The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  Alice leaned over him. For a moment Mattia stared at her hair falling vertically toward the center of the earth. Under the T-shirt that lifted slightly over her belly he recognized the upper edge of the tattoo, which he had observed close-up a long time ago.

  “You’re so thin,” he blurted out, as if he were thinking out loud.

  Alice jerked her head around to look at him, but then pretended nothing was wrong.

  “No,” she said, shrugging. “No different from usual.”

  She pulled back a little and pointed to the three pedals.

  “Right, then. Clutch, brake, and accelerator. left foot only for the clutch and right foot for the other two.”

  Mattia nodded, still somewhat distracted by the proximity of her body and the invisible smell of shower gel that lingered.

  “You know the gears, right? And anyway they’re written down here. First, second, third. And I have a feeling that’ll do for now,” Alice went on. “When you change gears, hold down the clutch and then slowly release it. And to start too: hold down the clutch and then release it while giving a bit of gas. Ready?”

  “And if I’m not?” he replied.

  He tried to concentrate. He felt as nervous as if he were about to take an exam. Over time he had become convinced that he no longer knew how to do anything outside of his element, the ordered and transfinite sets of mathematics. Normal people acquired self- confidence as they aged, while he was losing it, as if he had a limited reserve.

  He assessed the space that separated them from the pallets stacked at the end of the parking lot. A good fifty meters, at least. Even if he set off at top speed he would have time to brake. He held the key turned too long, making the motor screech. He delicately released the clutch, but didn’t press hard enough on the accelerator and the engine stalled with a gulp. Alice laughed.

  “Almost. A bit more decisive this time though.”

  Mattia took a deep breath. Then he tried again. The car set off with a jerk and Alice told him to hit the clutch and put it in second. Mattia changed gears and accelerated again. They drove straight until they were almost ten meters from the factory wall, when he decided to turn the steering wheel. They did a 180- degree turn that threw them both to one side and returned them to the point they had started from.

  Alice clapped her hands.

  “You see?” she said.

  He turned the car again and performed the same move. It was as if he knew how to follow only that narrow, oval trajectory, even though he had a huge lot all to himself.

  “Keep going straight,” said Alice. “Turn onto the road.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Come on, there’s no one there. And besides, you’ve already figured it out.”

  Mattia adjusted the steering wheel. He felt his hands sweating from the plastic and the adrenaline stirring his muscles as it hadn’t done for ages. For a moment he thought he was driving a car, the whole thing, with its pistons and greased mechanisms, and that he had Alice, so close, to tell him what to do. Just as he had imagined so often. Well, not exactly, but for once he resolved to ignore the imperfections.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He steered the car toward the exit. Once there he leaned toward the windshield and looked in both directions. He delicately turned the steering wheel and couldn’t help following its movements with his whole torso, as children do when they pretend to drive.

  He was on the road. The sun, already low in the sky, was behind him and shone in his eyes from the rearview mirror. The arrow of the speedometer pointed to 30 kilometers an hour and the whole car vibrated with the hot breath of a domesticated animal.

  “Am I doing okay?” he asked.

  “Brilliantly. now you can change into third.”

  The road went on for several hundred meters and Mattia looked straight ahead. Alice took advantage of the situation to observe him calmly from close-up. He was no longer the Mattia from the photograph. The skin of his face was no longer an even texture, smooth and elastic: now the first wrinkles, still very shallow, furrowed his brow. He had shaved, but new stubble was already emerging from his cheeks, dotting them with black. His physical presence was overwhelming; he no longer seemed to have any cracks through which one could invade his space, as she had often liked to do when she was a girl. Or else it was that she no longer felt she had the right to. That she was no longer capable of it.

  She tried to find a resemblance to the girl from the hospital, but now that Mattia was here, her memory grew even more confused. All those details that seemed to coincide were no longer as clear as they had been. The color of the girl’s hair was lighter, perhaps. And she didn’t remember the dimples at the sides of her mouth, or those eyebrows, so thick at the outer ends. For the first time she was really worried that she had made a mistake.

  How will I explain it to him? she wondered.

  Mattia cleared his throat, as if the silence had gone on for too long or as if he had noticed that Alice was staring at him. She looked elsewhere, toward the hill.

  “You remember the first time I came to pick you up in the car?” she said. “I’d had my license for less than an hour.”

  “Yeah. Of all the possible guinea pigs you chose me.”

  Alice thought that it wasn’t true. She hadn’t chosen him over all the others. The truth was that she hadn’t even thought about anyone else.

  “You spent the whole time clutching the door handle. You kept saying slow down, slow down.”

  She cried out with the shrill voice of a little girl. Mattia remembered that he had gone against his will. That afternoon he was supposed to be studying for his mathematical analysis exam, but in the end he had given in, because it seemed so damned important to Alice. All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.

  “We drove around for half an hour in search of two free parking spaces because you couldn’t get into a single one,” he said, to banish those thoughts.

  “It was just an excuse to keep you with me,” Alice replied. “But you never understood anything.”

  They both laughed, to stifle the ghosts let loose by her words.

  “Where do I go?” asked Mattia, becoming serious.

  “Turn here.”

  “Okay. But then that’s enough. I’ll let you have your seat back.”

  He changed from third to second without Alice having to tell him, and took the curve well. He turned into a shady street, narrower than the other one and without the dividing line down the middle, squashed between two rows of identical, windowless buildings.

  “I’ll stop down there,” he said.

  They were almost there when a tractor trailer truck appeared from around the corner, heading straight toward them and taking up most of the road.

  Mattia gripped the wheel tightly. His right foot didn’t have the instinct to hit the brake, so he accelerated instead. With her good leg Alice searched for a pedal that wasn’t there. The truck didn’t slow down, but merely moved slightly to its side of the road.

  “I can’t get by,” said Mattia. “I can’t get by.”

  “Brake,” said Alice, trying to seem calm.

  Mattia couldn’t think. The truck was a few meters away and only now did it show any sign of slowing down. He felt his foot contracting on the accelerator and thought about how he could pass it. He remembered how he used to ride his bike down the ramp of the bike path and how at the end he’d have to brake abruptly in order to get between the posts that blocked the cars entering. But Michela never slowed down, she’d go right between them on her bike with training wheels, but never once did she so much as brush them with the handlebars.

  He turned the steering wheel to the right and seemed to be heading straight for the wall.

  “Brake,” Alice repeated. “The middle pedal.”

  He pressed it down hard, with both feet. The car
jerked violently forward and came to a standstill just a few feet from the wall

  The recoil made Mattia bang his head against the left- hand window, but the seat belt held him in place. Alice rocked forward like a bending twig, but held on tightly to the door handle. The truck, two long, red segments, sped past them, indifferently.

  They sat in silence for a few seconds, as though contemplating something extraordinary. Then Alice started laughing. Mattia’s eyes stung and the nerves in his neck pulsed as if they had all been suddenly inflated and were about to explode.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” Alice asked. It was as if she couldn’t stop laughing.

  Mattia was terrified. He didn’t reply. She tried to become serious again.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  She freed herself from her seat belt and stretched over him as he stared at the wall directly in front of them. He was thinking about the word anelastic. About how the kinetic energy now making his legs tremble would have been unleashed all at once on impact.

  At last he took his feet off the brake and the car, its engine off, slipped backward slightly, down the almost imperceptible slope of the road. Alice pulled on the hand brake.

  “You’re fine,” she said, brushing Mattia’s forehead.

  He closed his eyes and nodded. He concentrated to keep from crying.

  “Let’s go home and you can lie down for a bit,” she said, as if home were their home.

  “I have to go back to my parents’ house,” protested Mattia, but without much conviction.

  “I’ll take you back later. Now you need to rest.”

  “I have to—”

  “Shut up.”

  They got out of the car to swap seats. The darkness had taken over the whole of the sky, apart from a thin, useless strip running along the horizon.

  They didn’t say another word the whole rest of the way. Mattia trapped his head in his right hand. He covered his eyes and pressed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. He read and reread the words on the side mirror: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. He thought about the article he had left Alberto to write. He was bound to make a mess of it; Mattia had to get back as soon as possible. And then there were lessons to prepare, his silent apartment.

  Alice turned to look at him, worried, taking her eyes off the road from time to time. She was doing all she could to drive gently. She wondered if it would be better to put on some music, but she didn’t know what he would like. In truth she didn’t know anything about him anymore.

  In front of the house she went to help him out of the car, but Mattia got out by himself. He swayed on his feet as she opened the door. Alice moved quickly, but carefully. She felt responsible, as if it were all the unexpected consequence of a bad joke.

  She threw the cushions on the floor to make room on the sofa. She said to Mattia lie down here and he obeyed. Then she went into the kitchen to make him some tea or chamomile or anything that she could hold in her hands when she came back into the sitting room.

  As she waited for the water to boil she started tidying up, frantically. Every now and again she turned to glance at the sitting room, but all she could see was the back of the sofa, its bright, uniform blue.

  Soon Mattia would ask her why she had summoned him there and she would have no escape. But now she was no longer sure of anything. She had seen a girl who looked like him. So? The world is full of people who look alike. Full of stupid and meaningless coincidences. She hadn’t even spoken to her. And she wouldn’t have known how to find her again anyway. Thinking about it now, with Mattia in the other room, the whole thing seemed ridiculous and cruel.

  The only certainty was that he had come back and that she didn’t want him to go away again.

  She washed the already clean dishes that were in the sink and emptied the potful of water sitting on the stove. A handful of rice had been lying on the bottom of it for weeks. Seen through the water, the grains looked bigger.

  Alice poured the boiling water into a cup and dipped a tea bag in it. It gushed dark. She added two heaping spoonfuls of sugar and went back into the living room.

  Mattia’s hand had slipped from his closed eyes to his throat. The skin of his face had relaxed and his expression was neutral. His chest moved regularly up and down and he was breathing only through his nose.

  Alice set the cup down on the glass table and, without taking her eyes off him, sat down in the armchair next to him. Mattia’s breathing restored her calm. It was the only sound.

  She slowly began to feel that her thoughts were regaining coherence. At last they slowed down, after dashing madly toward some vague destination. She found herself back in her own sitting room as if she had been dropped in it from another dimension.

  Before her was a man whom she had once known and who was now someone else. Perhaps he really did look like the girl in the hospital. But they weren’t identical, certainly not. And the Mattia who was sleeping on her sofa was no longer the boy she had seen disappearing through the elevator doors that evening when a hot, unquiet wind came down from the mountains. He was not the Mattia who had taken root in her head and blocked her path to everything else.

  No, what she had in front of her was a grown-up person who had built a life around a terrifying abyss, on terrain that had already collapsed, and yet who had succeeded, far away from here, among people Alice didn’t know. She had been prepared to destroy all that, to disinter a buried horror, for a simple suspicion, as slender as the memory of a memory.

  But now that Mattia was there in front of her, with his eyes closed over thoughts to which she had no access, everything suddenly seemed clearer: she had looked for him because she needed to, because since the night she had left him on that landing, her life had rolled into a hole and hadn’t moved from there. Mattia was the end of that tangle that she carried within herself, twisted by the years. If there was still some chance of untying it, some way of loosening it, it was by pulling that end that she now gripped between her fingers.

  She felt that something was being resolved, like a long wait coming to an end. She sensed it in her limbs, even in her bad leg, which usually never noticed anything.

  Getting up was a natural gesture. She didn’t even wonder if it was appropriate or not, if it was really her right to do so. It was only time, sliding and dragging itself after more time. Only obvious gestures that knew nothing of the future and the past.

  She bent over Mattia and kissed him on the lips. She wasn’t afraid of waking him, she kissed him as you kiss someone who is awake, lingering over his closed lips, compressing them as if to leave a mark. He gave a start, but didn’t open his eyes. He parted his lips and went along with her. He was awake.

  It was different from the first time. Their facial muscles were stronger now, more conscious, and they sought an aggression having to do with the precise roles of a man and a woman. Alice stayed bent over him, without getting onto the sofa, as if she had forgotten the rest of her own body.

  The kiss lasted a long time, whole minutes, long enough for reality to find a fissure between their clamped mouths and slip inside, forcing them both to analyze what was happening.

  They pulled apart. Mattia gave a quick smile, automatically, and Alice brought a finger to her damp lips, as if to make sure it had really happened. There was a decision to be made and it had to be made without speaking. They looked at each other, but they had already lost their synchronicity and their eyes didn’t meet.

  Mattia stood up, uncertainly.

  “I’ll just go . . .” he said, pointing to the corridor.

  “Sure. At the end of the hall.”

  He left the room. He still had his shoes on and the sound of his footsteps seemed to be slipping away underground.

  He locked himself in the bathroom and rested his hands on the sink. He felt stunned, groggy. He noticed a little swelling that was spreading slowly where he had hit his head.

  He turned on the tap and put his wrists under the cold water, as his father
had done when he wanted to stanch the blood gushing from Mattia’s hands. He looked at the water and thought about Michela, as he did every time. It was a painless thought, like thinking about going to sleep or breathing. His sister had slipped into the current, dissolved slowly in the river, and through the river she had come back inside him. Her molecules were scattered all through his body.

  He felt his circulation returning. Now he had to think, about that kiss and about what it was that he had come in search of after all that time. About why he had been prepared to receive Alice’s lips and about why he had then felt the need to pull away and hide in here.

  She was in the other room waiting for him. Separating them were two layers of brick, a few inches of plaster, and nine years of silence.

  The truth was that once again she had acted in his place, had forced him to come back when he himself had always yearned to do it. She had written him a note and had said come here and he had jumped up like a spring. One letter had brought them together just as another had separated them.

  Mattia knew what needed to be done. He had to get out of there and sit back down on that sofa, he had to take her hand and tell her I shouldn’t have left. He had to kiss her once more and then again, until they were so used to that gesture that they couldn’t do without it. It happened in films and it happened in reality, every day. People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. He had either to tell Alice I’m here, or leave, take the first plane and disappear again, go back to the place where he had been hanging for all those years.

  By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains. It had happened with Michela and then with Alice and again now. He recognized them this time: those seconds were there, and he would never make a mistake again.

  He closed his fingers around the jet of water. He caught some of it in his hands and bathed his face. Without looking, still bent over the basin, he stretched out an arm to take a towel. He rubbed it over his face and then pulled away. In the mirror he saw a darker patch on the other side. He turned it around. It was the embroidered initials FR, placed a few centimeters away from the corner, in a symmetrical position in respect to the bisecting line.