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In that house, that big house of yellow sandstone with iron balconies on that crooked and black-lava road, the road that seemed to walk on the slopes of the volcano and on which every door looked like a crater, my grandparents lived. My great-grandparents had lived there, their parents had lived there, and so on, out of the time of this story.

My grandfather Marco and my grandmother Maria went to live in the big family house in 1961. This same year, my grandfather began to take a pencil in hand, to dissolve colors in turpentine, and to create art. He painted new figures, new eyes, hands, lips, skin hardened by the sun, by life, barefoot children wrapped in their mothers’ shawls, drunks red with love, men on fire or in sensual intimacy, women touching their heads or breastfeeding with love. The house was populated with all these new tenants. Many are characters from my grandfather’s childhood, or at least have the traits of his friends when they were young, traits of the vagabonds of the town, of the peasants whom he spotted along the streets at sunset, on their way back from the fields, of patrons of bars and public squares, of women of the family. I think that when we create, we hold on to everything we know best, and from there, we start to imagine. No one throws himself into the open sea without knowing exactly where his home is, even though you will never go back, even though when you go back, it won’t be yours anymore.

My grandfather spent the long afternoon hours smoking and painting in the laundry house, which had become his studio. Sometimes he helped my mother with Latin or Greek because he had studied in the seminary, before he ran away twice and decided to oppose the will of the family that intended him for priesthood. Eventually, he graduated with a degree to teach in elementary schools, but this would not be his official profession; instead, he would become a librarian and director of a center of historical studies about the local territory. Between studies and imagination, Sicily came to life on his canvases in all its roughness, its harsh beauty.

In the living room of the house, my mother had a painting of a drunkard leaning against a table with a glass full of wine in one hand, his head balanced on the other, and his eyes closed, and behind him, a boundless countryside, barren, cracked by burning, as if all were floating on a sea of lava. As a child, I was so afraid of the image that every time I had to walk past it, I’d start to turn my head the other way. I thought that one day, he’d open his eyes, in a second’s flash, and scare me to death, without anyone seeing him. But at the very end, I couldn’t resist, so every time I looked at him, it was a relief that he was always there with his heavy eyelids. But now I’m not enchanted; now I know very well the color of his eyes.

In those same years, just after the death of my great-grandfather, along with the discovery of his talent, my grandfather began his most troubled period. Reality began to become increasingly blurry, or so ferocious as to be misunderstood, then modified. It may, for example, happen that the reality we live is not the reality we feel. All this happened very slowly, and my grandmother, who has always been close to my grandfather and has always helped him, went with him to the exhibitions and supported him. She loved him, perhaps without understanding him, because that’s how people loved each other at that time, or maybe just because love is a mystery itself.

I have a deeply warm memory of my grandfather Marco. He was a charming man, a mix between Leonard Cohen and Al Pacino, always elegant, very sensitive; you could see it in his looks and gestures. I remember so many adventurous days with him in those rooms full of strange people and with my grandmother, who was always yelling at us. Some other times we used to paint together, and he taught me the chiaroscuro technique and how to change the brushstrokes to get different effects. Now that I’m an adult and unable to paint, I just hope to have inherited a chunk of his fantasy, of his imagination, as a way to look at the world differently. I wish I had his eyes.

Now, when I feel alone, I close my eyes and see: a vain woman with soft green hair, three sisters holding tight to each other, three cats, a desperate man, a resigned man, the drunk man with his pupils wide open, a girl who looks like my mother, my grandmother, my uncles and other friends who sit with me at the table of that big house, as if we were one big family.

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Margherita Autuori was born in Calatafimi-Segesta in Sicily, Italy. She is a chemist with a strong passion for literature and all kinds of stories, and her epistolary story “Dear Friend” was published in LR18. She studies English at the Tompkins Square branch of the New York Public Library. Her teacher is Terry Sheehan.