47

 47

ON THURSDAY during the lunch break, Giulia and her friend Angela marched up to the step Martino was sitting on to eat but they didn’t say anything to him. He pretended to be busy with his veal mayonnaise sandwich. The girls pulled little sugar pellets off their brioches, popping them into their mouths one by one.

“You’re eating your napkin.”

“Huh?”

“Your napkin. You’re eating it,” Angela informed him bluntly.

Martino felt as if he hated her. It was true: the bread and paper had cemented into one and were edged with his toothmarks.

“Oh, this. Right, thanks.”

He looked up but Angela wasn’t there anymore, only Giulia, with a mixed expression of skepticism and surprise on her face as if her friend’s disappearance hadn’t been planned but had caught her off guard as well. She took a couple of steps toward Martino and with the tip of her shoe began tracing a line through the dirt in the playground.

Deep down, Martino knew that eating a napkin doesn’t injure a man’s dignity as much as getting pigeon poo on his head. The summer before, in Turin’s Vanchiglia neighborhood, he’d stopped to watch a couple arguing beside the road. Just as the man raised his voice, a squirt of gray hit him right on the forehead. He removed his dirty glasses immediately and did his best with a handkerchief, but his girlfriend burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. She’d try to stifle it only to go on spluttering intermittently.

Across the road Martino, too, had been amused, all the more so since the sting had never gone out of that old incident of the dog poo thrown on his jacket and, well, misery loves company. But after a while, the woman’s laughing seemed excessive even to him. The man’s eyes blazed like those of a boss confronting an insubordinate underling, while his companion doubled over, half blinded by tears, drying them from time to time with the inside of her wrist. He raised his hand and slapped her. The laughter stopped instantly, and the girl furiously tore a ring off her finger and threw it on the pavement, where it disappeared down a drain. At that point, to Martino’s great surprise, the couple’s alarmed expression had simultaneously turned to one of complicity: they’d searched the drain on hands and knees for ages. That’s what pigeon shit can do to you.

“I wonder why Greppi is staring at you,” Giulia began.

Martino suddenly turned and for an instant his eyes met those of the teacher, who was standing against the wall smoking. His thick black beard hid his lips whenever he took a drag.

“Did you say he’s looking at me?”

“Before, too, while you were playing football.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like us making the ball with sticky tape and loo roll.”

“Why should that matter? Out of all of us, he was looking at you.”

“So what.”

“He doesn’t even know you.” Giulia whispered as if she held a grudge, and Martino made the connection.

“Let’s hope he leaves soon—that Canepa comes back soon so he’ll go.” He was floundering, but apparently she didn’t notice.

“If she comes back . . .” Giulia murmured.

“I think she will.”

“Thanks,” she replied, as if he’d said something polite but groundless, a cross between a wish and a condolence. “I don’t know if you know,” she added, “that she’s my dad’s cousin and she’s almost always lived with us.”

Anselmo, Martino noted—the cousin Silvia had invoked in her trance in the hut—was Giulia’s father.

“I knew she was part of your family.”

Giulia sat down beside him. Her blue-and-gray plaid skirt peeked out from under her smock and she smoothed it with the palms of her hands; she also tidied her shoulder-length hair, which swung forward.

Martino was a bundle of nerves. He was trying to dislodge a piece of chewed-up sandwich stuck to the roof of his mouth without her noticing, irritated with his mother for making him that sticky snack. Don’t do anything stupid, he said to himself.

He started up again. “I think she’s still around here somewhere.”

“My father has looked everywhere. Even in the churches. Someone told us she might be hiding in a church.” Giulia looked at him hesitantly, as if considering whether to add something.

“Did she often go to church?”

“Not that much.”

“So nothing’s really come up.”

“Nothing. My parents have gone all the way to Santhià, Salussola, as far as Turin. Someone was sure they’d seen her in Borgo Dora. Or at the station, they think they saw her near the platforms but it’s not true. They’re mistaking her for someone else. Not so much purposely, I think, as from a desire to do good.”

Martino let himself be drawn in by that version of the story.

“Does she know anyone in Turin, someone who could help her?”

“Yes, we also have relatives there.”

“And couldn’t she be hiding with them?”

“But they’d tell us!”

“Maybe she needs time to pull herself together.”

“And you think she wouldn’t let us know? That she’d leave us here looking for her like . . . like idiots?”

“Yes—I mean no. You’re right,” Martino gave in. At that moment he was certain: he’d messed it all up. He should never have kept the teacher’s secret. What a colossal mistake he’d made. But it was too late. If he admitted his mistakes it would be a disaster. Giulia would never forgive him. He got the hiccups, having swallowed the last bites of his sandwich too quickly, and had to hold his breath to stop them while she waited quietly.

“You came for a really great year,” she commented sarcastically.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not always like this.”

A bit late, Martino finally smiled at her. “I believe it.”

“I know the village you live in.”

“Ah.”

“My father’s from there. Silvia too.”

“No way!”

“Does that bother you?”

“No.”

“Well compared with Turin it must be boring.”

“Yeah, well. It’s different.” He decided he absolutely wouldn’t mention the woods and cleared his throat.

“Your mother is really pretty,” Giulia was saying. “I remember her; she came at the beginning of the year.”

“Yours too,” he replied impulsively.

“Have you ever seen her?”

He blushed. “I think so. Maybe I got mixed up.”

“On Saturday we’re going to your village. Maybe we’ll see each other.” Giulia moved on to other things, her embarrassment a current pulling her along, while Martino sat there dazed, a rabbit in the headlights.

“I’ll be there,” he replied. He promised himself on the spot that he’d refuse to go on any walk and stand lookout on the main road—for the whole day if he had to.

“Do you know the chapel in the woods?”

“You mean the sort of ugly one?” he dared.

“Horrible! I want to repaint it myself in a few years; I’m practicing. I even have a book that tells how to do it: Fresco Painting. You have to be quick because basically the wet plaster absorbs the color and then when it dries it sets. When I’m older I want to be a painter, or maybe restore old masterpieces.”

She said it just like that, “old masterpieces,” and she was thinking about the installments of Masters of Color and volumes on the finds at Herculaneum and Pompeii that Silvia kept in her messy room. She’d spent entire afternoons bent over pictures and drawings, on statues both nude and clothed, with blank eyes. Sitting beside Silvia while she marked homework or set exercises, Giulia copied the most stunning pieces into her notebook: Odilon Redon’s spider and cyclops, Roman masks with jug ears and grotesque noses like gnocchi made of wax, the sculpture of a boy holding a dolphin, lion-paw table legs topped with female busts.

As he listened, Martino tried to think of something worthy of telling her. He wanted to have a project as grandiose and original as hers. He quickly rejected the pirate and adventurer. Could he say that he wanted to become a sailor? A musician? He’d often thought of asking his parents for an instrument to help him control his need to move around, beat things and punch them. A drum kit, he told himself, and it seemed like a bright idea that Giulia had whispered to him.

“Let’s go back in. It’s time.” She went ahead of him and the bell rang loudly, vibrating through the soles of their feet.