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THE TWO-STORY SCHOOL BUILDING was the color of milky coffee and surrounded by a narrow mesh fence, hydrangeas, and cherry laurel. The playground was paved over in gravel and cement with insets for grass where little trees were growing, tormented by the youngest children who climbed on them and tore off their leaves to make “soup.” It was a fifteen-minute walk from the newsagents.

“She must have opened the paper on the way,” they later surmised.

In fact, the teacher had taken the paper from her handbag while she was still walking. She liked to scan the headlines at least before getting to school, to feel more firmly attached to the world. You’ve got your head in the clouds, Silvia. You’re off with the fairies. People always said that. She shook the paper open and at that moment, by the side of the road, she read the news. She stopped abruptly, seemingly unperturbed, and yet, if one had looked closer, her stillness might have appeared unnatural. There was an avalanche inside her. Almost immediately, she was unable to decipher the characters, but in the rubble of letters a few isolated words continued to pulsate before her eyes: fell, body, tragedy. After a minute or so, she turned the page to find the end of the article and a photo of the large block of flats with a torrent, the Cervo, winding below it.

She became aware that she was walking again, her legs carrying her miraculously and without her intervention. She hurried along, like someone late for an appointment, and only now and then did she stumble or her ankle give way. But she couldn’t have said whether she was limping or her shoulder was hurting; she’d brushed against a wall (plaster dust had left a clear mark on her raincoat, or maybe it was chalk from the blackboard the day before). She passed the hospital and let herself be led down the hill. The pavement beside the cement wall was narrow, and the passing cars rattled and shook over the cobblestones.

At the last bend in the road the Cervo and the bridge came into sight, and she realized that her legs were dying to throw her into the water. She had nothing against this plan. It didn’t matter to her, and actually it seemed reasonable, even logical. It would be easy to get over the railing: no one paid her any attention, and no one would get there in time to stop her. But, to her surprise, she covered the entire span and reached the opposite bank as if she were cycling, and in fact she felt a cramp in her stomach because she wasn’t far from the block of flats shown in the paper, and she remembered, momentarily, the tale of the Pied Piper who drowns rats in the river and then drowns the children, too, in revenge. She was the rat, but the sequence was all wrong: the rat comes before the girl, not after.

She’d missed her chance and had to go on; she thought she’d probably walk until she fainted and that, too, would be fine with her, though it would take a lot longer.

Her eyesight worsened; she no longer recognized shapes. It felt like the woods had come after her, entangling her in a jumble of trunks, spines, and foliage.