the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (17 page)

Her father lowered the newspaper and with two fingers he rubbed his weary eyes. Sol turned the memory of the high-heeled shoes around in her head for a few seconds, then put it back in its place and got up to clear the things away.

On her way to Mattia's house, Alice kept the music turned up, but if when she got there someone had asked her what she was listening to, she wouldn't have been able to say. All of a sudden she was furious and she was sure that she was about to ruin everything, but she no longer had any choice. That evening, getting up from the table, she had crossed the invisible boundary beyond which things start working by themselves. It was like when she was learning to ski, when she would move her center of gravity too far forward by an insignificant couple of millimeters, just enough to end up facedown in the snow.

She had been to Mattia's house only once before, and only as far as the living room. Mattia had disappeared into his room to change and she had had an embarrassing chat with his mother, Mrs. Balossino, who observed her from the sofa with a vaguely worried air, as if Alice's hair were on fire or something, without even offering her a seat.

Alice rang the doorbell and the display beside it lit up red, like a final warning. After a few crackles Mattia's mother answered in a frightened voice.

"Who is it?"

"It's Alice, Mrs. Balossino. I'm sorry about the time, but . . . is Mattia there?"

From the other end she heard a thoughtful silence. Alice pulled her hair over her right shoulder, having the disagreeable impression of being observed through the lens of the intercom. The door opened with an electrical click. Before coming in, Alice smiled at the camera to say thank you.

In the empty hallway her footsteps echoed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Her bad leg seemed to have lost all life, as if her heart had forgotten to pump blood into it.

The door to the apartment was ajar, but there was no one to welcome her. Alice pushed it open and said, "Hello?" Mattia emerged from the sitting room and stopped at least two meters away from her.

"Hi," he said, without moving his arms.

"Hi."

They stood looking at each other for a few seconds, as if they didn't know each other at all. Mattia had crossed his big toe over his second one, inside his slipper, and by squashing one over the other and against the floor he hoped he could break them.

"Sorry if I'm--"

"Won't you come in?" Mattia broke in automatically.

Alice turned to close the door and the round brass handle slipped from her sweaty palm. The door slammed, shaking the frame, and a shiver of impatience ran through Mattia.

What's she doing here? he thought.

It was as if the Alice he had been talking to Denis about only a few minutes before wasn't the same one who had just dropped by without warning. He tried to clear his mind of that ridiculous thought, but the irritation remained in his mouth like a kind of nausea.

He thought of the word
hunted.
Then he thought about when his father used to drag him onto the carpet and imprison him between his enormous arms. He tickled him on his tummy and on his sides and he exploded with laughter; he laughed so hard that he couldn't breathe.

Alice followed him into the sitting room. Mattia's parents stood waiting, like a little welcoming committee.

"Good evening," she said, shrinking back.

"Hi, Alice," replied Adele, without moving.

Pietro, on the other hand, came over and unexpectedly stroked her hair.

"You're getting prettier and prettier," he said. "How's your mother?"

Adele, behind her husband's back, held a paralyzed smile and bit her lip for not having asked the question herself.

Alice blushed.

"Same as usual," she said, so as not to appear overdramatic. "She's getting by."

"Say hello from us," said Pietro.

All four of them stood in silence. Mattia's father seemed to stare right through Alice and she tried to distribute her weight uniformly on her legs, so as not to look crippled. She realized that her mother would never meet Mattia's parents and she was a bit sorry about that, but she was even sorrier to be the only one thinking anything of the kind.

"You two go on," Pietro said at last.

Alice passed beside him with her head lowered after smiling once more at Adele. Mattia was already waiting in his room.

"Shall I close it?" asked Alice once she was inside, pointing to the door. All her courage had deserted her.

"Uh-huh."

Mattia sat on the bed, with his hands crossed on his knees. Alice looked around the room. The things that filled it seemed not to have been touched by anyone; they looked like articles that had been carefully and calculatedly displayed in a shopwindow. There was nothing useless, not a photograph on the wall or a stuffed animal from childhood, nothing that gave off that smell of familiarity and affection that teenagers' rooms usually have. With all the chaos that filled her body and her head, Alice felt out of place.

"Nice room," she said, without really meaning it.

"Thanks," said Mattia.

There was an enormous list of things to say floating over their heads and both of them tried to ignore it by looking at the floor.

Alice slid her back along the wardrobe and sat down on the ground with her working knee against her chest. She forced a smile.

"So, how does it feel to have graduated?"

Mattia shrugged and smiled very slightly.

"Exactly the same as before."

"You really don't know how to be happy, do you?"

"Apparently not."

Alice let an affectionate mmm slip through her closed lips and thought that this embarrassment between them made no sense and yet it was there, solid and ineradicable.

"But things have been happening to you lately," she said.

"Yes."

Alice thought about whether to say it or not. Then she said it, not a drop of saliva left in her mouth.

"Something nice, no?"

Mattia drew in his legs.

Here we go, he thought.

"Yes, actually," he said.

He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to get up and go and sit next to her. He was supposed to smile, look into her eyes, and kiss her. It was that simple. It was mere mechanics, a banal sequence of vectors that would bring his mouth to meet hers. He could do it even if at that moment he didn't feel like it; he could trust the precision of his movements.

He made as if to get up, but somehow the mattress kept him where he was, like a sticky morass.

Once again Alice acted in his place.

"Can I sit next to you?" she asked.

He nodded and, even though there was no need to, moved slightly to one side.

Alice pulled herself to her feet, with the help of her hands.

On the bed, in the space that Mattia had left free, there was a piece of paper, typed and folded in three like an accordion. Alice picked it up to move it and noticed that it was written in English.

"What's this?" she asked.

"It came today. It's a letter from a university."

Alice read the name of the city, written in bold in the top left-hand corner, and the letters dimmed under her eyes.

"What does it say?"

"I've been offered a grant."

Alice felt dizzy and panic turned her face white.

"Wow," she lied. "For how long?"

"Four years."

She gulped. She was still standing up.

"And are you going?" she asked under her breath.

"I don't know yet," said Mattia, almost apologizing. "What do you think?"

Alice remained silent, with the sheet of paper in her hands and her gaze lost somewhere on the wall.

"What do you think?" Mattia repeated, as if she really hadn't heard him.

"What do I think about what?" Alice's voice had suddenly hardened, so much that Mattia gave a start. For some reason she thought about her mother in the hospital, dazed with drugs. She looked expressionlessly at the sheet of paper and wanted to tear it up.

Instead she put it back down on the bed, where she had been about to sit down.

"It would be important for my career," Mattia said by way of self-justification.

Alice nodded seriously, with her chin thrust out as if she had a golf ball in her mouth.

"Fine. So what are you waiting for? Off you go. Besides, it doesn't seem to me that there's anything to keep you here," she said between clenched teeth.

Mattia felt the veins in his neck swelling. Perhaps he was about to cry. Ever since that afternoon in the park the tears were always there, like a lump that was hard to swallow, as if that day his tear ducts, clogged for so long, had finally opened and all that accumulated stuff had finally begun to force its way out.

"But if I went away," he began in a slightly quivering voice, "would you . . . ?" He stopped.

"Me?" Alice stared at him from above, as though he were a stain on the bedcover. "I'd imagined the next four years differently," she said. "I'm twenty-three and my mother's about to die. I . . ." She shook her head. "But none of that matters to you. Go ahead and worry about your career."

It was the first time she had used her mother's illness to wound someone, and she didn't particularly regret it. She saw Mattia shrink in front of her eyes.

He didn't reply and in his mind ran through the instructions for breathing.

"But don't you worry," Alice went on. "I've found someone it does matter to. In fact that's what I came here to tell you." She paused, her mind blank. Once again things were taking a course of their own; once again she was tumbling down the slope and forgetting to stick in her ski poles to brake. "His name's Fabio, he's a doctor. I didn't want you to . . . you know."

She uttered the phrase like a little actress, in a voice that wasn't hers. She felt the words scratching her tongue like sand. As she uttered them, she studied Mattia's expression, to pick up a hint of disappointment that she could cling to, but his eyes were too dark for her to make out any spark in them. She was sure none of it mattered to him and her stomach crumpled like a plastic bag.

"I'll be off," she said quietly, exhausted.

Mattia nodded, looking toward the closed window to eliminate Alice completely from his field of vision. That name, Fabio, had pierced his head like a splinter and he just wanted Alice to leave.

He saw that outside the evening was clear and he sensed a warm wind was about to blow through. The opaque pollen of the poplars, swarming under the beam from the streetlights, looked like big leg-less insects.

Alice opened the door and he got to his feet. He walked her to the front door, following a few steps behind. She distractedly checked in her bag that she had everything, to gain another moment. Then she murmured okay and left.

Before the elevator doors closed, Alice and Mattia exchanged a good-bye that meant nothing at all.

28

M
attia's parents were watching television. His mother sat with her knees curled up under her nightdress; his father with his legs stretched out, crossed on the coffee table in front of the sofa, the remote control resting on one thigh. Alice hadn't responded to their good-bye, she didn't even seem to have noticed that they were there.

Mattia spoke from behind the back of the sofa.

"I've decided to accept," he said.

Adele brought a hand to her cheek and, bewildered, sought her husband's eyes. Mattia's father turned slightly and looked at his son as one looks at a grown-up son.

"Fine," he said.

Mattia went back to his room. He picked up the sheet of paper from the bed and sat down at the desk. He perceived the universe expanding; he could feel it accelerating under his feet and for a moment he hoped that its stretching fabric would burst and let him come crashing down.

He groped around for the light switch and turned it on. He chose the longest of the four pencils lined up side by side, dangerously close to the edge of the desk. From the second drawer he took the sharpener and bent down to sharpen it into the wastepaper basket. He blew away the thin sawdust that was left on the tip of the pencil. There was already a blank sheet in front of him.

He placed his left hand on the paper, palm down and fingers spread wide. He ran the very sharp graphite tip over his skin. He lingered for a second, ready to plunge it into the confluence of the two big veins at the base of his middle finger. Then, slowly, he removed it, and took a deep breath.

On the sheet he wrote
To the kind attention of the Dean.

29

F
abio was waiting for her by the front door, with the lights of the landing, the door, and the sitting room all on. As he took the plastic bag with the tub of ice cream from her hands, he linked his fingers with hers and kissed her on one cheek, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He said that dress really suits you and he meant it, and then he went back to the stove to get on with cooking dinner, but without taking his eyes off her.

From the stereo came music that Alice didn't recognize, but it wasn't there to be listened to, just to complete a perfect scenario; there was nothing casual about it. Two candles were lit, the wine was already open, and the table was tidily set for two, with the blades of the knives turned inward, which meant that the guest was welcome, as her mother had taught her when she was little. There was a white tablecloth with no wrinkles and the napkins were folded into triangles with the edges perfectly aligned.

Alice sat down at the table and counted the empty plates stacked on top of one another to work out how much there would be to eat. That evening, before leaving the house, she had spent a long time locked in the bathroom staring at the towels that Soledad changed every Friday. In the marbled-topped chest of drawers she had found her mother's makeup and used it. She had made herself up in the semidarkness, and before running the lipstick over her lips, she had sniffed the tip. The smell hadn't reminded her of anything.

She had allowed herself the ritual of trying on four different dresses, even though it was obvious from the outset, if not from the previous day, that she had already decided on the one she had worn to the Ronconi boy's confirmation, the one that her father had said was the most inappropriate because it left her back uncovered to below the ribs and her arms completely bare.