Three Light-Years: A Novel (37 page)

But it was only for an instant. She opened the door for the child, kissed him again, ignoring his protests, and said: “Now tell me everything from the beginning.”

THE UNEXPECTED

Memory is a room that’s jam-packed. Four years ago but it seems like ten, her niece’s First Communion at Cecilia’s house, her father dead for three months; she’d lost four pounds, her mother had quickly assumed the widow’s role, in a sense she’d been a widow for years, and this should be probed and exposed, but no, it remains inevitably mysterious (how her father felt about her mother, how her mother felt about her father, what went on in bed, as long as they shared a bed, etc.). That day, the three women in the family, like fragments that will never again form a coherent whole, are making their first public appearance since the funeral, and it is Silvia’s personal opinion that they should avoid seeming unnecessarily grief-stricken, the manifestation of extreme, prolonged sorrow is ridiculous, she pointed this out to her mother, who got offended and nearly started crying. She didn’t press the issue, she stayed away from her mother so she wouldn’t spoil the party for Cecilia. But what could spoil the party for her sister? With broad, resounding steps, Cecilia strides down the hallway between the kitchen and the living room carrying bowls of potato salad, tuna and prosciutto mousse, minicutlets, caprese salad, gnocchi alla romana, lasagna, enough food for a legion of relatives, looking like a person possessed, a person determined to get through it at all costs. Sometimes, often, her sister frightens her: she could run over anyone in her way.

So then, memory is a living room flooded with light and full of smiling faces, mouths all talking at once, and she and Cecilia and their mother, assisted by an occasional woman from Luca’s family, see to the food, while Luca uncorks bottles of wine for the adults and pours sugary drinks into colorful plastic cups for the children. Her sister doesn’t simply walk down the hallway, she
advances
with a quick, vibrant gait; her mother has one shoulder lower than the other as if she were trying to shrink and disappear, her head tilted like the pointer on a scale to indicate to everyone the weight of her grief, and she actually looks like a servant, a maid who doesn’t want to be noticed. Silvia has survived her father’s death and she feels like standing on a chair and saying to everyone with great dignity: “Your attention, please: I wanted to let you know that I’m here with you thanks to the good heart of my sister who fed me for four weeks, otherwise I would have starved to death. I came through it, though, and now I’m stronger.”

She’s not so sure that’s true. For a few days now her hands have been trembling, maybe she has a degenerative disease. But who cares, she’s the black sheep of the family. Unless even the likelihood of being thought the black sheep is exaggerated. For instance, she always did well in school. Let’s just say she’s not as perfect as Cecilia, period. On the other hand, who’d want to be as perfect as Cecilia?

Memory is all those eyes that don’t see her, and if they do look at her, before really even seeing her they judge her through the lens of sincere compassion or distrust or indifference. Then all of a sudden a pair of eyes, Luca’s eyes, stare at her in a way they never have before, and because they’re looking for the black sheep in her, because they recognize her fragility and instability, and think they can find understanding and counsel, they lock on to hers for the first time in many years, maybe ever. Luca looks at her in that new, frightened way, and as she places a tray of minipizzas on the table, already half empty after the children rushed her in the hallway, he approaches and whispers, “I have to talk to you,” and his eyes are those of a desperate man, a man who is asking for help and who can’t be Luca. Eyes like that? They’re not like him. So Silvia smiles incredulously. Asking her for help? It doesn’t make sense. “I need to talk to someone.”

The strangeness of that look: Luca hopes to be seen, but can’t see her, he’s a black-and-white image on the monitor of an intercom, sad, frightened, unsure of finding her home. Or he’s Princess Leia: a very tiny hologram who launches his cry for help, and dissolves. Whenever her father rewatched all the
Star Wars
movies, which was at least once a year, Silvia was the one who kept him company in front of the television. She never had the heart to tell him she thought the story was trite if not downright dumb. Still, she identified quite a bit with the princess and years before had considered showing up for a film history exam with two large “cinnamon bun” coils on either side of her head, although her hair hadn’t been quite long enough. She should be the one to launch messages of alarm and requests for help, but instead in this film it’s Luke Skywalker, who seems elsewhere, yet is finally within reach; in another galaxy, but in the end a brother.

Memory is therefore a crowded room, a pair of eyes, a look, a feeling that something isn’t right, that something has been derailed: Luca and Cecilia’s life together was a silent, punctual train, pull the handle only in case of emergency, and things that seem like they would never emerge come to the surface, and the moment the tray is placed on the table, Silvia says, “Of course, whenever you want, but what’s happened?”

“Later. Don’t say anything to Cecilia.” And he walks off. Silvia smiles, still incredulous. Then she thinks: He has someone else, he’s going to leave Cecilia. And immediately afterward: Impossible. The look was her own fabrication, he wasn’t desperate at all. She’s desperate and she’s projecting her desperation onto other people’s eyes. Luca meant it as a joke: Save me, I can’t take any more of this, the house full of people, the screaming, rowdy kids.

Meanwhile Cecilia advances down the hall and her mother slips among the relatives like a servant. The kids scream and chase one another through the rooms. Memory is also the genuine silent panic that grips her in the midst of their noisy, make-believe panic. Despite the occasional temptation to grab one of them and hug him, the temptation, for a few seconds, to be a mother. Michela still hasn’t taken off her long white dress and is acting like a bride, even turning her back and tossing a bunch of flowers as if it were a bouquet, a surprising development since until recently she’d played the part of a novice on the eve of her vows.

Not just three forsaken women, in fact, but four. Michela has passed her rite of initiation and enters that caste, enters the family and enters mourning.

Other characters? No. The boy, for example, is absent, in the background as always, unseen. Everyone talks about how much he suffered over his grandfather’s death (not caring about how much
she
suffered), but if he really had suffered, he didn’t show it.

And Luca’s look, for those ten seconds, a look from a black-and-white monitor, or from a futuristic hologram from the seventies.

*   *   *

Then there’s another recollection, distinct from the other but contiguous, a scene that took place at another time, which memory continues to associate with Michela’s First Communion. It’s a different room, crowded with silent presences, Cecilia and Luca’s bedroom with the metal stand where all the guests’ coats are hung, neat and tidy and silent while their owners, standing in the living room, talk and laugh with a plate and a glass in their hands. And for Silvia, of course, better the company of the coats. (At a family celebration a few years ago, she stole a fifty-thousand-lira note from a coat.)

There’s a girl with her, a relative of Luca’s who followed her in there despite numerous futile attempts to shake her, and now she won’t leave her alone. So instead of Luca asking to talk, recognizing that even a black sheep can be useful every now and then, there’s this idiot who won’t stop asking questions about her work and showers her with exclamations of infinite admiration. Difficult to admire her work, unless you’ve completely misunderstood it. Impossible to admire her.

Why does her mind continue to orbit around these two memories? The first might have some reasons to justify its gravitational pull: the intersection of past and present, the first party without her father, a herald of Luca’s revelation, a sign of trouble in her sister’s marriage (until then perfectly concealed), the end of the glorious era in which she was the black sheep of the family and the beginning of a period of dormancy or cryopreservation that shows no signs of ending. But the second memory, why does it keep coming back with such insistence? A parasitic memory, a rough draft of the first, from which the cloying taste of narcissism emanates; unjustified admiration is almost worse than unjustified disapproval. Only her father was entitled to admire her, only her mother was entitled to criticize her.

*   *   *

“You don’t get along with Grandma,” Michela suddenly says, as if confiding a great adult secret.

For some time, Michela has been sleeping at Silvia’s place at least once a week. It started by accident, Mattia’s flu compounded by Luca’s absence compounded by the usual problems created by Cecilia’s night shifts. It had been natural for Silvia to suggest that Michela stay with her. She was surprised at having suggested it so easily, almost joyfully. She’s so used to living alone, proud and protective of the independence she’s achieved. And she’d amply repaid her debts to her sister, even if she hadn’t technically settled them. So she didn’t suggest it because she feels indebted to her or because she feels lonely. Nor did she suggest it to usurp one of her mother’s privileges (for years now she had declared a unilateral truce with her mother), though her mother made it known that she was jealous. She wanted to help Cecilia.

But then two things happened.

The first is that Cecilia started behaving strangely, as if she wanted to keep Michela away from home. And this worried Silvia, because the year before, she’d told her a confused story about Michela’s alleged negative influence on Mattia’s appetite. As long as it’s just one night a week, she told herself, it was best to humor her sister’s paranoia. She pictured Cecilia and the boy having supper, like two secret lovers, her adoring, him distant and apathetic.

The second is that having Michela at her house made her happier than she’d been in years, maybe happier than she’d ever been. As happy as she’d dreamed of being when she still believed that sooner or later she’d be happy. As she may have been for brief periods on vacation with her girlfriends—except then she would always get into some argument or feel terribly restless or bored to death, and would be even happier to get back home.

She likes Michela. She’s always been the last adult to give in when confronted with the girl’s exuberance, on vacation or during the holidays. She would put up with it for hours before finally admitting that Michela was capable of being almost unbearable at times. She thinks she’s precocious, intelligent, and sensitive. Funny, outgoing. Too impulsive and generous to come up with complex strategies to annihilate her brother. Who, for that matter, is the type to annihilate himself.

Silvia is cooking; she thought Michela was finishing a literature assignment. “What did you say?” she asks, even though she understood her clearly.

“I noticed … that you don’t get along with Grandma.”

She searches for a suitable answer without raising her eyes from the minced onion she’s sautéing in olive oil.

“We have very different personalities.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning … I don’t know … you know how your grandmother is … she’s very orderly, her house is perfect, all neat and clean…”

Michela seems confused: “Your house is clean, too.”

“I mean … you see what a mess there is in here, I don’t care if something sits on the table for weeks, or if that stack of newspapers stays on the floor, or if the remote control is left between the couch cushions…”

“You’re
messier
.”

“Right, that’s it.”

“Did she yell at you a lot when you were little?”

“I’ll say … yeah, she was strict.”

“Mama is strict, too.”

“Oh, no.” She smiles. “You don’t know what a strict mother is.”

“Why, what did Grandma do to you?”

“I was always being punished.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her lots of lies, I disobeyed.”

“Why?”

“I was a little wild.”

Michela smiles. “Even when you got older?”

“Especially then.”

“You didn’t tell her where you were going?”

“I didn’t tell her
whom
I was going with.”

“With boys?”

Silvia laughs. “You sure are curious!”

“Tell me, come on…”

“I was a little rebellious, but your grandmother was wrong, because she used to lock me in my room.”

“She locked you in?!”

“Once she locked me out on the balcony!”

“Then what?”

“Your grandfather immediately came to let me back in. We both screamed and yelled and then we sat down at the table as if nothing had happened.”

“And what did my mother say?”

“She stood up for me. But she had other things to do, she had to study, then she got married, you were born.”

“Mama always has something else to do.”

Silvia pauses, looks at her: “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

Michela blushes, lowers her eyes. She seems embarrassed.

And as if she hadn’t said it, she starts talking about a friend who goes shopping with her grandmother and makes her buy her whatever she wants. “She takes advantage of her, you know?”

Convenient, changing the subject. Period, new paragraph, full of energy and hope, she’s talking at the top of her lungs again, as if she has to be heard from across the street; she describes things as if they are happening for the first time in human history, as if her experiences were unique and unparalleled, and her friends one of a kind and exceptional; you can believe that only at that age. A few more years, and then the marks left by words and events fade more slowly each time, like bruises.

*   *   *