Free A Life Apart by Mariapia Veladiano Page B

cracked like whips, who called their students by surname, mistook them for one another as if they were pawns on a chessboard, and in fact did move them like pawns around the classroom each time a buzz of chatter was deemed in any way subversive.
    I had to cross a small part of the city to make my way to Contrà Riale: I would walk past the Retrone, then in Piazza Matteotti pass the snow-white columns of Palazzo Chiericati, walk up Corso Palladio as far as the austere Contrà Porte that held the most precious buildings in the city, and then down Contrà Riale, towards the “good school” of Vicenza. An ungainly grey building, it had a huge entry gate with peeling paint, but only a tiny door cut inside this gate would ever open for the children to walk in single file into a gloomy, dimly lit hall. Nothing in that building complied with any existing norm – indeed nothing was even simply normal. The stairs curled and coiled up three storeys with their high steps of polished and slippery marble worn down by the passing generations. Each year, as punctual as the autumn rain, some of the children would fall and fracture an arm, a kneecap, in one case even a vertebra. The rooms were too high, and there was nosystem capable of heating their stone floors, from which a bitter, paralysing cold rose all the way to our knees.
    Maddalena had an apparently unwarranted aversion for that school, but had not stood against Aunt Erminia’s wish – certainly not out of fear of her, but rather because of a sense of awe for what she, as a person of little formal education, felt was a high and sacred ideal to which one could sacrifice the wish for a healthier and better attended environment.
    “Holy Virgin of Monte Berico! What happened to you?”
    There is no hiding from Maddalena: she can hear the unusual hesitation with which I am opening our front door, the heavier thump of my school bag onto one of the little armchairs in the hall, the jittery, slow pace at which I am climbing up the stairs, leaning on my right foot as if it were a walking stick, my hand crawling up the banister and not finding a way to lift itself.
    But there are no words to tell everything – not at that age. Sometimes one learns them later, when they have lost their smell, their colour, and above all their sorrow.
    “The needle’s eye” – that was the name I gave to that narrow fissure that swallowed me into its blackness each morning and then, once digested, vomited me out after the day’s lessons.
    To the very last day, I walked through the school gate exactly like the camel in the Gospel, constricting myself in the effort to shrink, grow thinner, disappear. I had not learnt the art of rebellion, and walked through the darkness of the hall in full knowledge of what lay in wait for me, without that knowledge ever diminishing the terror I felt. One cannot forestall the offence that drives a nail into the body and the spirit, piercing the spirit through the body.
    The first to begin was the beadle, Albina. She was perched on a sort of huge wooden trestle at the bottom of the stairs so she could warn the children to take care while climbing up, “else you will slip on the steps and
breakyourneck
.” She was tacitly exonerated from any type of work because of her excess fat. The trestle on which she was balanced like a medieval monk on the misericord of a choir stall had no back or armrests, so as to allow her hips to ooze out over the three sides and tumble down all around her into a flabbergasting heap, made even more monstrous by the enormous black smock that covered it.
    Whenever I passed her, she took special care to avoid looking at me, and never spoke to me, but after I had climbed the first few steps, she would furtively cross herself, in a sort of pagan ritual of her own which would exorcise the evil that surely must emanate from a graceless, monstrous creature such as I.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I could just about catch a glimpse of her hand lifting