the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (22 page)

Alberto's wife came in holding a soup tureen, from which emanated a strong smell of cumin. The conversation turned to food, a more neutral territory. A tension that they hadn't previously been aware of dissipated. Everyone, apart from Mattia, expressed nostalgia for some kind of delicacy that they couldn't get here in northern Europe. Alberto talked about the ravioli his mother used to make. His wife remembered the seafood salad they used to eat together in their university days, in that restaurant facing the beach. Nadia described the cannoli filled with fresh ricotta and dotted with tiny chips of dark black chocolate that the only pastry shop in her little village made. As she described them she kept her eyes closed and sucked in her lips as if she could still taste a little of that flavor. She caught her lower lip with her teeth for a moment and then let it go. Mattia fixed on that detail without realizing it. He thought there was something exaggerated about Nadia's femininity, in the fluidity with which she rolled her hands around, and the southern inflection with which she pronounced her labial consonants, almost doubling them when there was no need. It was as if she possessed a dark power, which depressed him and at the same time made his cheeks burn.

"You just need the courage to go back," Nadia concluded.

All four of them remained in silence for a few seconds, as if each were thinking about what it was that kept them so far from home. Philip banged his toys against one another a few feet away from the table.

Alberto was able to keep a tottering conversation alive all through dinner, often embarking on long monologues, his hands waving above an increasingly untidy table.

After dessert, his wife got up to collect the plates. Nadia made as if to help her, but she told her to stay where she was and disappeared into the kitchen.

They sat in silence. Lost in thought, Mattia ran an index finger along the serrated edge of his knife.

"I'll just go and see what she's up to in there," said Alberto, getting up as well. From behind Nadia's back he darted a glance at Mattia, which meant do your best.

He and Nadia were left on their own with Philip. They looked up at the same time, because there was nothing else to look at, and they both laughed with embarrassment.

"What about you?" Nadia said to him after a while. "Why did you choose to stay here?"

She studied him with her eyes half closed, as if trying to guess his secret. She had long, thick eyelashes and Mattia thought they were too still to be real.

He finished lining up the crumbs with his index finger. He shrugged.

"I don't know," he said. "It's as if there's more oxygen here."

She nodded reflectively, as if she had understood. From the kitchen came the voices of Alberto and his wife talking about ordinary things, about the tap that was leaking again and who would put Philip to bed, things that at that moment seemed tremendously important to Mattia.

Silence fell again and he forced himself to think of something to say, something that seemed normal. Nadia entered his field of vision wherever he looked, an awkward presence. The dark color of her low-cut top distracted him, even as he was staring at his empty glass. Under the table, hidden by the tablecloth, were their legs and he imagined them down there, in the dark, forced into a strained intimacy.

Philip came over and put a toy car in front of him, right on his napkin. Mattia looked at the miniature Maserati, then looked at Philip, who observed him in turn, waiting for him to decide to do something.

Rather hesitantly he picked up the toy car and made it go back and forth on the tablecloth. He felt Nadia's dense gaze upon him, assessing his embarrassment. With his mouth he imitated a shy vroom. Then he stopped. Philip stared at him in silence, slightly annoyed. He stretched out his arm, took the car back, and returned to his toys.

Mattia poured himself some more wine and drained it in one gulp. Then he realized that he should have offered some to Nadia first and asked her would you like some? She said no, no, drawing in her hands and hunching her shoulders, as people usually do when they're cold.

Alberto came back into the room and made a kind of grunt. He rubbed his face hard with his hands.

"Sleepy time," he said to the child. He lifted him up by the collar of his polo shirt as if he were a doll.

Philip followed him without protest. As he left he glanced back at his toys piled up on the floor as if he had hidden something in the middle of them.

"Maybe it's time for me to go too," said Nadia, not quite turning toward Mattia.

"Yeah, perhaps it's time," he said.

They both contracted their leg muscles as if to get up, but it was a false start. They stayed where they were and looked at each other again. Nadia smiled and Mattia felt pierced by her gaze, stripped to the bone as if he could no longer hide anything.

They got up, almost at the same time. They put their chairs next to the table and Mattia noticed that she too had the foresight to lift hers off the ground.

Alberto found them standing there, not knowing how to move.

"What's happening?" he said. "Are you off already?"

"It's late, you must be tired," Nadia replied for both of them.

Alberto looked at Mattia with a smile of complicity.

"I'll call you a taxi," he said.

"I'll take the bus," Mattia said quickly.

Alberto gave him a sidelong look.

"At this time of night? Come on," he said. "And besides, Nadia's place is on the way."

34

T
he taxi slipped along the deserted avenues on the edge of town, between identical buildings without balconies. Few windows were still lit. March days end early and people adapt their body clocks to the night.

"The cities are darker here," said Nadia, as if thinking out loud.

They sat at opposite ends of the backseat. Mattia stared at the changing numbers on the taxi's meter, and watched the red segments going off and on to compose the various figures.

Nadia thought about the ridiculous space of solitude that separated them and tried to find the courage to occupy it with her body. Her apartment was only a few blocks away and time, like the road, was being consumed in a great hurry. It wasn't just the time of that particular evening, it was the time of possibilities, of her nearly thirty-five years. Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.

She reflected that if anything was going to be resolved, it would be resolved in that car. Afterward she would no longer have the strength. She would finally abandon herself, without remorse, to her translations, to the books whose pages she dissected by day and night, to earn her living and fill the holes dug by time.

She found him fascinating. He was strange, even stranger than the other colleagues that Alberto had introduced her to, to no avail. The subject they studied seemed only to attract sinister characters, or to make them so over the years. She could have asked Mattia whether Mattia had been attracted by math because he was weird or if math had made him weird, to ask something funny, but she didn't feel like it. And yet, "strange" conveyed the idea. And disturbing. But there was something in his eyes, a kind of shining molecule drowning in those dark pupils, which, Nadia was sure, no woman had ever been able to capture.

She could have turned him on, she was dying to. She had pulled her hair to one side so as to reveal her bare neck and she ran her fingers back and forth along the seams of the bag that she held on her lap. But she didn't dare to go any further and she didn't want to turn around. If he was looking elsewhere, she didn't want to find out.

Mattia coughed quietly into his clenched fist, to warm it up. He noticed Nadia's urgency, but couldn't make up his mind. And even if he did decide, he thought, he wouldn't know what to do. Once Denis, talking about himself, had told him that all opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

But I don't even know the opening moves, he thought.

What he did was to rest his left hand in the middle of the seat, like the end of a rope thrown into the sea. He kept it there, even though the synthetic fabric made him shiver.

Nadia understood and in silence, without any abrupt movements, she slid toward the middle. She lifted his arm, taking it by the wrist as if she knew what he were thinking, and put it around her neck. She rested her head against his chest and closed her eyes.

She was wearing strong perfume and it nestled in her hair; it stuck to Mattia's clothes and forced its way into his nostrils.

The taxi pulled up on the left, in front of Nadia's house, with its engine running.

"Seventeen-thirty," said the taxi driver.

She sat up and they both thought how much trouble it would be to find themselves like this again, to break an old equilibrium and build a different one. They wondered if they'd still be able to do it.

Mattia rummaged in his pockets and found his wallet. He held out a twenty and said no change, thanks. She opened the door.

Now follow her, Mattia thought, although he didn't move.

Nadia was already on the sidewalk. The taxi driver watched Mattia in the rearview mirror, waiting for instructions. The squares on the taximeter were all illuminated and flashing 00.00.

"Come on," said Nadia and he obeyed.

The taxi set off again and they climbed to the top of a steep flight of stairs, with the steps covered in blue carpet and so narrow that Mattia had to walk with his feet at an angle.

Nadia's apartment was clean and very well kept, as only the home of a woman living on her own can be. In the middle of a circular table there was a wicker basket full of dry petals, which had stopped giving off any perfume a long time ago. The walls were painted in strong colors, orange, blue, and egg-yolk yellow, so unusual here in the north that there was something disrespectful about them.

Mattia asked may I come in? and watched Nadia take off her coat and lay it on a chair with the confidence of someone moving in her own space.

"I'm going to get something to drink," she said.

He waited in the middle of the sitting room, his ravaged hands hidden in his pockets. Nadia came back a few moments later with two glasses half full of red wine. She was laughing at a thought of her own.

"I'm not used to all this anymore. It hasn't happened to me for a long time," she confessed.

"That's fine," replied Mattia, rather than say that it had never happened to him.

They sipped the wine in silence, looking cautiously around. Each time their eyes met they smiled faintly, like two children.

Nadia kept her legs folded on the sofa, so that she could get closer to him. The scene was set. All that was required was an action, a cold start, instant and brutal as beginnings always are.

She thought about it for another moment. Then she set her glass down on the floor, behind the sofa, so as not to risk knocking it with her foot, and stretched out resolutely toward Mattia. She kissed him. With her feet she slipped off her high heels, which fell resoundingly to the floor. She climbed astride him, not leaving him the breath to say no.

She took his glass from him and guided his hands to her hips. Mattia's tongue was rigid. She began rolling hers around his, insistently, to force it to move, until he began to do the same, in the opposite direction.

With a certain awkwardness they rolled onto one side and Mattia ended up underneath. One of his legs was dangled off the sofa and the other was extended straight, blocked by her weight. He thought of the circular movement of his own tongue, its periodic motion, but soon he lost concentration, as if Nadia's face squashed against his own had managed to obstruct the complicated mechanism of his thought, like that time with Alice.

He slid his hands under Nadia's top and contact with her skin didn't repel him. They got undressed slowly, without pulling apart or opening their eyes. There was too much light in the room and any interruption would have made them stop.

As he busied himself with the unfastening of her bra Mattia thought it happens. In the end it happens, in some way you couldn't imagine before.

35

F
abio had gotten up early. He had switched off the alarm clock so that Alice wouldn't hear it and had left the room, forcing himself not to look at his wife, lying on her side of the bed, with one arm out of the sheet and her hand stretched out as if she were dreaming about clutching on to something.

He had fallen asleep out of exhaustion and passed through a sequence of nightmares that gradually became more and more gloomy. Now he felt the need to do something with his hands, to get himself dirty, to sweat and wear out his muscles. He considered going to the hospital to do an extra shift, but his parents were coming for lunch, as they did every second Saturday of the month. Twice he picked up the phone with the intention of calling them and telling them not to come, that Alice wasn't feeling well, but then they would have phoned to find out how she was doing, and he would have had to talk to his wife again, and things would have gotten even worse.

In the kitchen he took off his T-shirt. He drank some milk from the fridge. He could pretend nothing was wrong, behave as if nothing had happened the night before and carry on like that, as he had always done, but deep in his throat he felt a completely new sense of nausea. The skin of his face was taut with the tears that had dried on his cheeks. He splashed his face with water at the sink and dried himself with the dish towel hanging next to it.

He looked out the window. The sky was overcast, but the sun would come out shortly. It was always like that at this time of year. On such a day he could have taken his son out for a bike ride, followed the track that ran along the canal all the way to the park. There they would have drunk from the fountain and sat on the grass for about half an hour. Then they would have come back, on the road this time. They would have stopped at the bakery and bought some pastries for lunch.