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THAT MORNING she’d gotten up wearily, as always. Her alarm clock sat on a small saucer, and she’d placed coins in it so that whenever the alarm went off, clanging and vibrating, the intolerable sound made her jump. She’d turn it off with a slap, eyes still shut; its many tumbles to the floor had dinged and dented it into something unrecognizable.

The teacher would get up and light the burner under her waiting coffeepot. Only after a coffee, she told herself, will I be able to think. She’d leave the small empty cup on the table in the midst of the circular prints made by other cups, other coffees drunk over the preceding days.

She’d take off her nightgown in the bathroom and wash her arms and chest, making sure not to neglect any part of her skin because she knew she was careless, and every now and then her cousin’s wife would alert her: “Silvia, you should change your jumper. You’ll sweat now that the heating is on.” She must have smelled of sweat. She didn’t notice it, but she didn’t want to upset anyone, especially the children. With children you had to be neat and clean because they were forced to be well groomed, and if they were found to have a sweaty collar or dirty nails they got shouted at. So she had gotten into the habit of washing with too much soap. Every week she used entire bars of Felce Azzurra and doused her armpits, underwear, and inside her shoes with talcum powder. But she remained at one with the countryside, the rake and the beasts, and she knew that one day when she retired she would go back to her village and throw fistfuls of salt over red snails to dissolve them before they could attack her lettuces. She’d sweep up hens’ droppings, repair the rabbit hutch, and force herself to remember to wash her hands before she ate.

Outside the sky was clear and the light threw the hillside, trees, and buildings into sharp silhouette. At least two people saw her walking down the road that slithered around the incline: Signora Berti, from a window in her house between two medlar trees, and then Giulio Motta, who was having coffee on his balcony with the cat on his knees.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew the teacher. She had moved to Biella as a young girl for school, and she hadn’t gone anywhere since then aside from a few coach trips to Valle d’Aosta and Switzerland, and to Liguria to dip her toes in the water. She’d taken her one flight to visit relatives in Melbourne, Australia, but she remembered almost nothing of that trip, saying only, “It was nice,” or “If they see a kangaroo, they run over it or put it on the barbecue.” And if someone pressed her on that—“What do you mean, Silvia? How do they manage to hit them?” or “Poor things,” “But isn’t the car damaged?”—she just shrugged. She often shrugged, was often lost in thought, and she walked with her head down, lower lip protruding, brow furrowed. She looked at her feet or at the road ahead of her and her close-set blue eyes remained hidden beneath their lids.

She lived on the edge of the city, where multi-story blocks of flats with lifts alternated with houses and their gardens, wild meadows, kitchen gardens, and chicken coops. Sorb hedges thrust clusters of orange berries out onto the pavements, and even at that early hour piles of dead branches and foliage left after pruning were already burning in courtyards. The smoke hit her sideways, in gusts, while the stench of rotten foliage rose from gutters and ditches. She inhaled deeply and thought that some pungent odors were, after all, agreeable. She liked the smell of cellars and the skin of salami, for example. On the other hand, she hated the smell of milk simmering on the cooker, which she blamed on her years at boarding school, when they gave her sour milk at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

She would hurriedly buy a paper from the newsagent at the bottom of the hill because she wanted to get to class early and finish writing out the homework she’d assigned to her students. She made each child a copy by hand in her clear, neat writing.

Signor Minero in the newsagents didn’t dare say anything and he didn’t stop her. Anyway, he wasn’t sure whether the girl was one of her students. Perhaps Silvia barely knew her. Mainly, he was embarrassed: he didn’t want to be the first to talk to her about it. Clearly, he would have been the first—almost no one knew, it was still early, and she seemed wholly unaware of what had happened. And what if she started crying? Or fell to the ground?

While he was mentally trying out a few phrases (Silvia, did you see? Silvia, have you heard? Silvia, wait), clearing his voice and opening his mouth to speak, she went out. She left some coins, the right amount, on the plastic tray and was instantly out of the door.

“Didn’t she even read the headlines?” he was asked later.

“No, she folded the paper in half, shoved it in her handbag, and left.”

Who can say whether it would have made any difference if she had discovered what had happened to the girl while she was not alone? She might have collapsed right there in front of them. She wouldn’t have been able to leave like that, on her own, as if nothing had happened. Minero would have taken her home or phoned her relatives: Something’s happened—come and get Silvia. Or maybe she would have trembled, hesitated, then pulled herself together, gripped her handbag, and said, I’m all right. I’ll go to school anyway. Instead she had gone into the woods.

“I should have stopped her,” Minero repeated over the following days.

“That ass, Minero! Why didn’t he stop her?” thundered Silvia’s cousin, the closest relative she had. He was over six feet tall, and his voice shook the glasses.

“Don’t shout, Anselmo.” His wife tried to calm him, unable to bear her husband’s fussing, his theatrical eruptions.

“He’s a prat! I’ve always said so!” he went on, shouting like crazy and beating the table with hands as large as spades.

“That’s enough. You’ll have a seizure.”

“Idiot!”

“Oh come on! Why do you care about Minero? We should focus on Silvia. Where might she have gone? Where could she have slipped and fallen?”

“Quiet, you. You don’t understand a thing,” Anselmo shouted, and he clenched his fists to squeeze out his anguish.