32

 32

LEA SCALDED HERSELF on the edge of the pan in which she was cooking risotto. She poured out the broth with her left hand, sucking the back of her right hand all the while.

“Do me a favor: cut me a slice of potato to put on it,” she said to Martino.

A veil of fog had fallen over the window, concealing garden and street. Stefano had arrived a short time before.

“Give me a big hug,” he said, turning to his son. He’d say big hug and a brief moment even though it bothered Lea. Yet he also said intiero instead of intero and giuoco instead of gioco and that made her laugh, reminding her of the books she’d read as a child and her school textbook.

Stefano was now standing on a chair in the hallway, where he’d decided to hang a picture he’d brought from their house in Turin. It wasn’t a good idea, not least because Martino had gone quiet and his whole body was saying, “That’s all we need!” and Stefano was useless at that sort of thing, to the extent that he didn’t even know how to hammer a nail in the wall. He couldn’t put anything together or repair it; he could barely change a light bulb. On the other hand, he had a few recipes he cooked well: breaded liver, fried mushrooms, stuffed fish cooked in the oven.

“Papa’s making something out of solid brick today,” they’d say.

Stefano tasted as he cooked and made other people taste, too, and they’d end up already full by the time they sat down at the table.

Lea and Martino appeared in the doorway.

“Don’t stand there staring at me.”

“Stefano . . .”

“I can manage with a picture.”

Martino and Lea moved into the kitchen and listened closely. Soon there was a sound of hammering and crumbling plaster.

“I knew it!” Lea said.

Stefano stopped with his arm in midair, looking incredulous.

“Papa? Papa, you’ve put a hole in the wall behind you!”

“It’s not a hole. You can’t even see it.”

“Sweep up now.”

“But this corridor is so narrow—how can I? It should be illegal to build like this.”

They laughed, and for a few seconds Martino forgot about his secret and there was no ramshackle hut in the middle of the woods with a teacher inside it to keep alive. Not much later, though, his secret re-emerged at the back of his mind and therefore in reality—beyond the window, the fog, and the trees—and Martino felt once again at odds with himself, observing himself from the outside, too, at an angle, while he ate his risotto and chatted—until going to bed and to sleep seemed like the way to get back inside his own shape. To put himself together again.

“So how’s he doing?” Stefano asked Lea a little later, while he stood cleaning his teeth in his underwear and she found his pajamas for him, poured his Idrolitina in water, hurrying things along so she could get into bed and read.

“Well enough. Managing.”

“Has he made any friends?”

“He’s angry with us.”

“But he’s better.”

“Yes, and very disappointed about that.”

“So no friends.”

“He likes Gianni but I’m not sure adults count.”

“Oh yes. The writer.”

Lea mumbled her agreement, quickly capping the bottle and shaking it to dissolve the Idrolitina.

“Now that you know a writer, you’ll surely fall in love.”

“Oh no. He’s not my type.”

Stefano saw that she wasn’t embarrassed so he knew it was true.

“No trace of the teacher?” he asked.

Lea guessed immediately that she wouldn’t be able to read that night, and she felt she’d been a bit simple not to have taken that into account earlier: you haven’t seen your husband for a week, a child is dead, a teacher has disappeared, your son feels displaced, and you want to go to bed and read. What kind of person are you!

When Martino came home from school upset, Lea had phoned Stefano. Like her, he was skeptical about the possibility of the teacher’s returning home safe and sound. Now he was anxious to hear about the search and the girl’s funeral as well.

Martino hadn’t felt like going to it but Lea had heard that it was well attended. There’d been a picture of the overflowing nave in the paper. Giovanna’s father had wanted her to be put in the coffin wearing a white dress, the article had said.

“For goodness’ sake. Eleven years old. Holy shit. What does an eleven-year-old know about death?” Stefano muttered.

“Well who knows? Who really knows?”

“C’mon, Lea, don’t start philosophizing. A kid jumps from her window. Even just saying it . . .”—he hunched his shoulders—“gives me the shivers.”

“We have no idea what goes on in the head of an eleven-year-old. Some little thing, a nothing to you or me, they’ll take as the end of the world.”

“You can’t live like that, though—you yell at your child and they go and throw themselves in the river.”

They got under the covers. The sheets were cold and they joined each other in the middle of the bed.

Lea heard Martino snoring in the other room and thought about Giovanna’s mother and what she would have to endure, with no respite, until the end of her days. She began crying silently, tears falling from the corners of her eyes and running straight into the shells of her ears.

She dried them angrily with her index fingers and tried to hold back her sobs. She could put up with being a domineering woman or a scornful one, but not a woman who cries. She’d talked about that with Gianni between one break in the conversation and the next, like a mule that plants its feet and bucks—and his analysis: “That’s a knotty situation. If you were a character in a book, it would be my duty to unravel it. But since you’re a real person, I guess it’s up to you.”

Fortunately, Stefano made the mistake of consoling her, which gave her the opportunity to take it out on him. She pushed him away and started talking angrily about her pig of an uncle, the one who called her my little redhead, or pretty little thing, and then felt her up. He’d tried to kiss her when she was only eleven, just like the girl, Giovanna, and she’d wriggled away and escaped by running around the big kitchen table—one, two, three times. It was a terrifying, mathematical certainty that he would have caught her sooner or later—but then someone came into the kitchen and her uncle pretended nothing was going on. Lea was so muzzy with fear that she couldn’t speak and she’d been sent straight to bed. Sometime later she’d made a huge effort to tell her mother and her mother had told her father. But nothing happened. Her father and her lecherous uncle continued to go fishing together. Her father would come home pleased with his bucket of trout and perch, and it was Lea’s job to clean them; she opened their stomachs and threw out the guts, doggedly scraping off scales over which the light threw miniature rainbows.

“And it’s not that they didn’t believe me, you see. They knew themselves that he was a predator, a kiddie-fiddler. This is what goes on at home. What do we know about that girl?”

“Okay, I’m sorry. But calm down.”

“Listen: good night. I’m going to read a couple of pages—if I don’t, I won’t be able to go to sleep.”

Her eyes glued to her book, Lea asked herself if a lot of what happened later hadn’t been a response to her parents’ betrayal, parents who hadn’t lifted a finger to help her. I’ll defend myself, I’ll give the orders, I’ll decide when to let my pants down. The trigger? Her predatory uncle. But no, people aren’t that simple. Who knows where it came from, her feisty character, what combination of genes, conversations, and events had shaped it? And choices, she said to calm herself. Above all, choices.