But by the time Mattia and Roberto got close, many of the girls had tired of the stalls, where they couldn’t buy anything, and had gathered in the part of the piazza where Roberto had played football a few evenings earlier. They were getting organised. Barbara was among them, and Roberto gave a start when he recognised her. Over the past few days he had forgotten her and he felt now as though he had cheated on her. He admired her from a distance, as he had before, and was astonished by this new experience of being relatively close to her in the middle of so many other girls and boys who had joined the group to play hide-and-seek.
When the counting began they scattered. Roberto would have liked to stay with Mattia, as he always did, but he lost sight of him when everyone ran off. He stopped for a moment, surprised, but then began running, trying hard to avoid being caught. He ended up sharing a hiding spot with two little girls with braces, so tiny they both could have fitted under a stone. They were laughing themselves silly over nothing, crouched like a couple of broody hens, but instead of annoying him this amused him. Without knowing why, he found himself cackling along with them. The whole thing took a few minutes because they were hiding behind large pots with ornamental bushes that stood outside the closed bar and the seekers went straight past without seeing them.
The three of them ran to base and were free. There were only two other children still on the loose but he didn’t know them. While he waited, he sat on the little wall outside base, watching the others running around and being tagged. Actually, he was hoping to see Barbara again and maybe, if the occasion arose, to exchange a precious word with her. But those were just fantasies. He was also waiting for Mattia.
As he waited he thought about the forbidden subject of baby-children. He thought about the girls, who seemed older than them and in some cases were older, and about boys his own age, including those from the holiday camp, about the fire they had started and the idea of looking for a way to feel older, and he convinced himself that maybe he and Mattia needed to look at things differently. In short, that everything was much more complicated. He wouldn’t mind being seen as a hero by those girls—especially Barbara, whose name he barely even knew. He retained his intolerance for little children, those his age who had no balls, and adults who acted like children, but that was a whole other topic and he let it go.
Shortly afterwards, he began to feel bored. The kids who had made it safely to base began to move off towards their friends and the other girls from the holiday camp and towards the stalls.
One by one they filed by. In the end, since some still hadn’t returned, the seekers declared the game over, and they left too. Evidently those who still hadn’t turned up had quit without telling anyone.
Roberto continued to wait. After what felt like a never-ending period, Mattia and Barbara turned up.
He looked first at Mattia with infinite rage growing inside him, but couldn’t glean much from him: his expression was the same as always.
‘Shall we go?’
Roberto wanted to look Barbara in the eye. She had her eyes turned to the ground at first but he studied her face as soon as she happened to look up into his. She couldn’t hold back a malicious look. Her eyes were red. Her eyes were smiling.
She ran off, waving to them both.
‘Right, shall we go?’
As they walked along the road, the fun of the festival and the game seemed to have dissipated. All harmony had been broken on the barrier—painful and submerged—that had appeared between them.
They were silent. And this silence, this obstinate refusal to give a clear form to his fears, his envy, increased his rancour. When he could no longer bear it, he spoke to hurt.
‘I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. They’re coming to pick me up.’
Mattia stopped to look at him for the first time, a confused expression on his face.
‘My grandfather is really sick. I have to go back too.’
There was nothing more to add.
‘But just like that with no warning…’
‘It’s what my parents want.’
Mattia shook his head, unable to say anything more. He was accustomed to rebelling against adults’ wishes, getting around prohibitions, avoiding obligations. But he could put up no opposition now. He walked alongside his friend, shut up inside himself, feeling an urgent need to say that it wasn’t fair, that it was hard enough being separated from his friend at the end of a holiday, but this was even worse, so suddenly, without any preparation. Five days stolen from their friendship was an eternity.
They followed the sealed road for several minutes without saying anything, as the sounds of the night, and of the forest that flanked the road as it wound uphill, covered their bitter silence. The rage, however, was already gone.
When the feeling that he was wasting the time he had with his friend, even now that they were together, became unbearable, Roberto found the strength to ask him the question.
‘What did you do with that girl in the woods?’
It took Mattia a few moments to collect his thoughts.
‘We kissed. She’d done it before. She was good at it.’
Mattia’s reply was direct, with no special emphasis. More like he was delivering a technical report than confiding something. Roberto looked closely at him as he walked, awaiting further details. The answer had left his stomach burning a little, but Mattia’s tone reduced the sense of distance.
‘A tongue kiss. Not bad,’ he explained.
‘I’ve never done it with tongue.’
Mattia stopped a moment, and Roberto did the same.
‘You gotta try. It’s easy.’
‘I don’t know how to do it.’
‘I’ll explain. You open your mouth’—he demonstrated by opening his own, as if to scream—‘she does the same, and then you stick out your tongue, or she sticks out hers.’
Roberto took a step closer to see better under the streetlights.
‘And your tongues touch and go round and round a bit,’ Mattia continued standing right under the light to show how to rotate the tongue.
‘To begin with it’s a bit gross, but then you get used to it and it starts to feel nice.’
Roberto looked sceptical. He watched Mattia rotating his tongue, completely intent on showing how it was done, and he felt a bit like laughing and a bit like asking how you could possibly summon the enormous amount of courage needed to do something like that with a girl.
‘Nah, I don’t think I could do it,’ he concluded, defeated, thinking not so much of the technical description but rather the intimacy and conviction required, which to him seemed insurmountable. But Mattia took him literally.
‘It’s really easy! This is a bit gross, but if you need the practice…’ and he moved closer to take Roberto’s head in his hand.
‘Mattia!’ Roberto managed to sputter, his eyes wide. But Mattia had already grabbed him and pressed his lips against his. ‘Come on, open!’ he said.
Roberto obeyed, feeling some distaste.
They kissed. When their tongues touched, Roberto felt a wave of embarrassment and disgust. He lasted a few seconds, just long enough to learn the movement.
They separated almost at once.
‘It’s gross!’ He spat on the ground to clean out his mouth. Mattia did the same.
‘Yeah, it is a bit gross between us,’ Mattia admitted, spitting on the ground a second time in that inimitable way of his, straight through his teeth like grown-ups do, ‘but with Barbara it was nice. It wasn’t gross and something rose up from down there…’ But he didn’t finish the description.
‘If it was all the same everyone would kiss their friends, instead of boys kissing girls, right?’
‘You’re right.’
‘You should try it with Barbara. I reckon she wants to.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Roberto asked with all the yearning and naivety in the world.
Mattia nodded.
‘For sure. You’ll see. If we can find her tomorrow we’ll make it happen.’
And with that he put an arm around Roberto’s shoulder and Roberto smiled, because when he was with Mattia, things stopped being complicated.
22
When Roberto and Mattia awoke the next morning, each in his own bed, they experienced almost simultaneously the realisation that this was going to be their last day together.
Roberto tossed between the sheets, trying to shake off the pain, which might ruin his whole day, until he began to cry with rage. A single tear that he buried in the fabric of the pillow.
He hurried downstairs still half asleep, with the idea of phoning home to say that he didn’t want to return, that he wasn’t going to accept it, that he would be staying behind. Or at least to beg for at least one day, just one more day. With each step, still muddled by sleep, he began to lose his initial resolve, thinking again of his mother, his adored mother, and as he approached the hotel’s only telephone, he realised there was a sheet of white paper attached to the grey receiver. A handwritten message, one single, eloquent phrase: Out of order. He was not disappointed, deep down, because it was an excellent excuse not to phone, to let everything happen as it was supposed to, the way the adults had decided it had to be.
Mattia got straight out of bed. His disappointment about his friend’s departure was at least as great as Roberto’s. But when something hurt, Mattia preferred to pretend nothing was wrong and find something else to layer over the top of it, to mix in, to dilute his emotions. That morning he rose earlier than usual to get to the hotel, and to his friend.
They met at the bar, very early. Their morning ritual at the bar, one last time before leaving.
They sat down to wait for something to happen. And soon it did.
It had happened again. This time, the one telling the story was an old man neither Mattia nor Roberto had ever seen before. He didn’t have the local valley accent. He seemed upset. More tourists, he said. Yesterday afternoon, up at Black Peak.
The police and a bunch of volunteers had begun looking for them before dawn. They hadn’t found them yet. They had disappeared, as though the mountain had swallowed them right up.
Some people in the bar already knew all this but the two boys, who had had so much else going through their heads the previous day, were hearing the news only now. From the old man’s account they could grasp little of the story, and hardly anyone else appeared interested. These were young people. A pair of fit young men experienced at hiking in the mountains, and everyone was wondering: how could it have happened? What had become of them?
The very fact that nobody had yet found them echoed through the air, filling the bar with the kind of dark hanging questions that cast doubt on one’s own safe detachment from other people’s catastrophes. Two expert climbers up at Black Peak. On a walk generally considered to be relatively easy.
As the patrons’ comments died out, Aldeno arrived with the morning post. Aldeno kept no schedule. As far as his postal duties were concerned, he really was a free agent. The mail might arrive at dawn, or around lunchtime, depending on whatever personal errands he had organised for his day. At least, this was what malicious voices said behind his back, though nobody much minded it.
He spotted them in the corner of the bar, where they usually sat. They had finished eating breakfast and were using a small stone to squash tin bottle lids they had got from the barman. There was a pile of lids on the table.
He greeted them with a broad smile. They had been true to their word—nobody had learnt about his hiding place or their night-time meeting—and Aldeno was grateful. The two kids were now also somehow his accomplices.
He smiled and turned to the barman.
‘The usual.’
His drinking schedule was another thing that was flexible.
The barman placed an opened bottle of lime soda on the bench with a bottle of white wine alongside it. Aldeno began waving a sachet of sugar, opened it, and stopped, holding it in mid-air.
Chief Superintendent Ropele from the border police walked in. Two men in uniform followed him. Aldeno, who had smelled them even before he saw them, was paralysed. They sized up everyone with a nod as they entered, then they spotted him.
‘There you are.’
‘Are you expecting mail?’ was Aldeno’s cocky reply. Now that he had pulled himself together he poured the sugar.
‘Actually we were looking for you.’
Aldeno did not speak, nor did the other customers, who were curious to see how it was going to end. Everyone knew he had ongoing issues with the border police, a constant source of headaches for both parties.
‘We need you to keep us company for an hour or so.’
Ropele, after more than twenty years in charge of the border, was known for his well-trained eye.
‘Company?’
Aldeno turned to them in surprise, or pretend surprise—it was impossible to say. Roberto and Mattia pricked up their ears: Aldeno was now part of their gang, after that night he’d agreed not to say anything to Leo.
‘We need to ask you a few questions. About some bags.’
‘Bags? What bags?’
‘Stuff crossing the border, Aldeno,’ Ropele said good-naturedly, as the two uniformed men approached.
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘Maybe nothing,’ the superintendent admitted with a smile, ‘we’ll see.’
Aldeno lowered his eyes and focused his attention on his favourite drink, though he accompanied his sip with a grimace.
‘Bags containing metal parts,’ Ropele added.
‘So?’
‘You didn’t cross the border with anything like that the other week?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘We can, though.’
‘You must have a good memory.’
‘Actually we photographed you with it.’ He smiled again, this time seeking corroboration from his colleagues, which was quick to arrive.
‘On the way there and on the way back,’ he added.
Aldeno put his glass down, running out of patience. ‘What’s illegal about transporting parts?’
‘Nothing, as long as you pay duty at the border. And as long as that’s all that’s in the bags.’
Ropele looked him straight in the eyes, rather intensely. He’d finished his introduction, now he was getting serious. Aldeno remained composed, as though everything was now clear. But his lightness, his exuberance had vanished into thin air.
‘Let’s go.’
Ropele nodded, as did his two agents. Aldeno headed for the door, but then turned almost at once.
‘Go on,’ said the barman, ‘that one’s on the house.’
As they left, Roberto and Mattia quietly stood up to watch them reach the car. ‘Just a quick chat to clarify who produces these parts and what you’re really transporting,’ the chief superintendent added, almost in a whisper, as they descended the stairs.
The car was parked near the grass. Aldeno climbed in the back with one of the two officers. The other got behind the wheel. After they’d left, Mattia leaned in towards Roberto and said, ‘My father could be in trouble.’
‘Let’s warn him.’
‘It’s none of our business. At least this way I won’t have him breathing down my neck today.’
They lost interest in the affair and went down to the pond to play with the tin bottle tops.
They had prepared them by squashing them down flat, making them into thin, razor-sharp discs. You needed to be careful handling them but they cut through the water beautifully and if you skimmed them right you could do an incredible number of bounces, up to eighteen or even twenty. Usually competitions between them could go on for hours and this time, thanks in part to the barman, they had a bag full of the things.
Yet they didn’t feel quite the same enthusiasm as usual. It wasn’t just Roberto’s imminent departure. Perhaps it was the natural evolution
of the games they played together, the unstoppable progression of desires that change and get abandoned, replaced by others. And so they played, but had to force themselves to summon up the kind of satisfaction they had felt until a few days earlier and which they now could not achieve. This added to their sense of a burgeoning melancholy, like something bubbling up from a black well.
‘In a few years I’ll come and live up here in the mountains.’
Mattia sat alongside him, silently watching him throw a bottle top.
‘That way we’ll always be together, even at work.’
Mattia stared at him. ‘What work?’
‘I don’t know. Something we both like. Maybe something we do together.’ He sat down. ‘It’s your turn, I’m at forty-eight.’
Mattia barely nodded. He got to his feet. He picked up a small disc.
‘I’ll get my parents to buy me a house near yours in the village and we’ll go for lunch at the hotel whenever we feel like it. But only when we feel like it.’
Mattia touched the sharp edge of the lid with the tip of his index finger. He lightly ran it all the way around, exploring its ridged edge.
‘That way we’ll be together all year round. We won’t only see each other for three weeks every summer.’
Mattia pressed down hard. He felt the burning almost at once. He looked down at the result: there was a light cut in his skin and the line of blood was slowly beginning to darken. He sucked at the blood and skimmed the bottle top.
‘We’ll spend our time up here in the mountains. It’ll be good,’ said Roberto, sitting on a rock alongside his friend. He couldn’t stop himself. As though a lack of words to express hope for the future could be even more painful, like an early surrender.
‘It’ll be good.’
Mattia looked down at him with a serious air. It was no longer that of a child and perhaps never had been, taking on full legitimacy now that there was something important to do and say.
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