Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  She tells Michela it’s okay, as long as she’s in bed by ten. They finish eating and sit on the couch in front of the television. Right away she thinks she’s seen the actress playing Mother Teresa before, though she can’t remember where. She’s a young actress whom they’ve aged by adding some wrinkles here and there, or else she’s the older sister of a young actress whom she’s seen in another film. She takes her laptop and opens it up on her knees, and does a Google search for the actress’s name; she finds it, it’s Olivia Hussey, and she discovers or rediscovers that she played Mary in Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus was really hot in that movie, with his hollow cheeks, prominent eyes, and oiled hair), and so, of course, the choice has a certain logic, the veil suits her. But Hussey was also in Romeo and Juliet, and this is less understandable; or is it?

  She starts to tell Michela about her discovery, she turns and sees that the girl is weeping silently, she hadn’t noticed. She weeps furtively, not making a sound, wiping her tears with a handkerchief balled up in her hand. Silvia pretends she hasn’t seen, she turns back to the computer screen. What’s wrong? What should she do? The film seemed so insipid, she can’t imagine that Mother Teresa bent over a dying man could upset the girl.

  Maybe, deep down, Michela still wants to become a saint. Maybe she’s just learned to hide her earlier mystical crises.

  “Hey, is something wrong?”

  Michela shakes her head.

  “Is it upsetting you?”

  She shrugs. “Of course not.”

  “Want me to turn it off?”

  “Yes, it’s so boring.”

  Silvia laughs, relieved, tells her she thought she was crying because of the film. Though actually it’s much worse if she’s crying for some other reason.

  Michela thinks so, too; taking a pillow and pressing it to her face, she begins to sob, letting out everything she’s been holding in until then.

  Silvia hugs her. They stay on the couch until half past eleven.

  At first there’s an endless list of trivial events that seem totally unrelated. Not to Michela, who fits them together like Lego bricks.

  In between there’s a story about a slap Cecilia gave her a year ago, a scrupulous explanation of its dynamics and motivation, and the admission that she hadn’t been nice to her brother, but she didn’t mean anything by it. And the slap is the only thing Silvia remembers later on, because she didn’t think Cecilia ever hit the children, and she can’t imagine it.

  Finally there’s the shattering conclusion that her mother can’t stand her, she can sense it, she knows she doesn’t like her whereas she wants so much to make her happy.

  Silvia reassures her, strokes her, holds her tight.

  In the end the girl gives up, exhausted, even though her aunt’s reassurances haven’t convinced her. How could they? They don’t even convince her aunt.

  * * *

  I wonder if I’m not giving too much importance to sofas, it seems I want everything to happen around them. Silvia’s is definitely too big for the room it’s in. Silvia salvaged it from the family of a friend who wanted to throw it out. It has enormous arms and perpetually sagging cushions that droop to one side; it’s covered with a large Indian print cotton spread to hide the stains and cigarette burns on the Prussian-blue velvet upholstery. It’s massive, but really only two can sit comfortably there; if you try to put a third person in the middle, after a while the unfortunate soul ends up being squashed by the two on either side, who slowly but inevitably cave in on him. When I think of Silvia, that’s how I see her: a piece of furniture too big for the room that contains her.

  As soon as Michela falls asleep, Silvia returns to the living room and carefully writes down her niece’s words. What’s wrong, what should she do? She’s not eager to talk to her sister. She doesn’t know if she has a choice.

  She wants to be a good surrogate mother, and she can understand Cecilia, who surely wants to be a good mother. At one point, during the most difficult period of the divorce, Cecilia was afraid to go and talk to the teachers at school: afraid they might say that the boy was malnourished, neglected, tired, dirty. That the fault, glaringly obvious, was hers.

  Anything, but don’t act like a teacher. She lies down on the couch, lets her eyes trace the contours of the shadows on the ceiling. Michela arouses something more than simple tenderness in her. To start crying like that, out of the blue! To carry so much anguish inside, hold it in with clenched teeth, and then let it all out with someone she feels she can talk to. To have an inner life and feelings and not be satisfied with living in a state of dormancy.

  * * *

  Cecilia had been the one to tell her that their father was ill. She’d told her in person and without their mother present (whom she’d told the same way, without their father present). Cecilia, the family’s protector and guardian. Healer as well, though not capable of miracles. Cecilia stopped by to see her the day of the diagnosis and told her: she said he could be treated, the recovery rates were high, that there was no reason to panic and think their father’s case was terminal. Silvia felt like she was going to die, she couldn’t breathe. Ceci gave her a sedative. Then she made her promise not to make a scene in front of their father. She promised, but the next day she went to see her parents and burst into tears. And told her mother to go to hell. She did everything she shouldn’t have done. But wasn’t that what everyone expected from her anyway, that she do what she wasn’t supposed to do, what was better and more reasonable for her not to do?

  She wept in front of her sister, wept in front of their father, told her mother to go to hell when she asked her to take it easy and not make things worse (on the other hand she, too, was crying, so what the hell did she expect). Their father got up and withdrew to his room; he’d spent the last ten years mediating, he’d just been diagnosed with intestinal cancer (his other daughter had diagnosed it; when she was little she’d been a wonderful child, always so serious), he didn’t have the strength to intervene that night, he had a right to a little respite. Silvia and her mother suddenly found themselves alone, wept a little longer, in silence, each to herself, then Silvia got up and left her parents’ house without another word. The next day her father called to comfort her; you’d think she was the one who had cancer, that she was the one who needed to be consoled. Her father repeated Cecilia’s lies as if he believed them, maybe he did believe them, maybe they weren’t lies, he didn’t believe them but he was used to believing what he forced himself to believe and so in the end he believed it, yes, he believed it, he believed he would be cured.

  * * *

  At times of sinking self-esteem she feels like a cleaning lady venturing into other people’s pages. If you’re not familiar with the house, it’s more difficult at first, you don’t know where the dirt is hiding. Your presence shouldn’t be evident. Anyone who comes across the perfect page, after you’ve cleaned it up, shouldn’t be aware of your role, he should think the page was that way to begin with. Pages have a center, sentences a barycenter, they mustn’t lean to one side or the other. You have to dust, straighten, shift, and put things in order. You have to know a lot of graphic marks to show where the corrections should be inserted—a pair of legs, raised arms, heads upright or inverted—and in more pressing cases make up new ones—crowned heads, hands with elephantiasis, the male reproductive organs. And to cancel a correction, the most beautiful mark of all: STET! But it’s a dying art: in a few years she, too, like everyone else, will be editing electronically.

  Alternately, when she’s a little less depressed, she pictures herself as a loving mother entering her kids’ room (she has to think of them as little kids and they have to be sweet, otherwise it doesn’t work). Every toy they haven’t put away, every notebook left open, facedown on the floor, every sock tossed in a corner. She has to think about their excited or inept or distracted acts, correct them, and smile. And feel a pang and love them despite the mess they manage to make.

  But since in reality these writers and translators are
neither children nor grandchildren, when she starts getting irritated she feels like slapping them. How dare they? What were they thinking? What makes them think that someone should come and straighten up for them? Do they think I’m their servant? She often talks to the author or translator as she works, addressing the computer screen as if it were HAL 9000’S red eye, and tells them to go to hell. People with whom, in person, she has an excellent relationship.

  She works alone, no one supervises her. If she doesn’t supervise herself, she’s lost. When she gets distracted and loses her focus and rhythm, she storms out slamming the door behind her and goes shopping. If she doesn’t need to shop, she takes a walk around the block. She returns to her desk ten minutes later and quickly picks up the thread. But if she loses it again she’s in serious trouble. She gets up, looks out the window: a lady with a dog is walking down the street. No obligations, a life that lets you take the dog out at eleven o’clock in the morning, immoral, it’s immoral, it shouldn’t be allowed, it disturbs those who are working, with or without a dog.

  What’s bothering her? She broods over the question for a few days and finally decides that she has no choice, she must talk to her sister about what her niece told her. It’s a Monday in late May, she spends hours at the stupidest job in the world, she checks to see that she’s made all the revisions, spelling the words out on the screen, tapping them out, as if she were knocking to find out who’s behind them. In the evening she goes out with two of her best friends (the third is living in exile in Barcelona, unless in the end it turns out that they’re the ones living in exile).

  * * *

  Her friend Carla has a boyfriend and a child, and that night she’s wearing a very elegant black dress, with a stunning neckline. Silvia and Stefania, who live alone and are dressed any old way, notice it and tease her about it. They go to a bar, drink mojitos, and munch on two-day-old canapés, dried-up, shriveled little pizzas, and tasteless jumbo olives. They’re well aware that the canapés are stale, and the fervor they put into chewing goes along with their excitement as they laugh and talk, interrupting one another, discussing the fate of their absent friend Francesca. Sometimes Silvia, Stefania, and Francesca discuss Carla’s fate, and other times Silvia, Francesca, and Carla discuss Stefania’s fate, so it is very likely that Stefania, Carla, and Francesca have discussed Silvia’s fate. What on earth would they have to say about her for hours on end? She recalls many shameful things her friends have told her, but she isn’t sure she remembers all the shameful things she’s told them about herself. They laugh, but they’re really not joking, because the questions that fascinate them are questions of life and death: a life they’re afraid they won’t live, a life that hasn’t begun, a love life, a professional life. They fear the lack of strong, passionate feelings and exciting, long-lasting careers, or an excess of tenuous feelings and precarious careers. An absence of life that is fear of death; that is always there.

  Silvia, who laughs and talks loudly and chews like the others, can’t manage to forget Michela’s weeping. They’re thirty-two years old. All three are petite, with dark hair, brown eyes. They know they have a lot in common, but they would never admit they look alike. They laugh and talk very loudly and chew the stale canapés and drink three mojitos but pay for only two because they know the bartender. His name is Rumi, he’s Australian, what kind of a name is Rumi? It sounds like a dog’s name. Rumi, come! They laugh. They sink their molars into the plump olives and all that squirts out is sour liquid. They switch from mojitos to a white wine—still, please, Rumi, not fizzy—and from the shriveled little pizzas to hot pizzas that are much better. New faces provide material to fill any gaps in the conversation (look at how that one is dressed) and after an hour of talking about Francesca’s fate there’s not much left to talk about, or better yet, Francesca’s fate has lost its distinctive features and coincides more and more with their own.

  Silvia remembers when, a few years ago, she’d told them laughingly about Michela’s so-called mystical crises. Then she regretted making fun of her with her friends, she felt like a piece of shit and had suddenly turned very serious. Now she doesn’t know if she should tell them what Michela said to her. Still, she can’t help it. Stefania is talking about how companies replace women on maternity leave with temp workers, how suspicious the system makes her, about what a jungle the labor market is, topics she can go on about forever. So when Silvia announces that she needs some advice, Carla displays what might be excessive enthusiasm.

  They talk about Michela for an hour, and Silvia listens to them explain what she already knows: it’s absolutely essential that she tell Cecilia what her daughter said. Not just for Michela’s sake, not just for Cecilia. For her sake: she can’t live with that anguish.

  “Am I wrong to call it anguish?”

  “Call it whatever you want, but go talk to her.”

  Then Carla has to get back to her son and leaves them, followed by a trail of desirous, hopeless stares. All that, the dress, for nothing, unless it’s for when she gets back home. Silvia and Stefania find themselves alone; Stefi points out some people they met a few months ago, Silvia turns out to be in a bad mood and says she doesn’t feel like saying hello to them, Stefi insists, Silvia unfairly says something terrible and uncalled-for to her (whether she’d like to entertain them by talking about temp workers), and Stefi gets up and stalks off. It all happens in a few seconds, no time to reflect and avoid it. On top of everything, the song that’s playing just then is “In Between Days” by the Cure, which reminds her of Enrico Fermi and makes her sad. She dashes out, sends Stefania a text message that says: sorry sorry sorry I’ll call you tomorrow.

  * * *

  When her father got sick, she imagined spending time with him, reading him novels by Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. Le Guin or any other science fiction writer with the middle initial K. She imagined the scene bathed in a sweet, melancholy light, her father immobilized in bed.

  But during the months of chemotherapy, her father was no longer the same. He was no longer the same with her. He no longer felt like talking. He seemed to be eager to listen, but it was a ruse. She went to see him every two or three days, her mother always left them alone. Her explanation was that she “took advantage of it to go out,” but in fact she used it as an excuse for not staying with them, so she wouldn’t have to read her husband’s love for his younger daughter in his eyes.

  Her father made an effort to chat. His objective in any conversation had always been to avoid talking about himself. Usually he would adopt a diversionary tactic: he’d talk about colleagues, old friends, people he’d met, places he’d seen; he was able to recall entire books. Now he’d become a kind of gentle cop, a kindly but relentless interrogator. He never stopped asking questions and was never satisfied with easy answers.

  The window was partly open and the smell of rain or the scent of spring drifted in from outside, the trees along the avenue had finally put out their first leaves, the light in the room took on the same shade of pale green. When she arrived she found him in an armchair, in the living room, a room where they never spoke in the past, it was too subject to her mother’s supervision. The TV off, the closed book beside him—always the same novels in those months, The Left Hand of Darkness or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Ubik, the bookmark always at the same point (which maybe wasn’t the point, maybe the point was to pick up the book and open it when her mother appeared, to encourage her to disappear again).

  It wasn’t warm enough yet to have the window open, it wasn’t open by accident, just as it was no accident that the armchair was farther away than usual from the couch, and it was no accident that her father’s complexion was sallow and his breath unbearable. Cecilia had told her their father was afraid he smelled bad, that he stank of illness and therefore death; he didn’t want to cause any discomfort or create unpleasant memories. Silvia sat on the couch, far away from him, looking out, saying, “The sunlight’s so beautiful on the trees, the rain’s so beautiful on the window
panes.” It was more beautiful—more incredible—however, to see her mother approach her father as she’d never done, at least not in front of their daughters, to help him up from the chair.

  Every now and then she would have liked to take her father to the doctor, to the hospital, without her mother always in tow. She would have liked to spend time with her father, to have him confide in her. Any kind of confidence. She was a little jealous of Cecilia during those months. Her sister had never competed for their father’s affection, but in recent years she’d had a formidable weapon: his health. Even before his illness, Cecilia knew things about their father, intimate things—cholesterol numbers, SED rate, prostate size—about which Silvia was in the dark. They had topics to discuss—diets, recommendations, dosages—which interested her father more and more as he got older. She saw it in his eyes, she saw it in their looks. The sight of Cecilia reassured him. For a time, when Cecilia had decided to get married, they had stopped speaking to each other. Too young, he’d said, not out loud; for a few months he kept muttering that maybe they could wait. Later he was the first to admit that he’d been wrong; besides, when grandchildren arrive, everything changes, of course. When he gives you a grandson, even the man who is fucking your daughter becomes likable.

  When she starts thinking such awful, unfair things, she knows she’s hit the rock bottom of her depression. She can’t imagine herself being any more depressed than this. Usually her specialties are panic, anxiety, agitation, and worry. But when that odious depression comes over her, the only remedy is to shut herself in and work.

  * * *

  She counts the number of pages remaining in the tome of Hindu mythology. She seems to have spent a lifetime counting pages. Even in college she used to count the pages that remained. To count, she subtracts. She takes the last page, takes the page she’s up to, subtracts. But it’s not exact. There are pages with illustrations, pages only partially full, blank pages, pages crammed with footnotes that she can ignore because they’re just bibliographical references that others will check. Then she comes up with an estimate of these phantom pages and deducts it from the result of the first subtraction. Over the years she’s even extended the counting of pages to the books she reads in her spare time. Sometimes when she saw her father holding one of his hefty volumes of science fiction, she would ask him how many pages he still had left. He never had any idea, or rather he was always “more or less halfway through” (her father was more or less halfway through everything, he was an unfinished man, though that wasn’t his fault). In her work she now comes across texts composed of different-sized characters, she encounters tourist guides with text boxes and sidebars that complicate the calculation, illustrations whose space she must take into account. Counting the pages, guessing the final number of printed pages: she loves doing that. The editors at the publishing houses she works for admire her precision. She belongs to a well-defined category that can immediately be identified: a valuable employee who has moments of unreliability. Every now and then she receives a phone call for apparently no reason and only after a day or so does she realize that they were checking to make sure the work was going along as it should.