Two Hundred and Twenty-Eight Nights

I didn't sleep that night. The bedroom door stood open onto the corridor, and the corridor was dark.

I switched off the lamp and waited. Chiara said you had to wait a bit. After a minute, the stars came on across the ceiling, a very soft pale yellow, the moon, the crooked comet. They had drunk in the lamplight and now they were giving it back. They glowed brightly, then less and less. After a while there were only traces left. I switched the lamp back on to charge them up again. I did it several times. After that, I stopped. I didn't want the light to be seen from the corridor, since the door was staying open.

There was no radio in the room. I listened to the house instead. The lake against the stones of the boathouse below, a steady lapping, like slow breathing. A boat in the distance, once. The heating ticking in the walls. On the ground floor, long after midnight, the sound of a glass set down on marble, and then another. Tommaso wasn't sleeping either. And the village church, across the road, ringing the hours and the half-hours. I set myself by it. A bell is a radio that only says one thing.

Now I have to say how I know all this.

The door that scrapes. The stars. The botched comet. The music theory. Pina and the fried onions. Dante on the jetty. The father's glasses on his forehead. I had never set foot in that house before Friday 20 February 2026. I had never seen that lake. And yet I knew where everything was, and what everything was called.

I lived with Chiara Varenghi. In the dark. Underground. Two metres away from her, sometimes less.

Two hundred and twenty-eight nights.

That number isn't mine. I don't count. I never wanted to count, not the days, not anything. Counting, down there, was hurting yourself for nothing. Chiara counted. She scratched a line in the wall with the handle of a spoon every morning, after the six o'clock news. She said it was so she'd know, when she got out, how many swims she'd missed. Two hundred and twenty-eight lines. The last one, I made.

Before her, I'd been alone down there for months. I'll come to those months later, when I have the courage. One night the hatch opened and a thirteen-year-old girl was sent down, and from that day on I was never alone again.

She talked. She talked all the time. I think she talked so she wouldn't hear the silence, or the cold breath that came out of the back of the rock, that never stopped, that you ended up hearing like a voice. I didn't talk much. I had nothing to tell. She had a whole house.

In the dark, you can't see the one who's talking. You only see what she tells you. For months I didn't know exactly what her face looked like. I knew her voice, her laugh that went up too high, her cough, the sound of her hair when she scratched her head, the warmth of her back against mine when it was too cold to sleep alone. I knew the green gate of her house better than her eyes.

She told me the villa room by room, step by step. The green gate, the two mulberry trees, the boathouse under the terrace, the mahogany launch her father was so proud of that he put the cover on it himself. She told me about her room, and the stars, and how her brother had stuck them up. She told me about Pina, who made the best polpette in the world and sang out of tune in Italian and in tune in dialect. She told me about Dante, a black and white dog of no breed at all, who slept on her feet and was frightened of swans. She told me about Signora Ceriani, the piano teacher, her cold fingers, her metronome, her peppermint breath, and how much she hated the piano, and how much her mother wanted her to stick at it. She told me about the pool in Como, the smell of chlorine, her coach who shouted, her eleven medals. The crossing to Torno, the cold in the middle of the lake. The dinners where her father talked about silk and the Japanese. The summers, the winters, school, her friends, the boys whose names she wrote down and then crossed out.

And she told me about Maso. Maso most of all. Her big brother, five years older, who carried her on his shoulders in the water, who had taught her to dive off the jetty, who teased her and stuck up for her. For weeks she said Maso was going to come and get her. She said it every time the hatch made a noise.

What else she said about her brother I'm keeping for later. He was the one I had to tell first.

At first I didn't remember everything. After a while she started making me recite.

She asked me questions in the dark, like a schoolteacher. What's my piano teacher called? Ceriani. The dog? Dante. What's he scared of? Swans. My bedroom door? You have to lift the handle. Where's my diary? Under the music theory. If I got something wrong, she started again. If I got it right, she added more. She said it was to pass the time. She only told me the real reason at the end.

I learnt French from the radio, later, in France, without meaning to, because there was nothing else. I learnt Chiara from Chiara. It's the same thing. You learn a language by listening to it talk in the dark until it gets into your mouth. After a few months I knew her house better than my own. I didn't really have a house of my own any more. It was easier to live in hers.

I haven't said my name yet. Mine doesn't matter for now.

And I haven't said what became of Chiara. I know what became of her. Chiara didn't come out with me. I'll tell the rest when I can.

People will wonder why I didn't go to the police in Marseille and tell them all this under my own name. I thought about it every day on the road. I'll give one of the reasons. The others will come.

I didn't know where the cellar was. I'd never seen it from the outside. I'd arrived there at night and left at night, in the back of a closed van. I knew the inside by touch, by the cold, by the sound of the air. I couldn't have told you which mountain, above which village, at the end of which road. If I'd walked into a police station under my own name, I'd have been a girl with no papers telling a story about a cellar somewhere in Italy. They'd have listened politely. They'd have written it down. And they'd have let me go.

With Chiara's name, they drove me back here two days later.

To get to sleep, I usually recited a phone number to myself. Ten digits. I'd learnt it years before and never forgotten it, even in the years when I forgot everything else. It starts with zero two. I'd say it slowly, two digits at a time, and when I got to the end, I'd start again. Who it belongs to is nobody's business for now. I didn't even know if anyone would answer.

That night I said it over to myself ten times or so. It didn't work. The bell rang one o'clock, half past, two, half past.

At three o'clock, I heard footsteps on the stairs.

Not Tommaso's. I'd heard him come up at about two, heavily, holding on to the banister, and a door had shut on the first floor. These were light, even, unhurried. Bare feet, or slippers. They came up the stairs to the second floor. They crossed the runner in the corridor.

I didn't move. I kept my eyes open. In the dark, the stars had stopped glowing altogether.

She stopped in the doorway. I could barely see her, a shape paler than the corridor, a light-coloured dressing gown, arms folded. The iris came into the room before she did. She didn't turn the light on. She didn't come over to the bed. She didn't cross the threshold. She stayed standing exactly where a door would have been.

She waited. I think she wanted to know if I was asleep. She must have seen my eyes, or heard that I wasn't breathing like someone sleeping.

“Tomorrow there'll be journalists outside the gate,” she said.

Her voice was low and level, but not a whisper. A voice that gives the time.

“They'll be there for several days. You won't go out. You won't go near the windows on the road side. On Monday the carabinieri will come and ask you some questions, here, in the house. With a psychologist. I'll be there.”

She stopped. Down below, the lake went on breathing against the stones.

I waited for her to ask me something. How I was feeling. Whether I was cold. Whether the room was the way it used to be. Whether I wanted her to stay. Who that man was. What he'd done to me. Where I'd been for twelve years, while she kept the stars on the ceiling.

She didn't ask anything.

She unfolded her arms. She laid a hand on the door frame, where Tommaso had laid his a few hours before.

“You won't talk about the cellar,” she said. “To anyone. Not to the police, not to your brother, not to me.”

Not even to me.