The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  He turned to look at her in the semidarkness and vaguely remembered the moment when he had turned his back on Michela in the park.

  He walked barefoot to the sitting room. He picked up his clothes from the sofa and his shoes from the floor. He opened the door, as always, without a sound, and when he was in the corridor, still clutching his trousers, he finally managed to breathe deeply.

  38

  On the Saturday evening of the rice incident, Fabio had called her on her cell phone. Alice had wondered why he hadn’t tried on the home phone first and then thought that perhaps it was because the home phone was an object that belonged to both of them and he didn’t like the fact that there was something they shared at that moment any more than she did. It had been a short call, in spite of the drawn- out silences. He had said for tonight I’m staying here, like a decision that had already been made, and she had replied as far as I’m concerned you can stay there tomorrow as well and as long as you like. Then, once these tiresome details had been worked out, Fabio had added Alice, I’m sorry, and she had hung up without saying me too.

  She hadn’t answered the telephone again. Fabio’s insistent calls soon abated, and she, in an attack of self- commiseration, had said to herself you see? Walking barefoot through the flat she had picked up at random a few things of her husband’s, documents and a few items of clothing, and put them in a box, which she had then dumped in the hall.

  One evening she had come back from work and found it wasn’t there. Fabio hadn’t taken away much else. The furniture was all in place and the closet still full of his clothes, but on the living room shelves there were now gaps among the books, black spaces that bore witness to the start of the breakup. Alice had stopped to look at them and for the first time the separation had assumed the concrete outlines of a hard fact, the massive consistence of a solid form.

  With a certain relief she let herself go. She felt as if she had always done everything for someone else, but now there was just her and she could simply stop, surrender, and that was that. She had more time for the same things, but she was aware of an inertia in her actions, a weariness, as if she were moving through a viscous liquid. She finally gave up performing even the easiest tasks. Her dirty clothes piled up in the bathroom and, lying on the sofa for hours, she knew that they were there, that it wouldn’t take much effort to pick them up, but none of her muscles considered this a sufficient motive.

  She invented a case of the flu so as not to go to work. She slept much more than necessary, even in broad daylight. She didn’t even lower the blinds; she had only to close her eyes to be unaware of the light, to cancel out the objects that surrounded her and forget her hateful body, which was growing weaker and weaker but still clung tenaciously to her thoughts. The weight of consequences was always there, like a stranger sleeping on top of her. It watched over her even when Alice plunged into sleep, a heavy sleep saturated with dreams, which was coming more and more to resemble an addiction. If her throat was dry, Alice imagined she was suffocating. If one of her arms tingled from being under the pillow too long, it was because a German shepherd was eating it. If her feet were cold because the blankets had fallen off them in her sleep, Alice found herself once more at the bottom of the crevasse, buried in snow up to her neck. But she wasn’t afraid, or hardly ever. Paralysis allowed her to move only her tongue and she stretched it out to taste the snow. It was sweet and Alice would have liked to eat it all, but she couldn’t turn her head. So she stayed there, waiting for the cold to rise up her legs, to fill her belly and spread from there to her veins, freezing her blood.

  Her waking life was infested with half- constructed thoughts. Alice got up only when she had to, and her drowsy confusion faded slowly, leaving milky residues in her head, like interrupted memories, which mixed with the others and seemed no less true. She wandered through the silent apartment like the ghost of herself, unhurriedly following her own lucidity. I’m going mad, she thought sometimes. But she didn’t mind. In fact, it made her smile, because at last she was the one making the choices.

  In the evening she ate lettuce leaves, fishing them straight from the plastic bag. They were crunchy and made of nothing. They tasted only of water. She didn’t eat them to fill up her stomach, but just to stand in for the ritual of dinner and somehow occupy that time, which she didn’t know what else to do with. She ate lettuce until the flimsy stuff made her feel ill.

  She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn’t been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl. To the moment when Mattia had left and, shortly afterward, her mother too, on two journeys that were different but equally remote from her. Mattia. That was it. She thought of him often. Again. He was like another of her illnesses, from which she didn’t really want to recover. You can fall ill with just a memory and she had fallen ill that afternoon in the car, by the park, when she had covered his face with her own to prevent him from looking on the site where that horror had taken place.

  No matter how hard she tried, from all those years spent with Fabio she couldn’t extract so much as one image that crushed her heart so powerfully, that had the same impetuous violence in its colors and which she could still feel on her skin and in the roots of her hair and between her legs. True, there had been that one time at dinner with Riccardo and his wife, when they’d laughed and drunk a lot. She’d been helping Alessandra wash the dishes and had cut the tip of her thumb on a glass that had shattered in her hands. And as she dropped it she had said ouch, not loudly— she had barely whispered it—but Fabio had heard and come running. He had examined her thumb under the light; leaning forward he had brought it to his lips and sucked a little of the blood, to make it stop, as if it had been his.With her thumb in his mouth he had looked up at her, with those disarming eyes that Alice couldn’t resist. Then he had closed the wound in his hand and kissed Alice on the mouth. She had tasted her own blood in his saliva and imagined that it had circulated throughout her husband’s body and come back to her cleaned, as though through dialysis.

  There had been that time and there had been an infinite number of others, which Alice no longer remembered, because the love of those we don’t love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.What was left now was a faint red patch, almost invisible on her drawn skin, the spot where Fabio had kicked her.

  Sometimes, particularly in the evening, she remembered what he had said. I can’t do this anymore. She stroked her belly and tried to imagine what it would have been like to have someone in there, swimming in her cold liquid. Tell me what it is. But there was nothing to explain. There was no reason, or not only one. There was no beginning. There was her and that was that and she didn’t want anyone in her belly.

  Perhaps I should tell him that, she thought.

  Then she picked up her cell phone and ran through her contact list till she got to F. She rubbed the keyboard with her thumb, as if hoping to activate the call by mistake. Then she pressed the red button. To see Fabio, talk to him, rebuild: it all seemed like an inhuman effort and she preferred to stay there, watching the furniture in the sitting room being covered with a layer of dust that was getting thicker by the day.

  39

  He hardly ever looked at the students. When he met their clear eyes directed at the blackboard and at him, he felt naked. Mattia wrote out his calculations and made precise comments, as if he were explaining them to himself as well as to everyone else. The classroom was too big for the dozen fourth-year students who were taking his course in algebraic topology. They arranged themselves in the first three rows, more or less always in the same places and leaving an empty seat between one and the next, as he himself had done in his university days, but in none of
the students could he spot anything that reminded him of himself.

  In the silence he heard the door at the back of the classroom close but he didn’t turn around until the end of the proof. He turned a page in his notes, which he didn’t really need, realigned the pages, and only then noticed a new figure in the topmost margin of his field of vision. He looked up and saw it was Nadia. She had taken a seat in the back row; dressed in white, she sat with her legs crossed and didn’t greet him.

  Mattia tried to conceal his panic, and moved on to the next theorem. He almost lost his thread, said I’m sorry, and tried to find the step in his notes, but was unable to concentrate. A barely perceptible murmur ran through the students; the teacher had never once hesitated since the beginning of the course.

  He started over and made it to the end, writing quickly, his writing sloping more and more toward the bottom as it shrank toward the right- hand edge of the blackboard. He crammed the last two steps into a top corner because he had run out of space. Some of the students leaned forward to make out the exponents and subscripts that had gotten jumbled up with the formulas around them. There was still a quarter of an hour to go before the end of the lesson when Mattia said okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.

  He set down the chalk and watched the students get up, slightly puzzled, and give him a little wave before leaving the classroom. Nadia was still sitting there, in the same position, and no one seemed to notice her.

  They were alone. They seemed very far apart. Nadia got up in the same instant as he stepped toward her. They met more or less halfway across the lecture hall and stayed a good meter apart.

  “Hi,” said Mattia. “I didn’t think—”

  “Listen,” she broke in, looking resolutely into his eyes. “We don’t even know each other. I’m sorry I just turned up like this.”

  “no, don’t—” he tried to say, but nadia didn’t let him speak.

  “I woke up and didn’t find you, you could at least have . . .”

  She stopped for a second. Mattia was forced to lower his gaze because his eyes stung, as if he hadn’t blinked for more than a minute.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Nadia went on. “I don’t chase after anybody. I don’t feel like it anymore.”

  She held out a piece of paper and he took it.

  “That’s my number. But if you decide to use it don’t wait too long.”

  They both looked at the floor. Nadia was about to lean forward, and wobbled slightly on her heels, but then suddenly turned around.

  “Bye,” she said.

  Mattia cleared his throat instead of responding. He thought that it would take a finite amount of time for her to reach the door. Not enough time to make a decision, to articulate a thought.

  Nadia stopped in the doorway.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “But whatever it is, I think I like it.”

  Then she left. Mattia looked at the piece of paper, on which there was merely a name and a sequence of numbers, mostly odd numbers. He picked up his papers from the desk, but waited for the hour to finish before leaving.

  In the office Alberto was on the phone, the receiver pinched between his chin and his cheek, so he could gesticulate with both arms. He raised an eyebrow to Mattia in greeting.

  When he hung up he leaned back into his chair and stretched his legs. He gave him a complicit smile.

  “So?” he asked. “Were we up late last night?”

  Mattia deliberately avoided his gaze. He shrugged. Alberto got up and went and stood behind Mattia’s chair, massaging his shoulders like a trainer with his boxer. Mattia didn’t like to be touched.

  “I understand, you don’t feel like talking about it. All right, then, let’s change the subject. I’ve jotted down a draft for the article. Feel like casting your eye over it?”

  Mattia nodded. He drummed gently with his index finger on the 0 of the computer, waiting for Alberto to take his hands off his shoulders. Some images from the previous night, always the same ones, ran through his head like faint flashes of light.

  Alberto went back to his desk and slumped heavily into his chair. He started looking for the article amid a shapeless pile of papers.

  “Ah,” he said. “This came for you.”

  He tossed an envelope on Mattia’s desk. Mattia looked at it without touching it. His name and the address of the university were written in thick blue ink, which must have soaked through to the other side of the paper. The M of Mattia started with a straight line, then, slightly detached from it, a soft, concave curve set off, continuing into the right- hand vertical. The two t’s were held together by a single horizontal line and all the letters were slightly sloped, piled up as if they had fallen on top of one another. There was a mistake in the address, a c too many. He would have needed only one letter, or nothing but the asymmetry between the two potbellied loops of the B in Balossino, to recognize Alice’s handwriting straightaway.

  He gulped and reached around for the letter opener, which was in its place in the second drawer down. He turned it nervously around in his fingers and slipped it into the flap of the envelope. His hands were trembling and he gripped harder on the handle to control himself.

  Alberto watched him from the other side of the desk, pretending to be unable to find the papers that were already sitting in front of him. The trembling of Mattia’s fingers was apparent even from that distance, but the piece of paper was hidden in the palm of his hand.

  He watched his colleague close his eyes and stay like that for a good few seconds, before opening them again and looking around, as if lost and suddenly far away.

  “Who’s it from?” Alberto ventured.

  Mattia looked at him with a kind of resentment, as if he didn’t even recognize him. Then he got up, ignoring the question.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to go. I think . . . to Italy.”

  Alberto got up as well, as if to stop him.

  “What are you talking about? What’s happened?”

  He instinctively walked over to him and tried once more to peer at the piece of paper, but Mattia kept it hidden between his hand and the rough fabric of his sweater, pressed against his stomach, like something secret. Three of the four white corners stuck out beyond his fingers, giving a clue to its rectangular shape and nothing more.

  “Nothing. I don’t know,” Mattia shot back, with one arm already in the sleeve of his Windbreaker. “But I’ve got to go.”

  “And what about the article?”

  “I’ll look at it when I get back. You just go ahead.”

  Then he left, without giving Alberto time to protest.

  40

  The day Alice went back to work she turned up almost an hour late. She had switched off the alarm without even waking up and as she got ready to go out she had had to stop often, because every movement put an unbearable strain on her body.

  Crozza didn’t tell her off. He needed only to look at her face to understand. Alice’s cheeks were hollow and her eyes, even though they seemed to pop too far out of her head, looked absent, veiled by an ominous sense of indifference.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she walked in, without really meaning it.

  Crozza turned the page of his newspaper and couldn’t help glancing at the clock.

  “There are some pictures to be printed by eleven,” he said. “The usual crap.”

  He cleared his throat and lifted the newspaper higher. He followed Alice’s movements from the corner of his eye. He watched her putting her bag in the usual place, taking off her jacket, and sitting down at the machine. She moved slowly and with excessive precision, which betrayed her efforts to make everything seem all right. Crozza watched her sitting lost in thought for a few seconds, with her chin resting on her hand, and at last, after brushing her hair back behind her ears, deciding to begin.

  He calmly assessed her excessive thinness, hidden beneath her high-collared cotton sweater and in
her far-from-skintight trousers, but apparent in her hands and even more in the outline of her face. He felt a furious sense of powerlessness, because he played no part in Alice’s life, but by god she did in his, like a daughter whose name he hadn’t been able to choose.

  They worked until lunchtime without speaking. They exchanged only indispensable nods of the head. After all the years they had spent in there, every gesture seemed automatic and they moved with agility, sharing the space fairly. The old Nikon was in its place under the counter, in its black case, and they both sometimes wondered if it still worked.

  “Lunch. Let’s go—” the photographer said hesitantly.

  “I’ve got something to do at lunchtime,” Alice interrupted. “Sorry.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “If you don’t feel well, you can go home for the afternoon,” he said. “There isn’t much to do, as you can see.”

  Alice looked at him in alarm. She pretended to rearrange the things on the counter: a pair of scissors, an envelope for photographs, a pen, and a roll of film cut into four equal segments. All she was doing was swapping them around.

  “No, why? I—”

  “How long is it since you’ve seen each other?” the photographer interrupted.

  Alice gave a slight jump. She stuck one hand into her bag, as if to protect it.

  “Three weeks. More or less.”

  Crozza nodded, then shrugged.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “But . . .”

  “Come on, let’s go,” he repeated, more firmly.

  Alice thought for a moment. Then she decided to follow him. They locked up the shop. The bell hanging from the door jangled in the shadow and then stopped. Alice and Crozza set off toward the photographer’s car. He walked slowly, without showing it, out of respect for her laborious gait.