In the courtyard of Riccardo’s building, Mattia glanced back at the lit window. His classmates’ muffled cries filtered out like the reassuring hum of the television in the living room when his mother sent him and Michela to bed in the evening. The gate closed behind him with a metallic click and he began to run.
He entered the park, but after ten yards or so the light from the street lamps was no longer enough for him to make out the gravel path. The bare branches of the trees where he had left Michela were no more than slightly darker scratches against the black sky. Seeing them from a distance, Mattia was filled with the clear and inexplicable certainty that his sister was no longer there.
He stopped a few yards from the bench where Michela had been sitting a few hours before, busily ruining her coat. He stopped and listened, catching his breath, as if at any moment his sister were bound to pop out from behind a tree saying peekaboo and then run toward him, fluttering along with her crooked gait.
Mattia called Michela and was startled by his own voice. He called again, more quietly. He walked over to the wooden tables and laid a hand on the spot where Michela had been sitting. It was as cold as everything else.
She must have gotten bored and gone home, he thought.
But if she doesn’t even know the way? And she can’t cross the road on her own either.
Mattia looked at the park, which disappeared into the darkness. He didn’t even know where it ended. He thought that he didn’t want to go deeper and that he didn’t have a choice.
He walked on tiptoes to keep from crunching the leaves under his feet, turning his head from side to side in the hopes of spotting Michela crouching behind a tree to ambush a beetle or who knows what.
He walked into the playground. He tried to remember the colors of the slide in the Sunday afternoon light, when his mother gave in to Michela’s cries and let her have a few goes, even though she was too old for it.
He walked along the hedge as far as the public toilets, but wasn’t brave enough to go inside. He found his way back to the path, which was now just a thin strip of dirt marked by the coming and going of families. He followed it for a good ten minutes until he no longer knew where he was. Then he started crying and coughing at the same time.
“You’re so stupid, Michela,” he said under his breath. “A stupid retard. Mom told you a thousand times to stay where you are if you get lost. . . . But you never understand anything. . . . Nothing at all.”
He went up a slight slope and found himself looking at the river that cut through the park. His father had told him its name loads of times, but Mattia could never remember it. A bit of light from who knows where was reflected on the water and quivered in his teary eyes.
He went over to the riverbank and sensed that Michela must be somewhere close by. She liked the water. His mother always told how when they were little and she gave them a bath together, Michela would shriek like mad because she didn’t want to get out, even once the water was cold. One Sunday his father had taken them to the riverbank, perhaps even to this very spot, and taught him to skip stones across the water. As he was showing him how to use his wrist to spin the stone, Michela leaned forward and slipped in up to her waist before their father caught her by the arm. He smacked her and she started whining, and then all three of them went home in silence, with long faces.
The image of Michela playing with a twig and breaking up her own reflection in the water before sliding into it like a sack of potatoes ran through his head with the force of an electric shock.
Exhausted, he sat down a couple of feet from the river’s edge. He turned around to look behind him and saw the darkness that would last for many hours to come.
He stared at the gleaming black surface of the river. Again he tried to remember its name, but couldn’t. He plunged his hands into the cold earth. On the bank the dampness made it softer. He found a broken bottle, a sharp reminder of some nighttime festivity. The first time he stuck it into his hand it didn’t hurt, perhaps he didn’t even notice. Then he started twisting it into his flesh, digging deeper, without ever taking his eyes off the water. He expected Michela to rise to the surface from one minute to the next, and in the meantime he wondered why some things float while others don’t.
ON THE SKIN AND
JUST BEHIND IT
1991
3
The horrible white ceramic vase, with a complicated gold floral motif, which had always occupied a corner of the bathroom, had been in the Della Rocca family for five generations, but no one really liked it. on several occasions Alice had felt an urge to hurl it to the floor and throw the countless tiny fragments in the trash can in front of the house, along with the Tetra Pak mashed-potato containers, used sanitary napkins—although certainly not used by her—and empty packets of her father’s antidepressants.
Alice ran a finger along the rim and thought how cold, smooth, and clean it was. Soledad, the Ecuadorean housekeeper, had become more meticulous over the years, because in the Della Rocca household details mattered. Alice was only six when she first arrived, and she had eyed her suspiciously from behind her mother’s skirt. Soledad had crouched down and looked at her with wonder. What pretty hair you have, she had said, can I touch it? Alice had bit her tongue to keep from saying no and Soledad had lifted one of her chestnut curls as if it were a swatch of silk and then let it fall back. She couldn’t believe that hair could be so fine.
Alice held her breath as she slipped off her camisole and closed her eyes tightly for a moment.
When she opened them again she saw herself reflected in the big mirror above the sink and felt a pleasurable sense of disappointment. She rolled down the elastic of her underpants a few times, so that they came just above her scar, and were stretched tightly enough to leave a little gap between the edge and her belly, forming a bridge between the bones of her pelvis. There wasn’t quite room for her index finger; but being able to slip her little finger in made her crazy.
There, it should blossom right there, she thought.
A little blue rose, like Viola’s.
Alice turned to stand in profile, her right side, the good one, as she would tell herself. She brushed all her hair forward, thinking it made her look like a child possessed by demons. She pulled it up in a ponytail and then scooped it higher up on her head, the way Viola wore hers, which everyone always liked.
That didn’t work either.
She let her hair fall on her shoulders and with her usual gesture pinned it behind her ears. She rested her hands on the sink and pushed her face toward the mirror so quickly that her eyes seemed to form one single, terrifying Cyclops eye. Her hot breath formed a halo on the glass, covering part of her face.
She just couldn’t figure out where Viola and her friends got those looks they went around with, breaking boys’ hearts. Those merciless, captivating looks that could make or break you with a single, imperceptible flicker of the eyebrow.
Alice tried to be provocative with the mirror, but saw only an embarrassed girl clumsily shaking her shoulders and looking as if she were anesthetized. The real problem was her cheeks: too puffy and blotchy. They suffocated her eyes, when all the while she wanted her gaze to land like a dagger in the stomachs of the boys whose eyes it met. She wanted her gaze to spare no one, to leave an indelible mark.
Instead only her belly, bum, and tits got slimmer, while her cheeks were still like two round pillows, baby cheeks.
Someone knocked at the bathroom door.
“Alice, it’s ready,” her father’s hateful voice rang out through the frosted glass.
Alice didn’t reply and sucked in her cheeks to see how much better she would be like that.
“Alice, are you in there?” her father called.
Alice puckered her lips and kissed her reflection. She brushed her tongue against its image in the cold glass. Then she closed her eyes and, as in a real kiss, swayed her head back and forth, but too regularly to be believable. She still hadn’t found the kiss she really wanted o
n anyone’s mouth.
Davide Poirino had been the first to use his tongue, in the third year of secondary school. He’d lost a bet. He had rolled it mechanically around Alice’s tongue three times, clockwise, and then turned to his friends and said okay? They had burst out laughing and someone had said you kissed the cripple, but Alice was happy just the same, she had given her first kiss and Davide wasn’t bad at all.
There had been others after that. Her cousin Walter at their grandmother’s party, and a friend of Davide’s whose name she didn’t even know, and who had asked her in secret if he could please have a turn too. In a hidden corner of the school playground they had pressed their lips together for a few minutes, neither of them daring to move a muscle. When they had drawn apart, he had said thank you and walked off with his head held high and the springy step of a real man.
But now she was lagging behind. Her classmates talked about positions, love bites, and how to use your fingers, and whether it was better with or without a condom, while Alice’s lips still bore the insipid memory of a mechanical kiss in third year.
“Alice? Can you hear me?” her father called again, louder this time.
“Ugh. of course I hear you,” Alice replied irritably, her voice barely audible on the other side of the door.
“Dinner’s ready,” her father repeated.
“I heard you, damn it,” Alice said. Then, under her breath, she added, “Pain in the ass.”
Soledad knew that Alice threw away her food. At first, when Alice started leaving her dinner on her plate, she said mi amorcito, eat it all up, in my country children are dying of hunger.
One evening Alice, furious, looked her straight in the eyes.
“Even if I stuff myself till I burst, the children in your country aren’t going to stop dying of hunger,” she said.
So now Soledad said nothing, but put less and less food on her plate. But it didn’t make any difference. Alice was quite capable of weighing up her food with her eyes and choosing her three hundred calories for dinner. The rest she got rid of, somehow or other.
She ate with her right hand resting on her napkin. In front of the plate she put her wineglass, which she asked to be filled but never drank, and her water glass in such a way as to form a glass barricade. Then, during dinner, she strategically positioned the saltshaker and the oil cruet too. She waited for her family to be distracted, each absorbed in the laborious task of mastication. At that point she very carefully pushed her food, cut into small pieces, off the plate and into her napkin.
Over the course of a dinner she made at least three full napkins disappear into the pockets of her sweatpants. Before brushing her teeth she emptied them into the toilet and watched the little pieces of food disappear down the drain. With satisfaction she ran a hand over her stomach and imagined it as empty and clean as a crystal vase.
“Sol, damn it, you put cream in the sauce again,” her mother complained. “How many times do I have to tell you that I can’t digest it?”
Alice’s mother pushed her plate away in disgust.
Alice had come to the table with a towel wrapped like a turban around her head in order to justify all the time she had spent locked away in the bathroom.
She had thought for a long time whether to ask them for it. But she’d do it anyway. She wanted it too much.
“I’d like to get a tattoo on my belly,” she began.
Her father pulled his glass away from his mouth.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard,” said Alice, defying him with her eyes. “I want to get a tattoo.”
Alice’s father ran his napkin over his mouth and eyes, as if to erase an ugly image that had run through his mind. Then he carefully refolded it and put it back on his knees. He picked up his fork again, trying to put on all his irritating self-control.
“I don’t even know how you get these ideas into your head,” he said.
“And what kind of tattoo would you like? Let’s hear,” her mother broke in, the irritable expression on her face probably due more to the cream in the sauce than to her daughter’s request.
“A rose. Tiny. Viola’s got one.”
“Forgive me, but who might Viola be?” her father asked with a bit too much irony.
Alice shook her head, stared at the middle of the table, and felt insignificant.
“Viola’s a classmate of hers,” Fernanda replied emphatically. “She must have mentioned her a million times. You’re not really with it, are you?”
Mr. Della Rocca looked disdainfully at his wife, as if to say no one asked you.
“Well, pardon me, but I don’t think I’m all that interested in what Alice’s classmates get tattooed on them,” he pronounced at last. “At any rate you’re not getting a tattoo.”
Alice pushed another forkful of spaghetti into her napkin.
“It’s not like you can stop me,” she ventured, still staring at the vacant center of the table. Her voice cracked with a hint of insecurity.
“Could you repeat that?” her father asked, without altering the volume and calm of his own voice.
“Could you repeat that?” he asked more slowly.
“I said you can’t stop me,” replied Alice, looking up, but she was unable to endure her father’s deep, chilly eyes for more than half a second.
“Is that so? As far as I know, you’re fifteen years old and this binds you to the decisions of your parents for—the calculation is a very simple one—another three years,” the lawyer intoned. “At the end of which you will be free to, how shall I put it, adorn your skin with flowers, skulls, or whatever you so desire.”
The lawyer smiled at his plate and slipped a carefully rolled forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.
There was a long silence. Alice ran her thumb and forefinger along the edge of the tablecloth. Her mother nibbled on a bread stick and allowed her eyes to wander around the dining room. Her father pretended to eat heartily. He chewed with rolling motions of his jaw, and at the first two seconds of each mouthful he kept his eyes closed, in ecstasy.
Alice chose to deliver the blow because she really detested him, and seeing him eat like that made even her good leg go stiff.
“You don’t give a damn if no one likes me,” she said. “If no one will ever like me.”
Her father looked at her quizzically, then returned to his dinner, as if no one had spoken.
“You don’t care if you’ve ruined me forever.”
Mr. Della Rocca’s fork froze in midair. He looked at his daughter for a few seconds, seemingly distressed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, a slight quaver to his voice.
“You know perfectly well,” Alice said. “You know it’ll be all your fault if I’m like this forever.”
Alice’s father rested his fork on the edge of his plate. He covered his eyes with one hand, as if thinking deeply about something. Then he got up and left the room, his heavy footsteps echoing across the gleaming marble hallway.
Fernanda said, oh Alice, with neither compassion nor reproach, just a resigned shake of the head. Then she followed her husband into the next room.
Alice went on staring at her full plate for about two minutes, while Soledad cleared the table, silent as a shadow. Then she stuffed the napkin filled with food into her pocket and locked herself in the bathroom.
4
Pietro Balossino had stopped trying to penetrate his son’s obscure universe long ago. When he would accidentally catch sight of Mattia’s arms, devastated by scars, he would think back to those sleepless nights spent searching the house for sharp objects left lying around, those nights when Adele, bloated with sedatives, her mouth hanging open, would sleep on the sofa because she no longer wanted to share the bed with him. Those nights when the future seemed to last only till the morning and he would count off the hours, one by one, by the chimes of distant church bells.
The conviction that one morning he would find his son facedown on a blood-soaked pillow had taken
root so firmly in his head that he was now used to thinking as if Mattia had already ceased to exist, even at times like this, when he was sitting next to him in the car.
He was driving him to his new school. It was raining, but the rain was so fine that it didn’t make a sound.
A few weeks before, the principal of Mattia’s science high school had called him and Adele to his office, to inform them of a situation. But when the time came for the meeting, he skirted the issue, dwelling instead on the boy’s sensitive temperament, his extraordinary intelligence, his solid 90 percent average in all subjects.
Mr. Balossino had insisted on his son being present for the discussion, for reasons of correctness, which doubtless interested him alone. Mattia had sat down next to his parents and throughout the whole session he had not raised his eyes from his knees. By clenching his fists tightly he had managed to make his left hand bleed slightly. Two days before, Adele, in a moment of distraction, had checked only the nails on his other hand.
Mattia listened to the principal’s words as if he were not really talking about him, and he remembered that time in the fifth year of primary school when, after not uttering a word for five days in a row, his teacher, Rita, had made him sit in the middle of the room, with all the other kids arranged around him in a horseshoe. The teacher had begun by saying that Mattia clearly had a problem that he didn’t want to talk to anyone about. That Mattia was a very intelligent child, perhaps too intelligent for his age. Then she had invited his classmates to sit close to him, so that they could make him understand that they were his friends. Mattia had looked at his feet, and when the teacher asked him if he wanted to say something, he finally opened his mouth and asked if he could go back to his chair.
Once the plaudits were finished, the principal got down to business. What Mr. Balossino finally understood, although only a few hours later, was that all of Mattia’s teachers had expressed a peculiar unease, an almost impalpable feeling of inadequacy, with regard to this extraordinarily gifted boy who seemed not to want to form bonds with anyone his age.