The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

  Mattia turned around and found another, identical towel. At the same point the letters ADR were sewn.

  He looked around more carefully. In the water-stained glass there was a single toothbrush and next to it a basket of things all jumbled together: creams, a red rubber band, a hairbrush with hairs attached to it, and a pair of nail scissors. On the shelf under the mirror lay a razor, with tiny fragments of dark hair still trapped beneath the blade.

  There had been a time when, sitting on the bed with Alice, he could scan her room with his eyes, identify something on a shelf and say to himself I bought that for her. Those gifts were there to bear witness to a journey, like little flags attached to stages of a voyage. They marked out the rhythm of Christmases and birthdays. Some he could still remember: the first Counting Crows record; a Galilean thermometer, with its different- colored bulbs floating in a transparent liquid; and a book on the history of mathematics that Alice had received with a snort but had actually read in the end. She preserved them carefully, finding an obvious position for them, so that it would be clear to him that she always had them before her eyes. Mattia knew it. He knew all that, but he couldn’t move from where he was. As if, in yielding to Alice’s call, he might find himself in a trap, drown in it, and be lost forever. He stayed there, impassive and silent, waiting until it was too late.

  Around him now there was not a single object that he recognized. He looked at his own reflection in the mirror, his tousled hair, his shirt collar slightly askew, and it was then that he understood. In that bathroom, in that house as in his parents’ house, in all those places, there was no longer anything of him.

  He remained motionless, getting used to the decision he had made, until he felt that the seconds were over. He carefully folded the towel and with the back of his hand he wiped away the little drops that he had left on the edge of the sink.

  He left the bathroom and walked down the hall. He stopped in the doorway of the living room.

  “I have to go now,” he said.

  “Yes,” replied Alice, as if she had prepared herself to say it.

  The cushions were back in their place on the sofa and a big lamp lit everything from the middle of the ceiling. No trace of conspiracy remained. The tea had grown cold on the coffee table and a dark and sugary sediment had settled at the bottom of the cup. Mattia thought that it was merely someone else’s house.

  They walked to the door together. He touched Alice’s hand with his as he passed close to her.

  “The card you sent me,” he said. “There was something you wanted to tell me.”

  Alice smiled.

  “It was nothing.”

  “Before you said it was important.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Was it something to do with me?”

  She hesitated for a moment.

  “No,” she said. “Just with me.”

  Mattia nodded. He thought of a potential that had been exhausted, the invisible vector lines that had previously united them through the air and had now ceased to exist.

  “Bye, then,” said Alice.

  The light was all inside and the darkness all outside. Mattia replied with a wave of his hand. Before going back in, she saw once again the dark circle drawn on his palm, like a mysterious and indelible symbol, irreparably closed.

  46

  The plane traveled in the dead of night and the few insomniacs who noticed it from the ground saw nothing but a little collection of intermittent lights, like a wandering constellation against the fixed black sky. not one of them lifted a hand to wave to him, because that’s something only children do.

  Mattia got into the first of the taxis lined up in front of the terminal and gave the driver his address. As they passed along the seashore a faint glow was already rising from the horizon.

  “Stop here, please,” he said to the taxi driver.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  He paid the fare and got out of the car, which immediately drove away. He walked across about ten meters of grass and approached a bench, which seemed to have been put there especially to look at the void. He dropped his bag on it but didn’t sit down himself.

  A strip of sun was already appearing on the horizon. Mattia tried to remember the geometrical name for that plane figure, bounded by an arc and a segment, but it wouldn’t come to him. The sun seemed to be moving faster than it did in the daytime; it was possible to perceive its velocity, as if it were in a hurry to come up. The rays grazing the surface of the water were red, orange, and yellow and Mattia knew why, but knowing added nothing and didn’t distract him.

  The curve of the coast was flat and windswept and he was the only one looking at it.

  At last the gigantic red orb detached itself from the sea, like an incandescent ball. For a moment Mattia thought of the rotational motion of the stars and the planets, the sun that fell behind him in the evening and rose there in front of him in the morning. every day, in and out of the water, whether he was there to look at it or not. It was nothing but mechanics, conservation of energy and angular momentum, forces that balanced one another, centripetal and centrifugal thrusts, nothing but a trajectory, which could not be anything other than what it was.

  Slowly the tonalities faded away and the pale blue of morning began to emerge from the background of the other colors and took over first the sea and then the sky.

  Mattia blew on his hands, which the brackish wind had made unusable. Then he drew them back into his jacket. He felt something in his right pocket. He pulled out a note folded in four. It was Nadia’s number. He read the sequence of numbers to himself and smiled.

  He waited for the last purple flame to go out on the horizon and, amid the dispersing mist, set off for home on foot.

  His parents would have liked the dawn. Perhaps, one day, he would take them to see it and then they would stroll together to the port, to breakfast on smoked salmon sandwiches. He would explain to them how it happens, how the infinite wavelengths merge to form white light. He would talk to them about absorption and emission spectra and they would nod without understanding.

  Mattia let the cold air of morning slip under his jacket. It smelled clean. not far away there was a shower waiting for him, and a cup of hot tea and a day like many others, and he didn’t need anything else.

  47

  That same morning, a few hours later, Alice raised the blinds. The dry rattle of the plastic slats rolling around the pulley was comforting. outside the sun was already high in the sky.

  She chose a CD from the stack next to the stereo, without thinking too much about it. She just wanted a little noise to clean the air. She turned the volume knob to the first red notch. Fabio would be furious. She couldn’t help smiling as she thought about how he would say her name, shouting to make himself heard over the music and lingering too long over the i, jutting his chin.

  She pulled off the bedsheets and piled them in a corner. She took clean ones from the closet. She watched them filling with air and then falling back down, undulating slightly. Damien Rice’s voice broke slightly just before he managed to sing, “Oh cuz nothing is lost, it’s just frozen in frost.”

  Alice washed calmly. She stayed in the shower for a long time, her face turned toward the jet of water. Then she got dressed and put a little makeup, almost invisible, on her cheeks and eyelids.

  By the time she was ready the CD had been over for some time, but she didn’t notice. She left the house and got into the car.

  A block from the shop she changed direction. She would be a bit late, but it didn’t matter.

  She drove to the park where Mattia had told her everything. She felt as if nothing had changed. She remembered it all, apart from the pale wooden fence that now surrounded the grass.

  She got out of the car and walked toward the trees. The grass crunched, still cold from the night, and the branches were full of new leaves. Some kids were sitting on the benches where Michela had sat so long before. In the middle of the table, cans
were arranged on top of one another to form a tower. The kids were talking loudly and one of them was moving wildly around, imitating someone.

  Alice walked over, trying to catch scraps of what they were saying, but before they could notice her she had walked on and headed for the river. Since the city council had decided to keep the dam open all year, hardly any water ran at that point. The river looked motionless in the elongated puddles, as if forgotten, exhausted. On Sundays, when it was hot, people brought their deck chairs from home and came down here to sunbathe. The bottom was made of white stones and a fine, yellowish sand. The grass on the bank was tall; it came up above Alice’s knees.

  She walked down the slope, checking with each step to make sure that the ground didn’t yield. She continued on to the riverbed, to the edge of the water. In front of her was the bridge and farther away the Alps, which on clear days like this seemed incredibly close. Only the highest peaks were still covered with snow.

  Alice lay down on the dry pebbles. Her bad leg thanked her by relaxing. The larger stones pricked her back, but she didn’t move.

  She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the water, all around and above her. She thought of Michela leaning over from the shore. Of her round face that she had seen in the papers reflected in the silver water. of the splash that no one had been there to hear and the wet icy clothes dragging her down. of her hair floating like dark seaweed. She saw her groping with her arms, waving them awkwardly and swallowing painful mouthfuls of that cold liquid, which dragged her farther down until she almost touched the bottom.

  Then she imagined her movement becoming more sinuous, her arms finding the right gestures and describing circles that gradually became wider, her feet stretching out like two flippers and moving together, her head turning upward, where some light still filtered in. She saw Michela rising back up to the surface and breathing, finally. She followed her, as she swam on the surface of the water, in the direction of the current, toward somewhere new. All night long, all the way to the sea.

  When she opened her eyes the sky was still there, with its monotonous and brilliant blue. not a cloud passed across it.

  Mattia was far away. Fabio was far away. The current of the river made a faint, somnolent swish.

  She remembered lying in the crevasse, buried by snow. She thought of that perfect silence. Also now, like then, no one knew where she was. This time too, no one would come. But she no longer expected them to.

  She smiled at the clear sky. with a little effort, she could get up by herself.