The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  The principal paused. He leaned back in his comfortable armchair and opened a folder, which he didn’t need to read. Then he closed it again, as if remembering all of a sudden that there were other people in his office. With carefully chosen words he suggested to the Balossinos that perhaps the science high school was not capable of responding fully to their son’s needs.

  When, at dinner, Mattia’s father had asked him if he really wanted to change schools, Mattia had replied with a shrug and studied the dazzling reflection of fluorescent light on the knife with which he was supposed to be cutting his meat.

  “It isn’t really raining crooked,” said Mattia, looking out the car window and jerking his father out of his thoughts.

  “What?” said Pietro, instinctively shaking his head.

  “There’s no wind outside. Otherwise the leaves on the trees would be moving as well,” Mattia went on.

  His father tried to follow his reasoning. In fact none of it meant anything to him and he suspected that it was merely another of his son’s eccentricities.

  “So?” he asked.

  “The raindrops are running down the window at an angle, but that’s just an effect of our motion. By measuring the angle with the vertical, you could also calculate the fall velocity.”

  Mattia traced the trajectory of a drop with his finger. He brought his face close to the window and breathed on it. Then, with his index finger, he drew a line in the condensation.

  “Don’t breathe on the windows, you’ll leave marks.”

  Mattia didn’t seem to have heard him.

  “If we couldn’t see anything outside the car, if we didn’t know we were moving, there would be no way of telling whether it was the raindrops’ fault or our own,” said Mattia.

  “Fault for what?” his father asked, bewildered and slightly annoyed.

  “For them coming down so crooked.”

  Pietro Balossino nodded seriously, without understanding. They had arrived. He put the car in neutral and pulled on the hand brake. Mattia opened the door and a gust of fresh air blew inside.

  “I’ll come and get you at one,” said Pietro.

  Mattia nodded. Mr. Balossino leaned slightly forward to kiss him, but the belt restrained him. He leaned back into the seat and watched his son get out and close the door behind him.

  The new school was in a lovely residential area in the hills. It had been built in the Fascist era, and in spite of recent renovations, it remained a blot on the landscape amid a row of sumptuous villas; a parallelepiped of white concrete, with four horizontal rows of evenly spaced windows and two green iron fire escapes.

  Mattia climbed the two flights of steps leading to the main door but kept his distance from all the little groups of kids who were waiting for the first bell, getting wet from the rain.

  Once inside, he looked for the floor plan with the layout of the classrooms, so that he wouldn’t have to ask the janitors for help.

  F2 was at the end of the corridor on the second floor. Mattia took a deep breath and entered. He waited, leaning against the back wall, with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his backpack and the look of someone who wanted to disappear into the wall.

  As the students were taking their seats, their new faces glanced at him apprehensively. No one smiled at him. Some of them whispered in each other’s ears and Mattia was sure they were talking about him.

  He kept an eye on the desks that were still free, and when even the one next to a girl with red nail polish was taken, he felt relieved. The teacher came into the classroom and Mattia slipped onto the last empty chair, next to the window.

  “Are you the new boy?” asked his neighbor, who looked just as alone as he did.

  Mattia nodded without looking at him.

  “I’m Denis,” he said, extending his hand.

  Mattia shook it weakly and said nice to meet you.

  “Welcome,” said Denis.

  5

  Viola Bai was admired and feared with equal passion by her classmates, because she was so beautiful she made people uneasy, and because at the age of fifteen she knew more about life than any of her contemporaries did; or at least that was the impression she gave. On Monday mornings, during break, the girls congregated around her desk and listened greedily to the account of her weekend. Most times this was a skillful reimagining of what Serena, Viola’s older sister by eight years, had told her the day before. Viola transferred the stories to herself, but embellished them with sordid, and often completely invented, details, which to her friends’ ears sounded mysterious and disturbing. She talked about this or that bar, without ever having set foot in them, and she was capable of giving minute descriptions of the psychedelic lighting, or of the malicious smile that the bartender had flashed at her as he served her a Cuba libre.

  In most cases she ended up either in bed with the bartender or out behind the bar, among the beer kegs and the cases of vodka, where he took her from behind, covering her mouth with his hand to keep her from screaming.

  Viola Bai knew how to tell a story. She knew that all the violence is contained in the precision of a detail. She knew how to work the timing so that the bell rang just as the bartender was busy with the fly of his name-brand jeans. At that moment her devoted audience slowly dispersed, their cheeks red with envy and indignation. Viola was made to promise that she would go on with her story at the next bell, but she was too intelligent to actually do it. She always ended up dismissing the whole thing with a pout of her perfect mouth, as if what had happened to her was of no importance. It was just one more detail in her extraordinary life, and she was already light-years ahead of everyone else.

  She had actually tried sex, as well as some of the drugs whose names she liked to list, but she had been with only one boy, and only once. It had happened at the shore. A friend of her sister’s who had smoked and drunk too much that evening to realize that a little thirteen- year-old girl was too young for certain things. He had fucked her hastily, in the street, behind a trash bin. As they walked back, heads lowered, to rejoin the others, Viola had taken his hand but he had snatched it away and asked what are you doing? Her cheeks burned and the heat still trapped between her legs had made her feel alone. In the days that followed the boy didn’t say a word to her and Viola had confided in her sister, who had laughed at her naïveté and said wise up, what did you expect?

  Viola’s devoted audience was made up of Giada Savarino, Federica Mazzoldi, and Giulia Mirandi. Together they formed a compact and ruthless phalanx: the four bitches, as some of the boys at the school called them. Viola had chosen them one by one and had demanded a little sacrifice from each of them, because her friendship was something you had to earn. She alone decided if you were in or out, and her decisions were obscure and unequivocal.

  Alice observed Viola on the sly. From her desk two rows back, she fed off the broken sentences and fragments of torrid tales; then in the evening, alone in her room, she savored every detail.

  Before that Wednesday morning Viola had never spoken a word to her. It was a kind of initiation and had to be done properly. None of the girls ever knew for sure whether Viola was improvising or whether she planned the torture in advance—but they all agreed that it was brilliant.

  Alice hated the locker room. Her oh-so-perfect classmates stood around for as long as possible in their bras and underwear so as to make the others envious. They assumed stiff, unnatural poses, sucking in their stomachs and thrusting out their tits. They sighed at the cracked mirror that covered one of the walls. Look, they’d say as they sized up their hips, which could not have been better proportioned or more seductive.

  On Wednesdays Alice wore her shorts under her jeans so that she wouldn’t have to get completely undressed. The others would look at her suspiciously, imagining the horrors that were surely hidden under her clothes. She would turn her back to take off her sweater so they wouldn’t see her belly.

  She would put on her sneakers and tuck her shoes, neatly parallel, against the wall, and
then carefully fold her jeans. Her classmates’ clothes, in contrast, tumbled chaotically from the wooden benches, their shoes scattered about and upside down because they had yanked them off with their feet.

  “Alice, do you have a sweet tooth?” Viola asked.

  It took Alice a few seconds to convince herself that Viola Bai was actually talking to her. She was sure she was invisible to her. She pulled the two ends of her shoelaces, but the knot came untied between her fingers.

  “Me?” she asked, looking around uneasily.

  “I don’t see any other Alices.”

  The other girls giggled.

  “No. Not particularly.”

  Viola got up from the bench and came closer to her. Alice felt those marvelous eyes on her, bisected by the shadow of her bangs.

  “But you like gumdrops, don’t you?” Viola continued in her honeyed voice.

  “Yeah. I guess. Pretty much.”

  Alice bit her lip and chided herself for being so wishy-washy. She pressed her bony back against the wall. A tremor ran down her good leg. The other remained inert, as always.

  “What do you mean pretty much? Everyone likes gumdrops. Isn’t that right, girls?” Viola addressed her three friends without even turning around.

  “Mm-hmmm. Everyone,” they echoed. Alice noticed a strange trepidation in Federica Mazzoldi’s eyes as she stared at her from the other end of the locker room.

  “Yes, actually, I do like them,” she corrected herself. She was starting to feel frightened, even though she didn’t yet know why.

  In the first year, the four bitches had grabbed Alessandra Mirano, the one who ended up being thrown out and going to beautician school, and dragged her into the boys’ locker room. They shut her inside and two boys pulled their cocks out in front of her. From the corridor Alice had heard the four torturers egging them on and laughing hysterically.

  “I thought so. Now, would you like a gumdrop?” Viola asked.

  If I say yes, who knows what they’re going to make me eat, Alice thought.

  If I say no, Viola might get pissed off and I’ll end up in the boys’ locker room as well.

  She sat in silence like a moron.

  “Come on. It’s not such a hard question,” Viola said mockingly. She took a handful of fruit candies from her pocket.

  “You girls back there, what flavor do you want?” she asked.

  Giulia Mirandi came over to Viola and looked into her hand. Viola didn’t take her eyes off Alice, who felt her body crumpling under the gaze like a sheet of newspaper burning in the fireplace.

  “There’s orange, raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, and peach,” Giulia said. She threw a fleeting, apprehensive glance at Alice, without letting Viola see.

  “I’ll have raspberry,” said Federica.

  “Peach,” said Giada.

  Giulia tossed them their candies and unwrapped the orange one for herself. She slipped it into her mouth and then took a step back to return the stage to Viola.

  “Blackberry and strawberry are left. So do you want one or not?”

  Maybe she just wants to give me a candy, Alice thought.

  Maybe they just want to see whether I eat or not.

  It’s just a candy.

  “I prefer strawberry,” she said quietly.

  “Damn it, that’s my favorite too,” Viola said, giving a terrible performance of disappointment. “But I’ll happily give it to you.”

  She unwrapped the strawberry candy and let the paper fall to the ground. Alice held out her hand to take it.

  “Wait a minute,” Viola said. “Don’t be so greedy.”

  She bent down, holding the candy between her thumb and index finger. She rubbed it along the filthy locker room floor. Walking with her knees bent, she dragged it slowly along the whole length of the room to Alice’s left, close to the wall, where the dirt had coagulated in balls of dust and tangles of hair.

  Giada and Federica were dying of laughter. Giulia nervously chewed on her lip. The other girls had figured out where things were going and left, closing the door behind them.

  When she got to the corner, Viola headed for the sink, where the girls splashed their armpits and faces after gym. With the candy she wiped up the whitish slime that lined the inside of the drain.

  Then she turned to Alice and held the revolting object under her nose.

  “There,” she said. “Strawberry, just what you wanted.”

  She wasn’t laughing. She had the serious, determined look of one who is doing something painful but necessary.

  Alice shook her head no. She pressed herself even closer to the wall.

  “What? Don’t you want it anymore?” Viola asked her.

  “Go on,” Federica cut in. “You asked for it and now you can eat it.”

  Alice gulped.

  “What if I don’t?” she summoned the courage to say.

  “If you don’t eat it, you’ll accept the consequences,” Viola replied enigmatically.

  “What consequences?”

  “You can’t know the consequences. Ever.”

  They want to take me to the boys, Alice thought. Or else they’ll strip me and not give me back my clothes.

  Trembling, but almost imperceptibly, she held her hand out

  toward Viola, who dropped the filthy candy into her palm. She slowly brought it to her mouth.

  The others had fallen silent, and seemed to be thinking, no, she’s not really going to do it. Viola was impassive.

  Alice put the gumdrop on her tongue and felt the hairs that were stuck to it dry up her saliva. She chewed only twice and something squeaked between her teeth.

  Don’t throw up, she thought. Do not throw up.

  She choked back an acidic spurt of gastric juices and swallowed the candy. She felt it as it went down, like a stone, along her esophagus.

  The fluorescent light on the ceiling gave off an electrical hum and the voices of the kids in the gym were a formless mixture of shouts and laughter. Here in the basement the air was heavy and the windows were too small to allow it to circulate.

  Viola stared solemnly at Alice. Without smiling she nodded her head as if to say now we can go. Then she turned around and left the locker room, passing the other three without so much as a glance.

  6

  There was something important you had to know about Denis. To tell the truth, Denis thought it was the only thing about him worth knowing, so he’d never told anyone.

  His secret had a terrible name, which settled like a nylon cloth over his thoughts and wouldn’t let them breathe. There it was, weighing heavily inside his head like an inevitable punishment with which he’d have to come to terms sooner or later.

  When, at age ten, his piano teacher had guided his fingers through the D major scale, pressing his hot palm on the back of Denis’s hand, Denis had been unable to breathe. He bent his torso slightly forward to hide the erection that had exploded in his sweatpants. For his entire life he would think of that moment as true love, and would fumble around every corner of his existence in search of the clinging warmth of his teacher’s touch.

  Each time memories like this surfaced in his mind, making his neck and hands sweat, Denis would lock himself in the bathroom and masturbate fiercely, sitting backward on the toilet. The pleasure lasted only a moment and radiated just a few inches beyond his penis. But the guilt rained down on him from above like a shower of dirty water. It ran down his skin and nestled in his guts, making everything slowly rot, the way that damp eats away at the walls of an old house.

  During biology class, in the basement lab, Denis watched Mattia dissect a piece of steak, separating the white fibers from the red. He wanted to stroke his hands. He wanted to discover whether that cumbersome lump of desire that had taken root in his head would really melt like butter simply through contact with the classmate he was in love with.

  They were sitting close to each other. Both rested their forearms on the lab bench. A row of transparent flasks, beakers, and test tubes sepa
rated them from the rest of the class and deflected the rays of light, distorting everything beyond that line.

  Mattia was intent on his work and hadn’t looked up for at least a quarter of an hour. He didn’t like biology, but he pursued the task with the same rigor he applied to all subjects. Organic matter, so violable and full of imperfections, was incomprehensible to him. The vital odor of the soft piece of meat aroused nothing in him but a faint disgust.

  With a pair of tweezers he extracted a thin white filament and deposited it on the glass slide. He brought his eyes to the microscope and adjusted the focus. He recorded every detail in his squared notebook and made a sketch of the enlarged image.

  Denis sighed deeply. Then, as if taking a backward dive, he found the courage to speak.

  “Mattia, do you have a secret?” he asked his friend.

  Mattia seemed not to have heard, but the scalpel with which he was cutting another section of muscle slipped from his hand and rang out on the metal surface. He slowly picked it up.

  Denis waited a few seconds. Mattia sat perfectly still, holding the knife a few inches above the meat.

  “You can tell me; you can tell me your secret,” Denis went on. His veins pulsed with trepidation. Now that he had pushed himself over the edge and into his classmate’s fascinating intimacy, he had no intention of letting go.

  “I’ve got one too, you know,” he said.

  Mattia cleanly sliced the muscle in half, as if he wanted to kill something that was already dead.

  “I don’t have any secrets,” he said under his breath.

  “If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine,” Denis pressed. He moved his stool closer and Mattia visibly stiffened. He stared, expressionless, at the scrap of meat.

  “We have to finish the experiment,” he said in a monotonous voice. “Otherwise we won’t be able to finish the chart.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the chart,” said Denis. “Tell me what you did to your hands.”