Letizia

Letizia is Marco Carrera’s mother and Probo Carrera’s wife, a figure whose belief in the body’s own developmental design stands beside the family’s attempts to keep its losses present through preserved books, rooms, and photographs. The account of Marco’s unexpected growth reveals her confidence in nature’s pattern; the family’s archives, meanwhile, show how remembrance can be both carefully maintained and difficult to face.

Identity and Belief

After Marco received experimental treatment for his growth deficiency, he grew sixteen centimeters in eight months, then continued at a steadier pace until his height aligned with the median of his peers. The result exceeded Dr. Vavassori’s expectations. Letizia was convinced the treatment had not caused the leap: she believed Marco’s genetic code had already provided for his initial shortfall, the sudden burst of growth, and the later return to ordinary proportions.

Her explanation gave the startling physical change a pattern, but it did not settle the family’s response to it. Probo had strongly wanted the treatment and was pleased by its success, yet he worried that so large a deviation from the forecast might mean he had lost control over its effects. He feared delayed consequences, including infertility, degenerative disease, tumors, or malformations. Where Letizia trusted the course encoded in Marco’s nature, Probo remained troubled by what the experiment might eventually cost their son.

Family Memory and Preserved Objects

The family’s care for its possessions gives memory a material form. Probo’s science-fiction collection ran from issue one through issue 899, covering 1952 to 1981, with only six missing issues; its volumes had been individually protected and were still remarkably well preserved decades later. Letizia’s own photographic archive presented a different kind of inheritance: thousands of photographs documenting a crowded world of artists, architects, and other collaborators.

That archive was difficult for Marco to handle. The photographs could embarrass and hurt him, in part because they showed a social and artistic world surrounding his mother in which he wondered whether some of the men had been her lovers. He also felt the painful absence of his father from that world. Probo’s books and models, by contrast, suggested to Marco a solitary world, while Letizia’s photographs seemed to contain a whole company of people and activity. The contrast made the archive not merely a store of images but a charged record of a life that Marco could not approach without jealousy or unease.

Presence Through Absence

The preservation of Irene’s room offers another measure of the family’s attachment to what has been lost. The room remained intact, clean, and ready as if Irene might return: its blue bedspread, ordered desk, lamps, guitar, records, record player, posters, and the dollhouse Probo had made for her were all still there. Years later, Marco entered the room and sat on the bed, disturbing the bedspread’s untouched surface. He found a poetry book he had never noticed before, tucked among the familiar objects.

The room’s preservation is not presented as ordinary tidiness. Marco calls it a room at peace, a place from which no further trouble can come. Its stillness makes the family’s keeping of Irene’s belongings at once an act of care and a lasting arrangement with her absence. Letizia’s confidence in a natural pattern of growth belongs to the same family world as this careful preservation: one looks forward to a life unfolding, the other holds a vanished life in place.