White as Silence, Red as Song

by Alessandro D'Avenia

  I will fly . . .”

  Silence. When I look up, Silvia is gone. Somebody whistles and somebody boos at me. Somebody laughs, maybe out of envy. Somebody claps.

  The door of the enchanted castle opens. A shadow slowly walks toward me. I stare at the face approaching me in the semidarkness.

  “Silvia is at her dance class. I told you from up there, but you couldn’t hear me. She should be back anytime now. You’re good though! I listened carefully. It was one hundred percent you . . .”

  Silvia’s mother smiles. I mistook her for Silvia, but it’s her mother. Fortunately the darkness hides the redness spreading across my face, which could explode at any moment into a thousand pieces, like the worst of horror movies.

  “Do you want to wait upstairs until she gets back?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll wait for her here.”

  “If that’s what you want. But . . . sing it to her again.”

  I sit on the steps outside the front door with my guitar, like a busker asking for money for his art, trying to conceal his shame or some secret in the heart of night. Terminator curls up peacefully at my feet for the first time in his life.

  I close my eyes and sing again, almost in a whisper. My fingers play the notes of the melody like a flying carpet, my voice soaring freely across the city rooftops and seizing the stars as if they are the notes of my song, floating in the infinite celestial musical score.

  When I open my eyes, a face is scrutinizing me.

  That face with caring blue eyes breaks slowly into a smile, like a rusty door creaking open, and from that partially opened door a sudden gush of forgotten happiness inundates me—the kind of happiness that, after Beatrice’s death, I no longer felt. It whirls and wraps itself around me, submerging me and whispering to me almost as if singing, “And I will always manage to escape among colors to be discovered . . .”

  We hug like two pieces of Lego.

  “It seems to me that we match perfectly,” I whisper in her ear.

  Silvia responds by hugging me tighter. Thanks to that hug I feel my sharp edges, my flaws, my thorns. And I can already feel them softening, becoming gentler and fitting tenderly into her empty places.

  Terminator runs around us, forming circles that magically protect us from any possible sorcerer, just like in fairy tales.

  And a kiss is the red bridge we build between our souls, which are dancing on the white vortex of life without fear of falling.

  “I love you, Leonardo.”

  My name, my whole name, my true name preceded by that verb in the first person is the formula that explains all things hidden in the center of the world.

  They call me Leo, but I am Leonardo.

  And Silvia loves Leonardo.

  Chapter 112

  “I’ll teach you a game.”

  “It isn’t one of your crazy dares, is it?”

  “No, no, it’s a game Beatrice taught me. It’s called the silence game.”

  “You mean the one we used to play in junior high?”

  “No, no. Listen. You lie side by side in silence. You stay quiet for five minutes with your eyes closed and focus on the colors that appear beneath your eyelids.”

  On the red bench there isn’t much room for two, but by squeezing up close we manage to fit with our faces looking up at the sky. Love is this too: making room for each other when there isn’t enough.

  Hand in hand, eyes closed and in silence, cell phone set up for the five-minute countdown.

  When, during the second minute, I furtively open my eyes and turn toward Silvia, I find her staring at me. I pretend to be angry and, looking at the phone display, tell her there are still at least three minutes to go.

  “What did you see?” she asks.

  “The sky.”

  “And what was it like?”

  “Blue . . .” Like your eyes, I’d like to say to her, but the words don’t come out.

  As if she has understood, Silvia smiles a perfect smile, without clouds.

  “And you?”

  “Every color.”

  “And what was it?”

  “A clown . . . and it was you.”

  “Thanks. How sweet,” I say, a bit annoyed.

  I had thought of the sky, probably like the most predictable of romantics, but the sky is still the sky. Whereas I appeared in her closed eyes as a dorky circus performer.

  Silvia laughs, then she turns serious and speaks without shifting her gaze.

  “Harlequin was a boy from a poor family. One day he came home feeling very sad and his mother asked him why. The next day was Carnival, and everyone would have a new outfit even though he would have nothing to wear. His mother hugged him and reassured him. Harlequin went to bed feeling relieved. His mother, who was a seamstress, fetched her basket of colored fabrics, remnants from other items of clothing, and spent the night sewing them together. The following day Harlequin had the most beautiful and original outfit. All the other children were amazed and asked him where he had bought it, but he kept the secret about his mother, who had spent the entire night sewing colored scraps of fabric together—white, red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple . . . And he realized that he wasn’t poor because his mother loved him more than any other, and that costume proved it.”

  Silvia says nothing for a few seconds.

  “Leonardo, you are the most beautiful person of all because you have known how to give and receive love, without holding back. And it has left a clear mark on you.”

  “It’s you who’s like that, Silvia.”

  I stare at the sky in silence, with Silvia nuzzling her face between my neck and shoulder, our hands clasped together like a perfect puzzle. I feel like I can see my skin covered in a thousand squares of colored cloth.

  After all, life does nothing but cut you out a multicolored garment, at the cost of endless sleepless nights, nights made of the remnants of other lives and then sewn together.

  It’s precisely when we’re feeling poorer that life, like a mother, is sewing us the most beautiful thing to wear.

  Chapter 113

  First day of school. I wake up forty minutes early. Not because it’s the first day of school, but because I’ve decided to pick up Silvia from her house. I speed off on my new Batscooter (which is a reincarnation of the previous one, but with brakes) in the September air that holds blue inside it, blue like the lucky charm I’m wearing around my neck. I zip between cars like Silver Surfer.

  I laugh at everything and everyone, even at the dozy crossing guards and the red lights, who try in vain to stop me. When I get there, Silvia is already waiting for me. She’s the punctual one, not me. She hops on my steed. I can feel her hands clinging tightly to my waist. It feels like my life is in her hands.

  She’s not scared like she used to be. If for no other reason than the fact that I now have brakes. My Batscooter has become a white horse, not galloping but flying over the road. I am alive! I look at the sky and it seems almost as if the moon, still white, is God’s smile of approval at what I’m doing. But he soon thinks again when he sees Niko sidling up to me with his devilish look, challenging me to a dare that I cannot refuse. I let him win because I have Silvia behind me, but the smile that Niko and I exchange at the end of the dare is the warmest of handshakes, the reddest of embraces. Things are always so much easier between guys.

  First day of school. When I’m sitting next to Silvia, even the school hours seem short, wonderful, and full of life. It’s as if the dying universe has been given the blood transfusion it needed in order to breathe again.

  As of today I’m going to start writing. I need to write all these things down so I remember them. I don’t know if I can do it, but at least this time I want to try. Maybe it’s best to use a pencil. No, pen is better. A red pen. Red like blood. Red like love, the ink of the crisp white pages of life. I believe the only things worth remembering are those told with blood; blood doesn’t make mistakes and no teacher can correct them.

  The white of these pages no lo
nger scares me, and I owe it to Beatrice. Beatrice, white like milk, red like blood.

  I stare at the blue of Silvia’s eyes: a sea in which to be shipwrecked without dying, an ocean floor where there is always peace, even when a storm rages at the water’s surface. And as this sea cradles me, I smile the perfect smile. And without words, my smile says that when you truly begin to live, when life bathes in our red love, each day is the first, each day is the start of a new life.

  Even if that day is the first day of school.

  Dear Leo,

  I am returning your manuscript. I read it all in one go, in one night, and it reminded me of a story about a famous Greek general who, with the aid of only six hundred men who had taken refuge on Mount Parnassus, had to face an immense army of enemies who had surrounded them at the foot of the mountain. Defeat was certain, but the soothsayer of that small army had an idea: he suggested scattering chalk powder over his comrades, over themselves and their weapons.

  This army of ghosts attacked the enemy during the night, with the aim of killing anyone who wasn’t whitened. The sentries of the huge enemy army were petrified by the mere sight of them. Thinking it was some weird phenomenon, they started to scream and retreat in the middle of the night, pursued by the army of ghosts whose pallor was heightened by the moonlight. The troops were paralyzed with terror, so much so that the six hundred men eventually conquered the battlefield and were left surrounded by four thousand blood-soaked corpses. The blood had also dirtied the armor and the whitened skin of that army of ghosts, and the mixture of white and red appeared even more frightening in the light of dawn.

  Leo, at times we fear enemies who are much weaker than they appear to be. Only the white that shrouds them in the dead of night makes them appear mysterious and terrifying. The true enemy is not a soldier covered in chalk powder, but fear.

  We need white.

  Just as we need red.

  Perhaps you don’t know that recent anthropological studies claim that, in most cultures, the first words that referred to color distinguished between light and dark. When a language became refined enough to include the names of three colors, the third one almost invariably referred to red. The names for other colors only developed later, after the term for denoting red became common usage, and often the word for “red” has a connection to the word for “blood.”

  Scholars confirm what you have found out by living. Cultures and civilizations took decades to discover what you have discovered in one school year. Thank you for sharing your discovery with me.

  I have limited myself to supplementing parts in which you talk about me and correcting a few subjunctives here and there. Other than that, I haven’t touched any of your words. It would have been like touching your life, and I want that to remain intact.

  I am proud to have taken part in this adventure and am proud of you.

  Your incurable teacher,

  The Dreamer

  Acknowledgments

  Once, a student of mine, despairing over the umpteenth writing assignment I had burdened him with, suddenly asked me, “Sir, why do you write?” I replied instinctively, “To know how it ends.” And it always ends in the same way, in writing as in life: with a thank-you.

  Someone has said that bad writers copy and good ones steal. I don’t know what category the reader will consign me to, but one thing for sure is that both stem from the debt we have toward life and the people from whom we have copied, stolen, or—less furtively—received. Life always has the best copyright: a tireless scriptwriter who turns us into characters ever more capable of love and of loving.

  As children we were constantly tormented with the prompt: “So, what do you say?” And we would reply with an exaggerated thaank youu that we didn’t remotely believe in. As I grew up, however, saying thank you became not just a question of common sense, but perhaps the happiest way of getting by in life.

  And so it is:

  To my family, from whom I learned that love is possible, always; to my parents, Giuseppe and Rita, who this year celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary; to my incredible brothers and sisters who, with their points of view, add subtleties and nuances to the colors of my world: Marco, the philosopher; Fabrizio, the historian (with Marina and Giulio); Elisabetta, the psychiatrist; Paola, the art historian; and Marta, the architect as well as the author of the photograph of me on the book cover. To these I add Marina Mercadante-Giordano and her family.

  To those who believed in this book and helped me to bring it to completion: first and foremost Valentina Pozzoli, unrivaled deliverer of stories, without whom this one would not have seen the light of day. Then: Antonio Franchini, who believed in it from the start with the same enthusiasm I saw in his children as they listened to fairy tales on the terrace known as “Greece”; Marilena Rossi, who knows and loves the characters more than I do; Giulia Ichino and Alessandro Rivali, friends as well as sensitive, honest, and meticulous proofreaders. I would also like to thank everyone at HarperCollins who has worked on the English-language edition, including Daisy Hutton, Amanda Bostic, Becky Monds, Jocelyn Bailey, and Jodi Hughes.

  In no particular order to all those who, in various ways and at different times, have played a role behind the scenes of these pages: first-year students (sections A and B) and colleagues at the Liceo Classico San Carlo in Milan; students in Rome, particularly the second years at Liceo Classico Dante; students at Iunior and Liceo Visconti, at the theater group “Eufemia” and at “Ripagrande.” Mario Franchina, my unforgettable high school teacher, and Father Pino Puglisi, who one day, when I was in my fourth year, failed to come back to school. Gianluca and Tessa De Sanctis, Federico and Vanessa Canzi, Roberto and Monica Ponte, Angelo and Laura Costa with their families, friends of the “Living Room” and “Delta.” Paolo Pellegrino, Rosy from the bookshop II Trittico, Raffaele Chiamili, Sveva Spalletti, Guido Marconi, Filippo Tabacco, Alessandra Gallerano, Paolo Virone, Antoine De Brabant, Michele Dolz, Valentina Provera, Sirio Legramanti, Paolo Diliberto, Giuseppe Corigliano, Sergio Morini, Mauro Leonardi, Armando Fumagalli, Marco Fabbri, Paola Florio, Maurizio Bettini, and my PhD colleagues Emanuela Canonico, Susanna Tamaro, Giuseppe Brighina, Roberta Mazzoni, Lorenzo Farsi, Carlo Mazzola, and Marcello Bertoli, and my neighbor’s dog.

  And to you, reader, who, from a sofa, beneath the bed-covers, in the street, on a bus, on a red bench, or wherever most takes your fancy, have reached this page and therefore have dedicated your precious time to my characters . . . Thank you.

  P.S. In Italy, the rules that govern blood donation by a minor are stricter and more complex than what may come across in the novel. In this context, narrative purpose has prevailed over rigorous adherence to reality.

  About the Author

  Photo by Marta D’Avenia

  Alessandro D’Avenia holds a PhD in classical literature and teaches Ancient Greek, Latin, and literature at a high school in Milan. White as Silence, Red as Song, his first novel, was published in Italy in 2010 as Bianca Come il Latte, Rossa Come il Sangue. It sold a million copies in Italy, has been translated into over twenty languages, and was released as a film in 2013. Alessandro has since published four more books, the latest of which, Every Story Is a Love Story, was published in October 2017.

  About the Translator

  Tabitha Sowden was born in the United Kingdom, raised in Italy, and is a curious traveler and explorer of cultures and languages. She has an extensive portfolio of Italian to English translation work built up over fifteen years of collaboration with some of the most prominent names in the world of publishing, film production, and design.

 

 

 
ayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share