59

 59

A PENSIONER OUT MUSHROOMING found her handbag at around six in the morning buried under a layer of chestnuts on the left bank of the Cervo. In it there were soaked notebooks, a pencil case, a wallet containing all her ID, keys, and throat lozenges. No newspaper—who knows where that ended up, blown away by the wind, disintegrated in the rain. Relative to the teacher’s house, it was more or less on the way to the village.

Anselmo rushed to the spot together with the fire brigade, but there were no further traces of her. Days must have passed, and one couldn’t be sure if the teacher had kept going that way or in another direction—to take the train, perhaps. Not even the dogs, put to work, could smell anything. Nevertheless, they expanded the search and spent the entire morning on it, after which Anselmo decided that it was worth trying in Bioglio as planned. So they only arrived—he, Gemma, Giulia, and Corrado—at lunchtime. They parked in a relative’s courtyard and an exhausted Anselmo, heels blistered, hurried out to meet the team.

A few meters below the road two boys were fighting on the shady bank of the river. Anselmo called out to them but it was no good. One of them was smaller, a cockerel’s thin neck sticking out of his jacket as it was being tugged; the other, strong and curly-headed, had him on the ground and was kneeing him in the stomach. Anselmo got to them in four leaps, put his large hands on the older boy, and shoved him over.

The Leader was ranting, “Hey, hey!” but when he recognized Anselmo he shut up. He knew the man, and more than that, the man knew his mother and father. He was helping Turin, coughing and gasping, to sit down. When all was said and done it didn’t seem like anything that bad had happened to him apart from a punch that had smashed his lips against his teeth. Turin stared up at him, eyes glittering with hate, fists clenched, mouth swollen and flecked with blood. The Leader thought he was about to cry, but he took his inhaler from his pocket and greedily breathed in a stream of his medication. So it was true that the little pip-squeak was handicapped, the Leader noted.

Anselmo pulled the boy to his feet, put a hand on his shoulder, and started interrogating them. The two rivals retorted, heads down, voices low, replies blunt and in their view dignified.

“You really are a big coward, Walter. I’m eager to see what your father thinks about this. You can be sure I’ll call him,” Anselmo threatened. He then turned to Martino. “You go on home. Tell your mother to put some ice on you.”

“My mother’s gone out.”

“Oh, damn! You two are wasting a lot of my time. I’ll take you to my wife. Buzz off, Walter,” he ordered, and he left dragging Martino behind him, not stopping until he was knocking at a door. After a few seconds he knocked again. A woman hurried to open it. Martino had seen her around, with her sharp face and glasses as round as the lights on a locomotive.

Anselmo pushed him in. “He’s been beaten up. He needs ice and probably something sweet to drink. He’s also short of breath. Will you see to him?”

“You’re Lea’s son, from Turin, right? My goodness.” The woman lifted his chin and studied the bruise on his lip from behind her enormous lenses. Martino thought she was the big man’s wife but then she said, “Look, Luisa. Look what Anselmo’s brought us,” and led him into the kitchen. There, seated at the table, was Giulia, eyes bulging, mouth open as in a comic strip. Meanwhile Martino connected the dots: the big man, Anselmo, was Giulia’s father, the formidable lady with the brown hair must be her mother, and the baby dunking his bread in water and dribbling it all over the tablecloth might be her brother.

“Martino?” Giulia said, and from then on the explanations came together. Giulia and Martino were in the same class; the older lady—thin and as straight as an arrow—was Giulia’s grandmother; someone had found Silvia’s handbag; Anselmo and the others were getting ready to beat the shores of the River Quargnasca; Martino had been tussling with an older boy, Walter, who was identified as the son of a well-known person (“A bully from day one,” Gemma remarked). Martino’s mother had gone to town in Gianni’s car to do something he couldn’t explain, some errand, no doubt.

What Martino took care not to reveal was that he’d been walking up and down the main road for hours to make sure he didn’t miss Giulia, and that’s how he ran into the Leader. He’d tried to get away, but this time the other boy wasn’t about to be surprised. He’d come up to him and grabbed him by the jacket collar, almost choking him, dragged him down the bank, stones hammering against Martino’s sacrum, his lungs unable to keep pace with the galloping of his heart. At that moment, though, it all seemed worth it because his embarrassment could pass for the demeanor of a boxer, one who’d been honorably beaten. A few glances of silent admiration came from Giulia: rays of sun filtering through a closed shutter.

Luisa gave him a cup of Ovaltine to drink and treated his lip with ice and antiseptic cream.

Giulia went out to the kitchen garden and Martino, hesitant, lingered at the French doors, the external stairs, and then by the gate, finally reaching her where she stood amid the last yellow blooms of the Jerusalem artichoke.

“Let’s go to the chapel,” she suggested.

58

 58

LEA TOOK A LONG TIME in the shower, smoothing her thighs with the loofah mitt. She shaved her legs and armpits, passing the blade over skin slippery with bath foam, fixed her hair with the curling iron, put on blue eye shadow and mascara. Finally, all spruced up, she started cleaning the house.

Martino was a bundle of nerves. He vanished as soon as he finished his breakfast. All she’d managed to get out of him was the name of his eagerly awaited classmate: Giulia.

Gianni came by to leave the keys to his car, but Lea still didn’t know if she would use it. She was washing vegetables and she dried her hands on her skirt as though getting it wet didn’t bother her. She thought she could detect the sour odor of sweat under her perfume and was sure that Gianni had noticed her hair, her white blouse belted at the waist, and the way she was risking getting dirty by doing the housework in that outfit.

“Shall I put some artichokes aside for you?” she asked.

“Thanks. Martino?”

“He’s outside waiting for his friend Giulia. His Pearl of Labuan, I’m afraid.”

Gianni laughed and the scars on his cheeks wrinkled. A lock of hair, stiff with brilliantine, had escaped the discipline of his comb and stood up on his head like an antenna. “But that’s Anselmo Rosso’s daughter. I’m waiting for them too. They’re late. Should have been here two hours ago. We’re beating the shores of the Quargnasca today.”

“How can it be that we know nothing yet? Ten days must have passed by now.”

“Look, I don’t know. At least her body must be somewhere around here.”

She held out a bag of cleaned artichokes.

“Did you know that the English say artichoke like we do? Exactly the same way.”

“Articioc?”

“Artichoke: a-r-t-i-c-h-o-k-e.”

“What do you know!”

“I think it’s from the Arabic. Ciao, Lea. I don’t need the car. Keep it till tomorrow.”

“Well, you know we’re taking the train to Turin tomorrow.”

“Exactly. Leave it in the station car park so when you get back you’ll find it waiting for you.”

Afterward, Lea thought for a while that she would just stay put. She made something to eat and walked a little way down the road looking for Martino. When he saw her he hurried over. “Are you going to Biella?”

“Why?”

“You look elegant.”

“Well, yes,” she replied, “but I’ll be back soon. There’s something ready for you to eat at home. Still no Giulia?”

She got a dirty look.

“I’m asking because Gianni is expecting them too. When they get here, you two children can go to the house. Show her your room.”

Distracted, Martino nodded and Lea turned back. He was short of breath and he felt like a fraud.

She rolled down the car windows to let in the cold and get rid of the smell of cigarettes and vetiver. She hooted the horn at Martino, standing by the edge of the road, and as she drove off she felt calm again. She passed women on their way to do the shopping and a boy with curly hair and trousers that were too short at his ankles. A chattering of starlings expanded and contracted in the sky like an accordion, a cloud of soot with a life of its own.

When she got to town, she parked near the school but not in the teacher’s road, checking her face and hair in the rearview mirror once more before getting out. As she turned the corner she saw the bicycle in its place on the balcony with the blue-painted railing.

57

 57

AT DUSK THE AIR WAS CLEAR AND COLD. A frosting of stars lit up the heavens and a breeze blew dry leaves into the hut along with the scent of cyclamen. Once she was alone, Silvia spoke again. Actually, there were certain things she only thought.

Her father beat her. And Anselmo, they beat him, too, when he was a child. They beat us at boarding school. So what was different about it? It was Giovanna.

She felt something wet on her face and the idea of crying in relief disgusted her. She wiped herself dry and then studied the objects Martino had brought her: canteen, blankets, an issue of The History of the West, bread she hadn’t yet eaten, chocolate. She opened the comic book and tried to read some of the stories about bison and American Indians: the Dakota, the Crow, the Nez Perce. The block letters, all at close range and squeezed together, gave her a headache and she didn’t understand the appeal of galloping or the volleys of hot lead that swept the Indians away from the fort’s ramparts. It was a different matter, though: these were Martino’s things and she pondered them carefully, as if she were choosing fish at the market, and taking care not to ruin them.

Martino risked being yelled at, grounded, and, as far as she knew, even beaten. If anyone else found her they would find all the provisions, too—she had never been concerned about that. What an idiot you are, Silvia.

Since she’d never dreamed that Giovanna might jump into the river, she had a moment’s worry that Martino might do the same if he were discovered. She didn’t believe it, because even in her isolation, the state she was in, she considered such a thing impossible, another thing like that. But she felt quite upset about it all the same, and it was the first feeling she’d had—sharp, alive, and unconnected to Giovanna—since she’d read the news in the newspaper one morning a few days earlier.

How many, she had no idea. She didn’t know how long she’d been taking advantage of the boy so she tried to calculate using food: What has he given me to eat? Bread, butter and sugar, salami, more bread, maybe some cheese at one point. We talked about dogs and what did he bring that day? Cake? No: apples. She applied herself for some time but she couldn’t work it out.

56

 56

ALL THAT TIME, Martino was in the hut in the middle of the woods.

For the entire morning at school he had brooded over things to say to Giulia but hadn’t managed to utter even one of them. It was astonishing how awkward her presence made him, and yet this awareness wasn’t enough for him to control himself. His hands, for example: if he suspected that she was looking at him, his hands turned into a couple of mechanical shovels wholly unsuited for fine work such as tying his shoelaces or taking a sharpener out of his pencil case. His brain made desperate attempts at the control panel to maneuver those shovels, but the knot on his shoes turned out loose and cockeyed, the sharpener fell to the floor, and his foot—also clumsy—kicked it away by mistake.

Besides, there was his secret, which stood in his way. Sometimes he forgot about it for a while, at times it made him fractious, but most of the time he felt like he could keep it forever. That wasn’t true, because the teacher was dependent on him and it was impossible to sustain a burden like that for long.

Lea had let him go out after he solemnly promised not to venture far from home—and he’d scaled the hill without losing a moment. Despite having food, water, and blankets the teacher looked increasingly unhealthy: the skin on her face was sagging under her cheekbones and purple rings haloed her eyes. Talking to her, however, had become easy, much easier than talking to Giulia.

“What did you do today?” she asked him, and he didn’t refrain from mentioning Giulia and confessing that they had become friends, sort of.

Silvia seemed not to react. Her expression was gentle, faintly dopey.

“Why don’t you go back?” Martino went right in.

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of being blamed.”

“But nobody thinks that!”

“I feel it myself. In my conscience.”

Martino fell silent. He was pondering things.

“As if someone were keeping an eye on you from the inside,” she added to explain what a conscience was.

“A teacher.”

Silvia looked away from the mud caked on her shoes and dirty skirt.

“Yes, a teacher,” she said.

55

 55

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, a Friday, Giulia got drunk at home with her friend Angela. They had come back from school hoping to hurry through their homework so that in each other’s locked diaries they could copy out and illustrate phrases popular with girls in their class: Best friends are the sisters you choose for yourself (Eustache Deschamps), Forget me not, the little river flower whispers / Forget me not, I too whisper! (Anonymous)

They both had bad colds, blocked noses and painful sinuses, so before getting down to work they decided to make themselves two cups of hot milk with a drop of grappa, the way the grown-ups usually made it for them. The only thing was, they didn’t know how to measure the grappa. It should have been a droplet, but in their hands it became a shot glass. Within ten minutes they were doubled over their notebooks laughing, oblivious to ink smears and instead exhilarated by their increasingly deformed, uneven writing.

They threw themselves on the sofa and Angela decided to pretend to be Martino. Giulia had to give her a proper kiss on the lips, she insisted, and Giulia scoffed and backed away, saliva dribbling from her mouth. The two of them were thin and straight as a rail, so that the bones of their elbows and knees, sternums and pelvises were aligned. When she got home with Corrado, Gemma found them in that state and Corrado enthusiastically threw himself into the mix.

Gemma sniffed the empty cups and wrinkled her nose. The girls’ cheeks were red, ears boiling, and they were wriggling to get away from the little boy’s kicking. Their grandmother came to help them. She extricated Corrado, managed to get his shoes on him, and ordered Giulia and Angela to stand up. They swayed and giggled, explaining in comical drawls that they’d only drunk a little fortified milk as usual. Giulia asked Angela if she saw the pattern on the carpet wriggling like worms. Angela leaned over to examine it, rapt. Seconds later she said yes, she saw it, too, and was so exultant she could hardly refrain from kicking her legs in the air.

Gemma didn’t try to hide the fact that she found it all amusing. She pushed them into the bathroom and washed hands, necks, and faces while the girls cackled, gurgled, and held to the edge of the sink in an effort to stay upright. Since their undershirts were soaking wet by then, she dressed them in some of Giulia’s dry clothes. She made them eat bread and drink a great deal of water and then phoned for Angela’s father to come and get her.

It was the first time since Silvia’s disappearance that something approaching good humor had welled up in Gemma’s chest. She wished she could do Giulia’s homework for her, but she had completed the third year only and still read by mouthing the words; she did her math in a mixed and unorthodox way, by breaking things down and guessing. She got Corrado busy sticking cards and toothpicks onto a corkboard and helped Giulia by scratching her back, shooing away the flies that persisted in settling on her drooping head.

54

 54

LUISA HAD BEEN CONVINCED that she would be able to hold back her screams during labor, but she had yelled as her body behaved in a way that was at odds with what she knew about it. A band of muscles that had always been quiet in the past now squeezed to make space for the baby’s head, drawing it out of her uterus where it had been protected for months.

She smelled something bittersweet, like prawns boiling in their shells, and all she could feel was that her legs were pointing in different directions and remained rigid as sticks whenever they were moved or bent. Her waters gushed out rhythmically, and near the end they were tinged first with pink, then with red. At that point something hard forced her pelvis open. It was accompanied by a burning sensation, as if from an open wound. Her muscles pushed of their own volition and tried to release themselves in the pushing, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

She stopped yelling only because they ordered her to stop. They told her she had to focus her energies. She gritted her teeth and groaned. Toward the end she vomited up the water she’d drunk. The obstetrician kept passing a finger over her labia, tight as a drum, saying that she could see the baby’s hair, “black as a raven’s wing.” Another push, and a brief flash of pain accompanied the first actual delivery in sixteen hours: the head emerged. Luisa then allowed herself to remember the home births of her relatives: no equipment, not enough disinfectant, kerosene lamps lit all night, tin stirrups, and mountains of sheets to wash by hand the next day.

She thought she’d done it. The rest of the baby slid out with a shudder like a large fish and she didn’t even notice the placenta: they’d shown it to her while she was thinking that the butcher’s block was the thing she found most like birth, with its wet, pink flesh, rumps and hindquarters, the rubbery bloom of small organs. She flopped back on her pillows and waited for them to restore her baby to her, clean and swaddled. Only the baby wasn’t breathing: perhaps the heart, a problem with its metabolism, or undeveloped lungs.

Anselmo held her close and cried. She found it hard to take in the fact that she now had to halt that convoy of love, germ cells, effort, imagination, vomit, preparations, and ligaments loosened to make room for a little person who had really existed and had had eyebrows, nails, the name they’d chosen for him, and the little blue bottom that she’d spied while he was still alive.

For a long time Luisa had continued to feel the baby hiccuping: regular taps around her navel. She wasn’t brave enough to try again, but neither did she have the courage to escape. Day and night, she fantasized about becoming a nun. At the time, she envied Silvia inside her shell—alone, free, perhaps a little sad but at least not panic-stricken, not pregnant. Silvia thought the same thing—Why should I bother? Why should she bother?—and they told each other so years later.

“And yet,” Silvia added, “look what beautiful children you have.”

“Yes, it turned out well for me in the end.”

“I wouldn’t have made it.”

Luisa had wanted to be sedated for Giulia’s birth so they could pull her out without Luisa’s being aware of it, and instead the same thing happened all over again. But the baby had cried instantly with the irritated bleating of a vexed creature. She was fat and beautiful and plastered with a newborn’s waxy white film, her cheeks rounded as bagpipes. She had grown up and was about to become a young girl. Silvia was gone—dead or alive, she’d decided to leave them. Luisa sat in the kitchen at night, trying to see herself through her daughter’s eyes and wondering what she was teaching her.

53

 53

ON THURSDAY EVENING, Luisa had to go up to her neighbor’s to give her an injection and Giulia wanted to go with her.

“We’ll have to ask if she minds showing her bum cheeks.”

Palma, their neighbor, had no objections. She was a large woman in her seventies with a frail and avoidant husband who opened the door to them and went back to watching Double Your Money. Her hair was very short and she had a pretty face, shiny and smooth with its wrinkles ironed out by fat, violet lips, and an enormous bum glowing in the light of the table lamp.

She wanted to know how the search was going, how Anselmo was, how they were doing. But she also felt compelled to complain about her husband and before long she said, “As soon as I can I’m going to get a divorce.”

“You don’t mess around, Palmina.”

“You’ll see. You’ll see, it’ll go through.” She was referring to the law that would make divorce legal, one that parliament had been quashing for the last five years.

Giulia, meanwhile, held out the things her mother needed: a cotton-wool ball soaked in disinfectant, the metal tray with syringe and needles, a phial of Lamuran with a rubber cap for the needle. Luisa filled the syringe, replaced the needle to ensure that it was sharp, and then snapped the syringe with the nail of her index finger and squirted out a few drops of medicine. She disinfected Palmina’s skin and stuck the needle in without wasting time. She withdrew the plunger to aspirate the needle and was able to inject. Giulia was memorizing the various steps.

“Yes, but even if they approve it . . . your husband has to be crazy or in prison or that’s it.” Luisa extracted the syringe. “Done.”

“I didn’t even notice. You really have golden hands,” said Palma, and she went right back to her argument. “Leaving the marital home,” she pronounced.

“But he’s right there in the living room!”

“And who’ll take him away? I’m going to go. I’ll go to my children in Desenzano. I already have three grandchildren and I never see them because of him.”

“Will they take you in?”

“Laura’s already said yes. ‘Mamma, come whenever you want to. I’ll fix up the dining room for you.’”

“Well, go then.”

“You bet I will, and after five years I’ll ask for a divorce.”

“Of course, of course. Then you’ll see.”

“I’ll ask him. Just for the satisfaction. I don’t want to end up buried beside him, our photos one above the other with the inscription: In Greggio. I want to die as Palma Ferraro, full stop. You’ll see—without me he’ll bet even his underwear, never mind his pension. And to think that he has a good one.”

As Palma hoisted herself to her feet and adjusted her clothes, Luisa turned a wry smile on Giulia to play down the situation.

When they got back downstairs Giulia asked her mother to fill her in. She didn’t understand what sort of game Palma’s husband, Primino, played so avidly or what was wrong. Luisa explained that he had a weakness for playing cards and lost money at them, which was why his wife was angry with him. She told her, but only because everyone knew and it wasn’t a secret. She filled the bathtub. A chill from tiredness and worry had risen from her feet, her fingers were icy-cold, and her head was heavy on her neck.

The usual bath day was Sunday, and besides, it was late already: Anselmo had gone to bed with his crossword. Gemma and Corrado were sure to be asleep by now. They both got undressed as steam rose and clung to the mirror. Luisa examined some red bumps that had grown on her breast and under her armpits. “Angiomas,” she explained. “Harmless angiomas. I have polka-dot skin.”

She had only one breast. The other had been removed three years earlier because of a tumor and all that was left of it was a curved line on her flat chest; she filled her bra with a specially made silicone pad. Giulia felt odd when she thought about the breast that had nursed her having been cut off and thrown away. Luisa said she’d gone back to being half child, and every now and then Gemma brought up Saint Agatha, who carried her severed breasts on a platter.

While they were immersed in the bathtub Anselmo came to the door and grumbled, “You’re both crazy. Didn’t you see what time it is?”

“Shut the door; you’re letting the heat out,” Luisa replied.

She put bathing caps over her hair and Giulia’s to keep it dry. They used a lot of soap. Luisa washed Giulia’s toes one by one and exfoliated her heels with a pumice stone. Every so often she let out a long sigh of pleasure. “This was just what I needed. I really needed this.”

Giulia compared her mother’s one nipple, which was grainy and distinct from its pale areola, with her own flat ones and their tiny fleshy nut at the center.

“When you were a girl did you heat water over the fire in saucepans?”

“Yes, that’s what we did. And at least three people used the same water. We used to draw lots to decide who would get into the water first.”

“Will you get a divorce from Papa too?”

Luisa’s eyes widened and Giulia clasped her own shoulders. “No, I don’t really think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I still love him.”

“Grandma says they don’t allow divorced people in church.”

“That may well be.”

“So then you can’t divorce.”

“Right. But luckily I don’t want to, right?”

“Palmina won’t go into church anymore?”

“Many years go by before a divorce becomes final. In the meantime you can go in and even take Communion.”

“After that?”

“I don’t think she’s bothered about it.”

“But at her funeral later, how will they say Mass for her?”

“I don’t know. You’ll see: they won’t deny her a church funeral. Are you worrying about that?”

Giulia thought about it while she gathered foam in her hands and stuck it to her chin, a sparkling beard. “No.”

“Good. Then turn around and I’ll wash your back.”

It made Giulia a little ticklish. Luisa got out first and held Giulia’s bathrobe open, tied it around her waist.

Later in bed she found Anselmo lying on his side with his back to her, barricaded in reproach. And sure enough, as soon as she lay down he started reeling off the waste of water, the time, school next day, lost sleep, bad habits. Luisa opened her little box of earplugs, shoved them in, and closed her eyes while he went on talking with his back to her. But from the tension of the sheets and the rocking of the mattress she could tell that her husband was still grumbling even in the silence.

When Anselmo finally fell asleep, Luisa leaned over him in the dark. Soft chest hairs stuck through his ribbed vest; she loved to caress them and Corrado would pull them out to initiate play-fighting. His long body, submerged in sleep, gave off warmth. Anselmo was three years younger than she was and this had always reassured her: during the war he was only a boy and he hadn’t had time to do anything bad.

Luisa got up and went to the kitchen, where she found some leftover roast potatoes in the fridge and began eating them, sitting there in the dark. Silvia’s disappearance, Palmina and her plans to run off, her own youth, marriage and work in the factory, illnesses, hospital stays and recovery, childbirth: that chorus of seemingly dissonant events corresponded to a secret harmony she was trying hard to name, as when you can hear a song in your head but you can’t sing it out loud. Some kind of glue was holding the pieces of her life together, an assumption, the same one that kept her from throwing plates at Anselmo when he badgered her. She tried to formulate it clearly to herself while chewing on cold potatoes and watching the jagged black mountains turn gray and white as the moon scythed through clouds, illuminating the snowfall on their peaks.

What’s keeping you upright? she wondered. It was her sense of duty. She’d been taught—by whom? everyone and everything: example, religion, people she loved—that you had to do things right, do the right thing, keep on going. How are things? Oh, we’re trundling along was the automatic reply, and yet it was perfectly sincere. Trundling along was a moral precept because life is a cart to pull, a work to bring to completion. When you’re tired, you persevere. When you’re suffering, you endure. When you want to leave, you stay. Industry as an antidote to unhappiness. Not that Luisa hadn’t been happy; she’d often been so. Her joys naturally came from persevering, enduring, and staying. After the death of her first love, she had married. After the death of her first baby, Giulia and Corrado had been born. She’d had a life of second chances. Of resurrections, as Sister Annangela had once told her.

She recalled Silvia’s face when she came to visit Luisa in the hospital after she first gave birth, that inexpressive face that had allowed her to rest under its gaze. Silvia had sat down in the visitor’s chair, which she’d placed at a three-quarter-degree angle facing the window, and she stayed there for a long time, ankles attached to legs of steel. Silent, as if at a wake—for all practical purposes, it was one. Silvia was the only person who hadn’t tried to console her, nor did she try to guess, by watching her, whether she would ever get over the loss of her child.

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 . . .”

51

 51

LEA KNEW THE TEACHER lived near the school. “See how it all connects?” he said, and from the door of the café he’d pointed to his small balcony on the fourth floor where his bicycle was wedged diagonally, handlebars leaning over the blue-painted railing. He used it, he told her, to go for long rides in the afternoon, sometimes on the mountain’s hairpin bends, occasionally toward the rice fields, now dry. With Stefano away in Turin and Martino absorbed by his new friend, she’d have Saturday free to spend checking her urge to go to town.

As a distraction she took out a hammer and screwdriver and threw herself into destroying a potter wasp’s nest that had been built between an internal shutter and the wall at the end of August. Together she and Martino had observed the wasp’s comings and goings but from a distance, since they weren’t sure if it stung or might be dangerous, like a hornet.

Martino sat on a bench beside the front door—somewhere he never sat—homework on his knees, sulking. Patches of light briefly filtered through the clouds as if signaling to him, babbling in an unknown code.

Around the corner came Maria, the one they called Big Mouth, with her thumping step and a plastic bag knocking against her flowered dress. Her sharp eyes, small mouth, and nose were all set close together in the middle of a wide, square face framed by the fat beneath her chin. She wrung the necks of the village chickens and geese and was famed for her skills. As she approached, Martino peered at her hands and nails but they were clean. There were white feathers sticking out of her sack and she confirmed without his having to ask, “A young bird. They gave me one for my work. But you’re from the city—as far as you’re concerned chickens grow in shops, already plucked.”

For the fun of it—and to disgust him—Maria improvised a lesson on how to dispatch poultry. Her bag, abandoned on the tarmac, relaxed and grew larger, shaping itself over the hen whose long, stiff flight feathers poked against the plastic.

“You hold the chicken by the feet with your bad hand—mine’s my left—while you squeeze its neck and plant your thumb in the hollow behind its head. Then you have to give it a sharp yank with both arms.” And she mimicked the gesture, a sudden and brutal movement that made Martino jump. “So the vertebra snaps and that’s it, the chicken is gone. Never twist the neck: the beast can escape with its head dangling and it won’t die. So: the worst is over. After that you snip its throat with some big scissors and hang it up to drain the blood.”

“But how come they always call you?”

“Because the beasts don’t suffer as much with me. You mustn’t feel sorry for the animal or it’ll have a bad death. Even fear makes it suffer, so you have to be decisive, understand? And quick, so it doesn’t even notice.”

Martino looked up at her with reverence as an angel of death. She was wearing perforated white leather clogs, a summer pinafore dress, and a woolen cable jumper.

“The hard work comes later. Plucking, or skinning a rabbit,” she added, relishing the effect of every word before starting the march toward home again.

Martino’s mother called him from inside. “Martino, come here! Come and see!” She’d scooped the broken wasp’s nest into the dustpan and insisted on showing him something.

“That’s enough dead animals for now!” he burst out.

“Why? What other dead animals have you seen?”

“Maria’s hen—but I didn’t really see it.”

“Okay, never mind.” Lea wanted to bend over and kiss his head, but Martino had already turned his back and moved away, and he didn’t notice.

Later, when he’d finished his homework and felt a little better, Martino asked his mother, “What was it you wanted to show me?”

“Oh, it was nothing. Something actually kind of grim.”

“What?”

“I think the larvae ate the wasp.”

“That’s revolting! Are you sure?”

“I thought I saw a piece of the wasp in there. The things mothers will do!”

It was ironic, but he wanted to check no matter what, as if to restore the honor of the offspring.

The nest was still in the metal dustpan, broken into large regular cylindrical cells surrounded by little pieces. He saw organic fragments, an abdomen, maybe, and lots of tiny, crushed feet which under the magnifying glass proved to be spiders’ legs. Exultant, he ran to report: the wasp had not let herself be eaten after all but had caught prey for her babies and then gone off to do her own thing.

50

 50

AS SOON AS HE GOT HOME Martino knew his mother was in a bad mood. She kept her head down and shook her hands as if to get rid of who knows what. All her gestures—rinsing a glass, putting lunch on to warm, slicing the bread—were speedy yet overemphatic.

“Your room is a pigsty. Clean it up after lunch,” she ordered.

She wanted to know why he wasn’t hungry, but he didn’t feel like telling her about the Cri-Cri Sandra’s mother had given him. She seemed like a witch but she wasn’t all that bad.

When Lea announced that they’d be taking the train to Turin the next day, he shot up like a spring. She was dumbfounded: it was the first time Martino had blamed her clearly and articulately for imposing her will on him, and he spoke like an adult who could harness his rage and ride it. He threw it all back at her, the fact that she’d torn him away from Turin, put him in a school in town without asking his opinion, shoved him around and laid down the law, always giving orders. But he was sick of it. He didn’t want to go back to Turin now. It was out of the question. He had things to do: a friend was coming on Saturday, his friend from that shitty school, and Papa would get along just fine without them.

“But your father needs us,” she retorted. “This is a tantrum, and I don’t give in to tantrums.”

“What do you mean a tantrum! It’s a matter of life or death!” Martino shouted to her face. And then it came out: “You don’t know it but the teacher’s involved.”

“What do you mean, the teacher?”

“Because—because . . . my friend is related to her. She’s coming to look for her and I want to help.”

“Are you kidding? That woman may have been dead for days. There’ll be trouble if you go looking for her, do you understand? Don’t you understand that you could find yourself—” Lea stopped and blinked, as if she’d suddenly realized something obvious. “Don’t tell me you go to the woods because you’re hoping to find the teacher? Tell me the truth.”

“No, I go there to play Sandokan.”

“You’ll have to stay close to home. Look, you’re not going out today.”

Martino suddenly stopped mid-flow, choked with disappointment. He threw his schoolbag to the floor and ran to his room, slamming the door behind him.

The scent of damp plants hit the house in gusts. It was so strong in the woods that it tickled his nose and he could tell sharp pine needles from the caramelized putrescence of dead leaves. But the woods were inaccessible and so was the teacher, who was in danger of becoming very ill if he left. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: four whole days. He absolutely had to go out, buy some food with his savings, and take it to the hut.

Martino threw open both shutters and decided to leap out and run for it. It wasn’t that far down, and if Sandra’s mother had survived a jump like this one, surely he would too. He leaned out to judge the width of the cement pavement that ran around the house; he’d have to leap over it in order to land on soft lawn. Just as he was mustering up courage by imagining a wild boar at his heels, his mother came into the room. She was coming to make peace, but at the sight of him leaning out with one knee on the windowsill her blood boiled again.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Martino put his foot back on the floor and, despite his good intentions, he felt on the verge of confessing: another Martino, barely any younger but still there inside, urged him to throw himself into Lea’s arms, cry hard enough to scare her so she’d soften up and forgive him for the lies he’d told, for having kept the teacher hidden and snitched food for her, for letting everyone worry and search for her with dogs and volunteers, for allowing her relatives to go on wild goose hunts in the village, under bridges, all the way to Salussola and Turin. But in the last few weeks, something had changed. He also felt in his chest a heart both hard and elastic, a rubber ball that bounced crazily and without warning for the most disparate reasons: the thought of Piero and Agostino being so far away, his friendship with the teacher, Giulia, those three idiots wanking off in the woods.

They started arguing again. “You’re coming to Turin,” to which he replied, “Absolutely not!” In the end, both tired, they came to a compromise that suited neither of them: they’d leave early on Sunday and come back the same day on the last train.

49

 49

LEA FOUND A LETTER in the letter box addressed to her but bearing no return address. Inside was a card with a clipping pasted on it: a woman with red hair drawn by Modigliani. She was wearing a plain black dress with a soft-gray collar. Her eyes had no pupils, or maybe they were all pupil, because they were entirely filled with black. The curved lines echoed one another: nose, face, neck, wrist, knee. It seemed like she had no bust, a doughnut high under her armpits. Lea really did look like her, as if the painting were a calmer, tamed version of herself.

She couldn’t find any writing, much less a signature, but she was sure the teacher had sent it. Not Stefano or Gianni, not a colleague. As for her, she’d dreamed about him in one of those classic dreams, such as the one where you find a tap that’s gone dry when you’re thirsty while asleep: they met in a harshly lit, crowded conference room and tried unsuccessfully to find someplace to be alone.

Lea tucked the clipping between her underclothes in a drawer and lay down on the bedspread. The day before, Gianni had asked her why she was so convinced that she was a bad person, and she replied that she just wanted to be different since people usually make themselves out to be virtuous and go around saying that they’re good and kind, thinking they’re always right.

“I’m not that gullible,” was his reply.

The phone rang and Lea got up, tense and trembling at the thought of the teacher. It was Stefano: his knee was swollen again because of a torn meniscus and he couldn’t drive. His mother had brought over platters of food from the deli, claiming to have cooked them herself (“Vols au vent and tongue in salsa verde? As if!”), but Stefano hoped that Lea and Martino would take the train the next day and stay with him until Sunday.

“Sure,” said Lea. “Of course we’ll come.”

“But wait a sec, did you get it?” he asked.

“Get what?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I can tell it hasn’t arrived. What a jerk. I’ve ruined it now.”

“Would you tell me what you’re talking about?” she barked. “Come on, Stefano!”

“I sent you something silly.”

“A letter?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Well you’ve said too much now, so you might as well.” She persisted so doggedly that she ended up offending him.

“A chemise. I put it in an envelope. Tell me if you like it.”

Lea offered an awkward apology, ashamed of herself and thinking all the while that the sender of the postcard really must be the teacher. A tingle went down her spine.

Once the phone call was over, she began boiling quince for jelly and mocking herself for feeling that a stranger could step right into her marriage and carry her away. She took the Modigliani card from the drawer and went to throw it in the dustbin. But she changed her mind, went back to her room, and put it in the ugly chest where she kept her woolens.

48

48

MARTINO WAS TURNING that conversation over in his head on the way home from school. It seemed like a long and meaningful one. He accepted the bus’s jolts as affectionate pats. Traffic lights blazed against the gray sky and pylons seemed to him miracles of latticed beauty festooned with high-tension cables.

He jumped out in front of the church and recognized Sandra, the lady with the pointy bosom, maneuvering to get an unsteady figure down on the bench. She planted herself in front of the elderly lady, legs akimbo, keeping her own arms loose and leaning back in order to set her down as slowly and gradually as possible, and then rearranged her cardigan, which had climbed up her back, and went to the chemist’s.

The elderly lady noticed right away that Martino was looking at her. “Do I know you? Come a bit closer. Come here.”

Of course she must be Sandra’s mother, the one who’d thrown herself out of the window. The metal stick her daughter had placed beside her slipped to her feet and Martino reluctantly bent over to pick it up while she grumbled, “She’s really not good at anything, that one.” The woman held the stick, her hand speckled with age spots, and put it next to her as if it were a sword. Her sparse white hair had been backcombed and gathered in a tiny bun, revealing her pink skull through her parting.

“Whose son are you?” she asked.

“I’m not from this village.”

“From where then?”

“Turin.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I’ve come for my health.”

“You! You seem fit as a fiddle.”

Martino was half listening to her and half imagining her unstrung and in the act of clambering over the windowsill. Once again he was struck by the similarity with Giovanna’s story and he thought that, of the two, it would have been better if the girl had survived.

“Okay, I don’t get out much, but completely senile I am not,” said the elderly lady. “I knew yours wasn’t a face I recognized.”

She had a leather handbag in her lap with a snap clasp and she started working it with twisted fingers until she got it open.

“And yet you are definitely flesh and bone.”

She felt around in her bag and huffed. Her gold chain with a medallion of the Madonna swung back and forth.

“Beastly arthritis. You don’t know how many dollars.”

“Dollars?” Martino leaned toward the handbag, expecting to see a handful of banknotes.

“I meant how dolorous it is.”

“Oh.”

“What’s my daughter doing in there? It must be half an hour since she went in.” The woman was growing impatient.

“Well, no, it can only be five minutes.”

The elderly lady brandished the watch on her scrawny wrist. “Half an hour, I’m telling you.” She went back to rummaging in her bag and soon took out a Cri-Cri, a chocolate hazelnut praline wrapped in shiny paper. “Wait, I have some more.”

Martino had a weakness for Cri-Cri. Usually he bit them in half with his teeth to relish the hazelnut center followed by the chocolate, then the hundreds and thousands.

“So are you going to eat it or not?”

A man with a bushy mustache stopped to say hello. Like many men his age, serious drinkers, his cheeks were hatched with rosacea and the tip of his nose was a network of broken capillaries. “How are we getting along, Miranda?” he asked the old lady.

“How am I getting along? With a stick.”

“I see you’re in good company.”

“From Turin.”

“Fancy that.”

“Well! It’s not that big a deal.”

Martino was itching to be on his way but was worried about bumping into the Leader and his two sidekicks. He wanted to shelter at home, bask in the details of Giulia’s proximity—the golden down on her knees, for example, though her hair was chestnut—and go up to the woods later taking a roundabout route to avoid any unfortunate encounters—and talk to Silvia about Giulia, tell her how much Giulia felt her absence. One scene was etched in his mind: him coming down from the woods on Saturday, supporting the teacher and taking her to Giulia.

The old lady noticed that he wasn’t really there with them. She said, “I think I’ve tormented you enough,” and, moving her entire face, she managed to give him a wink.

“Thank you for the chocolates.”

“Go, go on. Don’t stand there thanking me.”

To avoid the café, Martino walked along the vineyard where the last harvest of the year was taking place. The grape pickers laid clusters of grapes in plastic buckets as they sang:

On the hat, on the hat we wear

There’s a long black, long black feather

It serves, it serves as our flag

Up the mountains, to the mountains we go

To wage war.

Tralala!

As he turned toward the church, Martino saw that Sandra had come out of the chemist’s. She stood behind the bench with a hand on her mother’s shoulder. Her mother wound her own fingers through Sandra’s and, thus interlaced, they continued chatting with the man.

47

 47

ON THURSDAY during the lunch break, Giulia and her friend Angela marched up to the step Martino was sitting on to eat but they didn’t say anything to him. He pretended to be busy with his veal mayonnaise sandwich. The girls pulled little sugar pellets off their brioches, popping them into their mouths one by one.

“You’re eating your napkin.”

“Huh?”

“Your napkin. You’re eating it,” Angela informed him bluntly.

Martino felt as if he hated her. It was true: the bread and paper had cemented into one and were edged with his toothmarks.

“Oh, this. Right, thanks.”

He looked up but Angela wasn’t there anymore, only Giulia, with a mixed expression of skepticism and surprise on her face as if her friend’s disappearance hadn’t been planned but had caught her off guard as well. She took a couple of steps toward Martino and with the tip of her shoe began tracing a line through the dirt in the playground.

Deep down, Martino knew that eating a napkin doesn’t injure a man’s dignity as much as getting pigeon poo on his head. The summer before, in Turin’s Vanchiglia neighborhood, he’d stopped to watch a couple arguing beside the road. Just as the man raised his voice, a squirt of gray hit him right on the forehead. He removed his dirty glasses immediately and did his best with a handkerchief, but his girlfriend burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. She’d try to stifle it only to go on spluttering intermittently.

Across the road Martino, too, had been amused, all the more so since the sting had never gone out of that old incident of the dog poo thrown on his jacket and, well, misery loves company. But after a while, the woman’s laughing seemed excessive even to him. The man’s eyes blazed like those of a boss confronting an insubordinate underling, while his companion doubled over, half blinded by tears, drying them from time to time with the inside of her wrist. He raised his hand and slapped her. The laughter stopped instantly, and the girl furiously tore a ring off her finger and threw it on the pavement, where it disappeared down a drain. At that point, to Martino’s great surprise, the couple’s alarmed expression had simultaneously turned to one of complicity: they’d searched the drain on hands and knees for ages. That’s what pigeon shit can do to you.

“I wonder why Greppi is staring at you,” Giulia began.

Martino suddenly turned and for an instant his eyes met those of the teacher, who was standing against the wall smoking. His thick black beard hid his lips whenever he took a drag.

“Did you say he’s looking at me?”

“Before, too, while you were playing football.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like us making the ball with sticky tape and loo roll.”

“Why should that matter? Out of all of us, he was looking at you.”

“So what.”

“He doesn’t even know you.” Giulia whispered as if she held a grudge, and Martino made the connection.

“Let’s hope he leaves soon—that Canepa comes back soon so he’ll go.” He was floundering, but apparently she didn’t notice.

“If she comes back . . .” Giulia murmured.

“I think she will.”

“Thanks,” she replied, as if he’d said something polite but groundless, a cross between a wish and a condolence. “I don’t know if you know,” she added, “that she’s my dad’s cousin and she’s almost always lived with us.”

Anselmo, Martino noted—the cousin Silvia had invoked in her trance in the hut—was Giulia’s father.

“I knew she was part of your family.”

Giulia sat down beside him. Her blue-and-gray plaid skirt peeked out from under her smock and she smoothed it with the palms of her hands; she also tidied her shoulder-length hair, which swung forward.

Martino was a bundle of nerves. He was trying to dislodge a piece of chewed-up sandwich stuck to the roof of his mouth without her noticing, irritated with his mother for making him that sticky snack. Don’t do anything stupid, he said to himself.

He started up again. “I think she’s still around here somewhere.”

“My father has looked everywhere. Even in the churches. Someone told us she might be hiding in a church.” Giulia looked at him hesitantly, as if considering whether to add something.

“Did she often go to church?”

“Not that much.”

“So nothing’s really come up.”

“Nothing. My parents have gone all the way to Santhià, Salussola, as far as Turin. Someone was sure they’d seen her in Borgo Dora. Or at the station, they think they saw her near the platforms but it’s not true. They’re mistaking her for someone else. Not so much purposely, I think, as from a desire to do good.”

Martino let himself be drawn in by that version of the story.

“Does she know anyone in Turin, someone who could help her?”

“Yes, we also have relatives there.”

“And couldn’t she be hiding with them?”

“But they’d tell us!”

“Maybe she needs time to pull herself together.”

“And you think she wouldn’t let us know? That she’d leave us here looking for her like . . . like idiots?”

“Yes—I mean no. You’re right,” Martino gave in. At that moment he was certain: he’d messed it all up. He should never have kept the teacher’s secret. What a colossal mistake he’d made. But it was too late. If he admitted his mistakes it would be a disaster. Giulia would never forgive him. He got the hiccups, having swallowed the last bites of his sandwich too quickly, and had to hold his breath to stop them while she waited quietly.

“You came for a really great year,” she commented sarcastically.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not always like this.”

A bit late, Martino finally smiled at her. “I believe it.”

“I know the village you live in.”

“Ah.”

“My father’s from there. Silvia too.”

“No way!”

“Does that bother you?”

“No.”

“Well compared with Turin it must be boring.”

“Yeah, well. It’s different.” He decided he absolutely wouldn’t mention the woods and cleared his throat.

“Your mother is really pretty,” Giulia was saying. “I remember her; she came at the beginning of the year.”

“Yours too,” he replied impulsively.

“Have you ever seen her?”

He blushed. “I think so. Maybe I got mixed up.”

“On Saturday we’re going to your village. Maybe we’ll see each other.” Giulia moved on to other things, her embarrassment a current pulling her along, while Martino sat there dazed, a rabbit in the headlights.

“I’ll be there,” he replied. He promised himself on the spot that he’d refuse to go on any walk and stand lookout on the main road—for the whole day if he had to.

“Do you know the chapel in the woods?”

“You mean the sort of ugly one?” he dared.

“Horrible! I want to repaint it myself in a few years; I’m practicing. I even have a book that tells how to do it: Fresco Painting. You have to be quick because basically the wet plaster absorbs the color and then when it dries it sets. When I’m older I want to be a painter, or maybe restore old masterpieces.”

She said it just like that, “old masterpieces,” and she was thinking about the installments of Masters of Color and volumes on the finds at Herculaneum and Pompeii that Silvia kept in her messy room. She’d spent entire afternoons bent over pictures and drawings, on statues both nude and clothed, with blank eyes. Sitting beside Silvia while she marked homework or set exercises, Giulia copied the most stunning pieces into her notebook: Odilon Redon’s spider and cyclops, Roman masks with jug ears and grotesque noses like gnocchi made of wax, the sculpture of a boy holding a dolphin, lion-paw table legs topped with female busts.

As he listened, Martino tried to think of something worthy of telling her. He wanted to have a project as grandiose and original as hers. He quickly rejected the pirate and adventurer. Could he say that he wanted to become a sailor? A musician? He’d often thought of asking his parents for an instrument to help him control his need to move around, beat things and punch them. A drum kit, he told himself, and it seemed like a bright idea that Giulia had whispered to him.

“Let’s go back in. It’s time.” She went ahead of him and the bell rang loudly, vibrating through the soles of their feet.

46

 46

ONE EVENING fifteen years earlier, Silvia was sitting in Marilena’s garden. They were young and Marilena’s first child was sleeping in the pram, the white bonnet knotted under his chin making him look like a little pilot. In the orchard on the opposite side of the wide bend a female roe deer slunk between the plants, bending her head to graze upon fallen apples and turning her downy hindquarters to them. Marilena’s husband had just finished the watering and was coiling the plastic hosepipe.

Marilena picked up the knife. “I’ll cut you another slice of gâteau.” She liked using French words—she said pardon, dommage, en plein air—and Silvia saw her husband shaking his head in the distance. She almost never refused an offer of food. “Give me a big slice,” she said, and when she leaned forward to hold out the plate, her chair knocked against the wrought-iron table.

“None of it is true,” Marilena let out at one point, as if she were pursuing a conversation that had already started and was clear to the two of them.

“None of what?” Icing sugar and greasy crumbs were raining all over Silvia’s jumper but she didn’t notice.

“None of what they told us at boarding school. All that stuff. This thing’s sinful, that one’s wicked.”

“I know.”

“I want to tell you something now.” Marilena lowered her voice and moved her pale face closer to Silvia. “My husband, you know”—and she motioned toward him with her chin—“well, you know he’s very hairy. You saw him with his shirt off while he was cutting the grass. The first night we were married, after everything that was supposed to happen happened, he falls asleep and I go to the bathroom to wash. I put on the light and I see myself in the mirror with curly black hair all over me: my stomach, my bosom . . . I was scared for a second and I thought: Look, Marilena, this is your punishment for being with a man! As if they’d grown on me, right? Divine punishment. Which makes not a particle of sense, given that we were already married. But it upset me anyway, and I couldn’t help but see Sister Slumpy with her wonky ear and hear her threats all over again.”

“God is watching you!” Silvia chanted in a high-pitched voice.

Marilena fluttered a hand over her chest and Silvia finally brushed off the crumbs.

“They really overdid it.”

“But it was a weight on us! It was like being a hunchback carrying a really heavy rucksack,” Marilena huffed. “I thought it was part of me and I couldn’t get rid of it. Feeling guilty for being happy, for example. When Slumpy told us that Jesus never laughs in the Gospels—if anything, he cries. Well even if he happened to laugh and it wasn’t written down, you can be sure he wouldn’t have cracked up like we did, our mouths open so wide you could see our tongues.”

Silvia gestured as if to say: water under the bridge. During that period she was convinced she’d put everything behind her.

“So it’s not because of the nuns that you didn’t get married?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I felt like it.”

“Well I did want to, but I didn’t get married just to get married. You remember how I always used to say, ‘Saint Anna the Blessed, may I soon be wedded!’”

Silvia put a hand on Marilena’s arm in her somewhat mechanical way. She knew it was true. Marilena loved to talk about whatever was going through her head (the story of the hair—no one else she knew would have brought up something like that). Not Silvia, and she would never let on that she hadn’t had sex with a man or with herself, if you discounted a few rare, clumsy, and inconclusive blunders. Nor would she ever talk about the letters she’d exchanged with the doctor who had operated on her grandmother when she broke her hip and was bedridden for months.

Hidden in the woods, though, Silvia remembered a dream about a boy from Bioglio. She must have been Giovanna’s age and she liked him. She was conscious of it at the time because she responded to his presence as she would to something dangerous. What was he like? He had bandy legs, glasses that made him look older, hazelnut eyes, and an earthy odor reminiscent of Marilena’s watered garden.

At boarding school Silvia had dreamed about that boy not once but many times, and even in her dreams he remained somewhat blurry, but she could see his gestures and hear his voice. They’d made contact in only one of them: he had scratched a dry scab off her knee. A patch of pink skin had emerged just where she now had a hole in her tights.

Silvia thought about her appearance for a few moments, something she hadn’t done for days—in fact something she never did. She inspected her worn-out shoes, her laddered tights, the oily sheen she could feel on her face, her dirt-rimmed nails and flabby stomach. She was nothing like Giovanna, more an overgrown girl in long johns, puffy, wilted, and wrinkled. Her life wasn’t over, but it was passing her by. And all the while it was going down the drain.

45

 45

MARTINO HURRIED toward the village, disturbed by the teacher’s story.

Her mother had vanished from one day to the next, but how did she know she hadn’t gone away on purpose? That she’d ceased to exist and was to be found nowhere on earth? He imagined Silvia looking for her mother and the arms of her grandmother replacing those of her mother, and then himself not hugging his mother, whose red hair always ended up in his eyes or even in his mouth, but his maternal grandmother.

Maybe her grandparents had taken little Silvia to the cemetery, in which case she must have seen the coffin lowered into the ground, or at least the tombstone with her mother’s photo in an oval frame. Once awakened, he couldn’t get that morbid daydream out of his head, and he kept on walking without paying attention. He passed the dogwood and found himself about a dozen meters from someone facing the other way.

The boys from the café were there. He hid behind a bush, seized by suffocating anxiety. They’d catch up with him and tear him apart, the idiots. Where did they think they were going? Did they know about Silvia’s hut? He forced himself to stare at something small and close to calm down, but all that red in his eyes wasn’t helping—it was an exciting color, a warning color. Those three, though, weren’t moving, or rather they weren’t walking in any particular direction and, oddly, they weren’t speaking either.

Martino saw their elbows shaking vigorously, as when Lea was whisking egg whites and it made her whole back quiver. Now and again one of them would let out a grunt or gulp some air and hold it in his chest. They’d stuck a page torn out of a newspaper to a tree trunk, showing a shape, a woman in a bikini posing as a mermaid on a rock.

Martino finally noticed that the three boys were looking from the photo back to their loosened trousers where their willies were hanging free. He’d have done better to take that chance to scurry off, but he was riveted by the spectacle of their joint masturbation. He was still too young for erections, nocturnal emissions, and a broken voice, but he knew something about it all anyway. He guessed, for example, that the kisses between Corto Maltese and Sandokan weren’t the end of their amorous adventures and that sleeping wasn’t the only thing adults did in bed.

One of the boys yelped as he stopped squeezing himself and bent forward to avoid spunking on his shoes. He wiped his fingers on the moss, on his socks. Get away without being seen or heard, Martino decided. But the boy, the one with the horse’s face and a tuft of flattened hair on one side, began recovering from his trance and looking around to be sure no one was about to surprise them. Martino made the leaves crackle, jumped and stumbled, and the other boy reassembled the fragments behind the dogwood until they came into focus.

“Hey you, what are you doing here? Are you here to spy on us?” He looked as scandalized as a priest.

“What’s going on?” another one echoed.

“Turin followed us.”

“I did not,” he defended himself.

“Turin!” thundered the one who seemed to be the leader. He stood in front of Martino, legs spread, black curls stuck to his forehead with sweat.

“Torino likes salami, guys. He likes bechamel sauce. You wanna try it, right?”

The other two laughed coarsely.

“His mother taught him. Even though she’s married she always invites someone else to supper. Does everyone do that in Turin?”

“Gianni is our relative,” Martino explained, but they ignored him.

“It’s disgusting! With that cleft he looks like he’s got an arse on his chin,” the third one butted in.

The Leader contradicted him. “Leave it—I’d do her.”

“Fuck off,” Martino burst out.

The Leader opened his eyes theatrically and turned to Tufty. “Bring him over here.”

“I have asthma! I have asthma! You can’t. I’ll die!” Martino panted, and while they dithered the memory of Silvia twirling the blanket to confuse the wild boar flashed before him. Instantly he remembered the dead creature under the dogwood. He turned and it was still there, a scrap of fur lying on clover, tiny fangs, yellow chinstrap, pink gums, and now a few flies too. Overcoming his repulsion, he grabbed its tail and felt the tiny bones under its fur. He whirled it once to gain momentum and then threw it toward the Leader, shouting, “Watch out, it bites!”

The Leader staggered backward and ended up with his bottom flat on the ground. The carcass landed on his legs only a whisker away from his open fly. The other two stared speechless with disgust, but Martino was already flying down the slope, nearly twisting his ankle with every step, scattering twigs and leaves on all sides. Wisely, he stifled a victorious smile.

44

 44

BY THIS TIME Martino had a favorite route for climbing up to see Silvia. It was simple, almost a straight line. He’d go out of his garden at the back, cross the lane, and follow a faint path, a rocky, weedy track that cut across the side of the hill. His shoes sank into succulent turf and glided over patches of cyclamen.

When he got halfway he came across a bush he considered a friendly presence; he didn’t know its name, dogwood, but he liked the leaves, which were changing from green to steak-red. After that he had to cross a stream, jumping across on the rocks, and a little after that the small chapel rose up beside a yew tree loaded with fuchsia-colored berries. From that point on the vegetation began to change: a spruce grove, then thickets of sorb, juniper, hazel, ivy-clad acacias, pale globes of mistletoe hanging from bare branches, intertwining leaves, intricate grafting, and bundles of dead branches fallen on top of each other. It was the wood in its primordial state of arboreal confusion and reciprocal suffocation.

On Wednesday, Martino got to the dogwood and plucked off a leaf—it looked like a flame, especially when he twirled the stalk between his thumb and index finger. He got back on track, and because he was looking around as he walked for fear of running into another wild boar, he didn’t notice the furry shape he almost stepped on until the last moment.

He was too much of a townie to know what it was with any certainty: weasel, stone marten, ferret, or pine marten. The animal was lying on its side on a bed of clover, its back arched, paws together. The chestnut fur was still pretty, and a yellow patch expanded over its throat. Its whiskers barely quivered in the air, or maybe it was Martino’s breath that stirred them as he crouched down to get a better look. Small, sharp teeth and an edge of pink-and-black gum stuck out of its mouth; curved claws crowned its paws. It wasn’t clear whether it had been killed by a hidden gash, a bullet, or distemper.

Once he got up there, Martino asked Silvia if it was a good idea to bring Gianni’s dog with him on the pretext of taking it for a walk, so that it would scent animals and defend him. But she replied that if there’s one way to annoy animals it’s to bring a dog around and, what’s more, Gianni’s griffon was old, and since it had had a stroke it couldn’t even run in a straight line.

They talked about dogs. Martino wished he could have one, but Lea didn’t offer him any hope. Silvia’s grandfather had kept a female pointer, white and orange and devoted to her mother, Delia, who had fed it the edge of her piecrusts when she was a girl. The bitch’s offspring were still populating the village with bastard hunting dogs. They talked about mothers, and Martino got more worked up than he had envisioned. His mother was likeable, he said, she made him laugh and she knew a lot; sure, she sometimes got agitated and his father would say, “You’re a piece of work,” which usually made the situation worse. You had to let her read in peace, not dirty the floors with your muddy shoes, not drip everywhere when you got out of the bath, not eat while you were walking around the house, not get into bed with your clothes on—stuff like that. But other than that she was really nice; played cards, talked to him about books for grown-ups like Jane Eyre (he cleared his voice and moved on, because it contained a delicate discussion of a madwoman in the attic and, who knows, maybe Silvia had read it herself). And as far as he knew, she was the only mother with red hair and freckles all the way down to the backs of her hands.

Silvia listened, gentleness showing through the exhaustion on her face. She barely remembered her mother; Silvia hadn’t turned five when she died. She’d once read a magazine story about a woman who’d lost her father; he must have been famous but she no longer remembered who it was. For the funeral speech, the daughter wanted to talk about his great passion for woodworking, and since she didn’t remember how he’d gotten started she phoned to ask him. Only at that moment, with the receiver next to her ear, did she realize that her father could not be reached: he was dead, and she would never be able to speak to him again.

In her own case, Silvia didn’t know very well what she had lost, let alone who her mother was. No one had helped her to reconstruct it and when she got to the age of reason she hadn’t wanted to think too much about it. She was nostalgic for someone she didn’t know and for a relationship she hadn’t had, and also she mourned the person she might have been had her mother brought her up.

“I barely remember her. At some point I must have asked, ‘Where is my mother?’ They must have said something in reply. ‘Your mother has gone to heaven, she had to go to heaven.’”

“In heaven? With whom?”

“‘With the angels. With God.’ I think I was jealous of God, who got to spend time with my mother while I didn’t.”

Other memories: tearing the wings and feet off insects, asking for them to be fixed, hearing that it wasn’t possible, it was too late; you can’t fix a grasshopper’s leg—the wing won’t move. Believing that your mother watches over you (like God, with God) and feeling uncomfortable about that, inadequate, a humble spectacle. They said it to comfort her: “Your mother is still watching you from above.” Silvia aimed embarrassed smiles at the heavens. There was a period when she was ashamed to go to the loo, and she’d hold it in until her bladder was so stretched it hurt and her intestines threatened to rebel. One evening after prayer she decided to address a frank request to her mother’s soul: Please don’t ever look at me when I’m in the loo!

“Do you know,” she said to Martino, “it feels strange to be older than my mother ever got to be.”

Silvia had two portraits of Delia. Who knows what pictures she would have invented without them? In one photo with scalloped edges Delia was holding Silvia, less than a year old and all lace, in her arms, supporting her firmly, hands under her armpits and chin grazing her fine hair. For Silvia, that photo was proof of her being in love—the only proof, in the absence of memory, of the only reciprocal falling in love she’d experienced in her entire life; it portrayed the most intimate contact she’d ever had. She would occasionally ask herself whether she had perhaps remained loyal to her mother by not starting her own family and embalming the orphan she’d been somewhere inside herself. Such thoughts made her feel profoundly uncomfortable.

To Martino she repeated the commonplaces of family lore: Delia of the swanlike neck; the fingers of a pianist; a lover of animals. According to these attributes, her mother was different not only from her, her daughter, but also from her parents and their world, their social class; or maybe she hadn’t had time to get old and become like her family. Indeed, her grandfather had been a distinguished man, and it was said that as a young woman her grandmother had had a nice figure.

After Martino was gone, Silvia went on talking by herself as she hadn’t dared to with a ten-year-old boy. With the passing of time, she’d noticed her friends becoming intolerant of their own mothers, critical and drained. She knew that some of those older mothers were sources of unhappiness and torment, and she forced herself to consider that things could have turned out like that for her: it wasn’t certain that she and Delia would have had a good relationship.

On the other hand, boarding school had been full of orphans who’d had it much worse than she had, with no one to love or care about them. Don’t go on about it, Silvia—you’re hardly the only one. People around her got sick and died, there was Mussolini and then the war. Her own grandmother had spurned her mother-in-law after the death of her baby girl, but without making a scene: her mourning had taken concrete form, as silent belligerence and walls erected to divide the house. When she referred (a rare event) to the death of her daughters, her grandmother called them “my calamities, the first and the second.”

With few exceptions, among them Gianni, those who’d been in the army, who’d been demobilized, the Alpine troopers who’d come back from Russia with fingers eaten away by the cold, draft dodgers, those in the resistance, people who’d been consumed by hunger in the concentration camps, who had escaped the bombs, pulling their children out of bed and huddling in cellars—all these people she knew were fleeing from the story of their own pain, forever varying the same ritual catchphrases: “I’ve seen things I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” “I’ve seen things that can’t be repeated,” “The things I’ve seen will go with me to the grave.”

But through not going on about it, you’ve gone crazy. Look: look at the state you’re in.

The teacher fell silent because once more it struck her internally: the conviction that the one sure way of not going on about it would be to end it all. The usual spiteful whisper was quick to suggest: But you survived. You survived your mother and you survived Giovanna.

She crawled around, found the billhook, and, in an act of rebellion, brandished it against the voice.

Despite everything they did, the nuns never had a single student who committed suicide, but you did! the voice accused, not at all impressed.

43

 43

AT SCHOOL, the children would end up talking about Giovanna before their first class or during break, in small groups and in low voices.

“Maybe she leaned out too far.”

“She was angry and lost control of her movements.”

“She didn’t realize.”

“If you ask me, she did it on purpose.”

Once Ludovico asked, “What if she regretted it while she was falling?”

They shivered. Giulia said, “Well, it didn’t last long,” with an echo from her friend Angela, “Yes, five seconds if that.”

“So you’re saying that’s not enough time to regret it?” Ludovico sought reassurance.

But it was, which was why no one answered.

Martino burbled something about her maybe having been courting danger, the way you do when you’re riding your bike and you feel like closing your eyes to see if you can keep your balance.

“Who would do something so stupid?” Angela frowned.

There were a few scattered giggles.

Martino tucked his chin into his neck and crossed his arms. Let them laugh, he thought, but he felt hurt and a little ashamed. At least he’d stopped himself in time, before revealing that two summers previously he’d broken his wrist doing just that—riding a bike with his eyes closed. The accident had been very painful, but he’d made his entrance at school the next day with a fresh plaster cast on show and laughed about the exploit with his friends in a way that seemed completely different to the squawking of the Biellesi children. Like a hero who, disdaining danger, or rather inviting it, must reckon with the consequences of his audacity. He’d kept his cast. It was on the top shelf in his room in Turin.

42

 42

THE CALL OF THE BARN OWL sounds like her alarm clock, and Silvia gets up and goes out of the hut. The plants are breathing; humidity is rising from the soil.

“My feet are cold,” she used to say to Anselmo when they went looking for mushrooms, and he’d reply, “Think about the animals—they’re always outside, but we’ll soon be going back to the stove.” Once, they burned their heels on the red-hot, cast-iron stove, trying to warm up in a hurry. They often burned themselves on the embers and sparks from the chimney or matches they lit to burn ticks. Silvia would dig them out of their dog’s skin with alcohol and tweezers and Anselmo applied the flame. Swollen with blood, they looked like green olives or mature acorns and before long they’d burst, making the hens squawk as they scratched around, hoping to eat.

Silvia breathes into the frozen bowl of her hands and thinks that each morning in the woods is a triumph. Being damaged is the same as being alive. The damage you’ve suffered is proof of your existence: the parasites, mold, scratches, ulcers, loose teeth, matted fur, maimed wings, lameness. There’s nothing undamaged apart from an embryo (sometimes), a hard, closed bud, a spore. She, dirty and hungry, is nothing special.

Anselmo: she wants to remember what he was like when he was Giovanna’s age. A large, awkward boy, a bottomless well who could devour entire loaves of bread and half a dozen raw eggs, sucking them directly from a small hole in the shell. Report card day: hers average, almost good, Anselmo’s disastrous—a report that incited turmoil, punishment, and running away.

In the woods, Anselmo hurled stones at the crows with a slingshot, always missing, and peed from treetops with his friends. They’d play in the village, throwing lumps of coal at each other and giving the mule slices of bread dipped in wine for the fun of seeing him sway. At night they’d scare their grandmother, howling under her bedroom window until Grandfather came out holding a broom. Then it was the German occupation, and Anselmo didn’t understand any of it, but he argued with everyone.

Spring of ’44, on the Biella–Oropa tram, a couple of months before the partisans of the Bixio battalion took the valley. The carriage stopped and Germans and fascists looking for deserters, real or suspected, sifted through the passengers while the lorry waited, engine running, before the extended colonnades of the sanctuary.

Anselmo hadn’t bothered to bring any ID with him. Not yet fourteen, he was taller than the carriage and his hooked nose made him look older. There was nothing in him that inspired compassion or suggested his age. They chose him: he stood there blinking in a row of adult men, thin and white as a leek.

Silvia feels once more the rush of heat that hit her face as it does when you bend over to open the oven door—and again she sees herself going over to the republican and pointing, with a faintly apologetic smile: “That idiot, my cousin—if only he hadn’t grown so big. He’s thirteen years old. You can check, but right now I’m going to take him home. Can’t you see how alike we are? Can’t you see that he doesn’t have a single whisker? What are you trying to do, shoot a child? He’d be perfectly useless if you did make him work in Germany. In fact he’d be a pain.”

Afterward they walked all the way down to Biella. Silvia tried to keep up with Anselmo, who was striding through the meadows and scratching his arms till they bled. The light was dazzling and the wide valley, spread before them, seemed bewitched by silence. To release tension, they threw pine cones at each other and the last coarse lumps of snow. Farther down they pulled up clumps of sorrel, sucking on the acidic stems veined with red.

“But it’s not true that I’m a pain,” Anselmo grumbled. Just then he tripped and fell into a hole and laughed till he cried.

The present seeps into her memory and Silvia feels something of Anselmo’s anger and the fear he must feel for her. But she can’t bear it, so she turns her thoughts to other anxieties, the everyday ones that don’t concern her.

Anselmo lives in a constant state of overexcitement, and being so close to him means almost feeling the anguish humming in his chest like a hornet. He doesn’t want his children to run, jump on the sofa, or knock into furniture because he instantly imagines them in the hospital. They mustn’t be out of his sight for long or away from his supervision. They can’t go on swings, can’t sweat, drink from fountains, eat prosciutto or cheese without bread. According to him, these are grave threats to their health and good manners and he treats them as such, shouting like crazy and threatening punishment. He can’t bear it when Giulia reads for a long time, for fear that she’ll ruin her sight, and yet he wants her to be top of her class. He never allows her to read at the table, and that rule would be reasonable were it not for the fact that he dines with La Stampa open in front of him, using the water jug or vinegar bottle as a stand, and grumbles whenever someone moves it to pour a drink or season their food.

Anselmo lives in constant fear of something terrible happening. And yet, for all his ranting, no one is afraid of him, and when they obey him it’s out of exasperation more than anything else.

Now Silvia has given him a valid reason for being afraid, and has united the family in the same fear.

Once again she dismisses the idea, seeking other images in which to take refuge: Marilena (but she brings boarding school along with her), the house in Bioglio (Anselmo comes back forcefully), Giulia. She might be able to calm down thanks to Giulia—if only she didn’t come as a pair with Giovanna.

Sudden gusts stir the foliage. The woods have become once more an alliance into which Silvia has intruded: trees that change color without knowing it, animals without peace and without sin. A family of roe deer are sitting on their haunches among the cyclamen in the small glade, but when one of them scents her presence and pricks up its ears, the others rise in unison and flee as fast as they can.

41

 41

THE BUILDING was from the late 1950s and stood in the San Paolo area. Its balconies were cluttered with clotheshorses, plastic deck chairs, small tables, tricycles, geraniums, stacked plant pots, rugs, and blankets left out to air, all partially hidden by striped awnings that had faded in the sunlight.

Luisa and Giulia spotted the entryphone panel. Names, handwritten, had been added in at different points and taped over more than once.

“There it is: Belletti.”

A tabby cat came to rub against Giulia’s socks but her mother pulled her along. “Come on. We mustn’t make them wait for us.”

The walls of the apartment were papered in bottle-green, hazelnut, and mustard-yellow. Belletti’s wife had already put the coffee on and she brought it straight through into the dining room, a smallish space with nothing in it apart from the round table in the middle. She opened up a games table with a green cloth surface and set the plastic tray on it with cups and a glass of lukewarm orange squash. Giulia had a tummy ache and tried not to look at Signor Belletti, who was making small talk with her mother and explaining that he preferred to be called a clairvoyant. The man was balding, with a chest that had expanded over the years, an enormous head, and eyes that were magnified by glasses. His smooth, fleshy cheeks and bulging forehead made him seem like an elderly infant, as if his hair had not yet grown in and his head and body had never been in proportion.

It was her friends from the factory who’d advised Luisa to see the clairvoyant. Two of them had visited him personally and could vouch for his being a very serious and humble person, a council employee who in his spare time exercised his gift in the service of others.

“Trying doesn’t cost anything,” they’d said, “or, well—the price is reasonable.”

Luisa’s faith was accommodating. She believed in what were called presences, in guardian angels, dreams that foretold the future. Actually, she did feel the conflict between Catholic teaching and her attempt to contact the other world after she’d forked out the money, but in her view the Church didn’t manage to encompass all the relationships between the human and the divine, though it definitely covered the majority. In situations of extreme anxiety, trying everything was forgivable. She drank her coffee, staving off impatience. Giulia looked over at her nose and thought: Why didn’t I get my mother’s nose? So straight. I don’t look at all like her. She’d insisted on being taken there and was sure that Luisa wouldn’t have given in if she hadn’t been strung out with insomnia and false hope.

There had been other sightings after Santhià. Anselmo had taken a leave of absence from work so he would be ready to run anywhere along with the fire department or friends already retired. Gemma and Luisa cooked at home while they waited, telling themselves it was better to remain pessimistic. Meanwhile they cleaned floors on their hands and knees, attacked tile joints with a brush, or applied themselves to the blinds and rugs to dispel some of their anxiety. Whenever they heard the key turn in the lock, they held back from running down the hallway. Anselmo would come in by himself, tired and enraged, drink a glass of water and baking soda in the kitchen. He found the blinds half washed and arabesqued with trickles of black water, rugs rolled up, the furnishings in disarray, and he whined. They let him do it, knowing that it was his way of pouring out his desperation, the way they did by scrubbing and polishing. To each his own.

Signor Belletti sat down and his wife left the room, closing the door. A crucifix hung on the wall behind him, above it an olive branch with dusty leaves. Luisa held out a photo of Silvia, which he turned upside down on the table before closing his eyes to concentrate.

Giulia struggled to believe it would all be useful. She’d heard that clairvoyance, like prayer, works only if you truly expect it to, and she didn’t want to sabotage Signor Belletti’s abilities with her doubts. She closed her eyes, too, and when she opened them again Luisa was moving the tray to a chair and the man was spreading a large map of the area on the table. He took a pendulum from a drawer, a brass cone hanging from a thin chain, and let it fall perpendicular to the map.

The chain quivered. Belletti slowly moved it from side to side, over the city, hills, and the surrounding mountains, valleys, woods, and villages. Luisa seemed troubled and Giulia realized that she feared the total absence of a sign, which would mean that Silvia had gone a long way away or, worse, that she was dead. She gripped the hem of her skirt in her fists. Imperturbable, Belletti moved his arm. He was passing over the city again when the cone began to rotate. His hand looked motionless and relaxed while the pendulum turned and turned.

“Clockwise,” he commented. When he moved the chain to another area, the twisting slowed until it stopped, and when he went back over the city it regained momentum.

Belletti put the pendulum down and turned the photo of Silvia over. Giulia had goose bumps and the hair on her arms was standing straight up.

“According to what I’m seeing, your relative is alive somewhere in the city. I can’t be certain, but I believe she’s hiding in a church.”

“A church?”

“Behind the organ, maybe, or in one of the back rooms.”

Luisa was worried. “She won’t have been able to drink if she’s been indoors.”

“Maybe she’s drunk the holy water, Mamma!” Giulia suggested earnestly.

Belletti nodded in approval with his massive head. “You can continue to hope. And as for holy water, I stock up every year with water from Lourdes. Let’s close with a nice blessing, okay?”

From a drawer he took a small perfume bottle bearing a sticker with LOURDES on it in capitals. He sprayed the map, the pendulum, and, quickly, his two guests.

40

 40

MARTINO AND GIANNI were waiting for Lea to finish adding cheese to the polenta. There was something about her that was difficult to put a finger on, something confusing. Still, she was behaving as usual: quick, almost brusque. She opened a window to air the kitchen, which was hot because of the cooker.

“You’re shining like polished silver tonight. What’s gotten into you?” asked Gianni.

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Really, Lea, you haven’t had a little tipple while you’ve been cooking?”

“No, but I’d love one now.”

Gianni poured her some red wine, a drop for Martino, too, just enough to wet his lips. It seemed horribly sour to him—tongue-curling—and he immediately ate a piece of cheese to chase it down. He decided they wouldn’t be suspicious if he tried to talk about Silvia. They’d never imagine him capable of playing a double game like a secret agent.

“In your opinion, if someone runs away and hides and doesn’t come out, are they crazy?”

“Are you thinking about the teacher?”

“Yes,” he admitted. He must not have been very subtle.

Gianni took him seriously. He said he couldn’t speak as a doctor, a psychiatrist, only as someone who observed people and read books. Madness, in his view, wasn’t something that existed outside people of sound mind, but as a possibility within each of us.

“Maybe that’s why it makes us uneasy. When we’re extremely sad, disappointed, frightened, or angry,” he said, “we may step into it. The possibility can become reality for a minute, weeks, sometimes years. There are things that really scramble your brain: losing someone you love or being mistreated as a child. Some of us can withstand the blows and some can’t. I know people, for example, who have sunk into great sadness. It’s called depression. They literally don’t eat or get out of bed. Are they ill? Are they crazy? That’s not important: the most important thing is to understand whether they want help and how they want it. Of course, there are also more serious, more obvious cases. Where it’s easy to say: crazy. People who are convinced that they’re Napoleon reincarnated, who slap themselves, or cut off two fingers with an axe like Guerino, that old man, just because he was ordered to do so by the voice of his father, who’d been dead for twenty years.”

“Who? That old guy carried around by a donkey?” asked Lea.

“That’s the one.”

“But someone who hides . . .” Martino took it up again.

“Martino, it’s best to be honest,” his mother interrupted. “What’s most likely is that the teacher put an end to her life. That she’s not coming back.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “These are tough things, I know. I know, Ratìn.”

Martino looked at Gianni, who held his palms up as if to say: anything is possible. But he looked blank.