Imperfect

Zoe said goodbye to dear old Luciano with a smile and dashed to her room. Her great-uncle Luciano from Ingelheim had showed up at home that morning. Luciano had always been a figure she had never known except for his fame as the family gypsy and self-proclaimed black sheep. He had stayed for just over an hour with the joviality of a boy and the appearance of a hillbilly grandfather, and as he took his leave he had flashed a lady-killer smile, waving his bejeweled fingers as he said goodbye. Zoe put on the shorts hanging from the orange armchair, adjusted her purple tank top and put on her sunglasses. "I"m going out!" she shouted, as she skipped across the entryhall like a schoolgirl ready for summer camp. The front door closed behind her with a thud that echoed up the stairs to the attic. She arrived at her grandmother"s house practically crawling because of the heat. The sun had followed her, slipping through the alleyways and appearing from the eaves, from the chimneys, annoying her with its dazzling reflections on the cars. It was June 9 and her grandmother was on vacation with her aunt. Zoe dug into pocket of her shorts and found the duplicate of the house key and opened the gate. She looked around, but no one seemed to be watching fron the windows. She walked up the marble steps, turned into the passageway between her great-uncles’ house and the vineyard, fenced where the valley became a hill. After five minutes spent trying to open all the turns of the lock, the door opened: she took a step and the dark hall swallowed her with the typical smell of old paintings and memories. Daylight was coming through the door that she had left open. which gave onto the small forest that her grandfather had cultivated until his last day. You could say that, like a wild man of other times, as he had been, he had passed away in the forest like a Tarzan who retreats into the jungle to end everything from where it had began. Luciano had spoken of some relatives who had moved to Canada in the 50s, that Zoe had never heard of, at least until then. She crossed the living room passing by the cold fireplace. The photos of herself and her cousins smiled at her from the mantelpiece; a round table was home to about twenty medicines in bottles and boxes, a calendar was marked by various strokes of a pen. She went up the spiral staircase heading to where she knew she would find what she was looking for. The door of her grandmother"s room was partly open, a wedge of light was lying on the floor exactly in the direction of the hallway which led to the balcony that ran around the perimeter of the house to the terrace. There was an iron sitting on the coffee table, the ironing board was hidden behind the door, the walls were full of photos of her grandparents. Zoe went to the huge cupboard and opened the middle door: she just had to start there. At least three hours had passed and Zoe had leafed through all the photo albums she had found on the various shelves of the cupboard, but still no trace of the letters between her grandmother and Natalia. Luciano had captured Zoe"s attention when he had mentioned great-aunt Natalia. She was an Italian-Canadian relative who not only wanted to know the new generation of their lineage, but had always kept in touch with Zoe"s grandmother. She wasn"t sure why she was doing it, but Zoe wanted to find at least one of those letters at all costs. The truth was that she had no exam to prepare for that summer because, although if she had not told anyone, she would be leaving the literary class. Another factor was her nervous breakdown because of her mother, who had been through a long year of illness that had forced Zoe to consider that house, to all intents and purposes, a prison. The winter had gone by with the slow pace of a nightmare and Zoe was desperate. She stretched her back as she filed away yet another box of memories. MOM: Where are you? you have to give me a hand with the blueberry cake, I can"t mix" She finished listening to the voice message, wondering what wasn’t clear to her mother about the doctor"s order ‘you must rest’. She looked at the half-open balcony door and sighed. She had to take the dog out, prepare dinner for her mother, for herself and make her understand that she shouldn’t be making a blueberry cake at eight in the evening because A. she couldn’t eat it and B. Zoe didn’t like it, so it would have just been a waste and nothing else. It wasn"t so much the list of things to do that frightened her and made her feel she had no strength, but rather the weight and pressure that came with it. She closed box number twelve and went to put it away again in the drawer of the dresser. As she closed it, it stopped halfway. It didn"t slide. She pulled it back and tried again, but no, something was blocking it. The phone began to ring, so she thought of dropping everything and leaving, but then, when she thought about it, she was tempted to pull out the drawer and smash it on the ground. She sighed again and pulled out the drawer, sliding it onto the table before it fell on her big toes. As she peered into the opening in the cabinet she saw a folder wedged there right between the wooden runners. She retrieved it and opened it. The first line read: "Dear Valeria" "Bingo!"