The Smoker on the Balcony

She waved at the little girls as they crossed the street. She always stood there, leaning on the balcony's green banister, with a cigarette between her fingers waiting for them to come back from school. Sometimes they would go and spend some time with her before getting on with their homework and extracurricular activities. Sometimes they wouldn't. But seeing their face lighten up as they looked around and found her balcony, among the rest, felt like enough. 

She would smoke her cigarette, sometimes two. She would look at the street, all too familiar, but always changing. Sixty years observing its every detail, still never being able to get one clear image. What had been a restaurant, and then become a bank, was now a coffe shop. The trees in the middle of the roundabout had been there only for a few years. The metro stop, after months of loud work, had been opened just recently. Even if she looked at that same Roman street day after day, it never seemed to be the same one she had first gotten to so many years earlier. 

After finishing her cigarette she would get inside. That was her safe space. The place that didn't seem to change as much as everything around it. The old piece of furniture where the TV was now standing had been there since day one, the couch she had bought years back with her brother, the table and four chairs, used only when people visited…everything so familiar. The little cart next to the window with its bowl full of sweets, ready for when the two little girls visited. The flowers she would carefully take care of every week. The painting in the hall, from some well-known artist whose name she always forgot. The room that used to be her workplace. That's where she made dresses and directed le ragazze, as she used to call them, which worked with her. Now there was only a table, and a sewing machine on one side to remind her of everything she had been. The mirror she had taken from her parents' house after her mother passed away. She didn't like to stare into it for too long. Her blue piercing eyes, still the same as always. That warm smile, she had learned never to change and the red lipstick she would put on every morning. Her hair, once long and dark, was now dazzling white. And then of course the dark circles below her eyes, and wrinkled skin, which made her all the more proud to be still alive and well at the age of 86. Or that's at least what people around her said to see, because then again, she didn't like to stare into that mirror for too long.  

That small apartment on the third floor had been her house since her twenties. It was the place she had rented and then bought, with a little help, and which had ended up being her one and only home. She hadn't necessarily planned it to be that way. In fact, at some point in time, she would have most likely not wanted it to be that way. And that point in time had a name and a face. Not that she liked to remember either of them, it was too painful. It was the name of an Italian man and the face of a handsome pilot. He had died in a plane crash at a time when she was ready to become his wife. That was the only time she had ever thought of maybe leaving that house for another one. Maybe a bigger one, with that man, and children running around. But that life never got to be lived, and she never knew love after that. Maybe she never really wanted to either. 

Despite everything, in that little apartment, she had grown to be who she was. That's where she had first learned to be on her own. That's where she had become a renowned dressmaker, a role model to the young women who worked with her. That's where she had picked up the phone to the happiest and saddest news. That's where she had packed and unpacked for her long travels around the world. That's where she had put on her fancy dresses, and taken off her heels after nights of dinners and dances. That's the place she had come home to after her breast cancer and heart surgeries. That's where she now prepared carbonaras on Tuesdays and invited her friends to play cards on the weekends. 

And that's the place where she saw the two little girls for the first time.

Their mother had knocked on her door on a rainy September day and she had recognized her immediately. It was the woman who had recently moved in with her husband and two daughters into the apartment on the seventh floor of that same building. The couple had introduced themselves one day in the elevator, and she had offered her help as a welcoming neighbor. Now standing at the door, the woman asked if there was any way she could leave her daughters with her for about an hour while she went to the doctor. She said it was her pleasure and welcomed them inside, saying that the bowl of chocolates was in the last room to the right. The two blonde little girls, back then no older than two and five respectively, which had been hiding shyly behind their mother, walked in cautiously. That was their first encounter, but far from the last.

She started spending more time with them, taking care of one, the other or both of them, when their mother asked. She then started to visit in the afternoons, invite them for a snack and dine with the family. She would feed the little one, talk to the older, and learn how to play their games. She would wear colorful wigs on Halloween, and go to every single one of their school plays. She would remember their birthdays and ask them about their friends. She would stand out on her balcony and see them turn around at the end of the street, waving goodbye before going to school. 

She grew fond of them, and they grew fond of her. They would call her the third grandmother, living moreover far away from both of their own so that sometimes she felt like it was real. And in more ways than one it was. All the life that people at her age seemed to start to lose, she was getting back with them.

That smiling old woman, which appeared to everyone so close to her end, was in reality more alive than most. She was everything she had been, everything she now was, and everything she never got to be. She was that dressmaker who missed her sewing machine, she was a loving sister, a caring daughter, a daring traveler, a careless dancer, a passionate lover. She now was the friend who made everyone laugh, the pleasant neighbor, the smoker on the balcony. And at times she was everything that she never got to be. A bride, a wife, a mother, someone who lived the rest of her days being in love. And above all that, in that blurry line where reality and irreality meet, she was a grandmother.