Listen to Oonagh Stransky read an excerpt from in her English translation of “Maybe.”

translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky

The light in March has the same greenish hue as when you’re about to faint and your vision grows blurry. It bounces off the building across the street, the one the color of a decaying vegetable, hits the Formica desktops, and spreads across the students’ faces. Only Alessia remains in the shadows, but she’s naturally green, or maybe just bitter about being stuck with that name.

Unlike everyone else, I go to great lengths not to ignore her. She sits near the coat rack in the back corner—puffy-­faced, breathing through her mouth, her eye makeup done badly. “Alessia, can you tell me what an oxymoron is?” I ask gently. Two or three hands fly up, teenagers who want to talk. I gesture to them to wait. Alessia tips her head to the side and rests her cheek on one of the nearby coats. Seconds pass in silence. I need to be patient: her reply usually comes after looking at me quizzically for several long moments.

In the meantime, the owner of the coat waves to Alessia to move away from it; she doesn’t want Alessia to get makeup on it. Behind me, I hear kids snicker and whisper “moron.” I snap my fingers to silence them, to wake her out of her silent stupor, and to get her to sit up, away from the coat.

“Maybe . . .” she finally says, “. . . something dark. Maybe.”

“Moron,” the kids start snickering again.

The Moor, I think, as the students who had their hands raised let them drop with disappointment now that I no longer need their knowledge. I’m starting to sweat, there’s a pounding in my temples. This too shall pass, I say to myself and patiently signal for the class to be silent. They quiet down. But Alessia continues to sit there, open-­mouthed, full of doubts. Alessia lives in a state of constant doubt. Even if I were to say, Correct, an oxymoron is black, she would add, Maybe. Sometimes, the word “maybe” contains everything: her name, her address, the class, me. “Water on the brain,” her classmates say in that artificially empathetic tone that kids use when they want to show that they’re not entirely indifferent to human tragedy. “Alessia doesn’t exactly shine in class,” I tell her parents, but then I’m ashamed for having chosen a verb used to describe the act of polishing something until it glistens, like a pair of shoes or a door handle, evoking the image of a housewife breathing onto a brass nameplate before buffing it. I speak but no longer know what I’m saying. It’s because of my bad circulation: I’m losing words, faces, memories.

I suddenly recall a student I once had—or was he a classmate of mine? I’m not sure anymore, it’s hard to say. I only know that he was absolutely convinced that his future would be radiant. This was back when students had to be screened periodically for tuberculosis, pressing their bare chests against a freezing metal plate to root out any hotspots. According to the boy, you knew you’d have a radiant future—that you’d end up impressing everyone—when they x-­rayed your chest and saw that everything was fine. For him, the word “radiant” derived from “radi­ologist.”

When he told me that, I thought, Oh, okay. It sounded feasible. I had never associated the possibility of having a radiant future with the rays of the sun either. No, I always thought of radiance in terms of bicycles, how the spokes radiate out from the center in so many radii. I imagined that the future was like pedaling a bike so hard that the orderly tangle of metal segments was mysteriously transformed into something radiant. “That which is to come is radiant,” I had read in elementary school, and somehow the future fell into the same spinning vortex that allowed my friends to come careening towards me, bent over their handlebars. Essentially, for me, the future meant having my own bike, something I never did—except for a brief period when I had one that was too small, and a girls’ model at that. As an adult, I never biked much. Maybe that’s why I’m not radiant, maybe that’s why I never really had a radiant future.

Now that I think about it, the boy was definitely one of my students. He wrote songs and conversed with the dead. Mostly the latter; he was obsessed with the notion that the dead had left remnants of their voices in their written words, and his lyrics were inspired by the most loquacious of them.

I had inadvertently suggested this possibility to him during a class lecture on Humanae litterae when, in a tremulous voice, I encouraged my students to read more. The act of reading—I told them—is extraordinary for how it lets you engage in conversation with people who lived twenty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago.

He ran with it: Or fifteen hundred years ago, or even two thousand, three thousand, five thousand, six thousand years ago.

“Halt!” I ordered him. And he stopped. Only much later on would he tell me that he’d discovered the pleasure of reading thanks to me. But he did not read a lot in terms of quantity. No, he spent endless amounts of time on a single sentence or stanza, trying to imagine the sound of the author’s voice, or how the people around the author spoke; their words were part of the books, too, he used to say.

“But we don’t write with the same voice we speak with,” I often told him, trying to correct him. That would set him off and trigger debates that lasted for days and involved the entire class. He wanted to convince us that you could take a text and wring it so hard that the sound of the words would come dripping out the exact way they had sounded to Dante, for example, the first time the great poet heard them inside his head.

He didn’t like the way I read The Divine Comedy. According to him, I parodied the voices. Once, for an entire lesson, he repeated over and over “. . . and I shall guide you, taking you from this place through an eternal place, where you shall hear the howls of desperation and see the ancient spirits in their pain, as each of them laments his second death; and shall see those souls who are content within the fire . . .” Eventually, he read it without reciting it, as if he were talking about casual everyday things, in a very normal tone. His admirers laughed, and he laughed right along with them. Then he informed us that when he grew up he was going to invent a machine that would extract the voice of the dead from a text. First, he would try with x-­rays: each word would be x-­rayed, and then, he carefully explained, the word would start to glow and irradiate the voice of the person who had spoken it.

Listening to him reminded me of my own teenage daydreams. But I had been a silent and detached kid, more like Alessia, while he was expansive and brash, obstreperous. In order to teach him that learning is a serious business and that genius needs to be nourished with carefully researched information and not fantasy, I cut him off and quizzed him on the spot: “Who is Dante referring to with those ‘who are content within the fire’?” The right answer was: the souls in Purgatory. He replied: “Pyromaniacs.” I flunked him: “Three.” Now, hearing myself say “three” in my head and writing it down, his name comes to mind. It was Enrico.

I often thought that Enrico was the one student who would render me immortal. I don’t know if other teachers do this, but I confess to imagining that my name would one day appear in his biographical notes the same way that Brunetto Latini’s does for Dante Alighieri. Enrico picked up on this. And as soon as he realized that I was ready to hang my radiant future on the radiant future of his name, he almost immediately started treating me with less respect. For example, he used to try to sneak out of the room during class, stealthily crawling from one desk to the next in the direction of the door. I’d see him out of the corner of my eye but I never said a thing. His classmates tried to help him by drawing my attention to something happening on the other side of the room, so I wouldn’t notice him silently opening the door and creeping out to go smoke in the bathroom. Maybe I pretended not to notice because I wanted to indulge his rebellious streak, maybe because I didn’t want to risk becoming unpopular. Now I can’t get him out of my head. Enrico. What did he look like? And what was his last name?

Now and then, old students return as if from the underworld for a visit. Some go to university but have lost all hope. Many hold down jobs and are depressed; they do this or that, but never what they originally wanted, never what they confided to me in response to the assignment I gave them: “What I want to be when I grow up.” Others, in addition to working, have gotten married and have had children who now have their own radiant futures. They all think that I’ll remember them instantly.

Sometimes I remember their last names, they come to me in alphabetical order, a distant echo of countless roll calls: Barani—here! Battistini—here! Bertolazzi—here! But I have a hard time remembering who they actually were. For example, if one of them shows up and says by way of introduction, “It’s me, Bertolazzi!” I instantly exclaim, “Bertolazzi!” and embrace a person I recognize only by their last name. “Bertolazzi!” I say again, coolly waiting for them to provide me with a few more details: something about their classmates, if it had been a good year or a rotten one, some telling anecdote.

Other times, I recognize their faces instantly but can’t recall their names, and they don’t bother telling me because they’re sure I must remember them. They start chatting about this and that, they update me, they tell me stories: the time I stood up to one of my despotic colleagues on their behalf; the precise moment they actually started enjoying Latin, which they had thoroughly detested before I was their teacher; when I told them “nothing remains the same,” oh what a great line, they never forgot it, it’s always right here, they say, tapping their foreheads.

I heard these exact words not too long ago from a tall, muscular young man in a T-­shirt, his car radio tucked tightly under his arm. He was getting married, he added. To Cristofori. “Cristofori, Laura,” I suddenly remembered, and that made him happy. But one memory always leads to the next, and I found myself asking with surprise: “Wait, but didn’t she used to go out with Occhipinti, Roberto? They started going out in their first year of high school. Oh well, too bad.”

There was an embarrassing silence. Then he told me that he was Occhipinti, Roberto; he figured I was teasing him. I looked at him and snickered, as if to say, Good joke, right? Then I thought: He thinks he’s Occhipinti but he’s not Occhipinti; he’s a sarcophagus for my Occhipinti, who’s buried deep inside, one feature here, one there, the expression in his eyes, his sneer—signals that come to the surface and then sink back down into this new, soon-­to-­be-­married Occhipinti.

“You haven’t changed one bit. You’re lucky,” he said with a sigh. Did I remember the time I tried to strangle Silvestri? Did I remember Silvestri? I remember lots of students with that name, or some version of it: Silvestri, Silvi, Silvani, Silvestrotti. All of them deserved to be strangled, but I don’t think I ever really tried to do it. Even so, I replied: Yes. His eyes filled with tears, which he swiftly wiped away with a very masculine gesture. Then he left and went back out into the world without giving me any kind of sign that would allow me to share the emotion with him, a mysterious semblance carrying an even more ancient semblance within.
It seems impossible that adults like him were once bright-­eyed—or in all likelihood, bleary-­eyed—kids who, to earn my approval, had to memorize the lives and times of Dante and Boccaccio. If their memories were to fail them now, I wouldn’t be able to help them remember a thing.

I had one Silvestri who played the guitar. Maybe that was my brilliant student’s last name: Enrico Silvestri. How long ago would that have been? Seven, nine, twelve, fourteen years ago? Did I really try to strangle him? If so, why?

He and I had a tacit agreement. If I gave the class an assignment like “Analyze Tommaso Campanella’s sonnet ‘Della plebe,’” he’d ignore the prompt entirely and write whatever he wanted. When it came time to correct their essays, I always pulled his out of the pile with some trepidation. It usually included a number of interesting ideas. “Dear Professor,” he would begin, then he’d skip a line and write a few pages loaded with mistakes. But they were mistakes, I quickly realized, that could take him far.

For example, he once wrote that he intended to live his entire life in uno stato de brezza. I corrected the spelling to uno stato d’ebbrezza, a state of inebriation. He came up to my desk to contest my correction. He was tall and had long hair which he wore parted in the middle; his kind eyes were always dilated, as if he could see things others could not. Either marijuana or hash, I thought. I asked him what ebbrezza meant for him and how he intended to attain it. “Wind,” he said. And he went on to explain that, over the course of his life, he wanted to be like a swift body of air, or a warm breeze, or a sudden draft that slams doors shut. To demonstrate what he meant, he huffed and puffed a number of times, accompanying each exhalation with an emphatic gesture of his hand away from his chest and towards me. I shifted slightly in my chair, worried that he might accidentally hit me. “Ah, brezza as in a springtime breeze, a gentle zephyr?” I asked. He nodded, so I erased my initial correction and wrote “come fossi una brezza,” as if I were a breeze. How poetic, I thought to myself, pleased with the solution I had found for him. But he was still unhappy when he went back to his seat. It took me quite some time to fully understand that his state of inebriation also meant breezy. As different as the two words were, ebbrezza and brezza coexisted in his brain as a single concept: he had melded them together to make just the right word.

I ought to have figured as much from his songs. He was in that particular state when he composed them, and was in that state during breaks when he picked up his guitar and belted out: “I’ve got no reeturn address, nowherrre to turn, you knowww how to address me, undress me, and return me; No, I’ve got nooo return address . . .” He would strum on his guitar, head back and off to one side, long hair tucked behind his ears: plinkity pling plonk, plinkity pling plonk. He was nuts. He was so unlike how I had been at his age that I started to think—precisely because of how different we were—that he could go on to achieve great things in his life, that all he needed was a little guidance.

He was well-­liked by his classmates. Much more than I was as their teacher. I was jealous but didn’t show it. I decided that I had to pretend to be one of his admirers and work at destroying his misdirected creativity; I had to stop Silvestri from blindly following destiny, which would only get him legitimately labeled an idiot, and set him on the arduous path of unquestionable exceptionality.
That’s my method. That’s how I’ve always done things.

Sometimes ghosts come through the front doors of the school, climb the first and second flights of stairs, and knock on my classroom door. Not ghosts of the dead. Ghosts of the living. Try as I might, I can’t get the dead to come to me.
Today, things got a little confusing when a student walked in after class had already started. The only excuse I have for my behavior is that I was tired. Also, a few months ago I learned that I have high cholesterol. I blew up at her: Why are you always late to my class? Were you out smoking in the hall again? What were you doing out there? Or did you fall into the toilet?

“No, I . . .” she tried to reply.

“One more word and I’m sending you the principal,” I said in a menacing voice.

Then I noticed that the rest of the class was giggling. I had gotten confused. She was an old student of mine. By chance, the desk that she used to sit at was empty. I couldn’t remember when exactly she had been my student.

I hugged her warmly while thinking to myself: Who is this girl? And what the hell is her name?

“You’re the same as ever,” she said.

Me, the same as ever.

Not physically, she said with her eyes. Physically, I had turned into her grandfather. Your way of being—she said out loud; always teasing, always joking around.

That’s exactly what that sarcophagus of Occhipinti said, I thought, trying to orient myself. She had to be a classmate of his, maybe even his future wife: Cristofori, Laura. I must have gone to great efforts during their year to be funny, always ready with a joke. My current students looked puzzled. They couldn’t believe I had a playful side.

“I’m getting married,” Cristofori announced. She had come to tell me because I had been her favorite teacher. I had given her so very much, she said. Once she had even written down something I had told the class: “Nothing remains unchanged.” Oh, what a great line that was.

Ah, I said. How could I have possibly uttered such a banal phrase more than once? I inquired what kind of work she did. Don’t you remember what I wanted to become, she asked by way of reply. Of course I do, I lied. I knew you would, she said with evident pleasure. Apparently, I had given her essay about what she wanted to become a high grade. Unfortunately, despite her talent and skills, she couldn’t do what she aspired to; it just wasn’t in the cards. She was currently the business manager of a medical practice, a gynecologist’s office. Her job was to discourage patients from asking for a fiscal receipt. She showed me how she did it. First she scowled, and then she asked coldly: You won’t be needing a receipt, will you . . . ? I told her she was very good at it, and added that I never asked for my receipts, not even at restaurants. I also told her that if I were to go to her gynecologist and if she were to ask me that question, I’d immediately say: Who me? No way, what do I need a receipt for?

“What about Silvestri?” she asked, did I remember him? The time I tried to strangle him . . .

I suddenly felt like I was having a panic attack.

“Did I succeed?” I asked.

She laughed and shook her head, but I couldn’t tell if it was to reassure me or to say: so funny, such a comedian.

“Well, all the best to you, Cristofori,” I said, bidding her farewell, already feeling a little bit better.

That annoyed her. “My last name’s Giovannetti,” she said. Maybe I was confusing her with Cristofori because there was a period of time when Occhipinti liked both of them? But she had always liked Silvestri. Didn’t I remember? Or was I just teasing her again?

“I remember! Of course, I remember,” I said, trying to sound convincing, then added, “Did you know that Cristofori and Occhipinti are getting married, too?”

I feel mangled, mutilated. In the twenty-­two years I’ve been teaching, hundreds of individuals have chopped off and carted away parts of me. How I move my right hand. How I pronounce certain words. What I said one morning when I was on fire. How artfully I embellished Foscolo’s sonnet, “A Zacinto.” Advice I gave for this or that existential crisis. The difference between topos and pantegana.

Still to this day, they use and abuse the fragments they took from me. They remember scenes with me as the protagonist that somehow shaped their lives—I, who have never considered myself to be the protagonist of anything. They cling tightly to those anecdotes and nurture them, they retell them whenever they bump into each other. I, meanwhile, can’t even recall when or why I tried to strangle Enrico Silvestri.

Maybe it happened after I explained to the class how when you say “white,” you’re also saying “black”; how if you say “black,” you’re inevitably also saying “white.” Cerebral stuff like that always impressed them and sparked endless discussions. I force myself to try to remember them, but all I can see are faceless silhouettes sitting at their desks like paper targets. All except Occhipinti and Giovannetti, whose faces are those I saw on their recent visits. Unfortunately for them.

One day, Enrico announced that he had created a space where white was not yet white and black was not yet black, and that’s where he wanted to exist. And from that moment forward, no one could talk to him. He drew the curtains around himself and proclaimed that nothing we said or any of our words either signified, or didn’t signify, a single thing; it was all just pure sound, like the wind in the trees, and if he happened to hear it, he was overcome by a sense of eternity and catapulted into uno stato de brezza. He set up camp in the back row near the radiators, close to the window, which let him contemplate the building across the
street, which even back then was probably the color of a decaying vegetable.

I found the whole thing commendable. That’s what I said to the rest of the class, anyway, to justify why I didn’t punish him for turning a deaf ear on me. I actually thought he was being intolerably stupid and I found it hard to stay calm, but I had already embraced a strategy of pretending to admire him in order to guide his creativity towards more constructive ends. All things considered, Enrico Silvestri was the only promising student I ever had. I definitely didn’t want to stand in the way of his genius.
I’d say his name out loud, “Enrico.” Then I’d ironically explain to the rest of the class with a knowing air that at this particular moment in time, Enrico is not yet Enrico, nor is he non-­Enrico; he inhabits the world of “maybe” where the goddess Fortuna wanders around blindfolded; maybe he’ll come into being and maybe he won’t; we’ll never know if one day he’ll become the man formerly known as Enrico because we don’t know if he’ll ever become Enrico; only time will tell. So we waited to see how long Enrico would hold out before he uttered a word or a syllable or even took a breath.

During my hour, when I came into their classroom to teach, the kid communed with the secret rhythms concealed in the writing of the dead. These rhythms inspired him to write songs, noisily unwrap snacks, munch on crackers, and do homework for his other teachers who, unlike me, had barged into his sacred space and flatly said: Go and sit in your assigned seat or I’ll flunk you immediately.

Everything came to a screeching halt a couple of weeks later when Enrico’s preverbal corner of the room suddenly got crowded with friends who, like him, wanted to abandon the Aristotelian premise of Logos, and just sit there and babble, while I continued to drone on about Saul or Mirra, or another one of Alfieri’s tragic heroes. I flew off the handle, stormed across the room, barged into his territory, grabbed Enrico by the neck, and dragged him back to the world of common mortals—we with no radiant future.
He acquiesced without batting an eye while I kept an amicable hand at the nape of his neck.

“I was starting to get bored anyway,” he said. That was the last brilliant thing he ever said. He died, but I had nothing to do with it.

He died, if I’m not mistaken, the year after he graduated, from a heart condition that he didn’t even know he had. Strangle him, I did not. I merely placed my hand on the back of his neck and guided him back to his desk. Why, even now, after all this time, do his classmates remember me strangling him?

Sometimes kids end up getting lost in the real world, but not like Occhipinti in his sarcophagus. Sometimes they lose their future entirely. When it happens, it’s hard to find the right words. I think of Pascoli’s poem “L’Aquilone.” Me, I erase and erase until I forget. They told me that Enrico went on a bender, drinking and smoking, and then he suddenly started sweating heavily and died. I’ll always remember standing next to him, my hand on the back of his neck, and how he said, “I was starting to get bored anyway,” leading me to believe that he had returned to us.

Me, I’d been bored for a long time. After a certain number of years, life is like a mandated curriculum in public school: always the same, unchanging. The years that have passed feel plotless and confused. We tell ourselves we’re living healthy beings, but we experience neither pleasure nor peccadillos; we’re saints without halos. The illusions that once consumed so much of our energy seem like games we have played too many times—repetitive and soporific. The milestones of life, essential and memorable, turn out to be not even worth mentioning. Random, free-­floating, timeless, and placeless moments are much more interesting: a partial landscape, the expression in someone’s eyes (without any other defining features), a wall we stared at, the despair we once felt, a pleasure we sought out, visions that came to us in a blink of an eye one evening before this or after that, hard to say when exactly. Come to think of it, Enrico was the only person who could have given my life meaning, or at least let me live with the possibility that maybe one day it could’ve had meaning. Too bad.

It’s almost the end of March now, and the light is an even brighter green. After her wedding, Giovannetti returned to visit with her husband, a man I felt I recognized immediately. The class was shocked. They probably thought: We can’t wait to never see the old fogey again, and these people come back to visit? They must be insane.

Giovannetti looked at me radiantly. “Do you remember Silvestri?”

I answered a little sadly. “Enrico, yes. But it isn’t true, I didn’t try and strangle him.”

“Carlo,” her husband corrected me shyly. “My name is Carlo.” And then he told me how I bolted across the room from my desk, wrapped my hands around his neck, and started screaming. No doubt about it: I definitely wanted to strangle him.

“I deserved it,” he admitted. He had done absolutely everything imaginable to annoy me. How did I manage to put up with him for so long? Still to this day, he was impressed at how patient I’d been with him and his guitar, that stupid song, plinkity-­plonk, the voices of the dead, his stato de brezza, the black and the white, how embarrassing, how deeply embarrassing. Any other teacher would have made sure he never received his high school diploma. But he did, he got it, and now he has a steady job in a travel agency. Actually, he’d been wanting to tell me something for years, and that’s why he came back to see me: I hadn’t been just a teacher for him, I had been his salvation. That line I had once said—“Nothing remains the same”—had become something of an eleventh commandment, and not just for him, but for the whole class. It had helped him realize that he had to stop wasting his time, and so he came to his senses.

I tried to visualize him with long hair, parted down the middle.

“Silvestri,” I said circumspectly.

“Yup. Silvestri, Carlo. That’s me,” he said proudly.

“But . . . what happened to Enrico?” I asked.

The young couple stared deeply into each other’s eyes, lovingly trying to recall someone named Enrico, eventually coming to the conclusion that there had been no Enrico in their class.

After they left, I walked slowly around the room, between the desks. I noticed Alessia’s befuddled gaze following me. So, in an inspirational tone of voice, I declared, “Kids, remember this: Everything changes, nothing remains the same.” She was the only one whose eyes lit up. She opened up her planner and started writing.

After school, we came out at the same time and walked to the bus stop together. She was embarrassed and so was I. For the past few weeks, she’s been applying her makeup the way adolescents out here in the suburbs do—incompetently. I felt like an elderly dad walking with his youngest daughter.

“O living death, o delightful evil,” I said, sighing heavily. “Those are oxymorons. Petrarch was good at oxymorons.”

The look in her eyes told me she was worried that the short walk might turn into an outdoor lesson.

“Now you tell me something,” I said.

She stood up a little straighter and started to titter nervously. Then she mumbled something about wanting to change.

“Do you think the Virgin Mary really visits people?” she asked between giggles.

I doubt it, I said. She confided in me that she slept with her bedside light turned on because she was scared that the Virgin Mary might visit her. Every night, before falling asleep, she tried to blind herself by staring at the light bulb and the word OSRAM that was printed on it. She fell asleep muttering OSRAM over and over to herself as if it were an incantation to keep the Virgin Mary away.

“That’s a good story,” I said sincerely.

“No, it’s not. It’s bad,” she replied. Then, so as not to offend me, she added, “Maybe.” And she got on her bus.

I then waited patiently for mine to come, as I always do. The entire trip home, I kept asking myself: So who was Enrico then? What did he say, what did he do, what would he have done? And why did he die?

It occurs to me that if I didn’t fabricate this Enrico figure, whose role had been to save me from oblivion, I could take it upon myself now and try and save him, seeing that I’ve survived him. I can see him now: his narrow, gaunt face and long, straight hair parted down the middle. Maybe one day he took out his guitar in class to show me how well he played. Maybe he wrote me an essay that felt like a long letter of farewell. Maybe I did actually flunk him for how he refused to follow the rules. I never saw him again—except maybe once, while crossing the street from opposite directions. He had cut his hair and so had I, and we were shocked to see each other looking so naked and ugly. He had a serious heart condition but didn’t know it. Maybe he never did or said any of the things I described. His last name wasn’t Silvestri, but for the life of me I just can’t remember what it was. ■

NOTES:
This story was published in the book La Scuola, copyright 2022 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino.
Lines 114–177 from Dante’s Inferno, quoted here, are from the translation by Allen Mandelbaum.

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