Page 187 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 15.

Stones in your pockets

Being duped into doing all the work on the ceilings, only now not to be paid for
it...caught Aurelio hard, very hard indeed. He felt he’d run out of options. He’d not found
anyone to teach him to speak, he was out of savings, and now he was about to be bilked out of
being paid.

Aurelio contemplated filling his pockets with stones and stepping off the San Trinita
bridge. This was not the first time he’d had such a thought. In fact, in the summer of 1581, he’d
felt this way often. and increasingly. He would take a little lunch to the water's edge and stare at
the endless ripples of the water, passing under the bridge and then onto the next bridge and the
one after that...and all for what? It all seemed so pointless, just drifting through the River of Life
like an Unnoticed Ripple.

And yet he never actually put any stones in his pockets. This surprised him, daily.
Whenever he awakened in the mornings, it was always with surprise that he had managed to live
another day; or rather, that he had not managed to throw himself into the Arno. What was he
waiting for? Was he a coward? No, that wasn't it. Was he the opposite, that is, was he defiant,
daring to show his family he meant to live a normal life in spite of their utter rejection of him, of
their having called him a monster, an abnormality, a disgrace? Again, no.

He lingered in this world because he felt one day he would speak.

It wasn't rational, he knew. No one but Santi del Meglio took the slightest bit of interest
in him. No one was interested in trying to teach him to make sounds which the hearing could
understand. I live in an absolutely silent world. I am alone in it. There is no reason to linger
here.

But even as he thought this, a part of him, a very small frightened part of him thought
there is a reason to linger here. That doctor in England, Dr. Cardona. If I could just get enough
money together to sail to England and study with this doctor, I think I could learn to speak. I
could stipulate for myself. I could take my rightful place.

So, no stones today.

Aurelio stood near the front of the San Trinita bridge, where a railing had worked itself
loose and was missing. (The bridge had been newly restored by Ammannati about fifteen years
earlier, and was still occasionally creaking with settling in, so some of the railings had leapt off
their moorings into the water below, as though to taunt Aurelio by showing him the way.) A
person could easily slip off the bridge here and land in the Arno. Aurelio came to this place
deliberately. It would be so easy here. Just a single step and you'd be plunging into the water.
No need even to climb over a railing. Awfully difficult it would be, will be, with stones in your
pockets. But you'd need the stones, I should think. Not deep enough here for the drowning body
not to fight its way back to the surface and find air again. The middle of the bridge, where the

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