Three Light-Years: A Novel (36 page)

She understood, however, ten days later, when she found Viberti waiting for her outside the ER. He had his usual beaten-dog look. He
was
a beaten dog. As usual (not to say that it meant anything important), seeing him raised her spirits. He didn’t talk much, he didn’t know what to say, and Cecilia took pleasure in his embarrassment and his silence. They talked about the boy, then they stopped at the window opposite the locker room and the internist told her about watching her through that window two years ago, on the day Mattia was discharged after his first hospitalization. What Viberti remembered about that scene (which she remembered vividly), the way he spoke about it, touched her deeply. Two years had passed; they seemed like twenty. Then the internist began a sad, confused confession, a kind of self-accusation like at a people’s court, and she stopped him before he could scourge himself too severely, told him not to say anything more.

They began seeing each other at lunchtime again as if nothing had happened. They didn’t mention Silvia, and they didn’t talk about their future. For two weeks they ate together as they’d always done, enjoying each other’s company, talking about the usual things, the hospital, Marta’s condition, the children. The children were on vacation.

If she had the afternoon shift, Cecilia spent the morning in the house, which was still cool, lying on the bed in her bra and panties reading old Maigret and Poirot mysteries. Or she took out the folders with the children’s drawings: serene cats and anxious dogs, scurrying clouds, graceful blades of grass endlessly repeated, hysterical suns and somewhat demented moons, cheerful redbrick cottages. Or she leafed through the books they’d looked at together for years, every night: books by Richard Scarry, with those tiny little creatures that filled the white pages, the big red double-decker elephant-bus with Big Ben in the background and the distracted bunny who crosses the street and is sent sprawling by the rhinoceros-taxi, while the bunnies on the sidewalk despair. Or she would start watching television: reruns of a popular cooking show from last season. She watched an hour-long episode in which professionals and amateurs discussed a thousand ways to prepare
carbonara
: bacon or pancetta, pecorino or Parmesan cheese, whole egg or just the yolk, toss in a pan or pour onto the plate. A few months ago she might have gotten restless, but now she watched it straight through, relaxed and serene.

If she had the morning shift, she left the hospital at two and walked to the pool, braving the sweltering heat in the shade of the chestnut trees, swam for an hour and a half, and then went to spend the evening at her mother’s. They ate together in front of the open kitchen window, longing for a breath of air. Since the internist had confessed to watching the deserted courtyards for hours, not thinking about anything, she often moved a chair out to her mother’s balcony and did the same thing. At home the interior windows looked out onto a dark shaft where there was nothing to see. Picturing Viberti in that melancholy pose, putting herself in his place, she no longer felt sad; instead, she felt like laughing and patting his ghost sitting next to her. Her mother sometimes caught her with a big smile on her face, and said it was nice to see her smile like that again. And she nodded, letting her believe she was thinking of Mattia, about the scares she’d had. But in fact, during that time she was learning not to think about her children as incessantly as she once used to. Not because they’d grown up; as if she had grown up.

She hardly ever saw Silvia. She was closeted at home, finishing up an assignment. Cecilia wasn’t jealous of her anymore, if she ever had been. On the contrary, one day it occurred to her that her sister had helped her. And apart from everything else, she now had an excellent excuse to keep her relationship with Viberti a secret for a little while longer. Above all, it eased her mind about keeping it hidden from the children. All of those thoughts, which she considered as she lay diagonally across her bed, naked or in a bra and panties, were thoughts detached from reality, given that she and Viberti had become friends again, not lovers.

The day before going to pick up Mattia at summer camp, when she opened the locker in the dressing room she saw a white envelope fall to the floor. She opened it; it was a letter from Viberti. Could he have copied it from a novel? she wondered. She smiled, imagining the internist bent over the kitchen table writing her a love letter. She added a huge dictionary to the scene and thought that maybe she really was in love. She was even envious. How had he managed to write such a beautiful letter? He must have copied it. The fraud. Who did he think he was fooling. She would tell him so as soon as she saw him, and she wanted to see him right away.

She left the locker room and called him. When she heard his voice she knew that she would tell him everything that night. She walked unhurriedly beneath the trees along the avenue, looking for her car. The idea no longer made her anxious, telling the (now shy again) internist everything would be the easiest thing in the world.

(And this is her moment of perfect happiness, a moment that will never come again, in which she walks alone on a summer afternoon and feels lighthearted, like another woman. And even if it’s paradoxical, because
it isn’t her
, that’s how I like to remember her.)

*   *   *

Before falling asleep in Viberti’s arms, she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She thought she would keep waking up and would lie there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling in that unfamiliar room. She imagined she would leave at five or six, at the crack of dawn, and get a couple of hours’ sleep in her own bed. She would say goodbye to him with a kiss, while he still dozed, avoiding any morning-after conversation. But that daybreak fantasy did not materialize. She fell into a deep sleep and woke up only once during the night: the window had been left partly open. She got up, closed it completely, and went back to bed, wrapping the sheet around her. She still felt cold, it seemed the draft wasn’t coming from the window that was now closed, but from the wardrobe without doors, impossible to close. Only then did she realize that Viberti wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing or snoring, he was motionless as a mannequin, naked as a jaybird. She touched his arm lightly, still warm, he couldn’t be dead. She smiled. She would tease that man for the rest of her life, and that would make her happy.

When she woke up the second time she thought it was very late, but it was only eight o’clock. Viberti was wearing an elegant blue bathrobe and was sitting beside the bed. He was looking at her the way one looks at a sleeping infant or a woman who has just given birth. She didn’t want to be heartless, now that she was sure she really loved him. But you could read it so clearly in his face, the desire to be a father, to have a family, children, at least one child, and to make a woman a mother. And that would be a problem, but not a troubling one. They would talk about it quietly, on the balcony, she sitting in the wicker chair and he kneeling on the ground, like the night before, surrounded by those white wedding flowers.

“Why are you sitting there looking at me?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

She burst out laughing. “I really doubt it, at this hour,” she said, and covered her head with the sheet. “Why were you looking at me?” she asked again, looking for his shadow through the weave of the fabric.

“I brainwashed you.”

“At most, you could wash out my stomach with a stomach pump.”

But Viberti was dead serious as only he could be. He said that as a child he had watched a TV series that had really scared him. There was a man who entered houses at night, knelt at the foot of the beds as if saying his prayers, and stared at the people sleeping, telepathically planting the seed of a thought in their heads. Usually an evil thought.

“Like what?”

“Like thoughts that turned people into killers.”

“Where were your parents, why did they let you watch those shows? This is at least the third show you’ve told me about that you saw as a child, that changed your life.”

“Every so often my mother would sleep for days on end, I don’t know what was wrong with her, but I pretty much did what I wanted. In fact, if I have a son I’ll let him watch all the television he wants, I’m living proof that it doesn’t do any harm.”

“So then, living proof, what seed were you trying to plant in my brain?”

“The desire to be with me the next day, too.”

She pulled the sheet off her head slowly, cautiously, and looked at him, serious.

“Did it work?” he asked, serious.

“Maybe.”

Then he joined her under the sheet.

Where had that man learned to make love like that? It seemed unlikely that he had really spent the last ten years alone. And if it were true? What if she had aroused passion and skill? He knew where to touch her because he loved her: Could it be?

Afterward she said: “I didn’t change my mind the day after, though. I was just confused.” He nodded.

*   *   *

For the first time in months, maybe years, she felt she had done the right thing. The road to Mattia’s summer camp was straight and monotonous, the landscape nondescript. Chandelier factories on one side, faucets and medical supplies on the other, kitchens on display, tiles, a chapel swallowed up by brambles, an abandoned farmhouse, and more bathrooms and sofas in genuine leather. The internist’s half-empty apartment: after ten years he hadn’t replaced the furniture that his former wife had taken with her, not even the doors to the wardrobe. Should she be worried? Were they signs of a repressed depression, ready to erupt? She didn’t need that confirmation to know that Viberti was a melancholy type, she’d read it in his eyes the day they’d met and maybe that was one of the reasons she liked him. So she shouldn’t be alarmed. And his mania for watching the courtyards for hours on end wasn’t really troubling either. Nothing was troubling or serious or irredeemable. That morning everything seemed curable, there was a remedy for everything. She was melancholy, too, and such optimism frightened her, but it wasn’t true optimism, she was far from knowing the genuine, blithe, vigorous optimism of the truly carefree. That morning she simply felt better because pessimism had loosened its grip a little. She would help him choose new furniture, they would play at setting up house together. Two armchairs for the living room, she knew where to buy them. A carpenter for the wardrobe doors, she would recommend one. A recommendation is always welcome.

The cell phone rang. It was Silvia. She hesitated before answering, not because she was driving, but because she was afraid her sister would be able to tell from her voice what had happened.

Silvia seemed to be in a hurry, she was breathless. “I need to talk to that coworker of yours, you know the one I told you about, I can’t reach him on his cell phone. Or else he’s not answering me, who knows,” she said with a sarcastic little laugh. “He forgot something at my house and I want to give it back to him. I can’t reach him, do you know if he’s out of town by any chance?”

There was nothing wrong with Silvia and Viberti seeing each other, in fact, it was best if the matter ended as civilly as possible.

“Yes, I think he took his mother to the country or to the mountains, I’m not sure. You’ll find him for sure on Monday.”

They talked about the children and then hung up.

Soon afterward Cecilia came to an intersection, and leaving the provincial road, found herself lined up in a small caravan of parents headed, like her, to pick up their kids. The cars behind and in front of her were carrying fathers and mothers, in pairs or alone. Those who came alone weren’t necessarily divorced. Or alone. They drove along, skirting the wooded hillsides that shaded the road, until they came to a colorful sign indicating the final turnoff for the camp. The shade became denser as they entered the woods and the road, now a dirt track, began to climb. After a few curves the rough terrain forced them to park. They would have to cover the last few hairpin turns on foot.

She recognized a mother she’d seen two weeks ago. She’d stayed away from her more or less intentionally. She was carrying an infant in a baby sling. She’d often thought of the woman in the days that followed, thinking she’d had no reason not to speak to her. So this time she went up to her immediately. The baby girl was a delight. She talked about the experience of being a parent for a second time after ten years; the baby hadn’t let her and her husband get any sleep that night but now she was dozing blissfully. Cecilia had a clear recollection of that fatigue, what it meant not to sleep a wink because of a baby; she remembered having the urge to suffocate Michela to make her shut up. She hadn’t
really
wanted to, she’d just understood how someone might be driven to it. The exhaustion was very different from that following a night spent in the ER. Mattia, on the other hand, had been an angel, he hadn’t woken her even once during the night.

They emerged from the woods and came to the lodge, just below the top of the hill. The kids’ bags were already waiting in the yard, but the children barely greeted them; they went on playing, their attention elsewhere, as if they were staying at camp for another two months. They’d made a whole bunch of projects, displayed on the porch in front of the main building: plaster casts of leaves, wooden slingshots, antistress balls filled with flour.

It took half an hour to get Mattia away from his remaining companions and persuade him to leave. After the first sharp bend on the way down he let her hug and kiss him and started talking.

He was proud that he hadn’t been afraid during the night hike in the woods this time, not at all.

“Of course you’re not afraid anymore, you’re ten years old now,” Cecilia said.

She waved to the infant’s parents, who had picked up their other child and were driving off. She stopped next to the car to look for the keys and as she rummaged through the backpack she thought of Silvia, imagining what Viberti might have left there, and she felt a chill.