10

 10

GIOVANNA APPEARED TOWARD EVENING. She was a tall girl with a vast repertoire of hostile expressions. To Silvia, she now seems a tiny thing with a long chin, pointy elbows, her shoulder blades little wings, and a dirty-blond fringe bouncing over inhuman eyes. She sits in front of Silvia in the tumbledown hut, her thin wrists protruding from sleeves too short for her like thigh bones on a chicken leg.

All this time, the phone call with Giovanna’s mother is going around and around in her head. She tries furiously to change some of what she said, sure that Giovanna’s father was told and that it triggered an argument, some punishment.

That’s why the girl is dead, and Silvia is her betrayer. She sees the blows: slaps or worse, lashings from a belt that sear her skin. She sees Giovanna crying with blind rage, running to the window, jumping onto the windowsill, and throwing herself out. She hears the thud of her body, still alive, its impact on the boulders, and then the Cervo’s immense whirlpools: silent, liquid galaxies. Down there, stippled trout swim between scraps of fabric and tiny fragments of submerged rubbish, coins, so many lost things not made to be in the water, which break down and finally decompose.

She tears herself back—and it’s the morning of the previous day.

Silvia recalls going to the phone, looking at the class agenda to find the number, putting her index finger in the hole to dial, rotating the plastic disk four, five, six times. She makes up different versions and an equal number of ways out: she changes her mind, the line is busy, she has the wrong number, Giovanna’s mother doesn’t answer. The effort of going back in time brings her out in a sweat, and she racks her brain in order to undo what’s already done.

And now Giovanna is in class, as she should be, biting her nails. Everything about her seems lovable. She didn’t realize it immediately, but right beside the recent Giovanna is the one from the first year. That Giovanna puts two fingers in her mouth and brings out a milk tooth, places it in her palm, and looks at it wonderingly before putting it in her pocket.

Silvia can’t bear to be alive in this world knowing that Giovanna is no more.