Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  His phone rang immediately. It was Giulia.

  “Did you see how frightened she was?”

  “I saw.”

  “I told you, she’s afraid to leave the house. I realized it this winter, when she insisted it was too cold to go out, and you know that’s a clear sign.”

  “Maybe for an elderly person being afraid to go out is normal. If they snatch your purse and you end up on the ground…”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “What is she afraid of, then?”

  “Of not finding her way home!”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “All right, we’ll talk about it later, but I promise you we’ll talk about it.”

  “And what’s your solution?”

  “She needs someone full time.”

  “There’s Angélica.”

  “Three full days and three mornings, but from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning Marta is alone. Not counting the time that Angélica is at your place. Couldn’t you have found another housekeeper? Did you have to take your mother’s?”

  “She’s said over and over that she doesn’t want her at night.”

  “You’re her son, you’re a doctor, order her to! It’s not all that hard: you say, ‘Listen, Mama, you have to have this person in your house…’”

  “I’ll think about it, we’ll see how the examination goes.”

  “The examination won’t tell us anything.”

  “Then why are we doing it?”

  “To make her see she needs help.”

  As if a light had abruptly been turned off. “We’ll talk about it later,” he murmured, and hung up.

  After twenty years at the hospital he still wasn’t used to people’s stares, to the effect the white coat had on nameless patients. He would have liked to hang a sign around his neck: I’M SORRY, I CAN’T HELP YOU. And he would feel the same way his whole life. I remember him nearing retirement, going around the hospital with that furtive, guilty look. In self-defense he kept his eyes lowered to the ground, specifically the bottom of the wall where the baseboard curved down and smoothly joined the floor. He thought about other things. Every now and then he got so absorbed that he walked right past the door or hallway he’d been heading toward. If you get lost in the woods, the first thing to remember is this: don’t give in to fear and panic instead of trying to find the way out, or you’ll make the situation even worse. What you should do is sit down, take a few deep breaths, and calmly attempt to mentally reconstruct the way you came, then get up and try to retrace the steps you took. Everyone leaves a trace, no one can make himself truly invisible, not even accidentally, even the prehistoric man who fell into a glacier was discovered eventually.

  Cecilia hadn’t told him she had a sister, she had kept silent about the existence of a sister, she had treated him like a stranger. Not only had she kept him out of her life, not only had she kept him away from her children. He would have liked to see Mattia again; for two years he’d been wanting to see the boy again and she’d never let him see him. He would have liked to buy him another garage, at Christmas. He’d seen it in a toy store, a two-story garage with a gas pump and a lift for raising cars, that one was definitely suitable for a child her son’s age. But Cecilia had said that Mattia was too big for that kind of toy.

  He went into the locker room to change before going back to get his mother and take her home.

  “You see,” Marta said to him as they rode down in the elevator, “I always got a twenty-nine at the university, I was never good enough for a thirty, or maybe the professors were tougher than they are now, but here it’s an excellent mark, you know.”

  “You scored a twenty-nine again on the Mini mental test? Really?”

  “Does that seem so incredible to you? I’m not a moron, I just have memory issues.”

  “Of course, Mama, I didn’t mean you’re a moron.”

  * * *

  Later he was supposed to have dinner with the whole family at Giulia’s place, but as soon as he got out of the shower he heard the doorbell ring. Through the peephole he saw a caricature of Giulia, an enormous head and an inverted cone for a body, even more irritable and mad at the world than she looked a moment later, in the flesh, once he’d opened the door.

  She said she’d come up to speak with him alone and Viberti didn’t dare ask for even two minutes to get dressed; instead, he invited her into his spartan kitchen and sat down with her, his hair wet, in his bathrobe. She’d found someone to stay the night with Marta, she was Peruvian, a cousin of Angélica’s, or a friend, or niece, or goddaughter, “with these people you never know where the family begins and where it ends.” The same observation could be made about their family, but Viberti had no intention of pointing that out to her. Angélica’s cousin, Maria, could start right away, but they had to hire her at once, maybe give her an advance, not pass up the opportunity, start out with daytime assistance.

  Marta was against it, she’d said it a thousand times, she didn’t want strangers in the house at night, she wouldn’t be able to sleep peacefully. One night in January, however, around three a.m., she had shown up at Giulia’s door wearing a coat with a fur collar and a woolen hat pulled down on her head, with a crocodile handbag dug out of the bottom of her closet: “I don’t know why Angélica hasn’t arrived yet, can you let her know that I had to go out on an errand?” Her clock had stopped at 9:20 the night before and not only hadn’t she noticed that the hands had not moved from that position, but she wasn’t even surprised to see that it was still pitch-dark outside. She thought it was nine in the morning. Which was more troubling: the fact that she didn’t remember being afraid to leave the house, or that she wanted to go visit her sister in the hospital, the sister who’d died ten years ago? The following evening Marta had laughed about it with Viberti. “Just think, last night I was sure your aunt Bruna was still alive. How silly.”

  Viberti admitted that things were getting worse, even if the symptoms were contradictory. There had been no more serious incidents, but Giulia tended to view any sign of deterioration as irreversible. Viberti argued that with Angélica doing the housework and cooking, Marta was self-sufficient. For most of the day she didn’t seem at all forgetful and she hadn’t scored any lower in the Mini mental test. One morning, however, Giulia had found her cooking with three burners turned on and two pots full of vegetables boiling on the stove. “I had nothing ready for Claudio,” she said. Giulia seemed even more angry when maternal feelings and instincts floated up through her mother-in-law’s senile dementia.

  “Unfortunately, every now and then women find themselves having to deal with senile mothers and menopause at the same time,” Antonio had said to Viberti.

  “But Giulia is forty years old and Marta isn’t her mother.”

  “Premature menopause.”

  Recently Giulia had gotten into the habit of sitting at the table with her chair turned at a ninety-degree angle. She couldn’t manage to put her legs under the table, as if her legs suffered from claustrophobia. Viberti, wisely sitting across from her, saw her in profile and she almost always faced the French doors as she spoke, turning every so often to meet his eyes.

  “Fine, let’s sign her up, let’s hire her,” Viberti said.

  “Fine, my ass,” Giulia said, “don’t think you can get out of it just like that. You have to be the one to tell her.”

  “All right, I’ll tell her.”

  “And if she says no?”

  “I’ll persuade her.”

  Giulia stared at him. She raised her voice: “Don’t think it’ll be easy. Don’t start out with the idea that it’ll be easy, because if you can’t persuade her I can’t guarantee anything. It’s not as if you can find good people who are willing and able on every street corner.”

  “You’re right,” Viberti said, “if I can’t persuade her I solemnly swear to find someone else within two weeks.”

  “Like hell you will,” Giulia said, shaking her head.

  It had been a lo
ng day, and it wasn’t over yet. Viberti said he absolutely had to dry his hair, he’d be back in a sec. That day he’d received an e-mail from Silvia Re. He hadn’t responded yet, he’d printed out the message and put it in his coat pocket to remind himself to reply in his own good time that evening or the next day. Every so often he found it in his hand again, didn’t remember what it was, and reread it. He’d reread it a few times during the day and read it again when he found it near the sink, then he left it on the stool nearby.

  Not turning off the hairdryer, he looked in the mirror and said aloud: “I’ll speak to her tonight. She’ll say yes. You’ll see.”

  He returned to the kitchen, found Giulia in the same position.

  “I’ll speak to her tonight. She’ll say yes. You’ll see.”

  He stretched, extending his arms, and rubbed his eyes. When he reopened them, Giulia was looking at him. He drew the flaps of his bathrobe closed, trying not to make it too obvious, hiding the little patch of bare chest he had unintentionally shown.

  “You were always modest.”

  “There’s not much to see.”

  Yet for a while after the separation, three or four times a year, even after she’d remarried, Giulia would climb the two flights of stairs and go back to him. They, too, had had their relapses.

  After a brief hesitation Giulia nodded: “She’ll say yes to you. She never says no to you.”

  Then she stood and told him not to come down in his bathrobe, that in fact he wasn’t much to look at.

  * * *

  Dinner nearly turned into a disaster. Viberti spoke with Marta in Giulia’s study; he told her that Angélica had a cousin who was looking for work and that they’d promised to help her. Marta, with a surprising lucidity, replied that she’d expected as much, she knew they would keep trying to bring someone into the house, and she didn’t think badly of them, for heaven’s sake, “I know you want to do it for my own good,” but she didn’t need anyone. Viberti suggested a trial period, but Marta took him by the hand and led him out of the study. “Dinner is ready, you must be famished, and in any case you won’t be able to persuade me.” In fact, Viberti was starving.

  At the table Giulia launched into a tirade against the obsession with diets. Marta said that at one time people were thinner because there wasn’t so much stuff to eat. Everyone smiled. Viberti said: “Do you remember how skinny I was as a kid, Mama?”

  Marta said that Viberti had always been rather plump. In fact, she’d been afraid he had inherited his diabetic great-uncle’s body.

  Viberti began fidgeting in his chair. “Plump? No, Mama, you’re confused. I was thin as a rail.”

  “Come on! We called you Fatty—”

  “Fatty?”

  The others burst out laughing, but Viberti wasn’t taking it well. Giulia signaled to him to let it go, for once she was the one ready to forgive Marta’s confusion, and Marta pressed her advantage.

  “I always thought your getting fat like that was a reaction to your father’s death. Luckily, Stefano Mercuri came along and took you out to play a little tennis.”

  Viberti shook his head. Giulia’s husband passed him the pasta bowl: “Some more tagliatelle, Fatty?” They all laughed.

  After dinner he had an idea. Maybe Marta had already forgotten his previous attempt, maybe he could try again as if he were asking her for the first time. He joined her in the living room, where she sat playing cards with Giulia’s child, and repeated the same speech. In fact, his mother didn’t seem to remember that, an hour ago, her son had already asked her to take a Peruvian caregiver into the house overnight, though she demonstrated exemplary consistency: her response was the same.

  Times past and forgotten flowed out of Marta’s mind like the genie from the lamp and settled around Viberti, who, not knowing what else to say, glanced toward the dark corridor and saw Giulia’s shadow go by. Eavesdropping?

  Maybe Marta had pretended not to remember. It occurred to him that her senile dementia was making everyone demented. He’d repeated his speech as if he didn’t remember having already said it, his mother had replied not remembering that she’d already replied, or had remembered it and was pretending to reply for the first time, like the first time. Dementia was spreading through people and things, dictating a new order.

  He leaned forward, took his mother’s bony hand into his own, the skin thin and spotted, unconsciously he felt her pulse, bradycardic.

  “I know you don’t need anyone. It’s for our peace of mind, you see? We’d like to stay with you, but we can’t. Do it for us, take this person. I’m asking you as a favor.”

  Marta seemed distraught. She stared at Viberti and her beautiful blue eyes glistened with tears. Suddenly she said, “All right, I agree.”

  “You agree?”

  “If it’s to do you a favor, yes. You could have told me sooner that I had to do it for all of you. Because I really don’t need her. I’m just losing my memory.”

  Viberti enfolded her in a hug—she was small and slight, easy to enfold—and gave her a kiss. Then he asked: “But is it true you called me Fatty?”

  * * *

  Two days later he came home in the afternoon with a gardenia he’d bought from the kids at the rehab who had a stand outside the hospital; he set it among the other pots on the balcony and sat down in the wicker chair to gaze out at the courtyards. His eyes followed the walls separating the yards, their edges, the shards of glass, the climbing vine, the window of the gym, and the roof of the storehouse. After a bright shiny day, a dull patina had settled over things, the morning’s promises betrayed or forgotten, as if the colors of the world had always been spent, or slowly fading. He could have remained in that chair for hours, he would have if he hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom. Afterward he washed his hands and, on the floor, under a stool, he spotted the slip of paper with Silvia Re’s e-mail, damp and wrinkled like an old parchment. He had no intention of reading a novel in which a cook manipulated people, whatever the verb “manipulate” might mean in this case (Viberti suspected it meant “cooked”). Still, he wanted to thank her, because she was Cecilia’s sister, because it was kind of her.

  Before he could think twice about it, or at least before he could think more clearly about it—and imagine how the call might go—he dialed the cell phone number that Silvia had included in her e-mail and a moment later, unprepared and regretful, he was listening to an account of the extraordinarily bizarre circumstances in which the book, hidden in the recesses of her mother’s attic, had turned up while Silvia was looking for a volume she needed for work, the very day after their meeting. “So it was fate.” Claudio said again that she had been very kind to write to him, that the book sounded interesting though he was very busy with work just then and didn’t have time to read, maybe as summer reading, who knows, he might use it to avoid overeating while on vacation.

  “I always lose weight on vacation,” she interrupted him, “how can you gain weight on vacation?”

  He said he didn’t know, maybe he ate more, maybe he ate things that were fattening.

  “Like what?”

  “I eat a lot of pasta.”

  “Yes, it’s true, on vacation there’s always someone who knows how to prepare a special sauce.”

  Viberti said that even without special sauces pasta was the fastest thing to cook.

  “One time I ate pasta without sauce. Awful. What about desserts? It’s desserts that are fattening.”

  “I don’t eat many desserts.”

  “You don’t eat desserts on vacation?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  He began to feel the weight of that idiotic conversation; their first interaction had been fun, but he shouldn’t take a chance by repeating it. A second time would turn Cecilia’s eccentric sister into a loquacious babbler.

  Silvia seemed to sense his impatience and said she wasn’t using the book in any case, she would lend it to him or maybe give it to him, would he rather have Cecilia bring it t
o him at the hospital or did he want to stop by and pick it up? Come to think of it, there was no need for them to agree on a time, she could leave it in her mailbox, it was a paperback, small as a prayer book, the mailbox was big enough to hold it and it was always unlocked, so even if she wasn’t home Viberti could pick it up at any time, or even if she was home and he was in a hurry and had left his car double-parked, he could dash in quickly and grab the book from the mailbox, any day that week or the next, she would put it in the mailbox the next morning, because she wasn’t planning to go out that night.

  “Yes,” Viberti said, “let’s do that.”

  Maybe it was impossible to reach some baseline of clarity with that woman, who was vague in a way that was opposite yet complementary to her sister. Cecilia was more reticent than vague. But, all in all, in the end the effect was the same.

  “Which?” she asked, not letting it go.

  “I’ll come and pick it up in the next few days, where do you live?”

  And so Viberti discovered that Silvia lived in an area north of the city center that wasn’t more than half an hour on foot from his neighborhood, an area he was familiar with because Stefano Mercuri had lived there for forty years before finally moving to the coast. A half hour’s walk when he was in his twenties. Viberti often met Mercuri at his house and from there they went to the tennis courts at a nearby club together. He would leave home in shorts and a T-shirt, his tennis shoes caked with red clay, the racket slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

  “I know the area well, a family friend used to live there, it’s not far from my house,” he said.

  They talked some more about the two adjoining neighborhoods. Silvia also had a friend who lived in Viberti’s area; she, too, was amazed at the coincidence and said so two or three times, until Viberti was certain that there was really nothing extraordinary about it, it wasn’t a sign, it meant nothing.

  But the minute he hung up he genuinely dreaded the thought of the lonely night that lay ahead of him; he thought about the mild evening and the nice fresh air, he thought about the walk he used to take twenty years ago, proud to have people look at him, and also a bit worried that they might stop him and steal his racket or shoes (because in those years thefts of motorbikes and jackets and wallets were common). Now no one would notice a guy walking down the street in tennis clothes anymore, but at one time it had been different, in fact, his mother always used to say to him: “Are you going around dressed like that? Aren’t you ashamed?” It didn’t sound like a reproach, she was honestly surprised that her son wasn’t ashamed to go around in shorts (her son was ashamed of the fact that tennis wasn’t a sport of the Left since he’d decided to be a leftist like Mercuri, who on the other hand didn’t think twice about playing tennis).