When I think of an image for her, quicksilver comes to mind. An active volcano, roiling, hot, magmatic. Fertile ground, lush with life. But not a dangerous volcano. A volcano like Etna.
Or a gust of wind that sweeps into a room and turns everything upside down, that pushes at your back, that tickles and sets off bright laughter—a spring breeze, fizzy and full of mischief.
The first great storyteller of my life. I would have listened for hours to her "animated" tales of childhood adventures, the farmhouse with her siblings, the war, improbable journeys to poor countries as an ambassador of Faith and Light. Thunderous, delighted, stubborn in proving that she, yes, remembered it all. While my mother and her siblings would mock her, push back, deny.
It didn't matter to me. I didn't care which memories were truest. The way she told them was my favorite version.
So vivid before my eyes that I never missed the cinema. Yes. She was my favorite cinema, when I was a child.
Sometimes she would get angry, scandalized. She was unafraid of the raw force that erupted from her in those moments. Neither was I. On the contrary.
I admired her. Her vibrant, burning ardor swept me away, and I envied her courage, her wild fury—yet so passionate. In those moments, as a girl and a teenager, I saw in her the image of Jesus driving the merchants from the temple, one of the Gospel images that has always fascinated me most. I understood that all that energy sprang from love. An immense love for the ideal she was pursuing, seeking, wanting to build day after day, here and now.
In this explosive aspect, perhaps I resemble her a little (someone might say regrettably). I, instead, truly hope I learned from her at least something of this "stubbornness." And it partly gave rise to the wonderful things she helped found and nurture: Faith and Light, Ombre e Luci. Small pieces of heaven.
Over time she changed. Alongside this creative energy, other qualities found room in her: the lucidity of her gaze, almost surgical, the way she brought situations into focus. A quieter wisdom, and benevolence. The look of someone who has traveled far and turns to those just beginning their steps, offering precious counsel, patient encouragement, stimulating suggestions.
Generous, tireless, smiling, a force in group settings but also capable of quiet concentration.
"Air! Air!" she would cry, mock-gruffly, at grandchildren pestering her for another game, another story. She needed space. She demanded it, sometimes. She loved silence, where I believe she nourished her ever-active mind. Only to return again to trilling, singing, fighting—what seemed to my child's eyes an endless performance.
She taught me wonder. A child among children. Hungry for Beauty, she found it, she hunted it down in the most unexpected places. And she was fiercely angry at anyone who spoke of it dullly. More than once I heard her complain about all those people who, faced with a newborn, could do nothing but cry "how beautiful this child is!"—while she fumed at all those mothers who were never told the same thing about their own children.
But she knew what true Beauty was. Beauty with a capital B. Not the plastic kind we're used to seeing, fake, on the pages of magazines heavy with glossy, Photoshopped images.
Deep Beauty. The kind that shines through that wonderful whole—made of light and shadow—that is every human being, any human being.
She could recognize it. She sought it. She was so full of it that it showed in the blue of her eyes. Which are now sky, in the sky.
Marta De Rino, 2014