White as Silence, Red as Song

by Alessandro D'Avenia

  Chapter 72

  My cast has already been off for a while, but it seems that my brain is still set in plaster because it won’t budge. That’s why I am studying with Silvia. Only she can help me catch up on all the school days I’ve missed. I don’t want to ruin my summer by having to retake things. With Silvia I am strong. I am happy. But when I think about Beatrice, I continue to feel lost. After the umpteenth time of Silvia bringing me back to earth from one of my trips to the moon, she goes to get something out of a notebook she keeps in her room, one of those diaries that girls write their thoughts in.

  In this sense girls are better than us. At least, Silvia is definitely better than me, because girls write important things down in their diaries. Every time they discover something important, they write it down, so that at any moment they can reread it and remember it.

  I have tons of important things I’d like to remember, but then I never write them down because I’m lazy. So even though I know better, I forget them and always make the same mistakes, but I don’t want to plunk myself down, my backside glued to the seat. That’s what it means to have abilities but not apply them. To have a backside and never sit on it, which is the point of having it after all . . . If I had written down everything I’ve discovered, goodness knows how many things I wouldn’t need to relearn each time. More than a diary, I think, a whole novel would come out of it. I think I’d enjoy being a writer, but I am not sure how to start, and besides, I’m easily discouraged because when I try to think about a story, I can never come up with a plot. Anyhow, Silvia has one of those diaries that helps you remember things. And slipped between the pages of that diary is a piece of paper.

  “Here. This is the rough draft of the letter we wrote to Beatrice.”

  In that moment, my soul recomposes itself. As if by some kind of miracle all the pieces of paper that the river had swallowed up with my rage and cowardice are there in front of me, pieced back together by a miracle from Silvia, who saved those words.

  “Why did you keep it?”

  Silvia doesn’t answer right away. She fiddles with the edge of the piece of paper, almost caressing it. Then, without looking at me, she whispers that she liked the words. She liked rereading them and hoped that one day her boyfriend would dedicate such beautiful words to her. Silvia searches my eyes, and for the first time I look into hers.

  There are two ways of looking at a person’s face. One is to look at the eyes as a part of the face. The other is to just look at the eyes, as if they are the face. To do it instills fear in you. Because eyes are life in miniature. White all around, like the nothingness in which life floats, then the colored iris, like the unpredictable variations that characterize a life, until plunging into the blackness of the pupil, which swallows everything like a dark well, a colorless and bottomless pit. And that’s where I dive, looking at Silvia in that way, in the deep ocean of her life, entering it and letting her enter mine: through the eyes. I can’t hold her gaze, but Silvia keeps looking at me.

  “We can rewrite it if you want, and you can take it to Beatrice. We can go together, if you like.”

  Silvia has read my thoughts.

  “It’s the only way I could do it,” I say to her with such a big smile that the edges of my mouth touch my eyes.

  Then we start studying, and when Silvia explains things, it all becomes easier. Life makes more sense.

  Chapter 73

  The Dreamer gives me an oral exam. I prepared for it with Silvia. Everybody expects a fight to the bitter end after the clash we had the other day, but nobody except Silvia knows that in the meantime there’s been ice cream and a billion gallons of tears. Everything will go smoothly. The Dreamer and I are friends now. But then he asks me some really difficult questions, and I glare at him and say, “But that’s not in the book.”

  Without flinching, he replies, “So what?”

  I remain silent. He looks at me seriously and says he thought I was more intelligent, but I must just be a typical student who repeats things by rote and is thrown off by the first slightly different question.

  “The most important answers are written between the lines of books, and you’re the one who must be able to read them!”

  Who do you think you are, Dreamer, to ruin my life and think you know everything and think that I care about the way you see things? You’re the one who sees things like that and only you. Now quit breaking my balls and give me the same test as everybody else. I am on the verge of walking back to my desk and telling him to bite me when he says:

  “Are you going to run away?”

  So I think back to Beatrice and how I fled the hospital. Something happens inside me, and the man I evolved into a few evenings ago emerges from the cave. And so I answer. Not with the swear words of a capricious child. I answer as a man would. I get a nine out of ten, for the first time in my life. And that grade isn’t about history. That grade is about my story, my life.

  Chapter 74

  Beatrice is back home. The bone marrow transplant didn’t go well. Her cancer isn’t getting better, and her red blood keeps turning white in her veins. One of the most poisonous snakes on earth can make you die in atrocious suffering with its poison. A poison able to dissolve the structure of your veins. You start losing blood from your nose and ears, and your veins slowly liquefy until you are consumed.

  That’s what is happening to Beatrice. Beatrice, the most marvelous creature to exist on the face of the earth. Beatrice, who is only seventeen and had the most beautiful red hair known to history. Beatrice, the two most beautiful green windows in the galaxy. Beatrice, a creature who exists so she can carry her beauty across the world and make it a better place with her mere presence.

  Beatrice is poisoned by this cursed white snake that wants to take her away. Why waste all this beauty? To make us suffer more. Beatrice, I beg you to stay. God, I beg you: Leave me Beatrice. Otherwise the world will become white.

  And I will be left without dreams.

  Chapter 75

  I’m seeing Niko again today. I remembered the hamburger dare we did once—who could eat the most Big Macs. It ended up 13–12 for Niko. Afterward we both threw up for three hours solid. I’ve never been so sick in my whole life. Every time we remember it we have fits of laughter. That’s why we now only get the chicken nuggets.

  Niko.

  It came to mind because Niko has proposed a new dare: the winner is the one who scores the most goals in today’s match against year 4C. The team is called Vitamin C, and they could certainly use some . . . We just need to win this game to catch up with Vandal’s team and sail smoothly toward the final. There’s just one tiny problem: I shouldn’t be playing soccer yet.

  There is only one solution in this case. To become the invisible man. I leave my radio on, close the door, stand on tiptoes, and silently escape to the soccer field. If my parents catch me, I’m done for. This time they would be the ones to break my arm and even my leg . . . But at least I’ll get to play the match, and if I score a decent number of goals, I’ll be back on track for the high-scorers’ ranking. I have to at least get ahead of Vandal.

  So here I am, with my shimmering cleats caressing the third-generation grass as if it were a girl’s cheek. Back on the field with Niko. He doesn’t know everything that has happened to me in these past few weeks because I don’t tell him everything like I tell Silvia. There’s no need. Or perhaps I’m embarrassed. But on the field we’re always the best. When we were little we both wanted to be like the twins from the Captain Tsubasa cartoon with their catapult trick, but neither of us had a twin. So when we met in high school, we realized that we were each the twin the other had always wanted. We never learned to do the catapult, but we did try once: I came out with a gargantuan bruise, and Niko banged his face against the goalpost.

  But when it’s crunch time we can triangulate in a way not even Pythagoras with his theorem could have imagined. We win hands down. I score five goals. We’re tied with Vandal’s team, and I am one goal behind
him in the goal scorers’ ranking. It couldn’t have gone any better. I change clothes quickly to get home without being seen. Niko stops me.

  “I’ve got a girlfriend.”

  He says this point-blank as he’s taking off his Pirates shirt, and the news blends in with the smell of his sweat.

  “Her name’s Alice. She’s in year 2, form H.”

  I rack my brain trying to visualize the girls from the second year, but I can’t think of anyone named Alice.

  “You don’t know her. Her parents are friends with mine and I didn’t know it. She showed up at my place for dinner one evening.”

  I’m curious to know what she’s like.

  “She’s really hot. Tall, with long black hair, dark eyes. She also does track-and-field sprints. You should see her. When I hang out with her, everybody turns to look at us.”

  I say nothing. I’m unable to get excited by the news. Niko is too busy thinking about swaggering down the street with this hot chick next to him, and too taken by our victory to realize that I’m pretending to be curious and pleased for him. I’m suddenly jolted back into the hospital room where the most beautiful girl in the world is curled up like a wounded child—and all the beauty has been sucked away by a poisonous serpent, and that beauty not only will never be mine but will never be at all.

  “I’m happy for you.”

  Niko wants to introduce her to me as soon as possible. I perfunctorily say yes, but in reality I hope to never see this so-called Alice.

  “Have you seen the new FIFA video game? We absolutely have to crack it.”

  I nod with a forced smile as I watch Niko being sucked back into the Stone Age and into Alice’s wonderland.

  “Yeah, we should . . .”

  It’s all I can bring myself to say. The only thing I can focus on is the fear of losing Beatrice. I’ve never felt so alone after winning a match with my team of Pirates.

  “It’s a matter of life or death . . .”

  “Come on, Leo, don’t exaggerate. It’s just a video game! Gotta go. Alice is waiting for me. See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I slip the keys in the lock like a thief.

  The door opens slowly. Nobody in sight. I hear music blaring from the radio. I recognize Vasco’s voice repeating, “I want a reckless life, I want a life like those in the movies,” and it comes across to me as a joke in bad taste. I close the front door. Mom hasn’t heard me, but then Terminator starts barking frantically, gripped by the pressure on his bladder caused by his overexcitement whenever he sees me opening or closing a door. Mom appears, summoned by the commotion—and there I am, with my tracksuit and backpack, with Terminator yapping away as he circles me.

  “What are you doing? Weren’t you in your room studying?”

  Leo, breathe. Everything is at stake here.

  “Yes, but I needed a break. I took Terminator out to pee . . .”

  The only excuse that can save me.

  Mom stares at me like a police officer cross-examining someone in an American cop film.

  “Then why are you so smelly?”

  “I took a quick jog. I can’t stand just studying and doing nothing else anymore . . . Sorry, Mom. I should have let you know, but Terminator was going nuts. You know what he’s like!”

  Mom’s face relaxes. I make a dash for my room, where Vasco is still screaming, before my face betrays my lie and Terminator demonstrates, with proof, that nobody has taken his incontinent bladder for a walk.

  Chapter 76

  Monday. It’s five to eight. Five hours of classes await me, with an English test in the middle. A kind of gigantic cheeseburger with a slice of marble wedged in it. In the distance I see Niko with Alice, who indeed doesn’t go unnoticed. They haven’t seen me. I can’t run into them. They’re too happy.

  I sneak away and hide behind a group of fourth years who, with the sports newspaper in hand, are checking the players’ rankings to calculate the results of their fantasy soccer leagues. I’ve been following soccer much less lately. I’m caught up in other things, and I don’t have time to watch every single program imaginable and every match of every championship taking place on a rectangle of green grass.

  Anyhow, the image of Niko and Alice looking so happy together is too much for me this morning, and five hours of torture would only make things worse. I go back out into the street and slip down a quiet side road, so there is less risk of close encounters of any kind. Goodness knows why when you decide to skip school you inevitably run into people you haven’t seen for centuries, especially Mom’s friends who, coincidentally, will be having tea with her that afternoon.

  Your son has grown so much, he’s turned into such a handsome young man . . . I bumped into him this morning in the park around noon . . .

  Leaving aside the fact that to friends of moms everywhere, all kids grow into beautiful young adults . . . Mom plays along, plays down and pretends to be proud of the scoundrel who at noon should have had his butt glued to a green chair at school rather than sprawled out on a red bench in a park.

  Enough of this. The die is cast, and render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, as Caesar said . . . At least, I think he said that. In the distance I hear the school bell ring, like the tolling of bells at a funeral. And I don’t want to die. Each step that takes me farther away from school opens a chasm of fear and transgression that forces the ground to swallow me up. Why is going to school so difficult? Why do we have to do things when we are busy sorting out other more important things? And why is the English teacher walking toward me on this very street, the quietest in the entire school neighborhood?

  I manage, just in the nick of time, to crouch over my tennis shoes, pretending to tie them while hiding behind an SUV that gives me cover. From the corner of my eye I see the teacher hurrying because she too is late and is so intent on rummaging for something in her bag that she doesn’t notice my presence and walks right by. Phew! I breathe a sigh of relief, and a second later realize that my pretend shoe-tying was carried out on the early morning steaming pile from Terminator or some other dog . . .

  My lucky day!

  Chapter 77

  When you skip school you feel like a thief. And where do thieves go after a robbery? To their hideout. My hideout is the isolated red bench in the park near the river—the same one where I spent my first night as a tramp—beneath a huge tree with low and twisted branches that make it look like an umbrella with a million spokes.

  On that bench, protected by that umbrella, I’ve conquered millions of beautiful girls, solved the trickiest problems of humanity, become a masked superhero, and devoured family-size bags of BBQ-flavored chips, which are in fact my favorite. Time passes very quickly under there, overtaking the calm flow of the river water. The secret of time is hidden on that bench, and all dreams can become reality.

  And so today is the right day to apply myself (occasionally I do apply myself, but on my own terms) on my wooden bench, under the protection of the umbrella tree. I place my backpack in a corner and sprawl out with my knees bent. The sky is only blue in patches, crossed by crisp white clouds. They’re not rain clouds but fresh sea clouds. This makes the blue even more intense. My gaze slips between the branches of the umbrella and, mixed with the color of the oval leaves, reaches out to the sky, where I see the image of my happiness emblazoned: Beatrice. Nobody pays attention to the sky until they fall in love. The clouds turn red and become her hair, spreading for thousands of miles, gently covering the world in a soft and fresh mantle.

  I have to save Beatrice if it’s the last thing I do, and I’m in the right place to do it. Only on this bench do dreams come true, so I fall asleep in the silence of the park. If we had the time and the right bench, happiness would be guaranteed. But unfortunately, somebody invented mandatory school.

  Chapter 78

  I am awakened from my torpor by something brushing against my leg. I jump up, thinking it’s some yucky grasshopper that has fallen from a branch. It’s
actually just my cell phone. Message from Jack: “The English teacher said she saw you this morning and you’re not in class. I guess you’re in trouble now.” The punk is loving this. I really am in it! How come it’s so hard to be happy, and the one time you’re trying to solve this problem for good, someone stops you? Why didn’t Silvia text me? Oh well, it is what it is.

  I send a text to nobody, just to clear my thoughts. I write millions of text messages that I don’t send, but they help me think. “I’m in my dream.” Once again T9 surprises me. I set out to write dream, but it wants to turn it into blaze. “I’m in my blaze.”

  My bench could, at any moment, turn into a blaze, set on fire by all the people sickened by my heresies in life, as they did to heretics in the Middle Ages. They would tie me to the wooden bench and set fire to me under this marvelous sky, accuse me of being a coward, a weakling, a fugitive, a loafer, a sloth. And my dream would go up in smoke. But precisely because of this I must protect it. I must protect it from my parents and my teachers, from the envious, from my enemies and their fire. Today the wood of this bench is worth much more than the wood of my scrawled-over school desk.

  I didn’t skip school because I’m a sloth but because first I need to solve a more important problem: that of happiness. Even The Dreamer said, Love doesn’t exist to make us happy but to show us how strong our capacity to bear pain is.

  That’s it. That’s exactly what I’ll say to my parents when they place me on the pyre of deserved punishment. I just wanted to love. That’s all. I want to be cured of any drug: laziness, Play-Station, YouTube, The Simpsons . . . Can you understand that?