The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  24

  They saw each other often over the next month, without ever making a real date but never really by chance. After visiting hours Alice always ended up wandering around Fabio’s ward, and he always managed to run into her. They’d stroll around the courtyard, always taking the same route that they had decided by mutual agreement, without discussing it. That outer enclosure marked the confines of their story, carving out a space where there was no need to name that clear and mysterious thing flowing between them.

  Fabio seemed to have a precise knowledge of the dynamics of courtship; he knew how to respect rhythms and moderate phrases as if following a set protocol. He sensed Alice’s profound suffering, but remained beyond it, as if he were standing on the border. The excesses of the world, whatever form they might assume, didn’t really concern him. They collided with his equilibrium and common sense and so he preferred to ignore them, simply pretending that they didn’t exist. If an obstacle blocked his path, he walked around it, without altering his own pace in the slightest, and soon forgot it. He never had doubts, or hardly ever.

  Nonetheless, he knew how to reach an objective, so he was attentive to Alice’s moods in a way that was respectful, though slightly pedantic. If she didn’t talk, he asked her if something was wrong, but never twice in a row. He showed interest in her photographs, in how her mother was, and filled the silences with stories from his own day, amusing anecdotes he picked up around the ward.

  Alice allowed herself to be carried away by his self-confidence and gradually abandoned herself to it, as she had abandoned herself to the support of the water when as a little girl she played dead in the swimming pool.

  They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny is to coalesce at some point in space and time.

  Alice’s mother’s treatment had been suspended. With a nod of the head, her husband had finally given his consent to let her sink into painless sleep, under a heavy blanket of morphine. Alice merely waited for it to come to an end and couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty. Her mother already lived within her as a memory, settled like a clump of pollen in a corner of her head, where she would stay for the rest of her life, frozen in the same pile of soundless images.

  Fabio hadn’t planned to ask her and wasn’t the type for impulsive gestures, but that afternoon there was something different about Alice. A kind of nervousness emerged from the way she wove her fingers together and moved her eyes from side to side, always careful not to meet his own. For the first time since meeting her he was hasty and incautious.

  “My parents are going to the beach this weekend,” he said out of the blue.

  Alice seemed not to have heard. At any rate, she let the sentence drop. Her head had been buzzing like a wasps’ nest for days. Mattia hadn’t called her since his graduation, more than a week before, and yet it clearly was his turn now.

  “I thought you could come to dinner at my place,” Fabio tossed out.

  His confidence faltered for a moment in the middle of those words, but he immediately shook off his uncertainty. He plunged both hands into the pockets of his white coat and prepared to accept any kind of reply with the same kind of lightness. He knew how to build a shelter for himself even before he needed one.

  Alice smiled faintly, slightly panic-stricken.

  “I don’t know,” she said gently. “Perhaps it isn’t—”

  “You’re right,” Fabio interrupted her. “I shouldn’t have asked you. Sorry.”

  They finished their walk in silence and when they reached Fabio’s ward again he murmured okay, long and drawn out, as if speaking to himself.

  Neither of them moved. They exchanged a quick glance and immediately lowered their eyes. Fabio started to laugh.

  “We never know how to say good-bye to each other, you and me,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Alice smiled at him. She brought a hand to her hair, hooked a lock with her index finger, and tugged on it slightly.

  Fabio took a resolute step toward her and the gravel of the path crunched beneath his foot. He kissed her on her left cheek, with affectionate arrogance, and then stepped back.

  “Well, at least think about it,” he said.

  He smiled broadly, with his whole mouth, eyes, and cheeks. Then he turned around and walked confidently toward the entrance.

  Now he’ll turn around, thought Alice when he went through the glass door.

  But Fabio turned the corner and disappeared down the corridor.

  25

  The letter was addressed to Mr. Mattia Balossino, B.Sc., and to the touch it was so light and insubstantial it seemed impossible it could contain his whole future. His mother hadn’t shown it to him until dinner, perhaps out of embarrassment at having opened it without permission. She hadn’t done it on purpose, she hadn’t even looked at the name on the envelope: Mattia never got any mail.

  “This came,” she said, holding the letter over the plates.

  Mattia glanced quizzically at his father, who nodded at something vague. Before taking the letter he ran his napkin over his upper lip, which was already clean. Seeing the complicated circular logo, printed in blue next to the address, he had no idea what it might contain. He pressed on both sides of the envelope to take out the folded page inside it. He opened it and began to read, rather impressed by the thought that this letter was specifically for him, Mr. Mattia Balossino, B.Sc.

  His parents made more noise than necessary with their silverware and his father repeatedly cleared his throat. After reading it, Mattia refolded the page with the reverse sequence of gestures with which he had opened it, so as to return it to its initial form, and slipped it back into its envelope, which he then set down on Michela’s chair.

  He picked up his fork again, but was momentarily bewildered at the sight of the sliced zucchini on the plate, as if someone had made them appear there by surprise.

  “It sounds like a wonderful opportunity,” said Adele.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  As she spoke, Mattia’s mother felt heat flashing in her face. She was aware that it had nothing to do with the fear of losing him. On the contrary, she hoped with all her might that he would accept, that he would leave this house and the place that he occupied opposite her every evening at dinner, his black head dangling over his plate and that contagious air of tragedy surrounding him.

  “I don’t know,” Mattia replied to his plate.

  “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” his mother repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  Mattia’s father broke the silence that followed with random thoughts about the efficiency of northern Europeans, about how clean their streets were, putting it all down to the severe climate and the lack of light for much of the year, which limited distractions. He had never been anywhere of the kind, but from what he had heard that was clearly how it was.

  When, at the end of dinner, Mattia began stacking up the dishes, collecting them in the same order as he did every evening, his father put a hand on his shoulder and said under his breath go on, I’ll finish up. Mattia picked up the envelope from the chair and went to his room.

  He sat down on the bed and began turning the letter around in his hands. He folded it backward and forward a few times, making the thin paper of the envelope crack. Then he examined the logo beside the address more carefully. A bird of prey, probably an eagle, held its wings open and its head turned to one side so as to show its pointed beak in profile. Its wing tips and claws were inscribed in a circle, which a printing error had turned slightly oval. Another circle, larger and concentric with the preceding one, contained the name of the university that was offering Mattia a place. The Gothic characters, all those k’s and h’s in the name and the o’s with a diagonal line running through them, which in mathematics indicated a null set, made Mattia imagine a tall, dark building, with echoing corridors and high ceilings, surrounded by lawns wi
th grass cut to a few millimeters from the ground, as silent and deserted as a cathedral at the end of the world.

  In that unknown and far-off place lay his future as a mathematician. There was a promise of salvation, an uncontaminated place where nothing was yet compromised. Here, on the other hand, there was Alice, just Alice, and all around her a swamp.

  It happened as it had on the day he graduated. Once again his breath caught halfway down his throat, where it acted as a stopper. He gasped as if the air in his room had suddenly liquefied. The days had grown longer, and the dusk was blue and wearying. Mattia would wait for the last trace of light to fade, his mind wandering along corridors that he hadn’t yet seen, now and then bumping into Alice, who would look at him without a word, without so much as a smile.

  You’ve just got to decide, he thought. Go or don’t go. 1 or 0, like a binary code.

  But the more he tried to simplify things, the more confused he became.

  Someone knocked on the door of his room. The sound reached him as if from the bottom of a well.

  “Yes?” he said.

  The door opened slowly and his father poked his head in.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh”

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Pietro flipped the switch and 100 watts of light exploded in Mattia’s dilated pupils, which contracted with a pleasant pain.

  His father sat down on the bed next to him. They had the same way of crossing their legs, the left calf balanced on the right heel, but neither of them had ever noticed.

  “What’s the name of that thing you studied?” Pietro asked after a while.

  “What thing?”

  “That thing you wrote your dissertation on. I can never remember what it’s called.”

  “The Riemann zeta function.”

  “Right. The Riemann zeta function.”

  Mattia rubbed his thumbnail under the nail of his little finger, but the skin there had become so hard and calloused that he didn’t feel a thing. His nails slipped noisily over each other.

  “I wish I’d had your mind,” Pietro went on. “But I never understand a thing about math. It just wasn’t for me. You have to have a special sort of brain for some things.”

  Mattia thought there was nothing good about having his mind. That he would happily have unscrewed it and replaced it with a different one, or even with a package of biscotti, provided it was empty and light. He opened his mouth to reply that feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself, but he didn’t say anything. He thought about the time his teacher had sat him in the middle of the classroom, with everyone else staring at him like some exotic beast, and it occurred to him that it was as if he’d never moved from there in all those years.

  “Did Mom tell you to come?” he asked his father.

  The muscles in Pietro’s neck stiffened. He sucked in his lips and then nodded.

  “Your future is the most important thing,” he said in a vaguely embarrassed voice. “You need to think about yourself now. If you decide to go we’ll support you. We haven’t got a lot of money, but enough if you need it.”

  There was another lengthy silence, in which Mattia thought about Alice, and about the share of money that he had stolen from Michela.

  “Dad?” he said at last.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you leave, please? I have to make a phone call.”

  Pietro gave a long sigh that also contained a certain amount of relief.

  “Of course,” he said.

  He got up, and before turning around he stretched a hand toward Mattia’s face. He was about to caress his cheek, but stopped a few inches from the unruly tufts of his son’s beard. He redirected his hand to his hair, which he barely touched. After all, it had been quite a while since they had done such things.

  26

  Denis’s love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent. When he was nineteen, Denis found an advertisement for a gay bar on the last page of a local newspaper and tore it out, keeping the scrap of paper in his wallet for two whole months. From time to time he unrolled it and reread the address, even though he already knew it by heart.

  All around him, guys his age were going out with girls and by now they were used to sex, so much so that they’d stopped talking about it all the time. Denis felt that his only escape route lay in that piece of newspaper; in that address that had faded from the sweat of his fingertips.

  He went one rainy evening, without really having made his mind up to go. He put on the first thing he pulled out of his closet and headed out, giving a quick shout to his parents in the other room. I’m going to the movies, he said.

  He walked past the bar two or three times, circling the block every time. Finally he went in with his hands in his pockets and a confidential wink to the bouncer. He sat down at the bar, ordered a lager, and sipped it slowly, staring at the bottles lined up along the wall, waiting.

  A guy came over to him a moment later and Denis decided he’d be okay, even before he looked him properly in the face. The man started talking about himself, or maybe about some film that Denis hadn’t seen. He shouted in his ear but Denis didn’t listen to a word. He brusquely interrupted him saying let’s go to the toilet. The other guy was struck dumb and then he smiled, revealing bad teeth. Denis thought he was horrible, that his eyebrows almost joined up and he was old, too old, but it didn’t matter.

  In the toilet the guy pulled his T-shirt up over his belly and bent forward to kiss him, but Denis pulled away. Instead he knelt down and unbuttoned the other man’s pants. Damn, he said, you’re in a hurry. But then he let him get on with it. Denis shut his eyes and tried to finish as quickly as possible.

  He didn’t get a result with his mouth and felt completely hopeless. Then he used his hands, both of them, insistently. As the guy came he came too, in his pants. He almost ran from the toilet, without giving the stranger time to get his clothes back on. The same old sense of guilt took hold of him as soon as he was past the toilet door, and drenched him like a bucket of icy water.

  Outside the bar he wandered about for half an hour in search of a fountain to wash the smell off him.

  He went back to the bar on other occasions. Every time he talked to someone different and he always found an excuse not to give his real name. He never hooked up with anyone else. He collected the stories of people like himself, mostly keeping silent and listening. He slowly discovered that the stories were similar, that there was a process, and that the process involved immersion, putting your whole head under until you touched the bottom and only then coming up for air.

  Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their heart, as his love for Mattia had done. Each of them had been afraid and many of them still were, but not when they were here, among others who could understand, protected by the “scene,” as they put it. When he talked to those strangers Denis felt less alone and wondered when his moment would come, the day when he would touch bottom, resurface, and finally be able to breathe.

  One evening someone told him about “the cemetery lamps.” That’s what they called the little path up behind the graveyard, where the only light, faint and trembling, was from the tombstone lamps filtering between the bars of the big cemetery gate. They would grope about there, it was the perfect place to empty themselves of desire without seeing or being seen, merely putting their bodies at the disposal of the dark.

  It was at the lamps that Denis had touched bottom. He slammed into it with his face, chest, and knees, as though diving into shallow water. Afterward he never went back to the bar, locking himself away, more stubbornly than before, in his own denial.

  Then, in his junior year at university, he went to study in Spain. There, far from the probing eyes of his family and friends, far from all the streets whose names he knew, love found him. His name was Valerio and he was Italian like him;
young and scared to death like him. The months they spent together, in a little apartment a few blocks from the Ramblas, were quick and intense and they removed the useless cloak of suffering, as on the first clear evening after days of pouring rain.

  Back in Italy they lost sight of each other, but Denis didn’t suffer. With a completely new confidence, which he would never lose, he moved on to other affairs, which seemed to have been waiting for him for all that time, lined up in an orderly fashion just around the corner. The only old friendship he maintained was with Mattia. They spoke only rarely, mostly on the phone, and were capable of being silent for minutes at a time, each lost in his own thoughts, punctuated by the other’s reassuring, rhythmical breathing at the other end of the line.

  Denis was brushing his teeth when the call came. At his house they always answered after the second ring, the time it took to get to the nearest telephone from anywhere in the apartment.

  His mother called Denis it’s for you, and he took his time answering. He rinsed his mouth out well, passed the towel over it, and glanced once more at his two upper front incisors. Over the past few days he had had a sense that they were overlapping, because of his wisdom teeth pushing in from the sides.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  Mattia never introduced himself. He knew that his voice was unmistakable to his friend and anyway he didn’t like saying his name.

  “So, Mr. Graduate, how are you?” Denis said cheerfully. He wasn’t upset about the graduation business. He had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over that chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void. Mattia’s voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

  “Did I disturb you?” asked Mattia.