Paolo Giordano: The Solitude of Prime Numbers

There had been others after that. Her cousin Walter at their grandmother's party, and a friend of Davide's whose name she didn't even know, and who had asked her in secret if he could please have a turn too. In a hidden corner of the school playground they had pressed their lips together for a few minutes, neither of them daring to move a muscle. When they had drawn apart, he had said thank you and walked off with his head held high and the springy step of a real man.

But now she was lagging behind. Her classmates talked about positions, love bites, and how to use your fingers, and whether it was better with or without a condom, while Alice's lips still bore the insipid memory of a mechanical kiss in third year.

"Alice? Can you hear me?" her father called again, louder this time.

"Ugh. Of course I hear you," Alice replied irritably, her voice barely audible on the other side of the door.

"Dinner's ready," her father repeated.

"I heard you, damn it," Alice said. Then, under her breath, she added, "Pain in the ass."

Soledad knew that Alice threw away her food. At first, when Alice started leaving her dinner on her plate, she said mi amorcito, eat it all up, in my country children are dying of hunger.

One evening Alice, furious, looked her straight in the eyes.

"Even if I stuff myself till I burst, the children in your country aren't going to stop dying of hunger," she said.

So now Soledad said nothing, but put less and less food on her plate. But it didn't make any difference. Alice was quite capable of weighing up her food with her eyes and choosing her three hundred calories for dinner. The rest she got rid of, somehow or other.

She ate with her right hand resting on her napkin. In front of the plate she put her wineglass, which she asked to be filled but never drank, and her water glass in such a way as to form a glass barricade. Then, during dinner, she strategically positioned the saltshaker and the oil cruet too. She waited for her family to be distracted, each absorbed in the laborious task of mastication. At that point she very carefully pushed her food, cut into small pieces, off the plate and into her napkin.

Over the course of a dinner she made at least three full napkins disappear into the pockets of her sweatpants. Before brushing her teeth she emptied them into the toilet and watched the little pieces of food disappear down the drain. With satisfaction she ran a hand over her stomach and imagined it as empty and clean as a crystal vase.

"Sol, damn it, you put cream in the sauce again," her mother complained. "How many times do I have to tell you that I can't digest it?"

Alice's mother pushed her plate away in disgust.

Alice had come to the table with a towel wrapped like a turban around her head in order to justify all the time she had spent locked away in the bathroom.

She had thought for a long time whether to ask them for it. But she'd do it anyway. She wanted it too much.

"I'd like to get a tattoo on my belly," she began.

Her father pulled his glass away from his mouth.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard," said Alice, defying him with her eyes. "I want to get a tattoo."

Alice's father ran his napkin over his mouth and eyes, as if to erase an ugly image that had run through his mind. Then he carefully refolded it and put it back on his knees. He picked up his fork again, trying to put on all his irritating self-control.

"I don't even know how you get these ideas into your head," he said.

"And what kind of tattoo would you like? Let's hear," her mother broke in, the irritable expression on her face probably due more to the cream in the sauce than to her daughter's request.

"A rose. Tiny. Viola's got one."

"Forgive me, but who might Viola be?" her father asked with a bit too much irony.

Alice shook her head, stared at the middle of the table, and felt insignificant.

"Viola's a classmate of hers," Fernanda replied emphatically. "She must have mentioned her a million times. You're not really with it, are you?"

Mr. Della Rocca looked disdainfully at his wife, as if to say no one asked you.

"Well, pardon me, but I don't think I'm all that interested in what Alice's classmates get tattooed on them," he pronounced at last. "At any rate you're not getting a tattoo."

Alice pushed another forkful of spaghetti into her napkin.

"It's not like you can stop me," she ventured, still staring at the vacant center of the table. Her voice cracked with a hint of insecurity.

"Could you repeat that?" her father asked, without altering the volume and calm of his own voice.

"Could you repeat that?" he asked more slowly.

"I said you can't stop me," replied Alice, looking up, but she was unable to endure her father's deep, chilly eyes for more than half a second.

"Is that so? As far as I know, you're fifteen years old and this binds you to the decisions of your parents for-the calculation is a very simple one-another three years," the lawyer intoned. "At the end of which you will be free to, how shall I put it, adorn your skin with flowers, skulls, or whatever you so desire."

The lawyer smiled at his plate and slipped a carefully rolled forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.

There was a long silence. Alice ran her thumb and forefinger along the edge of the tablecloth. Her mother nibbled on a bread stick and allowed her eyes to wander around the dining room. Her father pretended to eat heartily. He chewed with rolling motions of his jaw, and at the first two seconds of each mouthful he kept his eyes closed, in ecstasy.

Alice chose to deliver the blow because she really detested him, and seeing him eat like that made even her good leg go stiff.

"You don't give a damn if no one likes me," she said. "If no one will ever like me."

Her father looked at her quizzically, then returned to his dinner, as if no one had spoken.

"You don't care if you've ruined me forever."

Mr. Della Rocca's fork froze in midair. He looked at his daughter for a few seconds, seemingly distressed.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, a slight quaver to his voice.

"You know perfectly well," Alice said. "You know it'll be all your fault if I'm like this forever."

Alice's father rested his fork on the edge of his plate. He covered his eyes with one hand, as if thinking deeply about something. Then he got up and left the room, his heavy footsteps echoing across the gleaming marble hallway.

Fernanda said, oh Alice, with neither compassion nor reproach, just a resigned shake of the head. Then she followed her husband into the next room.

Alice went on staring at her full plate for about two minutes, while Soledad cleared the table, silent as a shadow. Then she stuffed the napkin filled with food into her pocket and locked herself in the bathroom.

Pietro Balossino had stopped trying to penetrate his son's obscure universe long ago. When he would accidentally catch sight of Mattia's arms, devastated by scars, he would think back to those sleepless nights spent searching the house for sharp objects left lying around, those nights when Adele, bloated with sedatives, her mouth hanging open, would sleep on the sofa because she no longer wanted to share the bed with him. Those nights when the future seemed to last only till the morning and he would count off the hours, one by one, by the chimes of distant church bells.

The conviction that one morning he would find his son facedown on a blood-soaked pillow had taken root so firmly in his head that he was now used to thinking as if Mattia had already ceased to exist, even at times like this, when he was sitting next to him in the car.