Silvia says that Cecilia is an excellent mother, considering the example they had. Considering the difficulty of the divorce, considering the problems with the boy.
As soon as she says the word “boy” she stops suddenly and looks at Viberti, who wasn’t expecting such an abrupt break or that look; he reddens, thinking that Silvia has read something in his expression.
“Am I talking too much?” Silvia asks.
Viberti smiles. “No, of course not.”
“No, I mean, you know these things, don’t you? You know my sister well…”
He shakes his head and thinks he’s shaking it correctly, with the naturalness and credibility of a consummate actor. “I can’t say I know her well, but I know about the divorce and I met the child, when he was hospitalized. Cecilia tells me things every now and then, but most of the time we talk about work.”
Silvia shakes her head in turn, she says that Cecilia actually doesn’t tell her anything. It’s not a matter of discretion, of privacy—it’s genuine reticence. And this, for her, is her sister’s only fault. Cecilia doesn’t open up as much as she would like, she doesn’t open up enough. But this fault may be what allows them to have a close relationship: she says too much about everything, Cecilia says nothing or almost nothing about everything.
She looks at him again: “What is Ceci like at work?”
“How do you mean?”
“Tense, nervous?”
“She’s a very good doctor.”
“Every so often I think it’s too stressful for her.”
Luckily the sushi arrives; Silvia appears to completely forget about her sister and begins explaining the names and characteristics of the fish, piece by piece, as if the poster hanging behind her door were there in front of her. Though Viberti doesn’t ask how she knows all these things, she tells him about a boyfriend who made her fall in love with sushi and green tea. He went to Japan a lot on business; she’s never been there, it’s too expensive, but she dreams of being able to afford it one day—though really it’s like she’s been there, like she’s visited it through her boyfriend’s stories, since he talked about it constantly, describing in detail the streets, the buildings, the parks, the shops and restaurants, especially the restaurants, the endless business lunches in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima, in restaurants that she’d be able to find with her eyes closed, almost—and in any case she has the map of Tokyo, for instance, imprinted in her brain, and she associates the areas with the photos that her boyfriend sent her and that she still uses as screen savers even now, images of neighborhoods that have become so familiar that they appear to her in her dreams, not just as exotic backdrops but as three-dimensional spaces full of life, including people talking and the noises of the city—or rather almost excluding them, because her boyfriend told her an incredible fact, that absolute silence reigns in Japan’s megalopolises, in the streets, on the subways, in the supermarkets, even the cars seem to make less noise, and the children don’t cry.
“The children never cry?” Viberti asks smiling.
“Never.”
They laugh. When she laughs, Silvia looks more like Cecilia. The two sisters are very much alike though there’s no real physical resemblance; what unites them is what Silvia can still be and what Cecilia will never again be, as if the younger one were a more carefree version of the older sister: a person who can still be happy.
Silvia stops abruptly and looks at Viberti: “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe you’ve never eaten sushi,” she says.
“It’s true.”
“I might know someone who’s never eaten pizza, but sushi, no, it’s not possible.”
Viberti smiles. He loves the hot sake, it seems like one of those things, like cider, on which it’s impossible to get drunk. “I swear.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Take your sister,” Viberti says, “has she ever eaten sushi?”
“Of course, here, in this same restaurant. We came here a bunch of times, especially after the affair with the Japanese guy ended.”
“He was Japanese? I didn’t realize that.”
“His mother was Japanese, but he had always lived in Italy. I called him the Japanese guy. At one point he went back there.”
“And afterward, did you still feel like eating this stuff?”
“By then his memories were mine, and I didn’t want to give them back, it wasn’t right, and besides, raw fish is one of the few things that I can always digest, even at times of intense anxiety. For example, I would have starved to death when my father died, but Cecilia came here and bought sushi and brought it home to me.”
Viberti looks at her: “When did your father die?”
“Four years ago.”
“Of what?”
“A tumor.”
“A tumor?”
“Yes, why?”
Viberti takes a gulp of sake.
“It’s odd. We talked about my father, Cecilia and I. He died of a lymphogranuloma, many years ago. I don’t know. If she had mentioned her father’s illness, it would have been natural for me to tell her about my own father’s, I guess.”
“I told you, she doesn’t open up about anything, it’s awful.”
Well, maybe she’s reticent by nature, but maybe especially so with him. As if he were a stranger. But he doesn’t want Silvia to notice how his mood has changed.
“Were you very close to your father?” he asks, hoping to set off another monologue that will give him time to recover.
But Silvia just nods.
Viberti continues drinking hot sake, maybe that way he’ll manage to get a little drunk, at least. He feels a long surge of melancholy about to wash over him. All evening he’d tried to avoid it, coming up with that unlikely dinner with Cecilia’s long-winded sister, but sadness has caught up with him, it’s suddenly in front of him, around him, inside him. He sees the world as it truly is, and it’s the disorder of Silvia’s impossibly small house, the sheer volume of paper per square foot; it’s the deep, dark, cold lake in the film about reincarnation. He’s never liked lakes.
Poor Silvia starts talking again, telling him about a friend who lives in Barcelona. Behind that merciless conversational capacity, Viberti thinks, lies a heart more human than her sister’s unfathomable one.
At some point it’s clear to both of them that Viberti isn’t going to open his mouth again for the rest of the evening. Silvia says they’d better go, wait for her a moment, she’ll make a quick trip to the ladies’ room and be right back. The restaurant is still full, the Chinese cooks are cutting up the fish with the same flourish, but they seem less fascinating now that he’s been watching them for an hour. Viberti pays and goes out to the sidewalk. The evening air is not enough to restore him. He realizes that he’s had too much to drink, after all. He looks at his tennis shoes, his hairy calves, and smiles wistfully, not for the boy he was at fifteen, but for the ingenuous, enthusiastic man of a few hours ago. He has two options, to laugh or to cry. Start crying and confess to Silvia that he’s hopelessly (hopelessly) in love with Cecilia, tell her the whole story, disclose everything. And finally shut her up! Well, that would do it. He’d leave her speechless. He smiles. He chuckles to himself.
“So you’re not sad,” Silvia says, joining him outside. “I thought talking about my father had upset you, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, I always notice things too late.”
Viberti shakes his head. “I drank too much,” he says, as he goes on chuckling.
Silvia smiles. “Are you drunk?” As if it were good news. “Then I’ll tell you something: when it’s time to pay the check I always get the urge to pee. By now it’s a Pavlovian reflex, you know? Because for years I used it as a trick not to pay, because I never had any money.”
“Now you do?”
“Have money? No, of course not.”
“So you didn’t want to pay. You went to the bathroom to avoid paying.”
They laugh uproariously. A Chinese man comes out of the place to see what�
�s going on.
And they go on like that, Viberti pretending or exaggerating his drunkenness to make Silvia laugh, Silvia pretending to believe that he’s drunk or drunker than he really is, while worrying about how he is and how he’ll make it home safe and sound. And so, when they get to her house it seems like the most natural thing in the world to both of them for Silvia to invite him to come up.
The excuse is to drink a cup of tea with cherry blossoms, sakura, to revive Viberti a little, but when they enter the small apartment Silvia says she wants to go through the whole tea ceremony with him. She boils water in the kitchenette and sets out a flower-shaped tray with a teapot and two hand-painted cups. Picking one up, Viberti recognizes Papa Smurf in his village of cheerful mushroom cottages and starts laughing again. “Now I’ll explain how it’s done,” says Silvia, taking the cup out of his hand. She spreads two rectangular straw mats between the sofa area and the work area, makes Viberti kneel down. “We’ll skip the preparation stage,” she says, “maybe another time I’ll tell you about that, too. Not that it isn’t interesting, but it’s rather long.”
“Sure, let’s smurf it up,” Viberti says.
“Hey, don’t joke around. This is serious.”
“Okay, okay.”
Silvia kneels down at Viberti’s left, pours the tea into the cups. “Let’s pretend we are both guests and the person offering us tea is sitting here with us.” She turns to Viberti, bows slightly, and says, “Oshōban itashimasu.”
Viberti giggles. “I don’t know what to say,” he whispers.
Silvia smiles slightly. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s the opening phrase. I said, Please, allow me to share tea with you.”
“All right. I allow you. Let’s move on to the second stage.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry.”
Silvia bows to the nonexistent host and says: “Otemae chōdai itashimasu.” Then she whispers to Viberti: “I told him that it pleases me to drink his tea.”
“Well,” he says, “tell him I said so, too.”
“Pick up the cup, the chawan, with your right hand and place it on your left palm. Hold it firmly by placing your right thumb on the rim of the cup. Make a slight bow.”
Viberti does what she says, even though his hand is shaky.
“Now take hold of the rim of the cup with your index finger and the thumb of your right hand and turn the cup ninety degrees clockwise. Take a sip and make a comment about the tea.”
“Mmm. It tastes like cherry.”
“No, the comment has to be more positive.”
“Oh. Well then, excellent.”
“Between sips rest the fingertips of your right hand on the mat in front of you. At the last sip you must make a slurping sound against your palate.”
“I’ve never been good at making slurping sounds.”
“Try it.”
He emits a kind of cluck, then starts giggling again.
“Now wipe the rim of the cup with your right thumb and index finger. Turn the cup counterclockwise on your palm to return it to its original position. Set the cup down outside the edge of your mat and admire it. You can make comments.”
“About the cup?”
“It’s not mandatory.”
“But can’t I talk about something else?”
“No, not really. What did you want to say?”
“That I like being here with you.”
Silvia smiles, leans over, and kisses him. A moment later they’re lying down, embracing. Viberti is excited, even though he can’t stop thinking about Cecilia. Going to bed with her sister is not the best strategy to win her, but at that point it’s impossible to stop, as if he were no longer himself, as if he were the reincarnation of the Japanese boyfriend.
* * *
Later, back home, he tried to understand why he had done it. It was all very complicated. Made worse by a raging headache. He did it because he felt like it, because he was confused and frustrated; even though he’d enjoyed it, it didn’t mean anything, he was in love with Cecilia. He would tell Silvia that he couldn’t keep doing it, he would ask her to please not say anything to her sister.
Over the next four days, however, he perfected the tea ceremony with her two more times. They set a fourth date, but Viberti didn’t show up. He sent a text to say he wasn’t feeling well. Silvia asked him if he needed anything, then said she hoped he’d feel better soon. It wasn’t like him to lie like that and in fact he hadn’t thought it was possible to do so with such ease. It was necessary, however, because if he continued to see her, the mess he’d gotten himself into would be impossible to clean up. Maybe it already was, maybe Silvia had already told her sister everything. He felt a great tenderness and yearning for Cecilia and finally understood the state of mind in which she found herself after being with him. He would have liked to call Silvia now and tell her: “It’s not possible, I can’t keep doing this anymore.” But in the days that followed he did not call, and it became progressively more difficult to break the silence.
* * *
He didn’t see either sister for ten days, until Antonio phoned him late one Monday morning to tell him that Cecilia Re’s son had been admitted to the hospital after he’d fainted at school. It didn’t seem to be anything serious, and his father was with him. Viberti climbed the stairs with his heart in his mouth.
The boy had grown, he looked fine, he was much better, he wouldn’t have recognized him. Or maybe he would, maybe he would have recognized him, even though he was much more confident, bolder and more cheerful. His bond with his father, at whom the child glanced repeatedly as though seeking confirmation and permission, made Viberti jealous. This ex-husband of Cecilia seemed like an easygoing person, decent, pleasant. He was afraid of running into Cecilia. Besides, his visit was over. He had nothing to say to the boy, he felt like a stranger. He said goodbye to him, shaking his hand, and told him to have a good time on vacation.
In the afternoon he called Silvia. He apologized, he shouldn’t have disappeared like that, but he was confused, he didn’t know what to do and maybe it would be best if they didn’t see each other anymore. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a shit,” he said.
Silvia said she absolutely didn’t think that, and she agreed, it made no sense to go on seeing each other. She thanked him for calling her.
* * *
Sitting in an armchair in Marta’s living room, Viberti is leafing through a monthly travel magazine that Giulia buys regularly, even though she never goes farther than Bocca di Magra, and then passes on to her mother-in-law, who almost never leaves the house anymore. The usual beaches and monuments and sunsets, but between the lines the fear that people will give up vacations once and for all. An excess of enthusiasm, unsolicited reassurances, petrified smiles. At one point I started to keep a notebook in which I recorded all my vacations, weekends and short trips, New Year’s and birthday celebrations, whom I’d spent them with, where I had gone, but then I got tired of it, and if I forget them, so be it. I started because one day someone asked me where I had spent New Year’s 1986 or 1987. I couldn’t answer and I felt disoriented.
Windows open, the beginning of June, it already feels like summer. Marta has fallen asleep in the armchair next to Viberti, her head lolling, her mouth partly open. The TV is on, there’s the news, but as soon as he saw his mother dozing off, Viberti turned off the sound. They’d eaten together, Giulia had dropped by to say hello, and now Angélica is tidying up in the kitchen.
It could be a peaceful evening, he could wait another ten minutes and then get up and wake his mother with a kiss on the forehead, and offer to take her to bed (it’s not good for her to sleep in a chair). Or he could ask her if she feels like venturing out for a stroll around the block, the weather is so mild. He could also leave the living room quietly and ask Angélica to wake his mother in ten minutes, run off without saying goodbye since his mother wouldn’t notice his absence in any case. He could go up to his apartment and listen to some music, straighten u
p the house and his head, think calmly about the situation he’s created with Cecilia, make some decisions before submitting, as usual, to those of others. He could, but the phone in his pocket starts ringing.
Cecilia’s name flashes on the display. Viberti answers, speaking softly even though his mother can’t hear him.
Cecilia’s voice is pained, though she’s not crying, she’s not frantic. She says she heard about Viberti’s meeting with the child, they’re back home now, she asks him how he thought he was. Viberti replies that he thought he was doing just fine, that Mattia absolutely remembered him, even if he thought he was a cook. “I don’t know if he was teasing me, but I don’t think so, I think he really thought I was one of the cooks on the ward, because two years ago I always showed up at lunchtime.” Cecilia pretends to be amused and pleased, she talks to him with the familiarity, affection, and intimacy with which you talk to an old friend, a person you rely on and from whom you expect support. And Viberti feels a chasm open up in his chest, in place of his heart there’s a black hole that is collapsing, swallowing up the universe around him, because he realizes that Cecilia knows everything.
“This time it turned out well, but I don’t know how much more I can take, I’m falling apart physically, yesterday I couldn’t stand up, my legs were shaky.”
“My legs were shaky today, too.”
“I don’t know what to do and I feel like there’s no one I can ask for help.”
“I’m here, I’ll help you.”
“No, you’re not there either.”
“Why would you say I’m not here? You can call me anytime—where are you now? Do you want to meet me?”
“You’re not there.”
“Cecilia, I want to help you, all I want to do is be there for you.”
“That’s not true. It’s not true.”
“It is true. Where are you? Listen, tell me where you are. I want to come to you.”
“Why are you seeing Silvia? What’s going on with Silvia?”
Three Light-Years: A Novel Page 20
