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 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 Ans...

 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 outsid...

 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...

 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 dep...

 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 Ange...

 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...

 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 thing...

 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, to...

 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, sul...

 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...

 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 ...

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 M...

 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 ...

 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...

 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 ca...

 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...

 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 l...

 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...

 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...

 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,” h...