44

 44

BY THIS TIME Martino had a favorite route for climbing up to see Silvia. It was simple, almost a straight line. He’d go out of his garden at the back, cross the lane, and follow a faint path, a rocky, weedy track that cut across the side of the hill. His shoes sank into succulent turf and glided over patches of cyclamen.

When he got halfway he came across a bush he considered a friendly presence; he didn’t know its name, dogwood, but he liked the leaves, which were changing from green to steak-red. After that he had to cross a stream, jumping across on the rocks, and a little after that the small chapel rose up beside a yew tree loaded with fuchsia-colored berries. From that point on the vegetation began to change: a spruce grove, then thickets of sorb, juniper, hazel, ivy-clad acacias, pale globes of mistletoe hanging from bare branches, intertwining leaves, intricate grafting, and bundles of dead branches fallen on top of each other. It was the wood in its primordial state of arboreal confusion and reciprocal suffocation.

On Wednesday, Martino got to the dogwood and plucked off a leaf—it looked like a flame, especially when he twirled the stalk between his thumb and index finger. He got back on track, and because he was looking around as he walked for fear of running into another wild boar, he didn’t notice the furry shape he almost stepped on until the last moment.

He was too much of a townie to know what it was with any certainty: weasel, stone marten, ferret, or pine marten. The animal was lying on its side on a bed of clover, its back arched, paws together. The chestnut fur was still pretty, and a yellow patch expanded over its throat. Its whiskers barely quivered in the air, or maybe it was Martino’s breath that stirred them as he crouched down to get a better look. Small, sharp teeth and an edge of pink-and-black gum stuck out of its mouth; curved claws crowned its paws. It wasn’t clear whether it had been killed by a hidden gash, a bullet, or distemper.

Once he got up there, Martino asked Silvia if it was a good idea to bring Gianni’s dog with him on the pretext of taking it for a walk, so that it would scent animals and defend him. But she replied that if there’s one way to annoy animals it’s to bring a dog around and, what’s more, Gianni’s griffon was old, and since it had had a stroke it couldn’t even run in a straight line.

They talked about dogs. Martino wished he could have one, but Lea didn’t offer him any hope. Silvia’s grandfather had kept a female pointer, white and orange and devoted to her mother, Delia, who had fed it the edge of her piecrusts when she was a girl. The bitch’s offspring were still populating the village with bastard hunting dogs. They talked about mothers, and Martino got more worked up than he had envisioned. His mother was likeable, he said, she made him laugh and she knew a lot; sure, she sometimes got agitated and his father would say, “You’re a piece of work,” which usually made the situation worse. You had to let her read in peace, not dirty the floors with your muddy shoes, not drip everywhere when you got out of the bath, not eat while you were walking around the house, not get into bed with your clothes on—stuff like that. But other than that she was really nice; played cards, talked to him about books for grown-ups like Jane Eyre (he cleared his voice and moved on, because it contained a delicate discussion of a madwoman in the attic and, who knows, maybe Silvia had read it herself). And as far as he knew, she was the only mother with red hair and freckles all the way down to the backs of her hands.

Silvia listened, gentleness showing through the exhaustion on her face. She barely remembered her mother; Silvia hadn’t turned five when she died. She’d once read a magazine story about a woman who’d lost her father; he must have been famous but she no longer remembered who it was. For the funeral speech, the daughter wanted to talk about his great passion for woodworking, and since she didn’t remember how he’d gotten started she phoned to ask him. Only at that moment, with the receiver next to her ear, did she realize that her father could not be reached: he was dead, and she would never be able to speak to him again.

In her own case, Silvia didn’t know very well what she had lost, let alone who her mother was. No one had helped her to reconstruct it and when she got to the age of reason she hadn’t wanted to think too much about it. She was nostalgic for someone she didn’t know and for a relationship she hadn’t had, and also she mourned the person she might have been had her mother brought her up.

“I barely remember her. At some point I must have asked, ‘Where is my mother?’ They must have said something in reply. ‘Your mother has gone to heaven, she had to go to heaven.’”

“In heaven? With whom?”

“‘With the angels. With God.’ I think I was jealous of God, who got to spend time with my mother while I didn’t.”

Other memories: tearing the wings and feet off insects, asking for them to be fixed, hearing that it wasn’t possible, it was too late; you can’t fix a grasshopper’s leg—the wing won’t move. Believing that your mother watches over you (like God, with God) and feeling uncomfortable about that, inadequate, a humble spectacle. They said it to comfort her: “Your mother is still watching you from above.” Silvia aimed embarrassed smiles at the heavens. There was a period when she was ashamed to go to the loo, and she’d hold it in until her bladder was so stretched it hurt and her intestines threatened to rebel. One evening after prayer she decided to address a frank request to her mother’s soul: Please don’t ever look at me when I’m in the loo!

“Do you know,” she said to Martino, “it feels strange to be older than my mother ever got to be.”

Silvia had two portraits of Delia. Who knows what pictures she would have invented without them? In one photo with scalloped edges Delia was holding Silvia, less than a year old and all lace, in her arms, supporting her firmly, hands under her armpits and chin grazing her fine hair. For Silvia, that photo was proof of her being in love—the only proof, in the absence of memory, of the only reciprocal falling in love she’d experienced in her entire life; it portrayed the most intimate contact she’d ever had. She would occasionally ask herself whether she had perhaps remained loyal to her mother by not starting her own family and embalming the orphan she’d been somewhere inside herself. Such thoughts made her feel profoundly uncomfortable.

To Martino she repeated the commonplaces of family lore: Delia of the swanlike neck; the fingers of a pianist; a lover of animals. According to these attributes, her mother was different not only from her, her daughter, but also from her parents and their world, their social class; or maybe she hadn’t had time to get old and become like her family. Indeed, her grandfather had been a distinguished man, and it was said that as a young woman her grandmother had had a nice figure.

After Martino was gone, Silvia went on talking by herself as she hadn’t dared to with a ten-year-old boy. With the passing of time, she’d noticed her friends becoming intolerant of their own mothers, critical and drained. She knew that some of those older mothers were sources of unhappiness and torment, and she forced herself to consider that things could have turned out like that for her: it wasn’t certain that she and Delia would have had a good relationship.

On the other hand, boarding school had been full of orphans who’d had it much worse than she had, with no one to love or care about them. Don’t go on about it, Silvia—you’re hardly the only one. People around her got sick and died, there was Mussolini and then the war. Her own grandmother had spurned her mother-in-law after the death of her baby girl, but without making a scene: her mourning had taken concrete form, as silent belligerence and walls erected to divide the house. When she referred (a rare event) to the death of her daughters, her grandmother called them “my calamities, the first and the second.”

With few exceptions, among them Gianni, those who’d been in the army, who’d been demobilized, the Alpine troopers who’d come back from Russia with fingers eaten away by the cold, draft dodgers, those in the resistance, people who’d been consumed by hunger in the concentration camps, who had escaped the bombs, pulling their children out of bed and huddling in cellars—all these people she knew were fleeing from the story of their own pain, forever varying the same ritual catchphrases: “I’ve seen things I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” “I’ve seen things that can’t be repeated,” “The things I’ve seen will go with me to the grave.”

But through not going on about it, you’ve gone crazy. Look: look at the state you’re in.

The teacher fell silent because once more it struck her internally: the conviction that the one sure way of not going on about it would be to end it all. The usual spiteful whisper was quick to suggest: But you survived. You survived your mother and you survived Giovanna.

She crawled around, found the billhook, and, in an act of rebellion, brandished it against the voice.

Despite everything they did, the nuns never had a single student who committed suicide, but you did! the voice accused, not at all impressed.