Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  “What does he do to pester you?”

  “He gives me really ugly presents.”

  “Presents?”

  “He gives me little toys from Kinder Surprise eggs, he gives me old stickers, you know, for those albums where you have to put together a scene with a few pictures, and sometimes he gives me sets that don’t match, I don’t stick them on anyway, but…”

  “I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong.”

  “Because you’ve never seen him, he’s an idiot.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret, the best thing is to ignore him.”

  “But I do ignore him.”

  “How were things between you before he started acting that way, were you friends?”

  “No, not friends, but he does so badly in school, he’s terrible, he never studies, he says he doesn’t have time because he has to work in his parents’ store, so I felt sorry for him and a couple of times last year I went over his science and history lessons with him, and he got decent grades and was very happy.”

  “That’s so nice, Michi, you never told me that. That’s a lovely thing you did, helping him like that. So it’s understandable that he’s taken a liking to you, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “But it’s not my idea, it’s the teacher who teams us up.”

  “Oh, yes, teamwork, I think it’s a good idea.”

  Michela wasn’t at all convinced and lingered in the kitchen to talk until Cecilia returned to the living room where Mattia was still watching Harry Potter.

  Now she had to call Viberti, she couldn’t put it off any longer, if she didn’t call him she’d spend another sleepless night, though she might still spend a sleepless night even if she did call him, unless venting her anger allowed her to recover her peace of mind and get to sleep. She decided to mentally recap what she wanted to say to him and prepare a list of topics so she wouldn’t sound like she was a raving lunatic. The only words that came to her, clear and conclusive, were “Was there something between us?” but she couldn’t figure out when to say it. Beginning that way didn’t seem possible, not for her, anyway. It would come up as they spoke. And maybe she could put it off, maybe she shouldn’t impose on the half hour before the kids went to sleep. She could call Viberti after ten. She might find the cell phone turned off, though, she might not find anyone home. She stood up, torn by anxiety. She wanted to call him immediately and settle the matter. The children were stretched out in front of the TV, they wouldn’t follow her.

  She locked herself in the bedroom. She phoned Viberti. As soon as she heard his voice she felt like crying. She tried to stay calm and talked about the children in sober tones. Then, rather quickly, the phone call fell apart, nothing that was said made sense anymore, it was as if they were competing to see who was more unhappy. She started crying. The questions formulated themselves and were one single question that she managed to voice after several attempts: Had he slept with Silvia? The answers weren’t answers, Viberti was in a panic, Cecilia sensed it and understood and in the end she was ashamed of having asked so insistently, as if that were the point. That wasn’t the point, and she resurrected the only question that she remembered having prepared: “Was there something between us?” But she didn’t want to punish him anymore, she just wanted to end the call. She didn’t understand his stammered apologies, if they were apologies, she didn’t understand anything anymore, she sobbed into the cell phone, crouched on the floor with her back against the bed, her head nearly under the nightstand so the children wouldn’t hear her. She wanted the call to end immediately, she hung up and turned the phone off.

  On her knees beside the bed, as if preparing to say her evening prayers, she buried her face in the pillow to wipe her tears and took a deep breath; before going back to the children she wanted to go to the bathroom and wash her face.

  As soon as she opened the bedroom door, she saw Michela’s shadow, standing in the dark hallway for who knows how long, sneaking around, eavesdropping, maybe alerted by her crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Cecilia asked, more frightened than irritated.

  Michela didn’t answer and Cecilia realized that she, too, was crying.

  She took her in her arms and whispered, “What is it?”

  She hugged her.

  The girl was crying.

  Cecilia took her into the bedroom, hoping that Mattia was still watching the movie, that he hadn’t been affected by their grief; she closed the door, a watertight compartment preventing the deluge from flooding the whole house.

  She led Michela to the bed. “Are you crying because of your classmate who pesters you?” Her daughter was crying like a little girl, she was a little girl. They lay down on the bed, their backs against the raised cushions, Cecilia made her rest her head on her breast. She asked again, “What’s wrong, Michi?”

  Michela didn’t answer right away, but after a while, when her mother was about to ask a second time if she was still upset because of that stupid kid who was infatuated with her, the girl spoke: “It’s not my fault, I swear, it’s not my fault.”

  “What’s not your fault? What are you talking about?”

  “If Mattia isn’t well it’s not my fault.”

  “But Mattia is fine.”

  “I heard you crying, I could hear that you were crying.”

  “Because I’m so worn out, and I had a scare, but the tests went well and Mattia is healthy as a horse. Do you believe me?”

  Michela didn’t answer.

  “And I don’t think it’s your fault, it’s not a matter of fault, it’s no one’s fault.”

  She went on comforting and reassuring her, losing track of time, hugging her daughter, who hugged her back, exhausted. She remembered a ridiculous phone call from Silvia, she couldn’t say when, five or six years ago. Her friend Stefania had been in a panic because her cat had been diagnosed with feline hepatic lipidosis and was in danger of dying. The cat was obese and hadn’t eaten in two days. “The cat is consuming himself,” Silvia had screamed into the phone, “don’t you see? He’s devouring himself!” That was her sister. And she never told anyone to go to hell.

  She must have closed her eyes at some point, because only when she sensed his presence beside the bed did she realize that Mattia was standing there.

  He was watching them curiously. “The movie is over,” he announced in his bored, solemn tone.

  * * *

  After the phone call she felt better, bruised but still intact, or rather, the more bruised she was, the more intact. She didn’t see Viberti for almost two weeks.

  Silvia brought him up only once, at the end of a long, complicated story about her work, saying it was a difficult time, that she was facing a lot of problems, not personal problems, though, because the situation she had mentioned to her had ended quickly and she wasn’t sorry about it. Had she caused her any trouble?

  “No, I already told you,” Cecilia replied.

  “Do you still see him?”

  “Sure, every so often I run into him,” she lied.

  “And he hasn’t said anything to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  She was very composed. She didn’t try to figure out where that composure was coming from.

  She understood, however, ten days later, when she found Viberti waiting for her outside the ER. He had his usual beaten-dog look. He was a beaten dog. As usual (not to say that it meant anything important), seeing him raised her spirits. He didn’t talk much, he didn’t know what to say, and Cecilia took pleasure in his embarrassment and his silence. They talked about the boy, then they stopped at the window opposite the locker room and the internist told her about watching her through that window two years ago, on the day Mattia was discharged after his first hospitalization. What Viberti remembered about that scene (which she remembered vividly), the way he spoke about it, touched her deeply. Two years had passed; they seemed like twenty. Then the internist began a sad, confused confession, a kind of self-accusation like at a people’s court, an
d she stopped him before he could scourge himself too severely, told him not to say anything more.

  They began seeing each other at lunchtime again as if nothing had happened. They didn’t mention Silvia, and they didn’t talk about their future. For two weeks they ate together as they’d always done, enjoying each other’s company, talking about the usual things, the hospital, Marta’s condition, the children. The children were on vacation.

  If she had the afternoon shift, Cecilia spent the morning in the house, which was still cool, lying on the bed in her bra and panties reading old Maigret and Poirot mysteries. Or she took out the folders with the children’s drawings: serene cats and anxious dogs, scurrying clouds, graceful blades of grass endlessly repeated, hysterical suns and somewhat demented moons, cheerful redbrick cottages. Or she leafed through the books they’d looked at together for years, every night: books by Richard Scarry, with those tiny little creatures that filled the white pages, the big red double-decker elephant-bus with Big Ben in the background and the distracted bunny who crosses the street and is sent sprawling by the rhinoceros-taxi, while the bunnies on the sidewalk despair. Or she would start watching television: reruns of a popular cooking show from last season. She watched an hour-long episode in which professionals and amateurs discussed a thousand ways to prepare carbonara: bacon or pancetta, pecorino or Parmesan cheese, whole egg or just the yolk, toss in a pan or pour onto the plate. A few months ago she might have gotten restless, but now she watched it straight through, relaxed and serene.

  If she had the morning shift, she left the hospital at two and walked to the pool, braving the sweltering heat in the shade of the chestnut trees, swam for an hour and a half, and then went to spend the evening at her mother’s. They ate together in front of the open kitchen window, longing for a breath of air. Since the internist had confessed to watching the deserted courtyards for hours, not thinking about anything, she often moved a chair out to her mother’s balcony and did the same thing. At home the interior windows looked out onto a dark shaft where there was nothing to see. Picturing Viberti in that melancholy pose, putting herself in his place, she no longer felt sad; instead, she felt like laughing and patting his ghost sitting next to her. Her mother sometimes caught her with a big smile on her face, and said it was nice to see her smile like that again. And she nodded, letting her believe she was thinking of Mattia, about the scares she’d had. But in fact, during that time she was learning not to think about her children as incessantly as she once used to. Not because they’d grown up; as if she had grown up.

  She hardly ever saw Silvia. She was closeted at home, finishing up an assignment. Cecilia wasn’t jealous of her anymore, if she ever had been. On the contrary, one day it occurred to her that her sister had helped her. And apart from everything else, she now had an excellent excuse to keep her relationship with Viberti a secret for a little while longer. Above all, it eased her mind about keeping it hidden from the children. All of those thoughts, which she considered as she lay diagonally across her bed, naked or in a bra and panties, were thoughts detached from reality, given that she and Viberti had become friends again, not lovers.

  The day before going to pick up Mattia at summer camp, when she opened the locker in the dressing room she saw a white envelope fall to the floor. She opened it; it was a letter from Viberti. Could he have copied it from a novel? she wondered. She smiled, imagining the internist bent over the kitchen table writing her a love letter. She added a huge dictionary to the scene and thought that maybe she really was in love. She was even envious. How had he managed to write such a beautiful letter? He must have copied it. The fraud. Who did he think he was fooling. She would tell him so as soon as she saw him, and she wanted to see him right away.

  She left the locker room and called him. When she heard his voice she knew that she would tell him everything that night. She walked unhurriedly beneath the trees along the avenue, looking for her car. The idea no longer made her anxious, telling the (now shy again) internist everything would be the easiest thing in the world.

  (And this is her moment of perfect happiness, a moment that will never come again, in which she walks alone on a summer afternoon and feels lighthearted, like another woman. And even if it’s paradoxical, because it isn’t her, that’s how I like to remember her.)

  * * *

  Before falling asleep in Viberti’s arms, she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She thought she would keep waking up and would lie there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling in that unfamiliar room. She imagined she would leave at five or six, at the crack of dawn, and get a couple of hours’ sleep in her own bed. She would say goodbye to him with a kiss, while he still dozed, avoiding any morning-after conversation. But that daybreak fantasy did not materialize. She fell into a deep sleep and woke up only once during the night: the window had been left partly open. She got up, closed it completely, and went back to bed, wrapping the sheet around her. She still felt cold, it seemed the draft wasn’t coming from the window that was now closed, but from the wardrobe without doors, impossible to close. Only then did she realize that Viberti wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing or snoring, he was motionless as a mannequin, naked as a jaybird. She touched his arm lightly, still warm, he couldn’t be dead. She smiled. She would tease that man for the rest of her life, and that would make her happy.

  When she woke up the second time she thought it was very late, but it was only eight o’clock. Viberti was wearing an elegant blue bathrobe and was sitting beside the bed. He was looking at her the way one looks at a sleeping infant or a woman who has just given birth. She didn’t want to be heartless, now that she was sure she really loved him. But you could read it so clearly in his face, the desire to be a father, to have a family, children, at least one child, and to make a woman a mother. And that would be a problem, but not a troubling one. They would talk about it quietly, on the balcony, she sitting in the wicker chair and he kneeling on the ground, like the night before, surrounded by those white wedding flowers.

  “Why are you sitting there looking at me?”

  “Because you’re beautiful.”

  She burst out laughing. “I really doubt it, at this hour,” she said, and covered her head with the sheet. “Why were you looking at me?” she asked again, looking for his shadow through the weave of the fabric.

  “I brainwashed you.”

  “At most, you could wash out my stomach with a stomach pump.”

  But Viberti was dead serious as only he could be. He said that as a child he had watched a TV series that had really scared him. There was a man who entered houses at night, knelt at the foot of the beds as if saying his prayers, and stared at the people sleeping, telepathically planting the seed of a thought in their heads. Usually an evil thought.

  “Like what?”

  “Like thoughts that turned people into killers.”

  “Where were your parents, why did they let you watch those shows? This is at least the third show you’ve told me about that you saw as a child, that changed your life.”

  “Every so often my mother would sleep for days on end, I don’t know what was wrong with her, but I pretty much did what I wanted. In fact, if I have a son I’ll let him watch all the television he wants, I’m living proof that it doesn’t do any harm.”

  “So then, living proof, what seed were you trying to plant in my brain?”

  “The desire to be with me the next day, too.”

  She pulled the sheet off her head slowly, cautiously, and looked at him, serious.

  “Did it work?” he asked, serious.

  “Maybe.”

  Then he joined her under the sheet.

  Where had that man learned to make love like that? It seemed unlikely that he had really spent the last ten years alone. And if it were true? What if she had aroused passion and skill? He knew where to touch her because he loved her: Could it be?

  Afterward she said: “I didn’t change my mind the day after, though. I was just confused.” He nodded.
>
  * * *

  For the first time in months, maybe years, she felt she had done the right thing. The road to Mattia’s summer camp was straight and monotonous, the landscape nondescript. Chandelier factories on one side, faucets and medical supplies on the other, kitchens on display, tiles, a chapel swallowed up by brambles, an abandoned farmhouse, and more bathrooms and sofas in genuine leather. The internist’s half-empty apartment: after ten years he hadn’t replaced the furniture that his former wife had taken with her, not even the doors to the wardrobe. Should she be worried? Were they signs of a repressed depression, ready to erupt? She didn’t need that confirmation to know that Viberti was a melancholy type, she’d read it in his eyes the day they’d met and maybe that was one of the reasons she liked him. So she shouldn’t be alarmed. And his mania for watching the courtyards for hours on end wasn’t really troubling either. Nothing was troubling or serious or irredeemable. That morning everything seemed curable, there was a remedy for everything. She was melancholy, too, and such optimism frightened her, but it wasn’t true optimism, she was far from knowing the genuine, blithe, vigorous optimism of the truly carefree. That morning she simply felt better because pessimism had loosened its grip a little. She would help him choose new furniture, they would play at setting up house together. Two armchairs for the living room, she knew where to buy them. A carpenter for the wardrobe doors, she would recommend one. A recommendation is always welcome.

  The cell phone rang. It was Silvia. She hesitated before answering, not because she was driving, but because she was afraid her sister would be able to tell from her voice what had happened.

  Silvia seemed to be in a hurry, she was breathless. “I need to talk to that coworker of yours, you know the one I told you about, I can’t reach him on his cell phone. Or else he’s not answering me, who knows,” she said with a sarcastic little laugh. “He forgot something at my house and I want to give it back to him. I can’t reach him, do you know if he’s out of town by any chance?”