Three Light-Years: A Novel (16 page)

He went on playing the game for more than two weeks, handing out tickets to speeders caught on the monitoring camera and stopping trucks with suspicious loads, stolen television sets or cats for vivisectioning. For a few days Cecilia pretended she hadn’t noticed, then she asked him: “What’s the name of that game?” Mattia shrugged without looking up and mumbled: “Tollbooth.” He didn’t just imitate the recorded voice of the automatic toll collector, he also made up conversations inside the cars. “Daddy, when are we going to get there?” a child complained. “I didn’t expect this backup” (a lower voice, the father’s). “Yes, there’s a lot of traffic” (the mother, a little irritable). “I want to go home,” the boy persisted. “Everybody wants to go home,” the father snapped.

Overnight the lineup of toy cars disappeared from the hallway. Cecilia thought Mattia must have gotten tired of the game and removed them on his own. Those were the days following the declaration and she had other things on her mind: the shy internist, his words, the complex feelings they’d aroused in her. So it was almost a week before it occurred to her to wonder what had happened, why had he tired of the game? She was curious, and, as usual, rather than ask him a direct question, worried about not worrying him, all she said was: “I noticed the traffic has cleared up in the hallway.” With a slight smile on her lips, waiting and hoping he’d know he should smile back. But the boy didn’t react; he busied himself looking for a notebook in his backpack and pretended he hadn’t heard. He had to finish his homework for Monday and Cecilia might have been better off letting it go, but she couldn’t help herself. “Hey, I asked you a question,” she said, no longer smiling, and the child stopped, taken aback, unsure whether to keep pretending he hadn’t heard, uncertain about the question he’d been asked, since
in fact
he hadn’t been asked a question.

“How come you don’t play Tollbooth anymore?” Cecilia asked, pulling him to her.

“It made a mess.”

“It made a mess? No, that’s not true. Who told you it made a mess? You can play in the hallway as much as you want. Sometimes it’s fun to be messy.”

“Michela said that you said it made a mess.”

“Michela? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Michela said so. But it’s true, it made a mess.”

She told him to open his notebook and start his math exercises. Then she stood and walked out, her steps measured so as not to seem rushed, so she could slow down and have time to stop, if she decided to stop, if she hadn’t decided instead to go and find Michela, who was lying on the couch in the living room, studying her history book. She closed the door behind her, took a few steps toward her daughter, and before she could think rationally and restrain herself, gave her a slap on the head that landed between her forehead and her eye. She realized an instant later the enormity of what she had done, but her rage had not subsided. The girl put her hands to her head, incredulous; her book had fallen to the floor. She didn’t cry and she didn’t say anything because she still didn’t know what had happened. “Don’t you ever dare give your brother orders,” Cecilia hissed without raising her voice, “and don’t make up things I never said. If he wants to play in the hallway with his toy cars, he can, do you understand?”

The girl started sobbing and Cecilia collapsed on the couch, her legs trembling. She hugged Michela, who hugged her back as if the woman who’d slapped her a moment ago weren’t the same one who was now comforting her. There was a glazed earthenware pot on the cabinet behind the sofa. The writing said
HÔTEL DES TILLEULS
; they’d gotten it as a gift during a vacation in the South of France. On the way back they’d stopped at that aquarium, on the Côte d’Azur. In the depths of a tank, which visitors could view from underground, two dolphins had been mating in a frenzy of splashing. The children hadn’t understood, Luca had squeezed her hand, smiling. All this centuries ago, in another life, which would never return.

Despite the sound of Michela’s desperate weeping in her ears, she heard a creaking, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the door open and Mattia standing in the doorway.

*   *   *

There was no need to get over the incident or cause the children to see it as an incident or offer reasons that might excuse her action. There was no need to go back and talk about it or to ignore it. She was certain the children wouldn’t forget in any case, and she was equally certain that they didn’t want to talk about it anymore and that they were actually able to not think about it anymore, except unintentionally, briefly, quickly suppressing the thought. She was certain of it because that’s what she’d done as a child when faced with something disturbing or incomprehensible or violent.

Despite this certainty, she spoke to them. During supper, she explained that she had lost her temper because she didn’t want them being spiteful to each other (the offense reduced to “spitefulness”). Smiling, she asked Michela if seeing her mother angry had scared her, and Michela nodded, not at all sure it was something to smile about. Meanwhile, Cecilia checked Mattia’s plate without letting him notice. Worried that he might not eat that night, she hadn’t filled it as much, but there were no immediate consequences. For long-term ones, she’d have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, however, when she went to pick the kids up at Luca’s after his turn with them on Sunday, her husband came out on the landing, pulling the door closed behind him, and asked her what had happened, if it was true that she’d slapped Michela. He asked her, but not angrily; it was as if she had been the one slapped, with the solidarity of one parent talking over a problem with the other, in order to solve it. She nearly started crying, she was so moved; on the dimly lit landing, surrounded by the smell of minestrone, they were once again a couple, albeit part-time. She confessed that she’d lost her head because she liked to see the boy play and she was disappointed that he’d stopped—the row of toy cars like a ray of hope, a matter of waiting and then the traffic jam would clear up.

Luca said: “Every now and then Michela deserves a slap. And we never gave her any.”

“Do you think I’ve became a violent parent?”

Luca hesitated, it was inevitable, and she regretted the question, even when he replied with a smile: “No, I really don’t think so.”

*   *   *

She thought often about the shy internist’s declaration. It must have cost him a lot, he must have thought about it for months, but perhaps he hadn’t expected a different result. So why declare himself? To free himself of an obsession, he’d stammered something like that. In fact, afterward, after delivering his little speech, it seemed like a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. But within a couple of weeks all the benefits disappeared and their lunches became more strained. If there’d been any momentary relief, it soured quickly, like certain perishable substances delivered to the hospital. Expired, ineffective, it wasn’t an honest-to-goodness, effective relief, maybe because the underlying intention hadn’t been to free himself of that weight. She thought and thought about this possibility, and felt that the shy internist had inadvertently managed to find one of her weak points, a soft spot where she was easily moved. Yes, she’d been moved because that forty-year-old man had not only declared himself, but had begged her (almost immediately, anxiously) to discourage him, as if he himself were afraid of his own feelings. How hopelessly incompetent.

She thought and thought about his constancy and his commitment, about the extraordinary attachment the man had for their table at the café. She went so far as to think that probably no one had ever loved her so much, but she immediately had second thoughts. It was ridiculous for two reasons: first, someone else had loved her, and second, an undeclared love doesn’t count. It counted only from the time of the declaration, before that it was mute adoration, infatuation. To worship someone for a year without telling her—it took constancy, but it was sheer madness. If he was mad, the internist’s madness was concentrated in a single symptom: her. Yet this was a further sign of absolute commitment.

She thought and thought about the declaration while she had the children do their homework. Mattia had to reconstruct the chronological order of a newspaper article that the textbook authors had divided into six segments and mixed up.

They left their dog alone on the balcony and went off while the summer heat hung over the city with a temperature of over 100 degrees.

Whatever idea she may have formed about Viberti, he didn’t seem to her to be either an abandoned dog or the victim of a cruel master.

Firemen quickly arrived on the scene and thanks to their vehicle, equipped with a ladder, they went up to the balcony and carried the dog to safety
.

It was a strange association of ideas: when the conversation became less strained, he’d said he sometimes felt like a dog and told her that she reminded him of a cat.

The neighbors reported that it wasn’t the first time the dog had been left alone on the balcony for days
.

While the boy read the jumbled parts of the story, she imagined holding the shy internist on a leash.

They then transported him to a veterinary clinic where he was examined and treated
.

But she had no intention of being his mistress.

The dog owners were ultimately charged with cruelty to animals and the dog was turned over to the municipal dog pound
.

So maybe she would speak to him and tell him that he was wasting his time, that she was still getting over the divorce and too busy with the children to get involved in a relationship, that even if she could, it didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to.

It happened yesterday, on one of the hottest days of the year. An anonymous caller alerted the volunteers of ENPA, the National Board for Animal Protection, who immediately went to the scene and called the fire department
.

She’d tell him that she was fond of him, but nothing more. She had to have the courage to give him up, not mislead him into thinking that something might happen in the future. After the declaration she’d been scared, because she didn’t want to give up their lunches, but now she had to do it quickly.

Mattia dashed off the correct order of the segments, 1-6-2-4-3-5, and started closing his notebook.

Cecilia insisted on checking, and it was right.

She told him he’d done well and quickly, too. The child looked at her then shook his head, dismissing the compliment: “It was a breeze, Mama.”

*   *   *

She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t have the nerve. The next day she saw him at lunch and they spoke for an hour about the hospital administrator’s absurd, dangerous, unconstitutional initiatives, the chief surgeon’s stupidity, and a patient with malaria, the first of her career. She didn’t feel guilty and didn’t think she was leading him on. Claudio Viberti was not an inept bumbler, he was a forty-year-old doctor, in love with her, true, but old enough to make his own decisions without being led on a leash.

One afternoon, however, while she was trying to remember where she had parked her car, she saw him turn a corner and walk down the other side of the street. He hadn’t noticed her, and his curved back and hunched shoulders, the downcast eyes staring at the sidewalk, made her feel dejected again, as if his sadness were her fault.

She didn’t mean to spy, but her eyes couldn’t help following him. He was headed to a café that was not their usual one. She ran after him and caught up with him inside. She teased him a little for betraying their table so lightly, he accused her good-naturedly of having followed him. It occurred to her to ask him about his father; she’d thought about it one night, tracing back a thread of associations. It had started with the words of a patient who, shaking his head, had said that “to be a doctor you have to really be cut out for it.” Being cut out made her think of being scarred, and looking back, she hadn’t been able to find any suitable traumas in the first eighteen years of her life. She kept thinking she’d fallen into medicine by accident, yet the profession captivated her. Yes, she was cut out for the job, but maybe she was well suited for any job in which she had to constantly prove she was the best in the class and win the professors’ praise. The shy internist, on the other hand, had compelling reasons: a father who’d died of a malignant lymphogranuloma when he was a boy.

Viberti didn’t buy the explanation, and he seemed quite embarrassed to have to disappoint and contradict her. But the explanation he gave was exactly the same, though in disguise: there was a father figure involved, a well-known doctor (Cecilia had seen his name in a journal) who’d taken his father’s place, and who had inspired him. She thought of pointing out that the two interpretations were perfectly compatible, but she was afraid to stick her nose into matters that didn’t concern her. She was tempted to tell him about her own father’s illness and death, although that certainly didn’t explain anything—she’d actually already gotten her residency—so she dropped it. As soon as they parted, however, she felt a stab of longing in her chest, a feeling she’d never felt for him and that she hadn’t felt in a long time for any man, except her son. It was the wrench in her heart she felt in the morning when she watched Mattia go into school. She wanted to take Viberti by the hand and walk with him through his day. Maybe she wanted to hold him, too. For the first time since she’d known him, she thought she should invite him home some evening, let him see Mattia again; the boy might hardly remember him, but who knows.

*   *   *

The next night she began thinking about the shy internist and for four nights her sleepless hours were filled by images of sisterly embraces, innocent walks hand in hand, films watched together on an imaginary couch, her head resting on his shoulder. So it was a great surprise to her when, arriving at the café on Monday and finding Viberti already sitting there waiting for her—his skin sunburned, his hair a little disheveled, his white shirtsleeves rolled up—she realized she was actually attracted to the man, wanted to put her arms around him and kiss him and probably make love to him. She ate almost nothing while he told her about his weekend with the elderly Mercuri, about a walk in the countryside, amid the vegetable gardens, about a world in which you felt strange and far away from everything. She felt strange and too close to him, after a quarter of an hour she told him she had to go. She was worried she had bungled something in the ER, she wanted to go back and check.