65

 65

SILVIA MADE HER PREPARATIONS in the night, feeling her way. She put the canteen, folded blankets, and empty jar in a corner along with some leftover wrapping paper. Between the pages of The History of the West she slipped the heart-shaped leaf of a cyclamen, a fragment of mica, and a treecreeper’s feather she’d picked up from the base of the beech tree.

She leaned against the doorway of the hut like a swimmer unable to decide whether or not to dip her big toe in cold water. It was a long way, and it would take hours.

Small, luminous discs gleamed in the dark: the eyes of a fox or a badger. She walked through the woods whenever she could, avoiding paths and the road. The plants breathed around her and every so often she stood back against a trunk, holding on to a knot and letting the sound of an animal in flight go by, another one hunting, something being plucked, a scrabbling just over her head. Near the edge of the woods, where the darkness was less dense, she recognized poisonous mushrooms and the venomous flowers of false saffron: a quick end had always been within reach if only she had wanted it.

Brushes of cardoon bordered the meadows, still wet and plunged in shadow. A few sleepy cows raised their muzzles to her, solemn and large; a red dappled cow extended its rubbery tongue toward the nettles growing beyond the cow guard.

Nettles, little nettles

Alone I passed you

Alone and raw, I ate you,

Silvia whispered, like Maid Maleen in the Grimms’ fairy tale. She missed Giovanna’s face and the combative expression—without reproach but also devoid of mercy—she’d worn when she appeared in the hut. It was a while now since she’d turned up.

The really difficult part was putting her feet on the asphalt and looking toward the hard, linear buildings. She closed her eyes to cross the bridge over the Cervo and inched her way along the cement railing, bit by bit . . . Her fingers were still sticky with resin and sooty mold.

The city was sleeping under a creamy mist when she stood outside Anselmo and Luisa’s house at dawn. She swayed in her tiredness and gripped the door handle, her life stuck at an angle like a stripped screw that won’t take hold and doesn’t fit in its tracks as it should. Maybe she’d been worn away by the death of her mother, maybe before or perhaps later. Oh well, she said to herself, that’s how it is.

The sound of the entryphone pulled everyone out of bed.