2.
Silvyefantì, the trekker, has a good-bye postcard stuck to her coat that she’s never sent from any of her long trips. On it is the picture of an Algonquin AmerIndian who’s dancing.
Bologna has forgotten when she started walking. In this theoretical meanwhile, Silvyefantì has died countless times amidst sheer cliffs, rushing rivers, iced-over snows and red mud, and every time she’s died she’s failed to send that good-bye postcard, never crossing the fatal threshold to the great beyond and keeping a continuous ‘arrivederci’ within. That’s how she comes back to life, going on to other lives that merge with her. Silvyefantì is always broke, yet became the woman who scaled K2 without oxygen, the woman who traversed Ethiopia’s highland plateau on mule-back, the woman who first rode a bicycle into the city of Lhasa, the woman who likes lizards drawn in the Nazca desert, and on Colombia’s Pacific coast the Colorado woman who could run for seven hours in the forest. If there’s a story nagging her, she treks in it and it goes with her on to another, and the road is always a different one under the stars of fickle fortune, and then it becomes clear: the path-breaking girl will take her last step. This is what’s happening up on Bologna’s Casaglia hill. On the reverse side of the postcard stuck to her coat is a phrase written for friends far away: – Whogivesadamn about the here and now, it’s already the past – Silvyefantì’s into life seven, and no one knows if she’ll send it.