On my first day in Italy, my host sister Federica and I walked together by the Po. We walked down the white stone quays. Orange enamel streetcars slid over the arched bridge and vanished into the cypress-heavy hillside. Boys in long boats dipped their oars. We walked up the stairway and into the Vittorio square. Streetcar wires crisscrossed overhead like a zodiac ceiling. The piazza started broad and narrowed into Via Po.
Large parts of the city were blocked off, rehabilitating for the Winter Olympics, which were going to take place in February. Federica kept pointing out the logo, a tilting blue mountain above the multicolored rings.
Federica held the leash of the family’s German Shepherd, Luna. She offered me the leash and Luna pulled on it hard and so I gave it back. We walked west on Via Po. Once Hannibal marched over the mountains and into Turin with his elephants. Like everything else in Turin, the Roman gate was unremarked upon, unfenced, and there for the taking. In Turin nothing was barred off. It was like an old tomb that no one had discovered.
Federica and I walked along Via Po with the evening light cutting at us along the arcades. I didn’t speak Italian, so Turin felt void of conversation. People were talking loudly and the effect was still one of silence, nothing for my thoughts to grip. People passed like shades of the underworld.
We walked from the 18th-century arcades to the fascist arcades of blocky polished granite. A plastic ice-textured countdown clock stood in front of the castle. Turin smelled like laundry, diesel fuel, lemon balm, and cigarettes.
We arrived in Parco Valentino, where there was space for Federica to train the dog. Competitive walkers swished past on the royal paths. The sky was blushy and Luna’s gums were black. Federica held biscuits in her hands for Luna. She shouted commands. She made Luna stay. She made Luna lie down.
At fifteen she was already something I’ve never become, which is the kind of person who could train a dog. She was able to be strict. She was able to subject others to her will, even if they protested. She had something to prove. She never allowed herself to be weak.
She told me, “If a dog likes treats it doesn’t mean the dog is stupid. The best dogs love treats. The best dogs will do anything for a treat.”
Desire didn’t make me stupid. Desire made me sharp, and good.
I had arrived in Turin earlier that day at the station called Porta Nuova. The other station, Porta Susa, was under renovation for the Winter Olympics. Carla, the mother, carried a sign that said “Benvenuta Nora.” She had fluffy blond-dyed hair and stringy, convex bangs. Gianni was long-limbed with gray curls and a stubbly face. He held Luna’s leash. He pointed out the police dogs to me as we went through the station. “Good husbands for Luna,” he said, with a twisted smile.
Then there was Federica, tall with wide shoulders and narrow hips. She had a long straight nose with no dip where it met her forehead, like Augustus Caesar’s profile on coins, and angry eyes that were archaically large, too large for her face.
I didn’t like her at first, as we walked down the platform and out into the sunshine on the grand baroque city. She was terrible at English and skeptical of me.
Even at 15 I liked to put myself in situations and see how they felt, I was the scientist and the rat. That was why I cut myself, I think, which was the behavior that sent me to Italy. I thought it was silly and dramatic to cut my arms so I cut my thighs. It was essential that my actions not be interpreted as a “cry for help.” The pediatrician told my father and his crying immediately made my behavior serious. Serious enough to earn me a plane ticket across the ocean. Serious enough to find me stretching my legs at 5am in the soft plane corridor as the ocean turned cold red. The sun came over the horizon in a hot blade. First my hair and hands, then the ocean became lustrous copper. Cold air leaked in around the oval window.
I couldn’t process the cause and effect, how hacking at my thigh with a Swiss Army knife in the shower had produced this. On the plane, I had the first coffee of my life.
In the gleaming morning that felt like midnight, my first Italian morning, Federica opened the shutters and batted at the interior air as though it held something toxic. After a breakfast of hard, tiny toast from a plastic sleeve, we drove four hours down the coast, over the border into France, then over another border, into Monaco. In the car, I tried to engage Federica in English and she ignored me. “She’s timida,” Carla said.
We got out to look at the view. I didn’t know that Monaco was glamorous, couldn’t discern that the casino was glamorous, couldn’t even see that the yachts in the milky blue harbor, fringed by spiky dark trees and glowing pink houses, were glamorous. In Florida the beach was wide open and windy and often empty. Clean and stacked with tropical clouds. On the riviera the beach was dirty and demarcated by rocks and crammed with umbrellas you had to rent.
We drove five minutes back to France, and Gianni and Carla went to a shopping mall.
“You,” Federica said. “We go.” Federica and I climbed up a steep hill—the mountains tumbled right down into the ocean. We were in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, ocre houses and red tile roofs. Perilous mossed stone walls. The sundial made a pointed shadow. We passed a courtyard with a coffin-shaped drinking fountain. A chilly breeze blew from it, a scent of damp stone and citrus. We passed under a vaulted passageway. The temperature sank beneath it, then rose again after. In the stone walls, iron studs had wept down red. I walked several yards behind Federica, and took gasping breaths of lavender, toast, manure, straw. At last, my feelings had flown over the ocean and caught up with my body. My eyes got hard with tears.
Federica showed me the immense many-trunked olive tree flowing over a stone wall. Olivier millénaire, the plaque said. It was planted perhaps in 200. Its pewter leaves flickered in the wind. “You like?” she said, nodding at me. There was no way to say what I felt. I wanted to ask Federica what it meant, to stand beneath such an old tree.
She reached into her pocket. Like a man, she stored things in her pockets. She’d worn the same pair of Levis since I’d arrived. She wore a red polo shirt and Onitsuka Tiger shoes. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. I could see the tie of her tie bikini at the nape of her neck. She took out a pack of Lucky Strikes.
She handed me the lighter. “Fiamma,” she said, gesturing. “Make fiamma.” I was learning how fi replaced fl in some Italian words. Fiamma was flame.
I scuffled my thumb against the ridged metal piece. Federica watched me curiously. I’d never tried to use a lighter before. I dug in with my nail and snapped it painfully. I couldn’t even get the striking wheel to turn.
“I don’t know,” I said to Federica.
She gave me a scornful smile. I felt a surge of annoyance. I could have hit her. I was trying. It wasn’t easy. She was looking at me like I was a child. “Tranquilla,” she said.
She lit her cigarette and blew a triangle of smoke up at the olivier millénaire. I looked up and the sun was radiating through the smoke, a white-pointed star.
She offered me the cigarette. I paused. I’d never smoked, but maybe here I would be a different, dissolute person. “You are a good girl, Nora,” she said in English, and withdrew the cigarette.
I regretted it. It was true that I was a good girl in the direction that mattered, the external. I did what adults wanted and did not impose on other people. And it was true that Federica telling me I was good made me want to stay that way. If she’d said that she could tell I was bad, would I have smoked? Yes. I wanted her to tell me how she wanted me to be.
She pressed the end of a fresh cigarette into the one she had almost finished smoking. This was another thing I’d never seen before. The smoke from the new cigarette smelled better than the smoke from the old cigarette.
When she’d smoked the second she handed me the third and told me to light it. She held the stub in her mouth and I pressed the long white end into the black-orange embers. “Bene,” she said, and took the new cigarette from me. My hands were shaking. Federica expelled smoke against the side of my face. I wondered about secondhand smoke and the blood-brain barrier, and how, in Hamlet, poison goes through the ear.
I wanted her to ask me again if I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to get her to say “bene” again.
She was quiet, smoking and looking vacantly across the street. I wondered whether she wanted me to say something, and what I could possibly say that would please her. “I like your pants,” I said, finally. She ignored me.
We began our walk back down and she bought gum at a convenience store and spoke French. I thought she was offering me gum, but she was handing me her box of cigarettes, to carry for her in my canvas bag.
I walked next to her but she didn’t speak. “Maybe you can teach me some Italian words,” I said, flustered, in English. She didn’t respond. I’d never encountered this kind of neglect. It wasn’t really bullying because she wasn’t being mean. And it wasn’t really the adult kind of neglect because she was not, I knew, caught up in concerns so pressing she’d sincerely forgotten about me. “Are you excited for school?” I said, trailing her past archways, climbing roses, green metal chairs, a yellow church.
I imagined what would happen if I didn’t follow her. If I hid behind the stone wall. She’d come back looking for me, calling my name, but I wouldn’t respond. The thought of upsetting her excited me. I was realizing how trying to interact with a crazy person could make you crazy.
We drove back to Italy to go to the beach. By now it was almost evening. Sitting among the nude children and old, shockingly tan women in bikinis, I watched her run with Luna towards the water. I looked at her broad shoulders and broad hips and thin legs and flat stomach. I guessed she was shaped like a woman, and I was shaped like a girl. I put my face in my canvas bag and smelled her Lucky Strikes. My bag smelled like dry leaves and America.
At dinner Carla and Federica fought about something. I couldn’t understand, so I watched Gianni, who’d ordered cut peaches and some kind of liquor, and then poured liquor all over the peaches, saddening me, because now I couldn’t try the peaches. The liquor fumed off the peaches and Gianni carefully spooned up the pieces of fruit, steadying them with his fingers. While the others argued, Gianni told me, in a remote, wistful tone, that Federica and I were going to volunteer for the Olympics. We were too young to be full volunteers, so we were going to work for the “Welcome Team.” He pronounced the W like a V. We would stay in the family’s apartment in Sestriere, a ski resort in the alps. Later we would attend trainings and receive uniforms.
Carla had a high-pitched voice as she scolded Federica, and Federica had a low calm voice that reminded me of how she’d ignored me on the walk down from Roquebrune.
“Sigaretta,” Federica said to me, and tapped my forearm. She did a smoking gesture. I nodded.
Carla said, “Did Federica smoke a cigarette?”
I pressed the place on my arm that Federica had tapped. My arm was fuzzy and I felt embarrassed.
Carla said, “Did she smoke a cigarette?” and then translated the question into Italian. I looked at Federica who was looking down at the table, but I knew she could see me looking, because for one moment, still avoiding my gaze, she smiled.
“No,” I said to Carla. “We went and saw the olive tree.” I checked on Federica again but she’d stopped smiling. She’d gotten what she wanted.
The family had an apartment in a sandy-halled high rise. Carla folded out the armchair into a narrow bed. Gianni’s snoring kept me up for a while, but I was asleep when Federica shook my shoulder. She already carried my tote bag over her arm. Even though I had nothing intimate in my bag, I didn’t like her carrying it. Maybe she’d looked through it, maybe she’d felt it and smelled it. “Anduma,” she said, which meant “let’s go” in Piemontese, the dialect her parents spoke. We took the tiny beige elevator down and walked through the concrete courtyards to the walkway by the sea. The waves were much louder now at night, sounding like hoarse barking dogs as they slumped over and over on themselves, leaving their white froth to glow dimly on the sand. The sky was clear over the maritime alps.
This was one hour of one night my first week of Italy, but I returned there so often during that year. So often I placed myself there on the empty and strangely visible beach, where the dark isn’t as dark as you’d expect if you grew up among deciduous trees. So often I walked down the walkway wondering what Federica would do next, feeling the warmth of that wondering in my ears and throat and teeth. You are a good girl, Nora, she’d said earlier in her vowelly way, vowels clinging onto the end of each word, good-eh girl-eh.
Federica had a cigarette in her mouth. She handed me her lighter. “Fiamma,” she said. I tried the lighter again and again. She put her hand over my hand and pulled.
In the final warm days of fall, we went on long walks. Walks on Via Po by the booksellers, walks in Parco Valentino with our sensitive dog. I felt so close to her then. We were always out together. We’d meet after class and head off. It was helpful that I couldn’t speak Italian.
I noticed that men, who never looked at me when I was by myself, stared at us when we were together. When she smoked, they stared even more, as though the smoking gave them permission. I couldn’t tell if the smoking made her look more mature, and thereby more desirable, or more party-girl immature, and thereby more desirable. Sometimes men called after us or followed us. Then Luna and I would both draw in closer.
Fall in Turin turned to winter. The men leaned long ladders all the way up to the arcades, scraping down and repainting the arches. Already you could buy Olympics keychains with little rubber mascots, Neve and Gliz. It was cold and on clear days you could see the snowy Alps on the horizon at the end of the streets.
School was Liceo Classico Massimo D’Azeglio. The building had once been a monastery. After that, it had been Primo Levi’s school. It was cold as a cellar. In the marble bathrooms, there were no toilets, just porcelain holes in the floor. We all wore our coats in class. That year, all the girls liked to wear a single long earring and the popular earrings were made of many iridescent sequins hanging from a little loop, like a fishing lure.
At intervallo all the schoolchildren crammed into the courtyard to smoke. I wanted to try smoking but I was afraid to adjust the position Federica had determined for me. Everyone had a fountain pen with a thick nib and transparent blue ink. Everyone was reading I Promessi Sposi that year. I could not take Italian, Greek, or Latin, though I helped Federica memorize the conclusion to Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe: “nam color in pomo est, ubi permatuit, ater”—mulberries are dark from lovers’ blood. I took several art history classes. I studied Guarini’s domes and Etruscan art, the muted Etruscans, known only from their tombs. I wrote a little paper on halos and aureolas. An aureola is the kind of halo that surrounds your whole body with gold.
We had to stand up when the teachers entered the room. After my first oral exam, everyone applauded. I took several PE classes. In the beautiful old-fashioned wooden gym, we carried out nonscientific exercises—walking around the room raising and lowering our arms—and all different kinds of handball. A caffe vendor came at the breaks and sold brioches in the hall. Brioche referred to what I’d call a croissant. I liked the brioche with apricot jam and the brioche with custard. I liked that classes ended usually at 1pm, and then all the boys would go down to Caffe Big Apple and drink coffee and wrap their keffiyahs around their necks and spread out over the city on their motorcycles.
One Saturday in November, Federica took me to the disco. I hated the music and the strobing lights, and the overexcited chanting, “Roma, Provincia! Torino Capitale!” Federica believed that Southerners were inferior. I watched her triumphantly kiss three different boys. I was enraged by how much attention she paid them, and how little she paid me.
I sat on a leather couch and watched people touch each other under their clothes. I liked watching this and no one minded me. No men stared. No men talked to me. I’d never gotten drunk, and I refused to drink now. I was obsessed with being good. I had to be very, very good, because, it seemed to me, that was how I could please Federica.
Outside, Federica blew smoke in my eyes, which I loved. “You don’t need to be so scared,” she said. But I was waiting for someone to take control of my better nature.
Finally, at dawn, we took a streetcar home from the disco. The streetcar’s interior was a shiny gray enamel which kept tossing the shadows of the empty trees and the yellow buildings down its length. It was cold and I could barely hear. Federica and I sat on the round wooden seats in the back. She smiled at me. “You hated that,” she said.
I nodded. “You ignored me,” I said.
“It’s good for you,” she said. I realized she’d been ignoring me to make me jealous. Manic happiness began to grow in me. She’d been trying to bother me: She was thinking of me, even among all those kisses and boys.
The sun was rising. It caught in the arcs of dried soap that the window washer had left whenever he washed. He’d washed quickly. The sun turned his haste electric pink. The stale cigarette smell of our clothes lost itself in the soapy smell of the morning. The jingling windows of the tram, just a few shutters opened by the earliest risers. Bright ice melting in the gutters. The whole city rang like a bell. Turin that morning was a very thin veil behind which reality glowed. It wasn’t only that the city was different, though it was: it was in its tautest, most lavender state. But that morning, I was also different. Maybe I could scrub off my layers of anxiety and habit, and all the adjustments I made to feel consistent, all the choices constrained by previous choices, the part of me that ran straight for solitude, that didn’t really believe that the most important things could be shared. A hope for discontinuity was what I felt. Federica had been thinking of me. How was it possible? Each view of the streets—the towering cream palazzi with green shutters, the arcades with enormous open doors into courtyard gardens—lifted me into exaltation.
We passed the bull’s head fountains under the arcades, decorative fountains that were also drinking fountains that never turned off, pouring out fresh water that gravity poured down from the Alps. In fact, the entire city was a fountain, perforated and trickling. The birds, the berries, the fat light and blue shade; dogs, breaths, Alps linked in white. “See, you don’t need to be so scared,” Federica had said. This morning was hers. I wanted to seize her hand. I turned to her, about to speak.
“Cazzo, cazzo, cazzo,” she said. She’d chosen the wrong tram. We’d end up far from home. She was angry. We exited in Piazza Vittorio Veneto.
She had power and she knew how to push me. But she could not revel in the morning, which we hadn’t been sharing at all.
The shadows of the cypresses were long and blue. The morning air was lilac; we bought blood oranges from a street stand and they were impossible to peel. Federica gave me two euros, and I drank a latte macchiato in a tall glass. Foamed milk with just a tiny bit of espresso. The Po was slow and green.
One afternoon I came with her to the video rental store and picked out Star Wars: A New Hope. I wanted her to see the scene when Darth Vader comes with the shiny round torture droid to torture Princess Leia. This was my favorite scene in any movie when I was growing up, I could spend hours thinking about it. I liked the heavy breathing and the droid’s neat tools.
The droid floated towards Leia, and we could hear Darth Vader breathing. E ora, Altezza, discuteremo l’ubicazione della vostra base ribella segreta. The dubbing made Darth Vader seem debonair and self-conscious. And now, your highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base. The camera zoomed in on the syringe, containing some disabling injection Leia would not be able to escape.
“Awful,” I said to Federica, watching her face. “I hate this scene.”
“Why are we watching it?” she said. Neither of us moved to turn it off. “Because you were talking, I couldn’t hear,” she said. She rewound, and we once again watched the droid approach, calibrated to keep Leia alive while forcing her to submit. I was in a reverie all afternoon.
Some weekends, though, we drove the terrifying chasm-paralleling roads to Sestriere. In the Alps, Federica would relax her strictures. She loved to ski. She was a graceful, expert skier. She loved to exhaust herself in solitude in the Via Lattea. If I was dominant at school and increasingly dominant in the family, she could still dominate in the mountains. She would barely speak to me, but she’d ski with me until she got tired of the easy slopes. Her skiing trophies formed a long row above the kitchen cabinets.
As winter arrived, she was searching for a reason to be angry with me. We still passed time together—we often walked all the way to Fiorio as the sky darkened and over Via Roma the winter decorations exploded into light, bright constellations in yellow and blue neon, hanging between the Savoy arcades, illuminating the alpine vapor and the plastic countdown clock that counted down the days to the Olympics. But she acted like she didn’t care.
Soon, at school, she found something to get mad about.
It happened in November, when, shortly after our Star Wars viewing, I asked Federica for a euro to buy a brioche during break, and she refused. “It’s not good for you,” she said. “Too many sweets.”
An older boy named Marco from my art history class heard her say that and bought me one himself. Then he invited me to go to Hafa Café after school. “If Federica will let you,” he said. I loved that. I said yes, quietly, so Federica couldn’t hear.
I didn’t tell Federica, of course. Marco and I walked together to the Roman Quarter. I found him incredibly difficult to talk to. We exchanged about a dozen words each on our families, school, places we’d traveled. Vesuvio, he said.
I tried to tell him how, as a child, someone bought me a picture book about a volcano that filled me with such sublime fear I couldn’t even open it. Even looking at the book’s spine on the shelf frightened me. The book was about the farmer in Mexico who had discovered a volcano in his cornfield. One day he was out working and the ground opened up. The volcano rose up from the cornfield and destroyed two towns. I didn’t know enough Italian to tell this story properly. Marco kept nodding at me, then furrowed his brow. “Vesuvio is near Naples,” he said.
Then neither of us could think of any more topics. An awkward silence descended, and his tight white face was brittle and still. I imagined trying to kiss him. It was useless; the whole afternoon was ruined by our incompetence.
At home, Federica was in the kitchen, frying chestnuts and shaking with rage. I knew she was going to punish me somehow. “Ciao, Fede,” I said. She hit her pots so hard against the sink that Luna started whining. She was digging up the volcano. Or was I?
I went to work in our shared bedroom. I was jumpy and excessively kind to Carla and Gianni at dinner. I took a long shower and thought about her and about what I’d done. I wondered if I had been malicious, going off with Marco. The best part was when he’d said to me to come “if Federica will let you.” I’d felt such a flutter of excitement at that. I could have kissed him for that. I washed myself with the family’s bodywash from Di per Di. We all used the same bodywash that smelled like fragrant olive flowers, a smell that nowadays makes me cry. I wondered what Federica would do if I provoked her even more. I imagined her screaming at me. Perhaps throwing me to the floor. I thought that through for a while, and shut off the water. The bathroom was white with steam. Steam velvety on the shower door. Falling in long drops. I stepped out onto the mat and heard the door unlatch. I had just turned to see the source of the sound – and she busted her way in.
“Why didn’t you lock it,” she said. And she stared at my naked body. The air was condensing, and there was a cold draft from the open door.
She must have heard the water, and heard me shutting off the water. She knew I was in there. She picked that moment. She meant to invade. She meant to make me ashamed.
But I was, strangely, not ashamed. This was a surprise to me. Despite all my interest in being good, I liked her looking at me. I liked that she didn’t ask permission. I liked that I was guiltless. I liked that I was exposed. I was patchy red with heat, small-breasted; my hair was pulled into one long dripping tail. I didn’t move to cover myself. And because of that, I noted with a thrill, she became the one who was ashamed. She blushed and withdrew. No one had seen me naked at this age but the doctor who had inspected me for cutting.
“What happened to you?” she said.
“You know you have to knock,” I said, in a high, panicked voice. Though I didn’t feel panicked then, because I hadn’t understood her question.
“Lock the fucking door,” she said from the hall.
After the shower, Federica ignored me. She ignored me that evening at dinner, that night, the next morning. At first I thought she was punishing me, I thought, for not being cowed by her invasion. For transforming what she’d intended to be her moment of power into mine. Or, beyond that, for acting as though I wanted her to see me, and thereby calling up in her a desire she did not want to face. For I knew she’d wanted to see me naked. Though I could never, ever speak it, I knew she desired me, and I desired her, and maybe she felt she’d edged up too close on it; she had to introduce distance; she was afraid.
And then I thought, “What happened to you.” She meant, how did you get those scars? She thought I was weird, inhuman. She pitied me. Something had gone too far, it was too much, the extremity of what I revealed. Then I thought, hopefully, she felt she had to protect me.
The night before the Olympics we put on our red uniforms and attended the trial run of the opening ceremony. We sat so close I could smell her hot licorice odor. She was only pretending to be bored. She fidgeted slightly.
We watched commedia dell’arte puppets and sloppily executed human formations. A man put the Olympic flame against an archway that exploded into fireworks, and the flames ran up to the Olympic cauldron.
We walked home in our identical outfits. The city was black and gold. The piazzas and arcades were jammed with cold, electrified people.
All the barricades for the construction sites had come down. The streets had filled with languages that I didn’t know. My brain couldn’t even place English, it sounded like soft Dutch until I got right up close to the speakers. Even that evening, the athletes weren’t guarded like celebrities, rather they walked among us in their national uniforms. And all the students had two weeks off of school. The city was loud that night, almost frantic, we could hear breaking glasses and screaming laughter.
It was very late by the time we walked through Piazza Carlo Alberto. Shadowy men stood under the arcades, smoked in front of the closing bars. Groups of men seemed to be following us. Social relations were too sticky that night. Strangers too open. Something entirely too gleeful, too much mania in the air. I couldn’t tell if I was making it up.
“Let’s get home, Fede,” I said.
“Are you scared?” she said. “I’ll protect you.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was mocking me. “I wish we had Luna,” I said.
“Look, if we light a cigarette, no one will come near,” she said. “They’re like wolves.” Lupi.
She lit a cigarette. The more attention we got, the greater the impression of safety. “You need protection,” she said to me.
“Why?” I said.
“You need protection,” she said again, like she was talking to an idiot.
The next day we drove up to Sestriere and held a green, black, and blue ribbon tight across the entry of a new Olympics lounge, and the mayor snipped it. Sestriere filled with languages, enamel pins, and beautiful tan people. In the evening, we went to a party at the communal pool, and members of the Savoy family, Italy’s ejected royals, were there, drinking in the lit-up chlorinated steam.
Carla and Gianni finally returned to Turin. Federica and I had one week alone in the time-share apartment in Sestriere. She had a red Kappa ski jacket with an eagle on it, a fascist-looking eagle, I thought, and her skiing trophies were above the kitchen cabinets.
The first five days, we sat in the Olympics lounge and played Set and watched the bartender boys practice their tricks with the tumblers. We watched bobsled races and curling.
Then one of the many aimless American journalists told us to come to the Sestriere pub, L’Irish, in the evening.
The gold medalist from the day’s downhill skiing was there, her skiing onesie unzipped and a medal around her neck. Bode Miller was there, and the brown-haired Bush daughter. I introduced myself to her and got her to sign a napkin for me.
Two cross country skiers talked to us, but when they asked our ages—fifteen—they laughed and left us, “We don’t want to get arrested.” I felt embarrassed by this; clearly I’d made a mistake. I told Federica that I’d say we were 18 from now on. She was terrible at English and smiled at everyone, looking demure. This was the closest she’d ever come to the United States, and she was nervous and out of place.
We wanted to stay, but we didn’t know anyone or what to do, so we ordered drinks. First I drank limoncello, which went down hot and seemed to pool in my ears, then vodka with pear juice chasers. Then every blink made the bar bounce. The lights became squiggling wires.
Federica and I could barely get home. We held onto the railings walking up the sloping central square. The cobblestones had a fluid look. They bulged and streamed. I felt I was walking parallel to the two of us on the riviera, that night when she brought me to watch her transgress, knowing I wouldn’t tell. We reached our apartment, Fede turned on the overhead light, which bounced chaotically off the walls. No! I cried, and turned it off. I felt a strange intensity. Intensity headed towards wrath with the stereo roar of the bobsleds.
I felt giddy on power. I wanted to see if I could get her angry enough to hit me. That was the challenge her kind of anger proposed. Why not try, I thought.
To Federica, I said, “Why are you so mean to me?” Being drunk made it easier to speak Italian, I noticed. I’d learned so much since the summer. I felt hard hilarious clarity.
“I’m always looking out for you,” she said quickly. She was unsurprised by my question, which reinforced my courage. I wondered whether she’d planned a conversation like this. Her chin was high, her face was strict—the merciless face of an animal trainer. However, I could not be intimidated, because I was aiming for her to hit me. I was amazed at the surging energy I felt from choosing to run towards the thing I had always tried to flee.
“Why don’t you talk with me anymore? Why don’t you go out with me?”
“You’re my little sister,” she said. “I do what’s good for you.” I could tell she was drunk and ready to fight.
“Remember when you caught me in the shower?” I said.
She was shaking her head.
“You wanted to see me naked,” I said.
The effect was even more extreme than I had intended. She blanched and looked away.
“You came in on purpose,” I said. I was dizzy and ineloquent, but I felt surgical in my degree of control over her emotions. “Why did you want to see me?” I said, overly gently.
Now she was fidgeting. She stepped from one foot to the other, and she kept smoothing her hair and tightening her ponytail.
I stepped closer to her. My heart was exploding. I heard the chug chug chug in my ears. Take it out on me, Federica, I wanted to say. “What’s wrong,” I murmured.
She was looking to the side. I stepped a little closer. “Don’t be angry with me,” I said. I reached my hand out to her face, but did not touch her. I held my hand close to her cheek, then dropped it. I wanted to say, you love me. “You wanted to see me,” I whispered.
Finally, she moved. She lunged at me, and too fast to think, she’d pushed me onto the floor. I felt the hard heat of the floor’s impact and not the fall itself. I looked up at her ferocious electric face. I grabbed her arm, pulled her down. She fell without a sound.
With both hands, I brought her face into mine and inhaled her alcohol-infused breath. She leaned forward and pressed her nose to my neck. My whole body caught in my throat, like I had been beheaded, and then below I was a wash of air.
She’d kissed boys at the disco before, but she was also innocent.
I don’t know how long we kissed, I was drunk and breathless. I was helpless and empty of shame. I kissed her mouth. When her lips were closed, their soft tautness was like a persimmon, when her lips were open her mouth was wet-giving and fleet and changeable. Ghostly. I experienced the sweetness of her deodorant, the alternating heat and sourness of her body, her humid breath. We didn’t touch each other under our clothes, but she reached for my breast and felt its shape and pressed on it.
Afterwards in the bathroom I discovered I was wet. A sign I remembered had been mentioned in my puberty book.
That night I slept on the couch. In the morning, the sunlight on her trophies daggered my eyes, my head felt kicked in, and the ice-covered road to the square was rainbow-white like an opal. In the caffe, my cappuccino and brioche alla marmellata were so sweet and warm I thought Federica and I would carry on like that every night, and be married, and live forever.
I read La Stampa. I knew Italian now. I read that when they flew the lions home in the cargo airplane, they arranged the cages so that friends faced friends.
She was never kind to me again. We never skied again either. She began to tell her parents that she hated me and that I was cruel to her. At first they didn’t believe it. But she kept repeating it. She had something to prove.
After the Olympics, when it became clear that Federica was lost forever, I withdrew into myself. To Federica, what we had done was wrong, simply wrong, like choosing the wrong tram on the way back from the disco.
As spring arrived, I mostly stopped eating, which made me miserable but brought meaning to my life. I walked in endless circuits around Turin. My body grew fine hair all over it. I couldn’t sleep at night because I was so hungry. My legs were always cramping. Even during hot mid-day, I shivered. I wore many layers of clothing. Like the cutting, I did not want this to be a cry for help. I was doing it for my own reasons—I was disgusted by myself.
I bought cookbooks and fantasized about sticky sweet desserts—rice pudding, bread pudding, cassata, ricotta with honey. I watched Gianni crush persimmons into his mouth. Carla started to weigh me. I used to drink a lot of water before the weighings, which made no difference. The right thing to do is to conceal bags of coins under your clothes. That can add several pounds.
I continued on my walks. I looked at the severed heads and ancient dates and bread in the Egyptian Museum. In the back rooms of Fiorio, I ate a lump of sugar that had been bathed in pure alcohol. It was supposed to be set on fire, but it burned my throat instead.
Around this time, Carla and Gianni called me into the living room and said that, because of some changes with their budget and some difficulties in the family, they’d been in touch with my parents, and I’d be going home after the school year ended, in May.
In the weeks before the Olympics, we used to ski together in Sestriere. When we skied, she wore a red Kappa jacket with Sestriere’s eagle on it, a fascist-looking eagle, I thought. I wore Carla’s blue jacket.
She’d push me onto the path for the ski lift. I was always so frightened that the swinging chair would knock me over, or that I’d get a ski caught and break my leg. But she’d put me in place with her strong grip, and up would rush the chair, and suddenly we’d be swung out over the white hills, over flags and moguls and quick gaudy skiers, over pine-filled chasms and bivouacs entombed in snow. The glitter would fall from the tops of our skis. Silence, and my face reflected in her red goggles, and my ankles protesting the heavy attachments. Sometimes she would let herself whoop with delight, and I wanted to tell her that we were the same.
Then onto the snow, which some days squeaked, some days shuddered away under the skis and ridged like a seashell, some days presented itself thick with dust that sprayed up in flashy clouds.
I had to V-shape on each turn, but she kept her skis closely parallel; she skiied on a different substrate from the sticky chaotic stuff that kept knocking me down. She was nonchalant and show-offy like a dolphin. “Brava, Nora,” she’d shout as I made my nervous way.
Some evenings, we’d ski until the sun set. The snow easily took on any color and became a vast field of gold or trunk-striped lilac. The moon would lie on the snow when we turned towards home. We’d fall silently through the slopes, sinking fast on the liquid snow, with no anchors, weightless in a weightless world. We skied past tilted farms where we could hear the cowbells ringing inside the stables. The best part of the voyage home was when we reached the long flat straightaway: she’d fly out in front of me and hold her pole back to me, and I’d grip it and she’d launch me forward, and I’d crouch and surpass her in speed, then I’d pull her forward with the pole, then she, then I, then she, then I.
Recommended reading: The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq, In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
