The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  Mattia counted three breaths. Light molecules of ethanol stirred in the air, and some of them penetrated his nostrils. He felt them rising, a pleasant burning sensation along his septum, up to a point between his eyes.

  “You really want to know what I’ve done to my hands?” he asked, turning toward Denis but looking at the jars of formalin lined up behind him: dozens of jars containing fetuses and amputated limbs of all sorts of animals.

  Denis nodded, quivering.

  “Then watch this,” said Mattia.

  He gripped the knife in his fist. Then he plunged it into the hollow of his other hand, between his index and middle fingers, and dragged it all the way to his wrist.

  7

  On Thursday Viola was waiting for her outside the gate. Alice, head lowered, was walking past her when Viola grabbed her by the sleeve. Viola startled her, calling out her name. She remembered the candy and was dizzy with nausea. Once the four bitches had you in their sights, they didn’t let you go.

  “I’ve got a math test,” Viola said. “I don’t know anything and don’t want to go.”

  Alice looked at her uncomprehendingly. She didn’t seem hostile, but Alice didn’t trust her. She tried to pull away. Let’s go for a walk, Viola continued. You and me? Yes, you and me. Alice looked around in terror. Come on, get a move on, Viola urged, they can’t see us out here. But . . . Alice tried to object. Viola didn’t let her finish; she pulled her harder by the sleeve and Alice had no choice but to follow, hobbling, as they ran to the bus stop.

  They sat down side by side, Alice pressed against the window so as not to invade Viola’s space. From one moment to the next she expected something to happen, something terrible. But Viola was radiant. She took a lipstick from her bag and ran it over her lips. Want some? she then asked. Alice shook her head. The school shrank in the distance behind them. My father will kill me, Alice mumbled. Her legs were shaking. Viola sighed. Come on, show me your attendance sheet. She studied Alice’s father’s signature and said it’s easy . . . I’ll sign it. She showed Alice her own sheet. She faked a signature whenever she didn’t feel like going to class. Anyway first period tomorrow is Follini, she said, and she can’t see a thing.

  Viola started talking about school, about how she didn’t give a damn about math because she was going to do law anyway. Alice could hardly believe her ears. She thought about the day before, about the locker room, and didn’t know what to call this sudden intimacy.

  They got off in the square and started walking under the arcades. Viola stopped at a clothing shop with fluorescent windows where Alice had never even set foot. She was acting as if they were lifelong friends. She insisted they try on some clothes, which she picked out herself. She asked Alice her size, and Alice was ashamed to tell her. The shop assistants watched them suspiciously, but Viola paid no attention. They shared a dressing room and Alice surreptitiously compared her own body with her friend’s. In the end they didn’t buy anything.

  They went to a café and Viola ordered two coffees, without so much as asking Alice what she wanted. Alice hadn’t a clue what was going on, but a new and unexpected happiness was filling her head. Slowly she forgot all about her father and school. She was sitting in a café with Viola Bai and that time seemed theirs alone.

  Viola smoked three cigarettes and insisted that Alice try one too. Viola laughed, showing her perfect teeth, every time her new friend exploded in a fit of coughing. She subjected her to a little quiz about the boys she hadn’t had and the kisses she hadn’t given. Alice replied with her eyes lowered. You want me to believe you’ve never had a boyfriend? Never ever ever? Alice shook her head. That’s impossible. A tragedy, Viola exaggerated. We absolutely have to do something. You don’t want to die a virgin!

  So the next day, at ten o’clock break, they roamed the school in search of the boyfriend for Alice. Viola had dismissed Giada and the others, saying we’ve got things to do, and they watched her leave the classroom hand in hand with her new friend.

  Viola had already organized everything. It would happen at her birthday party the following Saturday. They just had to find the right boy. As they walked down the corridor she pointed this and that out to Alice, saying look at the ass on that one, not bad at all, he certainly knows what to do.

  Alice smiled nervously but couldn’t make her mind up. In her head she imagined with unsettling clarity the moment when a boy would slip his hands under her shirt. When he would discover that, underneath the clothes that fell so well, there was nothing but chubby flesh and flabby skin.

  Now they were leaning on the fire escape railing on the third floor, watching the boys play football in the courtyard with a yellow ball that seemed not to be blown up enough.

  “What about Trivero?” Viola asked.

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know who he is? He’s in the fifth year. He used to row with my sister. They say some interesting things about him.”

  “What sort of things?”

  Viola gestured with her hands, indicating something long, and then laughed loudly, enjoying the disconcerting effect of her allusions. Alice felt her face flush with shame, but she also felt a marvelous certainty that her loneliness was truly over.

  They went down to the ground floor and passed the snacks and drinks machines. Students had formed a chaotic line, chinking the coins in their jeans pockets.

  “Okay, but you’ve got to decide,” said Viola.

  Alice spun on her heels. She looked around, disoriented.

  “That one looks cute,” she said, pointing at two boys in the distance, near the window. They were standing close together, but they weren’t talking or looking at each other.

  “Who?” Viola asked. “The one with the bandage or the other one?”

  “The one with the bandage.”

  Viola stared at her. Her sparkling eyes were as wide as two oceans.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “You know what he did?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “He stuck a knife in his hand, on purpose. Right here at school.”

  Alice shrugged.

  “He looks interesting,” she said.

  “Interesting? He’s a psychopath. With a guy like that you’ll end up chopped to pieces and stuffed in a freezer.”

  Alice smiled, but went on looking at the boy with the bandaged hand. There was something in the way he kept his head tilted down that made her want to go over to him, lift his chin, and say to him look at me, I’m here.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” Viola asked her.

  “Yes,” said Alice.

  Viola shrugged.

  “So let’s go,” she said.

  She took Alice by the hand and pulled her toward the two boys at the window.

  8

  Mattia was looking out the opaque windows of the atrium. It was a bright day, an anticipation of spring at the beginning of March. The strong wind that had cleared the air during the night seemed to sweep time away too, making it run faster. Mattia tried to estimate how far away the horizon was by counting the roofs of the houses that he could see from there.

  Denis was surreptitiously staring at him, trying to guess his thoughts. They hadn’t talked about what had happened in the biology lab. In fact, they didn’t talk much at all, but they spent time together, each in his own abyss, held safe and tight by the other’s silence.

  “Hi,” Mattia heard someone say, too close to him.

  Reflected in the glass he saw two girls standing behind him, holding hands. He turned around.

  Denis looked at him quizzically. The girls seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Hi,” Mattia said softly. He lowered his head, to protect himself from one of the girls’ piercing eyes.

  “I’m Viola and this is Alice,” she continued. “We’re in 2B.”

  Mattia nodded. Denis’s mouth fell open. Neither of them said anything.

  “Well?” Viola said. “Aren’t you going to introduce yourse
lves?”

  Mattia spoke his name in a low voice, as if just remembering it himself. He offered Viola a limp hand, the one without the bandage, and she shook it firmly. The other girl barely touched it and smiled, looking in another direction.

  Denis introduced himself next, just as clumsily.

  “We wanted to invite you to my birthday party the Saturday after next,” said Viola.

  Again Denis sought Mattia’s eyes, but Mattia responded by staring at Alice’s timid half-smile. Her lips seemed so pale and thin to him, as if her mouth had been carved by a sharp scalpel.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Viola looked at him askance and then turned to Alice, with an expression that said I told you he was mad.

  “What do you mean why? Obviously because we feel like inviting you.”

  “No, thanks,” said Mattia. “I can’t come.”

  Denis, relieved, quickly added that he couldn’t come either.

  Viola ignored him and concentrated on the boy with the bandage.

  “You can’t? I wonder what could be keeping you so busy on a Saturday evening,” she said provocatively. “Do you have to play video games with your little friend? Or were you planning on cutting your veins again?”

  Viola felt a tremor of terror and excitement as she uttered those last words. Alice gripped her hand harder to make her stop.

  Mattia reflected that he had forgotten the number of roofs and wouldn’t have time to count them again before the bell.

  “I don’t like parties,” he explained.

  Viola forced herself to laugh for a few seconds, a sequence of piercing, high-pitched giggles.

  “You really are strange,” she teased, tapping her right temple. “Everyone likes parties.”

  Alice had withdrawn her hand and unconsciously rested it on her belly.

  “Well, I don’t,” Mattia snapped back.

  Viola stared defiantly at him and he blankly held her gaze. Alice had taken a step back. Viola opened her mouth to give some kind of reply, but the bell rang just in time. Mattia turned around and headed resolutely toward the stairs, as if to say that as far as he was concerned the discussion was over. Denis followed, pulled along in his wake.

  9

  Since entering the service of the Della Rocca family, Soledad Galienas had slipped up only once. Four years ago, one rainy evening when the Della Roccas were out to dinner at a friend’s.

  Soledad’s wardrobe contained only black clothes, underwear included. She had spoken so often of her husband’s death in a work accident that she sometimes even believed it herself. She imagined him standing on a scaffolding sixty feet off the ground, cigarette between his teeth, as he leveled a layer of mortar before laying another row of bricks. She saw him trip over a tool or perhaps a coil of rope, the rope with which he was supposed to make a harness and which instead he had tossed aside because harnesses are for softies. She imagined him wobbling on the wooden planks before plummeting without a sound. The image panned out so that her husband became like a little black dot waving its arms against the white sky. Then her artificial memory ended with an overhead shot: her husband’s body splattered on the dusty ground of the building site, lifeless and two-dimensional, his eyes still open and a dark pool of blood oozing out from under his back.

  Thinking of him like that gave her a pleasurable tremor of anguish, and if she dwelled on it long enough, she even managed to squeeze out a few tears, which were entirely for herself.

  The truth was that her husband had walked out. He had left her one morning, probably to start his life over again with a woman she didn’t even know. She had never heard anything more about him. When she arrived in Italy she made up the story of her widowhood to have a past to tell people about, because there was nothing to say about her real past. Her black clothes and the thought that others might see the traces of a tragedy in her eyes, a pain that had never been assuaged, gave her a sense of security. She wore her mourning with dignity, and until that evening she had never betrayed the memory of the deceased.

  On Saturdays she went to six o’clock mass, in order to be back in time for dinner. Ernesto had been courting her for weeks. After the service he stood waiting for her in the courtyard and, always with the same precise degree of ceremony, offered to walk her home. Soledad shrank into her black dress, but in the end she gave in. He told her about the post office where he used to work, and how long the evenings were now, at home alone, with so many years behind him and so many ghosts to reckon with. Ernesto was older than Soledad and his wife really had died, carried off by pancreatic cancer.

  They walked arm in arm, very composed. That evening Ernesto had shared his umbrella with her, allowing his head and coat to get soaked so as to shelter her better from the rain. He had complimented her on her Italian, which was getting better week by week, and Soledad had laughed, pretending to be embarrassed.

  It was thanks to a certain clumsiness, a lack of coordination, that instead of saying good-bye to each other as friends, with two chaste kisses on the cheek, their mouths had met on the front step of the Della Rocca house. Ernesto apologized, but then he bent over her lips again and Soledad felt all the dust that had settled in her heart whirl up and get in her eyes.

  She was the one to invite him in. Ernesto had to stay hidden in her room for a few hours, just long enough for her to give Alice something to eat and send her to bed. The Della Roccas would be going out soon and wouldn’t be back till late.

  Ernesto thanked someone up above for the fact that such things could still happen at his age. They entered the house furtively, Soledad leading her lover by the hand, like a teenager, and with her finger to her mouth she told him not to make a sound. Then she hastily made dinner for Alice, watched her eat it too slowly, and said you look tired, you should go to bed. Alice protested that she wanted to watch television and Soledad gave in, just to get rid of her, as long as she watched it up in the den. Alice went upstairs, taking advantage of her father’s absence to drag her feet as she walked.

  Soledad returned to her lover. They kissed for a long time, sitting side by side, not knowing what to do with their own hands, clumsy and out of practice. Then Ernesto plucked up the courage to pull her to him.

  As he fiddled with the devilish hooks that fastened her bra, apologizing under his breath for being so clumsy, she felt young and beautiful and uninhibited. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she saw Alice, standing in the doorway.

  “Coño,” she blurted out. “¿Qué haces aqu’?”

  She slipped away from Ernesto and covered her bosom with one arm. Alice tilted her head to one side and observed them without surprise, as if they were animals in a zoo.

  “I can’t get to sleep,” she said.

  By some mysterious coincidence Soledad was remembering that very moment when, turning around, she saw Alice standing in the study doorway. Soledad was dusting the library. Three at a time she pulled the lawyer’s encyclopedia, the heavy volumes with dark green binding and gilded spines, off the shelf. While she held them with her left arm, which was already beginning to ache, with her right she dusted the mahogany surfaces, even in the most hidden corners, because the lawyer had once complained that she only pushed the dust around.

  It was years since Alice had entered her father’s study. An invisible barrier of hostility kept her frozen in the doorway. She was sure that if she placed so much as a toe on the regular, hypnotic geometry of the parquet, the wood would crack under her weight and send her plunging into a black abyss.

  The whole room was saturated with her father’s intense smell. It had seeped into the papers stacked neatly on the desk, and drenched the thick, cream-colored curtains. when she was little, Alice would tiptoe in and call her father for dinner. She always hesitated for a moment before speaking, enchanted by her father’s posture as he loomed over his desk studying complicated documents from behind his silver-framed glasses. when the lawyer realized his daughter was there, he slowly lifted up his head and frowned, as
if to ask what she was doing there. Then he nodded and gave her a hint of a smile. I’m coming, he said.

  Alice was sure that she could hear those words echoing against the wallpaper in the study, trapped forever in these four walls and inside her head.

  “Hola, mi amorcito,” said Soledad. She still called her that, even though the pencil-thin girl standing in front of her was a far cry from the sleepy child she used to dress and walk to school every morning.

  “Hi,” replied Alice.

  Soledad looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to say something, but Alice glanced away nervously. Soledad returned to her shelves.

  “Sol,” Alice said at last.

  “Yes?”

  “I have to ask you something.”

  Soledad set the books down on the desk and walked over to

  Alice.

  “What is it, mi amorcito?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “What sort of favor? Of course, tell me.”

  Alice rolled the elastic of her trousers around her index finger.

  “On Saturday I have to go to a party. At my friend Viola’s house.”

  “Oh, how lovely,” said Soledad, smiling.

  “I’d like to bring a dessert. I’d like to make it myself. Would you help me?”

  “Of course, darling. What sort of dessert?”

  “I don’t know. A cake. Or a tiramisù. Or that one that you make with cinnamon.”

  “My mother’s recipe,” said Soledad with a hint of pride. “I’ll teach you.”

  Alice looked at her pleadingly.

  “So we’ll go shopping together on Saturday? even though it’s your day off?”

  “Of course, dear,” said Soledad. For a moment she felt important, and she recognized in Alice’s insecurity the little girl she had raised.

  “Could you take me somewhere else as well?” Alice ventured.

  “Where?”

  Alice hesitated for a moment.

  “To get a tattoo,” she said hastily.