Paolo Giordano: The Solitude of Prime Numbers

They must be looking for me.

I wonder if there really are any wolves around here.

I can't feel my fingers anymore.

If only I hadn't drunk that milk.

Bo-dy weight for-ward.

Of course not, wolves would be hibernating now.

Eric will be furious.

I don't want to race.

Don't be stupid, you know very well that wolves don't hibernate.

Her thoughts were growing more and more circular and illogical.

The sun sank slowly behind Mount Chaberton as if nothing was the matter. The shadow of the mountains spread over Alice and the fog turned completely black.

When the twins were small and Michela was up to one of her tricks, like throwing herself downstairs in her baby walker or sticking a pea up one of her nostrils, so that she had to be taken to the emergency room to have it removed with special tweezers, their father would always say to Mattia, the firstborn, that his mother's womb was too small for both of them.

"God only knows what the two of you got up to in there," he said. "I reckon all those kicks you gave your sister did her some serious damage."

Then he laughed, even though it was no laughing matter. He lifted Michela in the air and buried his beard in her soft cheeks.

Mattia would watch from below. He would laugh too, letting his father's words filter through him by osmosis, without really understanding them. He let them settle at the bottom of his stomach, forming a thick, sticky layer, like the sediment of wine that has aged for a long time.

His father's laughter turned into a strained smile when, at two and a half, Michela still couldn't utter a single word. Not even mommy or poo-poo or sleepy or woof. Her inarticulate little cries rose from such a solitary, deserted place that they made their father shiver every time.

When she was five and a half a speech therapist with thick glasses sat Michela down in front of a board with four different shapes cut out-a star, a circle, a square, and a triangle-and the corresponding colored pieces to place into the holes.

Michela looked at them with wonder.

"Where does the star go, Michela?" asked the speech therapist. Michela stared at the puzzle but didn't touch anything. The doctor put the yellow star in her hand.

"Where does this go, Michela?" she asked.

Michela looked everywhere and nowhere. She put one of the points in her mouth and began to chew on it. The speech therapist took the object out of her mouth and asked the question yet again.

"Michela, do what the doctor tells you, for God's sake," snarled her father, who couldn't quite manage to stay seated, as he'd been told.

"Signor Balossino, please," the doctor said in a conciliatory voice. "Children need time."

And Michela took her time. A whole minute. Then she let out a heartrending groan that might have been of joy or of despair, and resolutely jammed the star in the square hole.

In case Mattia had not already figured out for himself that something was not right with his sister, his classmates didn't hesitate to point it out to him. Simona Volterra, for example, during the first year of school. When the teacher said Simona, you're going to sit next to Michela this month, she refused, crossing her arms, and said I don't want to sit next to her.

Mattia let Simona and the teacher argue for a while, and then said Miss, I can sit next to Michela again. Everyone had looked relieved: Michela, Simona, the teacher. Everyone except Mattia.

The twins sat in the front row. Michela spent the whole day coloring, meticulously going outside the lines and picking colors at random. Blue children, red skies, all the trees yellow. She gripped the pencil like a meat pounder, pressing down so hard that she often tore the page.

At her side Mattia learned to read and write, to add and subtract, and was the first in the class to master long division.

His brain seemed to be a perfect machine, in the same mysterious way that his sister's was so defective.

Sometimes Michela would start squirming on her chair, waving her arms around crazily, like a trapped moth. Her eyes would grow dark and the teacher, more frightened than she was, would stand and look at her, vaguely hoping that the retard really might fly away one day. Someone in the back row would giggle, someone else would go shhh. So Mattia would get up, picking up his chair so that it wouldn't scrape on the floor, and stand behind Michela, who by now was rolling her head from side to side and flailing her arms about so fast that he was afraid they would come off.

Mattia would take her hands and delicately wrap her arms around her chest.

"There, you don't have wings anymore," he'd whisper in her ear. It took Michela a few seconds before she stopped trembling. She'd stare into the distance for a few seconds, and then go back to tormenting her drawings as if nothing had happened. Mattia would sit back down, head lowered and ears red with embarrassment, and the teacher would go on with the lesson.

In the third year of primary school the twins still hadn't been invited to any of their classmates' birthday parties. Their mother noticed and thought she could solve the issue by throwing the twins a birthday party. At dinner, Mr. Balossino had rejected the suggestion out of hand. For heaven's sake, Adele, it's already embarrassing enough as it is. Mattia sighed with relief and Michela dropped her fork for the tenth time. It was never mentioned again. Then, one morning in January, Riccardo Pelotti, a kid with red hair and baboon lips, came over to Mattia's desk.

"Hey, my mom says you can come to my birthday party," he blurted, looking at the blackboard.

"So can she," he added, pointing to Michela, who was carefully smoothing the surface of the desk as if it were a bedsheet.

Mattia's face went red with excitement. He said thank you, but Riccardo, having gotten the weight off his chest, had already left.

The twins' mother immediately became anxious and took them both to Benetton for new clothes. They went to three toy shops, but Adele couldn't make up her mind.

"What sort of things is Riccardo interested in? Would he like this?" she asked Mattia, holding up a jigsaw puzzle.

"How would I know?" her son replied.

"He's a friend of yours. You must know what games he likes."

Mattia didn't think that Riccardo was a friend of his, but he couldn't explain that to his mother. So he simply shrugged.

In the end Adele opted for the Lego spaceship, the biggest and most expensive toy in the store.

"Mom, it's too much," her son protested.

"Nonsense. And besides, there are two of you. You don't want to make a bad impression."

Mattia knew all too well that, Lego or no Lego, they would make a bad impression. With Michela, anything else was impossible. He knew that Riccardo had invited them only because he'd been told to. Michela would cling to him the whole time, spill orange juice on herself, and then start whining, as she always did when she was tired.

For the first time Mattia thought it might be better to stay at home.

Or rather, he thought it might be better if Michela stayed at home.

"Mom," he began uncertainly.

Adele was looking in her bag for her wallet.

"Yes?"

Mattia took a breath.

"Does Michela really have to come to the party?"

Adele suddenly froze and stared into her son's eyes. The cashier observed the scene indifferently, her hand open on the conveyor belt, waiting for the money. Michela was mixing up the candy on the rack.

Mattia's cheeks burned, ready to receive a slap that never came.

"Of course she's coming," his mother said, and that was that.

Riccardo's house was less than a ten-minute walk away, and they were allowed to go on their own. At three o'clock on the dot Adele pushed the twins out the door.