Three Light-Years: A Novel (40 page)

Enrico Fermi relaxed, looking at the CD covers. He was in no hurry to leave the jazz section, he knew that outside he would be plunged back into a nightmare of persecution. And he wanted to let his foot dry. Besides the sense of peace, besides the impression of being safe, he suspected that he had finally arrived in the foreign country where he naïvely thought he’d already landed three days ago, at Gatwick.

“Foreign country?”

“Far away from everything. It’s the same sensation I get when I’m with you.”

And that idea made her very, very happy. To be the foreign country where someone could take refuge and seek political asylum. The foreign country someone comes to after a long journey, to rebuild a life. Telling a woman with whom you’ve reconciled for the sixth time that she’s like a foreign country, well, there was something inspired about it.

Enrico Fermi was silent for a while, then he resumed his story. He didn’t know what had come over him, he had to talk with the clerk, as if the little man held some secret. So he made up a story about having to buy a gift to cheer up a sick friend. And the clerk didn’t bat an eye; making recommendations was his job. He went straight to a shelf, chose a CD, and put it in his hand. With that one he couldn’t go wrong, he said, because the heart and soul of jazz was in that recording. It was a concert at which five of the best musicians of all time had played, brought together that night—by chance for the one and only time, brought together despite the fact that they hated one another and barely spoke to one another, that they were quite drunk and more interested in following a boxing match on the radio, and that the saxophone player had hocked his instrument at a pawn shop to buy heroin and was forced to play with a plastic sax. The magic of the music came about by chance, and as it unfolded the players hadn’t seemed to pay the slightest attention to it. Then, without another word, the clerk bowed slightly and went back to his work.

“It was Yoda. You met Yoda.”

“Yoda?”

“The one from
Star Wars
, the tiny, wrinkled old wise man.”

“I brought you a present.”

Enrico Fermi pulled out the CD of that concert.

“I don’t like jazz.”

“It’s just the thought. It was the only time I found myself alone. I thought of you.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Enrico Fermi could no longer recognize a good sign. The appearance of Yoda was a fantastic sign.

That time they’d made it through the bad patch. But instead of continuing to tell her Zen stories, or funny stories, or stories of any kind, instead of understanding how to win her, in time Enrico Fermi had begun acting like a teddy bear, like a stupid Ewok from the Forest Moon of Endor. When he was in trouble he tried to move her by telling her about his problems, as if other people didn’t have any, until eventually she just felt pity for him. And anger, a lot of anger.

*   *   *

When she goes to look for Harry Kressing’s
The Cook
in her parents’ attic, with the idea of using it to reconnect with Viberti, she experiences the surefire, mysterious satisfaction that always accompanies the rediscovery of a book. It happens with books she has at home as well, books she’s sure she owns, when she hasn’t touched them for some time, as if they might have escaped, as if someone might have stolen them. They have no legs and no one is interested in them, so the joy she feels is all the more inexplicable. As long as her books don’t disappear, as long as her books continue to reappear, like spirits invoked on Walpurgis Night, nothing bad will happen to her.

She hasn’t been in that attic since the summer four years ago, the year her father died. She’d had a duplicate key made. At one point she had so many duplicates (building key, apartment key, key to the attic, basement key, key to the garage) that she could no longer remember which key opened which door.

Before going down to her mother’s place, she opens the big plastic bag she’s brought with her. She takes out three ceramic items wrapped in yellowed tissue paper and slips them into the only open carton, on which her mother had written
NONNA RE’S CHINA SET
with a ballpoint pen, puncturing the cardboard in several places. The tape has been torn off haphazardly and is hanging down the side of the box, like a loose shoulder strap. She strips it off altogether and seals the cardboard flaps with a fresh piece.

She takes the book, goes down three flights of stairs, and stands in front of the door. She hesitates, then rings the bell. No sound filters from inside. Then a light step and the door opens. Surprised, her mother gives a little start and takes a small step back. She was expecting the visit, but seeing her younger daughter makes her anxious every time. The daughter, on the other hand, finds that her mother has aged, even though she saw her just a few days ago. This, too, is a customary reaction.

She says she stopped by the attic (unconcerned that her mother might wonder where she got the key), shows her the book, “It’s for one of Cecilia’s coworkers, one of Papa’s books, see?” Her mother shakes her head slightly, perhaps unconsciously. Too much information, difficult to put it all together, and at the same time of almost zero interest. Why the attic? Why that book and not another one? Why one of Cecilia’s coworkers? Silly questions about things that don’t matter, Silvia will only disappoint her.

But the days when being disappointed infuriated her are gone for good, and gone forever are the days when being disappointed really irritated her, and perhaps the days when being disappointed made her feel bitter were on their way out as well. Now her younger daughter disappoints her and that’s that. “Would you like to come in? I’ve just made coffee.”

They settle in the kitchen, sitting on opposite sides of the table. “Are there still a lot of your father’s books in the attic? I haven’t been up there in a while.” Probably no one has been up there since she was last there, four years ago. Her mother, maybe, is afraid of the attic.

“No, all that’s left are the
Urania
volumes and some other paperbacks … but Papa loved this one, I remember.”

“Why don’t you take them all with you? Why leave them up there, collecting dust?”

She tells her she saw the carton with her grandmother’s china.

“Oh, that’s right, I’d forgotten I’d put it up there. Take it, you and Cecilia. It’s not doing any good there.”

Silvia sips the coffee. It’s very good. She’d like to inherit her mother’s coffeemaker, that’s for sure.

She smiles. “I remember when Nonna Re didn’t know what was what toward the end and was mean to you.”

Her mother frowns at her. But then she, too, smiles, because it was so many years ago, because it’s funny, and even though her mother-in-law could never stand her, what does it matter now.

“What was it she said to you?” Laughing, she mimics her grandmother’s regional pronunciation: “‘Get out of this house and leave my son alone.’”

“Poor thing, she was completely demented. If I reach ninety like she did, I’ll get like that, too, you never know…”

“Or maybe she said: ‘I don’t like my son bringing home a woman like you.’”

Her mother snorts. “As it happened, I was one of the people she no longer recognized. The only thing left was hostility, and
that
she was finally able to express.”

“Papa used to laugh…”

“I don’t remember him laughing. It seems odd. He was afraid I’d be offended.”

“Your mother didn’t lose her mind, why should you?”

“My mother died at sixty-five, she didn’t have time to lose her mind.”

“If you do, you’ll tell the whole truth then.”

Her mother’s expression doesn’t change, as if she hasn’t heard the remark. After a moment she gets up, takes the empty cups, puts them in the sink, and begins rinsing them.

*   *   *

Back at home, Silvia writes an e-mail to the nondescript Viberti. She tells him she found the book she’d mentioned to him, quickly reread it, and remembered the reasons why she was so enthusiastic about it: it’s a fantastic story, both in that it’s improbable and in that it’s fabulous—the cook of the title transforms the members of the family he goes to work for into servants, the father into a butler, the mother into a maid, and the son into a cook, then he marries the daughter and lets them support him and serve him happily ever after. The plot isn’t even the most important thing, it’s not a mystery, so she’s not spoiling anything by revealing how it ends. It’s a book worth reading. And the ending is still surprising,
colossal
.

She includes her cell phone number as well. She thinks she’s done everything appropriately, she’s been kind and she’s tossed out the bait.

Then she plunges back into the book on Hindu mythology, picking up from where Agni reenters Prajapati, who has just given birth to him, Prajapati lying empty and disjointed, Agni filling him and restoring him to life and vigor, re-creating his creator. And so on.

*   *   *

Occasionally, during the months when he was better, between one chemo treatment and another, her father arranged to see her at a nearby café. He would go out to buy a newspaper, he never ventured farther than the newsstand on the avenue. Silvia told him about a small publisher she’d begun working with, a publisher whose books were a little weird. Her father, amused, pretended to be concerned: weird
in what sense
? No, she replied, not obscene weird: strange weird, New Age weird. Like books about witches and shamans, or books on alternative medicine, prophecies, the Templars, or ethnic cookbooks. She didn’t tell her father that she’d read about an herbal treatment for cancer in one of those books, and that when she told Cecilia about it, her sister had given her a withering look, muttering, “Oh, please, give me a break.” She’d felt like an idiot.

During that period she was editing the translation of a book that taught you how to use mushrooms to drug yourself. More or less. It was serious stuff. Initiates who took part in the Eleusinian Mysteries ritual drank a potion in which a hallucinogenic mushroom was dissolved. The mushrooms had names like
Amanita muscaria
or
Psilocybe semilanceata
. For a short time she knew all about
Claviceps purpurea
. She could talk about it for hours, her father nodding quietly, pretending to be interested. The important thing was to talk about something
other
. Something other than what?

She took him back home. They sat in their usual places in the living room. Silvia waited for a question that would restart the conversation, but she knew that at some point her mother would appear and her father would start to get up, saying: “I’ll just go lie down for a bit.” She would try to help him, but he would rely on her mother, out of habit. Or else, to get rid of her, he would send her to look for an old
Urania
volume in the attic: Remember the story where Walt Disney was resurrected in the future? Or he would send her to buy batteries for the Walkman that he used to listen to hits from the sixties on cassettes given away by the newspaper: “If I Lose You Too,” “The Boy from Gluck Street,” “I Can’t Stay with You Any Longer.”

*   *   *

In the last October of the millennium, the tests revealed that the cancer had returned. Her father underwent a second operation. Opened and closed, said Cecilia, who when she spoke as a doctor did not resort to euphemisms. Though maybe opened and closed actually was a euphemism. You open and close a closet, because it seems like a good idea to straighten things up, but then you can’t do it. You open a file and close it again, because in the end you don’t feel like working. You open and close a kitchen cabinet, because you’re not hungry anymore. You open and close your wallet and tell the salesclerk you’ll come back later because you realize you don’t have any money and maybe what you wanted to buy wasn’t really so essential. You open your mouth to smile and close it again because as you get closer the face of a friend turns out to be that of a stranger. You open and close the buttons on your blouse because maybe you don’t feel like having sex after all. You open and close the door of your parents’ old apartment because you don’t have the heart to go in and see your father dying, and you open and close the front door of the building and thank the heavens above that you’re outside, in the open air, alive, even if it’s snowing, even if you’re crying.

Her father was rushed to the ER and hospitalized at the end of January and died the following morning, unconscious because Ceci had made them pump him full of morphine.

She wasn’t able to say goodbye to him.

She had managed to argue with her mother even on the day of the funeral (she ordered her not to touch her father’s things, her father’s things didn’t belong only to her). So much snow had fallen in the small cemetery at the foot of the mountains that getting to the grave site was impossible, an arctic coating of fresh ice covered the tombstones. On top of everything else, she got her period that night, a few days late (this often happened to her, but she’d still thought she might be pregnant, she’d thought Enrico Fermi’s son might come to relieve his father). Her mother had moaned all the way, how awful to leave him in the columbarium with people who were strangers. “It’s just until spring,” Cecilia said, squeezing Silvia’s hand tight, out of grief, or to keep from harshly telling their mother to shut up, or to keep her from doing the same. At a certain point Silvia asked her to let go because she was literally digging her nails into her skin. Later on, she thought about the incident with the nails to try to pinpoint the precise moment when her sister had started to fall apart.

*   *   *

When the nondescript Viberti calls her two days later, thanking her for her e-mail, she’s not just surprised: she’d truly forgotten all about
The Cook
and Viberti himself. Surprised and at the same time mildly disappointed, because from the internist’s tone it’s clear that the phone call is a courtesy call and that he’ll never come to pick up the book. In fact he says he’ll think about it,
maybe
; he’ll stop by,
maybe
.