The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  16

  The other guests had scattered about in small groups around the living room. Most of the boys were bobbing their heads back and forth to the music, while the girls scanned the room. Some held drinks in their hands; six or seven were dancing to “A Question of Time.” Mattia wondered how they could feel so at ease, moving around like that in front of everyone. Then he realized it was the most natural thing in the world, which was precisely why he was incapable of it.

  Denis had disappeared. Mattia crossed the living room and went to look for him in Viola’s room. He even looked in her sister’s and her parents’ rooms. He looked in both bathrooms and in one he found a boy and a girl from school. She was sitting on the toilet and he was on the floor in front of her, legs crossed. They both wore sad and questioning expressions and Mattia hastily closed the door.

  He went back to the living room and out onto the balcony. The hill dropped away darkly and below them lay the entire city, a series of bright white dots arranged homogeneously, as far as the eye could see. Mattia leaned over the railing and looked through the trees of the grounds of Villa Bai, but he couldn’t see anyone. He went back inside; anxiety began to shorten his breath.

  A spiral staircase led from the sitting room to a dark attic. He climbed the first steps, then stopped.

  Where has he gotten to? he thought.

  He went on, up to the top. The light that filtered from below allowed him to make out the shadow of Denis, standing in the middle of the room.

  He called to him. All through their friendship he had uttered his name only two or three times at the most. He had never needed to, because Denis was always right next to him, like a natural extension of his limbs.

  “Go away,” Denis replied.

  Mattia looked for the switch and turned on the light. The room was enormous, lined with tall bookshelves. The only other furniture was a big, empty wooden desk. Mattia had the impression that no one had come up to this floor of the house for a long time.

  “It’s almost eleven. we have to go,” he said.

  Denis didn’t reply. His back was turned, and he stood in the middle of a big rug. Mattia walked over to his friend. He saw that Denis had been crying. He was blowing through his teeth as he breathed, his eyes fixed straight ahead and his half-open lips trembling slightly.

  It took Mattia a few seconds to notice a desk lamp that lay shattered at his feet.

  “What have you done?” he asked.

  Denis’s breathing turned into a wheeze.

  “Denis, what have you done?”

  Mattia tried to touch his friend’s shoulder, but Denis gave a violent start. Mattia shook him.

  “What have you done?”

  “I . . .” Denis began. Then he froze.

  “You what?”

  Denis opened his left hand and showed Mattia a fragment of the lamp, a splinter of green glass, grown opaque from sweat, that seemed to swallow up the light.

  “I wanted to feel what you feel,” he whispered.

  Mattia didn’t understand. He stumbled back, confused. A burning sensation exploded in his gut and filled his arms and legs.

  “But then I couldn’t do it,” said Denis.

  He held the palms of his hands upward, as if waiting for something.

  Mattia was about to ask him why, but didn’t. The music rose up, muffled, from below. The low frequencies passed through the floor, but the higher ones seemed trapped.

  Denis sniffed. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Mattia nodded, but neither of them made a move. Then Denis turned and abruptly walked toward the stairs. Mattia followed him across the living room and then outside, where the cool night air was waiting to give them back their breath.

  17

  Viola decided if you were in or out. On Sunday morningGiada Savarino’s father had phoned Viola’s father, waking up the entire Bai household. It was a long phone call and Viola, still in pajamas, had pressed her ear to her parents’ bedroom door, but she hadn’t been able to catch a single word of the conversation.

  When she heard the bed creak, she had run back to her room and hid under the blankets, pretending to be asleep. Her father had woken her up saying you can tell me what happened later, but for now let me tell you that there will be no more parties in this house and, in fact, you can forget about parties of any kind for a good long while. At lunch her mother had asked her to explain the broken lamp in the attic and her sister hadn’t come to her defense, because she had noticed that Viola had laid her hands on her personal stock.

  She locked herself away in her room all day, disheartened and banned from using the phone. She couldn’t get Alice and Mattia, and their way of holding hands, out of her head. As she scratched away the last remnants of nail polish she decided: Alice was out.

  On Monday morning, locked in her bathroom at home, Alice finally removed the gauze that covered her tattoo. She balled it up and then threw it in the toilet, along with the crumbled biscuits that she hadn’t eaten for breakfast.

  She looked at the violet reflected in the mirror and thought that, for the second time, she had changed her body forever. She shivered with a pleasant mixture of regret and trepidation. She thought that this body was hers alone, that if she felt like it she could even destroy it, lay waste to it with indelible marks, or let it dry out like a flower picked on a whim by a child and then left to die on the ground.

  That morning she would show her tattoo to Viola and the others, in the girls’ bathroom. She would tell them how she and Mattia had kissed for a long time. There was no need to invent anything more than that. If they asked her for details, she would merely go along with their fantasies.

  In class she left her backpack on her chair and headed over to Viola’s desk to join the others. As she approached, she heard Giulia Mirandi saying here she comes. She said hi to everyone, beaming, but no one replied. She leaned over to give Viola two kisses on the cheeks, as Viola had taught her to do, but her friend didn’t move an inch.

  Alice stood up again and found herself looking into four hostile faces.

  “We were all ill yesterday,” Viola began.

  “Really?” Alice asked, with genuine concern. “What was wrong with you?”

  “A terrible stomachache, all of us,”Giada broke in aggressively.

  Alice saw Giada vomiting on the floor again and felt like saying I’m not surprised with the amount you all drank.

  “There was nothing wrong with me,” she said.

  “Of course,” sneered Viola, looking at the others. “There was no doubt about that.”

  Giada and Federica laughed; Giulia lowered her eyes.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Alice asked, disoriented.

  “You know very well what I mean,” Viola retorted, suddenly changing her tone and fixing her with her marvelous, piercing eyes.

  “No, I don’t know,” Alice defended herself.

  Giada attacked. “You poisoned us.”

  “What are you saying? What do you mean ‘poisoned’?”

  Giulia butted in, timidly. “Come on, girls, that’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. She poisoned us,”Giada repeated. “Who knows what disgusting things she put in that dessert.”

  She turned back toward Alice. “You wanted to make us all sick, didn’t you? well, it worked, well done.”

  Alice listened to the sequence of words, but it took her a few seconds to reconstruct their meaning. She looked at Giulia, who, with her big blue eyes, was saying sorry, there’s nothing I can do. Then she sought shelter in Viola’s eyes, but Viola returned an empty gaze.

  Giada held a hand over her belly, as if she were still having convulsions.

  “But I made it with Soledad. We bought all the ingredients at the supermarket.”

  No one replied. They looked in different directions, as if waiting for the murderer to leave.

  “It wasn’t Sol’s dessert. I ate it too, and I didn’t get sick,” Alice lied.

  “You’re a l
iar,” pounced Federica Mazzoldi, who hadn’t said a word till then. “You didn’t even taste it. Everyone knows that—”

  She suddenly froze.

  “Please, stop,” Giulia begged. She looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

  Alice put a hand over her flat stomach. She could feel her heart beating under her skin.

  “Everyone knows what?” she asked them in a calm voice.

  Viola Bai slowly shook her head. Alice stared at her former friend in silence, waiting for words that didn’t come but that floated in the air like tongues of transparent smoke. She didn’t even move when the bell rang. Ms. Tubaldo, the science teacher, had to call her twice before she finally went to sit in her place.

  18

  Denis hadn’t come to school. On Saturday, on the way home, he and Mattia hadn’t looked at each other once. Denis had responded to Mattia’s father in monosyllables, and hadn’t even said good-bye when he got out of the car.

  Mattia rested a hand on the empty chair beside him. Now and again Denis’s words in that dark attic ran through his head. Then they slipped away, too quickly for him to get to the bottom of their meaning.

  He realized it didn’t really matter to him to understand them. He merely wished Denis was there, to shield him from everything beyond his desk.

  The day before, his parents had made him sit down on the sofa, in the living room. They had sat in the chairs opposite him. Then his father said so tell us about the party. Mattia had clenched his hands tightly, but then stretched them out on his knees so that his parents could see them. He had shrugged and replied in a quiet voice that there was nothing to tell. His mother had gotten nervously to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen. His father, on the other hand, had come over to him and clapped him twice on the shoulder, as if consoling him for something. Mattia remembered how, when he was little, on the hottest days of summer, his father would blow on his and Michela’s faces in turn, to cool them down. He remembered what the sweat felt like as it evaporated from his skin, ever so lightly, and was filled with a searing nostalgia for a part of the world that had drowned in the river along with Michela.

  He wondered if his classmates knew everything. Maybe even his teachers knew. He felt their furtive glances weaving together above his head like a fishing net.

  He opened his history book at random and started learning by heart the whole sequence of dates that appeared from that page onward. The list of numbers, lined up without any logical meaning, formed an ever longer trail in his head. As he followed it, Mattia slowly moved away from the thought of Denis standing in the shadow and forgot the void that now sat in his place.

  19

  During break time Alice slipped into the infirmary on the second floor, a narrow white room furnished only with a hospital bed and a mirrored cabinet with the essentials for first aid. She had ended up there only once before, when she had fainted during PE because in the previous forty hours she had eaten only two whole-grain crackers and a low-calorie snack. That day the gym teacher, in his green Diadora tracksuit, his whistle, which he never used, around his neck, had said to her think carefully about what you’re doing, think very carefully. Then he had gone out, leaving her alone under the fluorescent light, without anything to do or look at for the whole next hour.

  Alice found the first-aid cabinet open. She took a wad of cotton wool the size of a plum and the bottle of rubbing alcohol. She closed the door and looked around for a heavy object. There was only the wastepaper basket, made of hard plastic, a dull color halfway between red and brown. She prayed that no one would hear the noise from outside and shattered the mirror of the little cupboard with the bottom of the basket.

  Then, being careful not to cut herself, she picked up a big triangular splinter of glass. She caught the reflection of her own right eye and felt proud that she hadn’t cried, not even a bit. She stuffed everything into the center pocket of the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing and went back to class.

  She spent the rest of the morning in a state of torpor. She never even glanced at Viola and the others and didn’t listen to a single word of the lesson on the theater of Aeschylus.

  As she was leaving the class, behind all her classmates, Giulia Mirandi furtively took her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into her ear. Then she kissed her on the cheek and ran after the others, who were already in the hallway.

  Alice waited for Mattia in the atrium, at the bottom of the linoleum-covered staircase down which poured a chaotic stream of pupils headed for the exit. She rested a hand on the banister. The cold metal gave her a sense of tranquillity.

  Mattia came down the stairs enveloped by that foot and a half of emptiness that no one other than Denis dared occupy. His black hair fell over his forehead in tousled curls. He watched carefully where he placed his feet, leaning slightly backward as he descended. Alice called out to him, but he didn’t turn around. She called again, more loudly now, and he looked up, said an embarrassed hi, and made as if to head toward the glass doors.

  Alice elbowed her way through the other students and joined him. She took him by the arm and he gave a start.

  “You have to come with me,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “You have to help me do something.”

  Mattia looked around nervously, in search of some kind of threat.

  “My father’s waiting for me outside,” he said.

  “Your father will wait. You have to help me. Now,” said Alice.

  Mattia snorted. Then he said okay but he couldn’t have said why.

  “Come.”

  Alice took him by the hand, as she had at Viola’s party, but this time Mattia’s fingers spontaneously closed around hers.

  They left the crowd of students. Alice walked quickly, as if she were escaping from someone. They slipped into the deserted corridor on the second floor. The doors leading to the empty classrooms conveyed a sense of abandonment.

  They went into the girls’ bathroom. Mattia hesitated. He was about to say I’m not supposed to be here, but then he let her drag him in. when Alice took him inside a cubicle and locked the door they were so close that his legs started trembling. The space not taken up by the old-style hole-in-the-ground toilet was nothing more than a thin strip of tiles and there was barely room for their four feet. There were pieces of toilet paper scattered on the ground half-stuck to the floor.

  Now she’s going to kiss me, he thought. And all you have to do is kiss her back. It’ll be easy; everyone knows how.

  Alice unzipped her shiny jacket and started to undress, just as she had at Viola’s house. She untucked her T-shirt and lowered the same pair of jeans halfway down her bottom. She didn’t look at Mattia; it was as if she were there on her own.

  In place of Saturday evening’s white gauze she had a flower tattooed on her skin. Mattia was about to say something, but then fell silent and looked away. Something stirred between his legs and he tried to distract himself. He read some of the graffiti on the wall, without grasping its meaning. He noticed how none of the writing was parallel to the line of tiles. Almost all of it was at the same angle to the edge of the floor and Mattia worked out that it was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees.

  “Take this,” said Alice.

  She handed him a piece of glass, reflective on one side and black on the other, and as sharp as a dagger. Mattia didn’t understand. She lifted his chin, just as she had imagined doing the first time they had met.

  “You’ve got to get rid of it. I can’t do it on my own,” she said to him.

  Mattia looked at the glass shard and then at Alice’s right hand, which pointed at the tattoo on her belly.

  She anticipated his protest.

  “I know you know how to do it,” she said. “I never want to see it again. Please, do it for me.”

  Mattia rolled the shard in his hand and a shiver ran down his arm.

  “But—” he said.

  “Do it for me,” Alice interrupted him, putting a
hand to his lips to shut him up and then removing it immediately.

  Do it for me, thought Mattia. Those four words stuck in his ear and made him kneel in front of Alice.

  His heels touched the wall behind him. He didn’t know how to position himself. Uncertain, he touched the skin next to the tattoo, to stretch it better. His face had never been so close to a girl’s body. The natural thing to do seemed to be to breathe in deeply, to discover its smell.

  He brought the shard close to her flesh. His hand was steady as he made a little cut the size of a fingertip. Alice trembled and let out a cry.

  Mattia recoiled and hid the piece of glass behind his back, as if to deny that it had been him.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  He looked up. Alice wept silently. Her eyes were closed, clenched in an expression of pain.

  “But I don’t want to see it anymore,” she sobbed.

  It was clear to him that she had lost her nerve, and he felt relieved. He stood up and wondered if it would be better to leave.

  Alice wiped away the drop of blood trickling down her belly. She buttoned up her jeans, while Mattia tried to think of something reassuring to say.

  “You’ll get used to it. In the end you won’t even notice it anymore,” he said.

  “How is that possible? It will always be there, right before my eyes.”

  “Exactly,” said Mattia. “Which is precisely why you won’t see it anymore.”

  THE OTHER ROOM

  1995

  20

  Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.

  For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn’t make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.