The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  The old Lancia started only at the second attempt and Crozza muttered a curse between his teeth.

  They drove down the avenue almost as far as the bridge, and then the photographer took a right and followed the road that ran along the river. When he changed lanes and switched on the right blinker to turn again, this time in the direction of the hospital, Alice suddenly froze.

  “But where . . . ?” she tried to say.

  He pulled up outside a shop with its security gate half closed, across from the entrance to the emergency room.

  “It’s none of my business,” he said, without looking at Alice, “but you’ve got to go in there. To Fabio, or some other doctor.”

  Alice stared at him. Her initial puzzlement gave way to fury. The road was silent. everyone was tucked away at home or in a restaurant for lunch. The leaves of the plane trees fluttered soundlessly.

  “I haven’t seen you like this since . . .” The photographer hesitated. “Since I’ve known you.”

  Alice considered that like this in her head. It sounded ominous and she glanced at herself in the mirror, but it showed only the side of the car. She shook her head, then unlocked the door and got out of the car. She slammed the door and without turning around she resolutely walked in the opposite direction of the hospital.

  She walked quickly, more quickly than she really could, to get away from that place and Crozza’s damned insolence, but after about a hundred meters she had to stop. She was out of breath and with each step she took her leg hurt more and more, pulsating as if asking her for mercy. The bone seemed to penetrate the living flesh, as if it had come out of joint again. Alice moved all her weight to the right and just managed to keep her balance, leaning one hand against the rough wall beside her.

  She waited for the pain to pass, for her leg once more to become inert as usual and her breathing to become an unconscious action again. Her heart pumped blood slowly, without conviction, but she could hear it even in her ears.

  You’ve got to go in there. To Fabio, or some other doctor, Crozza’s voice echoed in her head.

  And then? she thought.

  She turned back, toward the hospital, walking with difficulty and without any precise intention. Her body chose the way as if by instinct and the passersby she met on the sidewalk stepped aside, because Alice was staggering a little, although she wasn’t aware of it. Some of them stopped, unsure whether to offer to help, but then walked on.

  Alice stepped into the courtyard of Our Lady’s Hospital and didn’t think back to the time when she had walked along the same little avenue with Fabio. She felt as if she didn’t have a past, as if she had found herself in that place without knowing where she had come from. She was tired, with that tiredness that only emptiness brings.

  She climbed the steps holding on to the handrail and stopped in front of the doorway. She wanted only to get there, to activate the sliding doors and wait for a few minutes, just long enough to collect her strength and leave. It was a way of giving chance a little push, nothing more, to find herself where Fabio was and see what happened. She wouldn’t do what Crozza said, she wouldn’t listen to anyone, and she wouldn’t admit even to herself that she really hoped to find him.

  Nothing happened. The automatic doors opened and when Alice took a step back they closed again.

  What did you expect? she wondered.

  She thought about sitting down for a few seconds, hoping it would pass. Her body was asking her something, every nerve was screaming it, but she didn’t want to listen.

  She was about to turn around, when she heard the electric swish of the doors again. She looked up at the sound, convinced that this time she would really find her husband standing in front of her.

  The door was wide open, but Fabio wasn’t there. Instead, on the other side of the doorway, a girl was standing. It was she who had activated the sensor, but she didn’t come out. She stood right where she was, smoothing her skirt with her hands. At last she imitated Alice: she took a step back and the door closed again.

  Alice studied her, curious about that gesture. She noticed that she wasn’t all that young. She might have been the same age as Alice, more or less. She kept her torso bent slightly forward and her shoulders tightly curved, as if there wasn’t enough room for them.

  Alice thought there was something familiar about her, perhaps in her facial expression, but she couldn’t place her. Her thoughts closed in on themselves; they spun in the void.

  Then the girl did it again. She stepped forward, put her feet together, and a few seconds later stepped back.

  It was then that she looked up and smiled at Alice from the other side of the glass.

  A shiver ran down Alice’s spine, vertebra by vertebra, before losing itself in her blind leg. She held her breath.

  She knew someone else who smiled like that, merely arching her upper lip, barely revealing the two incisors, and leaving the rest of the mouth motionless.

  It can’t be, she thought.

  She stepped forward to see better and the doors remained wide open. The girl looked disappointed and stared quizzically at her. Alice understood and stepped back to let her go on with her game. The other girl continued as if nothing was wrong.

  She had the same dark hair, thick and wavy at the bottom, that Alice had managed to touch only a very few times. Her cheekbones protruded slightly and hid her black eyes, but as she looked at her Alice recognized the same expression that had kept her up till late so many nights: the same opaque gleam as she had seen in Mattia’s eyes.

  It’s her, she thought, and a feeling very like terror gripped her throat.

  She instinctively fumbled for the camera in her bag, but she hadn’t brought so much as a stupid Instamatic.

  She went on looking at the girl, not knowing what else to do. She turned her head toward her and her vision dimmed from time to time, as if her crystalline lens couldn’t find the right curvature. With her dry lips she pronounced the word Michela, but not enough air came from her mouth.

  The girl didn’t seem to tire of this. She played with the automatic door like a child. now she was taking small jumps, back and forth, as if to catch the doors out.

  An old lady walked over from inside the building. A big rectangular yellow envelope protruded from her bag, X- rays perhaps. without saying a word, she took the girl by the arm and led her outside.

  The girl didn’t resist. When she passed by Alice, she turned for a moment to look at the sliding doors, as if to thank them for amusing her. She was so close that Alice was aware of the displacement of air produced by her body. By holding out a hand she could have touched her, but it was as though she were paralyzed.

  She watched the two women as they walked slowly away.

  Now people were coming in and out. The doors were constantly opening and closing, in a hypnotic rhythm that filled Alice’s head.

  As if suddenly coming to, she called Michela, this time out loud.

  The girl didn’t turn around and neither did the old lady who was with her. They didn’t alter their pace by one iota, as if the name meant nothing to them.

  Alice thought she should follow them, look at the girl from closer up, talk to her, understand. She put her right foot on the first step and drew her other leg forward, but it remained frozen where it was, fast asleep. She found herself toppling backward. with her hand she sought the handrail, but didn’t find it.

  She collapsed like a broken branch and slid down the two remaining steps.

  From the ground she just had time to see the women disappearing around the corner. Then she felt the air becoming saturated with moisture and the sounds growing rounder and farther away.

  41

  Mattia had taken the three flights of stairs at a run. Between the second and the first he had bumped into one of his students, who had tried to stop him to ask something. He had brushed past him saying sorry, I’ve got to go, and in trying to avoid him he had almost stumbled. When he reached the entrance hall he had suddenly slowed down, t
o compose himself, but still walked quickly. The dark marble of the floor gleamed, reflecting things and people like a stretch of water. Mattia had given a nod of greeting to the doorman and gone outside.

  The cold air had taken him by surprise and he had wondered what are you doing?

  Now he was sitting on the low wall in front of the entrance and wondering why on earth he had reacted like that, as if all he had been doing all those years was waiting for a signal to go back.

  He looked again at the photograph that Alice had sent him. It was of the two of them, by her parents’ bed, dressed up as a bride and groom with those clothes that smelled of mothballs. Mattia looked resigned, while she was smiling. One of her arms was around his waist. The other held the camera and was partially out of the frame, as if she were now holding it toward him, as an adult, to caress him.

  On the back Alice had written only one line and below it her signature:

  You’ve got to come here.

  Alice

  Mattia tried to find an explanation for the message and, even more, for his own peculiar reaction. He imagined coming out of the arrivals zone of the airport and finding Alice and Fabio waiting for him on the other side of the barrier. He imagined greeting her, kissing her on the cheeks, and then shaking her husband’s hand by way of introduction. They would pretend to argue about who should carry the suitcase to the car and on the way they would try in vain to tell each other how life had been, as if it could really be summed up. Mattia in the backseat, them in the front: three strangers pretending to have something in common and scratching the surface of things, just to avoid silence.

  It’s pointless, he said to himself.

  That lucid thought brought him some relief, as if he were taking control of himself again after a moment of bewilderment. He tapped the photograph with his finger, already intending to put it away and go back to Alberto, to get on with their work.

  While he was still lost in his thoughts, Kirsten Gorbahn, a postdoc from Dresden with whom he had recently written some articles, came over to peer at the photograph.

  “Your wife?” she asked him cheerfully, pointing at Alice.

  Mattia twisted his neck to look up at Kirsten. He was about to hide the photograph, but then he thought it would be rude. Kirsten had an oblong face, as if someone had pulled it hard by the chin. In two years spent studying in Rome she had learned a little Italian, which she pronounced with all the o’s closed.

  “Hi,” Mattia said uncertainly. “No, she isn’t my wife. She’s just . . . a friend.”

  Kirsten chuckled, amused by who knows what, and took a sip of coffee from the polystyrene cup that she was holding in her hands.

  “She’s cute,” she remarked.

  Mattia looked her up and down, slightly uneasily, and then looked back at the photograph. Yes, she really was.

  42

  When Alice came to, a nurse was taking her pulse. She still had her shoes on, and was lying at a slight angle on top of a white sheet on a hospital bed by the entrance. She immediately thought of Fabio, who might have seen her in that terrible state, and suddenly sat up.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Lie down,” the nurse ordered her. “We’re going to do a checkup.”

  “There’s no need. Really, I’m fine,” Alice insisted, overcoming the resistance of the nurse, who tried to keep her where she was. Fabio wasn’t there.

  “You fainted, young lady. You have to see a doctor.”

  But Alice was already on her feet. She checked that she still had her bag.

  “It’s nothing. Believe me.”

  The nurse raised her eyes to the sky but didn’t stand in her way. Alice glanced around, lost, as if looking for someone. Then she said thank you and left in a hurry.

  She hadn’t hurt herself when she fell. She seemed merely to have banged her right knee. She felt the rhythmical pulsation of the bruise under her jeans. Her hands were a little scratched and dusty, as if she had dragged them along the gravel in the courtyard. She blew on them to clean them.

  She walked over to the reception desk and bent down to the round hole in the glass. The lady on the other side looked up at her.

  “Hello,” said Alice. She had no idea how to explain herself. She didn’t even know how long she had been unconscious.

  “A little while ago . . .” she said, “I was standing there . . .”

  She pointed to the spot where she had been, but the lady didn’t move her head.

  “There was a woman, by the entrance. I didn’t feel well. I fainted. Then . . . You see, I need to find out the name of that person.”

  The receptionist looked at her, bewildered, from behind the counter.

  “I’m sorry?” she asked with a grimace.

  “It sounds strange, I know,” Alice insisted. “But you’ve got to help me. Perhaps you could give me the names of the patients who had appointments in this department today. Or examinations. Just the women, I only need those.”

  The woman looked at her. Then she smiled coldly.

  “We aren’t authorized to give out that kind of information,” she replied.

  “It’s very important. Please. It’s really very important.”

  The receptionist tapped with a pen on the register in front of her.

  “I’m sorry. It really isn’t possible,” she replied irritably.

  Alice snorted. She was about to pull away from the counter, but then she approached again.

  “I’m Dr. Rovelli’s wife,” she said.

  The receptionist sat up straighter in her chair. She arched her eyebrows and tapped the register with her pen again.

  “I understand,” she said. “If you like I’ll let your husband know you’re here.”

  She picked up the receiver but Alice stopped her with a gesture of her hand.

  “No,” she said, without controlling the tone of her voice. “There’s no need.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, thanks. Never mind.”

  She set off toward home. All the way there she couldn’t think about anything else. Her mind was becoming clear again, but all the images that passed through it were obliterated by that girl’s face. The details were already blurring, plunging fast into the midst of an ocean of other memories of no importance, but that inexplicable sense of familiarity remained. And that smile, the same as Mattia’s, mixed with her own intermittent reflection on the glass.

  Perhaps Michela was alive and she had seen her. It was madness, and yet Alice couldn’t help believing it. It was as if her brain desperately needed that one thought. Clinging to it to stay alive.

  She began to think, to formulate hypotheses. She tried to reconstruct how things might have gone. Perhaps the old lady had kidnapped Michela, had found her in the park and taken her away, because she had a violent desire for a little girl but couldn’t have children. Her womb was defective or else she was unwilling to make a bit of room in it.

  Just like me, thought Alice.

  She had kidnapped her and then brought her up in a house a long way from there, with a different name, as if she were her own.

  But in that case, why come back? why risk being discovered after all those years? Perhaps she was being devoured by guilt. Or else she just wanted to tempt fate, as she herself had done outside the door of the oncology department.

  On the other hand, perhaps the old woman had nothing to do with it. Maybe she had met Michela a long time afterward and knew nothing about her origins, her real family, just as Michela remembered nothing about herself.

  Alice thought of Mattia, pointing from inside her car at the trees in front of him, his ashen, absent face that spoke of death. She was completely identical to me, he had said.

  Suddenly it seemed to her that everything made sense, that the girl really was Michela, the vanished twin, and that every detail now fell into place: the blank expanse of her forehead, the length of her fingers, her circumspect way of moving them. And more than anything that childish game of hers, that mo
re than anything.

  But just a second later, she realized she was confused. All those details collapsed into a vague sense of weariness, orchestrated by the hunger that had clenched at her temples for days, and Alice feared losing her senses all over again.

  At home, she left the door half open with the keys still in it. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard without even taking off her jacket. She found some tuna and ate it straight from the can without draining off the oil. The smell made her feel sick. She threw the empty can into the sink and picked up a can of peas. With her fork she fished them from the cloudy water and ate half of them, without breathing. They tasted of sand and the shiny skin stuck to her teeth. Then she pulled out the box of cookies that had sat open in the cupboard since the day Fabio had left. She ate five, one after the other, barely chewing them. They scratched her throat as she swallowed, like bits of glass. She stopped only when the cramps in her stomach were so strong that she had to sit down on the floor to withstand the pain.

  When it had passed, she stood up and walked to the darkroom, limping openly, as she did when she was alone. She took one of the boxes from the second shelf. The word Snapshots was written on the side in indelible red pen. She spilled the contents onto the table and spread out the photographs with her fingers. Some were stuck together. Alice quickly inspected them and at last found the one she was looking for.

  She studied it for a long time. Mattia was young, and so was she. His head was bent and it was hard to study his expression to determine the resemblance. A lot of time had passed. Perhaps too much.

  That fixed image brought others to the surface and Alice’s mind stitched them together to re- create movement, fragments of sounds, scraps of sensations. She was filled with searing but pleasurable Nostalgia.

  If she had been able to choose one point from which to start over, she would have chosen that one: she and Mattia in a silent room with their private intimacies, hesitant about touching each other but their outlines fitting precisely together.