The Human Body by Paolo Giordano

Author:Paolo Giordano
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Swarms of White Flakes

It was January and it was snowing the day I lied to Marianna about her dress. I had asked my sister to sit in the backseat, but she wouldn’t hear of it. As we stood arguing beside the door, tiny flakes settled on her fluffy new hairdo.

“The seat belt will crumple it,” I said.

“I’m not sitting in the back like a child. That seat brings to mind bad memories. Remember when your father explained to us what would happen to our craniums if there was a head-on collision? Things like that.”

Along the way she kept the seat belt loose, away from her chest so as not to crush the neckline. She rubbed her lips together and I knew she would have bitten them frantically, but she didn’t want to ruin the lip gloss applied by the makeup woman shortly before. If I had offered her my bare arm at that moment, it’s likely she would have sunk her teeth into it.

“A bride is supposed to feel happy if it snows on her wedding day.”

“Why, aren’t you happy?” I asked, though I immediately regretted it. Addressing Marianna’s discontent was exactly what I didn’t feel like doing.

She didn’t notice the treacherously broad nature of the question. Looking irritatedly at the whitened tree branches, she said: “To me it’s just one more nuisance to put up with. All those wet shoes. And the mud.”

The question I’d carelessly uttered aloud, however, was enough to sink me into a bitterness that I’d felt hovering over us for some months, a growing dismay that began after the silent earthquake that had split our family in two and left me in the middle, like a chewed-up apple core. In an hour from now, Marianna would be joined in matrimony to a nice young man. She was marrying him out of gratitude, but mostly to spite our parents. She was marrying him at just twenty-five years of age and dropping everything else. She was marrying him deliberately, and that was that, and I would be the one to take her arm and walk her down the center aisle of the church, stiff and ridiculous in a role that wasn’t mine, to give her away.

She flipped down the sun visor and studied her face in the small rectangular mirror. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. Naturally I was nervous, right? All women are, the night before. But I wasn’t just nervous, I had terrible stomach cramps and they had nothing whatsoever to do with tension—they were just cramps. I took two Buscopan tablets, but they had no effect. Of course, if your parents hadn’t stuffed us full of medicines when we were little, they might still be effective . . . Anyway, at three in the morning I couldn’t find anything better to do than try on the dress again, again. There I was in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, dressed as a bride, like a madwoman. And I had

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