La Scuola dei Silenzi: RisoltoLa Scuola dei Silenzi
Imprint
Prologue: The Cloth Came in Colours
Chapter 1: Iron, Old and Open
Chapter 2: Benedetta’s Spot
Chapter 3: Same Shape, Wrong Teeth
Chapter 4: The Bread Doesn’t Have a House
Chapter 5: Wear What You Are
Chapter 6: One Short
Chapter 7: A Coffer I Cannot Re-Use
Chapter 8: Three Observations Before Action
Chapter 9: The Network Tested You Back
Chapter 10: Hardcover
Chapter 11: Ombra Tie
Chapter 12: The Olive Trees Were Ancient
Chapter 13: But This Was Not a Life
I.O. Vargas
La Scuola dei Silenzi: RisoltoI.O. Vargas
This is the opening of the novel La Scuola dei Silenzi: the prologue and thirteen chapters. It is complete in itself - one thread is followed to its end here - but it is not the whole book. The complete novel is published as an ebook and can be finished there.
First edition, 2026. Independently published.
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The tailor knew my father’s shoulders before he knew my name. He did not ask my name. There was no reason to. A man measures you once, and after that you are a set of numbers he keeps in a drawer. The numbers do not change, even when everything else does.
I was sixteen. I had been told to put on a clean shirt and get in a van. I had done both. By then there was no one left to tell otherwise. The van went down out of the mountains toward a sea I had not seen in a long time. The road did what those roads do, pretending the water wasn’t there until it couldn’t.
Grey-blue. Enormous. I hadn’t seen the sea since my mother’s funeral. I looked at the water and I thought of her. Then I made myself stop. I was about to be measured by a stranger. I did not want to arrive already opened.
The shop was a narrow stone house at the edge of a fishing village, three storeys, one room wide, the windows facing the water. It smelled of cedar and chalk and a third thing I couldn’t name and learned later was simply old cloth: fabric that has been kept, folded, in the dark, for fifty years. Bolts of it lined the walls, racked shoulder-high like something curing. A dressmaker’s dummy stood at the window with its wooden shoulders bare to the light.
The tailor was an old man in a waistcoat. He did not greet me. He looked at me for three seconds. I counted. Counting was a habit I’d inherited from my mother and have never entirely put down. Then he pointed at a low wooden platform, and I stepped up onto it, and he began.
He measured my shoulders, my chest, my reach, my back, the distance from my collarbone to my wrist, the distance from my collarbone to nothing in particular. The tape made a small dry sound against the cotton. The light off the water moved across his hands while he worked. His hands did not hurry.
Halfway through, without looking up, he said: “Your father had these shoulders.”
I said: “You knew him?”
“I knew his shoulders,” he said. “It is enough. The rest of a man lies to you. The shoulders do not.”
Near the end, with the tape at my wrist, he asked the only question he asked that day.
“Describe the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.”
The truth was my mother’s face, on the morning she stopped counting the days. I kept it folded.
“Posillipo. At sunset,” I said.
A nod. One more measurement.
He didn’t ask what had become of my father. He didn’t ask what had become of anyone. He finished the measurement and set the tape down on the table. He went to the wall and ran one hand along the bolts the way you’d run a hand along the spines of books you’d read so many times you no longer needed to open them. He chose a black wool. No pattern, no sheen, single weight, the kind of black that does not try to be anything.
He carried it to the table. He picked up a stick of chalk. And on the black wool he drew one short, clean line.
I did not know yet what the line meant. I did not know that the cloth came in colours, or that the colours were a language. The line was the first sentence anyone at the school had ever spoken about me, written where I could see it and not yet read it.
I only knew the chalk was white, and the wool was black, and the old man had looked at my shoulders, and decided.