Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  It looked like one of Mattia’s sketches, but blurry, badly drawn. And in the drawing, vibrant and unexpected, was Cecilia. Standing beside a Scénic, rummaging in her bag for the key. How had she managed to get in? To park inside? A privilege granted only to a few and never to the younger doctors—the woman definitely had hidden resources. To get a better look at her, to see what she was up to, my father had to lean over and peer through the new foliage of a tree. He didn’t want to expose himself too much because he’d noticed some people who’d stopped to talk on the other side of the courtyard. He didn’t want them to see him spying on a colleague, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the window. The people in the distance were mere shadows at the edge of his field of vision, but cautiousness and fear made them loom larger. Cecilia meanwhile activated the remote door opener, but the smart key fell to the ground, landing in a puddle. Leaning over even farther, my father saw that the cause of Cecilia’s difficulty was the couple of packages she was juggling in addition to her handbag. To free herself from the packages she set them on the roof of the car, then picked up the key and dried it off with a tissue. At that point, as if inspired by a spirit and will of its own, the key dropped a second time, into the same puddle.

  She didn’t pick it up right away. She leaned against the Scénic and stared at it. And my father stared at her staring at the key. The ground floor was about five feet above the level of the courtyard, and from where he stood he could see her quite well. He tried to read the expression on her face. He couldn’t make it out. There was a trace of sadness in her eyes, but also something that simply didn’t make sense: tenderness, affection. Toward the key that had fallen? Toward herself? She didn’t seem like the type of person to feel sorry for herself, nor someone who would take an incident like that as a sign of bad luck. He would have liked to see a face like that every morning when he opened his eyes (my father thought for the first time). No, that wasn’t right. Not a face like that—that face. Sudden, overwhelming desire: he wanted to leap down from the windowsill—swoop down like an angel in an ex-voto—and wheel around her, glide down to grasp her and snatch her away, save her from an impending danger. What had come over him? Were a pair of tender, somewhat mournful eyes all it took for him to start having visions? Of all the faces in his life, why that one? As if the others had paled and dulled. Why such joy, such hope? It made no sense, any more than feeling sorry for an object made of plastic and metal that keeps falling.

  Across the courtyard, meanwhile, the small group of people had gone their separate ways, and a man and child had emerged from the glass door of the building opposite. They walked slowly, approaching the parking lot. My father was afraid they might see him if they looked up, but he couldn’t make himself budge. Cecilia’s eyes, staring down at the key, were now desperate. It was strange that someone so competent and self-confident would get so disheartened over something so trivial. He thought of calling to her—to say hello, to shake her out of her reverie, to prevent strangers from catching her in that moment of despair. He, too, felt paralyzed by the fallen key. When he was a boy, soon after his father’s death or shortly before, coming out of his room in his pajamas one Sunday morning, he found himself in the doorway of the kitchen. His mother, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in front of her, hadn’t heard him approach. She was staring blankly, her right hand gripping her left wrist. And he didn’t know whether to leave or stay, whether to go in and pretend he hadn’t noticed or hug her, comfort her, if she needed to be comforted. What had he decided to do, in the end? Impossible to remember. But he remembered the floor being cold underneath his bare feet.

  As they came closer, the boy holding hands with the adult looked more and more like Mattia. He must have recently been discharged. He hadn’t had time to say goodbye and already he missed him. They walked firmly toward the Scénic, and my father desperately tried to identify the man leading the child as a pediatrician, but with every step that became more and more unlikely. He was tall and rather good-looking despite an angular face and a big nose.

  How does the face of a teenager turn into the face of a man? It doesn’t. Time was, people became adults, and you could tell. Now we’re born with more or less adult faces and we keep them our whole lives, because life isn’t as draining as it used to be. So you had aging children, like Cecilia, graying young men, like my father, and mature adults, who at forty reached the age suited to their features.

  How could he have been so naïve. As if a person suddenly disappeared just like that from someone’s life. He didn’t disappear. As if inertia didn’t govern everyone’s relationships. It did.

  In the space of a few seconds, Cecilia looked up, saw her son and husband (or ex-husband), picked up the key, and opened the car door. She greeted them, kissing her son on the head and the man on the mouth, grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him to her, laughing. The sadness of a moment ago seemed to have left no trace. The man walked to the other side of the car and opened the passenger door so the child could climb in. Last of all, Cecilia retrieved the packages from the roof of the car. They got in, closed the doors, and the Scénic pulled out.

  My father stayed there awhile looking out at the deserted courtyard, undecided whether to focus his acute, intense jealousy on the child or on the mother. He’d always thought he was incapable of reading people and he was right. But it was more than that. It was as if everything around him lacked a dash of imagination.

  * * *

  So then: at the beginning, an empty room like a stage; in the middle of it, a man hidden behind a column, observing the world; finally, a window. The idea is more or less the same. Sitting in the audience, he watched. Hidden, looking out, he watched.

  Looking out at the world was my father’s preference. His name was Claudio Viberti, but everyone in the hospital just called him Viberti, and over the years he, too, came to think of himself by that name, as if it were his first name.

  Writing is what the son prefers, the son who in those days didn’t exist and so had no name yet. No one can keep me from it, there is no present that is of greater interest to me than that distant past that I did not experience, about which I know almost nothing, and which I continue to imagine, fabricating other people’s memories.

  PART II

  (2003)

  ABANDON ME ON THE ICE PACK

  For some months Marta had been experiencing memory problems. She would repeat the same question or the same story three or four times in a row, she forgot where she’d put her keys or glasses just moments before, and now she had started leaving pots and pans to scorch on the stove. Giulia had noticed it and, worried, had pointed it out to Viberti, who acted as if he weren’t aware of it. But pretending is a subtle art that requires a lot of practice, guile, and nerves of steel, and Viberti wasn’t up to it. Giulia made him confess that, yes, he had noticed his mother’s memory lapses and had ignored the facts, deciding that there was nothing that could be done. Always the wrong tack to take. So Marta was taken to a geriatrician, and the tests ruled out Alzheimer’s but not senile dementia. In a woman of eighty-two the course of the illness was unpredictable; she might not recognize anyone in three or four years’ time or she could die at the age of a hundred with the same minor issues.

  A year after having met Cecilia in Pediatrics, Viberti, returning home one evening in May, stopped by to see Marta, as he often did, though never frequently enough to allay the feeling that he was neglecting his elderly mother, who lived just three floors below him. It sometimes seemed to him that his ex-wife had settled in a nearby apartment with the goal of fueling that guilt (guilt was the alimony Viberti paid to Giulia). Marta’s kitchen was plastered with notes written by Giulia or by Angélica, the Peruvian woman who looked after her. Prosciutto and stracchino cheese in the refrigerator; Heat for 4 minutes on High; This envelope contains six (6) Ibuprofen tablets, given to Marta today, April 23, by Giulia, which must last until Sunday evening (April 27?), the last parentheses added in Marta’s rounded, ornate handwriti
ng. The table was littered with old photographs on the backs of which Marta had been adding captions for months now. In the chalet at Montenegro Bagni, Marta is holding her “dear” puppy Haile, it was a “fashionable” name because Italy had just “conquered” Abyssinia. Or: Excursion to San Colombano. Pietro displays a “trophy” of porcini mushrooms. On virtually every photo there was at least one word in quotation marks. Giulia claimed that the proliferation of quotes was due to a specific neurological problem: Marta no longer remembered whether certain expressions could be used in certain contexts, everything seemed out of place and uncertain to her; better to distance herself from them.

  Viberti’s visits might last a few minutes or more than an hour. That evening they’d started talking about Stefano Mercuri, an old family friend, a doctor, who had been like an adoptive father and spiritual guide to Viberti. Mercuri had long since retired and lived on the Riviera di Levante, where Viberti visited him from time to time. Marta listened absently to the latest news of their friend, then changed the subject and started retelling a story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Tarchetti, which she called “scandalous.” The name of the protagonist (who may have been Russian, French, or Italian) was Cecilia, and the chance appearance of that name on his mother’s lips seriously upset Viberti, though the story left him somewhat indifferent (some kind of incest)—especially since his mother’s narration was even less consistent than usual.

  * * *

  After a restless night he awoke with the conviction that he could no longer put it off; he had to speak to Cecilia or stop seeing her. He was forty-three years old. At forty-three, one could have a child of fifteen or twenty, at fifty, one could become a grandfather, at seventy-five, a great-grandfather. His father and mother had married late; he was the son of elderly parents and now he, too, was getting on in years; he’d lost some time but his time wasn’t up, it was at a standstill, dormant, adrift, stagnant and swampy.

  He began the day with the sole intention of finding ten free minutes to go down to the ER as soon as possible to find her. He never did that—usually they would agree to meet from one day to the next or they’d send each other messages, but the previous afternoon, saying goodbye, Cecilia had mentioned she wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat with him the next day. He scrambled to put off his outpatient visits, raced down the stairs, dashed into the ER, and looked into the ward where Cecilia was on call. She barely raised her eyes from the desk and told him she’d be busy at lunch.

  Viberti left the ER without knowing where he was going or why. The thought that he couldn’t stand this torment much longer crossed his mind, and he was immediately surprised. It was the first time in his life that he’d described an attraction or feeling with the word “torment,” the first time he’d doubted his ability to carry on. He’d always believed he was capable of enduring the most painful trials, certainly more painful than an infatuation or falling in love. Should he call it that? He wasn’t sure. But precisely because he was a loner, as his mother had described him the night before, precisely because he was acquainted with and dwelled in solitude, he didn’t need anyone, he’d never needed anyone, he was self-sufficient and then some. In any case, and this he was sure of: it was important to never feel sorry for yourself, ever.

  He kept walking briskly as if he were trying to run from the prospect of making a fool of himself, but in fact after two right turns he found himself returning to the ER via Radiology. That department must have been built or renovated in the fifties: the wooden moldings, baseboards, windows, and doors were pale, with shiny blue Formica panels, and the contrast between the two materials dated the work. For some reason that type of workmanship had become a mark of modernity and for a period of several years had been used extensively in schools and hospitals, only to later be replaced by metal and plastic. The work might have been done by the hospital’s on-site carpentry shop, which had existed until the early seventies, when Viberti, on a school trip to the hospital, had visited the workshop with his class to see how the lathe and milling machine worked. He had a clear recollection of the strong, pungent smell of the wood, the unbreathable air, the two carpenters who had been transplanted up north from Tuscany, craftsmen who in their spare time built inlaid furniture and bric-a-brac but who out of necessity had taken more practical jobs. When a classmate asked if they also made wooden legs for amputees there were several stifled laughs, and he, already quite shaken by their visit to the operating rooms, had fainted. When he came to, he found himself lying on the ground, his feet elevated on a low stool and his head resting on a soft bed of sawdust and wood chips. He’d never passed out like that again. And that might have been during the period when Marta was trying to starve him to death.

  Seeing that he’d come back after just a few minutes, the nurse at the reception desk looked at him with surprise. Cecilia was showing a medical student how an EKG in the cardiology textbook looked like the one they had just performed on a patient. Her tone was playful. Trust me, she said, things are often simpler than they look. The student walked away, somewhat troubled and still skeptical, and Cecilia looked at Viberti, smiled at him, and said: “Sometimes they don’t believe us.” Viberti slid the book left open on the desk over to him, turned to the blank flyleaf, and in the space hidden beneath the jacket flap wrote: I need to talk to you. Let’s eat together. Then he shoved the book back to Cecilia.

  She didn’t understand at first that it was a message, that she should read it, and when she read it she seemed uncertain and vaguely embarrassed. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, as if someone were spying on them, though the nurse nearby didn’t seem very interested in their business.

  He hadn’t expected Cecilia to have any doubt about the nature of their talk—his blush, his uneasiness, his look gave him away. An overture like that, for him, was virtually the height of intimacy. He felt exposed, and though the clues were obvious, she was far from the answer and getting colder.

  “Nothing,” Viberti stammered, “there’s no hurry…”

  Cecilia looked at him, confused. She told him she had agreed to eat with two colleagues. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

  He went to eat alone behind the usual column and brooded over the situation, hardly raising his eyes from his plate of boiled vegetables, analyzing and retracing each and every moment of the scene in the ER. What had he been thinking? Why that particular day, why not a month ago, or a year ago, or six months after he’d met her? For a year he’d acted as if nothing had happened, and then suddenly he’d realized that the woman had become irreplaceable.

  He’d spent the long weekend of April 25, Liberation Day, with three friends and their families. Had it been the children who’d made him feel his failure more intensely?

  Had it been the story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Tarchetti that pushed him over the edge? Or Marta’s condition, or the fear of growing old alone…? But if any of these were the case he would have been better off enrolling in a tango class or taking Spanish lessons, or bridge, or he could have taken a trip, a singles cruise. If he wanted to find a mate, anything would have been better. And besides, she might not even be his type (especially since Viberti had never really understood what the expression meant).

  * * *

  “She’s not your type,” Antonio Lorenzi, his pediatrician friend, had remarked a few months earlier, “why are you attracted to her?”

  Viberti mumbled that he didn’t know. As if a person always knew why he did things.

  “Yes, but there must be something about her that appeals to you.”

  “At first I didn’t like her much,” he lied. “She’s one of those doctors who call you from the ER asking for a bed and won’t leave you alone until you give it to them. But then we became friends and I started to want to see her.”

  “Do you talk about work?”

  “That, too. She’s very good.”

  “Good as a doctor?”

  Viberti nodded.

  “And what do you want from her, do you want to talk about medicine wi
th her? You talked about medicine with Giulia, too.”

  “I like her because there’s something about her that isn’t quite right … She dresses funny, her T-shirts are always tight and her pants baggy…”

  “They all dress like that.”

  “Yes, but she’ll put on a perfect white blouse, and then she’ll wear a shapeless sweater, full of holes, over it.”

  Antonio burst out laughing and Viberti told him to go to hell.

  They were a group of friends, old schoolmates, most married with children, Antonio separated with children, Viberti divorced with no children—though according to the others, Viberti’s divorce was an annulment in disguise, it didn’t count as a divorce and it didn’t count as a marriage. It hadn’t been like Antonio’s blood-sweat-and-tears separation, it hadn’t been a marriage with passion, bickering, long faces, joy, satisfaction, and frustration like the marriages of the other three. Every so often they played tennis together, and in the teasing that took place week after week, on the courts or in the locker room, in the endlessly repeated gibes and wisecracks that only they understood and were allowed to toss at one another, in the oral repertoire of their friendship, Viberti’s soubriquet was “Claudio, who didn’t consummate.”

  Unconsciously, not ever having spoken to one another about it, let alone to him, the group preferred that he remain a bachelor. He was their mascot. When he went on vacation with them it was only for brief periods of time—any longer and it didn’t work. Whether or not their children came along, it didn’t work, they all knew it. His friends’ idea of his private life was nebulous. Yes, he’d had a couple of affairs after the divorce; one woman refused to sleep at his house because she said there was a “ghost” there. But they didn’t know much more.

  Since his own divorce, Antonio took it for granted that he and Viberti would be a steady couple. Every Tuesday or Wednesday evening that winter, Antonio invited Viberti over to watch the game. Wednesday, Antonio had his two sons. The house was a mess; a housekeeper came three mornings a week—to “ward off the threat of disease”—but Antonio refused to run the dishwasher and washing machine, or do any cooking or cleaning. Every now and then it was Viberti who summarily tidied up the kitchen, during a break in the game. Maybe when he talked about Cecilia, Antonio was simply worried that his friend might remarry. Maybe he was jealous.