Pour toi, T.A.

Portagioie, the Italian word for jewelry box, is a compound of two polyvalent words. Gioia (pl. gioie) means both “joy” and “jewel.” Porta, meanwhile, derives from the Latin verb portāre, and belongs to a constellation of words pertaining to acts of bearing, bringing, carrying, and transporting…

Portagioie, therefore, could also be interpreted not only as a box of jewels, but a container of joy, a doorway or gateway to joy, something that brings joy.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

She opened the box and sold her jewellery, one item at a time. Most women did. Most widows do, to buy bread, to pay rent. She sold her jewels to pay for electricity from the neighborhood generator.

These days, government power comes from 10:30 to noon, then from 2 pm to 6, but then the sun sets. She calls herself lucky; the nearby shopping center has a powerful generator, and illuminates her apartment until closing hours. But then from 10 pm to dawn…

She is not afraid of death or dying, she told me once, or of pain or hunger. She is afraid of darkness. So, in order to pay for light, she sold the rubies, then the emeralds.

She had a pair of sapphire earrings. She sold those, and the opals. She delayed selling the diamonds. She sold the gold; the coins and bracelets and chains and rings, until only her wedding band remained. She sold the diamonds then, and for months, had electricity.

The night there was no money left and no power at all, she didn’t sleep. She would sell the ring the following morning. And the box, if they bought it. A beautiful lacquered jewellery box with red velvet inside that had been an heirloom. She would have no use for it after tomorrow.

The jewellery shop opened at nine. At five, she left the apartment. It had rained. The grass was soaked. It looked as if…

someone had broken into the store in the dead of night and pulled every diamond out of its setting—only the diamonds. Every diamond in the store, and perhaps the emeralds, then run out, and tripped,

caught by the morning light,

and slipped and spilled all the jewels in the world, all the stars, on the grass, in her honour.

5 a.m. dew on 5 a.m. grass. 5 a.m. light on myriad blades of myriad greens, shimmering for her only, all her jewellery all at once, more limpid, crystalline, clear, brighter than any morning she had ever seen.

She says she’s been carrying it around with her, that morning. Portagioie is not luck; that’s portafortuna. Still, she says she’s lucky.