50

 50

AS SOON AS HE GOT HOME Martino knew his mother was in a bad mood. She kept her head down and shook her hands as if to get rid of who knows what. All her gestures—rinsing a glass, putting lunch on to warm, slicing the bread—were speedy yet overemphatic.

“Your room is a pigsty. Clean it up after lunch,” she ordered.

She wanted to know why he wasn’t hungry, but he didn’t feel like telling her about the Cri-Cri Sandra’s mother had given him. She seemed like a witch but she wasn’t all that bad.

When Lea announced that they’d be taking the train to Turin the next day, he shot up like a spring. She was dumbfounded: it was the first time Martino had blamed her clearly and articulately for imposing her will on him, and he spoke like an adult who could harness his rage and ride it. He threw it all back at her, the fact that she’d torn him away from Turin, put him in a school in town without asking his opinion, shoved him around and laid down the law, always giving orders. But he was sick of it. He didn’t want to go back to Turin now. It was out of the question. He had things to do: a friend was coming on Saturday, his friend from that shitty school, and Papa would get along just fine without them.

“But your father needs us,” she retorted. “This is a tantrum, and I don’t give in to tantrums.”

“What do you mean a tantrum! It’s a matter of life or death!” Martino shouted to her face. And then it came out: “You don’t know it but the teacher’s involved.”

“What do you mean, the teacher?”

“Because—because . . . my friend is related to her. She’s coming to look for her and I want to help.”

“Are you kidding? That woman may have been dead for days. There’ll be trouble if you go looking for her, do you understand? Don’t you understand that you could find yourself—” Lea stopped and blinked, as if she’d suddenly realized something obvious. “Don’t tell me you go to the woods because you’re hoping to find the teacher? Tell me the truth.”

“No, I go there to play Sandokan.”

“You’ll have to stay close to home. Look, you’re not going out today.”

Martino suddenly stopped mid-flow, choked with disappointment. He threw his schoolbag to the floor and ran to his room, slamming the door behind him.

The scent of damp plants hit the house in gusts. It was so strong in the woods that it tickled his nose and he could tell sharp pine needles from the caramelized putrescence of dead leaves. But the woods were inaccessible and so was the teacher, who was in danger of becoming very ill if he left. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: four whole days. He absolutely had to go out, buy some food with his savings, and take it to the hut.

Martino threw open both shutters and decided to leap out and run for it. It wasn’t that far down, and if Sandra’s mother had survived a jump like this one, surely he would too. He leaned out to judge the width of the cement pavement that ran around the house; he’d have to leap over it in order to land on soft lawn. Just as he was mustering up courage by imagining a wild boar at his heels, his mother came into the room. She was coming to make peace, but at the sight of him leaning out with one knee on the windowsill her blood boiled again.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Martino put his foot back on the floor and, despite his good intentions, he felt on the verge of confessing: another Martino, barely any younger but still there inside, urged him to throw himself into Lea’s arms, cry hard enough to scare her so she’d soften up and forgive him for the lies he’d told, for having kept the teacher hidden and snitched food for her, for letting everyone worry and search for her with dogs and volunteers, for allowing her relatives to go on wild goose hunts in the village, under bridges, all the way to Salussola and Turin. But in the last few weeks, something had changed. He also felt in his chest a heart both hard and elastic, a rubber ball that bounced crazily and without warning for the most disparate reasons: the thought of Piero and Agostino being so far away, his friendship with the teacher, Giulia, those three idiots wanking off in the woods.

They started arguing again. “You’re coming to Turin,” to which he replied, “Absolutely not!” In the end, both tired, they came to a compromise that suited neither of them: they’d leave early on Sunday and come back the same day on the last train.