the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (7 page)

"I don't like parties," he explained.

Viola forced herself to laugh for a few seconds, a sequence of piercing, high-pitched giggles.

"You really are strange," she teased, tapping her right temple. "Everyone likes parties."

Alice had withdrawn her hand and unconsciously rested it on her belly.

"Well, I don't," Mattia snapped back.

Viola stared defiantly at him and he blankly held her gaze. Alice had taken a step back. Viola opened her mouth to give some kind of reply, but the bell rang just in time. Mattia turned around and headed resolutely toward the stairs, as if to say that as far as he was concerned the discussion was over. Denis followed, pulled along in his wake.

9

S
ince entering the service of the Della Rocca family, Soledad Galienas had slipped up only once. Four years ago, one rainy evening when the Della Roccas were out to dinner at a friend's.

Soledad's wardrobe contained only black clothes, underwear included. She had spoken so often of her husband's death in a work accident that she sometimes even believed it herself. She imagined him standing on a scaffolding sixty feet off the ground, cigarette between his teeth, as he leveled a layer of mortar before laying another row of bricks. She saw him trip over a tool or perhaps a coil of rope, the rope with which he was supposed to make a harness and which instead he had tossed aside because harnesses are for softies. She imagined him wobbling on the wooden planks before plummeting without a sound. The image panned out so that her husband became like a little black dot waving its arms against the white sky. Then her artificial memory ended with an overhead shot: her husband's body splattered on the dusty ground of the building site, lifeless and two-dimensional, his eyes still open and a dark pool of blood oozing out from under his back.

Thinking of him like that gave her a pleasurable tremor of anguish, and if she dwelled on it long enough, she even managed to squeeze out a few tears, which were entirely for herself.

The truth was that her husband had walked out. He had left her one morning, probably to start his life over again with a woman she didn't even know. She had never heard anything more about him. When she arrived in Italy she made up the story of her widowhood to have a past to tell people about, because there was nothing to say about her real past. Her black clothes and the thought that others might see the traces of a tragedy in her eyes, a pain that had never been assuaged, gave her a sense of security. She wore her mourning with dignity, and until that evening she had never betrayed the memory of the deceased.

On Saturdays she went to six o'clock mass, in order to be back in time for dinner. Ernesto had been courting her for weeks. After the service he stood waiting for her in the courtyard and, always with the same precise degree of ceremony, offered to walk her home. Soledad shrank into her black dress, but in the end she gave in. He told her about the post office where he used to work, and how long the evenings were now, at home alone, with so many years behind him and so many ghosts to reckon with. Ernesto was older than Soledad and his wife really had died, carried off by pancreatic cancer.

They walked arm in arm, very composed. That evening Ernesto had shared his umbrella with her, allowing his head and coat to get soaked so as to shelter her better from the rain. He had complimented her on her Italian, which was getting better week by week, and Soledad had laughed, pretending to be embarrassed.

It was thanks to a certain clumsiness, a lack of coordination, that instead of saying good-bye to each other as friends, with two chaste kisses on the cheek, their mouths had met on the front step of the Della Rocca house. Ernesto apologized, but then he bent over her lips again and Soledad felt all the dust that had settled in her heart whirl up and get in her eyes.

She was the one to invite him in. Ernesto had to stay hidden in her room for a few hours, just long enough for her to give Alice something to eat and send her to bed. The Della Roccas would be going out soon and wouldn't be back till late.

Ernesto thanked someone up above for the fact that such things could still happen at his age. They entered the house furtively, Soledad leading her lover by the hand, like a teenager, and with her finger to her mouth she told him not to make a sound. Then she hastily made dinner for Alice, watched her eat it too slowly, and said you look tired, you should go to bed. Alice protested that she wanted to watch television and Soledad gave in, just to get rid of her, as long as she watched it up in the den. Alice went upstairs, taking advantage of her father's absence to drag her feet as she walked.

Soledad returned to her lover. They kissed for a long time, sitting side by side, not knowing what to do with their own hands, clumsy and out of practice. Then Ernesto plucked up the courage to pull her to him.

As he fiddled with the devilish hooks that fastened her bra, apologizing under his breath for being so clumsy, she felt young and beautiful and uninhibited. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she saw Alice, standing in the doorway.

"Cono
,
"
she blurted out.
"?Que haces aqu'?"

She slipped away from Ernesto and covered her bosom with one arm. Alice tilted her head to one side and observed them without surprise, as if they were animals in a zoo.

"I can't get to sleep," she said.

By some mysterious coincidence Soledad was remembering that very moment when, turning around, she saw Alice standing in the study doorway. Soledad was dusting the library. Three at a time she pulled the lawyer's encyclopedia, the heavy volumes with dark green binding and gilded spines, off the shelf. While she held them with her left arm, which was already beginning to ache, with her right she dusted the mahogany surfaces, even in the most hidden corners, because the lawyer had once complained that she only pushed the dust around.

It was years since Alice had entered her father's study. An invisible barrier of hostility kept her frozen in the doorway. She was sure that if she placed so much as a toe on the regular, hypnotic geometry of the parquet, the wood would crack under her weight and send her plunging into a black abyss.

The whole room was saturated with her father's intense smell. It had seeped into the papers stacked neatly on the desk, and drenched the thick, cream-colored curtains. When she was little, Alice would tiptoe in and call her father for dinner. She always hesitated for a moment before speaking, enchanted by her father's posture as he loomed over his desk studying complicated documents from behind his silver-framed glasses. When the lawyer realized his daughter was there, he slowly lifted up his head and frowned, as if to ask what she was doing there. Then he nodded and gave her a hint of a smile. I'm coming, he said.

Alice was sure that she could hear those words echoing against the wallpaper in the study, trapped forever in these four walls and inside her head.

"Hola, mi amorcito,"
said Soledad. She still called her that, even though the pencil-thin girl standing in front of her was a far cry from the sleepy child she used to dress and walk to school every morning.

"Hi," replied Alice.

Soledad looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to say something, but Alice glanced away nervously. Soledad returned to her shelves.

"Sol," Alice said at last.

"Yes?"

"I have to ask you something."

Soledad set the books down on the desk and walked over to Alice.

"What is it,
mi amorcito
?"

"I need a favor."

"What sort of favor? Of course, tell me."

Alice rolled the elastic of her trousers around her index finger.

"On Saturday I have to go to a party. At my friend Viola's house."

"Oh, how lovely," said Soledad, smiling.

"I'd like to bring a dessert. I'd like to make it myself. Would you help me?"

"Of course, darling. What sort of dessert?"

"I don't know. A cake. Or a tiramisu. Or that one that you make with cinnamon."

"My mother's recipe," said Soledad with a hint of pride. "I'll teach you."

Alice looked at her pleadingly.

"So we'll go shopping together on Saturday? Even though it's your day off?"

"Of course, dear," said Soledad. For a moment she felt important, and she recognized in Alice's insecurity the little girl she had raised.

"Could you take me somewhere else as well?" Alice ventured.

"Where?"

Alice hesitated for a moment.

"To get a tattoo," she said hastily.

"Oh,
mi amorcito
." Soledad sighed, vaguely disappointed. "You know your father doesn't want you to."

"We won't tell him. He'll never see it," Alice insisted with a whine.

Soledad shook her head.

"Come on, Sol, please," she begged. "I can't get it done on my own. I need my parents' permission."

"So what can I do?"

"You can pretend to be my mother. You'll only have to sign a piece of paper, you won't have to say anything."

"But I can't, my dear, I can't. Your father would fire me."

Alice suddenly grew more serious. She looked Soledad straight in the eyes.

"It'll be our secret, Sol." She paused. "After all, the two of us already have a secret, don't we?"

Soledad looked at her, puzzled. At first she didn't understand.

"I know how to keep secrets," Alice continued slowly. She felt as strong and ruthless as Viola. "Otherwise he'd have fired you ages ago."

Soledad was suddenly unable to breathe.

"But--" she said.

"So you'll do it?" Alice cut in.

Soledad looked at the floor.

"Okay," she said quietly. Then she turned her back on Alice and arranged the books on the shelf while her eyes filled with two fat tears.

10

M
attia deliberately made all his movements as silently as he could. He knew that the chaos of the world would only increase, that the background noise would grow until it covered every coherent signal, but he was convinced that by carefully measuring his every gesture he would be less guilty of that slow ruin.

He had learned to set down first his toe and then his heel, keeping his weight toward the outside of the sole to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the ground. He had perfected this technique years before, when he would get up in the night and stealthily roam about the house, the skin of his hands having become so dry that the only way to know they were still his was to pass a knife over them. Over time that strange, circumspect gait had become his normal way of walking.

His parents would often find themselves suddenly face-to-face with him, like a hologram projected from the floor, a frown on his face and his mouth always tightly shut. Once his mother dropped a plate with fright. Mattia bent down to pick up the bits, but resisted the temptation of those sharp edges. His mother, embarrassed, thanked him, and when he left she sat on the floor and stayed there for a quarter of an hour, defeated.

Mattia turned the key in the front door. He had learned that by turning the handle toward himself and pressing his palm over the keyhole, he could eliminate almost entirely the metallic click of the lock. With the bandage on it was even easier.

He slipped into the hallway, put the keys back in again, and repeated the operation from inside, like a burglar in his own home.

His father was already home, earlier than usual. When he heard him raise his voice he froze, unsure whether to cross the sitting room and interrupt his parents' conversation or go out again and wait until he saw the living room light go out from the courtyard.

"I don't think it's right," his father concluded with a note of reproach in his voice.

"Right," Adele shot back. "You'd rather pretend nothing is wrong, act as if nothing strange were going on."

"And what's so strange?"

There was a pause. Mattia could picture his mother lowering her head and wrinkling up one corner of her mouth as if to say it's pointless trying to talk with you.

"What's so strange?" she repeated emphatically. "I don't . . ."

Mattia kept a step back from the ray of light that spilled from the sitting room into the hall. With his eyes he followed the line of shadow from the floor to the walls and then to the ceiling. He realized that it formed a trapezoid, only one more trick of perspective.

His mother often abandoned her sentences halfway through, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say as she was saying it. Those interruptions left bubbles of emptiness in her eyes and in the air and Mattia always imagined bursting them with a finger.

"What's strange is that he stuck a knife in his hand in front of all his classmates. What's strange is that we were convinced those days were over but we were wrong once again," his mother went on.

Mattia had no reaction when he realized that they were talking about him, just a mild sense of guilt at eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear.

"That's not reason enough to go and talk to his teachers without him," his father said, but in a more moderate tone. "He's old enough to have the right to be there."

"For God's sake, Pietro," his mother exploded. She never called him by name. "That's not the point, don't you understand? Will you stop treating him as if he were--"

She froze. The silence stuck in the air like static electricity. A slight shock made Mattia's back contract.

"As if he were what?"

"Normal," his mother confessed. Her voice trembled slightly and Mattia wondered if she was crying. Then again, she cried often since that afternoon. Most of the time for no reason. Sometimes she cried because the meat she had cooked was stringy or because the plants on the balcony were full of parasites. Whatever the reason, her despair was always the same. As if, in any case, there were nothing to be done.

"His teachers say he has no friends. He only talks to the boy who sits next to him and he spends the whole day with him. Boys his age go out in the evening, try to hook up with girls--"