7

7

GIOVANNA: THAT WAS THE GIRL’S NAME. At the end of the previous year she’d started skipping class. She’d never done very well at school; she was slow.

“What’s this all about? You can’t afford to stay at home,” Silvia told her. She kept her back after class and did her homework with her. She sat beside her, ill at ease yet determined, meanwhile unwrapping the sandwiches she’d prepared for the two of them. They were the only thing Silvia made in her kitchen other than coffee, since she always ate supper with Anselmo and Luisa. Mostly she put slices of cheese in those sandwiches, because she’d noticed Giovanna preferred that, or butter and jam.

“Everyone gets better with practice. Look at me. I’m not that bright, but I made an effort.” She said it without false modesty. It was the truth, and it had to be faced; she wouldn’t take compliments. Silvia felt she was at least intelligent enough to know that she wasn’t a genius. A completely normal brain, a dash of perseverance, diligence. At boarding school, where she’d studied after the war, the good ones were the others, girls who learned without trying, knew things instinctively or made them up. But not her; she did what she had to. She had a sense of duty and determination, an awareness of being too awkward and insecure to carry the weight of being considered a dunce. As an orphan, she’d grown up with her grandparents, and ended up in boarding school. She couldn’t bear being told off or humiliated because of her performance at school.

“Come on, Giovanna, let’s do your homework together. That way you’ll be set for tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Miss,” the girl replied. And then she was quiet because her mouth was full.

Giovanna’s parents were herders who had moved to Biella a few years before. Her mother shuttled back and forth from the shepherd’s cottage in the Elvo Valley, where her sister and brother-in-law still lived. Their children went to school in the village of Bagneri. There was only one class and desks and benches were pushed together to form a single block of dark wood, like the pews in church. Giovanna, too, had started elementary school there, but in December she’d caught pneumonia, was admitted to the hospital, and missed nearly three months of school. When she’d stepped back into her classroom, still exhausted and having lost weight, she didn’t remember any of the standard Italian her teacher had taught her.

That same year her father had found work in a textile factory, an industry that had exploded after the war and was still growing. He didn’t like it but he had a decent salary, his children could go to school in town, and they had an indoor loo, even a bath and a washing machine. The washing machine was a secondhand Candy Superautomatic 5, barely dented by the hail that had fallen on it during delivery.

All over, people were leaving their villages and valleys and Giovanna’s father left, too, but he was unhappy and embittered. Like everyone else, he drank and held it well: a bottle a day was nothing for him. Yet every now and then he overdid it, added a little grappa or ratafia. He missed the haystacks, the rattling of the dog’s chain at night, cows with their long eyelashes, even the steaming manure on frozen, trampled grass. He inflicted his dissatisfaction on others. He groped his wife roughly in bed and wouldn’t stop even when she complained or the children in the next room mumbled in their sleep. Giovanna had failed at school and started over in year one, but she continued to get poor marks. Her father’s method of discipline was to hit her, never systematically, never for long. But his calloused hands left bruises that took weeks to fade.

Giovanna was fed up with being hit and she tried hard to make a good impression on her new teacher in town. With great effort on both sides she got a pass mark, but once left to herself she’d started to sink. She’d been about to fail the third year but Silvia hadn’t felt like handing her over to another teacher so she’d pulled her along with her, raising Giovanna’s marks for drawing, PE, and crafts.

Something changed at the end of her fourth year. The girl became cheeky but also more sensitive. At times her eyes blazed with bewilderment: she’d started growing body hair and her breasts were developing. She used her fingers to hide the mustache sprouting under her nose; when she saw it in direct light from the bulb over the bathroom mirror, it reminded her of the film of mold staining the corners of the ceiling gray.

Although she feared Giovanna’s father’s reaction, Silvia had not managed to prevent her getting a string of low marks. “Two more smacks, Miss,” Giovanna commented laconically.

The family lived in a large council block called the Big House, which loomed over the Cervo between factories that had used hydraulic energy to wash wool for a century and a half. Concrete pillars and cement castings alternated with redbrick arches and the smokestacks of eighteenth-century mills.

The Big House was teeming with children and teenagers and some of the boys had begun to stare at Giovanna, which made her feel dirty but important. She didn’t know whether to strut her stuff or run away. Two of them, Michele and Domenico, didn’t only look and whistle; they spoke to her in dialect, acting tough as if they were already grown men. Like Giovanna’s, their bodies manifested the inconsistencies of puberty. She had two little mounds sticking straight out of her chest, seemingly ready to puncture her T-shirt, and two tufts under her armpits, but her behind was still flat and her hips were barely outlined under a child’s egg-shaped tummy. They had enormous hands planted at the end of fidgety arms, Adam’s apples like nuts caught in their throats, a few sparse whiskers on their chins but hopelessly smooth necks and cheeks.

At first, Giovanna didn’t answer them. She was stupefied with embarrassment, and her field of vision shrank to a square floating in front of her feet as she tried to avoid them, turning at the first possible corner and taking the stairs two at a time so she could disappear. As soon as she was beyond their reach she felt herself buzzing with nervousness and her heart pounded—yet it made her afternoons more exciting, and the following day she’d offer to go and ask a neighbor for some washing powder or stand on the landing for no reason, hazard a trip to the courtyard where she walked up and down, head bowed, pretending she’d lost something just to see if those two would talk to her.

Silvia sensed the significance of the change but couldn’t keep up with it. A spinster nearing old age, she was treated as a nun by all. Whenever she thought about herself she imagined a plantlike organism, a body less chaste than indifferent. She tried to scold the child. “You’re distracted! I can’t do everything for you myself. Come on, so we can finish quickly. Pay attention, or I’ll have to give you a really low mark. Giovanna, you’re not listening to me.”

It wasn’t that Giovanna had lost her fear of beatings; what’s more, her mother had begun to turn against her too. To hear her, you’d think her daughter was in constant danger. Now that she was growing up, there was a lot at stake. Her mother thought of her precocious development as bad luck. Having breasts at eleven years old was a misfortune, exposing her to dangers she didn’t want to deal with, worn out as she was by her bothersome husband, going back and forth to the Alpine hut, and her younger children, who used the umbrella ribs like spears to poke holes in the furniture. She convinced Giovanna that her boobs were a couple of bombs about to explode.

Giovanna couldn’t stand people talking about her body. It sent her into a rage. She no longer recognized herself, and as she struggled to make sense of it, the fact that everyone else was talking about the ongoing changes made her feel exposed, caught out. She wished for darkness, silence. The word “breast” in her mother’s mouth made her gag, made her seem smutty and prying. She was seething with anger and talked back rudely so her mother threatened to have her father punish her, and then Giovanna would leave, banging the door.

She seemed to haunt her own body. Little Giovanna had been decanted into the body of a misshapen young woman, a stranger.

In the Elvo Valley where she’d been born was a woman who worked as a medium. Behind her back she was called la masca, the witch: ghosts would enter her and move her arms and hands; their voices came rasping from her throat. People went to her to learn where a dead person had hidden their money, whether they’d been faithful, if they were vengeful. La masca didn’t seem all that happy about acting as the puppet for the dead, but the money, plump rabbits, and full jugs of wine suited her. Giovanna remembered her because she, too, had to inhabit a strange body, like the spirits swirling around the living body of the witch. And this was ongoing, not just for five minutes.

On the other hand, in a strange way it made her stronger. An arrow seemed to point at her wherever she went and, little by little, her aversion to the looks skimming over her was blended with a degree of curiosity. It was no longer a big deal: she was still just a little girl, and nobody thought about going further. Yet she sensed this was only the beginning, the trigger for something that would let her get away from her violent father, her distracted mother. She started reading photoromances published by Lancio, packed with heroines both poor and romantic: Letizia, Marina, Charme. She dreamed of having a crocheted cotton purse and long stockings instead of knee socks. And though she hated her face and little mustache, she daydreamed about receiving a love letter.

She’d ended up making friends with the two boys from the Big House. It was a relationship in which physical proximity failed to become intimacy. They spent time together in the same place, usually the courtyard or the boulders beside the stream, so they were friends and signaled that to the world, particularly to the other kids in the council block. But they never touched, not even by mistake or to help each other up and down the steep slopes between boulders. At most, they splashed each other with icy water, which was sometimes very clean and other times spotted with yellow and brown foam from the woolen mills.

Giovanna felt she didn’t know much about them and they knew nothing about her. When she went back home, it was as if she’d changed her skin yet again. But they would talk. About the rich kids in Michele and Domenico’s class, for example, and how they played dirty in the football matches that took place in the courtyard. About the moon landing. About Lele, the disabled boy who lived on the first floor and was always in his pajamas and wore handkerchiefs around his neck like a cowboy to catch his drooling. About the old man who’d lurk in the park to show his thing to people who were pissing in the bushes. About their parents, who tried to keep them under control. Not wanting to be outdone, Giovanna said that her teacher would do better to find herself a boyfriend instead of breathing down her neck, but when the other two said, “Who’d want that old hag?” she immediately came to her defense. “But you’ve never seen her. She’s not that bad. Pretty old, for sure, but not that bad. She’s a pain in the arse, though,” she added, not looking at them.

At a certain point they started skipping school. Walking around instead of sitting at their desks—it felt intoxicating. Domenico and Michele smoked noxious cigarettes. Giovanna wished she could ring all the intercoms and go looking for tadpoles, but instead she ended up hanging around the boys, imitating the laughter of uninhibited women—the usual photoromance heroines, but also Romy Schneider and, closer to home, Vanda from the haberdashery, who’d touch up her red lipstick in front of clients, and also Marilisa, the older sister of one of her classmates. In order to convince herself that growing up was exciting, Giovanna overdid it, flaunting herself in a sort of caricature. Obviously they were spotted, and obviously her father found out about it and beat her. Her teacher tried to avoid giving her bad grades so as not to aggravate the situation.

Giovanna felt like someone had tricked her. She hadn’t started growing up on purpose. She tried not to lose her balance as she was dragged along, and if she tripped up it wasn’t her fault. One day she would put a cigarette stub in her mouth, another she’d meekly follow the teacher’s lessons. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, grit her teeth, and rip the hair from her calves with duct tape, or she’d take her mother’s mirror to find out at last what she had between her thighs. Then she’d go out and play desperately with her brothers, completely forgetting her older friends, playing truant, or anatomical matters. She’d start the day proud and daring and finish it subdued and crippled with embarrassment.

There was only one constant: for some months, her father’s beatings on her new body had been unbearable, even more so than her mother’s probing looks. She couldn’t stand being touched other than by her little brothers, who jumped on her back or tugged at her. Many fathers beat their children—she didn’t feel singled out or sad. Above all, she was unsure exactly whom her father was beating. So her usual defenses, which on good days had allowed her to feel indifferent, didn’t work anymore.