52

 52

FOR THE FIRST TIME since she’s come to the woods, Silvia feels short bursts of something like boredom. It has to do with her perception of time, which is focused, however vaguely, on Martino’s visits. He doesn’t come, though, and her habit of not controlling her thoughts or movements takes over.

A red-and-black ant runs over the back of her hand. She squashes it with her thumb and smells her fingertip: a bubble of sharp scent. She picks up a pebble and puts it in her mouth without thinking about it, like someone who doesn’t notice their habit of biting their fingernails. Her tongue rasps over its flaky surface; cold metallic pins sting her. After a while she spits the pebble into her palm: it shines, almost completely covered with flecks of silvery mica. She picks up another, but it’s only a clump of earth and it crumbles immediately. A third, the size of a cherry and speckled with black and lilac, satisfies her for a long time. The leaves and straw are acidic; their fibers, tough as horsehair, nauseate her. If anything, she prefers the flavor of the dirt marinating under her fingernails. She goes back to the pebbles, most of them irregular blots of dull gray. She sucks on them and recalls Giovanna’s pretend sweets.

In the first year, Giovanna was the only one who didn’t bring sweets to school. She wore a plain smock with threadbare elbows and her blond hair escaped her hair slide and fell over her face. She was repeating a year, but it seemed she’d learned nothing. Her body, however, had had time to grow and, compared with her classmates, she was tall and awkward, so she’d hunker down behind her desk as much as she could, bending her spine so that her vertebrae stuck out from under the black fabric of her smock.

To the others she was the girl from the valleys, daughter of a primitive race. She spoke pure dialect, with an accent different to the one Silvia had learned during her childhood in the hillside villages. It was above all harsher than the accent of the city, and it gave the impression that the sound got stuck at the back of the palate. It was the same accent that rang out over the cowbells on the road during the transhumance at the beginning and end of summer, above the plumes of smoke from coal burners’ chimneys in the high valleys: the vernacular of people who are isolated and marginal, who come from proverbial savagery and filth.

All the children in the class Italianized Piedmontese words and confused things. They continued to write sagrinarsi, to worry or grieve, bogiare, move, and ramina, or saucepan, for a long time. When they spoke, they mixed Italian with dialect in varying proportions. Not Giovanna. For her, Piedmontese was the only language and Italian a hostile foreign idiom because it put her in her place: at the bottom. There was no room for her mother tongue at school. It wasn’t worthy of writing or reading.

During break, Giovanna kept to herself. Often she didn’t even leave the classroom. Silvia had once surprised her going through the waste bin to collect the sweet wrappers thrown out by her classmates, which she hid in her pockets. She slipped into the playground and from the gravel she inconspicuously chose stones with the most regular shapes, wrapping the little rectangles of colored foil around them. She was pretending, more for herself than for others.

As it turned out, Giovanna was a sharp, accurate shot at marbles and thanks to this skill she integrated into the class—thanks to the marbles and a couple of slaps she gave boys who were poor losers. Silvia neglected to mark those down against her conduct.

At the end of the first year, the teacher decided that Giovanna needed something to read to match the world of dialect she was going back to, so she lent her Angelo Brofferio’s Canzoni piemontese, an 1881 edition with the title stamped in gold lettering on the spine. It had belonged to her grandfather, who loved to recite the songs to his friends, especially “Humanity” and “Cod or Cavour and Cholera” or the one that was called “The Glory of Paradise.” Her grandmother would start crossing herself at the first rhyme and escape to another room, but her grandfather put a hand on little Silvia’s arm so she would stay and listen:

Se i poum d’or son per parei

Che noiousa landa!

Da Bergnif a stan aut mei;

Viva la ca granda!

Mei là giù con i diaulot

Che si dsour con i bigot.*

Giovanna liked it so much, that enlightened, anticlerical book, that she never returned it. The teacher had taken out a library card for every student, but she’d never entrusted one of her own hardcover books with golden lettering to anyone. At home, Giovanna’s father peered at the verses.

“Did your teacher really give you that? Are you sure?”

Giovanna was proud of it. She leafed through the pages feeling as though there were a balloon inflated in her chest helping her to stand up straight. Now and again, to make herself sound important she’d write in her essays: “As Brofferio, the illustrious poet, says . . .”