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 38

ON MONDAY Lea booked a visit to the optician in Biella. For weeks it had seemed as if her sight was deteriorating and she had a headache—like toothpicks behind her eyeballs—that she was convinced was related to her blurred vision. Over the years her mother had become so shortsighted that she recognized people chiefly by the sound of their voices and Lea was afraid of ending up like her, a half-blind mole bumping into door frames. The optician said, though, that her sight had not deteriorated much and he gave her a discount on some frames because they looked so good on her. They were leaf-shaped, with tips pointing toward her temples.

“So you don’t think I seem like a mole?” she asked.

“No, I really wouldn’t say that.” The bald-headed old optician was surprised.

She went to wait for Martino in the café near his school, ordered a coffee at the bar, and had a chat with the barista: Turin, Biella, a nod toward the tragedy. No, her son wasn’t one of the girl’s classmates, the girl who—the girl, anyway.

A young man with a brand-new leather briefcase came in and the barista whispered to her that he was standing in for Canepa; he grimaced as if to say I don’t envy him.

Lea decided to introduce herself. She wanted to know how things were going at school, what the atmosphere was like given that it was so hard to get anything out of Martino. The substitute teacher had a black beard and deep-set half-moon eyes. His eyes were as black as his beard and they shone like the tourmaline in a bracelet Lea had had years before—who knew where it was now.

In the space of a few minutes Lea noticed that her gestures had lost all their spontaneity: putting her cup down (she made it clatter too loudly on the saucer); smoothing her hair behind her ears (she did it too slowly). After a busy morning, her lipstick had bled and she felt sticky little clumps of it at the corners of her mouth. She had an urge to lick them, or else scrape them off with her incisors and swallow them. She tried wiping them off with a napkin and asked for another glass of water.

Clearly for the first time, the teacher found himself substituting for someone whose whereabouts were unknown—and on top of that, in a class upset by the loss of a classmate. He confessed that he found it horrible and extremely difficult. Yet as he did so, he turned on Lea a look both absorbed and cheerful, and she noticed it bouncing between her hair, eyebrows, and lashes, moving down from her forehead to her coat collar (actually very high-necked). They weren’t keeping an eye on the time, nor were they paying attention to the children outside walking on the pavement. Lea nearly threw away the receipt for her new spectacles with the dirty napkin.

As she went past the large window of the café, Sister Annangela noticed Greppi, the substitute teacher, with the mother of the new boy, Martino Acquadro, Year 6C. She’d run into her only once at the beginning of the year, but her red hair made her unmissable. There was nothing wrong there. They’d met, had a coffee together. But Sister Annangela was very observant, and she noticed Lea smiling and tilting her head to one side while she stood on one leg, teasing a heel with the tip of her other shoe. Meanwhile, with one elbow on the bar, he leaned toward her as if he were sitting in a box at the theater intent on enjoying the spectacle. And Sister Annangela guessed that the story wouldn’t end there.