46

 46

ONE EVENING fifteen years earlier, Silvia was sitting in Marilena’s garden. They were young and Marilena’s first child was sleeping in the pram, the white bonnet knotted under his chin making him look like a little pilot. In the orchard on the opposite side of the wide bend a female roe deer slunk between the plants, bending her head to graze upon fallen apples and turning her downy hindquarters to them. Marilena’s husband had just finished the watering and was coiling the plastic hosepipe.

Marilena picked up the knife. “I’ll cut you another slice of gâteau.” She liked using French words—she said pardon, dommage, en plein air—and Silvia saw her husband shaking his head in the distance. She almost never refused an offer of food. “Give me a big slice,” she said, and when she leaned forward to hold out the plate, her chair knocked against the wrought-iron table.

“None of it is true,” Marilena let out at one point, as if she were pursuing a conversation that had already started and was clear to the two of them.

“None of what?” Icing sugar and greasy crumbs were raining all over Silvia’s jumper but she didn’t notice.

“None of what they told us at boarding school. All that stuff. This thing’s sinful, that one’s wicked.”

“I know.”

“I want to tell you something now.” Marilena lowered her voice and moved her pale face closer to Silvia. “My husband, you know”—and she motioned toward him with her chin—“well, you know he’s very hairy. You saw him with his shirt off while he was cutting the grass. The first night we were married, after everything that was supposed to happen happened, he falls asleep and I go to the bathroom to wash. I put on the light and I see myself in the mirror with curly black hair all over me: my stomach, my bosom . . . I was scared for a second and I thought: Look, Marilena, this is your punishment for being with a man! As if they’d grown on me, right? Divine punishment. Which makes not a particle of sense, given that we were already married. But it upset me anyway, and I couldn’t help but see Sister Slumpy with her wonky ear and hear her threats all over again.”

“God is watching you!” Silvia chanted in a high-pitched voice.

Marilena fluttered a hand over her chest and Silvia finally brushed off the crumbs.

“They really overdid it.”

“But it was a weight on us! It was like being a hunchback carrying a really heavy rucksack,” Marilena huffed. “I thought it was part of me and I couldn’t get rid of it. Feeling guilty for being happy, for example. When Slumpy told us that Jesus never laughs in the Gospels—if anything, he cries. Well even if he happened to laugh and it wasn’t written down, you can be sure he wouldn’t have cracked up like we did, our mouths open so wide you could see our tongues.”

Silvia gestured as if to say: water under the bridge. During that period she was convinced she’d put everything behind her.

“So it’s not because of the nuns that you didn’t get married?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I felt like it.”

“Well I did want to, but I didn’t get married just to get married. You remember how I always used to say, ‘Saint Anna the Blessed, may I soon be wedded!’”

Silvia put a hand on Marilena’s arm in her somewhat mechanical way. She knew it was true. Marilena loved to talk about whatever was going through her head (the story of the hair—no one else she knew would have brought up something like that). Not Silvia, and she would never let on that she hadn’t had sex with a man or with herself, if you discounted a few rare, clumsy, and inconclusive blunders. Nor would she ever talk about the letters she’d exchanged with the doctor who had operated on her grandmother when she broke her hip and was bedridden for months.

Hidden in the woods, though, Silvia remembered a dream about a boy from Bioglio. She must have been Giovanna’s age and she liked him. She was conscious of it at the time because she responded to his presence as she would to something dangerous. What was he like? He had bandy legs, glasses that made him look older, hazelnut eyes, and an earthy odor reminiscent of Marilena’s watered garden.

At boarding school Silvia had dreamed about that boy not once but many times, and even in her dreams he remained somewhat blurry, but she could see his gestures and hear his voice. They’d made contact in only one of them: he had scratched a dry scab off her knee. A patch of pink skin had emerged just where she now had a hole in her tights.

Silvia thought about her appearance for a few moments, something she hadn’t done for days—in fact something she never did. She inspected her worn-out shoes, her laddered tights, the oily sheen she could feel on her face, her dirt-rimmed nails and flabby stomach. She was nothing like Giovanna, more an overgrown girl in long johns, puffy, wilted, and wrinkled. Her life wasn’t over, but it was passing her by. And all the while it was going down the drain.