On my last day of school, the teacher kept me behind after classes. It was Antonio Girasole’s turn to sweep—since the New Year la maestra had ceased to single me out, and the readings from the Lives of the Saints had dwindled—and for several minutes I sat silently beside the teacher’s desk while she waited for him to finish. Seeing the teacher’s eye on him, Antonio swept furiously, continually casting sidelong glances up to the front of the room; but he never seemed to move away from a small patch of floor in the back corner, enveloped there in a cloud of dust.
‘Go on, Antonio, you can finish in the morning,’ the teacher said finally. ‘Anyway I’ve told you a thousand times to be more gentle. All you do is move the dirt from one place to another.’
‘Scusi, maestra,’ Antonio said, head bowed, ‘but I can’t come in the morning. My mother is sick with diarrhoea, and I have to make the food for my brothers and sisters.’
‘Liar. I saw her on the street only this morning.’
‘She got sick this afternoon.’
‘Get out of here,’ the teacher said, ‘before I break your skull for your lies. And if you’re not here first thing in the morning, the devil himself won’t want you when I’m done with you!’
But when Antonio had gone, la maestra’s anger melted.
‘Come here, Vittorio,’ she said, motioning me around her desk; and when I had come close enough she reached out suddenly with both arms and pulled me against her, burying my face in her bosom. She held me a long moment, tight, rocking me back and forth, beginning to sob; but all I could think of was the way Fabrizio had called her quella porca a few days before, and ballooned out his arms in imitation of her.
When she drew away from me, finally, she pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to daub at her eyes.
‘Ah, Vittorio, figlio mio,’ she said, pulling in her breath. ‘You see what babies women are? Here, there’s something I want you to have.’
She reached down under the desk and pulled her Lives of the Saints from her leather bag.
‘I hope you’ll live by it,’ she said, handing the book to me. ‘I hope you’ll follow their example.’
I clutched the book guiltily under my arm.
‘Grazie.’
‘You know, Vittorio,’ she said, ‘I had a son once too. He would have been your age now, but he died when he was a baby, and the Lord hasn’t seen fit to give me another one.’
I stared at the floor. I had not imagined that teachers had babies, too. Suddenly la maestra seemed a stranger to me, as if she had split before my eyes into two separate people: one who had babies that died, the other who appeared as if from nowhere every morning in our classroom, and who faded into some shadowy limbo when school was over.
‘Go on now,’ she said, beginning to cry again. ‘I’ve already made a fool of myself. Go on home. Maybe you’ll send me a letter from America, no?’
‘Sí,’ I murmured.
She wiped at her tears.
‘Here, give me the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll write my address on the front page, so you’ll know where to send it.’
‘Signora Gelsomina Amicone,’ she wrote, in her large, careful script, ‘Piazza del Tomolo No. 3, Rocca Secca’; but I still could not make any sense of it, could not connect her to a name and address, to a table and chairs in some dim kitchen, to a bed. I had an image of her going into the market in Rocca Secca to buy her vegetables, like the other big-boned women there, talking like them with the traders, haggling over the price of a cabbage or bag of onions; but the image did not fit.
‘Go on now,’ she whispered finally, still wiping at her tears.
She leaned forward and planted a last silent kiss on my forehead.
‘Buona fortuna.’