The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  “Oh, mi amorcito.” Soledad sighed, vaguely disappointed. “You know your father doesn’t want you to.”

  “We won’t tell him. He’ll never see it,” Alice insisted with a whine.

  Soledad shook her head.

  “Come on, Sol, please,” she begged. “I can’t get it done on my own. I need my parents’ permission.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “You can pretend to be my mother. You’ll only have to sign a piece of paper, you won’t have to say anything.”

  “But I can’t, my dear, I can’t. Your father would fire me.”

  Alice suddenly grew more serious. She looked Soledad straight in the eyes.

  “It’ll be our secret, Sol.” She paused. “After all, the two of us already have a secret, don’t we?”

  Soledad looked at her, puzzled. At first she didn’t understand.

  “I know how to keep secrets,” Alice continued slowly. She felt as strong and ruthless as Viola. “Otherwise he’d have fired you ages ago.”

  Soledad was suddenly unable to breathe.

  “But—” she said.

  “So you’ll do it?” Alice cut in.

  Soledad looked at the floor.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. Then she turned her back on Alice and arranged the books on the shelf while her eyes filled with two fat tears.

  10

  Mattia deliberately made all his movements as silently as he could. He knew that the chaos of the world would only increase, that the background noise would grow until it covered every coherent signal, but he was convinced that by carefully measuring his every gesture he would be less guilty of that slow ruin.

  He had learned to set down first his toe and then his heel, keeping his weight toward the outside of the sole to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the ground. He had perfected this technique years before, when he would get up in the night and stealthily roam about the house, the skin of his hands having become so dry that the only way to know they were still his was to pass a knife over them. Over time that strange, circumspect gait had become his normal way of walking.

  His parents would often find themselves suddenly face-to-face with him, like a hologram projected from the floor, a frown on his face and his mouth always tightly shut. Once his mother dropped a plate with fright. Mattia bent down to pick up the bits, but resisted the temptation of those sharp edges. His mother, embarrassed, thanked him, and when he left she sat on the floor and stayed there for a quarter of an hour, defeated.

  Mattia turned the key in the front door. He had learned that by turning the handle toward himself and pressing his palm over the keyhole, he could eliminate almost entirely the metallic click of the lock. With the bandage on it was even easier.

  He slipped into the hallway, put the keys back in again, and repeated the operation from inside, like a burglar in his own home.

  His father was already home, earlier than usual. when he heard him raise his voice he froze, unsure whether to cross the sitting room and interrupt his parents’ conversation or go out again and wait until he saw the living room light go out from the courtyard.

  “I don’t think it’s right,” his father concluded with a note of reproach in his voice.

  “Right,” Adele shot back. “You’d rather pretend nothing is wrong, act as if nothing strange were going on.”

  “And what’s so strange?”

  There was a pause. Mattia could picture his mother lowering her head and wrinkling up one corner of her mouth as if to say it’s pointless trying to talk with you.

  “What’s so strange?” she repeated emphatically. “I don’t . . .”

  Mattia kept a step back from the ray of light that spilled from the sitting room into the hall. With his eyes he followed the line of shadow from the floor to the walls and then to the ceiling. He realized that it formed a trapezoid, only one more trick of perspective.

  His mother often abandoned her sentences halfway through, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say as she was saying it. Those interruptions left bubbles of emptiness in her eyes and in the air and Mattia always imagined bursting them with a finger.

  “What’s strange is that he stuck a knife in his hand in front of all his classmates. What’s strange is that we were convinced those days were over but we were wrong once again,” his mother went on.

  Mattia had no reaction when he realized that they were talking about him, just a mild sense of guilt at eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn’t supposed to hear.

  “That’s not reason enough to go and talk to his teachers without him,” his father said, but in a more moderate tone. “He’s old enough to have the right to be there.”

  “For God’s sake, Pietro,” his mother exploded. She never called him by name. “That’s not the point, don’t you understand? will you stop treating him as if he were—”

  She froze. The silence stuck in the air like static electricity. A slight shock made Mattia’s back contract.

  “As if he were what?”

  “Normal,” his mother confessed. Her voice trembled slightly and Mattia wondered if she was crying. Then again, she cried often since that afternoon. Most of the time for no reason. Sometimes she cried because the meat she had cooked was stringy or because the plants on the balcony were full of parasites. Whatever the reason, her despair was always the same. As if, in any case, there were nothing to be done.

  “His teachers say he has no friends. He only talks to the boy who sits next to him and he spends the whole day with him. Boys his age go out in the evening, try to hook up with girls—”

  “You don’t think he’s . . .” his father interrupted. “well, you know . . .”

  Mattia tried to complete the sentence, but nothing came to mind.

  “No, that’s not what I think. Maybe I wish that’s all it was,” said his mother. “Sometimes I think that something of Michela ended up in him.”

  His father let out a deep, loud sigh.

  “You promised not to talk about that anymore,” he said, vaguely irritated.

  Mattia thought of Michela, who had disappeared into thin air. But only for a fraction of a second. Then he let himself be distracted by the faint image of his parents, who, he discovered, were reflected in miniature on the smooth, curved surfaces of the umbrella stand. He started scratching his left elbow with his keys. He felt the joint twitching from one tooth to the next.

  “Do you know what really makes me shiver?” said Adele. “All those high grades he gets. Always the highest. There’s something frightening in those grades.”

  Mattia heard his mother sniff, once. She sniffed again, but now it sounded as if her nose were pressed up against something. He imagined his father taking her in his arms, in the middle of the living room.

  “He’s fifteen,” said his father. “It’s a cruel age.”

  His mother didn’t reply and Mattia listened to those rhythmic sobs rising to a peak of intensity and then slowly ebbing, finally growing silent again.

  At that point he walked into the living room. He closed his eyes slightly as he entered the beam of light. He stopped two steps away from his hugging parents, who looked at him in alarm, like two kids caught necking. Stamped on their faces was the question, how long had he been out there?

  Mattia looked at a point midway between them. He said, simply, I do have friends, I’m going to a party on Saturday. Then he continued toward the hall and disappeared into his room.

  11

  The tattoo artist had eyed suspiciously first Alice and then the woman with the too dark skin and the frightened expression whom the girl had introduced as her mother. He didn’t believe it for a second, but it was none of his business. He was used to tricks of that kind, and he was used to capricious teenage girls. They were getting younger and younger: this one couldn’t be as much as seventeen, he thought. But he certainly wasn’t in a position to refuse a job for a question of principle. He’d shown the woman to a chair, and she’d sat down and hadn’t s
aid another word. She had gripped her purse tightly in her hands, as if ready to leave at any moment, and looked everywhere except in the direction of the needle.

  The girl hadn’t flinched. He had asked does it hurt, because that’s something you have to ask, but she had said no, no through clenched teeth.

  He had recommended that she keep the gauze on for at least three days and to clean the wound morning and evening for a week. He had given her a jar of Vaseline and stuffed the money in his pocket.

  Back home in the bathroom, Alice took off the white tape that held the bandage on. Her tattoo had been in existence for only a few hours and she had already peeked at it a dozen times. Each time she looked, a bit of the excitement dispersed, like a pool of shimmering water that evaporates beneath the August sun. This time she thought only of how red her skin had turned, all the way around the design. She wondered if her skin would ever regain its natural color and for a moment her throat tightened with panic. Then she banished that stupid anxiety. She hated the fact that her every action always had to seem so irremediable, so definitive. In her mind she called it the weight of consequences, and she was sure that it was another awkward piece of her father that had wormed its way into her brain. How she longed for the uninhibitedness of kids her age, their vacuous sense of immortality. She yearned for all the lightness of her fifteen years, but in trying to grasp it she became aware of the fury with which the time at her disposal was slipping away. The weight of consequences was becoming more and more unbearable and her thoughts began whirling faster and faster, in ever smaller circles.

  She had changed her mind at the last moment. That was what she had said to the young man who had already turned on the whizzing machine and was bringing the needle to her belly: I’ve changed my mind. Unsurprised, he had asked her don’t you want to do it anymore? Alice had said yes I want to. But I don’t want a rose. I want a violet.

  The tattooist had looked at her, puzzled. Then he had confessed that he didn’t exactly know what a violet looked like. It’s kind of like a daisy, Alice had explained, only with three petals at the top and two at the bottom. And it’s violet in color. The tattooist had said okay and set to work.

  Alice looked at the livid little flower that now framed her navel and wondered if Viola would understand that it was for her, for their friendship. She decided she wouldn’t show it to her till Monday. She wanted to present it without any scabs, bright against her pale skin. She chided herself for not doing it earlier, so that it would have been ready for tonight. She imagined what it would be like to show it secretly to that boy she’d invited to the party. Two days before, Mattia had appeared in front of her and Viola, with that sunken air of his. Denis and I are coming to the party, he had said. Viola hadn’t even had time to come up with an unpleasant remark before he was already at the far end of the hall, his back turned to them and head lowered.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to kiss him, but it was all decided now and she would look like an idiot in front of Viola if she backed down.

  She measured the precise point where the top of her underpants had to come to be able to see the tattoo but not the scar immediately below it. She slipped on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt big enough to cover the lot— the tattoo, the scar, and the bumps of her hips— and then left the bathroom, to join Soledad in the kitchen and watch her make her special cinnamon dessert.

  12

  Denis took deep, long breaths, trying to fill his lungs with the smell of Pietro Balossino’s car. A slightly sour smell of sweat, which seemed to emanate not so much from the people as from the fireproof seat covers, and from something damp that had been sitting there too long, perhaps hidden under the mats. Denis felt the mixture wrap around his face like a hot bandage.

  He would happily have spent all night in that car, driving around the half- dark streets of the hill, watching the lights of the cars in the opposite lane strike his friend’s face and then return it to the shadows, unharmed.

  Mattia was sitting in the front, beside his father. To Denis, who had been secretly studying the absence of any expression on both their faces, it seemed that father and son had agreed not to utter a single word during the whole journey, and to ensure that their eyes didn’t meet even by accident.

  He noticed that they had the same way of holding objects, framing them with their fingers tensed, touching surfaces but not really resting on them, as if they feared deforming whatever they held in their hands. Mr. Balossino seemed to barely touch the steering wheel. Mattia’s frightful hands traced the edges of the present that his mother had bought for Viola and which he now held on his knees.

  “So you’re in the same class as Mattia,” Mr. Balossino forced himself to say, though without much conviction.

  “Yeah,” said Denis, in a shrill voice that seemed to have been trapped for too long in his throat. “we sit next to each other.”

  Mattia’s father nodded seriously and then, his conscience assuaged, he returned to his thoughts. Mattia seemed not even to have noticed that scrap of conversation and didn’t take his eyes off the window, through which he was trying to work out whether his perception that the dotted white line in the middle of the road was in fact a continuous line was due merely to his eye’s slow response or to some more complicated mechanism.

  Pietro Balossino braked a few feet away from the big gate of the Bai family’s property and put on the hand brake as they were on a slight incline.

  “She’s pretty well off, your friend,” he observed, leaning forward to see over the top of the gate.

  Neither Denis nor Mattia admitted that they barely knew the girl’s name.

  “So I’ll come back for you at midnight, okay?”

  “Eleven,” Mattia replied quickly. “let’s make it eleven.”

  “Eleven? But it’s already nine o’clock. what are you going to do for only two hours?”

  “Eleven,” insisted Mattia.

  Pietro Balossino shook his head and said okay.

  Mattia got out of the car and Denis did likewise, reluctantly. He was worried that Mattia might make new friends at the party, fun, fashionable friends who, in the bat of an eye, would take him away forever. He was worried that he would never get into that car again.

  He politely said good- bye to Mattia’s father and, to seem like a grown- up, held out his hand. Pietro Balossino performed a clumsy acrobatic maneuver to shake it without unfastening his seat belt.

  The boys stood stiffly at the gate and waited for the car to turn around before deciding to ring the bell.

  Alice was crouching at one end of the white sofa. A glass of Sprite in her hand, from the corner of her eye she was peeking at Sara Turletti’s voluminous thighs, crammed into a pair of dark tights. Squashed onto the sofa they became even bigger, almost twice as broad. Alice thought about the space she occupied compared to her classmate. The idea of being able to become so thin as to be invisible gave her a pleasant pang in the stomach.

  When Mattia and Denis came into the room, she suddenly stiffened her back and looked around desperately for Viola. She noticed that Mattia wasn’t wearing a bandage anymore and tried to see if he had a scar on his wrist. She instinctively ran her index finger along the trace of her own scar. She knew how to find it even under her clothes; it was like an earthworm lying against her skin.

  The boys looked around like hunted prey, but in truth not one of the thirty or so kids scattered around the room paid them the least attention. no one except Alice.

  Denis followed Mattia’s movements, going where he went and looking where he looked. Mattia walked over to Viola, who was busy telling one of her made- up stories to a group of girls. He didn’t even ask himself whether he’d ever seen those girls at school. He stood behind the birthday girl, holding the present stiffly to his chest. Viola turned around when she noticed that her friends had taken their eyes off her irresistible mouth and were looking instead over her shoulder.

  “Ah, you’re here,” she said rudely.

  “
Here,” said Mattia, placing the present in her arms. Then he added a mumbled happy birthday.

  He was about to go when Viola shouted in an overexcited voice, “Alice, Alice, come quickly. Your friend’s here.”

  Denis swallowed the lump in his throat. one of Viola’s little friends cackled into another girl’s ear.

  Alice got up from the sofa. In the four paces that separated her from the group she tried to mask her syncopated gait, but she was sure that that was what they were all looking at.

  She greeted Denis with a quick smile and then Mattia, bowing her head and saying hi in a faint voice. Mattia said hi back and his eyebrows jerked, making him appear even more spastic in Viola’s eyes.

  There followed an uncomfortably long silence that only she was able to break.

  “I’ve discovered where my sister keeps the pills,” she said, beaming. “Do you want some?”

  She aimed her question at Mattia, certain that he wouldn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. She was right.

  “Girls, come with me, let’s go get them,” she said. “You too, Alice.”

  She took Alice by an arm and the five girls jostled one another as they disappeared down the hall.

  Denis was alone with Mattia again and his heartbeat resumed its regular frequency. They both walked over to the drinks table.

  “There’s whiskey,” Denis observed, slightly shocked. “And vodka too.”

  Mattia didn’t reply. He took a plastic cup from the stack and filled it to the brim with Coca-Cola, trying to get as close as possible to that limit where the surface tension of the liquid prevents it from spilling over. Then he set it down on the table. Denis poured himself some whiskey, looking cautiously around and hoping secretly to impress Mattia, who didn’t even notice.

  Two rooms away, the girls had sat Alice down on Viola’s sister’s bed to instruct her about what to do.

  “No blow jobs. not even if he asks you, understand?” advised Giada Savarino. “The first time the max you can do is a hand job.”