Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  He was angry, with Cecilia, with himself. After the last relapse, when, for the fourth time, the scene of repentance had repeated itself, when for the fourth time she’d told him, I’m sorry but I can’t do this, he’d remarked: “So it’s all over.” Cecilia had gotten offended, she hadn’t appreciated his sarcasm, and had retorted, “Though maybe it never began.” At which point he had gotten offended. They hadn’t spoken to each other for two weeks, until Christmas, then they’d made up. He looked at the pairs of swings, motionless in the cold. He imagined sitting on the swing with Cecilia and talking, swinging up and down. By synchronizing their movements they could easily converse. But even without synchronizing them, even if they got out of synch, they would still meet at least once each swing.

  He decided to wait another ten minutes. After ten minutes he decided to wait another five. A homeless man shuffled along slowly, pushing a shopping cart with all his worldly goods. His home. The man stopped to stare at him. And Viberti saw himself through the homeless man’s eyes: a man in a white coat sitting on a big spring rider, in a playground painted strictly in primary colors. Should he go? Stay? Return the look? And what a look! Impossible to stare at someone with such intensity, a gaze that was blurry and at the same time sharp.

  After an interminable time the homeless man came up to him. He must be full of pathologies! A whole cross-section of samples. For a moment he thought the man actually wanted to ask him if he was a doctor. Instead he asked for a cigarette. Viberti smiled. “Asking a doctor for a cigarette? Ridiculous.” The homeless man wasn’t smiling. Viberti pulled out the candy and started to offer him one. The man took the whole package and went away without thanking him.

  * * *

  Like the homeless man, I, too, observe my father sitting on the flower-shaped spring rider, shivering in the icy February chill. It’s an image that should be read in its entirety, like a sign. The cold is a damp cold that goes straight through you. In the playground along the river, the internist Viberti is rigid, frozen in place, he seems chained to the flower, a prisoner. But we mustn’t forget that he’s sitting on a spring, like James Bond’s passenger in the Aston Martin, and at any moment he might be ejected.

  He might fall down with me on the playground’s spongy floor. I’m very familiar with that rubbery material, I can almost feel it under my feet as I fall from above, bouncing with my friends. My father bounces with me in my mind, in reality he’s sitting on a bench nearby, reading a newspaper. Whole afternoons, when the weather was nice.

  * * *

  When she arrives, Cecilia’s face looks very tired. Viberti is freezing and would like to forgive her for everything, but he can’t, because there’s nothing to forgive, and the blame, if there is any blame, is distributed equally between them. There is no blame, why should there be blame?

  Cecilia wants to walk along the river, Viberti implores her to go to a café he spotted on the street. They sit at a small table in the back. Cecilia talks about the children, Mattia has a cough, maybe he’s caught the flu, she sent him to school but she’s already sorry. And when he’s sick, it’s even more difficult to get him to eat.

  “But you didn’t call me here to talk about that,” Viberti says curtly.

  “No, but don’t be mean to me,” she replies, her voice cracking.

  “I’m sorry, but try to understand, I have to get back to the hospital, I thought something serious had happened.”

  She tells him she hasn’t been sleeping well at night, she’s so tired she collapses at ten, right after turning off the light in the children’s rooms, then she wakes up at two or three and starts tossing and turning in bed. She doesn’t want to start in again with the sleepless nights she had the year before. Every now and then she gets up to check on the children, to see if they’re breathing. “Can you imagine? Something you do with newborns.”

  Viberti sighs, takes her hand, squeezes it tightly. He expects she’ll try to break free immediately, because she doesn’t usually welcome signs of affection in public, instead she pulls him to her and gives him a kiss on the cheek. This is why she called him so far away from the hospital, so they could behave normally, for once at least, without being afraid that someone might see them.

  “I’m getting to it, okay? I’m getting to it.”

  And Viberti thinks she intends to tell him that they mustn’t see each other any longer, that she’s as tired as he is of that friendship which is not only friendship, that there’s no place in her life for such a waste of emotion.

  Instead Cecilia says: “When I have to think about something wonderful and good I think of you, at night I think of you and I calm down and fall asleep.”

  “Well, better me than a benzodiazepine.”

  Cecilia ignores him and continues: “So I said to myself that maybe I’m in love with you. I don’t know. I’m asking you: Do you think I’m in love with you?”

  Viberti lowers his eyes. How should he react to that question? By throwing his arms around her, weeping, shouting for joy? But the very fact that he asks himself this question means he doesn’t want to react in any way, it means he doesn’t believe what Cecilia has said, doesn’t believe that she’s really in love with him. He believes she’s very confused, and confused people confuse him, he doesn’t know how to act.

  “You don’t seem thrilled,” she says.

  He can’t speak, he can’t find anything sensible to say.

  “Please, say something.”

  He shakes his head.

  After a seemingly interminable time he says: “Of course you’re in love with me. I’m in love with you, too.”

  Cecilia nods.

  “But being together isn’t easy, is it?”

  “No, it’s not easy.”

  “Not after what you went through.”

  “Not after what I went through. What I’m still going through.” She squeezes his hand again. “You see. You understand me. You understand me right away.”

  Viberti thinks: Why don’t we try? Why don’t we try being together?

  It’s not what she wants. Is it what he wants?

  He’s seized by a sudden fit of anger. He doesn’t know why Cecilia lets herself go like that: old, scruffy loafers, a missing button at the neck of her blouse, that shabby backpack.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry you’re feeling miserable. I’d like to help you, but I don’t know how.”

  “But you do help me, you help me a lot.” Her eyes glisten with tears. “If you weren’t here, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “If I weren’t here.”

  “Yes,” Cecilia says.

  “But I am here.”

  They remain silent, holding hands, studying the brown ring of coffee left in the bottom of the cups. Cecilia concentrates on trying not to cry. Viberti is startled to have said “I’m sorry you’re feeling miserable.” He’d never realized how miserable she felt, “to feel miserable” means feeling very miserable, otherwise he would have said “I’m sorry you’re not happy.” And even more startled because she didn’t deny feeling miserable (therefore very miserable). She’s aware of it and doesn’t deny it, and she doesn’t talk about it, because it’s too painful to talk about.

  He glances around to see if anyone is watching them. A love story that has taken place entirely in cafés. One table among many. A tiny table on which to uncomfortably rest your elbows. The looks of strangers who embroider a wedding canopy around you, the paper place mat acting as the bridal veil, a small bottle of mineral water for the toast.

  * * *

  Then Cecilia perked up and asked him to tell her the story. Viberti didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “The story your mother told you, which had a Cecilia in it, you said it was a scandalous story … I thought about it last night and couldn’t forgive myself for never having asked you about it.”

  “The scandalous story … I’m not sure I remember it anymore. Why are you interested?”

  �
�I don’t know, because it has to do with you. I’m interested in everything that has to do with you. And it has to do with me, too, you told me about it the first time.”

  “The first time?”

  “When you gave me that solemn speech.”

  “The solemn speech … Oh yes, the solemn speech, I remember.”

  He couldn’t tell her he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t want to tell her that he couldn’t take it anymore. To cheer her up, to cheer himself up, he tried to reconstruct the story he had heard from Marta nine months ago, but he quickly realized that he wasn’t capable of telling it with his mother’s same rambling pace, her words rich with euphemisms and allusions. He went too fast, often forgetting an important detail, forced to go back and fill in the gap. Right off the bat he forgot a critically important detail. He began telling it halfheartedly and continued halfheartedly. He told the story to finish things in a hurry so he could get back to the hospital.

  His narration made it really seem like something an elderly, sick person would make up. Halfway through he felt guilty; Marta didn’t deserve to have her story dishonored that way. Or maybe the story gripped him as it hadn’t the evening he’d heard it, stole the scene and used him as a puppet. He recalled that at one point his mother had said something that made him laugh, and he recited the line as if it were his own: “And now you have to imagine one of those movie scenes with a dying man on his deathbed.” As if the two of them never saw any dying men. Cecilia laughed and said, “Oh sure, I can imagine.”

  Now he felt a different urge to tell it, the story no longer seemed so improbable, he was no longer sorry to have told it but he was sorry to be coming to the end. He managed to make Cecilia laugh again, imitating the glowering face of a watchmaker wearing a monocle.

  Because at the heart of it all was a pocket watch, locked away in a jewelry box in the drawer of an enormous dresser in the room of a man who is slowly dying. The man has been a widower for ten years, he is no longer able to walk, never leaves the house, and has trouble speaking. His daughter, Cecilia, cares for him with absolute devotion; though she’s only twenty, she spends her days with him and lives as a recluse in a house full of furniture and bric-a-brac, not far from the bank where her father worked before his sudden illness. One day the old man takes a turn for the worse, doesn’t get out of bed, can no longer speak, and must be spoon-fed and washed when he soils himself, like a child. Cecilia prays that he won’t suffer much, but she can’t bring herself to hope that he will die quickly. She watches over him till late, sleeps in an armchair beside the bed, is always ready to serve him.

  One evening her father asks her to get the claret-colored velvet jewelry box from the drawer. Cecilia is familiar with the jewelry box, she knows it contains some of her mother’s keepsakes, she thinks her father wants to give them to her. But there’s also a pocket watch in the jewelry box that doesn’t seem to be of much value. The old man raises his head from the pillow with an enormous effort, his forehead beaded with sweat, and mumbles something, he wants to speak but he can’t. Cecilia puts a pencil in his hand, supporting him so he can write on the first page of a book. He prints some letters in a shaky, somewhat lopsided hand. Cecilia recognizes the last name of the watchmaker who repaired the old grandfather clock at their home a couple of times. She thinks her father is asking her to take the pocket watch to be fixed. She thinks he’s delirious, she doesn’t take him seriously. That night her father dies.

  Several months go by; Cecilia gets over it. She decides to straighten up the house. She comes upon the watch again. She weeps, thinking about her father. And it occurs to her that maybe she should respect his last wishes, absurd though they may be, and take the old “turnip” to the watchmaker. A considerate gesture, a way of remembering him. Would visiting the cemetery and placing fresh flowers on the grave be any different? So she makes her way across the entire city, in a horse-drawn tram, the watch wrapped up and tucked in the purse she holds tightly on her lap. She arrives at the watchmaker’s place. She’s never been in the shop; the watchmaker has always come to their house, where he’d take the clock apart on the floor and arrange the pieces carefully on a white cloth. The small shop is very simple, the sign unassuming. Cecilia enters and the tinkle of the bell announces the arrival of a customer, but the watchmaker is bent over his workbench, wearing his monocle, and seems not to have heard. From the back, pulling aside a red drape, a young man has appeared; he looks into Cecilia’s eyes and she knows that this is the man for her. The young man looks just like Cecilia’s father when he was twenty, in a sepia photo, wearing a Cavalry uniform.

  “Then what?”

  “Then they got engaged, they got married.”

  “So where’s the scandal?”

  “They were brother and sister! Didn’t you get it?”

  “No, how can that be? Wasn’t he the watchmaker’s son?”

  “He was the son of the girl’s father, who had gotten the maid pregnant. The watchmaker married her afterward. And the girl’s father helped them, he set up the shop, he sent his son to school.”

  “Well, okay, you didn’t tell me about the maid.”

  Viberti smiled. “I forgot … but it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

  “But, come on, how come his father, that is, the watchmaker, knew and how come he didn’t object—the mother, too, the maid, she knew her son was the other man’s child, how come she…”

  The story had had the desired effect, it had taken her mind off things. She was smiling contentedly, murmuring to herself: “Really quite a story,” and she squeezed his hand as if by telling it to her, he had given her a gift.

  Thinking about his mother, however, had made Viberti strangely melancholy. Thinking about his mother, who remembered reading or thought she remembered reading that story. That story: like a mistaken diagnosis, the death of a neglected patient. The confession long in coming, deferred until fully delirious. The old man must have loved that boy more than anything, but who can say if he meant to have him marry his daughter. Maybe he merely wanted her to know of that brother’s existence. And if the character wasn’t in a story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Tarchetti, who could the author be?

  They spoke about a scandal that had hit the hospital: the arrest of the hospital administrator on charges of corruption. Then Viberti stood up, saying he had to find a good urologist.

  Cecilia misheard “neurologist,” she thought he was talking about his mother and said, “It won’t get any worse, you’ll see.”

  Viberti wondered how she could know about the barista’s son, he didn’t think he’d told her about him. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.

  * * *

  Nothing changed, nothing had to change, though if someone had overheard their conversation without knowing the story of the months leading up to it, he would have thought that everything was about to change, because Cecilia had never opened up as she had that day and Viberti had never opened up as he had that day. Two nights later they made love in the car and then everything went on as before; they saw each other because Cecilia needed to and because Viberti didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was better if they didn’t see each other anymore. Besides, it’s impossible to pull the plug on hope.

  A total inability to read people: the art of semiotics, fundamental in medicine, never learned. Certain things, for example, you learn only through experience. When I was forty I found that if you open the left rear window a little, the air that comes in through the left front window doesn’t create a draft but cools your car. Because it’s immediately sucked out, channeled, see? It’s one of those things that nobody can teach you.

  Every now and then Viberti thought that Cecilia might one day come to him and say that, yes, she wanted to try, she wanted to start a new life. But he thought that only occasionally; usually he was sure it would never happen. He was struck by the absolute skepticism with which he’d reacted to that confession of sorts: “So I said to myself that maybe I’m in love with you.” Not o
nly had he not believed her, not only did he think she was saying exactly the opposite, it was as if she were asking him to put a period on the story and start a new paragraph, as if she were telling him: “So I said to myself that maybe I’ll never be in love with you.” And in fact she came up with the story Marta had told, to close the circle.

  He couldn’t get it out of his head, the idea that he’d appeared too soon in Cecilia’s life. She and her husband had just separated, the wounds hadn’t yet healed, in a couple of years she would be ready for another relationship and he would always be remembered as a transitional episode.

  But something Cecilia had said stuck in his mind and refused to be dismissed, indeed it rose to the forefront as the only noteworthy thing that had been said that morning: “Not after what I went through. What I’m still going through.” What was she still going through, exactly? Why after all those months of friendship with relapses hadn’t he thought to ask her: “So how is your relationship with your husband now?”

  And why hadn’t he ever had the urge to follow her? And see with his own eyes where she lived? Who she went out with at night, if she went out, since she wouldn’t go out with him? So he decided he would do it, he would station himself near her house, in the parking lot behind the church, to spy on her. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision, and until he acted on it the infinite sadness of the plan didn’t occur to him.