Yesterday afternoon I went to the old apartment where I grew up, from perhaps 7 - 18. It was totally different from the one in my memory: it's small, dark, sombre, wornout, dirty...outside we have a garden, with a huge sweet osmanthus tree. Every autumn it is covered by tiny yellow flowers and the whole apartment is filled by the sweet smell.

 

I had the key, I unlocked the door, and I recalled my adolescence, those summer vacations and it must be in one of them that I read the novel Rebecca: I dreamt I went to Manderley again...for me it's the same experience...it seemed that I was in a dream, a dream gently covered by the shade of sweet osmanthus tree, many details came to me: those blurred thunders and rains of early spring, the catkins floatted under the rare sun, the green grapes of our neighbors, and the edge of a butterfly's wings - the whole body was eaten by the ants...however the apartment is so different now: quiet, so quiet, a deadly and still silence, and so small, and so old...and so many wrinkles on the wall...The piano was still there, I tried to play the Barcarole of Mendelssohn, the music was like a song from a mermaid, it seduced me as to seduce a Persian sailor, and I felt I was almost drown.