At ten years old, in a school in Rome in 1965, the assignment was seemingly simple: write the story of your life. While the rest of her classmates filled three or four pages with the immediacy typical of childhood, a Mexican girl with a boundless imagination wrote more than twenty pages structured as serial chapters. In that story, her father was a world-famous film director surrounded by journalists at the airport, her mother an idealized figure, and her home, a picture of unchanging perfection where the only known conflict was the jealousy of a German Shepherd named Daino.

The harsh reality, however, unfolded in a very different way. Her parents had divorced when she was just two and a half years old, after her father left her for another woman. In Italy at that time, where divorce wasn’t even legal and social silence made family breakdown an absolute taboo, belonging to a divorced family meant facing rejection. Writing a bright and happy biography wasn’t driven by a deceitful impulse, but by an instinctive defense mechanism: an intimate refuge where she could walk alongside other girls without the burden of exclusion.

That early exercise in fiction foreshadowed the detours and discoveries of a life marked by distance and reunion. Years later, during a vacation in Spain, she discovered the other half of her story when she met her paternal grandmother, Rosa, the matriarch of a large Sephardic family whose origins stretched back to Turkey and Mexico. This cultured, demanding figure with profound intellectual ambitions became an anchor of security and a symbol of family roots long yearned for in her Roman solitude. Among boxes overflowing with love letters in French and Ladino sent by her grandfather at the beginning of the century, the young woman understood the weight and the healing power of her lineage.

Today, rereading those childhood notebooks reveals that memory doesn’t always archive what happened, but rather what we need to believe in order to move forward. The fictions with which children protect their vulnerability end up becoming, over time, the most honest testimony of their absences.