the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (16 page)

"Did Mom tell you to come?" he asked his father.

The muscles in Pietro's neck stiffened. He sucked in his lips and then nodded.

"Your future is the most important thing," he said in a vaguely embarrassed voice. "You need to think about yourself now. If you decide to go we'll support you. We haven't got a lot of money, but enough if you need it."

There was another lengthy silence, in which Mattia thought about Alice, and about the share of money that he had stolen from Michela.

"Dad?" he said at last.

"Yes?"

"Could you leave, please? I have to make a phone call."

Pietro gave a long sigh that also contained a certain amount of relief.

"Of course," he said.

He got up, and before turning around he stretched a hand toward Mattia's face. He was about to caress his cheek, but stopped a few inches from the unruly tufts of his son's beard. He redirected his hand to his hair, which he barely touched. After all, it had been quite a while since they had done such things.

26

D
enis's love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent. When he was nineteen, Denis found an advertisement for a gay bar on the last page of a local newspaper and tore it out, keeping the scrap of paper in his wallet for two whole months. From time to time he unrolled it and reread the address, even though he already knew it by heart.

All around him, guys his age were going out with girls and by now they were used to sex, so much so that they'd stopped talking about it all the time. Denis felt that his only escape route lay in that piece of newspaper; in that address that had faded from the sweat of his fingertips.

He went one rainy evening, without really having made his mind up to go. He put on the first thing he pulled out of his closet and headed out, giving a quick shout to his parents in the other room. I'm going to the movies, he said.

He walked past the bar two or three times, circling the block every time. Finally he went in with his hands in his pockets and a confidential wink to the bouncer. He sat down at the bar, ordered a lager, and sipped it slowly, staring at the bottles lined up along the wall, waiting.

A guy came over to him a moment later and Denis decided he'd be okay, even before he looked him properly in the face. The man started talking about himself, or maybe about some film that Denis hadn't seen. He shouted in his ear but Denis didn't listen to a word. He brusquely interrupted him saying let's go to the toilet. The other guy was struck dumb and then he smiled, revealing bad teeth. Denis thought he was horrible, that his eyebrows almost joined up and he was old, too old, but it didn't matter.

In the toilet the guy pulled his T-shirt up over his belly and bent forward to kiss him, but Denis pulled away. Instead he knelt down and unbuttoned the other man's pants. Damn, he said, you're in a hurry. But then he let him get on with it. Denis shut his eyes and tried to finish as quickly as possible.

He didn't get a result with his mouth and felt completely hopeless. Then he used his hands, both of them, insistently. As the guy came he came too, in his pants. He almost ran from the toilet, without giving the stranger time to get his clothes back on. The same old sense of guilt took hold of him as soon as he was past the toilet door, and drenched him like a bucket of icy water.

Outside the bar he wandered about for half an hour in search of a fountain to wash the smell off him.

He went back to the bar on other occasions. Every time he talked to someone different and he always found an excuse not to give his real name. He never hooked up with anyone else. He collected the stories of people like himself, mostly keeping silent and listening. He slowly discovered that the stories were similar, that there was a process, and that the process involved immersion, putting your whole head under until you touched the bottom and only then coming up for air.

Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their heart, as his love for Mattia had done. Each of them had been afraid and many of them still were, but not when they were here, among others who could understand, protected by the "scene," as they put it. When he talked to those strangers Denis felt less alone and wondered when his moment would come, the day when he would touch bottom, resurface, and finally be able to breathe.

One evening someone told him about "the cemetery lamps." That's what they called the little path up behind the graveyard, where the only light, faint and trembling, was from the tombstone lamps filtering between the bars of the big cemetery gate. They would grope about there, it was the perfect place to empty themselves of desire without seeing or being seen, merely putting their bodies at the disposal of the dark.

It was at the lamps that Denis had touched bottom. He slammed into it with his face, chest, and knees, as though diving into shallow water. Afterward he never went back to the bar, locking himself away, more stubbornly than before, in his own denial.

Then, in his junior year at university, he went to study in Spain. There, far from the probing eyes of his family and friends, far from all the streets whose names he knew, love found him. His name was Valerio and he was Italian like him; young and scared to death like him. The months they spent together, in a little apartment a few blocks from the Ramblas, were quick and intense and they removed the useless cloak of suffering, as on the first clear evening after days of pouring rain.

Back in Italy they lost sight of each other, but Denis didn't suffer. With a completely new confidence, which he would never lose, he moved on to other affairs, which seemed to have been waiting for him for all that time, lined up in an orderly fashion just around the corner. The only old friendship he maintained was with Mattia. They spoke only rarely, mostly on the phone, and were capable of being silent for minutes at a time, each lost in his own thoughts, punctuated by the other's reassuring, rhythmical breathing at the other end of the line.

Denis was brushing his teeth when the call came. At his house they always answered after the second ring, the time it took to get to the nearest telephone from anywhere in the apartment.

His mother called Denis it's for you, and he took his time answering. He rinsed his mouth out well, passed the towel over it, and glanced once more at his two upper front incisors. Over the past few days he had had a sense that they were overlapping, because of his wisdom teeth pushing in from the sides.

"Hello?"

"Hi."

Mattia never introduced himself. He knew that his voice was unmistakable to his friend and anyway he didn't like saying his name.

"So, Mr. Graduate, how are you?" Denis said cheerfully. He wasn't upset about the graduation business. He had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over that chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void. Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

"Did I disturb you?" asked Mattia.

"No. Did I disturb you?" Denis teased.

"I was the one who called you."

"Of course, so tell me: I can tell from your voice that something's up."

Mattia remained silent. Something was up, it was there on the tip of his tongue.

"Well?" Denis pressed. "And this something would be?"

Mattia exhaled loudly into the receiver and Denis became aware that he was having difficulty breathing. He picked up a pen beside the telephone and started playing with it, passing it between the fingers of his right hand. Then he dropped it and he didn't bend down to pick it up. Mattia still wasn't speaking.

"Shall I start asking questions?" said Denis. "We could do it so that you--"

"I've been offered a position abroad," Mattia interrupted. "At a university. An important one."

"Wow," Denis observed, not surprised in the least. "That sounds fantastic. Are you going?"

"I don't know. Should I?"

Denis pretended to laugh.

"You're asking me that when I haven't even finished university? I'd go in a second. A change of air always does one good."

He thought of adding and what is there to keep you here? But he didn't say it.

"It's because something happened, the other day," Mattia ventured. "The day I graduated."

"Mmm."

"Alice was there and . . ."

"And?"

Mattia hesitated for a moment.

"Well, we kissed," he said at last.

Denis's fingers stiffened around the receiver. He was surprised by his reaction. He was no longer jealous of Alice, there was no point, but at that moment it was as if an undigested bit of the past had come back up his throat. For a moment he saw Mattia and Alice hand in hand in Viola's kitchen, and he felt Giulia Mirandi's invasive tongue forcing its way into his mouth like a rolled-up towel.

"Hallelujah," he remarked, trying to sound happy. "You two have finally done it."

"Yeah."

In the pause that followed both of them wanted to hang up.

"And now you don't know what to do," Denis struggled to say.

"Yeah."

"But you and she are now, what would you say . . . ?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen her since."

"Ah."

Denis ran the nail of his index finger along the curled wire of the telephone. At the other end Mattia did the same and as always he thought of a DNA helix, missing its twin.

"Numbers are everywhere," said Denis. "They're always the same, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"But Alice is only here."

"Yes."

"So you've already made up your mind."

Denis heard his friend's breath easing and becoming more regular.

"Thank you," said Mattia.

"For what?"

Mattia hung up. Denis spent another few seconds with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the silence inside it. Something within him went out, like one last ember that had stayed lit for too long under the ashes.

I said the right thing, he thought.

The busy signal sounded. Denis hung up and went back into the bathroom to check on those wretched wisdom teeth.

27

"?Que pasa, mi amorcito?"
Soledad asked Alice, tilting her head slightly to catch her eye. Ever since Fernanda had been in the hospital she had eaten at the dinner table with them, because father and daughter facing each other, alone, was unbearable for both of them.

Alice's father had developed the habit of not changing when he came home from work. He had dinner in his jacket and tie, slightly loosened, as if he were merely passing through. He held a newspaper open on the table and looked up only to make sure that his daughter was gulping down at least the occasional mouthful.

The silence had become part of the meal and disturbed only Sol, who often thought back to the rowdy meals at her mother's house, when she was still very young and could never have imagined she would end up like this.

Alice hadn't even looked at the cutlet and salad on her plate. She took little sips of water, crossing her eyes as she drank and regarding the glass resting on her lips as seriously as if it held some kind of medicine. She shrugged and flashed a swift smile at Sol.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm not very hungry."

Her father nervously turned the page. Before setting the paper back down he gave it an impetuous shake and couldn't help glancing at his daughter's full plate. He didn't comment and started reading again, beginning a random article in the middle, without grasping its meaning.

"Sol?" asked Alice.

"Yes?"

"How did your husband win you? The first time, I mean. What did he do?"

Soledad stopped chewing. Then she started again, more slowly, to gain some time. The first image that ran through her head wasn't of the day she met her husband. Instead she thought back to that morning when she had gotten up late and wandered barefoot around the house, looking for him. Over the years all the memories of her marriage had become concentrated in those few moments, as if the time spent with her husband had been only the preparation for an ending. That morning she had looked at the previous night's dirty dishes and the cushions in the wrong place on the sofa. Everything was just as they had left it and the sounds in the air were the same as ever. And yet something, in the way things were arranged and the way the light clung to them, had left her frozen in the middle of the sitting room, dismayed. And then, with disconcerting clarity, she had thought he's gone.

Soledad sighed, feigning her usual nostalgia.

"He brought me home from work on his bicycle. Every day he came with his bicycle," she said. "And he gave me some shoes."

"What?"

"Shoes. White ones, high heels."

Soledad smiled and indicated the length of the heels with her thumb and index finger.

"They were very pretty," she said.

Alice's father snorted and shuffled in his chair, as if he found all this intolerable. Alice imagined Sol's husband coming out of the shop with the shoe box under his arm. She knew him from the photograph that Sol kept hung over the head of her bed, with a dry little olive branch slipped between the nail and the hook.

For a moment Alice felt light-headed, but her thoughts immediately turned to Mattia, and stayed there. A week had passed, and he still hadn't called.

I'll go now, she thought.

She slipped a forkful of salad into her mouth, as if to say to her father look I've eaten. The vinegar stung her lips slightly. She was still chewing as she got up from the table.

"I've got to go out," she said.

Her father arched his eyebrows.

"And might we know where you're going at this hour?" he asked.

"Out," said Alice defiantly. Then she added, "To a girlfriend's," to soften the tone.

Her father shook his head, as if to say do what you like. For a moment Alice felt sorry for him, left on his own like that behind his newspaper. She felt a desire to hug him and tell him everything and ask him what she should do, but a moment later the same thought made her shiver. She turned around and headed resolutely for the bathroom.