22

 22

HE CAME DOWN THE HILLTOP like an avalanche, sweeping away the shrubs. With each stride it felt like his legs were about to detach from his body; his muscles were inflamed, blood pounded in his temples. He wanted to scream. He had to stop, bent double by a stitch, his fingertips pressing in below his ribs. Afterward he forced himself to walk in a more measured way. He was in danger of getting lost and taking too long to get home. The birds called out to one another from branch to branch, and beneath the foliage the light had faded and filled with dust particles. It wasn’t long before sunset.

When the vegetation thinned out and he spotted the first houses of his village, Martino slowed down rather than speeding up, aware that he was hesitating, uncertain how to act. He was rattled. He’d found the missing teacher. He’d found her! It wasn’t the moment to play the coward. He shook his head to banish those words of hers whirling around inside it like gnats: Don’t tell anyone!

The teacher was dying. He couldn’t leave her there. Why didn’t she want help? She needed help. If you see someone about to shoot themselves you try to get them to change their mind, and if you can you throw yourself at them to stop them pulling the trigger. This was the same thing. But the teacher was dying little by little. She wasn’t doing anything; in fact, she was staying absolutely still, turning into a plant, part of the woods. Martino had read somewhere that when Eskimos are old and death is nigh, they go off by themselves into the frozen wastelands and let the cold carry them away. Only she wasn’t that old. Her situation must be different.

Well, she’s crazy, he said to himself, why am I standing here thinking about it? She’s crazy. What she asked of me doesn’t count. She’s got a screw loose.

For starters, to stink like that she must have peed herself. Only the homeless sleeping in Turin’s doorways gave off that sour smell, dense and peppery, a wall of stench that kept clean people at a distance. They defended themselves by disgusting others. No one wanted to touch them, whether to help or to assault them.

The desire to hide was something Martino could understand himself. He’d already had to slip away in shame when he’d done something mean or really awkward, when he’d been humiliated by other kids or had actually humiliated someone else, driven to flee by his own cruelty.

At the end of his first year, one of his enemies, an obnoxious boy from his old school, had put his arm through the playground fence, picked up a log of dog poo with a leaf to keep his own fingers clean, and thrown it at Martino. It splatted against his jacket and left a mark; even Martino’s friends had laughed at him. These days he would have responded by beating him fast and furiously, but at the time he was little, had dog poo on him, and shame took hold of him like a fever with shivers and weakness. He’d crawled into a hedge and hadn’t come out during break, when everyone else came out to the playground again to look for him, or when his feet fell asleep. A caretaker had quietly flushed him out and taken him to his lodge, where he put the dirty jacket in a plastic bag and fed him a few segments of mandarin.

Children hide. And children piss themselves. But she was a teacher. The teacher is the opposite of the children: she sits on a platform in front of them and tells them what to do. In fact this teacher had asked him something, and you usually obey the teacher regardless of whether you agree or want to do it. Does a crazy teacher, a dying teacher still count as a teacher? If he didn’t betray her, Martino would end up betraying everyone else, everyone who was looking for her. What if she died? It would weigh on him forever. Fear pricked his side, similar to the stitch he’d had a short time earlier, and he wanted to get rid of it. He had a strong urge to enlist the adults and let them deal with it.

Everything that had happened—the girl dying and the teacher going on the run—everything that had fallen on top of him the moment he’d found the hut was too much for him on his own. So why was he in two minds about it? He had never kept a secret like this: he was the only one in the whole village and town, the only one in the world who knew where the teacher was and that she was alive. With that secret nestled inside, it would be impossible for him to get bored, even in Bioglio, so far from his friends. The secret was both a burden and a compensation. It was something he alone could decide. Not his mother or his father. Not the adults.

“You have to tell someone!” he exclaimed.

And yet he continued to stall. He felt torn inside, I’ll tell and I won’t tell, back and forth, and he ended up opening the door at home without having decided what to do. When his mother saw how agitated he was and asked, “Has something happened to you?”, he instinctively replied, “No, nothing,” because that way it felt like he hadn’t decided yet, had just put things off.

While he ate his supper he hoped that the teacher had eaten her sandwich and wouldn’t die that night. If she lives, I’ll stop copying Piero’s homework when we go back to Turin. I’ll stop kicking the pigeons, even though I never hit them. I’ll stop blowing my nose on my sleeves.

Later, in bed, he relished the ironed cotton sheets and bounced up and down on the mattress springs. He rubbed his cheeks against the down pillow and felt the woolen blanket. The pillowcase and the sheets were white with blue forget-me-nots on the border, each surrounded by a raised yellow ring in the middle of the corolla.

Martino was safe and dry. He thought he could still detect the smell of the plaster they’d redone the month before, a nice, solid, civilized odor of solvent and brick. He thought of her up there in the woods all by herself, suffering the damp and the dark, and as he fell asleep the woods went back to being the setting for fairy tales: forbidden and dangerous. An ancient, carnivorous place where there are wolves, where children lose their way, are abandoned, and meet ogres and witches. The first labyrinth.