Three Light-Years: A Novel (27 page)

“Anything to eat?”

“Yes, in Hong Kong, for example, nothing that I’d like … or in Brazil. What do people eat in Brazil?”

Viberti runs a hand through his hair; he’s plunged back into the absurd, or maybe he never left it. “I don’t know, Mama, I’ve never been there either.”

“But you should travel, listen, if I may give you a word of advice, you should travel while you’re young. Don’t wait until you retire. I should have traveled more with your father, you know, he always insisted that I go with him, but I didn’t feel like it, maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t find anything to eat.”

“All right, Mama, I’ll travel. Where do you think I should go?”

“One place is as good as any. The important thing is to go.”

Viberti nods. He clings to the arms of the chair, he needs a mooring so he won’t be swept away, a harness so he won’t nosedive, he needs to be securely tied down. Tied? No, no, no ties, maybe a punch in the face that will leave him stunned or unconscious on the ground, or maybe a drink would do it, stop or at least slow his racing thoughts, a glass of wine, some port, some rum, but here there isn’t anything, he has to get back home as soon as possible. He has to interrupt Marta, say good night to her.

“You should travel more, like your father did. Traveling is very instructive. But I can’t blame you—in fact it’s the opposite, I think I’m the one who passed my fears on to you.”

“Don’t be silly, Mama, I’m not afraid of traveling, besides, it’s not like I never go anywhere.”

“I never liked it, partly because I was afraid of flying and partly because I thought I couldn’t leave a young child.”

“Okay, I’ll try to travel more.”

“Well, you should, you haven’t set foot out of this house. You’re a homebody, that’s what you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve always lived in this building, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Mama, I’ve always lived here. Always,” and he starts to get up.

“Because in the end who’s really lived?” his mother says, setting the magazine down beside her on the sofa.

Viberti looks at her blankly, sits back down on the edge of the chair.

“Yes, in the end who’s really lived? Think about my grandparents, or even my parents, did they live any less because they didn’t see certain places, because they didn’t have certain experiences? I’ve always wondered, because as a young girl, you know, I was fascinated by hermits”—she gives an amused little laugh—“never going anywhere, seeing the same things each day, the same scenery, going without television,” which is turned off, Viberti notices only now; did she turn it off? Did she think the voice that was out of control was coming from the TV? Or was she aware of everything? Had she really been asleep? “By now we’re used to seeing everything like that.”

He’d like to ask her “What do you mean ‘like that’? How are we used to seeing things?” Instead he smiles and says: “I can’t picture you as a hermit. In the old photos you seemed like a girl who was full of energy, who wanted to have a good time.”

“Well, let’s not exaggerate: having a good time is a tall order. If I’d wanted that, I wouldn’t have married your father!”

They laugh. Marta is worried about the confession that came to her so impulsively. “Did I say something bad?” she asks, blushing.

She had been a beautiful girl, but maybe she didn’t know it. Or at least Viberti has always thought his mother belonged to that class of women: unaware of and indifferent to her beauty. A woman who doesn’t know how to use her beauty, who has no interest in taking advantage of it. When he was little, and his father was away from home for weeks on end, they would sometimes go out to a restaurant. When they entered the room, the child noticed the men’s glances as they turned around to admire his mother, a young woman, beautiful and vital, and he thought they were all friends of his father, inhabitants of his father’s world, a world he and his mother were excluded from, messengers who had to deliver letters, bring news.

“Did I ever tell you about the trip to Trieste? For the Giochi Littoriali, the swimming competitions. I had such fun! But I didn’t like to travel, not even then. I remember there was a border with guards, and I was scared. And later a girl I met there wrote to me and drew a big gun in her letter, because each time the starting gun went off, it scared me! How silly…”

“You’ve had a wonderful life. Do you feel like you haven’t really lived?”

“Me? I’ve lived maybe too long! Remember Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
? When you were in high school we had a theater subscription, once a month … you were so bored!”

Yes, Viberti remembers Chekhov, he’d been struck by the fact that he was a doctor, like Mercuri. But what does Chekhov have to do with anything now? Why the hell did he pop into her head? For a moment he’d been distracted and had stopped thinking about Cecilia and Silvia and now he has no desire to think about cherries, about
sakura
, about Japanese cuisine.

“There was that character, a nostalgic old man who was always whining, remember?”

“No, Mama, I don’t remember him.”

“Because he hadn’t lived enough, you know? He complained that he hadn’t lived enough. And I always thought he was such an idiot!”

He doesn’t remember, he doesn’t care. He stands up and says, “Mama, are we sure you have a memory problem? It seems to me you remember everything clearly.”

Marta reaches out her arm, as if to introduce herself, extends her open hand. Viberti shakes it. He will continue shaking hands with her as long as she lives, she clinging to him, and he clinging to her, in her few remaining years, until the day comes when, seeing a close-up of the Pope on television, she’ll ask softly: “Why is he looking at me?” until the day she scratches out people’s eyes in the old family photos, until she becomes convinced that her caregivers want to kill her, until she hurls insults at him, calling him a “little toad” because she doesn’t want him to give her an injection, until she no longer gets out of bed and she widens her blue eyes without speaking, and stares into his.

*   *   *

Some months ago Viberti had dreamed about Mercuri uttering the word “hypocomist.” No one answered him, nothing else happened. There was that word on Mercuri’s lips, and in the dream Viberti thought it was a synonym for “anesthetist” and was put out and amazed that he hadn’t learned it or even encountered it in his twenty-five years of medicine, from university to hospital. A brief dream, just before waking up, no anxiety or distress. It consisted almost entirely of amazement, of the resentful feeling of never being able to measure up to his role, of never being able to measure up to Mercuri (the idea that the doctors of the past were less specialized, but more capable). For a while, after opening his eyes, he continued to be certain that the word had a meaning and that it was precisely the one in the dream, then he woke up completely and admitted to himself that it didn’t mean anything. It was the first time he’d dreamed about a word.

“Hypocomist” bore no resemblance whatsoever to “anesthetist”; instead it made him think of someone who was hypo-communist, “not communist enough.” Or someone who ate too little (“
Vamos a comer
,” Angélica said to Marta). It could mean that Mercuri was asking him about an anesthetist, so as not to suffer too much when his time came, or it could mean that Mercuri was criticizing himself by saying, “I wasn’t communist enough.” Both made sense but it didn’t make sense for Mercuri to be accusing him of not eating enough.

He thought about it again when he went to visit Mercuri at the coast, on the third weekend in June. He hadn’t seen him in two months, and each time before he arrived he wondered: Will I find him changed? One day I’ll suddenly find him older, and resigned to old age, acquiescent and pliable. Mercuri immediately went to take his bag from him and Viberti said, “I’ll carry it. You always want to prove you’re in better shape than I am.”

“Around here, the day you’re no longer in perfect shape they take you up the hill and leave you there to wait,” Mercuri said, smiling.

The cemetery clung to the sides of the mountain, and each time Viberti visited, the old man found a way to make that joke, alluding to a family that convinces a dying relative to start up the hill on his own two feet, “Come on, the air is better up there,” both out of laziness—so they won’t have to carry a heavy coffin on their shoulders—and to save themselves the expense of a funeral; and
that
, the tightfistedness of the Ligurians, was certainly the main point of Mercuri’s irony. The repetition was a message from the older man to the younger one (“I have death on my mind”), but also a sign of senility, one of the few that Mercuri let slip.

“If you ask me, you’ll make a diagnosis and go there on your own, when you decide it’s time.”

By now Mercuri no longer bothered to explain his wife’s absence during Viberti’s visits; the house was, in any case, ready to welcome twelve guests. Eating under the trellised pergola they spoke almost exclusively of recent developments regarding Marta’s dementia. Compared with last year, Mercuri’s concern revealed no emotion, it was one doctor getting another’s advice. Viberti responded point by point, reporting even the smallest detail.

Bringing the coffee to the table, Mercuri said, “Stop looking at the sea like that.”

Viberti smiled. “How was I looking at it?”

“Ah well, I wish I were still your age.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“When it comes to women, I would. That’s the only thing.”

“Was I thinking about a woman?”

“Two, at least.”

He was irritated that the old man had guessed the truth with a simple remark. In the last ten days Viberti hadn’t seen or heard from either Cecilia or Silvia. Cecilia didn’t answer the phone, she no longer showed up at their usual café. He didn’t have the courage to go and look for her in the ER. Maybe he’d come to see Mercuri to borrow some courage from him. But he would never talk to him about his romantic affairs, and he thought he knew why.

He didn’t want to see Silvia again. He wished it had never happened. In the past few months he’d convinced himself that he was no longer in love with Cecilia and now that he knew he still was, that he’d never stopped being in love with her, he was bewildered. How could he have fooled himself like that? Suddenly he seemed to remember exactly how he’d felt, at sixteen or twenty, when falling in love meant complete, unconditional surrender. Thinking constantly and exclusively about a person, feeling that that person opened the door onto a new season, gave birth to a new life.

Mercuri went to take a nap and Viberti stretched out on the iron bed in the guest room and stared at the white ceiling. He didn’t think he would fall asleep, but the exhaustion that had been building up weighed on his eyes like a firm, gentle hand. He sank deeper and deeper into sleep and awoke an hour later, disoriented and afraid of falling. He felt along the edges of the bed with his hands to make sure he wasn’t in any danger. At what age did you learn not to fall out of bed anymore? It didn’t mean you couldn’t lose that skill when you got old. Old people were always falling out of bed in the hospital; a sense of balance was merely part of a transitional phase.

Absurd thoughts; he never slept in the afternoon. When Mercuri came to call him for their usual walk to the vegetable garden, he was ready to go out and stretch his legs, get good and tired, be exhausted by nightfall. It took more than an hour’s walk inland to get to San Giorgio, twelve uninhabited stone houses where generations of Ligurian farmers had lived for centuries. The gardens were divided by dry-stone walls and they were all cultivated, all perfectly cared for. Voices could be heard from time to time; a head of white hair would peep out from the rows of tomatoes and an arm would pop up to wave hello. It looked like ghosts were tending the land.

“Have you ever stayed and slept out here?”

“Are you crazy?”

There was a green wooden chair in front of the toolshed (inside was a cot, in case anyone needed a nap), and Viberti usually sat there, as though outside a café, and spoke with Mercuri, who immediately disappeared among the plants. He talked, and the old man mumbled confused, clipped phrases, partly because he was distracted by his work, partly because he was out of breath from the exertion. Would Viberti be able to carry him back down if he collapsed? But Mercuri didn’t collapse.

Viberti, however, got bored after ten or twenty minutes and announced he was going for a walk. He continued climbing up the mountain until his legs hurt. Then he stopped, sat down on the rocks along the trail, amid the oaks and chestnut trees, and tried to empty his mind. Black or reddish rocks, natural steps or shaped over hundreds of years, polished and carved by footsteps.

Suddenly he remembered an incident or a conversation that he’d meant to tell Mercuri and returned to the garden, bounding down the slope. There was a young boy in his building, fourteen or fifteen years old, who always wore a belt with the words
MANY ENEMIES, MUCH HONOR
and the colors of a soccer team. The boy might not know that the phrase was Mussolini’s, but what about his parents: How could his parents let him wear that? At the end of the story, Mercuri raised his sweaty forehead from the row of tomatoes he was tying up, and said: “They must be Fascists.” As if it didn’t worry him that there were still Fascists around.

“They’re not Fascists, and that’s worse.”

Compared to Mercuri he felt like a hypocomist—confused, inept and superficial—but Mercuri was more of a hypocomist than he was. Did he have some justification that Viberti wasn’t entitled to? He was no longer able to engage Mercuri in discussion, and he felt he was to blame for that, too.

It turned out that Mercuri had never been a Communist. Viberti told him about an area where shopping centers, multiplexes, and university buildings had replaced the old abandoned industrial plants. In the sixties Mercuri had worked in a tire factory and continued to talk about how gloomy and dismal those places had been back then.

“But you did it because you were passionate about it, didn’t you?”