14

 14

MARTINO HEADED for the bus stop, dazed and hungry. The seats in the bus shelter were occupied by two older girls—from the lyceum, maybe—who were comparing the veins in their arms. One had green veins, the other lilac. They discussed them for some time and then moved on to their hair: who had more split ends? It seemed they even found strands split into three. Martino wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. He recognized the disgusting pleasure he felt when he saw a hairy spider scampering up the wall. He moved a few feet away and in imitation started looking at the scratches on the backs of his hands (a blackberry bush), the white marks on his nails.

During break they realized that Giovanna’s teacher was also missing—all it took was for the year-six classes to meet in the playground. Sister Annangela crossed the cement drive, steering clear of the little ones from the second and third years playing football and tripping over their own feet. Tiny, round, and determined, she drew Giulia aside. Martino realized then that the teacher Canepa must be Giulia’s relative, perhaps an aunt.

He could hardly bring her to mind. The question wasn’t who she was, but what she was: a teacher, whose role it was to stay in class, explain things, give marks, and put notes in her diary. He struggled to recall something specific. Sister Annangela was friendly, but Canepa wasn’t. She seemed distracted—not busy, just distracted. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t ugly, neither tall nor short. Her hair was brown and she wore simple clothes that always looked the same, like a uniform. She didn’t make much of an impression.

On the bus, Martino sat a long way from the others. He wasn’t going to give in: this wasn’t his home and it was never going to become his home. He chewed belligerently on his salami sandwich and watched the famous green slide by, the green for which he’d come to live here, spotted with yellow, brown, and red. The trees and briars actually grew too much, overrunning paths, straying into the road, and weighing down rooftops, their roots splitting pavements and making the asphalt on the roads lumpy. The bus struggled along the windy route: it was turning around at the Rovella, at whose summit there were converging ridges covered with even thicker woods. Martino had no idea that his teacher had been born and lived for a long time in the village where he’d settled.

He got off at the stop in front of the church and passed the bar and the fountain. The house his mother, Lea, lived in had a typical Piedmontese façade with wooden shutters at the windows, paneled balconies and corbels in stone from Lucerne, wrought-iron railings. At the back was a garden with tall grass, a pergola with wisteria climbing over it, and a big persimmon tree loaded with fruit, round as bowling balls. When they set foot in it for the first time, Lea had scrutinized the crazy plants, hands at her sides.

“What a jungle!” she said. And of the wisteria: “Well, that will become a violet cloud in the spring.” Then she gestured toward the persimmons with her chin. “And on that one we’ll see a lot of little suns in a month’s time. Do you hear me, Grumpy?”

He found her right there, hanging up the washing. She snapped it like a whip and hung it on the line with a peg shaped like a soldier. She fished a tablecloth from the basket, and when she saw him she smiled.

“Come and help me.”

Martino threw his schoolbag to the ground and started shaking out the wet pillowcases. It was a good way of venting the anger he felt at finding himself in that place and the turmoil caused by the girl’s death which he now felt brewing in his stomach. For him it was the umpteenth proof that the decision to leave Turin had been disastrous, a catastrophe it was impossible to get used to. He hoped that all the persimmons would fall down together in a shower, splattering over the laundry like water balloons. The hair on the backs of his arms stood up. His mother noticed it.

“Wait, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on. Tell me.”

They went on like this for a while until Martino shouted, “I don’t want to be here! Kids die here!”

Lea was flabbergasted. “What do you mean?”

“A girl from the other class died,” he managed to add before running inside. As she followed him up the stairs, Lea asked herself if someone at work knew but hadn’t said anything about it. She’d managed to get a job as a secretary at the Biella knitwear factory in Pettinengo, where she transferred phone calls and kept papers, correspondence, and index files in order. The place had its own grim fascination. It was a huge bastion of industry constructed more than a century before, and from there it towered over the entire plain of Biella. She realized instantly that her new colleagues found her brusque and disagreeable, given her way of dealing with any duty quickly and well—like a robot—to get it out of the way as soon as she could. Yet though Lea had worked for more than ten years as a receptionist at a hair salon on Corso Francia in Turin, she didn’t miss it at all. The fact that she had red hair—a flaming red that looked as though it came from a bottle—didn’t help, and neither did the fact that she’d moved only with her son, and hadn’t brought her husband along.

Martino was sitting at the desk with a comic book in front of him, The Ballad of the Salty Sea. He wished he had sideburns like the sailor, Corto Maltese. The earring, no; that was a step too far. He wouldn’t have been seen as half-sailor, half-pirate, but a poofter to be roughed up. The corners of his eyes stung with tears that wanted release. His mother came to hug him from behind with the chairback between them, but she towered over him all the same. She rested her chin and neck on his head and breathed into his hair and he felt once more secure, as if he were inside a treasure chest.