Three Light-Years: A Novel (39 page)

They talk about Michela for an hour, and Silvia listens to them explain what she already knows: it’s absolutely essential that she tell Cecilia what her daughter said. Not just for Michela’s sake, not just for Cecilia. For her sake: she can’t live with that anguish.

“Am I wrong to call it anguish?”

“Call it whatever you want, but go talk to her.”

Then Carla has to get back to her son and leaves them, followed by a trail of desirous, hopeless stares. All that, the dress, for nothing, unless it’s for when she gets back home. Silvia and Stefania find themselves alone; Stefi points out some people they met a few months ago, Silvia turns out to be in a bad mood and says she doesn’t feel like saying hello to them, Stefi insists, Silvia unfairly says something terrible and uncalled-for to her (whether she’d like to entertain them by talking about temp workers), and Stefi gets up and stalks off. It all happens in a few seconds, no time to reflect and avoid it. On top of everything, the song that’s playing just then is “In Between Days” by the Cure, which reminds her of Enrico Fermi and makes her sad. She dashes out, sends Stefania a text message that says:
sorry sorry sorry I’ll call you tomorrow
.

*   *   *

When her father got sick, she imagined spending time with him, reading him novels by Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. Le Guin or any other science fiction writer with the middle initial K. She imagined the scene bathed in a sweet, melancholy light, her father immobilized in bed.

But during the months of chemotherapy, her father was no longer the same. He was no longer the same with her. He no longer felt like talking. He seemed to be eager to listen, but it was a ruse. She went to see him every two or three days, her mother always left them alone. Her explanation was that she “took advantage of it to go out,” but in fact she used it as an excuse for not staying with them, so she wouldn’t have to read her husband’s love for his younger daughter in his eyes.

Her father made an effort to chat. His objective in any conversation had always been to avoid talking about himself. Usually he would adopt a diversionary tactic: he’d talk about colleagues, old friends, people he’d met, places he’d seen; he was able to recall entire books. Now he’d become a kind of gentle cop, a kindly but relentless interrogator. He never stopped asking questions and was never satisfied with easy answers.

The window was partly open and the smell of rain or the scent of spring drifted in from outside, the trees along the avenue had finally put out their first leaves, the light in the room took on the same shade of pale green. When she arrived she found him in an armchair, in the living room, a room where they never spoke in the past, it was too subject to her mother’s supervision. The TV off, the closed book beside him—always the same novels in those months,
The Left Hand of Darkness
or
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
or
Ubik
, the bookmark always at the same point (which maybe wasn’t the point, maybe the point was to pick up the book and open it when her mother appeared, to encourage her to disappear again).

It wasn’t warm enough yet to have the window open, it wasn’t open by accident, just as it was no accident that the armchair was farther away than usual from the couch, and it was no accident that her father’s complexion was sallow and his breath unbearable. Cecilia had told her their father was afraid he smelled bad, that he stank of illness and therefore death; he didn’t want to cause any discomfort or create unpleasant memories. Silvia sat on the couch, far away from him, looking out, saying, “The sunlight’s so beautiful on the trees, the rain’s so beautiful on the window panes.” It was more beautiful—more incredible—however, to see her mother approach her father as she’d never done, at least not in front of their daughters, to help him up from the chair.

Every now and then she would have liked to take her father to the doctor, to the hospital, without her mother always in tow. She would have liked to spend time with her father, to have him confide in her. Any kind of confidence. She was a little jealous of Cecilia during those months. Her sister had never competed for their father’s affection, but in recent years she’d had a formidable weapon: his health. Even before his illness, Cecilia knew things about their father,
intimate things
—cholesterol numbers, SED rate, prostate size—about which Silvia was in the dark. They had topics to discuss—diets, recommendations, dosages—which interested her father more and more as he got older. She saw it in his eyes, she saw it in their looks. The sight of Cecilia reassured him. For a time, when Cecilia had decided to get married, they had stopped speaking to each other. Too young, he’d said, not out loud; for a few months he kept muttering that maybe they could wait. Later he was the first to admit that he’d been wrong; besides, when grandchildren arrive, everything changes, of course. When he gives you a grandson, even the man who is fucking your daughter becomes likable.

When she starts thinking such awful, unfair things, she knows she’s hit the rock bottom of her depression. She can’t imagine herself being any more depressed than this. Usually her specialties are panic, anxiety, agitation, and worry. But when that odious depression comes over her, the only remedy is to shut herself in and work.

*   *   *

She counts the number of pages remaining in the tome of Hindu mythology. She seems to have spent a lifetime counting pages. Even in college she used to count the pages that remained. To count, she subtracts. She takes the last page, takes the page she’s up to, subtracts. But it’s not exact. There are pages with illustrations, pages only partially full, blank pages, pages crammed with footnotes that she can ignore because they’re just bibliographical references that others will check. Then she comes up with an estimate of these phantom pages and deducts it from the result of the first subtraction. Over the years she’s even extended the counting of pages to the books she reads in her spare time. Sometimes when she saw her father holding one of his hefty volumes of science fiction, she would ask him how many pages he still had left. He never had any idea, or rather he was always “more or less halfway through” (her father was more or less halfway through everything, he was an unfinished man, though that wasn’t his fault). In her work she now comes across texts composed of different-sized characters, she encounters tourist guides with text boxes and sidebars that complicate the calculation, illustrations whose space she must take into account. Counting the pages, guessing the final number of printed pages: she loves doing that. The editors at the publishing houses she works for admire her precision. She belongs to a well-defined category that can immediately be identified: a valuable employee who has moments of unreliability. Every now and then she receives a phone call for apparently no reason and only after a day or so does she realize that they were checking to make sure the work was going along as it should.

*   *   *

She can’t put it off any longer, so she goes to talk to Cecilia. Talking to Cecilia scares her. She gets to the ER entrance and her legs refuse to go down the ramp, so she continues walking along the sidewalk to the corner of the street. Then, very slowly, she manages to retrace her steps; she finds herself in front of the reception desk and asks for her sister.

Cecilia reacts predictably, showering her with her anxiety; she becomes rigid and digs in her heels, so that Silvia suddenly remembers an expression her father used to describe a certain stance his older daughter displayed: “Tugging on the leash.” Certainly it’s hardly the time or place to recall those words. Cecilia has to be reassured: everyone is fine, nothing awful has happened, “I just want to talk to you about Michela.” Cecilia doesn’t believe her, but she realizes that she has no choice and leads her to a café across from the hospital, where they can talk and actually hear each other.

But when they are sitting face-to-face, they seem glued to their chairs, she speaking as if someone were twisting her arm behind her back, her sister gradually leaning farther and farther over the table, like she’s laying her head on the block to await the blade. Then Silvia starts trembling.

Cecilia notices it and now she’s the one reassuring her, she squeezes her hand, strokes it. Talking is good for you, God is it ever good. Silvia tells her everything, and the more she tells her the better she feels, until she almost feels good. She’s able to tell her everything! She even reminds Cecilia about the paranoid idea she had last summer. She’s so pleased with herself that she feels hungry.

Then something unexpected happens: a coworker Cecilia had agreed to meet shows up and sits down to eat with them. A nondescript type, quiet, the kind of man who as a doctor infuriated her, one of those for whom your little bellyache is just a nuisance. But his arrival isn’t a problem. She’s said what she had to say. I’ll finish my sandwich and go, she thinks. But it seems her sister is trying to encourage her to make conversation with this Claudio Viberti, she can sense it; soon Cecilia will utter the fateful phrase, “Silvia works in publishing.”

But no, what comes out instead is a very old story, which she’d nearly forgotten, the awful diet she’d come up with in her last year of high school, a kind of self-flagellation. Much better than talking about her work, however, and as she talks about it she’s almost happy, as if the earlier anguish had never been.

She recalls a Swiss philosopher’s lecture she’d attended with Enrico Fermi. And it’s just at that point that Cecilia leaps up and announces that she has to leave. What’s wrong?

She doesn’t have time to figure it out, her sister has already left the café. Even the nondescript Viberti seems surprised by the scene. They remain speechless. She let herself be fooled yet again. Cecilia is too shrewd for her. She let her think she wasn’t angry, she assured her she wasn’t mad at her. She seemed only mildly irritated with Michela. Instead, she was upset. She realized it the moment Cecilia grabbed her jacket, the way she put it on.

But the oddest thing is that the nondescript Viberti continues the conversation, as if her bizarre diet and the Swiss lecturer really interested him. Given the fact that it’s a bunch of crap and not at all interesting, there must be something to it. He seems about to make a confession. Or a pass. Maybe this man interests her after all.

And as she writes the script and directs this film in her head, she describes the virtues of green tea to amuse the nondescript Viberti, and then the plot of a novel she read centuries ago, one of her father’s books, though not exactly science fiction. She manages to get his e-mail address, with a promise to find the novel, and at that point, finally, the lunch can come to an end.

*   *   *

When a relationship ends badly people say it was
wrong
to begin with. They use phrases such as “the right man” and “the wrong man.” She’s the queen of correction, but her relationships are always wrong. The men are never the right ones. Correcting men and her relationships: impossible.

In the end, her one great love, Enrico Fermi, was also the man who came closest to becoming the right man. If nothing else, by accretion: they broke up and got back together six times. The earliest Enrico Fermi, age seventeen, is part of ancient history, he’s become a myth, all the rancor softened into a mellifluous memory. The more recent Enrico Fermis are the worst from this standpoint, the wounds still raw and painful. As a gesture of love, or compassion, to salvage him or to salvage herself, to salvage the time they’ve spent together, when she speaks to someone about him she makes up alternative biographies: Enrico Fermi the archaeologist, Enrico Fermi the rare tea expert, Enrico Fermi part Japanese.

She thinks back every so often to a particular time. The last Enrico Fermi had lasted one year; they’d been back together for a couple of months and had hit their first bad patch and she told him that maybe it was best to forget it. She’d told him that just before he left to accompany a class on a school trip (a little shitty of her). Then he came back and started to tell her about the trip. Enrico Fermi was a math teacher (he still is a math teacher). There was an awful kid in the group, not an idiot exactly, kind of a rowdy troublemaker, that’s what they would have called him once, the kind who jumped up on his desk in class, took off his T-shirt and waved it around (though maybe in the end there actually was something off about him), spoke loudly and insulted him, yelled “Communist, worthless do-nothing” at him … Who knows why he’d targeted him for harassment. He chased him through the halls of the hotel, throwing sopping wet toilet paper at him. He shouted: “You stink.” On the last day, Enrico Fermi’s tormentor had poured half a can of Red Bull in his shoe, while they were eating lunch at a fast-food place.

“Oh my God, how did he do that?”

Sneaking under the table behind his back. From the beginning the kid had made fun of his blue Clarks, Communist shoes, his ankles, too thin, and his pants, too short. And he’d gone around all afternoon with a wet foot. Then the kids had wanted to go to a music megastore. The other teachers took refuge in the café, while he holed up in the jazz section because it was the only area in the store that was completely deserted and he knew no one would follow him. He took off his shoe. A glass wall separated him from the other departments, the music was at an acceptable level, everything was suffused with a sense of great peace, and suddenly he was certain that she was in that room, hidden among the shelves, waiting for him.

“I wasn’t there, trust me.”

But something of her was there. And he’d felt much better. Soon afterward, he realized that he was not alone.

“Because my spirit was hovering in the room.”

No, there was a sales clerk. An elderly man, diminutive, a little hunchbacked, with thick glasses and a thatch of white hair. Bent over the shelves of CDs, he flipped through them with a swift flick of his fingers, like an obsessive-compulsive squirrel looking over its hoard of nuts. Now and then the clicking stopped and the clerk pulled out a case, studied it, put it back. Every so often he took a block of CDs from a plastic trolley and added them to the row. Aside from the clicking of the CDs knocking against one another and the whisper of the trolley’s wheels, he made no other sound.