away quickly.

1992 – What today is little more than an omelette of houses that slide from the hills to the sea, close to the railroad, tells your mother, was once a garden, a huge pine forest that descended to the well-kept villas of the rich vacationers, for the most Roman, facing the beach. In the gardens there were roses, there were roses everywhere. There in the middle, indicates a point beyond the shoreline, on the floating platform you could even dance. It was 1965, the hit of the moment, poignant, was called The world "I have not even imagined you yet," he tells you. Your mother is dying, your walks are increasingly circumscribed because of her pains, but her memory has never been so vivid. Remember everything: the sleepless night spent watching the moon because of your cries, "You were such a strange girl, you slept all day and you were referring to the crane of the yard in front of the house, I sincerely believed you were stupid! And at night you never slept! You laughed with laughter and tears, and you did not even know how to speak. "
It tells of holidays in Cortina, of wild dances, of when he got up at dawn to get to the beach before his friend Giorgio, the one who at the Bedetti bar always had a snack for the morning at school, a square puff pastry with tomato and baked ham. "Why did not you marry him?" You asked her as a child. This very kind preparer of snacks, instead of your father, who was never really there, even when he was there. Your mother is weak, and you who have never cooked before, prepare steamed soles and soups that lazily turns over the plate, without touching anything. "Why me?" He asks you sometimes, and you can not answer them, pour the soup into her plate, "Careful, because it's hot."

1991 – In Bologna are the years of the Pantera and the band of the Uno Bianca, your song is smells like Teen Spirityou know it's destined to last. The time spent in class seems to you the most interesting of your life, attend all the seminars, in-depth studies, lectures. Do not you care about who says "But what do you want to do with literature?". Silly Cassandre: what do they know? Believe that life will be an endless series of exciting things, travel, cute boys with glasses, poetry and bottles of red wine bought at the super. Your generation took its name from the book of your favorite writer: Generation X. Nothing bad can happen to you.

1989 – The houses you live are full of rooms and crowded with roommates: they come and go. Like loves, they do not last. Exit with one of the roommates, you are alone in a small bar behind Via Irnerio. "Where are the others?". Nobody comes, it's a two-way appointment. "Art," the roommate is telling you, "is where I look." "Do not you think you're exaggerating?" You ask him, genuinely worried about his megalomania. He is what a director thinks, he comes from Mirandola every Monday with the thermos of soup that his mother has prepared for him. The love between you does not take off, but the following week you already fell in love with the English assistant – a 35-year-old man, but nice. On your twentieth birthday, your best friend gives you a book: As fast as night, that is your favorite forever. The dedication says: «Not to lose vice.

1985 – At 16, in a bikini in front of the mirror of the bedroom with your best friend, look at your bodies that you consider imperfect. She is convinced that the rolls of flab that come out of the elastic and the bows of the new costume each correspond to a memory. Not all wrong: the two small bulges on the sides are a trip to Florence with your mother two years ago. Three days of restaurants, museums and tortellini. The little holes on the thighs are the spaghetti toasts you ate in England, and the first coke and rum offered to you by the young couple who hosted you: not really a hangover, but in short. Are you sure to make a clean sweep of everything for the body you want? Think about it. If only Madonna did not wear leggings!

1977 – Your grandmother plunges her hands into a small volcano – at least she looks like a volcano, with a crater in the middle, reminds you of a film you've seen recently, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". At a certain point all the protagonists started to model a soft mass, it could be clay, or mashed potatoes, creating a mountain, the miniature of the one on which the aliens would meet.
The mountain that is kneading your grandmother, pensive, is made of minced meat, she pulls it to the side leaving a hole in the center where it will drop the other ingredients, bread soaked in milk, cheese, eggs that give the meat a consistency slimy and sticky. Knead, and occasionally put your hands on the apron tied at the waist. Standing next to her, you stretch out to steal a piece of that mixture: the meat is flavorful, gritty, the nutmeg pinches your nose. From that mixture your grandmother extracts small perfect spheres at the end, which dips to cook in tomato sauce. Years later, your meatballs could pull them against a wall and bounce them like crazy balls. Having witnessed so many times to that ritual apparently was not enough.

1976 – At home you put on the table recipes that do not exist in your friends' homes. Instead of lasagna there is baked pasta, with macaroni that come out crispy from baking dish, stringers of bechamel, saffron risotto that you like because it is yellow, and polenta, your grandmother prepares it in every way, your mother It goes crazy, it dips it in the milk in the morning and in the evening it eats it together with the gorgonzola, that makes you impression because it is crossed by blue veins and has the mold. With the polenta you play in secret, touch it with a finger and make it sway on the wooden cutting board, imagine that the consistency like jelly is the belly of your fat cousin.

1975 – Some toys you want to eat them: the transparent red Crystal Balls like bubblegum, the embossed and soft stickers of Susanna Tutta Panna that you find in homage to the cheeses, the fragrant grommets to the fruit of your classmate.
On feast days, your grandmother is challenged with the recipes of the place where you were born (think back to her today as a pioneer of fusion), with the large window of the room that opens right in front of the sea. Prepare the brodetto: the fish must be 13, all different, traditionally, as in a magic potion. In the kitchen there are cuttlefish, baby octopus, scampi, mantis shrimps, the razor clams left to drain into the water and salt seek air out of their shells, they move blindly as long thin fingers. They break your heart. The fish soup is simmering in a pot that at six years seems gigantic, you go up in a chair to look inside: between the pieces of tomato pretend to read your future.

1974 – You're skinny, you like a few things to eat and almost all salty, you do not love sweets and especially you do not care about chocolate: which makes you impervious to adults' flattery.
You learn that some foods are forbidden because, according to your mother, they are harmful: the chips in the bags, the red berries on the trees, the lemon popsicles in the summer which, in any case, are always inexplicably finished.

1973 – With your father, on the food front, there are no bans. At the beach, in winter, jump into any boat on the shore and play the Sailor and the Captain: he is a simple sailor while you give orders and decide the route: straight, Sailor! You do not say that you would rather go to boarding and play pirates; he likes that hierarchy, where those who go wrong fall below to peel potatoes.
In the summer in the square at the party party, the band plays Forward people and he buys you a hot dog and lets you dip your finger in the beer foam. "Let's not tell mom" is the secret pact. He takes you fishing with him on the pier, while you change the bait the hook is slipping everywhere, between the hair and under the thin skin of the palm of the hand. Do not shed a tear, but sometimes you sneak back a fish in the water, see them gasp in the basin breaks your heart: go, ski, fish, in freedom! A flash of silver ripples the sea.

1969 – Your parents, aged 40, are considered an almost elderly couple. At their first baby, they wield you like glass pits, a little miracle. Looking back at the slides of the time, your companion says that, tiny and bald, you had the head in the shape of a funnel.
You have no memories, it's just a reeling, a blind desire, a rising against the current, an open mouth like a bird. As long as you taste your first food: your mother.

Tale of Raffaella Krismer

Born in Ancona, graduated in Languages, she studied in Bologna and Urbino. In 1990 three of his stories were chosen by Pier Vittorio Tondelli for the anthology Under 25 – Papergang treated by him. In 1997 he published the novel The Lord of the Meat, published by Baldini and Castoldi, and in 1999 History of my life on Earth, for Transeuropa. In 2000 he won the Pagine Nuove literary contest with a long story Waitress. He lives and works in Milan.

The snow-covered bay of Portonovo (Ancona). Photo courtesy Francesco Gabbianelli.

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