The Stars

On the Friday morning, Saïdi came to say goodbye to me in the entrance hall at La Timone. He shook my hand. He held on to it a second too long and looked at my fingers, the broken nails, the knuckles. He gave me a card with his number on it, in case one day I wanted to tell him something. He didn't say what. I put the card in my sock, with the envelope.

Livia had brought a bag of new clothes, the labels still on. Jeans, two jumpers, a navy parka, white trainers, socks, knickers. It was all roughly my size. She must have asked the hospital. I got dressed in the bathroom, with the door open. She waited in the corridor, her back turned.

She had hired a car at the airport, a big grey saloon, very clean, that smelt of leather and already of iris. I sat in the front. She pulled away without a word. After a kilometre, I pressed the button and let the window down three fingers' width. The February air came in. She didn't ask why. She turned the heating up.

I asked for the radio. She switched it on.

For hours the sea stayed on our right, then it vanished behind a run of tunnels. There were French voices, songs, the midday news. At one point, halfway through a tunnel, the voice cut out. When it came back, it was speaking Italian. A woman was reading the traffic for the Genoa motorway. I hadn't been ready for that. I turned my head to the window.

Livia spoke only once on the whole drive. After Genoa, her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road.

“Your father's dead. In March 2020. The virus.”

I didn't cry. Chiara would have cried. She used to talk about her father in the dark, his glasses pushed up on his forehead, the stories about silk he told at dinner that nobody listened to. I didn't cry because I don't cry, and because I'd never set eyes on the man. Livia didn't turn her head to see whether I was crying. She kept on driving.

I saw the lake as night was coming down, after Como, when the road started running along the water.

Chiara had talked about it so much that I was expecting a sea. A sea with mountains all round it, she used to say, so wide you couldn't see the other side when it was misty. It was a strip of dark water between two walls of mountain, and the lights on the far shore were so close I could have counted them. I didn't count them. The lake was narrower than in Chiara's stories. Everything you talk about in the dark gets bigger.

The road was called the Regina. It squeezed between the houses, so tight in places that Livia slowed down to let a coach through. Cernobbio, hotels closed for the winter, shutters down. Moltrasio. Villages clinging to the rock. Laglio. Livia drove right through the village to the far end, the north side, and stopped in front of an iron gate painted dark green, between two stone walls.

She tapped a code into a keypad. I looked the other way. I didn't want her to see me looking.

The gate opened onto a garden that went down to the water in terraces, stone steps, low walls, clipped trees. Right at the bottom stood a big pale-yellow house with green shutters, every window lit. Lower still, at the water's edge, a dark arch under the terrace. The boathouse. I knew what it was. Nobody needed to tell me.

The Villa dei Gelsi. The villa of the mulberry trees. There were two of them, very old, very twisted, one on each side of the front steps. Chiara said they'd fed silkworms once, long ago, before her great-grandparents' time.

He was sitting on the steps.

A man of thirty, tall, a little heavy in the shoulders, three days' stubble, a creased white shirt, no jacket despite the cold. He stood up when the car stopped. He stayed where he was on the bottom step, his arms at his sides. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. He was looking at me the way you look at a crash on the motorway, unable to look away and not wanting to see.

I got out of the car. I walked up to him. He smelt of drink, not strongly, the tail end of a day.

“Maso,” I said.

His face moved. Like water rippling. He didn't answer. He couldn't.

Behind him the door opened and a small woman came running out, in an apron, white hair pulled back in a bun, thick arms, a voice. She said my name, Chiara's name, four or five times, louder each time. She grabbed hold of me. She touched me all over. My face, with both hands, my hair, my shoulders, my arms, my hands, which she turned over to look at the palms. She was crying and talking at the same time, in Italian and in dialect, saying I was thin, I was cold, I had the hands of an old woman, she was going to feed me up.

I don't like being touched. I let her. I kept my arms held a little away from my body.

Pina. Giuseppina, but nobody called her that. Chiara said she always smelt of fried onions and washing powder, and that it was the smell of the house. It was true. She smelt of onions and washing powder.

Livia had locked the car. She was waiting at the foot of the steps, her bag in her hand. She didn't come near us. She told Pina to let me breathe, without raising her voice, and Pina let go of me at once.

I went upstairs on my own. Nobody showed me the way.

The hall, the big stone staircase, a banister of black wood. First floor, the parents' corridor. Second floor, a narrower corridor, a worn red runner down the middle, five doors. Chiara's room was at the end, on the left, the one that looked out over the lake. Chiara had told me the door scraped at the bottom, and you had to lift the handle as you pushed.

I lifted the handle as I pushed. The door opened without a sound.

Behind me, on the stairs, I heard Livia's heels stop.

The room hadn't changed since 2014. I could tell from the things in it. A school timetable pinned above the desk, for 2013-2014, the boxes coloured in with felt-tip. A calendar open at June. Exercise books in a pile, felt-tips in a pot, a white swimming cap hanging from the window catch. A narrow bed, a blue checked blanket. A swimmer cut out of a magazine and pinned to the wall, arms raised. The smell of a shut room that gets aired, of dusting done once a week, of nothing. Someone was keeping this room so that it wouldn't get any older.

I closed my eyes for a second. I looked up.

They were there. On the ceiling, pale yellow, stuck up any old how. Plastic stars of every size, a moon, a comet with a long tail. In the lamplight they didn't glow. They needed the dark for that. Chiara said you had to turn the light off and wait a bit.

Tommaso had come in behind me. He was standing by the door, one hand on the frame.

Chiara had told me he'd stuck them up for her eighth birthday, standing on the desk chair while she told him where, and that he'd done the comet all on his own, crooked, and she'd told him it was rubbish and she loved it anyway.

“You kept them,” I said.

He let go of the door frame. He walked out of the room. I heard him go down the stairs, fast, and a door slam somewhere below.

Pina came up with clean sheets and a hot-water bottle. She talked non-stop as she made the bed, about what I liked to eat, about what I was going to eat tomorrow. I asked where Dante was.

She stopped, a sheet in her hands.

“He's dead, sweetheart. Seven years ago. He was old. In the beginning he went down to the jetty every evening. He was waiting for you.”

She went back to the bed. She was crying without a sound, her hands busy.

When she'd gone, I opened the wardrobe. Children's clothes, folded. A red anorak. On the top shelf, lined up on a strip of felt, there were swimming medals. I counted eleven. It was the only counting I did that night. They had tricolour ribbons and dates. Behind them, propped against the back, was a photo in a pale wooden frame: a girl coming out of the water on a pebble beach, dark hair plastered to her head, lips blue, laughing with her mouth wide open. Someone outside the frame was holding out a towel. On the back, in pencil: “Torno, 2013”. She had swum across the lake at twelve, from Laglio. She'd told me about it thirty times. The crossing, the cramps, the cold water in the middle, her father in the club boat alongside her.

Chiara swam. I never learnt how.

That left the desk.

Chiara had told me she wrote everything down. A diary with a red cover and an elastic band, kept in the bottom drawer, under her music theory books, because nobody in the house would ever have thought of touching music theory. She'd told me she had written in it the day before the fireworks, and on the day itself, before she went down. What she'd written, I thought I knew. She had told me. I only wanted to see her handwriting on those days.

The diary was where it belonged, under the music theory. Red, the elastic gone slack. I leafed through it. Round handwriting in purple ink, drawings in the margins, boys' names crossed out, hearts, lists. September. January. April. June. On 24 June, a list of things to take to the pool. On the 25th, nothing. On 26 June, three lines about a row with Signora Ceriani, the piano teacher.

After the 26th there was no 27th, and no 28th.

Two pages had been cut out. Not torn: cut. With a craft knife, in a single stroke, flush with the binding, so close to the thread that you could only find the cut by running a fingernail along it. An adult's hand, one that knew how to hold a blade and had taken its time.

After that, the pages were blank to the end of the book.