the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (11 page)

"I'm sorry," she whispered into her ear. Then she kissed her on the cheek and ran after the others, who were already in the hallway.

Alice waited for Mattia in the atrium, at the bottom of the linoleum-covered staircase down which poured a chaotic stream of pupils headed for the exit. She rested a hand on the banister. The cold metal gave her a sense of tranquillity.

Mattia came down the stairs enveloped by that foot and a half of emptiness that no one other than Denis dared occupy. His black hair fell over his forehead in tousled curls. He watched carefully where he placed his feet, leaning slightly backward as he descended. Alice called out to him, but he didn't turn around. She called again, more loudly now, and he looked up, said an embarrassed hi, and made as if to head toward the glass doors.

Alice elbowed her way through the other students and joined him. She took him by the arm and he gave a start.

"You have to come with me," she said.

"Where?"

"You have to help me do something."

Mattia looked around nervously, in search of some kind of threat.

"My father's waiting for me outside," he said.

"Your father will wait. You have to help me. Now," said Alice.

Mattia snorted. Then he said okay but he couldn't have said why.

"Come."

Alice took him by the hand, as she had at Viola's party, but this time Mattia's fingers spontaneously closed around hers.

They left the crowd of students. Alice walked quickly, as if she were escaping from someone. They slipped into the deserted corridor on the second floor. The doors leading to the empty classrooms conveyed a sense of abandonment.

They went into the girls' bathroom. Mattia hesitated. He was about to say I'm not supposed to be here, but then he let her drag him in. When Alice took him inside a cubicle and locked the door they were so close that his legs started trembling. The space not taken up by the old-style hole-in-the-ground toilet was nothing more than a thin strip of tiles and there was barely room for their four feet. There were pieces of toilet paper scattered on the ground half-stuck to the floor.

Now she's going to kiss me, he thought. And all you have to do is kiss her back. It'll be easy; everyone knows how.

Alice unzipped her shiny jacket and started to undress, just as she had at Viola's house. She untucked her T-shirt and lowered the same pair of jeans halfway down her bottom. She didn't look at Mattia; it was as if she were there on her own.

In place of Saturday evening's white gauze she had a flower tattooed on her skin. Mattia was about to say something, but then fell silent and looked away. Something stirred between his legs and he tried to distract himself. He read some of the graffiti on the wall, without grasping its meaning. He noticed how none of the writing was parallel to the line of tiles. Almost all of it was at the same angle to the edge of the floor and Mattia worked out that it was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees.

"Take this," said Alice.

She handed him a piece of glass, reflective on one side and black on the other, and as sharp as a dagger. Mattia didn't understand. She lifted his chin, just as she had imagined doing the first time they had met.

"You've got to get rid of it. I can't do it on my own," she said to him.

Mattia looked at the glass shard and then at Alice's right hand, which pointed at the tattoo on her belly.

She anticipated his protest.

"I know you know how to do it," she said. "I never want to see it again. Please, do it for me."

Mattia rolled the shard in his hand and a shiver ran down his arm.

"But--" he said.

"Do it for me," Alice interrupted him, putting a hand to his lips to shut him up and then removing it immediately.

Do it for me, thought Mattia. Those four words stuck in his ear and made him kneel in front of Alice.

His heels touched the wall behind him. He didn't know how to position himself. Uncertain, he touched the skin next to the tattoo, to stretch it better. His face had never been so close to a girl's body. The natural thing to do seemed to be to breathe in deeply, to discover its smell.

He brought the shard close to her flesh. His hand was steady as he made a little cut the size of a fingertip. Alice trembled and let out a cry.

Mattia recoiled and hid the piece of glass behind his back, as if to deny that it had been him.

"I can't do it," he said.

He looked up. Alice wept silently. Her eyes were closed, clenched in an expression of pain.

"But I don't want to see it anymore," she sobbed.

It was clear to him that she had lost her nerve, and he felt relieved. He stood up and wondered if it would be better to leave.

Alice wiped away the drop of blood trickling down her belly. She buttoned up her jeans, while Mattia tried to think of something reassuring to say.

"You'll get used to it. In the end you won't even notice it anymore," he said.

"How is that possible? It will always be there, right before my eyes."

"Exactly," said Mattia. "Which is precisely why you won't see it anymore."

THE OTHER ROOM

1995

20

M
attia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.

For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.

But over time, the wound of adolescence gradually healed. The edges of skin met in imperceptible but continuous movements. The scab peeled off with each fresh abrasion, but then stubbornly reformed, darker and thicker. Finally a new layer of skin, smooth and elastic, had replaced the missing one. The scar slowly turned from red to white, and ended up merging with all the others.

Now they were lying on Alice's bed, their heads at opposite ends, their legs bent unnaturally to avoid any contact between their bodies. Alice thought if she turned around she could make her toes touch Mattia's back but pretend not to notice. But she was sure he would immediately pull away and decided to spare herself that little disappointment.

Neither one of them had suggested putting on some music. Their only plans were to stay there and wait for Sunday afternoon to wear itself out all by itself and it would once again be time to do something necessary, like eating, sleeping, or starting yet another week. The yellow light of September came in through the open window, dragging with it the intermittent rustle of the street.

Alice stood up on the bed, making the mattress ripple very slightly under Mattia's head. She held her clenched fists by her sides and stared at him from above. Her hair fell over her face, concealing her serious expression.

"Stay right there," she said. "Don't move."

She stepped over him and jumped down from the bed, her good leg dragging the other one behind it like something that had been attached to her by mistake. Mattia bent his chin to his chest to follow her movements around the room. He saw her opening a cube-shaped box that sat in the middle of her desk, and which he hadn't noticed until that moment.

Alice turned around with one eye closed and the other hidden behind an old camera. Mattia started to pull himself up.

"Down," she commanded. "I told you not to move."

Click. The Polaroid spat out a thin white tongue and Alice waved it in the air to bring out the color.

"Where did you get that from?" Mattia asked.

"The cellar. It was my father's. He bought it God knows when but never used it."

Mattia sat up on the bed. Alice dropped the photograph on the carpet and snapped another one.

"Come on, stop," he protested. "I look stupid in photographs."

"You always look stupid."

She snapped again.

"I think I want to be a photographer," Alice said. "I've made up my mind."

"What about university?"

Alice shrugged.

"Only my father cares about that," she said. "He can go, then."

"You're going to quit?"

"Maybe."

"You can't just wake up one day, decide you want to be a photographer, and throw away a year's work. It doesn't work like that," said Mattia sharply.

"Oh, right, I forgot you're just like him," Alice said ironically. "You always know what to do. You knew you wanted to be a mathematician when you were five. You're all so boring. Old and boring."

Then she turned toward the window and snapped a picture at random. She dropped it on the carpet as well, near the other two, and stomped on them with both feet, as if she were treading grapes.

Mattia thought about saying something to make amends, but nothing came out. He bent over and slid the first photograph out from under Alice's foot. The outline of his arms, crossed behind his head, was gradually emerging from the white. He wondered what extraordinary reaction was happening on that shiny surface and decided to look it up in the encyclopedia as soon as he got home.

"There's something else I want to show you," Alice said.

She tossed the camera onto the bed, like a little girl who's grown tired of a toy because she's spotted another, more inviting one, and left the room.

She was gone for a good ten minutes. Mattia started reading the titles of the books leaning crookedly on the shelf above the desk. Always the same ones. He combined the first letters of all the titles, but couldn't come up with a sensible word. He would have liked to identify a logical order in the sequence. He would probably have arranged them according to the color of their spines, copying the electromagnetic spectrum maybe, from red to violet, or according to height, in decreasing order.

"Ta-daaaa." Alice's voice distracted him.

Mattia turned and saw her standing in the doorway, gripping the frame as if afraid she might fall. She was wearing a wedding dress, which must have been dazzlingly white once, but which time had turned yellow at the hem, as if some disease were slowly devouring it. The years spent in a box had made it dry and stiff. The bodice fell limply over Alice's nonexistent bosom. It wasn't especially low-cut, just enough for one of the straps to slip a few inches down her arm. In that position Alice's collarbone looked more pronounced; it broke the soft line of her neck and formed a little hollow, like the basin of a dried-up lake. Mattia wondered what it might be like, eyes closed, to trace its outline with the tip of his finger. The lace at the end of the sleeves was crumpled and on the left arm it stood up slightly. The long train continued out of sight down the hall. Alice was still wearing her red slippers, which peeked out from under the full skirt, creating a curious dissonance.

"Well? Aren't you going to say something?" she said without looking at him. She smoothed the outer layer of tulle on the skirt. It felt cheap, synthetic.

"Whose is it?" asked Mattia.

"Mine, obviously."

"Come on, seriously."

"Whose do you think it is? It's my mother's."

Mattia nodded and imagined Fernanda in that dress. He pictured her wearing the only expression she ever gave him when, before going home, he would stick his head in the living room where she'd be watching television: an expression of tenderness and profound commiseration, like the one usually bestowed upon the sick when people visit them in the hospital. A ridiculous expression, as she was the sick one, sick with an illness that was slowly crumbling her whole body.

"Don't stand there gawking like that. Come on, take a picture of me."

Mattia picked the camera off the bed. He turned it around in his hands to work out which button to press. Alice rocked from side to side in the doorway, as if moved by a breeze that only she could feel. When Mattia brought the camera to his eye, she stiffened her back and assumed a serious, almost provocative expression.

"There," said Mattia.

"Now one of us together."

He shook his head.

"Come on, don't be your usual pain in the ass. And for once I want to see you dressed properly. Not in that mangy sweatshirt that you've been wearing for a month."

Mattia looked down. The wrists of his blue sweater looked as if they'd been devoured by moths. He had a habit of rubbing them with his thumbnail to keep his fingers busy and to keep from scratching the hollow between his index and middle fingers.

"And besides, you wouldn't want to ruin my wedding day, would you?" added Alice with a pout.

She knew it was only a joke, a silly game to pass the time, just a bit of nonsense like so many other things they did. And yet, when she opened the closet door and the mirror inside framed her in that white dress next to Mattia, for a moment the panic took her breath away.

"Nothing in here will work," she said hastily. "Come with me."

Resigned, Mattia followed her. When Alice got like this his legs would itch and he was seized by a desire to leave. There was something in her way of behaving, something in the violence with which his friend satisfied her childish whims, that he found unbearable. It felt as if she had tied him to a chair and then called hundreds of people, showing him off like a possession of hers, some kind of funny pet. Most of the time he said nothing and allowed his impatience to emerge through gestures, until Alice tired of his apathy and gave up, saying you always make me feel like an idiot.

Mattia followed the train of Alice's dress all the way to her parents' room. He had never been in there before. The blinds were down almost entirely and the light entered in parallel lines, so clearly that they seemed drawn on the wooden floor. The air was more dense and tired here than in the rest of the house. Against the wall was a double bed, much higher than the one that belonged to Mattia's parents, and two matching bedside tables.