Author’s Note

Author’s Note

This is a work of imagination, but some of the events narrated are based on a true story that I began to reconstruct as a child, picking up scanty allusions and conversational fragments because it was a painful and delicate story, one not openly spoken about—at least not with me.

My grandfather’s cousin, a teacher, never married and she had no children, yet she was an integral part of the family. She lived next to my grandparents in an adjoining house and ate lunch and supper with them. At the time, she was already retired and well loved by generations of former students. She was different from the other women who brought me up—my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—who were defined by having been mothers and married, divorced, or widowed. She may have been more alone, but in my eyes she also had more freedom. She didn’t cook, didn’t clean house, didn’t do anything one expects of a woman. Added to that, she was extremely absent-minded and distracted, a character trait we have in common and that bound us together. I was also struck by the fact that she was an orphan who had spent years at a boarding school with nuns. She didn’t speak much about the boarding school, where she had been very unhappy despite having made great friendships.

Already her story seemed to belong in a book. Characters in novels, especially those for children, are often orphans (Oliver Twist came to mind, Sophie in The BFG by Roald Dahl, Mowgli in The Jungle Book, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre).

Eventually it became clear to me that something had happened to scar the teacher as an adult. She went missing for days, only to come back home almost dead of hunger and thirst, soaking wet from the rain, and absolutely filthy. Where had she been? No one knew for sure. Probably hidden in a church, having drunk holy water to survive. But why had she gone away? No one wanted to tell me. I found out later: one of her students, a girl of nearly twelve, had committed suicide by jumping into the river, and the teacher felt responsible because she had told the girl’s family that she was often absent from school. Pain and a sense of guilt made her lose her mind.

The teacher never spoke about it with me and I never dared to ask. My father, however, remembered well the anguish of those days, the search and then her unexpected return: the doorbell ringing at dawn.

Her story did not stop calling to me after her death. At its heart is an undisputed event that resists the telling and remains unexplained and opaque: a young girl’s suicide.

Before I wrote or imagined anything, I felt the need to reconstruct the facts, or rather, the version of the facts given at the time; attempts to decipher them; the behavior of those who had lived nearby or written about them. For this reason, I spoke to people who had witnessed the event and I combed through contemporary newspaper articles. Those texts helped me focus on what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, and why—they helped me to find, as it were, the truth that corresponds to the specific shape of the novel and has to do with the human condition, the hearing of voices that seem faint but continue to speak to us, regardless of how many years have passed since it all took place or how much has changed since then: language, school, education, economic and political conditions.

In various articles that appeared in the Corriere Biellese and the Biellese, the account alternates between expressions of alarm and attempts to explain or judge two events that elude comprehension. A girl commits suicide; her teacher disappears: “However, both facts plunge too deeply into the dark recesses of the human psyche,” which remain impenetrable (this quote and the following quotes are literal, as is the one in Chapter 18).

The articles report such baffling details about the girl that using them in the novel would have made them seem artificial, and hopefully to some degree they are. For example: “After a lot of shouting, a sudden silence, and the mother goes to the sitting room which faces the millrace: M. M. is no longer there, but she’s left her shoes on the window; the tragedy is announced in an enigmatic note on the table: What are two shoes doing on the windowsill?” Interpretation of the girl’s act leads back to her premature adolescence and the desire for rebellion arising from it:

Private expressions found in her diary allowed one to glimpse signs of early youth in a girl who had already matured physically beyond her peers. . . . Perhaps the reason for the girl’s reckless reaction is hidden here; she already felt she was a woman because of a few furtive glances and some innocent approaches, and she was offended by what she considered an unfair reprimand. A reaction, however, for which no blame should go to the teacher: she alerted the parents; it was her express duty. After all, not everyone who gets told off for skipping lessons—even if harshly and with physical punishment—decides to put an end to their days.

The teacher is an enigma. She is described as a model instructor:

She was what one calls an old-fashioned teacher: nothing but home and school. Her work was her world and distractions had no place in her life. It’s true to say that she very often stayed at school during the break between morning and afternoon lessons, making do with a sandwich for lunch, or after hours to help students who needed special attention. She had been entrusted with that class precisely because she was known as someone with rare gifts of patience and affection who could extract the best results from “difficult” students.

The theory of a second suicide becomes increasingly persistent while simultaneously remaining unacceptable (there are interviews with friends and acquaintances while the family remains silent). In the meantime, the search is complicated by anonymous phone calls and false leads. The solution comes just when everyone is expecting to recover another body. But “the teacher’s odyssey” remains a mystery, because the woman maintains that she remembers nothing. Or maybe she intends to say nothing.

The novel emerges from that lacuna and fills it with imagination.

There’s a woman brought up by her grandparents and nuns who becomes a teacher thanks to her hatred of boarding school. Teaching becomes her mission, the center of her life. Though she has no children, she cares for generations of them and tries to be a good teacher (in contrast to the nuns), only to end up with a dead student. What disturbs the balance of her mind?

Just as in fairy tales, where it’s often children who solve problems and relationships are inverted, the adult, the teacher, hides in the woods and a child takes care of her. Martino never existed, but he is a personification of all the children who were important to the real teacher. I am convinced that it’s thanks to them, her fondness for them and her attachment to her role as a teacher, that she said yes to life once more and returned home.

I can add this: after months of convalescence, the real teacher went back to teaching. Today the village school bears her name.