Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Alice smiled nervously but couldn't make her mind up. In her head she imagined with unsettling clarity the moment when a boy would slip his hands under her shirt. When he would discover that, underneath the clothes that fell so well, there was nothing but chubby flesh and flabby skin.

Now they were leaning on the fire escape railing on the third floor, watching the boys play football in the courtyard with a yellow ball that seemed not to be blown up enough.

"What about Trivero?" Viola asked.

"I don't know who he is."

"What do you mean you don't know who he is? He's in the fifth year. He used to row with my sister. They say some interesting things about him."

"What sort of things?"

Viola gestured with her hands, indicating something long, and then laughed loudly, enjoying the disconcerting effect of her allusions. Alice felt her face flush with shame, but she also felt a marvelous certainty that her loneliness was truly over.

They went down to the ground floor and passed the snacks and drinks machines. Students had formed a chaotic line, chinking the coins in their jeans pockets.

"Okay, but you've got to decide," said Viola.

Alice spun on her heels. She looked around, disoriented.

"That one looks cute," she said, pointing at two boys in the distance, near the window. They were standing close together, but they weren't talking or looking at each other.

"Who?" Viola asked. "The one with the bandage or the other one?"

"The one with the bandage."

Viola stared at her. Her sparkling eyes were as wide as two oceans.

"You're crazy," she said. "You know what he did?"

Alice shook her head.

"He stuck a knife in his hand, on purpose. Right here at school."

Alice shrugged.

"He looks interesting," she said.

"Interesting? He's a psychopath. With a guy like that you'll end up chopped to pieces and stuffed in a freezer."

Alice smiled, but went on looking at the boy with the bandaged hand. There was something in the way he kept his head tilted down that made her want to go over to him, lift his chin, and say to him look at me, I'm here.

"Are you absolutely sure?" Viola asked her.

"Yes," said Alice.

Viola shrugged.

"So let's go," she said.

She took Alice by the hand and pulled her toward the two boys at the window.

Mattia was looking out the opaque windows of the atrium. It was a bright day, an anticipation of spring at the beginning of March. The strong wind that had cleared the air during the night seemed to sweep time away too, making it run faster. Mattia tried to estimate how far away the horizon was by counting the roofs of the houses that he could see from there.

Denis was surreptitiously staring at him, trying to guess his thoughts. They hadn't talked about what had happened in the biology lab. In fact, they didn't talk much at all, but they spent time together, each in his own abyss, held safe and tight by the other's silence.

"Hi," Mattia heard someone say, too close to him.

Reflected in the glass he saw two girls standing behind him, holding hands. He turned around.

Denis looked at him quizzically. The girls seemed to be waiting for something.

"Hi," Mattia said softly. He lowered his head, to protect himself from one of the girls' piercing eyes.

"I'm Viola and this is Alice," she continued. "We're in 2B."

Mattia nodded. Denis's mouth fell open. Neither of them said anything.

"Well?" Viola said. "Aren't you going to introduce yourselves?"

Mattia spoke his name in a low voice, as if just remembering it himself. He offered Viola a limp hand, the one without the bandage, and she shook it firmly. The other girl barely touched it and smiled, looking in another direction.

Denis introduced himself next, just as clumsily.

"We wanted to invite you to my birthday party the Saturday after next," said Viola.

Again Denis sought Mattia's eyes, but Mattia responded by staring at Alice's timid half-smile. Her lips seemed so pale and thin to him, as if her mouth had been carved by a sharp scalpel.

"Why?" he asked.

Viola looked at him askance and then turned to Alice, with an expression that said I told you he was mad.

"What do you mean why? Obviously because we feel like inviting you."

"No, thanks," said Mattia. "I can't come."

Denis, relieved, quickly added that he couldn't come either.

Viola ignored him and concentrated on the boy with the bandage.

"You can't? I wonder what could be keeping you so busy on a Saturday evening," she said provocatively. "Do you have to play video games with your little friend? Or were you planning on cutting your veins again?"

Viola felt a tremor of terror and excitement as she uttered those last words. Alice gripped her hand harder to make her stop.

Mattia reflected that he had forgotten the number of roofs and wouldn't have time to count them again before the bell.

"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.

Since 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.