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At that time our experience with death was very limited Sometimes someone’s grandfather or grandmother would die, like a domino falling when its turn comes at last, but still we all had at least two or three grandparents living Some grandparents – in particular, some grandmothers – threw themselves off their balconies This happened with a certain frequency; I have since asked myself if it was something peculiar to that neighbourhood or period in time, a coincidence, or else some fault in my memory Whatever it was, it happened, or at least I remember that it happened We would be playing peacefully in the street when first the rumours and then, later, the cries reached us: the grandmother of we-didn’t-know-who had thrown herself from a fourth, a fifth, a tenth floor, always from enough of a height to kill her The apartments – council blocks of exposed brick – were high and had narrow balconies cluttered with junk: cleaning supplies, birdless birdcages, plantless plant pots, and old, dirty mattresses were visible Some were enclosed by a barrier of green glass, but this, evidently, didn’t stop the old women perching on the edge and throwing themselves off into the void It was like a plague Five or six flung themselves off in the space of just a couple of years; once we even saw, from afar, a body crumpled on the pavement, light as a rag, through the police cordon and the neighbours surrounding it There was nothing to stop us getting nearer, except perhaps fear and revulsion; nothing prevented us, either, from inventing perverse fantasies about the possibility of a murder – someone pushed her, said one; they did it to get the inheritance, another added, repeating ideas from TV movies; us, children of a neighbourhood where the grandmothers did not have nor ever had an inheritance   The grandparents died, but for us life had no limit What concept could a child have, after all, of death? Or, rather, what concept could a child have of death in a country free of war or conflict, in an average city in