The Human Body by Paolo Giordano Page B

try again, let her try just one more time . . .
But another girl had already taken her place at the piano and was beginning a Brahms rhapsody with shameless audacity.
    On the way home, we spoke little. Ernesto said a few kind words, complimenting the evening as a whole rather than my sister’s performance, and Nini concluded by saying: “Oh, how exhausting! But now we’ll go home to our nice warm house and tomorrow everything will be back to normal.”
    Marianna continued the private piano lessons every Tuesday and Thursday for a total of thirteen years, with waning dedication, until she failed the entrance examination for her seventh year at the conservatory, a disappointment that was passed over in silence in our house and soon forgotten. By then Nini and Ernesto had bitterly opened their eyes to how greatly their daughter’s true inclinations differed from what they had earlier imagined for her. After that, Marianna never again raised the lid of the Schimmel grand, not even once; when walking through the living room she stayed away from it, as if the beast had tormented her far too long and, even though now dormant, was able to arouse fear and loathing in her. The piano is still there, silent and gleaming. On the inside, the steel strings are no longer taut and have lost their pitch.

Strong Wind, Blackout
    â€œH ow long have we been here?”
    â€œTwenty-five days.”
    â€œWhat the hell! A lot longer than that.”
    â€œTwenty-five, I’m telling you.”
    â€œStill, it seems like an eternity.”
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    O n the twenty-fifth day after the Alpines’ arrival in Gulistan, the thirty-sixth day since they’d landed in Afghanistan, FOB Ice is attacked for the first time.
    A sandstorm has been raging since nightfall, the air is thick with particles, and a dense orange fog obscures the sky. To go the few dozen yards to reach the mess hall or the toilets, the soldiers have to walk with their head down, eyes narrowed and mouth closed, while their exposed cheeks are scraped raw. The tents quake like shivering animals and wind gusts shriek with a frightening
whooosh
. The grains of sand whirling crazily in the squall at top speed have electrically charged every obstacle in their path—it’s as if the entire base were suspended over a low-voltage pylon. The molecules’ frenzy has even permeated the mood of the soldiers, who seem more garrulous than usual. Inside the Wreck, the guys of the Third Platoon are talking loudly, over one another. From time to time someone gets up from the benches to approach the only window in the place and contemplate the churning cloud of sand and the twisters writhing in the square outside, like ghosts. “Look at that,” he mutters, or maybe, “Shit.”
    The shouting is especially annoying to Marshal René, who is struggling to write an e-mail to Rosanna Vitale that he can’t seem to find a way to formulate. In his head he’s organized his thoughts systematically, as he usually does, but as soon as he transfers them to words, the logic that holds them together suddenly proves shaky, equivocal. He had begun with a long account of his military venture—the exhausting trip from Italy, the inertia of the days in Herat, the transfer to the FOB—and he even allowed himself a detailed description, poetic in its way, of what he saw during the excursion to Qal’a-i-Kuhna and of the storm currently raging. Only afterward did he get around to the real reason for the message, in a paragraph that began, “I’ve thought a lot about what we talked about the last time,” and continued with increasingly foolish verbal gymnastics just to avoid the word
baby
at all costs, replacing it with circumlocutions such as “what happened,” “the accident,” or even “you know what.” Reading it over, however, he realized that the initial digression was somewhat