36

 36

MARTINO COULDN’T JUSTIFY going out by himself before Sunday afternoon, after almost two days of strict monitoring during which Lea and Stefano had tried to understand how he really was; or rather, how bad his mood was, though they didn’t come to a clear conclusion. They asked him what he did in the woods.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“If you want, we can go for a walk together sometime and look for mushrooms. There’ll be a lot of them.”

“I prefer playing Sandokan.”

“Ah, okay. Well . . .”

“Maybe you can go with Crivelli’s son. Wait—what’s his name?”

“Maybe next time.”

“What direction do you take?”

“Depends. To the little chapel.”

Lea looked at him questioningly.

“Halfway up.”

“Be careful not to twist your ankle.”

Before going to the woods he filched a piece of cake, the tag end of a salami, and a couple of apples. Leaves were falling off their branches and the first stars were peeking out of the sky. Invisible birds and lizards rummaged through leaves on the ground. Maybe he should have hidden, too, in Turin, on a building site or in Valentino Park at night. They’d have found him right away, though: in a city, there are people everywhere.

When he got to the hut Martino remembered the promise he’d made to the teacher last time: to bring a book. He’d forgotten, and for a moment he felt like a failure, but he quickly told himself that he was there for the last time, to put things straight. And yet . . . it was pointless to deny it. He had hesitated; he’d had second thoughts. He was on tenterhooks, and he tried to calm down by repeating his prepared speech. I’m sorry, Miss, I can’t go on keeping quiet. Everyone is looking for you and they’re all worried. I’m sorry, Miss, I can’t go on keeping quiet. Everyone is looking for you and they’re all worried. I’m sorry . . .

So as not to frighten her, he knocked on the beams and waited a few seconds before peeping in.

She was sitting down and looked more composed, more normal. Martino couldn’t have said how, but it was the impression she gave, as if her shoulders and arms were in a fairly controlled position, her hands and feet still but not lifeless, not askew. Her face, though, looked terrible: white and green, like a piece of Gorgonzola.

“Ciao,” she greeted him.

“Hello.”

“Don’t you feel well?”

It was absurd to be questioned by someone who was more dead than alive. Someone getting by on his leftovers, whose voice sounded like it was coming from the catacombs.

For at least a day and a half, Silvia had been forcing herself to focus on the boy and construct some kind of logic. Meanwhile her mind kept filling up with Giovanna and other old things she thought she’d buried for good: her thoughts, heaped and incoherent like the cuttings and postcards in her messy room. She couldn’t get on top of them. She knew, though, that she had asked too much of the boy and would have to tell him. She had to free herself of that unexpected anchor. She’d tried to train herself, but every word cost her tremendous effort and sounded odd: an unused tool, a broken washing machine thrown out in the woods. Martino, I apologize. I asked you to do something difficult, something wrong. It’s not fair for you to feel responsible for me. Don’t come back. I promise that I will return—if I feel like it. When I feel like it, I’ll return. As soon as I feel like it. But don’t you worry.

Nonsense. The goose was cooked. The boy surely felt responsible and guilty and she felt guilty about him too. Guilt on top of guilt on top of guilt. They’d been hand in glove from the moment he’d turned up there. Silvia hadn’t succeeded in disappearing. Again she wondered if desperation might encourage her to do away with herself. But you’re eating, you’re drinking! a hateful voice accused.

“I brought you some cake but I forgot the book,” Martino said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

He cleared his throat but the teacher beat him to it.

“I’d like to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“I need to apologize.”

Martino hoped that she wanted to be rescued, that it was all over. Give me free rein now and I’ll tell my mother. Then we can phone your family.

“I asked you to do something difficult. It’s not—something wrong, yes. It’s not fair for you to feel responsible for me. Don’t come back. I promise that as soon as I feel like it, I’ll return. And if I don’t feel like it, it’s not your fault. It’s . . . something I’ve decided. It’s to do with me.”

“But if I don’t come, who will bring you something to eat?” Martino objected.

Silvia didn’t know what to say.

“And what if you’re too weak to walk?”

All the objections she’d put to herself he was now directing at her. He felt betrayed, and doubly so. The teacher was asking him to continue keeping quiet, but without his being able to keep an eye on her. No, my dear. Nope.

“What if you need something and there’s no one to help you? Or if there’s a cold night?”

It was a stalemate.

“You’re right,” she admitted.

“So why don’t you go back home?”

She mumbled, “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

Martino then remembered that essentially she was half mad or she’d gone crazy, so clearly you couldn’t really discuss everything. It was, as they say, a minefield. He felt a kind of calm. It was up to him. He had to keep a steady nerve, like the privateer Yanez de Gomera. The teacher was getting better. Maybe he just needed to be patient. Make a proper campsite, bring her some more blankets in the meantime. She really was behaving like a child, hiding because of her shame and grief, and he told himself that she would inevitably come out of her den at some point. He’d have to help her get there. And maybe she wouldn’t end up in an institution either, as Gianni feared.

“I’ll keep coming so you’ll get better faster.” Martino let himself get carried away with his recent resolution. He didn’t want to threaten her; he wanted to save her. “Otherwise I’ll tell.”

He sat for a while, looking at the tips of his shoes and wondering if he had accidentally gone overboard.

“Did your father come?” the teacher said, as if she hadn’t even heard his blackmail.

She really was strange.

“Yes, but how did you know about my father?”

“You told me about him last time.”

“Oh. Well, he’s leaving right after supper.”

“My father didn’t live with me either when I was your age.”

“How come?”

“He worked in Switzerland. I missed him, I think. I was rather angry with him.” So where had that come from? Starvation, an unhinged voice that didn’t even sound like hers, the fact that she was distracted by the thought of the cake he’d mentioned at the beginning.

“Papa misses me,” Martino admitted. “But I have my mother here.”

“I lived with my grandparents.”

“What about your mother? Was she gone too?”

“Um, you know . . . my mother. She was . . . she died young. That’s it.”

It seemed as if the teacher wanted to apologize for sharing something depressing, but on the other hand he had the impression that they were taking a few steps forward and he was relieved. Was it so surprising, he thought, that the pain of losing your mother as a child would make you more liable to end up crazy and alone in the woods? What would he be like without his mother? A disaster, a complete disaster! He didn’t dare go too far into the specifics just then. But in his brain he heard the terrifying word orphan, a prerequisite for changes of fortune. The teacher was a sort of overgrown Oliver Twist. And yet, he reflected, being brought up by your grandparents had to be better than getting lumbered with a wicked stepmother, sent to an orphanage or the slums of London.

“You lived here in the village, right?” he asked, just to say something.

“Yes. The house near the fountain. The one with wisteria climbing the wall.”

“We have wisteria in our courtyard.”

“Well I never.”

“The house was all musty inside.” Lea had said so, holding her nose. “That’s why we had to replaster.”

“Did you help?”

“I did the whole corridor by myself.”

Silvia noticed that she’d made headway. She could hold some sort of conversation almost without being aware of it. While one part of her brain registered the ascent of a small bird, a treecreeper, on the trunk of the beech tree and its disappearance behind the shelf of bark where it had surely built a nest, her other thoughts kept whirling around Giovanna, Giovanna, Giovanna. She was speaking like a robot, but more or less managing to follow the rules of conversation.

“The other night, though, my father was trying to put a picture up and he hit the wall with the hammer—the wall behind him!” Martino lit up as he imitated his father’s gesture, and Silvia managed a crooked smile.

“He completely ruined the paint. Oh well, I’ll fix it later,” the boy said, boasting a little.

Sitting there in front of him, Silvia hadn’t yet eaten. The wrappers and a new bottle of water sat on the ground, but she was ashamed to put food in her mouth with her hands, with her chin hanging over her knees like a monkey. Being watched while she ate was like admitting that she was giving in to her body’s survival. What is suffering when you’re faced with a slice of cake?

Incontinent Canepa, Greedy Canepa: the nuns again. I’ve never dealt with those damned nuns.

And to think that even she couldn’t get down the slop they served in boarding school: she’d toss it surreptitiously into a metal box so that during break she could bury the whole thing under a yew tree in a remote spot in the playground.

The boy seemed alarmed once more. Perhaps he’d been gone too long. So Silvia asked him what she usually asked children. “How’s school going?”

She was referring to his marks, or to how they were getting on without her.

Martino didn’t understand. “Okay,” he said haltingly.

“It’s difficult to change schools,” the teacher added, resurrecting another emotional tangle: the school, twenty years of students. Silvia, you’re all in a muddle, Marilena’s voice had said. As long as the other voice couldn’t make itself heard, the one that wanted her dead. Or rather, wanted to humiliate her because she wasn’t dead. Mortify, according to the etymology. Here they are again, here are the nuns, the great mortifiers.

Silvia, stay where you are. Don’t get lost, it urged. Listen: the boy is talking to you.

“ . . . my first teacher in Turin, but she wasn’t very good. The second one was, though, especially explaining math and science. I had lots of friends in my class. I’ll be with them again in middle school, with my best friends,” Martino was telling her.

“Oh, you will?”

“We’re going back to Turin next year. We’re not staying here. As soon as my asthma gets better.”

“And how is it?”

“Better, a lot better.”

They told each other something else of no consequence: she made signs of approval, mostly, to ensure that she didn’t make a mistake. Before he left, Martino took the empty canteen so he could bring it back full the next day.

Silvia allowed herself to be mesmerized by the treecreeper’s comings and goings. The little bird hopped up and up the trunk, its feet gripping the bark and never missing, its tucked-in head making it appear even more focused. After a short while she realized that there were two of them spiraling up the beech tree. Even in the dusk their feathers seemed tipped with gold.