Because, around that time, I had managed to transform even blood—especially the blood of others—into something fictional, I didn’t cry, nor did I get scared. Lello, on the other hand, screamed out in pain, burst into tears, and terrified my brother, who promptly gathered up the swords and went home. I tried to examine my enemy’s wound, but he pulled his arm away. Strunzguardachemmefàtto, he shouted in Neapolitan. What about what you did to me? I rebutted, reminding him of how he had flayed my ankle with his bike, and I hadn’t said a thing, not even a whisper, I had simply walked over to the fountain and rinsed it off. Come on, I said, don’t cry, I’ll help you rinse it off, what kind of man are you? To prove to me that he was indeed a man, and not a little girl, Lello forced himself to stop crying, came to the fountain with me, and stuck his arm under the jet of water. But when he saw the wound, he started crying again. I got scared, ditched him, and ran home.
All sorts of trouble ensued, too much to even list. Basically, I had to face my mother, my father, Lello’s mother, Lello’s father, and even Lello’s older brother, who kicked me, punched me, and threw rocks at me. My grandmother was the only person who took my side, and she even tried to suggest that it was all my brother’s fault, that he was the one who had stolen the knitting needles, constructed the swords, and led me down that troubled path, that I simply wasn’t capable of such things. The only time she got upset was when I reminded her that even Nonno had taken part in duels: what was so bad about dueling? It was normal. Your nonno never took part in any duels, she murmured, and then stopped talking for I don’t remember how long.
I quickly forgot everything and so did Lello. Soon we went back to our friendly rivalry. Actually, he was the one who told me that the girl from Milan had left for something called villeggiatura, but that she’d be back at the end of the summer, when we could try and kill each other again for her. Then he showed me all the messages I had put in the mailbox. They had been arranged in order and placed on a low wall with a rock on top to keep them from blowing away. The mailman, who had read them, had not only left a few comments of Bravo! here and there, he had also corrected my spelling mistakes.
“You don’t even know how to spell properly in Italian,” Lello said smugly.
“I know how to write better than you,” I replied.
“No, you don’t. You make spelling mistakes, and I don’t.”
“I only make a few.”
“I don’t make any,” Lello said.
“You’re lying! Buciardo!”
“You want to bet? Spell that!”
“What? Buciardo?”
“Yes.”
“B-u-c-i-a-r-d-o.”
“Wrong. It’s with a -g, not a -c. It’s bugiardo.”
“Who says?”
“The dictionary, that’s who. You want to write poems . . . but you don’t even know how to spell!”
I walked off clutching my letters and feeling depressed, firstly because I had never seen a dictionary since we didn’t have one at home; secondly because the mailbox had lost all its magic and turned out to be, like so many other things in this world, nothing more than a bright red metal box; thirdly because my message for the girl from Milan had evidently never reached its destination. And so, I decided that when she came back from villeggiatura, I would somehow overcome all the obstacles that stood between us and, face to face, hand her all the poems that I had ever written and would continue to write for her. In the meantime, I devoted myself to a series of activities designed to speed up the summer. I fought battles with Lello and read all the comics he owned and lent me, I practiced doing flips over the bars, and I collected leaves and examined how beautiful and firm they were at first, but then how, after some time, they shriveled up and crumbled at the touch.
More than anything else, I studied my grandmother. Now that I had seen her photograph, it was clear to me that the young man with the sword in his walking stick had taken one look at her and fallen in love at least as much as I had with the girl from Milan. I had no doubt that if the grandmother from the photograph were to step off that brownish cardboard and walk into the kitchen, I could fall in love with her, and, if she’d have me, even marry her and be photographed with her, carrying my very own weapon. But what was the connection between that grandmother and the one that lived with us? Nothing. Once or twice, I made her swear that it really was her in the photograph, and even though she did, I still couldn’t find a link between the two of them, and I was certain she’d never lie under oath, at least not to me. It was her transformation that created all the problems. Sure, I had seen photos of my mother, but she was only mediocre in them while in real life she was gorgeous. What was I supposed to think? Would my mother undergo the same horrible transformation that my grandmother had? What about the girl from Milan? What an awful conundrum—I thought to myself while examining my collection of leaves—its solution definitely had something to do with death. Maybe my beautiful grandmother had, out of love, gone to toil alongside her young husband in the land of the dead under the command of the black-feathered angels. Maybe she had left an ugly grandmother in her place, I continued to hypothesize, one that was ready to shrivel up and crumble like the leaves I picked off trees and bushes. And so, sometimes, while pretending to be the great poet Orpheus intent on saving Eurydice and wandering around that hidden corner of the courtyard where the entrance to the underworld lay, I told myself that if that stone slab really did cover the entrance to the land of the dead and if I actually did manage to break through the chain, maybe I could pull out my grandmother, the one from the photograph, and even my young grandfather, and, in exchange, give the angels the grandmother we had at home, since she was a hard worker and therefore better suited to slogging away in the darkness.
I often tried to include Lello in my adventures over the course of that summer, but with little success. I wanted him to play the part of the reliable sidekick and die so that I could go and fight off the dark angels and bring him back to life before the worms devoured him. But not long after getting wounded, Lello had a growth spurt and became increasingly skeptical of my stories, which consequently made me start to doubt them, too. Even when I told them to myself, I’d soon get bored and even a little embarrassed. In all of July and August, I managed to drag him over to the entrance to the underworld only twice. The first time it was pretty fun, but the second time, in part because I started talking about the black-feathered angels, and in part because I tried to convince him that the sounds coming from underground were actually my grandfather shouting for help to get out, he got fed up. You’re an idiot, he said and walked off.
Summer came to an end with me feeling lonely and thinking, as I continued to spy on the girl’s still-empty balcony, that Lello was probably right, I was an idiot. Maybe even my grandmother, to her great dismay, had started thinking the same thing because she soon stopped fussing over me and if she saw me staring out the window, she scowled more than usual and exchanged worried looks with my mother, who said things to me like: look, I bought you Tex, and even The Little Sherriff, go on, go read them. I read Tex and I read Kit, but at the appearance of either Lizzie with her braids or Flossie without, I went back to staring out the window.
In early September, I bumped into Lello.
“So, when does this villeggiatura thing end?” I asked him.
“What villeggiatura?”
“The one that the girl from Milan is on.”
“You’re still thinking about the girl from Milan?”
“Why, you’re not?”
“I can’t believe you haven’t heard.”
“Haven’t heard what?”
“The sea was rough and the girl from Milan drowned.”
My reaction to the news was excessive: I lost all sensation in my legs; they gave out entirely. I could only feel my torso and head. It was an entirely new physical experience. My vision went cloudy. I was overcome with the same revulsion I felt whenever I saw a bit of parsley on a plate, the way it looked like a dead fly. I fainted, collapsing first onto Lello and then to the ground.
I got back up with my friend’s help. He didn’t seem overly concerned. He had an older sister who often fainted.
“Men don’t faint. You’re a girl,” he said.