6

6

WHILE SHE’S SLEEPING, something rips open her stomach. She is the one doing it. She scrapes away the pulp with a knife, as if peeling a medlar until only the shiny kernel is left, a strange contrast with the fruit. She sees it glowing like a little black sun, a rejected black egg. A hollow Easter egg, nothing inside.

The teacher opens her eyes. As soon as she closes them the images appear. The ribs of a calf, a mole drowned for tunneling through the kitchen garden, billhooks on the cellar wall, a frog’s pulsing throat, which you can puncture with a needle or chop off: you draw a line with a knife, the way you would underline a word or cross it out to correct it. She sees mountains of notebooks with all the words crossed out, a dusty classroom, but maybe the particles in the air are ashes, and she finds herself in an empty fireplace—enormous like the one in Verrès Castle, which she has visited many times with her classes. Yet no, that can’t be, because her grandmother is dragging her feet around the room there. Silvia hears the rustling of her slippers and petticoat. A man carries a pheasant over his shoulders, head dangling, eye cloudy. An obese woman heads toward the loo at the back of the courtyard, looks around, and pulls up her skirt; because of her bulk, she can’t get all the way into the poky room and part of her is forced to remain outside. Trembling with the effort not to topple over, she grabs the frame of the gaping door. She doesn’t know that a few young boys are climbing up on the pergola to steal grapes, and now, laughing, they watch her from above. She doesn’t know it, but Silvia hears their muffled cackling.

The more violent her visions, the more they calm rather than scare her. Not far away, boars grumble. A blackcap whistles; it must be nearly morning. She doesn’t formulate this thought, but her ears register the sound and inside her something answers: blackcap. It’s a reflection more than information and is soon forgotten. Her senses bring her material, her brain tries to function, but it’s all a black sludge of indifference.

Through the door of the hut Silvia makes out a birch tree with its fruit. The image slams into her and she is tempted to use her arms to shield herself. The fruit of the birch look like little brown salamis dangling there. They crumble into powder on first contact, releasing their seeds. Anything that droops, leans, or hangs from a hook is fine by her. She herself feels like that, a bundle hanging by the waist from a skinny stem, which might also be a noose. Above her head the crooked roof reveals patches of the sky, growing ever brighter.

Outside is a beech whose bark has been colonized by bracket fungus: dozens of ash-gray hats protrude from the trunk like hoofs. The bark is already flaking off; large slabs of it are missing. Silvia knows there’s no escape for the tree: sooner or later it will fall. She knows this, but nothing is organizing itself in a coherent whole, into before and after, and anyway she doesn’t see any great difference between herself and plants with their parasites, mold on planks, living animals and their carcasses, the breeze coming through the door and cracks. She needs to urinate but doesn’t see why she should get up, go outside, and do that like the fat woman mocked by the boys’ excited gaze. She empties her bladder right where she is, not moving an inch.