Three Light-Years: A Novel (10 page)

From that day on, at least three or four times a week, Mercuri would ring the doorbell around seven o’clock: not that he needed an excuse, but one night he began telling them that a patient had given him two pounds of homemade pasta; the following evening it was a salami, then a jar of mustard, even a roast chicken. It became a game, to the point that patients occasionally brought him a full bag of groceries from the supermarket. But Mercuri didn’t only stock the pantry. He cooked, and kept mother and son amused with stories about patients and inept, uninformed physicians, a whole catalog of egregious blunders that years later would in fact end up in a joke book. Month after month he was a constant presence in their lives, even on weekends, when he played tennis with Viberti, even during the holidays, when they went skiing together. The dead father became a difficult subject to deal with, and was almost completely set aside. Mercuri, unlike Viberti’s father, had a wealth of anecdotes about the war, which he’d taken part in when he was sixteen, fighting on the right side, and which he’d won (so to speak). He was a born storyteller.

*   *   *

Antonio had caught them at it. Antonio unpredictably disguised as a dog owner. Summoning up all four memory talismans associated with his father: anxiety (“Cecilia might find out she’d been recognized”); bad impression (“caught going at it in the car like a python”); politics (“I missed the union meeting”); sex (“necking”).

Antonio wasn’t a dog owner for long; he managed to find a colleague, a cardiologist, who accepted the gift, since he had a house with a yard. He turned up unexpectedly one evening at Viberti’s place quite depressed, or at least depressed enough to want his friend to see. And therefore very depressed. Viberti had rented Almodóvar’s
Talk to Her
and had just started watching it. Antonio buzzed the intercom and invited Viberti to come and have a drink; Viberti didn’t feel like going out and invited him to come up.

Antonio came in, spirits sagging, telling him about the dog and the cardiologist. Then, with a glass of wine in hand, he began complaining about his hopeless situation, perfectly illustrated by the dog’s inevitable fate. (A) His ex-wife’s brainless parents give their grandsons a Dalmatian puppy, using their mother and father’s histrionic, stormy separation as an excuse not to deny the boys anything. (B) His ex-wife refuses to let the dog inside the house and the kids hand it over to him, promising to walk it twice a week. (C) They keep their promise for half a week and don’t take care of it on the weekends they spend with him. (D) Antonio has a very serious talk with his sons, who nod and agree that he will give it away to a colleague, because they hadn’t expected it to end any differently, because they couldn’t care less about the dog, because they’re fourteen and thirteen years old and very unfocused. So the dog becomes a symbol of what the children can no longer have, the parents’ union, the all-embracing love, the cartoon-like polka-dotted mantle that protects the family, a piece of inane rhetoric. Viberti nodded. Yes, Antonio was
extremely
depressed. He’d never heard him talk that way. He tried to put it in concrete terms, spelling out objective, irrefutable justifications: “How would you take care of a dog, working all day?” But that evening Antonio wasn’t listening to justifications, least of all objective, irrefutable ones.

They sat in silence, staring at the bottom of their wineglasses. Antonio asked him if he was watching a game.

Viberti said no, there were no good matches on, and besides, he’d rented a film.

“I’ll stay and watch part of it.”

“I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

“What’s it about?”

“A woman in a coma.”

“Great.”

They often watched soccer together on television. Or they watched separately, calling each other to banter about the results, or after a goal, or even after a goal that had been narrowly missed. They watched with married friends when big games were on, and took in the Tuesday or Wednesday cup matches with Antonio’s sons. They watched soccer on other evenings as well, recorded matches, minor teams from the German Bundesliga or the English Premier League or the Spanish Liga.

Viberti restarted the DVD. After a while, Antonio asked if there really wasn’t a game. Viberti said he
wanted
to see the film, Mercuri had recommended it to him and it would be courteous on his part to call him and tell him what he thought of it.

“Can’t you lie to him?”

They began laughing at the characters’ expressions.

Marco, a journalist, was in love with a female bullfighter, Lydia.

“So you’re separated,” said Lydia.

“I’m single,” Marco corrected her.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to see that particular film that night.

Lydia was gored by a bull and ended up in the hospital, in a coma.

“In your opinion,” Viberti said, “did I become a doctor so I could cure my father?”

“How do you mean?”

“Because I felt guilty for not having saved him, as if I were responsible for his death.”

“Oh,” Antonio said. “Well, even if you did kill him, we’re past the statute of limitations by now.”

He added that he was beginning to like the film.

Viberti, on the other hand, was bored. He didn’t understand what Mercuri had seen in it. Caetano Veloso crooned “Cucurrucucú Paloma” accompanied by guitar, cello, and double bass. Marco started weeping, though actually, he wept only a single tear and anyway it looked fake. Viberti pictured Mercuri crying as he watched the actor cry.

“I wept when something moved me because I couldn’t share it with her,” Marco said.

At the hospital Marco met Benigno, a nurse in love with another young woman in a coma (Alicia, a ballet student).

“Alicia and I get along better than a lot of couples,” Benigno said.

“You talk to plants, but you don’t marry them,” Marco pointed out.

Antonio laughed. “This film is pretty interesting.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m dead serious.”

He said that at a certain age men preferred women that way, in a coma.

Viberti felt uneasy. True, maybe it was a good film, but he wasn’t in the right mood. His discomfort grew when Benigno ended up in prison, accused of having raped Alicia, and, later, committed suicide. And when Marco realized that Alicia had come out of the coma giving birth to Benigno’s (stillborn) child, when Marco saw her, recovered, at the dance school across the street, Viberti felt the same emotion he’d experienced sitting under Mercuri’s pergola. He leaped up, ran into the kitchen, and went out on the balcony through the open French door.

When he didn’t come back, Antonio followed him, embarrassed, lingering a few feet away in the kitchen. He asked him what was going on. What was wrong? Did he feel sick?

Viberti couldn’t calm down, he couldn’t answer. He didn’t understand why Cecilia didn’t want to be with him. It seemed unbearably unfair.

It lasted a few minutes. Antonio turned halfway around, as if to leave, and stood there staring at the refrigerator. They’d known each other for thirty years, but they’d never found themselves in this kind of situation.

Viberti got the idea of using his mother as an excuse. He said it was terrible to think that a person could vanish like that, into thin air.

Antonio nodded, pretending to believe it.

But that’s what a true friend was, Viberti thought later. A true friend pretends there’s nothing wrong and believes the first excuse that pops into your head.

*   *   *

After Giulia left the apartment and moved to the third floor, Viberti hadn’t replaced the furniture she’d taken with her. They had divided it up as equitably as possible, joking about it: “You get the couch, I get the armchairs.” He hadn’t even shifted the remaining pieces to disguise the gaps that had been created. The furniture Giulia had chosen or drawn by lot had left behind a paler mark on the walls after its brief stay in that house. Roaming through the apartment, absently entering a room, Viberti sometimes thought he saw those pieces again. A phantom chest of drawers. The skeleton of a wardrobe. The suggestion of a painting.

On many evenings, during the months of June and July, Viberti convinced himself that what had happened in the doctors’ lounge and later in the Passat had been a mistake, as Cecilia said, and though he didn’t speak to her about the matter again, he let her know (or rather he thought he let her know) that he’d accepted the verdict, however harsh and final.

He never went straight home, and would sometimes linger in his mother’s kitchen until ten or so. Lying, he’d tell her he’d already eaten, and he’d listen to Marta’s memories as they went further and further back in time, ever more complicated and far-fetched, forgetting he was hungry until he crossed the threshold of his own apartment, where he would open the refrigerator in a rush, eat something cold, and go straight to bed. Some evenings, though, he found himself alone, and after supper he would sit out on the balcony in an old wicker chair, watching the courtyards for hours. Evenings when it had rained, evenings when it couldn’t make up its mind to rain, oppressive evenings, the sky stainless steel, heat you could cut with a knife, a fresh breeze like an unexpected gift, the light impervious.

On the balcony he often recalled an incident that had occurred during a period when Marta was sad. He used to think it had happened after his father’s death, but recently he’d become certain he’d been mistaken. The day after the incident he’d had a fever, he remembered this, too, quite clearly.

She’d locked him out on the balcony by accident, when he went out to get a bottle of mineral water. And she hadn’t heard him calling her. Maybe because she’d gone to bed. And stayed in bed all afternoon. She didn’t realize she’d locked him out until eleven o’clock that night, when she turned on the light in the kitchen to make herself some herbal tea. He’d been outside on the balcony in just a T-shirt for seven hours, in the middle of winter. He smiled, remembering it. And they’d always laughed about it with each other. But what was so funny? He might have been twelve or thirteen. Out in the cold like a survivor from
The Red Tent
. He’d come down with bronchitis and Mercuri had hurried over to treat him.

Marta! How could he be angry with Marta? Hold a grudge against his mother over such a stupid thing? In fact he didn’t hold it against her. He’d even created an alibi for her: his father’s death. But in reality (he recalled) it had happened
before
, not after. And then another time she’d left him locked out of the house all afternoon. He kept ringing the doorbell, but Marta was in bed and didn’t hear it.

And yet, and yet … Two episodes of shirking her motherly responsibilities in eighteen years (if you considered the age of majority as the cutoff). Two incidents of probable blackout due to depression in eighteen years. He didn’t recall any others. But perhaps there had been some and he hadn’t noticed them or hadn’t wanted to notice. Those two he’d had no choice but to notice, Marta had forced him to be more alert. Maybe because usually he paid no attention? Maybe so that he would report the episodes to someone else? His father? Mercuri? Too complex, too convoluted, his mother wasn’t that convoluted, no one was that convoluted.

In any case, he didn’t hold it against his mother, and his mother had never been seriously depressed. No matter what Giulia thought.

Still, he remembered that afternoon and that frigid evening spent out on the balcony. He hadn’t dared break the windowpane, maybe he should have. Huddled against the French door to steal a little warmth, watching the lighted windows of the houses across the way. People moving about in a yellowish, sixty- or seventy-five-watt glow, getting ready to go to bed in that luminous space. Lowering the shutters, as though shutting their eyes and not seeing him. Acts of hostility toward him. If only he’d at least seen a woman undressing.

*   *   *

One evening, toward the end of July, my father moves his armchair outside, prepared to let his gaze wander along the perimeters formed by the dividing walls between the courtyards. Imagining him in that position has a strange effect on me, given that later on I saw him many times, as an old man, observe the same courtyards with a serene expression on his face. I have to erase that serenity and replace it with anxiety and dejection.

The block where Viberti, Marta, and Giulia’s apartment house is located is a group of buildings, four or five stories high, almost completely surrounded by walls on all sides, like a fortress. The balconies and windows are draped with rainbow flags against the war in Iraq. Only on the left does a low building break the line of the interior facades: at one time it was an old factory that made pudding molds, now it’s a supermarket. The center of the quadrangle is occupied by a garage, now converted into a gym, and a small storehouse with a red-tile roof, nearly falling apart, where generations of cats have lived. The remaining space is divided among the courtyards. The smallest even has a little garden with a very tall pine tree; the others are paved with concrete tiles.

My father knows them well, those tiles. Rough but slippery, awful on the knees and elbows. As a child he spent his afternoons spinning around the yard on his bicycle, leaning in at every curve like a motorcyclist and covering himself with scabs from the inevitable falls. As a boy, when the weather was nice, he liked to study in that wicker chair, watching the cats’ antics, the factory workers carrying the aluminum molds, the cars driving up the garage ramp, for hours as he reviewed his lessons. Rather than being a distraction, the courtyards’ panorama had become a mnemonic device: he would associate each courtyard with the paragraphs of a certain chapter or the assumptions of a theorem or the phases of a historical event. Now, each time he returns to the balcony, his eyes feel compelled to follow a specific order. Only after he’s done so can he let his gaze and his thoughts wander.

At one point he thinks he sees a shadow slip between two chimneys on the roof of the supermarket. The more closely he looks, the more he thinks he knows who it is. It’s Giulia’s husband. What is he doing on that roof? It’s not something that intrigues him or arouses his curiosity. He’s never been jealous of Giulia’s husband. He’s never been as fond of Giulia’s son as he’s been of Cecilia’s son, for example. Then, too, as a general rule, he’s always preferred to know as little as possible about other people’s business.
As a general rule, it’s always best to know as little as possible about other people’s business. Not that it’s difficult to keep the things you accidentally come to know to yourself and pretend you know nothing. But even if you pretend not to know, you do know, and your life is invaded by the lives of others. You see someone slapping his son as you’re walking along the street. Then, each time you see him, you think about how many times he’s probably slapped his son in the meantime.
Giulia’s husband walks unhurriedly to the storehouse, climbs over the tile roof, disappears on the other side. As if it were no big deal, as if he did it every day. He can even do it twice a day, as far as I’m concerned, Viberti thinks.