the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (26 page)

It's pointless, he said to himself.

That lucid thought brought him some relief, as if he were taking control of himself again after a moment of bewilderment. He tapped the photograph with his finger, already intending to put it away and go back to Alberto, to get on with their work.

While he was still lost in his thoughts, Kirsten Gorbahn, a post-doc from Dresden with whom he had recently written some articles, came over to peer at the photograph.

"Your wife?" she asked him cheerfully, pointing at Alice.

Mattia twisted his neck to look up at Kirsten. He was about to hide the photograph, but then he thought it would be rude. Kirsten had an oblong face, as if someone had pulled it hard by the chin. In two years spent studying in Rome she had learned a little Italian, which she pronounced with all the
o'
s closed.

"Hi," Mattia said uncertainly. "No, she isn't my wife. She's just . . . a friend."

Kirsten chuckled, amused by who knows what, and took a sip of coffee from the polystyrene cup that she was holding in her hands.

"She's cute," she remarked.

Mattia looked her up and down, slightly uneasily, and then looked back at the photograph. Yes, she really was.

42

W
hen Alice came to, a nurse was taking her pulse. She still had her shoes on, and was lying at a slight angle on top of a white sheet on a hospital bed by the entrance. She immediately thought of Fabio, who might have seen her in that terrible state, and suddenly sat up.

"I'm fine," she said.

"Lie down," the nurse ordered her. "We're going to do a checkup."

"There's no need. Really, I'm fine," Alice insisted, overcoming the resistance of the nurse, who tried to keep her where she was. Fabio wasn't there.

"You fainted, young lady. You have to see a doctor."

But Alice was already on her feet. She checked that she still had her bag.

"It's nothing. Believe me."

The nurse raised her eyes to the sky but didn't stand in her way. Alice glanced around, lost, as if looking for someone. Then she said thank you and left in a hurry.

She hadn't hurt herself when she fell. She seemed merely to have banged her right knee. She felt the rhythmical pulsation of the bruise under her jeans. Her hands were a little scratched and dusty, as if she had dragged them along the gravel in the courtyard. She blew on them to clean them.

She walked over to the reception desk and bent down to the round hole in the glass. The lady on the other side looked up at her.

"Hello," said Alice. She had no idea how to explain herself. She didn't even know how long she had been unconscious.

"A little while ago . . ." she said, "I was standing there . . ."

She pointed to the spot where she had been, but the lady didn't move her head.

"There was a woman, by the entrance. I didn't feel well. I fainted. Then . . . You see, I need to find out the name of that person."

The receptionist looked at her, bewildered, from behind the counter.

"I'm sorry?" she asked with a grimace.

"It sounds strange, I know," Alice insisted. "But you've got to help me. Perhaps you could give me the names of the patients who had appointments in this department today. Or examinations. Just the women, I only need those."

The woman looked at her. Then she smiled coldly.

"We aren't authorized to give out that kind of information," she replied.

"It's very important. Please. It's really very important."

The receptionist tapped with a pen on the register in front of her. "I'm sorry. It really isn't possible," she replied irritably.

Alice snorted. She was about to pull away from the counter, but then she approached again.

"I'm Dr. Rovelli's wife," she said.

The receptionist sat up straighter in her chair. She arched her eyebrows and tapped the register with her pen again.

"I understand," she said. "If you like I'll let your husband know you're here."

She picked up the receiver but Alice stopped her with a gesture of her hand.

"No," she said, without controlling the tone of her voice. "There's no need."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, thanks. Never mind."

She set off toward home. All the way there she couldn't think about anything else. Her mind was becoming clear again, but all the images that passed through it were obliterated by that girl's face. The details were already blurring, plunging fast into the midst of an ocean of other memories of no importance, but that inexplicable sense of familiarity remained. And that smile, the same as Mattia's, mixed with her own intermittent reflection on the glass.

Perhaps Michela was alive and she had seen her. It was madness, and yet Alice couldn't help believing it. It was as if her brain desperately needed that one thought. Clinging to it to stay alive.

She began to think, to formulate hypotheses. She tried to reconstruct how things might have gone. Perhaps the old lady had kidnapped Michela, had found her in the park and taken her away, because she had a violent desire for a little girl but couldn't have children. Her womb was defective or else she was unwilling to make a bit of room in it.

Just like me, thought Alice.

She had kidnapped her and then brought her up in a house a long way from there, with a different name, as if she were her own.

But in that case, why come back? Why risk being discovered after all those years? Perhaps she was being devoured by guilt. Or else she just wanted to tempt fate, as she herself had done outside the door of the oncology department.

On the other hand, perhaps the old woman had nothing to do with it. Maybe she had met Michela a long time afterward and knew nothing about her origins, her real family, just as Michela remembered nothing about herself.

Alice thought of Mattia, pointing from inside her car at the trees in front of him, his ashen, absent face that spoke of death. She was completely identical to me, he had said.

Suddenly it seemed to her that everything made sense, that the girl really was Michela, the vanished twin, and that every detail now fell into place: the blank expanse of her forehead, the length of her fingers, her circumspect way of moving them. And more than anything that childish game of hers, that more than anything.

But just a second later, she realized she was confused. All those details collapsed into a vague sense of weariness, orchestrated by the hunger that had clenched at her temples for days, and Alice feared losing her senses all over again.

At home, she left the door half open with the keys still in it. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard without even taking off her jacket. She found some tuna and ate it straight from the can without draining off the oil. The smell made her feel sick. She threw the empty can into the sink and picked up a can of peas. With her fork she fished them from the cloudy water and ate half of them, without breathing. They tasted of sand and the shiny skin stuck to her teeth. Then she pulled out the box of cookies that had sat open in the cupboard since the day Fabio had left. She ate five, one after the other, barely chewing them. They scratched her throat as she swallowed, like bits of glass. She stopped only when the cramps in her stomach were so strong that she had to sit down on the floor to withstand the pain.

When it had passed, she stood up and walked to the darkroom, limping openly, as she did when she was alone. She took one of the boxes from the second shelf. The word
Snapshots
was written on the side in indelible red pen. She spilled the contents onto the table and spread out the photographs with her fingers. Some were stuck together. Alice quickly inspected them and at last found the one she was looking for.

She studied it for a long time. Mattia was young, and so was she. His head was bent and it was hard to study his expression to determine the resemblance. A lot of time had passed. Perhaps too much.

That fixed image brought others to the surface and Alice's mind stitched them together to re-create movement, fragments of sounds, scraps of sensations. She was filled with searing but pleasurable nostalgia.

If she had been able to choose one point from which to start over, she would have chosen that one: she and Mattia in a silent room with their private intimacies, hesitant about touching each other but their outlines fitting precisely together.

She had to let him know. Only by seeing him could she be sure. If his sister was alive, Mattia had the right to know.

For the first time, she perceived all the space that separated them as a ludicrous distance. She was sure that he was still there, where she had written to him several times, many years before. If he had moved, she would have been aware of it somehow. Because she and Mattia were united by an invisible, elastic thread, buried under a pile of meaningless things, a thread that could exist only between two people like themselves: two people who had acknowledged their own solitude within the other.

She felt around under the pile of photographs and found a pen. She sat down to write, careful not to smudge the ink with her hand. At last she blew on it to dry it. She looked for an envelope, slipped the photograph inside, and sealed it.

Maybe he'll come, she thought.

A pleasant apprehension gripped her bones and made her smile, as if at that very moment time had begun again.

43

B
efore seeking the runway, the plane on which Mattia was traveling crossed the green patch of the hill, passed the basilica, and flew twice over the center of the city in a circular trajectory. Mattia took the bridge, the older one, as his point of reference and from there followed the road to his parents' house. It was still the same color as when he had left it.

He recognized the park nearby, bounded by the two main roads that flowed together into a broad curve bisected by the river. On so clear an afternoon you could see everything from up there: no one could have disappeared into nothingness.

He leaned farther forward, to look at what the plane was leaving behind it. He followed the winding road that climbed part of the way up the hill and found the Della Roccas' building, with its white facade and its windows all attached to one another, like an imposing block of ice. A little farther on there was his old school, with the green fire escapes, their surfaces, he remembered, cold and rough to the touch.

The place where he had spent the first half of his life, the half that was now over, was like an enormous sculpture made of colored cubes and inanimate shapes.

He took a taxi from the airport. His father had insisted on coming to collect him, but he had said no, I'll come on my own, in that tone that his parents knew well and that was pointless to resist.

After the taxi had driven off, he stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, looking at his old house. The bag that he carried over his shoulder wasn't very heavy. It contained clean clothes for two or three days at the most.

He found the entrance to the apartment block open and climbed to his floor. He rang the bell and heard no sound from inside. Then his father opened the door and, before they were able to say anything, they smiled at each other, each contemplating the passing of time in the changes that had occurred in the other.

Pietro Balossino was old. It wasn't just the white hair and the thick veins that stood out too much on the backs of his hands. He was old in the way he stood in front of his son, his whole body trembling almost imperceptibly, and leaned on the door handle, as if his legs were no longer enough on their own.

They hugged, rather awkwardly. Mattia's bag rolled off his shoulder and slipped between them. He let it fall to the floor. Their bodies were still the same temperature. Pietro Balossino touched his son's hair and remembered too many things. Feeling them all at the same time gave him a pain in his chest.

Mattia looked at his father to ask where's Mum? and he understood.

"Your mother's resting," he said. "She didn't feel very well. It must be the heat these past few days."

Mattia nodded.

"Are you hungry?"

"No. I'd just like a little water."

"I'll go and get you some."

His father quickly disappeared into the kitchen, as if looking for an excuse to get away. Mattia thought that that was all that was left, that parental affection resolves itself into small solicitudes, the concerns his parents listed on the telephone every Wednesday: food, heat and cold, tiredness, sometimes money. Everything else lay as if submerged at unreachable depths, in a mass of subjects never addressed, excuses to be made and received and memories to be corrected, which would remain unchanged.

He walked down the corridor to his bedroom. He was sure he would find everything as he had left it, as if that space was immune to the erosion of time, as if all the years of his absence constituted only a parenthesis in that place. He felt an alienating sense of disappointment when he saw that everything was different, like the horrible feeling of ceasing to exist. The walls that had once been pale blue had been covered with cream-colored wallpaper, which made the room look brighter. Where his bed had been was the sofa that had been in the sitting room for years. His desk was still at the window, but on it there was no longer anything of his, just a pile of newspapers and a sewing machine. There were no photographs, of him or of Michela.