11

 11

MARTINO WAS NEW AT SCHOOL. The year had begun a few weeks ago and he didn’t have any friends. He tapped on his desk, pretending to play the piano even though he really didn’t know how. But no one actually knew that and it was his way of pretending to be someone and demonstrating his own lack of interest in his classmates, who ignored him noisily, called each other nicknames from one side of the class to the other, passed round marbles and toy figurines, played sea battles or spluttered secrets into each other’s ears, foreheads against temples.

Martino stayed focused, staring at his hands and using—or pretending to use—his little finger, the way he imagined professional pianists did. But he was actually listening to the buzz of voices and every now and then he glanced sideways at the row of desks close to the big windows to see if Giulia had noticed his display—and no, it seemed not at all: her profile, that of a sulky Madonna, was half hidden by her hair, and all he could see was her nose sticking out.

Martino didn’t like his class and he didn’t like Biella: the unfamiliar mountains, too close, and streets that were just streets, with no memories to bring them alive. Even the tap water had a funny taste, and every time he had a drink his mood soured. For him home was Turin, and his neighborhood, Borgo Vanchiglia, had hatched him like a mother hen. There wasn’t a single crossing or building without some meaning for him in his neighborhood. He knew everyone by sight, even the dogs, and could predict around which corner they might lift a leg.

Martino and his mother had moved during summer because of his asthma. Lately, a hiss that sometimes accompanied his exhalation, and which as a child he’d called The Whistle, had become constant. The attacks began with a cough, a metallic one that scratched his throat and stopped him from expelling and then taking in enough air. He knew that at that point his bronchial tubes would contract and become inflamed. He pictured them thick and tough, like the hide of a hippopotamus. He couldn’t even speak. At its worst, he had to put on an oxygen mask.

When there was no rain for weeks, the dust from factories, furnaces, and ducts saturated the air. Those were the years that saw the beginning of environmental protest, but in Turin very little was yet known, and it was only the workers’ movement that started to concern itself with the concentration of toxic substances in factories. On top of that, people smoked everywhere, hopping on buses and trams without putting out their cigarettes. Teachers smoked in class, and at the cinema a fug of smoke veiled the screen. You could even smoke undisturbed in hospitals.

Martino, who’d always been asthmatic, read the magazines and books his mother brought home: he knew he was breathing in carbon monoxide, hydrochloric acid composed of fluoride, sulphur dioxide, tar, and nicotine.

“The least he could do is go to the country,” his doctor ordered, “somewhere with a lot of greenery where the air is good.” Which is how they ended up moving to live with a relative in the village of Bioglio. Let’s try it for a year, they told him, to see if your asthma gets better. His father would join them on Friday evening and go back on Sunday. Rather than enrolling him in the tiny village school, which they were biased against since they were from Turin, they decided he would go to school in town.

Martino experienced it all as a sort of oppression. He’d have much preferred to die coughing in Turin, among the blackened doorways and trees freckled with dust that stuck to their leaves and trunks. Surrounded by his friends, Agostino and Piero and Roberto, all of whom had healthy lungs and couldn’t care less about pollution.