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IT WAS A ROOM SHE USED AS A BOX ROOM. She threw into it all the cards she wanted to keep or couldn’t get rid of; postcards her father had sent from Switzerland, where he’d worked when she was a girl, for example. They were beautiful: black-and-white views showing peaks towering over squares, cities and small villages, hand-painted scenes depicting young shepherds and shepherdesses in lederhosen and with red cheeks, little goats with barely sprouted horns looking into the eyes of the children who were their friends, and children looking at goats while chewing a blade of grass or whistling.

Silvia had felt mortal rage toward her father, cold and implacable, because he was never there. He’d promise to come for her birthday and then he never did. He left her with her grandparents and the nuns, and in the end he died far away in a work accident. She’d saved all his cards but they were a mess, and mixed up with papers from her students, letters from friends, empty envelopes, lists ticked off.

In the drawers and cupboards of the few pieces of furniture along the walls were stacks of memorial cards, greeting cards, and invitations to Christenings, first Communions, and Confirmations. On the floor of the room Silvia had piled shoeboxes full of newspaper clippings: former students who’d succeeded at this or that, news about Bioglio (elections, landslides, formal occasions), articles about Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly, and Princess Soraya of Iran. There were special editions on Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis and Princess Grace’s to Prince Rainier of Monaco, photoshoots with Soraya on holiday in Rapallo.

She’d never probed her own obsession with the three queens (in a certain sense, Jackie was one, too): the widow, the actress, the spurned woman. It must have been something to do with their weddings, the crystal and papier-mâché from which they were fashioned. Grace was the one who irritated her most, in her lavish wardrobe, or standing next to a prince who had cast aside his previous fiancée because she was infertile. Rainier needed heirs and Grace, the great actress, had shrunk herself to enter into that fairy tale in miniature. She gave him children.

Silvia didn’t conceal her habit of taking cuttings from glossy magazines—it wasn’t a secret passion. Luisa and Gemma kept aside reporting and interviews for her. Sometimes, at the doctor’s or her hair salon, she couldn’t resist, and she tore out pages and pages from a magazine in the waiting room while the person sitting next to her watched out of the corner of their eye. All that gossip reminded her that even what lies beyond our own horizon exists, and is simultaneously both like and unlike us.

Silvia is in the hut and she is in the messy room. She’d like to turn on the light but the switch isn’t working. It clicks in vain and she has to put up with the dim light. There, in the middle, are some of Giovanna’s drawings, notes she wrote, photos of her class. Somewhere there’s a card with a crooked silvery Christmas tree on it: “Best wishes, Miss Silvia, from Giovanna Morel (and family).” She wants to find it but her hands fall instead on the goats her father sent, the bends in the Rhine at Basel, Jackie in short sleeves and sandals, her grandmother’s romance novels. She’s struggling to separate the pile of stuff she’s already gone through from the rest, but she keeps on looking at the same letters, the same postcards.

She shakes herself in frustration. Her wet clothes feel freezing between her thighs and her waterlogged shoes chill her too. The fog has descended to obscure the woods; the trees farthest away have already disappeared and before long the night’s blackout will finish its work of erasure. Giovanna’s Christmas tree is invisible, too, and yet it’s there somewhere in the forest of her messy room, in the house Silvia has abandoned.

Look what happens when you never keep anything tidy.

The voice in her head could be Luisa’s. Silvia is ashamed, and immediately from that shame comes something worse: the nuns. Faced with their abrasive looks she goes back to being a little girl, stubborn, alone, and starved of affection. Like a chestnut plonking onto corrugated iron, a thought strikes her: she never grew up enough. She did it on purpose.

She is Giovanna.