42

 42

THE CALL OF THE BARN OWL sounds like her alarm clock, and Silvia gets up and goes out of the hut. The plants are breathing; humidity is rising from the soil.

“My feet are cold,” she used to say to Anselmo when they went looking for mushrooms, and he’d reply, “Think about the animals—they’re always outside, but we’ll soon be going back to the stove.” Once, they burned their heels on the red-hot, cast-iron stove, trying to warm up in a hurry. They often burned themselves on the embers and sparks from the chimney or matches they lit to burn ticks. Silvia would dig them out of their dog’s skin with alcohol and tweezers and Anselmo applied the flame. Swollen with blood, they looked like green olives or mature acorns and before long they’d burst, making the hens squawk as they scratched around, hoping to eat.

Silvia breathes into the frozen bowl of her hands and thinks that each morning in the woods is a triumph. Being damaged is the same as being alive. The damage you’ve suffered is proof of your existence: the parasites, mold, scratches, ulcers, loose teeth, matted fur, maimed wings, lameness. There’s nothing undamaged apart from an embryo (sometimes), a hard, closed bud, a spore. She, dirty and hungry, is nothing special.

Anselmo: she wants to remember what he was like when he was Giovanna’s age. A large, awkward boy, a bottomless well who could devour entire loaves of bread and half a dozen raw eggs, sucking them directly from a small hole in the shell. Report card day: hers average, almost good, Anselmo’s disastrous—a report that incited turmoil, punishment, and running away.

In the woods, Anselmo hurled stones at the crows with a slingshot, always missing, and peed from treetops with his friends. They’d play in the village, throwing lumps of coal at each other and giving the mule slices of bread dipped in wine for the fun of seeing him sway. At night they’d scare their grandmother, howling under her bedroom window until Grandfather came out holding a broom. Then it was the German occupation, and Anselmo didn’t understand any of it, but he argued with everyone.

Spring of ’44, on the Biella–Oropa tram, a couple of months before the partisans of the Bixio battalion took the valley. The carriage stopped and Germans and fascists looking for deserters, real or suspected, sifted through the passengers while the lorry waited, engine running, before the extended colonnades of the sanctuary.

Anselmo hadn’t bothered to bring any ID with him. Not yet fourteen, he was taller than the carriage and his hooked nose made him look older. There was nothing in him that inspired compassion or suggested his age. They chose him: he stood there blinking in a row of adult men, thin and white as a leek.

Silvia feels once more the rush of heat that hit her face as it does when you bend over to open the oven door—and again she sees herself going over to the republican and pointing, with a faintly apologetic smile: “That idiot, my cousin—if only he hadn’t grown so big. He’s thirteen years old. You can check, but right now I’m going to take him home. Can’t you see how alike we are? Can’t you see that he doesn’t have a single whisker? What are you trying to do, shoot a child? He’d be perfectly useless if you did make him work in Germany. In fact he’d be a pain.”

Afterward they walked all the way down to Biella. Silvia tried to keep up with Anselmo, who was striding through the meadows and scratching his arms till they bled. The light was dazzling and the wide valley, spread before them, seemed bewitched by silence. To release tension, they threw pine cones at each other and the last coarse lumps of snow. Farther down they pulled up clumps of sorrel, sucking on the acidic stems veined with red.

“But it’s not true that I’m a pain,” Anselmo grumbled. Just then he tripped and fell into a hole and laughed till he cried.

The present seeps into her memory and Silvia feels something of Anselmo’s anger and the fear he must feel for her. But she can’t bear it, so she turns her thoughts to other anxieties, the everyday ones that don’t concern her.

Anselmo lives in a constant state of overexcitement, and being so close to him means almost feeling the anguish humming in his chest like a hornet. He doesn’t want his children to run, jump on the sofa, or knock into furniture because he instantly imagines them in the hospital. They mustn’t be out of his sight for long or away from his supervision. They can’t go on swings, can’t sweat, drink from fountains, eat prosciutto or cheese without bread. According to him, these are grave threats to their health and good manners and he treats them as such, shouting like crazy and threatening punishment. He can’t bear it when Giulia reads for a long time, for fear that she’ll ruin her sight, and yet he wants her to be top of her class. He never allows her to read at the table, and that rule would be reasonable were it not for the fact that he dines with La Stampa open in front of him, using the water jug or vinegar bottle as a stand, and grumbles whenever someone moves it to pour a drink or season their food.

Anselmo lives in constant fear of something terrible happening. And yet, for all his ranting, no one is afraid of him, and when they obey him it’s out of exasperation more than anything else.

Now Silvia has given him a valid reason for being afraid, and has united the family in the same fear.

Once again she dismisses the idea, seeking other images in which to take refuge: Marilena (but she brings boarding school along with her), the house in Bioglio (Anselmo comes back forcefully), Giulia. She might be able to calm down thanks to Giulia—if only she didn’t come as a pair with Giovanna.

Sudden gusts stir the foliage. The woods have become once more an alliance into which Silvia has intruded: trees that change color without knowing it, animals without peace and without sin. A family of roe deer are sitting on their haunches among the cyclamen in the small glade, but when one of them scents her presence and pricks up its ears, the others rise in unison and flee as fast as they can.