Adolescence took my life by storm, ambushing it and then smashing it open with the wholesale, indifferent rage of a hurricane, without anyone noticing. By then I had already lost Lucilla – or so I thought at the time – and also Miss Albertina, who had been replaced by a cohort of ashen professors with voices that cracked like whips, who called their students by surname, mistook them for one another as if they were pawns on a chessboard, and in fact did move them like pawns around the classroom each time a buzz of chatter was deemed in any way subversive.
I had to cross a small part of the city to make my way to Contrà Riale: I would walk past the Retrone, then in Piazza Matteotti pass the snow-white columns of Palazzo Chiericati, walk up Corso Palladio as far as the austere Contrà Porte that held the most precious buildings in the city, and then down Contrà Riale, towards the “good school” of Vicenza. An ungainly grey building, it had a huge entry gate with peeling paint, but only a tiny door cut inside this gate would ever open for the children to walk in single file into a gloomy, dimly lit hall. Nothing in that building complied with any existing norm – indeed nothing was even simply normal. The stairs curled and coiled up three storeys with their high steps of polished and slippery marble worn down by the passing generations. Each year, as punctual as the autumn rain, some of the children would fall and fracture an arm, a kneecap, in one case even a vertebra. The rooms were too high, and there was no system capable of heating their stone floors, from which a bitter, paralysing cold rose all the way to our knees.
Maddalena had an apparently unwarranted aversion for that school, but had not stood against Aunt Erminia’s wish – certainly not out of fear of her, but rather because of a sense of awe for what she, as a person of little formal education, felt was a high and sacred ideal to which one could sacrifice the wish for a healthier and better attended environment.
“Holy Virgin of Monte Berico! What happened to you?”
There is no hiding from Maddalena: she can hear the unusual hesitation with which I am opening our front door, the heavier thump of my school bag onto one of the little armchairs in the hall, the jittery, slow pace at which I am climbing up the stairs, leaning on my right foot as if it were a walking stick, my hand crawling up the banister and not finding a way to lift itself.
But there are no words to tell everything – not at that age. Sometimes one learns them later, when they have lost their smell, their colour, and above all their sorrow.
“The needle’s eye” – that was the name I gave to that narrow fissure that swallowed me into its blackness each morning and then, once digested, vomited me out after the day’s lessons.
To the very last day, I walked through the school gate exactly like the camel in the Gospel, constricting myself in the effort to shrink, grow thinner, disappear. I had not learnt the art of rebellion, and walked through the darkness of the hall in full knowledge of what lay in wait for me, without that knowledge ever diminishing the terror I felt. One cannot forestall the offence that drives a nail into the body and the spirit, piercing the spirit through the body.
The first to begin was the beadle, Albina. She was perched on a sort of huge wooden trestle at the bottom of the stairs so she could warn the children to take care while climbing up, “else you will slip on the steps and breakyourneck.” She was tacitly exonerated from any type of work because of her excess fat. The trestle on which she was balanced like a medieval monk on the misericord of a choir stall had no back or armrests, so as to allow her hips to ooze out over the three sides and tumble down all around her into a flabbergasting heap, made even more monstrous by the enormous black smock that covered it.
Whenever I passed her, she took special care to avoid looking at me, and never spoke to me, but after I had climbed the first few steps, she would furtively cross herself, in a sort of pagan ritual of her own which would exorcise the evil that surely must emanate from a graceless, monstrous creature such as I.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could just about catch a glimpse of her hand lifting in a quick movement that would readily turn into a gesture of annoyance against some non-existing insect if I happened to slow down, giving her the impression that I might be turning around. But I never did.
And then there were the other children. I realise now this must be an inaccurate memory, because three years at school are a very long time for such a relentless exercise in sadism, but I cannot think of one friendly, polite or even neutral expression ever addressed to me by any of them. I think they must all have perceived me as a black hole in the continuity of the classroom space.
Yet they could see me very well indeed, since on the first day of school I had found the seats already allocated, and the white card with my name had been placed on the desk in the middle of the first row, right in front of the teacher’s desk. And there it stayed, the only pawn to remain fixed, cemented, unmoved in its place for three years.
“The witchie. The ootlin. She’s a craw-bogle.” The few who can resort to the dialect spoken by their country grandparents bring out expressions that have not often been heard under the noble eaves of the time-honoured school of Contrà Riale.
“You suety, putrid little hair tuft.” Some play with cultured alliterations.
“Homuncula, foetidissima.” Some with the Latin overheard from older siblings.
Their words came hissing, sharp as pins, or shouted, like spikes stabbing my back. I recognised their voices: like the blind, I got my bearings through sound in that universe teeming with treacherous life behind me, and more than the god Janus I knew the past and future of each one of them, because I could also hear the whispers addressed to a favourite friend, or the sighs they would keep to themselves.
No-one took the place of Miss Albertina in ensuring that the world in which I spent half of my days would retain some form of order. Anything could be said, anything could – and did – happen.
“Who can tell me where the Pamir range is? Does anyone remember the date of the Battle of Hastings? The name of the last Catholic king to rule over England? The symbol for carbon? The rules of badminton? How many miles of coastline does Italy have? How many does Sicily have? What about Veneto? When was the Republic of Venice founded?”
At school I did well out of desperation, so that I could impose some boundaries on chaos and somehow avoid being cut adrift and falling off the edge: the last mooring. If I know things nothing will go wrong, nothing bad will happen if every little piece of science and knowledge is in its proper place, with its own name and surname.
I was not really interested and would never show off, but only answered out of necessity, so as to stop up the holes into which I might have fallen. And also because, through my voice, I could feel that I existed.
On the other hand, and for the same reasons, my words went to swell the resentment that the other children felt against me.
They were not generally very gifted for school work. The girls might have been more diligent, or at least known how to look like they were, and if they were caught unprepared, they were ready to gracefully repeat that they had studied ever so much, but really, really did find the subject so hard to understand. The teachers would play the game and exhort them to try again – that paragraph was very, very easy after all. The boys would just not study, making a show of defiance. But like the girls, they were all somebody’s children, and the teachers’ subservience towards fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts or grandparents would take different forms, showing now as indulgence, now as debonair paternalism, and sometimes, with the weaker teachers, as downright fear.
This explains why no-one wanted to see or hear anything of what happened.
Some of the girls might have wanted to pass through the cone of shadow inside which I was moving. Sometimes I would catch a glance recognising me as a human being, a smile tinged with confusion, uncertainty, anxiety: shall I speak to her, what shall I say, what will the others say, no I shan’t. And for my part I would not encourage anyone to approach in any way. Not out of choice – out of incapability.
I too was somebody’s daughter, but my father was unpractised at the art of bestowing favours with the calculated precision that ensures one’s position in a small-town world of privilege, the world that counts and shelters its own from offence. His was an extravagant, mindless generosity that prevented him from keeping count of who and how much, and even kept him safe from having to suffer gratitude.
“He’s with the daughter of the newspaper lady of Piazza Matteotti – she had a crisis at seven o’clock. Perfectly capable of not coming back till the middle of the night. He’s burning out like a stook of dried stubble left in the middle of an August field!”
A furious Aunt Erminia takes her seat in front of the asparagus mousse especially prepared for their birthday supper and starts noisily drumming her fingers on the table.
“She’s very ill,” Maddalena says as she serves the croutons. “She has cancer at the final stage, the poor young thing. He’s been taking care of her ever since he found it in her breast. By now it has spread to her bones – she’ll be gone in a breath leaving three little orphans, if the Virgin of Monte Berico doesn’t look down in a hurry.” And she wipes away her tears.
“The city is full of tragedies,” Aunt Erminia shoots back furiously, thumping the table with her open hand. “Must my brother shoulder them all?”
But hers is not meanness, only something that Maddalena calls “the tantrums of Madama Erminia”: summer lightning, excess energy, no storm afterwards. It is her need for perfection and her powerlessness in the face of a world that will not match it, that will allow evil, allow her twin brother to miss their birthday supper. It is also a kind of self-centredness that has the transparency and solidity of diamond carbon, so pure that it can make those around her blind to discriminating judgement. Those who damned themselves to grant her a favour, no matter how capricious, always felt as if they were receiving one from her.
My father could move around the city unfettered by gossip, and although he knew so much about everyone, since his patients would entrust him with their bodies and their sorrows as if he had been a confessor, the idea of cultivating a hierarchy in his relationships never even touched his mind.
That is why his name did not protect me and, afterwards, did not ensure that justice would be granted to me.