'O curtiello

'O curtiello, the knife. In the Smorfia it isn’t the murder weapon: it’s the object found in every kitchen, the one used to separate — bread, meat, thread. Forty-one is the number of the cut, understood as a necessary gesture: dividing two things that were joined, and doing it decisively, because a half cut is worse than no cut at all. In dreams, forty-one arrives when something needs to be separated. A relationship that no longer holds up, a job to leave, a part of your life you have to keep away from another. And it also carries the idea of defense: in popular tradition, the knife is what you keep close when you’re afraid. The images that lead here all speak of breaking away and leaping. Daring, which is the courage you have to find before the cut. Misfortune, which is the cut you suffer instead of choosing. The landing, which is the crossing from one shore to the other: you step off, and from then on you walk alone. If forty-one has come up in your dream, there was something to divide. The Smorfia doesn’t say what, and above all doesn’t say when: it says that in your dream two joined things were asking to be separated, and that the gesture — whatever it is — takes a steady hand.