From her dialect my mother left me one specific word that she used to describe how one felt when one was pulled here and there by contradictory feelings that tore her apart. She said that she had inside a frantumaglia. La frantumaglia (she pronounced it frantum-maglia) depressed her. At times it made her dizzy, caused her a metallic taste in her mouth. It was the word for a discomfort, illness not otherwise definable, manifested out of the throng of heterogenous things in her head, like refuse on turbid water of the brain. La frantumaglia was mysterious, caused mysterious acts, was the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason…Often la frantumaglia made her cry, too, and the word remained in my mind from childhood to define first of all the crying that is sudden or without a reason one is aware of: tears of frantumaglia.