20

 20

GIANNI WAS THE ONLY FRIEND Lea and Martino had in Bioglio. He was a distant cousin—third or fourth—and before they moved they’d only bumped into him at a couple of weddings; he and Lea had barely exchanged ten words. They regretted never having gotten together previously, because friendship blossomed instantly.

Gianni worked at the knitwear factory, too, though in export since he spoke English so well. He was tall and skinny with a nose like an upturned mushroom, thin lips, cheeks marred with pits and laugh lines, a crew cut. He was always saying he was ugly but Martino wasn’t convinced. Gianni wasn’t at all ugly. He would have been the unlucky gunslinger or a gravedigger in a Western, the guy who saves the hero by hiding him in a coffin at just the right moment.

When Gianni came by for a coffee he’d pat his shirt pocket every so often looking for a cigarette. Lea would glare at him, glance at Martino, and gesture toward the door with her chin. He’d shake his head and sign with his index finger: I’ll smoke later.

Mostly they talked about books. Gianni wrote short stories that Lea feverishly read in a night, finding them beautiful. For the first time in her life she was friends with a writer; she might have felt intimidated, but since Gianni seemed intimidated by her, the two embarrassments ended up canceling each other out.

Sometimes Gianni would recite Milton or Gerard Manley Hopkins from memory, and he’d then translate on the spot.

“If you want to translate a poem, Martino, you have to pay attention to how it scans, to the enjambment, that is. En-jam-be-ment,” he’d say. To please him, Martino scanned “en-jam-be-ment,” even though it wasn’t really his dream to start translating poetry. At school he’d been forced to memorize Carducci, and he’d found it super boring.

Gianni, though, made him see words in a new light, and it was as if Martino realized how to use them for the first time in his life. When he’d broken his wrist two summers ago, he’d needed physio to relearn how to use it: in practice, he’d sit and look at it for many minutes, until it softened like a squid as he rotated and bent it, all the while thinking, Hey! Look what a wrist can do—a bunch of stuff. He felt something similar with Gianni and his poetry, though words were even more useful than a wrist: they helped him to talk, to ask things. He thought it all through.

When he got going, Gianni would say, “Glory be to God for dappled things, For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow . . . For skies spotted like a cow! Well, look at this sky—how does it seem to you? Hm! It’s paved with clouds.” And Martino imagined himself, head down like a bat, making for a patch of gray sky.

“You show off, Gianni! What a performance!” Lea teased.

“You haven’t heard a thing yet,” he replied, and he began reciting John Donne:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

“So who are those sublunaries?” Martino asked. He imagined them as bald aliens on a flying saucer.

“They’re us, young man. You are a sublunar boy.”

“We, who love foolishly,” Lea commented, and Gianni smiled at the wall.

That afternoon, Martino realized that Gianni was worrying about the missing teacher and wasn’t looking at the sky in order to find similes but to determine whether it was really clearing up or was starting to rain again as it had the day before, all night, and that morning too. Their garden was watered by the rain. The water was still gushing through the guttering and several persimmons had finally come down.

“What’s it like at school without Silvia? Miss Canepa, I mean.”

“She’s not my teacher. There’s a stand-in. I don’t know. Everyone’s sad.”

“What about the search?” Lea asked Gianni.

“Around here—nothing. We were hopeful, but: nothing. If she’s in the area, she’s not responding to anyone’s calls. There’s some hope that she might have gotten on a train and left.”

“But do you know her well?” Lea asked.

“Very well. We were children together. She’s younger than me, though, by at least four years.”

All at once Martino thought of searching the woods. It seemed like a mission, an adventure. He could be the one to find the teacher and win the respect of Gianni, his mother, the entire school, and Giulia, that swot. After a feat like that, he’d be able to convince his family to go back to Turin. You don’t deny a hero a return to his own country. He would penetrate the evil green of Bioglio as he would the scrub of an island populated by cannibals or the heart of the black jungle. A cross between the pirate Sandokan and the sailor Corto Maltese. “Ballad of the Dripping Forest,” Gianni had written. He went to get his raincoat and a walking stick.

“I’m going out for a while.”

“That’s a novelty.”

During the previous weeks Martino had done everything he could to block out the external world and avoid puncturing the bubble of Turinese images he was living in.

“Well don’t go far. And don’t forget your spray,” Lea added. She meant his inhaler.

“I’ll take a short stroll while it’s not raining.”

“Okay. Do you want to take a snack with you?”

Provisions weren’t a bad idea. While he was making himself a butter and sugar sandwich, Martino overheard Gianni saying to his mother, “You know, I just hope she hasn’t gone crazy with sorrow. I hope they don’t find her half dead with hunger and off her head. That’s all we need. Silvia in a mental institution.”

“Weren’t you saying that her family are nice people? They wouldn’t do that to her.”

“No, it’s true. But they’re not the ones doing the psychiatric evaluations.”

A madwoman with hair erupting all over her head and a loose nightgown, that’s what really scared Martino. Like the wife of that Englishman who rightly locked her up in an attic . . . Bertha . . . Bertha Mason. His mother had told him the story. And to top it off Bertha was a crazy pyromaniac. Did he feel like looking for someone who was already headed down that path? Corto Maltese wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Sandokan, goes without saying. The main thing was, his teacher Canepa, as far as he remembered, wouldn’t hurt a fly. It was this thought that pushed him out of the door, onto the shiny grass and beyond. Into the woods, which dripped cheerfully on his head.