the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (21 page)

When he finished he quickly withdrew, got out of bed, and went and shut himself in the bathroom, without even turning on the light.

He stayed there for longer than usual. Alice moved toward the middle of the bed, where the sheets were still cool. She put a hand on her stomach, in which nothing was happening, and, for the first time, thought she no longer had anyone to blame, that all these mistakes were hers alone.

Fabio crossed the room in the semidarkness, climbed into bed, and turned his back to her. It was Alice's turn, but she didn't move. She felt that something was about to happen, the air was full of it.

It took him another minute, or perhaps two, before he spoke.

"Ali," he said.

"Yes?"

He hesitated again.

"I can't do this anymore," he said softly.

Alice felt his words gripping her belly, like climbing plants sprouting suddenly from the bed. She didn't reply. She let him go on.

"I know what it is," Fabio went on. His voice grew clearer. As it struck the walls it assumed a slight metallic echo. "You don't want to let me in, you don't even want me to talk about it. But this . . ."

He stopped. Alice's eyes were open. They were accustomed to the dark. She followed the outlines of the furniture: the armchair, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers and on top of it the mirror that didn't reflect anything. All those objects sitting there, motionless and terribly insistent.

Alice thought of her parents' room. She thought how similar they were, that all bedrooms in the world were similar. She wondered what she was afraid of, losing him or losing those things: the curtains, the paintings, the carpet, all that security folded carefully away in the drawers.

"You barely ate two zucchinis this evening," Fabio went on.

"I wasn't hungry," she replied automatically.

Here we go, she thought.

"The same yesterday. You didn't even touch the meat. You cut it up into little pieces and then hid it in your napkin. Do you really think I'm that stupid?"

Alice clenched the sheets. How could she have thought he would never notice? She saw again the hundreds, thousands of times in which the same scene had repeated itself before her husband's eyes. She was furious about all the things he must have thought in silence.

"I expect you also know what I ate the evening before and the evening before that," she said.

"Tell me what it is," he said, loudly this time. "Tell me what it is that you find so repellent about food."

She thought of her father bringing his face down to the plate when he ate soup, the sound he made, how he sucked the spoon rather than simply putting it in his mouth. She thought with disgust of the chewed-up pulp between her husband's teeth every time he sat in front of her for dinner. She thought of Viola's gumdrop, with all those hairs stuck to it and its synthetic strawberry flavor. Then she thought about herself, without her T-shirt, reflected in the big mirror in her old house, and the scar that made her leg something slightly apart, something detached from her torso and useless. She thought of the balance, so fragile, of her own silhouette, the thin strip of shadow that her ribs cast over her belly and which she was prepared to defend at all costs.

"What is it you want? Do you want me to start stuffing myself? To deform myself to have your baby?" She spoke as if the baby were already there, somewhere in the universe. She called it your baby on purpose. "I can do some sort of treatment if you're so keen on the idea. I can take hormones, medicine, all the junk necessary to let you have this child of yours. Maybe then you'll stop spying on me."

"That isn't the point," Fabio shot back. He had suddenly regained all his irritating self-confidence.

Alice moved toward the edge of the bed to get away from his threatening body. He rolled onto his back. His eyes were open and his face was tense, as if he were trying to see something beyond the darkness.

"Isn't it?"

"You should think about all the risks, particularly in your condition."

In your condition, Alice silently repeated to herself. She instinctively tried to bend her weak knee, to demonstrate to herself that she was in full control, but it barely moved.

"Poor Fabio," she said. "With that wife of his, crippled and . . ."

She couldn't finish her sentence. That last word, already trembling in the air, caught in her throat.

"There's a part of the brain," he began, ignoring her, as though an explanation might make everything simpler, "probably the hypothalamus, which controls the body mass index. If that index falls too low, gonadotropin production is inhibited. The mechanism is blocked, and menstruation stops. But that's just the first of the symptoms. Other things happen, more serious. The density of minerals in the bones diminishes and osteoporosis ensues. The bones crumble like wafers."

He talked like a doctor, listing causes and effects in a monotonous voice, as if knowing the name of an illness were the same as curing it. Alice reflected that her bones had already crumbled once, and that these things didn't interest her.

"Raising that index is enough for everything to return to normal," Fabio added. "It's a slow process, but we still have time."

Alice lifted herself up on her elbows. She wanted to leave the room.

"Fantastic. I suppose you've had all this ready for a while," she remarked. "That's all there is to it. Easy as that."

Fabio sat up as well. He took her arm, but she pulled away. He stared into her eyes through the gloom.

"It's not only about you anymore," he said.

Alice shook her head.

"Yes, it is," she said. "Maybe it's what I really want, haven't you thought of that? I want to feel my bones crumbling, I want to block the mechanism. As you said yourself."

Fabio thumped the mattress, making her start.

"So now what do you want to do?" she said provocatively.

Fabio sucked in air through his teeth. The compressed violence in his lungs made his arms stiffen.

"You're just selfish. You're spoiled and selfish."

He threw himself on the bed and turned his back to her again. All of a sudden things seemed to return to their place in the shadows. There was silence again, but it was an imprecise silence. Alice noticed a faint whirring sound, like the rustle of old films in the cinema. She listened, trying to work out where it was coming from.

Then she saw the outline of her husband bobbing slightly up and down. She became aware of his suppressed sobs, like a rhythmical vibration of the mattress. His body asked her to stretch out a hand and touch him, to stroke his neck and his hair, but she didn't lift it. She got up from the bed and walked toward the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

33

A
fter lunch Alberto and Mattia headed down to the basement, where nothing ever changed and you measured the passing of time only by the heaviness of your eyes as they filled with the white light of the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. They went into an empty classroom and Alberto sat down on the teacher's desk. His body was massive, not exactly fat, but to Mattia it seemed as if it were constantly expanding.

"Fire away," said Alberto. "Tell me everything from the start."

Mattia picked up a piece of chalk and broke it in half. A fine white dust settled on the tips of his leather shoes, the same ones he had worn on the day of his graduation.

"Let's consider things in two dimensions," he said.

He started to write in his neat hand. He began at the top left corner and filled the first two blackboards. On the third he copied out the results that he would need later. It was as if he had performed this calculation hundreds of times, when in fact it was the first time he had pulled it out of his head. He turned toward Alberto every now and again, who nodded at him seriously, while his mind scampered to keep up with the chalk.

When he got to the end, after a good half hour, Mattia wrote "QED" next to the framed result, just as he had done when he was a boy. The chalk had dried the skin of his hand, but he didn't even notice. His legs were trembling slightly.

For about ten seconds they stayed there in quiet contemplation. Then Alberto clapped his hands and the noise echoed through the silence like a whiplash. He got down off the desk and almost fell on the floor, because his legs had gone to sleep from dangling like that. He put a hand on Mattia's shoulder and Mattia found it both heavy and reassuring.

"No bullshit this time," he said. "You're having dinner with me tonight; we've got something to celebrate."

Mattia smiled faintly.

"Okay," he said.

They cleaned the blackboard together. They took care that nothing legible was left, that no one would be able to make out so much as a shadow of what had been written on it. No one would really have understood it, but they were already jealous of the result, as one is of a beautiful secret.

They left the classroom and Mattia turned out the lights. Then they went upstairs, one behind the other, each savoring the little glory of that moment.

Alberto's house was in a residential area exactly like the one where Mattia lived, but on the other side of the city. Mattia took the bus, which was half empty, his forehead resting against the window. The contact between that cold surface and his skin soothed him, and made him think of the compress that his mother used to put on Michela's head, nothing but a damp cloth handkerchief, but enough to calm her in the evening when she had those attacks that made her tremble all over and grind her teeth. Michela wanted her brother to wear a compress too, she said so to her mother with her eyes, and so he would lie down on the bed and stay there, waiting for his sister to finish writhing.

He had showered and shaved, and had put on his shirt and black jacket. In a liquor store he had never entered before he had bought a bottle of red wine, choosing the one with the most elegant label. The lady had wrapped it up in a sheet of tissue paper and then put it in a silver-colored bag. Mattia rocked it back and forth like a pendulum as he waited for someone to open the door. With his foot he arranged the doormat in front of the door so that the perimeter aligned precisely with the lines of the paving.

Alberto's wife came to the door. She ignored both Mattia's outstretched hand and the bag with the bottle. Instead she drew him to her and kissed him on the cheek.

"I don't know what you two have been up to, but I've never seen Alberto as happy as he is tonight," she whispered. "Come in."

Mattia resisted the temptation to rub his ear against his shoulder to get rid of an itch.

"Albi, Mattia's here," she called.

Instead of Alberto, his son Philip appeared from the hall. Mattia knew him from the photograph that his father kept on his desk, in which Philip was still only a few months old, and round and impersonal like all newborn babies. It had never occurred to him that he might have grown. Some of his parents' features were forcibly making their way beneath his skin: Alberto's long chin, his mother's not-quite-open eyelids. Mattia thought about the cruel mechanism of growth, the soft cartilages subject to imperceptible but inexorable changes, and, just for a moment, about Michela and her features, frozen forever since that day in the park.

Philip came over, pedaling his tricycle like a boy possessed. When he noticed Mattia, he braked suddenly and stared at him in astonishment, as if he had been caught doing something forbidden. Alberto's wife gathered him in her arms, lifting him from the tricycle.

"Here's the horrid little monster," she said, burying her nose in his cheek.

Mattia gave him a forced smile. Children made him uneasy.

"Let's go in. Nadia's here already," Alberto's wife went on.

"Nadia?" said Mattia.

Alberto's wife looked at him, confused.

"Yes, Nadia," she said. "Didn't Albi tell you?"

"No."

There was a moment of embarrassment. Mattia didn't know a Nadia. He wondered what was going on and feared he already knew.

"Anyway she's in there. Come on."

As they walked toward the kitchen, Philip studied Mattia suspiciously, hiding behind his mother's back, his index and middle fingers in his mouth and his knuckles gleaming with saliva. Mattia was forced to look elsewhere. He remembered the time he had followed Alice down a longer hall than this one. He looked at Philip's scribbles hanging on the walls instead of paintings and was careful not to trample his toys scattered on the floor. The whole house, its very walls, was impregnated with a smell of vitality that he was unused to. He thought about his own apartment, where it was so easy to decide simply not to exist. He already regretted accepting the invitation to dinner.

In the kitchen Alberto greeted him, shaking his hand affectionately, and he responded automatically. The woman sitting at the table stood up and held out her hand.

"This is Nadia," Alberto said. "And this is our next Fields Medal winner."

"Nice to meet you," said Mattia, embarrassed.

Nadia smiled at him. She made as if to lean forward, perhaps to kiss him on the cheeks, but Mattia's motionlessness held her back.

"A pleasure," she said, and nothing more.

For a few seconds he remained absorbed by one of the big earrings that dangled from her ears: a gold circle at least five centimeters in diameter, which when she moved began swinging in a complicated motion that Mattia tried to decompose into the three Cartesian axes. The size of the earring and its contrast with Nadia's jet-black hair made him think of something shameless, almost obscene, that frightened and aroused him at the same time.

They sat down at the table and Alberto poured red wine for everyone. He grandly toasted the article they would soon write and obliged Mattia to explain to Nadia, in simple terms, what it was about. She joined in with an uncertain smile, which betrayed thoughts of a different kind and made him lose the thread of the conversation more than once.

"It sounds interesting," she observed finally, and Mattia looked down.

"It's much more than interesting," said Alberto, waving his hands around as if imitating the shape of an ellipsoid, which Mattia pictured in his mind.