Translator’s note:
“Whenever anyone asks how I became a writer,” Fausta Cialente remarked in a 1952 interview for l’Unità, “my first instinct is to correct them: not a writer (scrittrice), but a storyteller (narratrice). Writers, I’d say, are concerned above all with style; from a trivial idea, they can fashion a fine, harmonious, perfectly balanced page. Not me—never. My challenge has always been how to bring to life the characters I felt urging inside.”
Though she eventually received critical acclaim during her lifetime, Cialente stayed largely at arm’s length from Italy’s literary establishment throughout her itinerant career, eschewing mainstream trends and publishing on her own terms and timeline. Fiction was just one of the many forms her stories took, alongside radio broadcasts, war diaries, newspaper columns, memoirs, and translations, all penned in disparate parts of the world. A self-professed “foreigner always and everywhere” (“sempre e dovunque straniera”), Cialente noted more than once that the only thing Italian about her was the language she wrote in, and purely by geographical accident. Due in part to this idiosyncratic relationship with her native land and mother tongue, Cialente’s work as a novelist has been hard to categorize and belatedly celebrated in the Italian canon, even compared to other recently rediscovered authors of her generation.
There’s a similar rootlessness to A Very Cold Winter. Omniscience gives way to a motley chorus of inner monologues and hushed conversations, kitchen table squabbles, restless thoughts, wistful memories. Thus, the narrative voice comes to resemble the attic: at once enclosed and porous, claustrophobic yet expansive, shuttling between perspectives and tunneling among the makeshift rooms where Camilla and her extended family muddle through the long and difficult season. In translating the novel, I’ve sought to follow Cialente’s approach to storytelling: an exercise in listening closely to and teasing out the varied cadences of her characters. The musical prose hums with different accents, most evidently with Milena’s quips in French and Enzo’s Levantine lilt. But Cialente also captures the discordant keys of a multigenerational household, from childlike angst to youthful rebellion to marital frustration. I puzzled over solutions to convey these registers (what would an ingenuous aspiring writer say, versus a world-weary violinist?) without resorting to overly marked language or dated turns of phrase. The novel’s tone could be called “timeless,” despite its interest in how memory and history—personal and collective—inflect the current moment. Recurring parentheticals create nooks on the page, opening portals onto passing thoughts or faraway places (a balmy beach, a portside terrace), while forays into the present tense momentarily suspend narrative time with liveness and immediacy, particularly at moments of heightened emotion. Rather than treat these as instances of the historical present, I opted to preserve the shifts to underscore the disorienting temporality at play in grappling with the stark realities of postwar recovery. As Camilla’s family endures the interminably gray days, feeling adrift and out of place between the urban rubble and the quiet countryside, winter itself takes on the weight of a fellow character that speaks a forbidding language of snow and fog—all too familiar to anyone who has ever hunkered down under Milan’s leaden skies from November to February.
It was on one such dreary afternoon a few years ago that I spotted the recent Italian edition of Un inverno freddissimo in a bookshop along the Navigli, reminding me I’d encountered and enjoyed Cialente before as a graduate student, though her books had been harder to find, accessible only thanks to the university library. I smiled at seeing her name prominently on display among the new releases and bestsellers, no longer just a glossed-over entry in the annals of Italian literature. I’m even happier to introduce her distinctive talent to a new audience of readers with this translation. I thank Transit for bringing Cialente to more bookshelves and sharing far and wide the stories she told so well.
–Julia Nelsen, Berkeley, 2025
*
A faint glow on the sweeping horizon announced the autumn sun that was about to rise over the city, cloaked in rippling banks of fog. All night, the fog had stubbornly hidden the stars in the dark, impenetrable sky, but now the sliver of light widened little by little into a luminous band, a hazy phosphorescence that slowly spread and took over. As if on cue, a flock of mourning doves took off, gliding over the crumbling rooftops and run-down balconies, around the blackened chimneys where pale wisps of smoke had yet to rise, and traced jubilant circles around church spires and bell towers with their fast-beating wings. From up there, the doves could see the vast city’s aching wounds, the sooty remnants of doused fires marking the blazes of war, the rubble of burned and razed houses whose insides had caved in, where debris choked the street-level windows and sometimes reached the upper floors. The liveliness, the happiness of their flight tempered the sadness of the silent city, so grimly disfigured by disaster that it still seemed numb and dazed at having buried so much life, while the hungry doves were already looking for things to feed on as they fluttered across the pale, empty sky. As the last rusty leaves fell from the trees in the parks and historic piazzas, the birds swooped down, rummaging and pecking and shaking their feathers, then flew off again with quivers of delight.
Front doors began to open onto building entryways, revealing deserted courtyards inside. The clatter of rising shutters echoed through the empty streets, the occasional rambler scurried past, along the walls, bundled tightly in his coat, women walked by with milk bottles tucked in shawls wrapped around their chests. The cold was biting at that hour, and people hurried about, thinking of autumn—a season as bitter and disagreeable as a sour apple that could nonetheless hold a beautiful day or two in store before the freeze set in, a sudden blue sky washed clean by the wind or rain. With vague hope, they looked down the streets erased by the fog, only to see the ashen specter of the long, fierce winter that already lay in wait.
*
One of the doves perched on the balcony railing, catching Camilla’s eye as she peered through the curtains from inside. The bird had come, as it always did, looking for the breadcrumbs Camilla would scatter on the tiles, though she’d forgotten to the day before. It was too late now: the rickety fixtures of the old house creaked and squeaked terribly; if she’d tried to open the glass doors to the balcony, she would have woken Alba, who might still be asleep behind the flimsy wicker partition. Since she had also left the shutters open that night, she could now glimpse the dawn breaking in the sky, which looked frozen and distant against the dove’s restless pecking.
It was mid-November. The sun won’t rise before seven thirty, Camilla thought, as her gaze drifted bitterly over the nearby rooftops and domed churches in the distance. Down in the courtyard, hidden from view, gloomy, skeletal trees stood shrouded in a fog that was unmistakably Milanese: gray and filthy, like lint. The loose bricks on the terrace looked wet, as if it had rained overnight. Along the cracked, mossy wall stood a row of terracotta pots where a few withered, dull leaves drooped from weedy, bare stems, and a tangle of dark branches twisted around the iron rod at the edge of the railing: no one would have believed it was a rosebush, filled with lush scarlet buds during the warmer months.
The warmer months! In reality, winter had barely begun. They’d have to spend it in that attic again (for the second time since the war ended) and consider themselves lucky to have found somewhere to live that hadn’t been bombed, so soon after the catastrophe.
As she leaned against the window frame and looked out over the city’s stark angles, knowing there was nothing behind her but an old attic, Camilla had that same fleeting vision: a southern beach under a blazing sun, and Dario, lying half-naked on his stomach, letting his bare back burn, a canvas cap drenched in saltwater resting on the nape of his neck.
Alba wasn’t born yet, she thought, so it must have been . . . yes, it must have been the first year they were married.
She drew the curtain back over the window (useless, those daydreams of hers, useless, idle thoughts), startling the dove that had hopped down from the railing to peck at the tiles. As it flew away, she turned and saw that the morning light had meanwhile settled on the dreary walls of the large room and over the furniture that emerged gloomily from the shadows. The night before, they’d all argued around the table that was now barely visible in the makeshift dining room, right by the front door (in fact, if a visitor came in while they were eating, he’d practically fall face-first into the dinner plates). Argued was too strong a word, perhaps . . . they grumbled as they talked. It was an unpleasant conversation about how they’d survive that lousy, wretched winter—as if one of them (she, perhaps?) were solely to blame for all their troubles, as if they were the only family in all of Milan having a hard time! Alba and Milena grumbled more than the others, as usual, in tones she could no longer tolerate, prompting her to chide them, much to the children’s satisfaction. Arrigo, instead, surly and withdrawn as always, mumbled those incomprehensible phrases of his—not that anyone paid him any attention, not even his wife.
Right, Milena. The woman acted like she was born who-knows-where, in a lace-lined crib, waited upon by fairies! Lalla and Guido had every right to mimic and make fun of her: pensez-vous, dites donc . . .
“Stupid kids, the both of you,” Milena snapped and turned up her nose. “No one can ever talk with you two around. Go on, Camilla, you’d better send them to bed.”
It was truly useless to wonder how her nephew Arrigo could have fallen for a woman like her. The heart works in mysterious ways, every family has its differences. And yet they had to get along and pretend all was well, that the latest addition was the missing piece they’d lacked. Regina was the latest, actually; Milena was there first.
She isn’t just lazy, she’s a snob, Camilla thought, and she makes that dolt Arrigo feel like the crème de la crème, being born and raised in Paris, where her parents ran a luxury accessory shop for haute couture—feathers, tulle, sequins, the works . . . She’s well-dressed, Camilla had to admit, she’d even look good in rags, that’s why she and Alba get along so well, because Alba’s wild about all that luxury stuff, about anyone who knows fashion. Unfortunately.
Alba was still asleep on the other side of the partition. Soon Camilla would brew the coffee and wake her, and she’d start grumbling again about getting up early, the fog, going to work . . . “Blessed are those who can stay in bed as long as they please!”
Everyone’s unhappiness was so depressing, their eternal discontent! Thank goodness for Regina and the children. If anyone had reason to worry, in fact, it was Regina, starting with the matter of how to keep warm in that attic. It was Regina’s first winter there with the baby. Always tactful and accommodating, she’d hardly said a word that night, except to point out that they could easily store a week’s worth of coal and firewood on the balcony under the roof eaves, covered by a sack or two. Camilla suggested the same, since there certainly wasn’t enough room in the kitchen—that tiny kitchen—and leaving it out on the landing, as Alba and Milena had proposed, was an open invitation for the other tenants to steal. Those two even had the wild idea of piling the wood outside the toilet door, where the balcony turned a blind corner.
“How clever!” Camilla said. “So I won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing the face of the thief who’s stealing my coal and firewood!”
“You always think the worst, Mamma,” Alba scoffed, taking offense. “We already look like we’ve survived an earthquake with the toilet out on the balcony.”
“War’s far worse than an earthquake, my dear.”
Regina was about to speak up in Camilla’s defense but held back. Camilla felt sorry for her, knowing perfectly well that Regina forced herself to keep quiet because she felt like a burden, almost like an intruder there with her baby girl, and not who she truly was: Nicola’s widow. If not for Camilla, who’d gone out of her way to take Regina in, even letting her share the bedroom with her and Lalla, the others wouldn’t have welcomed her—not out of spite, no, because none of them were spiteful after all, but out of indifference, selfishness, plain and simple. Oh, how quickly the solidarity of war had faded—the only good thing those bitter years had brought to light.
Besides, even if she wanted to, Regina wouldn’t have had the chance to say what she thought, because Guido started teasing Alba: Could such graceful, delicate lips utter a word—gasp—like toilet? Annoyed, Alba shoved him out of the way, and the conversation was cut short.
It was true that Lalla and Guido didn’t take things too seriously and pestered the grownups. But what could you expect from two vivacious, outgoing kids who spent the war hiding out in the country, managing to carry on with their studies (Lord knows how), and now found everything about the city exciting? Nonetheless, they’d grumbled too, the night before. Like Alba, Guido had to sleep in a nook thrown together with wicker and wood panels at the far end of a makeshift passageway that separated him from the “honeymoon suite.” Despite the partitions and flap doors, Milena and Arrigo had far less to gripe about than the others, since they could make use of the spacious adjacent room with two windows that opened onto the balcony (one of them, luckily, let air and light into Guido’s nook) and even had its own entrance from outside. They had nothing to gripe about, nothing at all. And what about poor Lalla, who slept in an old bed with her mother, in the same bedroom (so to speak) as Regina and the baby, behind a partition in the corner? It wasn’t sharing the bed that Lalla complained about, so much as not having a quiet, private space to study. Clearly, such a thing was impossible in that vast space, divided up with curtains and partitions, which looked like a poorhouse with the baby’s clothes hung to dry by the wood-burning furnace when it rained outside.
The room was brighter now, and Camilla could see everything more clearly. The ceiling beams, for one, so charming and picturesque, those wide, sooty beams that slanted down toward the room’s outer edges, but when it rained or snowed . . . The landlord, that crook, did everything he could to throw them out after the Liberation, when they rushed back to the city and occupied the loft—squatting, if truth be told. In the end, he’d left them alone, since Nicola was wounded and fell ill—wounded in those last days of fighting, what bad luck!—but then got even by refusing to fix the roof and leaving them to deal with it. They built all the partitions themselves, and divided the space into roughly equal halves. On one side was the entrance from the balcony, through a tiny attic door, where they arranged a table and chairs and a rickety sideboard; on the other, a tatty sofa, two arm-chairs, a bureau. “What a dump,” Alba scoffed when she first saw the place. Her daughter’s vocabulary was hardly refined, who knows where she’d picked up such language, Guido was right to tease her. But what did they expect, all of them—brand new furniture, salvaged from a bombed house and left in a musty basement for years? They were lucky to find such a large space at all. The partitions fit under the slanted beams so that the make-shift rooms were almost fully sealed off, but it hadn’t been easy to set them up, map out the doorways, and install a gas stove on the only plaster wall that enclosed the kitchenette by the front door, so the vent pipe could pass through and heat up the space—otherwise, they’d have frozen to death. The sink and shower were tucked in a dark corner behind a few slapdash panels, which she’d covered with floral wallpaper so no one could peek between the gaps. It was thanks to Camilla, really, entirely thanks to her that they’d found those things when they did, when everyone refused not only to make themselves useful, but even to listen! Luckily, the weather was warmer then. After occupying the loft, she sent the children back to the country house with her nephews, even Nicola, and supervised the construction, cleaned up, claimed the old furniture and sent for the rest of her belongings. Though those things were hers, her mother, stern and suspicious as always, inspected each and every item. The summer was nearly over when they were all reunited, but of course no one thanked her; all they did was grumble and complain. Wasn’t she a mother, after all? Mothers have to grin and bear it. They should have thought twice before bringing children into the world, too bad for them.
Ringing in her ears, over and over, was the tacit accusation people make to a woman whose husband left her on her own: that an abandoned woman’s useless, even to her children, a good-for-nothing who can’t accomplish anything in life, a wreck. Milena, for instance, would never let a man leave her—easy enough, of course, with a man like Arrigo. But to deal with the likes of Dario! Fact is, a man like Dario would never look twice at someone like Milena.
I shouldn’t act like a mother-in-law toward my nephew’s wife, Camilla thought. After all, who she is or isn’t, what she does or doesn’t, is no business of mine.
Now she couldn’t recall exactly how many days she’d spent there, alone and in peace, amid the dust and cracked plaster, forced to carry bucket after bucket of water up from the courtyard, one after another, with no electricity to pump the water to the upper floors, let alone to the attic. Sitting on an empty crate, she’d have a piece of bread with a few slices of mortadella, or a glass of milk at night before retiring to the mattress she set down on the brick floor. Slightly less filthy than the ones on the balcony, those bricks could have used a coat of paint. Still, the balcony was a wonderful thing to have, a breath of fresh air when the weather was nice. That summer, Regina’s baby, then a newborn, had spent the end of August there in her bassinet, spared from the heat inside, where only a sliver of sun would hit the eastward wall in the early morning. There was no baby yet the summer before, when she toiled away. But Enzo was there. He’d helped her with the water bucket one day as she climbed the stairs, taking it from her and carrying it himself. Later on, he knocked on the door to ask if she needed more. Of course, she said, and having absolutely nothing to offer in return, except for some bread and mortadella, she invited him to sit with her on the balcony, in the moonlight, to escape the heat. There were no plants, no flowers, nothing at all: just the two of them, sitting on two shabby pillows against the wall, talking late into the night as the moon set. They’d been neighbors for a while; in those days, a neighbor like him was priceless. Like her, he occupied (more or less lawfully) a room at the far end of the balcony, around the corner, near the door that opened onto the sink and toilet—right where Alba and Milena wanted to store the firewood and coal. His room had a sink, too, but it ran dry, without a single drop of water. Though he chuckled telling her about it, she noticed that he rarely ever smiled. He offered her a water bucket, and she accepted. What times, those were. Nearly deserted streets, half-empty trams; the only people to be seen were in the Galleria and Piazza della Scala, at the busiest times of day. Along Via Brera and Via Torino, wherever you looked, walls and gates hid tidy piles of rubble from collapsed houses, but fever-bearing mosquitoes buzzed in the courtyards of those old palazzi. When the workers took breaks and Camilla had nothing to do, she’d sometimes go on walks with him—the foreigner. For Enzo was practically a foreigner, an Italian born abroad, raised between Egypt and Paris, who had made his way back to Italy with the Allied forces before the war ended, as far as she could tell. As they ambled along the destroyed sidewalks, side-stepping potholes and trenches, she told him about the city that was once orderly and organized, run by rich bureaucrats who spoke in a snobby dialect—and yet were still to blame for the war and all that rubble. He seemed intrigued as she spoke, taking her arm, like a friend. She knew she was repeating Nicola’s words—if Nicola said so, he must have been right. Milan was now a vast, wounded city, she said, that no longer smelled of burning but wore the sad colors of extinguished fires; he could see for himself. They stopped outside the wrecked buildings, where nothing was left standing except the exterior walls. Looking up, they saw the hazy sky through the gaping windows, like dark eye sockets that opened onto nowhere. Staircase landings with wrecked, dangling railings stood suspended in the void, and strange chasms took the place of the furniture inside the grand apartments of the grand palazzi where those rich people once lived with their orderly ways and snobby dialect, where faded scraps of wallpaper fluttered gently in the summer sky that was either quiet and drizzly or dry and dusty.
“It’s like Judgment Day, isn’t it?” she muttered, “And all for nothing. You’ll see.”
“Come now, don’t be such a pessimist,” he answered with the glimmer of a smile.
One evening—or night, rather—as they sat on those pillows against the wall, after a long silence, he asked, “Are you really on your own?” This surprised her, for they’d shared fairly long and frequent conversations which gradually alluded to every member of her family, the people she worked so hard for to put up those partitions and paint the walls . . . Her three children, first of all: Alba (though she hadn’t mentioned her eldest was very beautiful, she was sure Alba’s beauty surfaced in her stories one way or another, as it always did); then Lalla and Guido, fourteen and twelve. Then there were her nephews, Nicola and Arrigo, the sons of her sister Anna who died young, left fatherless years back and raised in boarding school. Camilla always looked after them, as a mother would: before the war, for instance, they spent almost every summer with her at their grandmother’s in the country—they were much younger and easier to please back then. Nicola was her favorite, she loved him like a son. (But to Enzo at the time, she must have said: I love him like a son, in the present tense, since Nicola was ill but hadn’t died yet. He wouldn’t have been living with them either; he was engaged to Regina, a nice young woman whom she was fond of. They’d soon marry and be off to Sardinia, where Nicola worked as a schoolteacher.) Arrigo, instead, had already married a middle-class young woman, who despite being half-Parisian still had the tired, backward mentality of a provincial Italian girl. Her family had left France when the war broke out, and they were among the evacuees near Camilla’s mother’s house in the country. That was how those two had met and fallen so in love that they’d married before the war ended.
Camilla was sure she’d told Enzo the whole story, so that question—“Are you really on your own?”—gave her pause. He also seemed to regret it the moment he asked.
“What do you mean, on my own? Can’t you tell I’ve got tons of people around?” she laughed. “And not one has a cent. Not even the newlyweds.” Nonetheless, she thought, here we go again, another man wants to know if I have a husband. If he were dead, the dear soul would come up right away, “My poor husband used to say this or do that,” and they’d soon find out if she was a widow.
“I can tell you’re fixing up the place for lots of people. But you know that isn’t what I meant,” he said. Maybe he’d given a wry smile.
Again, a silence fell between them, neither awkward nor aloof. Camilla looked up at the moon. He blew a puff of cigarette smoke away from her, as if to stay out of her way, yet still with an air of anticipation. “You want to know if I have a husband, don’t you? I did. But he left,” she sighed, with a wave of her hand as if something had suddenly vanished. “No one knows where.”
He laughed after a moment, affectionately. “I like the way you put it. Like a girl who’s seen a magic trick. Oh, forgive me!” He had taken her hand but pulled away. “I didn’t mean to offend you, forgive me. You seem so youthful and calm, but what you’ve told me could leave a woman broken and embittered. It doesn’t seem to have affected you.”
“Oh, it affected me. Even if it doesn’t look that way.” She turned to him, imagining that she must have seemed youthful and serene in that instant. “I loved my husband. Maybe I still care for him.” A pause, then the truth. “But I can’t show it, you know. Because nobody in here”—she gestured toward the dark, empty room, which smelled of freshly sawed wood, paint, and glue—“nobody wants to hear such things.”
“He must deserve to be loved,” Enzo answered, with his strange lilt. (She later learned that was the way Italians from the Levant talked.)
“Maybe not. But what does it matter? You don’t love someone because they deserve it, imagine that! The world would be so dull if that were true. All the good people on one side, loving each other, and the bad ones . . .”
She trailed off. He stared straight ahead, silent and impenetrable, with hard, gleaming eyes. (Goodness! she thought, has he seen a ghost?) An excitement began to stir inside her, awakened perhaps by his kind words.
“What about you?” she asked politely. “Are you on your own, too? Are you with someone?”
He reached to put out his cigarette on the damp bricks, with more force than needed to extinguish such a tiny ember. She worried her question was too vulgar, the kind of line a servant and soldier might exchange at a town dance. “Are you with someone?” How could she! Yet Enzo seemed neither surprised nor hurt. In the growing darkness, as the moon disappeared behind the eaves, his voice sounded so bitter that he must have been scowling.
“I should put it the same way you did, Camilla. There was someone . . . a woman I loved very much. But she disappeared.” It sounded like he’d dreamt it, like he was telling a fairy tale. “No one knows where.”
She stared at him in stunned silence. Was he serious? Hurt and unmoved, he added, “Wherever she went, all I know is she’s never coming back.”
He had called her Camilla for the first time. They would always call each other by name from then on. Once the others arrived, they called him Enzo, too, and now they were almost all on friendly terms. They considered him part of the scenery, like the old furniture salvaged from the bombings, though he lived alone in that solitary room at the far end of the balcony. Guido followed him around like a puppy, from the very first day, always knocking on his door. As for Alba, who Camilla thought would make an impression on him, Enzo barely paid her any attention—no more than anyone else, at least.
The coffee! Camilla gave a start. As she tiptoed past the tiny doorway to the big room where Lalla and Regina were still asleep, she heard cautious footsteps. Perhaps Regina had gotten out of bed, trying not to wake the baby.
The kitchen was so dim, she had to turn on the light. She picked up the coffee grinder and found it full. Regina must have ground the beans the night before—no one else ever thought to help. As she lit the stove, Regina came in and whispered good morning, wrapped in her robe.
Even after so long, Camilla was still moved at the sight of her, so graceful and petite, with that thin, waif-like face. The poor girl. Regina was standing by the window now, looking even more gaunt under the artificial light of the bulb behind her and the faint glow of the sunrise in front, which barely managed to filter through the balcony awning. As usual, she fiddled with the tortoiseshell headband that held back her thick hair, ashy brown streaked with blond, then shoved her hands in her pockets with a shiver. She must have felt cold in the silken robe that was a bit too long and loose-fitting, draped over her shoulders to accentuate her almost childlike physique; actually, she’d easily given birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and the robe hid milk-heavy breasts that she began to massage, grimacing as she turned to Camilla with a pained look.
“Are you leaking? Don’t fret, Nicoletta will wake up soon and empty them out, like she always does—you’d feel worse if she didn’t.”
“I know. The trouble is washing up afterward. The water’s so cold.” Regina looked down at her swollen, red hands. “Not just the baby’s clothes, mine too.”
“Give it time! Heat up all the water you need, don’t worry.” (In truth, needing so much hot water every day was a real problem.) “Everything will get easier in a few months. This damned winter will end.” As the coffee pot on the stove began to whistle, she laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s barely started. You heard them last night, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did, Camilla. You should stop asking their opinion and do as you please. You always do things right, anyhow. They certainly couldn’t do any better. It makes me so mad, every time!”
“I could tell you were upset. But you didn’t speak up.”
“You know I can’t, Camilla, and not because I’m afraid to.”
“I know that isn’t the reason, but it’s no good acting so withdrawn, as if you weren’t part of the family.”
Regina stared out the window without answering, deep in thought. Her melancholy look, if Camilla had seen it, clearly expressed that she didn’t feel part of the family—at least not yet.
The kitchen had two small windows, one facing the long balcony, where the glass doors opened onto the bedrooms, and another facing the corner under the awning, by the toilet and sink. Regina stood in front of the window overlooking the void that plunged down to the courtyard below, beyond the balcony railing. The window was the only source of light, suddenly blocked by a tall shadow bundled in a coat and scarf. With a quick tap on the glass, the figure vanished down the stairwell at the other end.
“Enzo,” whispered Camilla, “already out at this hour. He’s an early bird.” She picked up the breakfast tray. “I’ve got to wake Alba or she’ll be late.”
Seeing her holding the tray by the door, Regina shook her head. “What’s this! Why serve your daughter breakfast in bed? She should be the one serving you.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to spoil her, but she always gets in the way and makes a mess in the kitchen . . . she’s so irritable in the morning.”
“So you toss food in her cage, to keep her quiet!”
“She isn’t a wild animal, the poor thing, let’s not be dramatic. She’s just difficult, like everyone in here. Maybe it isn’t their fault, it’s because of the war . . . Would you switch off the lamp when you leave? You can light the furnace before the baby wakes, to boil some water.”
“But it’s early!” Regina seemed alarmed by the suggestion. “We’ll run out of firewood if we light it too soon, and everyone will complain if the house is cold tonight.”
“They’ll complain no matter what. Just make sure the room’s warm, if you want to give Nicoletta a bath.”
“No. We’ll wash up in the evening from now on.” Regina tightened the belt of her robe, as if to emphasize her sudden resolve. “I know it’s best to bathe her in the morning, at her age, but the house is always warmer at night.”
“You’re right,” said Camilla as she pushed open the door and left with a smile, holding the tray.
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From A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente, translated by Julia Nelsen. Reprinted with the permission of Transit Books. Copyright © 2026 by Julia Nelsen.
