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mathematics possibly matter to someone like me who had already declared his intention of reading literature at the university?— kept saying to myself that morning, as I cycled to school along corso Giovecca. Actually I’d hardly opened my mouth in the algebra or the geometry orals. Well, so what? Poor signora Fabiani, who’d never, during the past two years, dared give me less than six out of ten, would never do so at the final session with the other teachers; and I avoided the word “failed”, even mentally, for the very notion of failing in a subject, with the consequent trail of depressing, dreary coaching I’d have to put up with at Riccione for the entire summer, seemed absurd when referred to me. To think of me, me of all people, who’d never once undergone the humiliation of having to take an exam over again, and had, in fact, in the first, second and third form of high school been decorated “for good work and good conduct” with the much-prized title of “Guard of honour to the Monuments of the Fallen and the Garden of Remembrance”, to think of me failing an exam, being reduced to mediocrity, lost among the rabble, in fact! And what about my father? Suppose, just suppose signora Fabiani did fail me (she taught maths higher up in the school as weU: this was why she had questioned me herself-she had a right to !), how would I have the courage, a few hours later, to go home and sit down at table opposite my father, and start eating? Maybe he’d smack me: that would be best, after all. Any punishment would be better than the reproach of his terrible, silent blue eyes.
    I went into the school hall. A group ofboys, among whom I noticed several friends right away, was standing calmly in front of the notice-board. I leant my bike against the wall by the front door, and went up to it, trembling. No one seemed to have noticed my coming.
    From behind a hedge ofbacks turned obstinately to me I looked. My eyes clouded over. I looked again: and the red five, the only red ink figure in a long black row of them, seared my mind as viciously as a red-hot branding-iron.
    “Hey, what’s up?” said Sergio Pavani, giving me a friendly slap on the back. “You’re not going to make a tragedy out of a five in maths now. Look at me,” he said, and laughed. “Latin and Greek.”
    “Come on, cheer up,” added Otello Forti. “fve failed in one thing too: English.”
    I stared at him, stupefied. We had been in the same form and had sat side by side since we started school, and had always worked together, alternating between our two homes when we did our prep, and both convinced of my superiority. There had never yet been a year when I hadn’t passed in all subjects inJune, whereas he, Otello, always failed in something and had to do it over again in October: English sometimes, or Latin, or maths, or Italian.
    And now, suddenly, to hear myself compared with a mere Otello Forti, and the comparison made by him, what’s more! To find I’d suddenly shot down to his level!
    What I did and thought in the four or five hours that followed isn’t worth telling in detail, starting from the effect on me of my meeting, as I left school, with Mel-dolesi (he was s^nling, hatless and tieless, with an opennecked striped shirt, Robespierre style, and quick to confirm, as if there was any need to, signora Fabiani’s “pig-headedness” with regard to me, and her categorical refusal to “close an eye once again”) and continuing with a description of my long, desperate, aimless wanderings after Meldolesi had given me a friendly, encouraging tap on the cheek. All I need say is that about two in the afternoon I was still going along the Wall of the Angels, on my bike, in the neighbourhood of corso Ercole I d’Este. I hadn’t even rung them up at home. Face streaky with tears, heart bursting with selfpity, I was pedalling along scarcely realizing where I was, and making confused plans