Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  In the late afternoon he settles into the pediatricians’ lounge to fill out a self-evaluation form. The sun cuts diagonally across the long blue table and Viberti sits in the most shaded corner, away from the whitish glare. He spent the weekend at Mercuri’s and fell asleep on the beach, getting a sunburn. For three days he thought of nothing but Cecilia; the visit to his old friend made him feel his solitude more painfully (perhaps because Mercuri was alone all his life and has now solved the problem by marrying his housekeeper). He’d like to confess his tenacious obsession to the older man, or better yet he’d like to have him meet Cecilia, introduce her to him and receive his blessing. He’d like to hear him say: “She seems like an excellent doctor.” Why is it so important to him that Cecilia be an excellent doctor?

  Today he saw her again at lunch and it calmed him. They joked about his sunburn. Seeing her every day is absurd and comforting. The self-evaluation poses a difficulty. There’s a question, the last one, which last year he wasn’t able to answer: How do you rate the overall level of your performance? It’s a bit like when you go to the United States and they make you fill out that green card where you have to declare that you are not a terrorist, a murderer, or a thief. The year before, Antonio and Giulia had suggested he write: Fair, but I can always improve. They were joking, but he took them seriously and responded in just those words. Then he regretted it, because the personnel office probably thought he was being sarcastic. So today he goes straight to the final question and without thinking twice writes Fair, the answer he’ll continue to give in the years to come, until the last self-evaluation before his retirement.

  He turns the pages and starts the questionnaire from the beginning. The door opens and Cecilia comes in. The doctors’ lounge, as it did a year ago, now becomes the scene of future memories, at least as long as the minds in question are able to retain and recall them.

  Cecilia isn’t wearing her doctor’s coat. Time shifts gear, all the moments spent with this woman race by too swiftly, she is too quick to appear and disappear.

  “I thought you’d left.”

  “I’d forgotten a TB case report.”

  “And you came back specially?”

  Cecilia goes over to the window. Outside, the wide tree-lined boulevard is teeming with rush-hour traffic, and beyond it lies the river with two solitary rowers paddling, and beyond the river the green woods of a hill that rises steeply, houses set among the trees.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Cecilia shrugs. Something’s wrong, but what? She turns, looks into his eyes, goes over to him, maybe it was him she was looking for, maybe she wants to talk to him.

  She sits down beside him. The collar of her blouse is a little crooked, Viberti would like to straighten it but he restrains himself.

  “The sunburn looks worse, you should put some lotion on it.”

  “Yes, I can feel myself burning.”

  Cecilia lifts her arm, straightens the collar of his white coat. What a coincidence! He’s about to tell her, “Your collar is a little crooked too, let me fix it for you,” but she doesn’t lower her arm. She slides her fingers to the lapel, just above the pocket. She seems to want to take one of his pens or maybe the stethoscope that Viberti still has around his neck. It’s unclear whether that arm is a bridge about to unite them or the measure of a distance keeping them apart.

  Then Cecilia leans forward, pulls him to her, and kisses him on the mouth. Viberti is too stunned to part his lips; Cecilia breaks off, but doesn’t move away.

  They remain close, their breaths mingling, hardly any space between their faces. Five seconds and Viberti recovers. He grabs Cecilia by the back of her neck and sticks his tongue in her mouth with a groan of relief, because this is the time and place to fulfill a desire that has traveled far, was presumed lost and mourned for dead. He kisses her with an impetus that would amaze or disconcert or amuse or excite those who know him, a determination to stay in that hot, moist mouth, to make it his permanent residence, because he has to punish her for making him wait so long, because he’s afraid she might change her mind, because he likes it and knows that no matter how long it lasts it will never be enough.

  They break off suddenly, both looking toward the door. But the sound was only in their heads. There’s no one there.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Viberti says.

  Cecilia nods, looking at him as if she wants to kill him. This woman is scared, this woman scares him, this woman isn’t scared of anything.

  He gathers his papers, gets up, and remembers that he’s supposed to go to the union meeting with Antonio. He takes out his cell phone, calls him: “I screwed up, sorry, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Antonio sighs: “I can’t make it either,” but he hadn’t thought of telling him. Maybe he wouldn’t have let him know either, if it weren’t this that was keeping him from going, but in any case he doesn’t have time to think about it now.

  They leave the doctors’ lounge. Two nurses down the hall greet them with a nod and they respond by raising the same arm, as coordinated as a pair of synchronized swimmers.

  “I screwed up?” Cecilia whispers, smiling, as Viberti takes off his white coat in the locker room. Right, he actually said “I screwed up.” What was he thinking? Why not “I have an appointment” or “I don’t feel well, I’m going home”? If he really wanted to make an excuse. But why does he need to make excuses?

  He kisses her again, pushing her against the metal lockers. He wants her to feel how turned on he is, but her backpack is between them. Viberti thinks her mouth is exactly the right size, that their mouths were made to fit together. She pushes him away. “Let’s go.”

  They leave the hospital. They walk quickly; they’re fleeing, or chasing something, they’re late, they have to make up for lost time. They look around. They don’t run into any of their colleagues, but if they had they wouldn’t have noticed.

  “My car,” he says. He points to the other side of the boulevard like a military commander; neither of them smiles at the gesture.

  On the opposite sidewalk they pass by their café. “I need something to drink,” Cecilia says.

  “Yes, but not here.”

  They get into Viberti’s Passat, stop after a couple of blocks, check out a café from the outside, it seems too dismal, they look for another one, they find one. Viberti double-parks alongside some green garbage bins, gets out and goes around the car, and only when he’s already on the sidewalk does he realize that Cecilia hasn’t gotten out, she’s jammed in, she can’t get the door open even though she’s slamming it rather persistently against a Dumpster. He gets back in the car, shifts into reverse, makes sure the door is clear so Cecilia can get out, then moves forward again, gets out, and locks the car. During all these maneuvers neither of them comments or jokes or smiles even for a second; they’re serious and focused as if they were about to rob the café instead of getting something to drink.

  This time they don’t drink mineral water. Cecilia orders a Campari and, although he doesn’t particularly like the taste of Campari, Viberti has one, too. They’re sitting at a table in the back of the room, facing the wall. Viberti, leaning forward, strokes the inside of Cecilia’s thigh as she spreads her legs and slides toward him on the chair, looking at him languidly, her eyelids half-lowered and her lips parted. She is the picture of a woman who wants to fuck, Viberti thinks, he must have seen it in some film, then immediately corrects himself: no, not a picture, it’s she herself, she’s the woman who wants to fuck, in the flesh, and it’s him she wants to fuck. Can it be? It seems so, but it’s still strange. They stammer words of little importance and almost no meaning: “How did it dawn on you,” “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” “All of a sudden like that.”

  They drink the Campari quickly—as soon as they set their glasses down on the table they pick them back up to take another sip, they toss them down in five minutes. Their thoughts are very confused, not so much about what they want but about how to get it. They get back in t
he car. They come out on one of the streets bordering the hospital, they end up in a traffic circle, they make two complete turns around it, with no comment, not a smile, not even when the tires screech during too sharp a turn. Like with all spare parts, it’s not worth trying too hard to save money on tires, better to replace them at regular intervals, every year and a half, every two, every three years, depending on how much you use the car; there’s nothing worse than having to change a tire yourself, and it’s impossible to know when they’re worn through, you can’t trust the tire guys, obviously, just decide for yourself how long they’ll last and then don’t worry about it. Viberti then turns onto a bridge, crosses the river, and drives into a wooded area surrounding a school. Antonio lives not too far away, the neighborhood is familiar to him, and around the corner Viberti knows a dead-end street lined with plane trees, fairly quiet and secluded, where they can talk. Where they can calmly decide where to go to do what they want to do. They should go farther away from the hospital to make sure no one sees them, but what the hell, Viberti thinks, if she’s not worried about it why should he be worried? Besides, they’re only stopping to talk, that is, essentially to decide what to do and where to go, that is, Viberti is essentially going to try to persuade Cecilia to go straight to his house to have sex, even though getting into his building without running the risk of being seen by Giulia will be a whole other story, but they’ll face one problem at a time. But as soon as the Passat is safely parked on the dead-end street, deserted at that hour as it always is, as soon as the engine is turned off, the windows lowered to let in the cool air of late afternoon, as soon as they find themselves close and alone, seemingly alone, safe from prying eyes and unwelcome encounters, Cecilia and Viberti don’t start talking.

  Without a word they cling to each other and kiss each other and suck each other’s lips and bite and touch, pressing and rubbing, they undo buttons and loosen belts and slip their hands under shirts and into jeans. Viberti grabs a breast and squeezes the erect nipple between his thumb and forefinger, Cecilia pulls out his dick and whips her hand up and down, scratching his stomach with her nails, Viberti (in thirty seconds, leaning out of the driver’s seat with a contortion that he’ll look back on for months with pride and disbelief) manages to lower her jeans and panties to mid-thigh and dives in to kiss and lick the triangle of brown fluff that looks like a stylized drawing of a cunt between closed legs, the drawing of a horny teenager, but this isn’t a drawing, down here there’s a real cunt, can it be? Yes, it seems it can, and although Viberti has seen a cunt or two in his life, it’s as if he were about to see one for the first time. It’s like the mythical first time he never had because he preferred to erase the real, disappointing first time from memory, if only the damn panties would come down lower so she could open her legs, if only the legs would open and let him see and kiss and lick what he wants to see and kiss and lick, if only she would slide down on the seat and raise her legs on the dashboard, if only they were in a bed instead of in a car, but suddenly Cecilia pushes him off and screams loudly, loudly enough to be heard at the hospital emergency room: “Stop!”

  Viberti raises his head and she hugs him, hiding her face against him and resting her cheek on the patch of chest exposed by his unbuttoned shirt; she’s breathing heavily. They’re both breathing heavily now that they’ve stopped, and Viberti, rather alarmed, rather worried, is trying to figure out what could be the matter. “Sorry,” he says finally, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” But he really did mean to, and she really meant to also, so why is she shaking her head, she’s shaking her brown hair against him and holding him even tighter, so what’s the problem?

  “There’s someone back there.”

  Viberti turns his eyes to the rearview mirror and sees a man with a dog ten yards from the Passat, in silhouette, the unmistakable image of a dog walker with an animal that can’t make up its mind to do its business. He’s not a Peeping Tom; on the contrary, he’s turned his back because he must have seen that there was someone in the car. Viberti could wait, but the man seems vaguely familiar to him. Who does he know who owns a dog? If it were winter, it would already be dark at that hour. There’s too much light.

  He starts the car and leaves by driving onto the wide sidewalk between the trees and the houses so that the dog walker, across the street, won’t be able to see their faces even if he wants to. Meanwhile, Cecilia has straightened her clothes again, she’s pulled up her jeans and is buttoning her blouse, concealing the superb splendor she’d shown. “Don’t worry,” Viberti says, “he didn’t see us.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “No, why? Who was he?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see him.”

  “It was nobody.”

  “Somebody from the hospital.”

  “Is it so bad if they see us? Let’s go to my house, we’ll feel safer.”

  “And maybe we’ll run into your ex on the stairs…”

  “She has office hours until eight.”

  Cecilia shakes her head. “No, I have to go now, it’s late.”

  “Please.”

  She squeezes his arm, and smiles. “I want to, too, but I can’t. We’ll talk about it with cooler heads tomorrow.”

  Viberti isn’t sure that a cool head will encourage the realization of his desires, but he nods: “All right.”

  He takes her to where she left her car, and despite the fact that they are nearly across from the hospital and she’s evidently afraid of being seen, Cecilia gives him a long, passionate kiss, or at least that’s how it seems to Viberti. Otherwise maybe, when he watches her get out and head toward the Scénic, he wouldn’t think: That woman is mine, that woman is mine, that’s my woman.

  * * *

  Viberti was right, a cool head never encourages the realization of certain desires, because the next day Cecilia came to the café all worked up, explaining that she hadn’t slept a wink all night, but that she’d come to an important decision.

  “You don’t look tired, or maybe insomnia makes you even more desirable,” he said. The words were so unlike him that the panic he was feeling was even more evident. It wasn’t the assumed self-assurance of an actor, it was like flailing your arms as you fall through space, a useless conditioned reflex.

  Cecilia had thought and thought about what had happened, tossing and turning in bed, and had decided that it was all wrong. It was wrong because she couldn’t afford to, she was no longer mistress of her life, plus she wasn’t being honest with him, he was an important friend, but he would never be anything more. “I was an idiot, no, more precisely I was a shit, people shouldn’t act like that, I don’t know what came over me, or maybe I do know—anyway, I’m terribly sorry, now you’ll hate me, and you’re right, you’re absolutely right, you should hate me.” A speech delivered unhurriedly, calmly, almost in a subdued undertone.

  Viberti was stunned, he hadn’t seen it coming, it struck him head-on. Not that he felt he had found the woman of his life (or at least the second part of his life), not that he imagined being able to actually marry her, but he certainly hadn’t thought it would end so quickly, before it even began. And it certainly seemed like it was really over, the tone and composure used to announce dire decisions proved it.

  “Last night I was upset, I felt like I was someone else, I didn’t know why I’d done it, and why I then suddenly wanted to take it all back, not just for me, not for what it meant for me, but because I realized what I’d done to you. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  Speaking softly, Viberti said there was no need for forgiveness, there was nothing to forgive, and he certainly wasn’t capable of hating her, but he didn’t understand and maybe he shouldn’t even try to, they would talk about it later (with cool heads? How cool-headed did they need to be?). He told her it was best to let a few days go by, so that both of them would be thinking more clearly.

  “All right, but I’m already thinking clearly, that’s what I want you to understand. I’m quite clear about the si
tuation. I did something foolish and you shouldn’t expect it to happen again; please, tell me you won’t expect anything from me anymore, because it won’t happen, and it would be worse if you kept…”

  Interrupting her, Viberti stood and said he had to go back to the hospital, and although he was beginning to get irritated he managed to take her hand and tell her almost affectionately that he didn’t expect anything, he was a big boy, inured to this kind of thing, and he didn’t expect anything from anyone.

  “But don’t desert me now,” she said.

  “What do you mean? It seems to me it’s the other way around.”

  “No, no, don’t desert me, you don’t know how important you are to me, don’t desert me, let’s keep seeing each other, keep being friends.”

  “All right.”

  “No, don’t say ‘all right’ like that. Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “We’ll see each other at lunch tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He left her in front of the café rummaging through her backpack, looking for the car key. He took off nearly at a run; he didn’t believe in a fit of madness, he didn’t believe it had been a slip. He’d like to force her to take another look at herself: not just the kisses and embraces and caresses, not just what she had done or would have been ready to do, but how she had done it. A long close-up of her face from the moment they’d shared their first kiss until they’d parted: passion and abandon weren’t a lapse, they weren’t a mistake, they weren’t foolishness. He wanted to force her to open her eyes. Her real face was that face, not the wooden mask she’d just shown him.