39

 39

THAT AFTERNOON Martino was wheezing when he arrived at the summit of the Rovella. It was the fault of those three boys who shouted at him and made fun of him because he was new in Bioglio and spoke with a different accent, which they mangled. Or they’d make farting sounds, palms under their armpits, when he walked past. If they weren’t at the café playing table football, they were sitting on the cement embankment smoking. They’d hold their cigarette butts between thumb and index finger and then send them splashing a long way out. They talked about arses that made the rounds and boobs that sent them cross-eyed, just to be heard.

His mother went to work to make up the time she’d lost that morning. Martino had stuffed himself and then set out through the forest, starting at every noise, imagining those three idiots jumping out of the undergrowth. Once he got to the top he found Silvia staring into space again, catatonic, her eyes looking boiled. She wasn’t expecting him.

“Miss?” He tried to go along with her and looked in the same direction, toward the wall of the hut, where there was only blue lichen resembling miniature heads of lettuce and damp cracks. He took his time putting his paper bag on the ground; inside was a long loaf of bread and an edition of his favorite comic series, The History of the West in Color.

He’d thought about it long and hard because he wasn’t sure the Dakota warriors’ raids were the right sort of reading for the teacher, but he didn’t want to go through his mother’s books; she’d notice for sure. He’d chosen the issue with “The Legend of Sitting Bull.” Everyone likes Sitting Bull, of course, and there was the part that made him shiver, when the witch doctor goes to the future Big Chief: “Now I understand that your long slumber wasn’t due to illness, but the Great Spirit wanted it! He has put his mark on you. If you speak to him, he will listen!” Too bad Silvia didn’t seem in any condition to read.

“Miss?”

“Anselmo?” she asked.

“It’s Martino.”

She didn’t open her mouth and, feeling let down and frightened, Martino got ready to go. But he hadn’t walked twenty meters before a strangled roar stopped him short. Farther down, between trees and piles of dry leaves, he could make out a furry mass: a wild boar. It wasn’t snuffling, nose to the ground. Its glittering eyes darted here and there until they alighted on him.

Martino had heard grisly tales of wild boars that savaged dogs and tore old women to pieces. He backed up slowly, with a weight on his chest that boded ill. His fingers tightened around the inhaler but he didn’t take it out of his pocket for fear of dropping it and losing it in the undergrowth. The boar lifted its bagpipe of a nose and sniffed the air. Martino was now close to the hut and he called out: “Miss, Miss! There’s a wild boar!”, his voice so altered that it unnerved him.

Just then the boar bucked and took off, head lowered, hoofs galloping rapidly despite the ascent. Martino was about to leap to one side when the teacher came out of the hut holding the blanket. She got in front of him and twirled the blanket in front of the boar, which slowed down and traced a small circle, snorting. Martino watched it moving the tip of its snout up and down, up and down like a rubber hose.

“Get out of here! Go away!” the teacher said. When she decided the beast was tamed, she grabbed Martino by the sleeve and drew him into the hut.

He sat down, breath whistling, took out his inhaler, and opened his mouth to breathe in the spray.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded to let her know he was all right and she went back to her corner as if she wasn’t expecting anything else. Martino’s nose stung with the smell of ammonia the teacher’s movements had released.

“But why, why did it charge?”

“It didn’t charge.”

“But—”

“Blustering. A young male. Wild boars only charge in desperation.”

Martino was getting his breath back. It seemed that the sounds of grunting and of leaves being stomped were fading away.

“Gone,” the teacher confirmed. She was definitely more present than before. She’d gotten up, reacted in a hurry, and she’d rescued him. But something was keeping them apart.

“Who is Anselmo?”

“Anselmo?”

“You called me that, before.”

“Oh! My cousin. Are you really okay?”

He nodded again.

“Sorry. You know, I have certain thoughts every now and then”—Silvia touched her stringy hair—“which act like glue.”

“That’s okay.”

“When I was your age, everyone was always telling me I had my head in the clouds.”

“They tell me I’m fidgety and don’t know how to stay still.”

“I knew a girl like you at boarding school. We’re still friends.”

“You were at boarding school?”

“Yes. With the nuns. To learn.”

“Couldn’t you just go to school?”

“There was a war on, and curfew. And anyway I couldn’t have taken the teaching diploma here in the village.”

Martino wanted to hear about the boarding school. Every so often his maternal grandparents would say to him, “If you misbehave we’ll send you to boarding school,” and he had in mind the institute where the storybook rascal Gian Burrasca ends up. He expected it to be like a prison for boys where you eat dirty dishwater. And now, finally, he knew someone who had been there, and he asked her to tell him about it so eagerly that Silvia didn’t feel she could let him down. She talked about the stink of turnips and rat poison and about the discipline. She told him how they had to keep their eyes lowered when they went out for walks so as not to meet a man’s eyes. She told him there wasn’t much food and it was often disgusting, and she talked about the bowls of milk they drank to add calories to their meals. Since she’d left, she had in fact stopped drinking milk. She couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Was the food that awful?”

“It made you vomit,” she confirmed. “Sometimes we’d hide it in the biscuit boxes and then throw it away.”

“And what if they’d found out?”

“They’d have punished us. We had to eat what we had, even if it tasted spoiled.”

“And what were the nuns like? I mean, with you.”

“It depends. We liked Sister Elvira. She taught us science in the playground with earthworms, seeds, and roots. In general, though, they were very strict. Everything had to work perfectly, without hiccups. Crying was a problem, getting angry, arguing . . . Ugh! Better not argue. Breaking something, making it dirty, getting sick. Being afraid.”

“Were you there for long?”

“Seven years.”

“Seven years!”

“Middle school and high school. To get my teaching diploma.”

“And you never went home?”

“Yes, of course. At Christmas, Easter, in the summer.”

“Not that often,” Martino commented.

“Some of them were always there. The-Ones-With-No-Families, we called them. But my grandparents came to see me almost every Sunday in the dray cart.”

Martino’s curiosity was insatiable, but the teacher was tired. Her face looked torn, as if her features had slackened little by little, and her stories, too, became less restrained.

“We called one of the nuns The Mastiff because of her saggy cheeks and pug nose. She beat us hard. I remember how her knuckles were black and blue when she wielded the cane. One of The-Ones-With-No-Families, Agnese, would spit on the plates when it was her turn to serve the table. I loved her for that and we became friends.”

“Was she the fidgety one?”

“No, that was another one.”

“And did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you rebel?”

“Not on your life. I’ve always been a scaredy-cat. But at least I wasn’t a snitch.”

“Some of them were?”

“Some, yes. Agnese spent entire nights on her knees beside her bed as a punishment.”

Silvia didn’t tell him that once, when the nuns were exasperated, they’d given the girls tranquilizers and Agnese had turned into a sort of calf, wobbling on her feet and looking around with eyes narrowed to a slit, as if the sun were shining in her face.

“However, I wasn’t doing at all well myself. I was clumsy, absent-minded, and greedy for the sweets my grandparents brought me. I didn’t know how to cook or sew. I worked hard at my lessons but I never was one of the best.”

“But if you’re a teacher?”

A strange laugh escaped her. “You hardly have to be top of the class.”

Martino thought she was saying it out of modesty.

“So you were happy when you left,” he concluded.

“Yes. I didn’t know how things would go outside, but I had a job so I couldn’t complain. My friends—above all, I was sorry for my friends.”

“But you were always together there, in the same city.”

“Most of us. But you know, from living together, one goes . . .”

A yellow light thick as broth poured over them through holes in the roof between the corrugated tiling and the beams. Martino got to his feet.

“Well, you know what it’s like. You, too, have friends in Turin who are far away.”

“For a year.”

Silvia wondered if he was exaggerating the length of time or trying to minimize it.

“If they don’t forget me,” Martino added.

“They won’t, for sure.”

“How do you know?”

“Experience. And hopefully you’ll go and see them before the year goes by.”

“My friend Ago, Agostino, is like Agnese.”

Agostino fought with the older boys and knew how to stand up to anyone, even adults. Once when he was defending a cat, he got hit in the mouth with a stone that broke his front tooth.

“I wish I could be like that,” the teacher admitted.

“Me too.”

Silvia was on the verge of remembering why she’d chosen to be a teacher, other than convenience and habit: because of the restlessness of children, their fears and intelligence, because of how instinctively tender they are even if they are too new, too mocking and courageous to understand pity; because of the way they look when they’re learning something, before they become people pressing ahead, like newborn animals whose arrival in the world is a miracle, a wonder, until at some stage they become simply cattle as far as we are concerned.

“My fidgety friend is someone you know,” she revealed. “It’s Sister Annangela.”

“Sister Annangela!”

“After boarding school, she was the only one to take vows.”

Martino took in the news. Silvia and Annangela in uniform, being caned. He peered outside, but it didn’t look like there was anything big moving around.

“What do I do about the boar?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about going back down.”

“But he attacked me!”

“He didn’t. I’m telling you he didn’t. Go home. If you see one, don’t run. If you need to, take the long way around.”

Martino stalled in the doorway, but as soon as he made up his mind he left at a brisk pace, looking left and right as he did before crossing a road.

Nothing would happen to him. Silvia hadn’t thought about the fact that for an asthmatic, fear itself is a danger, even if it’s unprovoked or disproportionate. She let herself be drawn back to the age of eighteen: a girl like so many others, undermined by the humiliation that spared no one at boarding school—after all, it was an established educational technique—but one who didn’t like feeling sorry for herself. Thus, a little humiliated, a little proud, she had prepared for adult life.