24

 24

THE FUNERAL WAS MOBBED. You had to hold your elbows at your sides just to move and say, “Excuse me,” every time. “Excuse me.” Giovanna’s classmates were gathered in the nave on the left; on the right were her father’s colleagues and people who had come down from the valley, their skin tanned by the sun and wind, mustaches yellowed with pipe smoke and hand-rolled cigarettes. Her family sat in the first row, distant and unapproachable, the last outpost of black before the white of the coffin and the wreaths of white lilies.

Anselmo and Luisa came early, while footsteps and whispers still echoed under the vaulting. Luisa settled in a pew at the back while Anselmo stood near the entrance, taking advantage of his height to monitor the stream of people entering. He hoped Silvia was hiding in some cellar or courtyard nearby, under stacks of chestnut wood or under the canvas sheeting protecting tools and machinery. Maybe she had heard about the funeral—there were notices up everywhere and people were talking about it—and would come to say a final farewell. Luisa didn’t think so and she was probably right.

“Imagine her coming and being seen by everyone, disrupting things,” she said.

Anselmo, however, couldn’t sit down and hadn’t listened to her. Even so, it was difficult to keep still: something was poking into his kidneys, and instead of jerking around like he wanted to he wiggled his toes inside his shoes, stood on tiptoe, and lowered himself back down on his heels.

From his post he saw Giovanna’s mother and father go by, her aunt and uncle and brothers, faces slack with sorrow. Her father swayed to one side as if he’d forgotten how to walk, and Anselmo wondered whether he’d had a mini-stroke. When Sister Annangela came in he started—he was so accustomed to seeing her with Silvia—and the same thing happened with Marilena, who immediately went to sit next to Luisa, putting an arm around her shoulders. Anselmo disapproved when he saw women all made up and wearing lipstick, their eyelashes black with mascara: you don’t get dressed up for a funeral. He also disapproved of people who chattered among themselves, no matter how quietly, and when he noticed that Luisa and Marilena were whispering he gave them dirty looks behind their backs, hoping they’d turn around and feel ashamed when confronted with his scowls.

The church was so packed that people could no longer get in and began gathering in the churchyard. The scent of flowers, incense, and melted wax hung over their heads and made him think of the woods, but a fossilized or maybe charred wood, with stumps black like tires. It also reminded him of the lavender and pine poultices their grandmother had placed on him and Silvia to ward off colds, so boiling-hot they practically burned your eyelashes.

“Stay down, Anselmo! Watch how Silvia does it. Put your big head down! Look, if you don’t get better you’ll have to fend for yourself.”

The priest droned on about youth and confusion and from the front row came the sharp sound of suppressed sobbing, as if a dog were whimpering, a shutter creaking. It seemed to Anselmo that it was fluctuating in unison with the people around him, as if they were all flames fluttering in the same gusts of emotion. It hadn’t happened to him for a long time, not perhaps since he had gone into the street as a boy to shout out news of the war’s end. But then it had been euphoria that brought all those hearts together. It came back to him how, at the time, it was actually Silvia who’d spoken to him about hearts that beat as one and he had poked fun at her expression: “So who are you, Liala, the romantic novelist?!”

He dried his eyes and nose with a handkerchief and began once again peering into dark corners. On the other side of the door a small group looked anxious to disappear: two boys of about thirteen or fourteen with their parents and on their faces mixed expressions of sadness and embarrassment. Anselmo realized that they must have been the friends with whom Giovanna skipped school, those morons. They kept their hands buried in their pockets and every now and then looked over their shoulders, a stupid thing to do since there was only a wall behind them. One of them had a Turin scarf around his neck, maybe the only one he possessed, or perhaps he was too keen on it to leave it off at a time like this. They looked like two whipped dogs and he felt so sorry for them that he waited to catch the eye of at least one boy, to hazard a melancholy smile of the sort that’s allowed at funerals. But the boy suddenly hung his head and didn’t raise it again.

And meanwhile, Silvia did not arrive. Anselmo didn’t give up even after the church emptied. He stayed there for a long time, alone, out of the way, hoping she’d drag herself in later under cover of nightfall.