34

 34

THE FIRST TIME someone saw Silvia they believed it.

She was in Santhià and had asked for information about the regional trains for Milan. A little while later the man selling tickets remembered the teacher. He’d seen her photo in the papers: a woman of medium height, chestnut-colored hair and blue eyes, whom he’d never met before. She hadn’t taken the train so she must still be in the city.

Anselmo and Luisa arrived barely an hour after the call. The ticket seller found the newspaper and pointed triumphantly to the photo. “Looks just like her! As far as I’m concerned, it was her.”

“Was she okay?” asked Luisa. “It’s been four days since she disappeared.”

“She was okay. Fine.”

Luisa and Anselmo looked at each other. Someone’s helped her without saying anything, he was thinking resentfully. But Luisa’s hopes were fading: it was unlikely that Silvia looked “fine” after what had happened.

They scoured streets, cafés, and shops. Anselmo ahead, raving. He’d burst through the doors, bells would tinkle, and he’d be gone already. He used to do the same when he played hide-and-seek with his cousin as a child: he opened all the doors and in his excitement he missed things. Concealed in wardrobes, behind curtains or under the bed, Silvia got away. So he forced himself to slow down a little. In the meantime, Luisa was pounding the side streets. People turned their heads to look at them. “Have you lost a child?” worried a woman loaded with shopping bags.

Luisa was breathless and heard a clattering in her head. Suddenly she thought she spotted a figure at the end of the road who might be Silvia. Anselmo had gone into another café and she didn’t want to waste her chance by going back to tell him. She picked up her pace without losing sight of the figure, and actually focused on her with such intensity that two figures appeared before her eyes.

The woman was dressed in black with the right hair and the right walk, dragging her feet a little. No handbag. When she turned the corner Luisa began to run, her own bag bouncing back and forth like a swing—she felt an urge to drop it, but she didn’t. She called, “Silvia!” and her voice sounded hoarse. There was no one else in the street, only doors and gates and a stretch of stubbly grass on the opposite side, garages with their doors pulled down. A dog on a balcony began barking, going in and out of her field of vision, as anxious as she was.

Luisa tried to focus on the shoes. Low-heeled leather loafers. Dark blue or black? Silvia’s were black and these looked blue, or black faded by dust.

No. They really were blue. She let the race come to an end.

The woman stopped at the entrance to a house and took a bundle of keys from the pocket of her coat. Only then did she turn around, affronted.

A few steps away and as red as a tomato, Luisa had her handbag strap wound around her wrist and she held it tight in her fist. Her hair comb was hanging from an ear. She leaned against the wall and apologized, explaining that she’d mistaken her for someone else, someone she’d been looking for for days. The woman had been afraid of the racing behind her but now she was angry about it.

“Fine, but you can’t really follow people like that!” she said in a Milanese accent.

“I’m very sorry. The worry . . . I made a mistake.”

She went back to Anselmo, who’d become angry in the meantime because he’d lost sight of her.

“I mixed her up with someone else.”

“Good going! Did you at least ask if she was the one at the station?”

Luisa hadn’t thought to do so. “But she definitely had a Milanese accent. If you ask me, she’s the one the ticket seller spoke to.”

“If you ask me, if you ask me.” Anselmo lost it. “And according to you, can we settle for that?”

So they crisscrossed the whole village, barely exchanging a word, and afterward they retrieved their car and combed the streets, cutting through the rice fields. The combine machines had already passed through, harvesting the small plants, and stubble was being burned in many plots, leaving the fields with the black and yellow stripes of a tiger’s pelt. Even with the windows closed Luisa could still smell diesel and manure.

“I knew immediately that it was no use trusting that cretin at the station,” Anselmo mumbled, and she let him run with it.

“We were naïve,” she admitted.

“But I don’t know how you managed to mistake a Milanese woman for Silvia.”

He gave her a slap on the knee before changing gear, and Luisa thought that by dint of acting crazy and running away, Silvia had forced her to stay and be normal forever, as long as her natural life should last. She turned toward the countryside. The Alpine slopes were the same blue as the sky, and you could make them out only because of their peaks, jagged, stony, and snow-white against the misty white of the clouds. Pale-gray herons hunted along the canals, the watery surface doubling them like figures on a deck of cards, one sharply outlined, the other grainy yet sparkling. Luisa spotted a heronry between the black locust trees, dozens and dozens of large nests where other birds stood waiting.