As a child I, too, had a nanny. Her name was Teresa, “Teresina” to us, and she lived across the river. I don’t remember much about her; I don’t recall, for example, ever having touched her or hugged her, nor do I recall her smell. People have lots of sensory memories, comforting, warm memories to return to, but not me: I easily erase whatever isn’t visual. I can call to mind only a few fragments about Teresa, like the way she cut up the potatoes she fried, in wedges, without peeling them first. I can also remember her stockings, opaque brownish hose whose thickness did not vary from one season to another. But the clearest episode concerning her, the one that displaced the others, goes back to the last time I saw her. By then I was in high school, and my mother decided that we had to give up the afternoon to go and call on my nanny. We went to see her at her row-house flat that I had visited many years earlier and of which I had no distinct recollection. It now seemed shabby, vaguely seedy to me. Teresina shared the four rooms with her son’s family and spent her days in an armchair from which she kept an eye on her hyperactive granddaughter, who cavorted around and sometimes jumped on her, like a macaque. So my parents had chosen someone poor to look after me: I don’t know why, but at that moment the revelation left me indignant. After exchanging pleasantries, we sat for a while, listening to her rasping breath. When we were about to leave, Teresina drew a bill out of her wallet, as if adhering to an old automatic reflex, and insisted that I take it. I was appalled, but, correctly interpreting my mother’s look, I accepted it.
I wonder what train of memories Emanuele will have of Mrs. A. when he is grown. There will be a lot fewer of them than I imagine, most likely. In any case, I mull it over, kicking off the covers for the umpteenth time and finally settling on a compromise (one leg in and the other out); I’m certainly not going to suggest he see her. When a relationship is severed, it’s best if it’s severed cleanly and permanently.
_____
Nora attributes the return of my insomnia to my work and only that. My contract with the university expires in a little over a year, and as of now there’s been no talk of renewing it. When I inquired, asking my supervisor about the position that the department has been promising to offer for years, he spread his arms. “What can I tell you? We’re waiting for one of the old ones to die. But those guys are hardy.”
He did not add anything more, nor was he sensibly tempted, being sixty-six himself, to include himself in the “hardy” group. He doesn’t care to dwell too much on the matter of my professional advancement; he finds it more pleasurable to ramble on about departmental intrigues and from there shift to politics in general. Sometimes he goes on like that until nine or ten o’clock at night, when the corridors empty out and the guards lock the doors, except for one side door that opens with a magnetic key card (and if by chance you’ve forgotten it, you’re in big trouble). For the most part, I nod, scribbling out a page of calculations. I’m his personal audience, and I have no choice. I don’t think he’s happy for us to spend so many hours together either—he always goes away irritated—but he likes to exercise the authority he has over me, and sequestering me in his office is still better than what’s waiting for him at home. He’s never explained why, but when talking about marriage he becomes more caustic than usual. When I told him that I was getting married, his comment was nearly as callous as what Nora’s father said to her: “The important thing is to keep separate accounts, because love is love, but money is money.” What my supervisor told me was, “It’s still a few months off. You have time to reconsider.” He came to the reception alone, stationed himself near the buffet table to make sure he didn’t miss any goodies and was among the last to leave, somewhat tipsy. I was told he didn’t say a word about the wedding the following morning; instead he complained about something in the food that made him sick.
His ironic statement about the elderly professors will have to be enough for me to defer, for a few months, my fear of finding myself unemployed. Nevertheless, I record the variation in the probability distribution of my academic future, the standing altered by a few decimals in favor of a move to another city, another country—or maybe a dignified surrender, to finally undertake a less noble plan.
_____
The hypothesis involving a foreign move has the ability to upset the family’s equilibrium. Every time I tell Nora about a research center where a group of young scientists are working in a field related to mine and producing “something really interesting,” whenever I reveal to her how working with my supervisor is eroding invisible parts of me and describe the benefit I would gain from getting out from under his influence (being able to sleep again at night, I’m sure of it), her face darkens. She offers a distracted murmur of assent while the silence she counters with immediately afterward implores me not to go any further.
The period in which we learned of her pregnancy was also the time when the move to Zurich, where I had won a four-year research grant, seemed like a definite decision. I was to precede Nora by a few months to allow her to give birth in Italy, and as soon as the baby’s documents were obtained, we would all three of us settle in the most alien canton of alien Switzerland. We made an on-site visit together to look for an apartment. We visited three in the same district, the area where the majority of physicists land because it guarantees an acceptable balance between the new salary and the rent, and because there is a movie theater. Nora barely entered the houses. She nodded mechanically to the real-estate agent and stroked an as-yet-invisible baby bump.
Caught between her strange apathy and my own insecurity, I began pressing her once we’d completed the rounds. So which one did she prefer? Wasn’t it better to give up some square footage for a small courtyard, in anticipation of when the child would begin walking? I listed the pros and cons of each option. She listened to me without saying a word. When she spoke, she did so calmly. “I can’t live with the smell of Indian food permeating the stairs. I can’t live on that carpet, nor on those marbleized floors. And I don’t want to go walking through these streets with our child. By myself.”
Her eyes filled up, but she didn’t cry. “I’m spoiled, I know. And I’m very sorry.”
Nonetheless, the plan remained standing for a few weeks, even after Nora was confined to bed and as Mrs. A. was already busying herself around our house, tactfully imposing her new order on our rooms and routines. “Who knows what garbage they eat up there?” she would comment whenever I dared bring up life in Zurich (many of Mrs. A.’s considerations began and ended with food; she viewed meals as the culmination of her days). I’m certain that she and Nora had discussed the move in detail and had already rejected it, though they merely hinted at it with a cunning that was totally feminine. Nora often exercises that kind of forcefulness in matters that concern us, consisting of a firm but gentle opposition: she enacts her will, bit by bit. With a spirit not unlike that with which she furnishes other people’s homes, she has also furnished my life, which before her was bare and unadorned.
Both women waited for me to grasp their decision, and then they granted me the benefit of formally making my own. One morning I wrote an e-mail in which I explained in just a few lines that due to complications in my wife’s pregnancy I was forced to give up my grant. My supervisor was scornful of such surrender. “Scientific discoveries are not fond of convenient lives, much less inconvenient wives,” he said. In actuality he was glad about my renunciation, since no one else would have quickly taken over the work that I did for him (the development of dozens of Feynman diagrams, substituting for him in the group-theory course, drafting clean copies of his notes, the numerical simulations that I had to run in the evening and check in the middle of the night—all the things that enabled him to poke around on the Internet most of the time and only rarely show off at the blackboard in his office, displaying how smoothly the algebra, in all its brazen beauty, flowed from the chalk he held).
That evening, however, descending the stairs in the institute’s most modern wing
, I, too, felt an unexpected relief, even a sense of gallantry, for how I had set aside my own ambitions in support of Nora’s serenity. My emigrant colleagues might have academic glory unlocked to them and spacious offices in glass-and-metal structures, but they would live far away, far off not only from here but far off from anywhere. They would meet and marry foreign women, “convenient wives,” for the most part Nordic, with whom they would communicate in an intermediary language, French or English, like diplomats. And I? I, on the other hand, had Nora, who understood every nuance of the words I uttered and every implication of those I chose not to say. Could I aspire to anything more than that or imagine risking it all for a grant, albeit a prestigious one? All progress made by physics from the beginning—heliocentrism and Newton’s law of universal gravitation; Maxwell’s synthetic, perfect equations and Planck’s constant; restricted and general relativity; multidimensional twisted strings and the most remote pulsars—all the glory of those discoveries taken together would not be enough to give me the same sense of satisfaction. I was mindful of the fact that romantic ecstasy was destined to last just a brief time (not Planck’s constant—that would remain forever), and I had enough experience in relationships to know that such bliss could just as quickly turn into its exact opposite—but for that evening at least I could cling to it. Returning home, I deviated from the shortest route and at the fish market bought enough fried fish to feed a family of four. There was never another mention of Zurich.
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And now here we are again. I’m back to speculating about European destinations that might reconcile my professional needs with Nora’s expectations and which at least have an Italian elementary school for Emanuele. Durham, Mainz, Uppsala, Freiburg—none of them meet all the criteria completely, so I cross them off in succession. When I finish that list, I move on to a different one: the names of the colleagues with whom I’ll be competing for the next research grant. I check out their recent work on the Net, the number of citations they’ve gathered, I enter the data into an app and calculate the scores to compare them with mine. I have good reason to believe—with a few points in my favor, assuming the estimate is correct and excluding departmental intrigues—that I can still make it through at the next round.
Even if that’s so, the same uncertainty will come up again in a few years, then yet again, until a stroke of luck appears (a well-timed series of broken femurs on the fifth floor of the physics faculty, for instance) or until, more likely, I decide to put aside an impractical dream and devote my energies to something more concrete. There are positions open in finance, software, business consulting: physicists are able to manage large quantities of information, they are versatile, and above all they do not complain—so they say.
I push further for commiseration from my psychotherapist and declare myself depressed, or at least about to be. He, after describing my depression as “at most theoretical,” prescribes ordinary Lexotan for the worst nights.
Here we are, then, all three of us absorbed by ourselves and no one else: Nora reeling from her proliferation of chores, Emanuele trying to suppress his longing for his nanny and me giving in to psychic weakness. A family just starting out is sometimes like that: a nebula of self-centeredness in danger of imploding.
_____
All of this is enough to make me forget Mrs. A.’s cough, which in the meantime has worsened to the point of not allowing her to sleep. Another insomniac, and not because her room is infested with ghosts—her ghosts have been her best friends for a long time—now every time she lies down, her chest begins to heave, until she’s forced to sit up again and gulp some more water, more cough syrup.
She’s also stopped going to Mass because she was disturbing people; she noticed how they began eyeing her with disapproval, how the shoulders of those in front twitched impatiently. On the last Sunday, she left a few moments before the Eucharist, awkwardly stepping on the foot of the person beside her as she made her way out of the pew. The coughing echoed against the high, unadorned vault, unbearably amplified.
On her walk home via the shortcut that runs through the birch trees, driven by anger, she wondered about the business regarding Communion (“business” is a word that comes to me when talking about her, since she used it so frequently: “a fine business” or “what is this business?” or “we have to settle the business about the socks”—she had a “business” for everything). She wondered whether the special mystique surrounding Communion wasn’t a lot of hype after all, dependent on the hymns, the words whispered by the officiant, the people lined up with bowed heads, hands folded in prayer. With that thought, Mrs. A. began slowly to break away from a faith that she had never doubted and that she could have used now more than ever. She would no longer go to confession, not even as the end approached. At a certain point, I think, she was convinced that this time it was up to the Lord to ask her for forgiveness.
In fact, one of the rare disagreements between us had to do with religion. For a while she had made up her mind to teach Emanuele some prayers, not paying much attention to our opinion. Not that Nora and I were totally against it, but we’d chosen to get married in a civil ceremony and we had never set foot in a church together, except for other people’s ceremonies or purely as tourists. For the sake of conformity, I had received the sacrament of baptism at twelve years of age, along with my First Communion and confirmation, in a kind of convenient three-in-one (my father, who didn’t at all agree with it, had gone to the priest with his hand rigidly outstretched and muttered something about Galileo’s recantation and the stake, causing the cleric to turn pale). As suddenly as it had appeared, my faith was soon spent.
Nora, more simply, has always been lukewarm with regard to God. As far as I am aware, she never prays and has worn an ebony rosary around her neck for as long as I’ve known her, oblivious to its symbolic import, just because she likes the way it looks. “What harm is there?” she replied when I seemed puzzled by such an insouciant attitude.
Emanuele seemed to sniff out our ambivalence. At the table he would start reciting Mrs. A.’s prayers, defying us with his eyes. We went on eating, as if we hadn’t noticed. When he didn’t stop, Nora told him gently but firmly that it was not the proper time, that he should save his prayers for when he was alone in bed.
I wonder if faith would seriously have taken root in our son if Mrs. A. had had more time to nurture it. Maybe it would have been a good thing for him: any kind of belief, rational or not, complex or simple depending on the need, is still better than none, I’d say. Often I have the feeling that those of us educated in the field of rigid consistency, fenced in by scientific rigor, struggle more than others. Maybe Mrs. A. was right to place her trust in the divine to some degree, just as she relied on the radio’s morning horoscope. Maybe Nora is right to wear her rosary around her neck so casually.
In a few months, Emanuele’s Catholicism vanished. During Mrs. A.’s funeral, I watched him: he couldn’t even keep up with the Our Father—he didn’t know the words—and he struggled to latch onto scattered bits and pieces, scanning around. Jesus will likely remain just one of many stories that have been told to him.
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We learned of Mrs. A.’s worsening condition through a phone call. It’s Nora who calls her one evening. In all those years, Babette has never once dialed the number of our home; I suspect she always paid a fixed rate on her phone bill and not a penny more. Nora has a hard time understanding what she says, since Mrs. A. is constantly interrupted by her coughing. She first went to her general doctor, who prescribed a cortisone inhaler, but it didn’t do any good. So she wasted fifteen precious days. She went back, and this time he made an emergency referral to a pulmonologist, who first ordered an X-ray and then, when he’d seen that, a CT scan with a contrast medium.
“A CT scan?” Nora asks, alarmed, drawing my attention as well.
A CT scan, yes, but the report hasn’t yet arrived. With the X-ray, however, she’d reve
rsed her route. After the pulmonologist, who pointed out a thickening on the right side—“it could be an infection, the start of bronchial pneumonia or bleeding, call it a shadow for the moment”—she went back to her general doctor, the only one who always speaks plainly to her and who did so on this occasion as well. The doctor held the plate up in front of him for a long time, studying it against the light from the window. Then he handed it back to her, rubbed his eyelids with the palms of his hands and said simply, “I wish you the best of luck.”
With that, Mrs. A. bursts into uncontrollable tears. CT scan or no CT scan, she knows. As Nora, teary and wide-eyed, forms the letter C with her fingers, a capital C for “Cancer,” mouthing the other letters and then pointing to her chest, Mrs. A., in a paroxysm of coughing and sobbing, rants about a bird that came to find her, a bird that, at the end of the summer, had brought her the seemingly fatal pronouncement.
La locandiera
The diagnosis is quickly made. No surprise for Mrs. A., nor for us at that point, though there is a certain amount of bewilderment. Among all cancers, lung cancer is by far the most easily attributable to lifestyle, to pernicious habits, to negligent behavior. Mrs. A. never smoked a cigarette in her life, not even as a young girl when she helped out her father in the tobacco shop; if an impatient customer lit one while still inside the store, she would open the back door to get rid of the stink. There is no significant incidence of malignancies in her family—a great-aunt with throat cancer, a second cousin with a pancreatic tumor—and her personal medical history is limited to an osteoarthritic condition and the usual childhood diseases. She followed a healthy diet; whenever she could, she ate vegetables from her own garden, she breathed clean air and never failed to stick to her regimen, ever. And still.
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