Three Light-Years: A Novel (41 page)

But she’s even more surprised and astounded an hour later, when the buzzer sounds and it’s Viberti. He must be crazy. She doesn’t even have time to change, she welcomes him in her battle fatigues. The most ridiculous thing is that despite having come all that way and making it upstairs and into her house, Viberti seems no more interested in the book or in making conversation or in anything else than he was on the phone shortly before. He doesn’t seem interested in anything. He’s wearing tennis clothes, is he on his way to play? Apparently not. He came all the way there on foot. He leaves right away, with the book about the cook under his arm.

Silvia follows him from the window as he moves away down the sidewalk. A weirdo, not that she considers herself normal. Not that weirdos don’t interest her or that they frighten her, or that she doesn’t want anything to do with them. She attracts weirdos like honey draws bees. She attracts them and drives them away, evidently, because this one fled quickly.

She slumps down on the couch. It’s late by now, she no longer feels like going back to work. She stares at the dark TV screen and for half an hour lets her thoughts transport her through places in the distant past, populated by her own personal gallery of weirdos. First among them, Enrico Fermi. Or maybe not? Is it possible that Enrico Fermi wasn’t at all a weirdo, but the most normal and conventional of men? His dream, after all, was to spend his evenings at home watching old DVDs.

Then the phone rings again and Viberti invites her to dinner. Something devastating is eating at that man, if he has to call her, drop in unexpectedly, then call her again before making up his mind to invite her out. The most hesitant dinner invitation in the history of dating (but maybe it isn’t a date).

There are two possibilities, she thinks on her way to the restaurant where they’ve agreed to meet: He likes Cecilia and maybe doesn’t know her as well as it seemed. Or he likes me. Why couldn’t he like me?

She’d barely gotten a look at him, still, the nondescript Viberti’s physical features are so nondescript as to trigger an inordinate acceleration of the natural oblivion with which the physical features of strangers usually meet in her mind. She’s not sure she’s interested—when she saw him the other day at the café she wasn’t attracted to him, though maybe not repelled either. Since in her current condition of general lethargy almost no man attracts her instantly anymore, she wants to give him a second chance. There’s an eighty percent certainty that the nondescript internist is interested in Cecilia, but she has to know if he interests her and how much, just in case it’s the other twenty percent.

As soon as she sees him again, she decides no, he doesn’t interest her much at all. In particular, the tennis outfit remains a mystery. It reminds her of the game she had as a child in which you constructed figures by combining the heads, torsos, legs, and feet of different people; you could create a bearded man with buxom breasts, the legs of a soccer player, and a ballet dancer’s feet.

She tries to steer the conversation toward Cecilia, to see if she’s the crucial reason the internist has come this far after all. But nothing doing, she can’t get blood out of a stone, where blood is a revelation or a secret and the stone is Viberti, a rock that remains hard and impenetrable throughout dinner. This man eats sushi with pathetic suspicion, chewing each bite two hundred times. She’d like to take his hand and reassure him: “It won’t hurt you, go on, eat, don’t worry.” To pass the time, she begins telling him the Japanese version of Enrico Fermi’s life, and maybe Viberti believes it.

She’s asked herself many times what it is that compels her to fictionalize her relationship with Enrico Fermi that way. It’s a story in which there are no mother-of-all scenes, and even though she has problems with the concept of maternity, she likes climactic showdowns. The story with Enrico Fermi, at least in its latest versions, seems to be composed of nothing. When she thinks back, when she thinks about the time she spent with him, the first thing that comes to mind is the question: “What were we doing all that time?” What they did resurfaces in bits and pieces, darting, fishlike memories, intact and glistening, too wily to swallow the bait, only dynamite can catch them and in catching disintegrates them. The dynamite is the thought of having thrown away the best years of her life.

More than anything else, the nondescript Viberti appears to be very tired. Doctors are often very tired. On top of it, they tire easily of people. And at a certain point, while talking about dead fathers, Viberti seems to shut down completely. So she says they’d better go, she doesn’t want to stay up late. She gets up, goes to the ladies’ room: let him take care of paying.

Leaving the restaurant, she finds him giggling alone out on the sidewalk and the evening takes an unexpected turn. Maybe it’s the hot sake, but Viberti has become less nondescript and more simpatico. Maybe even tipsy. His shoelace is untied, and even though he’s been on his knees for ten minutes, he says, he can’t manage to retie the knot. Shoelaces, he says, have it in for him. So Silvia kneels down and quickly ties it for him. But the end of the lace is much longer than the one on the other shoe. “Your knot,” Viberti says, “looks like an overcooked Japanese noodle.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my knots that way,” she says, giggling. What’s stopping her from taking him home with her? What’s stopping her from introducing him to the tea ceremony?

All the way back they mimic the faces of the people they pass and then burst out laughing. By the time they reach the door to the building, they don’t seem anything like the two serious, sedate, rather glum individuals who ate at the counter at the Japanese restaurant.

And as usual, once the tea ceremony starts, it’s as if, in her head, Silvia had been aiming for that ending from the beginning of the evening. Even if it’s just a fuck, everything is weighted with meaning, afterward. And while that meaning should be examined and revealed, instead it remains inevitably mysterious.

*   *   *

This is the part that for me is really hard to explain: not so much the impact of the change of heart, but its unexpectedness. Until a moment ago Silvia had been fed up, bored, and not at all intrigued by Viberti. Then all she has to do is come out of the restaurant and find him a little tipsy, and she feels a sudden tenderness which is a kind of fraternal kinship, a destiny they have in common the moment the reserved, controlled internist loses his reserve and control and starts acting like an idiot.

All told, they act like idiots together three times.

*   *   *

Ten days later Silvia is having dinner at Carla’s house, Stefania is there, too. Carla has an eleven-month-old son, the
spitting image
of her. Now, certainly children may resemble their parents, but they shouldn’t be perfect miniatures. Clone wars? No. At the same time, looking at these two human beings who are like two peas in a pod, seeing how happy they are, you wonder if that’s the secret: replicate yourself instead of trying to be pointlessly original. Silvia wonders about it, though obviously being identical to her mother would be impossible, because her mother is one of a kind.

The nondescript Viberti sent her a text message a few days ago, making up an unmistakable excuse not to see her anymore, and she felt an unmistakable relief. Her disappointment over this heralded ending is a relative disappointment—an annoyance more than anything else; she’d like to have the guts to see the men who show up in her life only once. Instead, she seems to have to verify two, three, or even four times what she already knew the first time, namely, that they don’t interest her. It must be a form of premature senility, a kind of deafness toward feelings or dementia of attraction that makes her keep asking life, “What? What? Can you repeat that?” even though she’s heard the answer clearly. In particular, there’s the exasperation that all this is becoming a habit, virtually the rule; men she couldn’t care less about approach her, she doesn’t discourage them because she doesn’t want to be alone, she goes to bed with them because she sees no immediate reason not to, and she watches them disappear over the horizon with no regrets.

Carla’s baby loves to eat. When mealtime comes, he begins moving his hands frantically, as if he were turning two faucets, opening the flow of dinner. His eyes are wide, shining. He quivers with joy. Carla plays a game with him: she brings the spoon to his lips, pretends she’s about to put it in his mouth, and abruptly takes it away. It seems sadistic, but the baby laughs like crazy. Then he gets a mouthful as a reward. And again Carla pretends to take the food out of his mouth. The baby’s father says: “Can you believe it? At eleven months he knows what irony is.” The three women send him off to set the table.

An hour later, sprawled on the couch, Stefania starts telling a story: an elderly aunt of hers died and her cousin, an only child, had to empty his mother’s house; he took whatever furniture was worth taking and tried to sell the rest—nobody wanted it; he tried to give it away—nobody wanted it; he called a junk hauling service—they said they’d do it but that they didn’t pick up items larger than three by three feet; the cousin went and bought a saw—he spent two weekends sawing his mother’s furniture up into pieces.

At this point Carla pretends to shoot herself in the mouth.

Stefania is offended.

Silvia laughs, then she doesn’t feel like laughing anymore. She feels a tug at her heart. An image of the nondescript Viberti, at her door the first night, comes to mind. She’d asked him if he wanted to come up and he nodded with a kind of resignation, though he immediately started giggling again.

When it’s time to leave, Carla squeezes her arm and whispers: “Was there something you wanted to tell us tonight?”

“No, why?”

“Your mind was elsewhere. Are you still worried about Michela?”

Silvia shakes her head. “You have a beautiful baby.”

Carla smiles.

*   *   *

On Monday, Cecilia calls to tell her that Mattia fainted at school and was admitted to the hospital. He’s all right but they’re keeping him overnight for observation, could she stop by their house and pick up some pajamas and bring them to her? So she finds herself alone in her sister’s deserted house, and after getting the boy’s pajamas from a drawer, invents excuses to linger a little longer, even she doesn’t know why. Or maybe she does know: she hasn’t seen Cecilia since before the tea ceremony and she’ll have to pretend nothing’s wrong, she’ll be ill at ease and will have to hide it. Not that her sister will necessarily be angry; if she knew about her and Viberti she’d probably start laughing, because that’s Silvia’s fate, she’s destined to make a fool of herself in front of the tragic, severe paragon Cecilia represents.

She checks to see if there’s laundry to be hung or if the dishwasher needs emptying or if the beds have to be made. She paces the corridor with slow steps. She sits on the couch in the living room. She’s never envied Cecilia’s big house, the nicer neighborhood. Now maybe she does. She doesn’t feel like living alone anymore. How nice to have a house like that, how nice to see that disorder, so different from her disorder as a woman alone. Could she ask Cecilia to go and live with them? No. There’s no room, in every sense of the word: physically, mentally. She could suggest they get a bigger house, all together. Women used to do that. Old spinster aunts who kept each other company. In fact, she and Stefania have jokingly read that fate in their future more than once, as if by saying the possibility aloud they might exorcise it.

Without realizing it, as she sits there daydreaming with a blank stare, she’s been twisting Mattia’s pajamas in her hands, getting them all crumpled. She puts them in her backpack and hurries to the hospital.

*   *   *

When her father died, Silvia shut herself up in the house, lying on the couch for hours looking at the same patch of blank ceiling, listening to the same song over and over (“Risingson” by Massive Attack). She could no longer eat, each mouthful was always too big and too bitter, she had to have lukewarm or cold liquids that would easily slide down her esophagus. Cecilia came to her rescue, cooking broths and thin soups, providing her with yogurt, and occasionally buying raw fish at a nearby Japanese restaurant—an extravagance, but it was the only solid food that Silvia claimed she was able to swallow.

She spent her days spinning elaborate fantasies. Before dying, her father calls for her and asks her to deliver an envelope to someone. An envelope, a package, a small red velvet pouch. It contains a letter, a book, or Nonna Re’s engagement ring. The person is unknown, the address unfamiliar. A woman opens the door, the same age as her father, though she looks at least ten years younger. Behind her, a room full of books. Silvia doesn’t have to introduce herself, the woman was expecting her. They smile. She’d recognize that woman’s eyes anywhere. Because they recognize her, thanks to her father’s stories.

“I was sure you existed.”

“May I call you Silvia?”

Cecilia urged Silvia to look ahead. It was practically the same advice she’d given their father after the first operation, and considering how it had all ended up, it wasn’t a piece of advice that Silvia took well. Look ahead? Where? At what? But Cecilia was the last person she could afford to be angry with, since without her she would die of starvation.

Then her appetite returned, moderately, though little by little the shopping money petered out and there were no freelance assignments in sight; she had also run out of excuses for missed deadlines. Between February and March she reached a record low in productivity: she couldn’t manage to edit more than one sentence a day. She ate at Cecilia’s one evening a week, occasionally she skipped dinner, and in general she scrimped to the bone, the last of the money her father had secretly given her was almost all used up. She was so used to turning to him in her times of need, she was so sure she wasn’t in any danger, that she never checked to see what she had in the bank. They called her at home to tell her she was overdrawn. She couldn’t give up the rent, the heat, and her ADSL, she couldn’t give up the occasional night out with her girlfriends. She tried to reduce the rest to a minimum. The day came when she boiled a quarter pound of pasta one night and ate it without sauce, without even a drop of olive oil, and thought the simple flavor of the plain spaghetti was the tastiest in the world.