The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  When he got to the end, after a good half hour, Mattia wrote “QED” next to the framed result, just as he had done when he was a boy. The chalk had dried the skin of his hand, but he didn’t even notice. His legs were trembling slightly.

  For about ten seconds they stayed there in quiet contemplation. Then Alberto clapped his hands and the noise echoed through the silence like a whiplash. He got down off the desk and almost fell on the floor, because his legs had gone to sleep from dangling like that. He put a hand on Mattia’s shoulder and Mattia found it both heavy and reassuring.

  “No bullshit this time,” he said. “You’re having dinner with me tonight; we’ve got something to celebrate.”

  Mattia smiled faintly.

  “Okay,” he said.

  They cleaned the blackboard together. They took care that nothing legible was left, that no one would be able to make out so much as a shadow of what had been written on it. no one would really have understood it, but they were already jealous of the result, as one is of a beautiful secret.

  They left the classroom and Mattia turned out the lights. Then they went upstairs, one behind the other, each savoring the little glory of that moment.

  Alberto’s house was in a residential area exactly like the one where Mattia lived, but on the other side of the city. Mattia took the bus, which was half empty, his forehead resting against the window. The contact between that cold surface and his skin soothed him, and made him think of the compress that his mother used to put on Michela’s head, nothing but a damp cloth handkerchief, but enough to calm her in the evening when she had those attacks that made her tremble all over and grind her teeth. Michela wanted her brother to wear a compress too, she said so to her mother with her eyes, and so he would lie down on the bed and stay there, waiting for his sister to finish writhing.

  He had showered and shaved, and had put on his shirt and black jacket. In a liquor store he had never entered before he had bought a bottle of red wine, choosing the one with the most elegant label. The lady had wrapped it up in a sheet of tissue paper and then put it in a silver-colored bag. Mattia rocked it back and forth like a pendulum as he waited for someone to open the door. With his foot he arranged the doormat in front of the door so that the perimeter aligned precisely with the lines of the paving.

  Alberto’s wife came to the door. She ignored both Mattia’s outstretched hand and the bag with the bottle. Instead she drew him to her and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I don’t know what you two have been up to, but I’ve never seen Alberto as happy as he is tonight,” she whispered. “Come in.”

  Mattia resisted the temptation to rub his ear against his shoulder to get rid of an itch.

  “Albi, Mattia’s here,” she called.

  Instead of Alberto, his son Philip appeared from the hall. Mattia knew him from the photograph that his father kept on his desk, in which Philip was still only a few months old, and round and impersonal like all newborn babies. It had never occurred to him that he might have grown. Some of his parents’ features were forcibly making their way beneath his skin: Alberto’s long chin, his mother’s not-quite-open eyelids. Mattia thought about the cruel mechanism of growth, the soft cartilages subject to imperceptible but inexorable changes, and, just for a moment, about Michela and her features, frozen forever since that day in the park.

  Philip came over, pedaling his tricycle like a boy possessed. When he noticed Mattia, he braked suddenly and stared at him in astonishment, as if he had been caught doing something forbidden. Alberto’s wife gathered him in her arms, lifting him from the tricycle.

  “Here’s the horrid little monster,” she said, burying her nose in his cheek.

  Mattia gave him a forced smile. Children made him uneasy.

  “Let’s go in. Nadia’s here already,” Alberto’s wife went on.

  “Nadia?” said Mattia.

  Alberto’s wife looked at him, confused.

  “Yes, Nadia,” she said. “Didn’t Albi tell you?”

  “No.”

  There was a moment of embarrassment. Mattia didn’t know a Nadia. He wondered what was going on and feared he already knew.

  “Anyway she’s in there. Come on.”

  As they walked toward the kitchen, Philip studied Mattia suspiciously, hiding behind his mother’s back, his index and middle fingers in his mouth and his knuckles gleaming with saliva. Mattia was forced to look elsewhere. He remembered the time he had followed Alice down a longer hall than this one. He looked at Philip’s scribbles hanging on the walls instead of paintings and was careful not to trample his toys scattered on the floor. The whole house, its very walls, was impregnated with a smell of vitality that he was unused to. He thought about his own apartment, where it was so easy to decide simply not to exist. He already regretted accepting the invitation to dinner.

  In the kitchen Alberto greeted him, shaking his hand affectionately, and he responded automatically. The woman sitting at the table stood up and held out her hand.

  “This is Nadia,” Alberto said. “And this is our next Fields Medal winner.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Mattia, embarrassed.

  Nadia smiled at him. She made as if to lean forward, perhaps to kiss him on the cheeks, but Mattia’s motionlessness held her back.

  “A pleasure,” she said, and nothing more.

  For a few seconds he remained absorbed by one of the big earrings that dangled from her ears: a gold circle at least five centimeters in diameter, which when she moved began swinging in a complicated motion that Mattia tried to decompose into the three Cartesian axes. The size of the earring and its contrast with Nadia’s jet-black hair made him think of something shameless, almost obscene, that frightened and aroused him at the same time.

  They sat down at the table and Alberto poured red wine for everyone. He grandly toasted the article they would soon write and obliged Mattia to explain to Nadia, in simple terms, what it was about. She joined in with an uncertain smile, which betrayed thoughts of a different kind and made him lose the thread of the conversation more than once.

  “It sounds interesting,” she observed finally, and Mattia looked down.

  “It’s much more than interesting,” said Alberto, waving his hands around as if imitating the shape of an ellipsoid, which Mattia pictured in his mind.

  Alberto’s wife came in holding a soup tureen, from which emanated a strong smell of cumin. The conversation turned to food, a more neutral territory. A tension that they hadn’t previously been aware of dissipated. Everyone, apart from Mattia, expressed nostalgia for some kind of delicacy that they couldn’t get here in northern Europe. Alberto talked about the ravioli his mother used to make. His wife remembered the seafood salad they used to eat together in their university days, in that restaurant facing the beach. Nadia described the cannoli filled with fresh ricotta and dotted with tiny chips of dark black chocolate that the only pastry shop in her little village made. As she described them she kept her eyes closed and sucked in her lips as if she could still taste a little of that flavor. She caught her lower lip with her teeth for a moment and then let it go. Mattia fixed on that detail without realizing it. He thought there was something exaggerated about Nadia’s femininity, in the fluidity with which she rolled her hands around, and the southern inflection with which she pronounced her labial consonants, almost doubling them when there was no need. It was as if she possessed a dark power, which depressed him and at the same time made his cheeks burn.

  “You just need the courage to go back,” Nadia concluded.

  All four of them remained in silence for a few seconds, as if each were thinking about what it was that kept them so far from home. Philip banged his toys against one another a few feet away from the table.

  Alberto was able to keep a tottering conversation alive all through dinner, often embarking on long monologues, his hands waving above an increasingly untidy table.

  After dessert, his wife got up to collect the plates. Nadia made as if to help her,
but she told her to stay where she was and disappeared into the kitchen.

  They sat in silence. Lost in thought, Mattia ran an index finger along the serrated edge of his knife.

  “I’ll just go and see what she’s up to in there,” said Alberto, getting up as well. From behind Nadia’s back he darted a glance at Mattia, which meant do your best.

  He and Nadia were left on their own with Philip. They looked up at the same time, because there was nothing else to look at, and they both laughed with embarrassment.

  “What about you?” Nadia said to him after a while. “Why did you choose to stay here?”

  She studied him with her eyes half closed, as if trying to guess his secret. She had long, thick eyelashes and Mattia thought they were too still to be real.

  He finished lining up the crumbs with his index finger. He shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s as if there’s more oxygen here.”

  She nodded reflectively, as if she had understood. From the kitchen came the voices of Alberto and his wife talking about ordinary things, about the tap that was leaking again and who would put Philip to bed, things that at that moment seemed tremendously important to Mattia.

  Silence fell again and he forced himself to think of something to say, something that seemed normal. Nadia entered his field of vision wherever he looked, an awkward presence. The dark color of her low-cut top distracted him, even as he was staring at his empty glass. Under the table, hidden by the tablecloth, were their legs and he imagined them down there, in the dark, forced into a strained intimacy.

  Philip came over and put a toy car in front of him, right on his napkin. Mattia looked at the miniature Maserati, then looked at Philip, who observed him in turn, waiting for him to decide to do something.

  Rather hesitantly he picked up the toy car and made it go back and forth on the tablecloth. He felt Nadia’s dense gaze upon him, assessing his embarrassment. With his mouth he imitated a shy vroom. Then he stopped. Philip stared at him in silence, slightly annoyed. He stretched out his arm, took the car back, and returned to his toys.

  Mattia poured himself some more wine and drained it in one gulp. Then he realized that he should have offered some to Nadia first and asked her would you like some? She said no, no, drawing in her hands and hunching her shoulders, as people usually do when they’re cold.

  Alberto came back into the room and made a kind of grunt. He rubbed his face hard with his hands.

  “Sleepy time,” he said to the child. He lifted him up by the collar of his polo shirt as if he were a doll.

  Philip followed him without protest. As he left he glanced back at his toys piled up on the floor as if he had hidden something in the middle of them.

  “Maybe it’s time for me to go too,” said Nadia, not quite turning toward Mattia.

  “Yeah, perhaps it’s time,” he said.

  They both contracted their leg muscles as if to get up, but it was a false start. They stayed where they were and looked at each other again. Nadia smiled and Mattia felt pierced by her gaze, stripped to the bone as if he could no longer hide anything.

  They got up, almost at the same time. They put their chairs next to the table and Mattia noticed that she too had the foresight to lift hers off the ground.

  Alberto found them standing there, not knowing how to move.

  “What’s happening?” he said. “Are you off already?”

  “It’s late, you must be tired,” Nadia replied for both of them.

  Alberto looked at Mattia with a smile of complicity.

  “I’ll call you a taxi,” he said.

  “I’ll take the bus,” Mattia said quickly.

  Alberto gave him a sidelong look.

  “At this time of night? Come on,” he said. “And besides, Nadia’s place is on the way.”

  34

  The taxi slipped along the deserted avenues on the edge of town, between identical buildings without balconies. Few windows were still lit. March days end early and people adapt their body clocks to the night.

  “The cities are darker here,” said Nadia, as if thinking out loud.

  They sat at opposite ends of the backseat. Mattia stared at the changing numbers on the taxi’s meter, and watched the red segments going off and on to compose the various figures.

  Nadia thought about the ridiculous space of solitude that separated them and tried to find the courage to occupy it with her body. Her apartment was only a few blocks away and time, like the road, was being consumed in a great hurry. It wasn’t just the time of that particular evening, it was the time of possibilities, of her nearly thirty-five years. over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn’t make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.

  She reflected that if anything was going to be resolved, it would be resolved in that car. Afterward she would no longer have the strength. She would finally abandon herself, without remorse, to her translations, to the books whose pages she dissected by day and night, to earn her living and fill the holes dug by time.

  She found him fascinating. He was strange, even stranger than the other colleagues that Alberto had introduced her to, to no avail. The subject they studied seemed only to attract sinister characters, or to make them so over the years. She could have asked Mattia whether Mattia had been attracted by math because he was weird or if math had made him weird, to ask something funny, but she didn’t feel like it. And yet, “strange” conveyed the idea. And disturbing. But there was something in his eyes, a kind of shining molecule drowning in those dark pupils, which, Nadia was sure, no woman had ever been able to capture.

  She could have turned him on, she was dying to. She had pulled her hair to one side so as to reveal her bare neck and she ran her fingers back and forth along the seams of the bag that she held on her lap. But she didn’t dare to go any further and she didn’t want to turn around. If he was looking elsewhere, she didn’t want to find out.

  Mattia coughed quietly into his clenched fist, to warm it up. He noticed Nadia’s urgency, but couldn’t make up his mind. And even if he did decide, he thought, he wouldn’t know what to do. Once Denis, talking about himself, had told him that all opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don’t have to come up with anything new, there’s no point, because you’re both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it’s only at that point that you need a strategy.

  But I don’t even know the opening moves, he thought.

  What he did was to rest his left hand in the middle of the seat, like the end of a rope thrown into the sea. He kept it there, even though the synthetic fabric made him shiver.

  Nadia understood and in silence, without any abrupt movements, she slid toward the middle. She lifted his arm, taking it by the wrist as if she knew what he were thinking, and put it around her neck. She rested her head against his chest and closed her eyes.

  She was wearing strong perfume and it nestled in her hair; it stuck to Mattia’s clothes and forced its way into his nostrils.

  The taxi pulled up on the left, in front of Nadia’s house, with its engine running.

  “Seventeen-thirty,” said the taxi driver.

  She sat up and they both thought how much trouble it would be to find themselves like this again, to break an old equilibrium and build a different one. They wondered if they’d still be able to do it.

  Mattia rummaged in his pockets and found his wallet. He held out a twenty and said no change, thanks. She opened the door.

  Now follow her, Mattia thought, although he didn’t move.

  Nadia was already on the sidewalk. The taxi driver watched Mattia in the rearview mirror, waiting for instructions. The squares on the taximeter were all illuminated and flashing 00.00.

&
nbsp; “Come on,” said Nadia and he obeyed.

  The taxi set off again and they climbed to the top of a steep flight of stairs, with the steps covered in blue carpet and so narrow that Mattia had to walk with his feet at an angle.

  Nadia’s apartment was clean and very well kept, as only the home of a woman living on her own can be. In the middle of a circular table there was a wicker basket full of dry petals, which had stopped giving off any perfume a long time ago. The walls were painted in strong colors, orange, blue, and egg- yolk yellow, so unusual here in the north that there was something disrespectful about them.

  Mattia asked may I come in? and watched Nadia take off her coat and lay it on a chair with the confidence of someone moving in her own space.

  “I’m going to get something to drink,” she said.

  He waited in the middle of the sitting room, his ravaged hands hidden in his pockets. Nadia came back a few moments later with two glasses half full of red wine. She was laughing at a thought of her own.

  “I’m not used to all this anymore. It hasn’t happened to me for a long time,” she confessed.

  “That’s fine,” replied Mattia, rather than say that it had never happened to him.

  They sipped the wine in silence, looking cautiously around. Each time their eyes met they smiled faintly, like two children.

  Nadia kept her legs folded on the sofa, so that she could get closer to him. The scene was set. All that was required was an action, a cold start, instant and brutal as beginnings always are.

  She thought about it for another moment. Then she set her glass down on the floor, behind the sofa, so as not to risk knocking it with her foot, and stretched out resolutely toward Mattia. She kissed him. With her feet she slipped off her high heels, which fell resoundingly to the floor. She climbed astride him, not leaving him the breath to say no.

  She took his glass from him and guided his hands to her hips. Mattia’s tongue was rigid. She began rolling hers around his, insistently, to force it to move, until he began to do the same, in the opposite direction.