17

 17

BOARDING SCHOOL. It comes back to her with extraordinary clarity and it’s much more real than the rain dripping on her from the leaky roof. All the same, Silvia puts out her tongue to quench her thirst: it’s thick and dry like cardboard. It takes her back once more to boarding school, to the brown blankets they used.

They slept in big dormitories and made their beds every morning according to instructions, which were to tuck the sheets and blankets in so tight that getting in would be difficult. There was nothing soft about those cots. Inside the rectangle of the mattress were the pillow’s rectangle, the rectangle of the tucked-in sheets, the rectangle of the brown blanket. They got in, huffing and puffing with effort. The bed was supposed to be a sheath where the bodies of little girls and older girls were put back every night. They were to have no space to scratch themselves, bend their knees, or touch themselves freely. Nightgowns were wide and stiff, beds narrow and hard, and the combination a carefully considered effort to hinder and prevent.

Silvia sees her classmates, other boarders. Some remained good friends, but now they crowd around her just as they were in those years: girls in uniform, their knees pale orbs between tall socks and skirts, young, immature faces behind curtains of hair. Among those girls from another time is Giovanna, a girl forever, and together they watch as if Silvia were an exotic specimen trapped in a cage.

Sitting on the ground, she scoots backward just far enough to get out of the rain, into a corner of the hut that’s undamaged. Giovanna still has damp hair clinging to her skull, which is why logic is flashing on and off in Silvia’s mind and with it a feeble sense of time. The fact is that before (how long before? impossible to say), before, Silvia didn’t believe the story of the shower. She knows when a child is lying and she’s certain (she was certain) that it was the river water in which Giovanna drowned that made her soaking wet. Now, though, she wonders whether it isn’t the same rainwater falling on both of them. And if they are in the same rain, then Silvia is dead, too, and her visions are the ones that come after. She needs to go over everything, piece by piece, the whole muddle. Everything: Giovanna’s death as well, and Silvia tenses up because she hears the phone shrieking again, and she waits to hear the receiver being picked up.

But then she notices that the boarders are dry. Only Giovanna is wet, but it doesn’t seem to her (she looks hard) that there are any new drops falling on her. For the first time, Silvia wonders whether the opposite is true: maybe she’s alive after all, and the girls aren’t really there. “There” is where it’s raining, and what she’s absorbing at that moment is true, it’s real. She struggles to make a list: herself, the straw, the branches waving inside and outside the hut, the walls darkened with the damp. Those things, though, don’t interest her, which is why they retreat and become dim.

On the other hand, her school returns very clearly. The beds, her classmates, the refectory, the smell of soup and insecticide, the parlor where they met their families and where the orphans were spectators of the Great Mystery: having a mother. How a mother kisses you, how she ignores you. Some mothers were inattentive even on that one day of the week.

Silvia once heard one of them whispering to her little girl, “Don’t you dare whine. There’ll be trouble if you do,” and she was as offended as if that unjust telling-off had been directed at her.

On Sundays, the parlor. Her grandmother with flesh-colored tights rucked up around her ankles, like the skin on certain dogs. Her elegant grandfather, with his hat and well-cut jacket, his gilet and the handkerchief in his pocket. Her grandmother was losing her hair. And she wasn’t the person who’d given birth to her. This was important, she always said to her friend Marilena, who was left with only her aunts on her father’s side. Marilena is actually there beside Silvia, and she touches her tummy below her navel like pregnant women do.

“Well, come on,” she says. “Your grandmother is your mother’s mother after all.”

But Silvia is disgusted by the idea that her mother came out of her grandmother’s stomach in the big sleigh bed, its headboard inlaid with leaves and scrolls and Grandfather’s initials in the center: CC, Costantino Canepa. She herself often slept in it beside Grandmother, tucking the covers in tight so they wouldn’t fall down. At home as at school, she could expect a cocooned sleep.

Now Marilena’s round gray eyes are shining, and this means she’s arrived: Antonia’s mother, queen of Sunday visits. Silvia doesn’t remember the name of that beautiful woman anymore, blond with high cheekbones, wide nose, and invisible eyebrows, the cougar-mother, but again she sees the two cups she used to carry with her, carefully wrapped in newspaper (octagonal goblets, their rims outlined in gold), and the tin of powdered chocolate to be added to milk. She and her daughter Antonia say, “Chin-chin!” and drink. The mother whimpers, “I miss you. I miss you so much,” and Silvia understands why Antonia is upset by those bursts of affection, which only end up making her emotionally impoverished school life more difficult.

“I don’t believe that. You can’t miss me so much if you leave me here,” Antonia begins, and her mother takes pains to deny it and explain everything before a cowardly phrase slips out.

“Your father is inflexible.”

But Antonia isn’t appeased. She wants her mother to go away in torment as she herself is tormented by having to stay, but then she regrets it the moment her mother turns the corner. She runs her tongue around her mouth trying to taste the last bit of chocolate and looks at Silvia and Marilena because they’ve witnessed the scene and they’re orphans. They’re worse off than she is.