16

 16

GIULIA FOUND HER PARENTS at home when she got back from school. Anselmo became hysterical, and during the brief moments when he was quiet it was even worse: he paced the room, taking long steps, and transmitted anxiety like a human television antenna. To Giulia it seemed as if the waves were spreading and vibrating in her chest, a toxic weight of pain accumulated and stored behind her ribs. But it wasn’t long before her father exploded in a new tirade against Minero from the newsstand; the headmaster and Sister Annangela, who hadn’t phoned him immediately; and the forces of order and others who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

A pair of journalists came to the entryphone and he welcomed them in his way: shouting and swearing. He didn’t want to get the Carabinieri too involved because he considered them roughneck southerners, slowcoaches. He advised them to be careful and told them that he himself would help out with the search since he knew the area and the missing person very well. The priest was invited in only because Gemma and Luisa were ready to do battle on that point and they had become like martyrs on the gridiron. He was old, eighty and counting, with warts on his eyelids and rimming his eyes. If he’d been a young priest, they might not have sprouted. Don Luigi urged them to have faith and pray, especially to St. John the Baptist of La Salle, the patron saint of teachers, while Anselmo snorted like a bull and busied himself pouring a glass of absinthe.

Luisa got on the phone and called the city hospital and places Silvia might have gone by bus or train, but no one had admitted a woman answering to her description: injured, unconscious, mute. Struck with amnesia, driven mad with sorrow. It was good news—but also bad. She closed the phone book, fighting the urge to cry that was rising in her throat: she gave it her all. She didn’t want to frighten Giulia further.

Gemma turned the meatballs over in butter. They’d come out badly, lumpy and misshapen. The table was laid but no one wanted to sit down apart from five-year-old Corrado. He asked who Silvia was and was satisfied with an evasive reply. He was now hopping around Grandma, trying to convince her to give him a piece of meat straight from the wooden spoon.

Giulia hid her concern much better than Luisa. She helped Corrado cut up his meatballs with the fork and at one point she gave her mother a forced smile. Silvia, she thought, would have wiped the browned butter off the bottom of the saucepan with a piece of bread—she loved butter, oil, melted cheese, greasy crusts left in pans.

Giulia loved her a lot, and in particular the character traits the family scolded her for. Silvia knew better than anyone how to shut out the noise of Anselmo’s bickering, to the extent that when she was minding her own business she didn’t answer even if you asked her something. She’d had an appointment one afternoon to go to the land registry with Anselmo. He didn’t want to go upstairs so he called from the street until he was hoarse: “Silvia, Silvia! Are you deaf? Silvia! The land registry!” Louder and louder, more and more exasperated. Giulia had wanted to put her fingers in her ears, but Silvia just sat there cutting out an article on Princess Grace of Monaco from Christian Family magazine, and she’d kept on going until she realized that someone was yelling downstairs. Without looking up she said, “Your father is calling you, can’t you hear?”

“Look, you’re Silvia!” Giulia got her attention.

“Ah, so I am.” She put down the scissors, slipped on her coat and loafers, and went downstairs, unruffled.

She could ignore entire conversations without even using wax earplugs. But she’d focus completely when she felt like it and it was one-on-one. It made no difference if her interlocutor was a child: she gave you her undivided attention and made you feel like Scheherazade (Giulia owned a sumptuously illustrated edition of The Thousand and One Nights, and it was her favorite book). Silvia remembered that type of conversation, and would later ask for news and updates. She never gave advice. The only thing she stubbornly repeated to young people who ventured into her realm was “Study!”, pronouncing it with the closed Piedmontese “u.”

Giulia also sensed that Silvia had a problem: she felt too much a guest. She ate supper with them every evening, but it was just that—with them, in their family: she was on the edge. Nevertheless, Silvia and Anselmo were much more like siblings than cousins. Their grandparents had brought them up together since Silvia was an orphan and Anselmo’s parents had neglected him, a child between the firstborn, who was in delicate health, and the third: pretty and bossy.

Silvia’s disappearance had plunged Anselmo into fear, or rather a rage. It was fear of the sort he couldn’t find any way to off-load, not even by having it out with everyone, slamming doors or punching walls. He’d organized a search in the woods for the next day starting from Bioglio, the village he and Silvia were from. He opened a map on the table beside his plate of meatballs to study the best route. There would be about ten of them, and five or six obedient hunting dogs. Now and then he’d dunk a stick of celery in the pinzimonio, then insult the drops of oil he dropped on the map.

Giulia wasn’t as good as Silvia at exempting herself and she’d had enough that night. She asked for permission to go to bed and huddled under the covers with The Thousand and One Nights.

Luisa came to turn out the lights around nine.

“It’ll all be okay,” she whispered. She didn’t actually believe it.

Giulia wished she could tell her to stuff it, but she said, “Sure, Mamma.” It was the artificial utterance of an adult, and Luisa realized that it matched her own. Her daughter hid her feelings, preferring to keep them quiet and let things go, which meant she was growing up. She wished she could share that internal excitement, but she knew that slowly—with any luck very slowly—she’d be excluded and would have to be okay with it.

She stroked Giulia’s arm. “Sweetheart, we can’t do anything besides look for her and hope.”

Luisa realized with dismay that they hadn’t talked about Giovanna. Overwhelmed as they were by Silvia’s disappearance, they’d neglected the girl. She looked at her own daughter, a child, little bumps under the covers and the sober expression of a hieroglyph. She had to admit that no parent could fathom what Giovanna had done, not at her age. She was too young to foresee the consequences, to understand that she would cease to exist after leaping into the river. That she wouldn’t be able to get out on the bank, walk home, ring the bell, and stand dripping on the doormat. Maybe she’d jumped because of that failure to understand. Because she hadn’t realized that she would die.