The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  “No. Did I disturb you?” Denis teased.

  “I was the one who called you.”

  “Of course, so tell me: I can tell from your voice that something’s up.”

  Mattia remained silent. Something was up, it was there on the tip of his tongue.

  “Well?” Denis pressed. “And this something would be?”

  Mattia exhaled loudly into the receiver and Denis became aware that he was having difficulty breathing. He picked up a pen beside the telephone and started playing with it, passing it between the fingers of his right hand. Then he dropped it and he didn’t bend down to pick it up. Mattia still wasn’t speaking.

  “Shall I start asking questions?” said Denis. “We could do it so that you—”

  “I’ve been offered a position abroad,” Mattia interrupted. “At a university. An important one.”

  “Wow,” Denis observed, not surprised in the least. “That sounds fantastic. Are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  Denis pretended to laugh.

  “You’re asking me that when I haven’t even finished university? I’d go in a second. A change of air always does one good.”

  He thought of adding and what is there to keep you here? But he didn’t say it.

  “It’s because something happened, the other day,” Mattia ventured. “The day I graduated.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Alice was there and . . .”

  “And?”

  Mattia hesitated for a moment.

  “Well, we kissed,” he said at last.

  Denis’s fingers stiffened around the receiver. He was surprised by his reaction. He was no longer jealous of Alice, there was no point, but at that moment it was as if an undigested bit of the past had come back up his throat. For a moment he saw Mattia and Alice hand in hand in Viola’s kitchen, and he felt Giulia Mirandi’s invasive tongue forcing its way into his mouth like a rolled- up towel.

  “Hallelujah,” he remarked, trying to sound happy. “You two have finally done it.”

  “Yeah.”

  In the pause that followed both of them wanted to hang up.

  “And now you don’t know what to do,” Denis struggled to say.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you and she are now, what would you say . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Ah.”

  Denis ran the nail of his index finger along the curled wire of the telephone. At the other end Mattia did the same and as always he thought of a DNA helix, missing its twin.

  “Numbers are everywhere,” said Denis. “They’re always the same, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Alice is only here.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve already made up your mind.”

  Denis heard his friend’s breath easing and becoming more regular.

  “Thank you,” said Mattia.

  “For what?”

  Mattia hung up. Denis spent another few seconds with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the silence inside it. Something within him went out, like one last ember that had stayed lit for too long under the ashes.

  I said the right thing, he thought.

  The busy signal sounded. Denis hung up and went back into the bathroom to check on those wretched wisdom teeth.

  27

  “¿Qué pasa, mi amorcito?” Soledad asked Alice, tilting her head slightly to catch her eye. Ever since Fernanda had been in the hospital she had eaten at the dinner table with them, because father and daughter facing each other, alone, was unbearable for both of them.

  Alice’s father had developed the habit of not changing when he came home from work. He had dinner in his jacket and tie, slightly loosened, as if he were merely passing through. He held a newspaper open on the table and looked up only to make sure that his daughter was gulping down at least the occasional mouthful.

  The silence had become part of the meal and disturbed only Sol, who often thought back to the rowdy meals at her mother’s house, when she was still very young and could never have imagined she would end up like this.

  Alice hadn’t even looked at the cutlet and salad on her plate. She took little sips of water, crossing her eyes as she drank and regarding the glass resting on her lips as seriously as if it held some kind of medicine. She shrugged and flashed a swift smile at Sol.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not very hungry.”

  Her father nervously turned the page. Before setting the paper back down he gave it an impetuous shake and couldn’t help glancing at his daughter’s full plate. He didn’t comment and started reading again, beginning a random article in the middle, without grasping its meaning.

  “Sol?” asked Alice.

  “Yes?”

  “How did your husband win you? The first time, I mean. What did he do?”

  Soledad stopped chewing. Then she started again, more slowly, to gain some time. The first image that ran through her head wasn’t of the day she met her husband. Instead she thought back to that morning when she had gotten up late and wandered barefoot around the house, looking for him. Over the years all the memories of her marriage had become concentrated in those few moments, as if the time spent with her husband had been only the preparation for an ending. That morning she had looked at the previous night’s dirty dishes and the cushions in the wrong place on the sofa. Everything was just as they had left it and the sounds in the air were the same as ever. And yet something, in the way things were arranged and the way the light clung to them, had left her frozen in the middle of the sitting room, dismayed. And then, with disconcerting clarity, she had thought he’s gone.

  Soledad sighed, feigning her usual nostalgia.

  “He brought me home from work on his bicycle. Every day he came with his bicycle,” she said. “And he gave me some shoes.”

  “What?”

  “Shoes. White ones, high heels.”

  Soledad smiled and indicated the length of the heels with her thumb and index finger.

  “They were very pretty,” she said.

  Alice’s father snorted and shuffled in his chair, as if he found all this intolerable. Alice imagined Sol’s husband coming out of the shop with the shoe box under his arm. She knew him from the photograph that Sol kept hung over the head of her bed, with a dry little olive branch slipped between the nail and the hook.

  For a moment Alice felt light-headed, but her thoughts immediately turned to Mattia, and stayed there. A week had passed, and he still hadn’t called.

  I’ll go now, she thought.

  She slipped a forkful of salad into her mouth, as if to say to her father look I’ve eaten. The vinegar stung her lips slightly. She was still chewing as she got up from the table.

  “I’ve got to go out,” she said.

  Her father arched his eyebrows.

  “And might we know where you’re going at this hour?” he asked.

  “Out,” said Alice defiantly. Then she added, “To a girlfriend’s,” to soften the tone.

  Her father shook his head, as if to say do what you like. For a moment Alice felt sorry for him, left on his own like that behind his newspaper. She felt a desire to hug him and tell him everything and ask him what she should do, but a moment later the same thought made her shiver. She turned around and headed resolutely for the bathroom.

  Her father lowered the newspaper and with two fingers he rubbed his weary eyes. Sol turned the memory of the high-heeled shoes around in her head for a few seconds, then put it back in its place and got up to clear the things away.

  On her way to Mattia’s house, Alice kept the music turned up, but if when she got there someone had asked her what she was listening to, she wouldn’t have been able to say. All of a sudden she was furious and she was sure that she was about to ruin everything, but she no longer had any choice. That evening, getting up from the table, she had crossed the invisible boundary beyond which things start working by themselves. I
t was like when she was learning to ski, when she would move her center of gravity too far forward by an insignificant couple of millimeters, just enough to end up facedown in the snow.

  She had been to Mattia’s house only once before, and only as far as the living room. Mattia had disappeared into his room to change and she had had an embarrassing chat with his mother, Mrs. Balossino, who observed her from the sofa with a vaguely worried air, as if Alice’s hair were on fire or something, without even offering her a seat.

  Alice rang the doorbell and the display beside it lit up red, like a final warning. After a few crackles Mattia’s mother answered in a frightened voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Alice, Mrs. Balossino. I’m sorry about the time, but . . . is Mattia there?”

  From the other end she heard a thoughtful silence. Alice pulled her hair over her right shoulder, having the disagreeable impression of being observed through the lens of the intercom. The door opened with an electrical click. Before coming in, Alice smiled at the camera to say thank you.

  In the empty hallway her footsteps echoed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Her bad leg seemed to have lost all life, as if her heart had forgotten to pump blood into it.

  The door to the apartment was ajar, but there was no one to welcome her. Alice pushed it open and said, “Hello?” Mattia emerged from the sitting room and stopped at least two meters away from her.

  “Hi,” he said, without moving his arms.

  “Hi.”

  They stood looking at each other for a few seconds, as if they didn’t know each other at all. Mattia had crossed his big toe over his second one, inside his slipper, and by squashing one over the other and against the floor he hoped he could break them.

  “Sorry if I’m—”

  “Won’t you come in?” Mattia broke in automatically.

  Alice turned to close the door and the round brass handle slipped from her sweaty palm. The door slammed, shaking the frame, and a shiver of impatience ran through Mattia.

  What’s she doing here? he thought.

  It was as if the Alice he had been talking to Denis about only a few minutes before wasn’t the same one who had just dropped by without warning. He tried to clear his mind of that ridiculous thought, but the irritation remained in his mouth like a kind of nausea.

  He thought of the word hunted. Then he thought about when his father used to drag him onto the carpet and imprison him between his enormous arms. He tickled him on his tummy and on his sides and he exploded with laughter; he laughed so hard that he couldn’t breathe.

  Alice followed him into the sitting room. Mattia’s parents stood waiting, like a little welcoming committee.

  “Good evening,” she said, shrinking back.

  “Hi, Alice,” replied Adele, without moving.

  Pietro, on the other hand, came over and unexpectedly stroked her hair.

  “You’re getting prettier and prettier,” he said. “How’s your mother?”

  Adele, behind her husband’s back, held a paralyzed smile and bit her lip for not having asked the question herself.

  Alice blushed.

  “Same as usual,” she said, so as not to appear overdramatic. “She’s getting by.”

  “Say hello from us,” said Pietro.

  All four of them stood in silence. Mattia’s father seemed to stare right through Alice and she tried to distribute her weight uniformly on her legs, so as not to look crippled. She realized that her mother would never meet Mattia’s parents and she was a bit sorry about that, but she was even sorrier to be the only one thinking anything of the kind.

  “You two go on,” Pietro said at last.

  Alice passed beside him with her head lowered after smiling once more at Adele. Mattia was already waiting in his room.

  “Shall I close it?” asked Alice once she was inside, pointing to the door. All her courage had deserted her.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mattia sat on the bed, with his hands crossed on his knees. Alice looked around the room. The things that filled it seemed not to have been touched by anyone; they looked like articles that had been carefully and calculatedly displayed in a shopwindow. There was nothing useless, not a photograph on the wall or a stuffed animal from childhood, nothing that gave off that smell of familiarity and affection that teenagers’ rooms usually have. With all the chaos that filled her body and her head, Alice felt out of place.

  “Nice room,” she said, without really meaning it.

  “Thanks,” said Mattia.

  There was an enormous list of things to say floating over their heads and both of them tried to ignore it by looking at the floor.

  Alice slid her back along the wardrobe and sat down on the ground with her working knee against her chest. She forced a smile.

  “So, how does it feel to have graduated?”

  Mattia shrugged and smiled very slightly.

  “Exactly the same as before.”

  “You really don’t know how to be happy, do you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Alice let an affectionate mmm slip through her closed lips and thought that this embarrassment between them made no sense and yet it was there, solid and ineradicable.

  “But things have been happening to you lately,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Alice thought about whether to say it or not. Then she said it, not a drop of saliva left in her mouth.

  “Something nice, no?”

  Mattia drew in his legs.

  Here we go, he thought.

  “Yes, actually,” he said.

  He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to get up and go and sit next to her. He was supposed to smile, look into her eyes, and kiss her. It was that simple. It was mere mechanics, a banal sequence of vectors that would bring his mouth to meet hers. He could do it even if at that moment he didn’t feel like it; he could trust the precision of his movements.

  He made as if to get up, but somehow the mattress kept him where he was, like a sticky morass.

  Once again Alice acted in his place.

  “Can I sit next to you?” she asked.

  He nodded and, even though there was no need to, moved slightly to one side.

  Alice pulled herself to her feet, with the help of her hands.

  On the bed, in the space that Mattia had left free, there was a piece of paper, typed and folded in three like an accordion. Alice picked it up to move it and noticed that it was written in English.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It came today. It’s a letter from a university.”

  Alice read the name of the city, written in bold in the top left-hand corner, and the letters dimmed under her eyes.

  “What does it say?”

  “I’ve been offered a grant.”

  Alice felt dizzy and panic turned her face white.

  “Wow,” she lied. “For how long?”

  “Four years.”

  She gulped. She was still standing up.

  “And are you going?” she asked under her breath.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Mattia, almost apologizing. “What do you think?”

  Alice remained silent, with the sheet of paper in her hands and her gaze lost somewhere on the wall.

  “What do you think?” Mattia repeated, as if she really hadn’t heard him.

  “What do I think about what?” Alice’s voice had suddenly hardened, so much that Mattia gave a start. For some reason she thought about her mother in the hospital, dazed with drugs. She looked expressionlessly at the sheet of paper and wanted to tear it up.

  Instead she put it back down on the bed, where she had been about to sit down.

  “It would be important for my career,” Mattia said by way of self-justification.

  Alice nodded seriously, with her chin thrust out as if she had a golf ball in her mouth.

  “Fine. So what are you waiting for? Off you go. Besides, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything to
keep you here,” she said between clenched teeth.

  Mattia felt the veins in his neck swelling. Perhaps he was about to cry. Ever since that afternoon in the park the tears were always there, like a lump that was hard to swallow, as if that day his tear ducts, clogged for so long, had finally opened and all that accumulated stuff had finally begun to force its way out.

  “But if I went away,” he began in a slightly quivering voice, “would you . . . ?” He stopped.

  “Me?” Alice stared at him from above, as though he were a stain on the bedcover. “I’d imagined the next four years differently,” she said. “I’m twenty-three and my mother’s about to die. I . . .” She shook her head. “But none of that matters to you. Go ahead and worry about your career.”

  It was the first time she had used her mother’s illness to wound someone, and she didn’t particularly regret it. She saw Mattia shrink in front of her eyes.

  He didn’t reply and in his mind ran through the instructions for breathing.

  “But don’t you worry,” Alice went on. “I’ve found someone it does matter to. In fact that’s what I came here to tell you.” She paused, her mind blank. Once again things were taking a course of their own; once again she was tumbling down the slope and forgetting to stick in her ski poles to brake. “His name’s Fabio, he’s a doctor. I didn’t want you to . . . you know.”

  She uttered the phrase like a little actress, in a voice that wasn’t hers. She felt the words scratching her tongue like sand. As she uttered them, she studied Mattia’s expression, to pick up a hint of disappointment that she could cling to, but his eyes were too dark for her to make out any spark in them. She was sure none of it mattered to him and her stomach crumpled like a plastic bag.

  “I’ll be off,” she said quietly, exhausted.

  Mattia nodded, looking toward the closed window to eliminate Alice completely from his field of vision. That name, Fabio, had pierced his head like a splinter and he just wanted Alice to leave.

  He saw that outside the evening was clear and he sensed a warm wind was about to blow through. The opaque pollen of the poplars, swarming under the beam from the streetlights, looked like big legless insects.

  Alice opened the door and he got to his feet. He walked her to the front door, following a few steps behind. She distractedly checked in her bag that she had everything, to gain another moment. Then she murmured okay and left.