Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  * * *

  She had loved him. It wasn’t true that she didn’t remember. She’d loved him and she had proof of it. There had been gestures, places, words; they acted as clues, memories that she guarded closely, at times loathing or feeling ashamed of them. Every now and then smiling over them. She’d loved him, a long time ago. Only if she’d loved him could she have done and said and thought certain things. She had told at least two girlfriends that she was completely infatuated with him. She’d written “I love you” on a bus ticket and put it in his coat pocket so he’d read the message when he stamped the ticket in the machine (only now did the sexual innuendo of the act occur to her). She didn’t know how to iron but sometimes she had to iron a shirt of his, and as she ironed it she thought he’d notice how badly it was ironed and he’d feel the wrinkles on his skin and he’d think of her.

  Motionless in bed, sleepless nights. She didn’t want to take sleeping pills every night, maybe she should have. But she was so tired that deep down she liked the simple fact of lying there in bed, motionless. And also knowing it. As if knowing that she still had four hours of dark immobility ahead of her were more restful than spending that time unconscious in sleep. She didn’t move, didn’t turn over, didn’t straighten her legs or hug her knees. She lay motionless in one position, facedown on her stomach. And her thoughts weren’t necessarily unpleasant thoughts. Her mother’s words, after-school arrangements, incidents from the ER. Calm, slow processions, each thought leading another by the hand, or one hand on the shoulder of the thought ahead of it, like the Beagle Boys. Anxious thoughts arose every now and then out of fear and fueled it, but they too moved along unhurriedly.

  The first thought always concerned her child. Let the boy be all right, let him continue to eat, let him become more cheerful and spirited, let him grow stronger, let his arms and legs grow sturdier, especially his legs: the thought of her son’s scrawny legs was the advance guard sent out by anxiety to reconnoiter. After which she thought and thought about his meals, comparing them, recalling them, summoning up details from recent days, as well as times from previous weeks that had signaled some progress (when he’d asked for a second helping, even a small one, when he’d shown a liking for a certain dish—and then she’d remember, make a mental note of that dish, create variations, use it as a staple to make him eat more) or a minor setback (decipher the cause without him noticing, figure out if he’d eaten too many snacks or heavy foods at school, or if he had any allergies, find out if something had upset him). Overcoming her anxiety, making his terribly skinny figure seem innocuous, driving back the bleakest thoughts by making a list of things to do. First, don’t make him feel like he’s under observation. Second, forestall his refusals. Third, take your time planning dinners. Fourth, engage him by appearing distracted. Fifth, let him help you set the table. Sixth, don’t overdo it when filling his plate. Seventh, don’t rush him (don’t watch him out of the corner of your eye, don’t check on him, don’t touch his plate, don’t correct his posture or the way he holds his knife and fork). Eighth, let him have a choice. Ninth, accept it when he leaves something, but remember how much he left. Tenth, if he’s happy he’ll feel hungry. The Ten Commandments, the Covenant of the Dinner Table.

  * * *

  Before and after the first separation, the sleepless nights weren’t at all restful. Back then her thoughts raced along swiftly, rising in intensity and then suddenly plummeting in twisted downhill spirals, against a backdrop of catastrophic scenarios.

  When she and Luca had shared that bed, she would toss and turn to wake him, irritated that he went on sleeping, unaware, or seemingly unaware, of the intensity of her anger. Angry that he woke up rested and better equipped than she was to face another day of fighting. When he finally left and she had the double bed to herself, she’d tossed about in all directions, kicking and getting it out of her system as she’d never been able to before. But there was no longer anyone to awaken. Those had been nights of nervous gymnastics, of anxiety and fear. Then she’d given in to a sleeping pill.

  Mattia had been ill; Luca came back home for a few months and then left again. Now she saw him once or twice a week, depending on her shifts. Peaceful meetings on the landing, the children entering the house, passed from one warden to another (they had stopped calling it a “prisoner exchange,” sarcasm had lost much of its appeal), and him lingering for five minutes of very civil conversation, encouraging and comforting. Whatever the topic of their talk, his words said that they could do it, lots of couples were in their situation, there was nothing dramatic about it. That’s what the words said, and she submitted to them without putting up any resistance, neither curbing nor encouraging it, accepting each conversation for what it was. But meanwhile she kept thinking—and it had come to her often, recently, like the refrain of a song—she kept thinking: How strange, I loved this man.

  The second time he left, there was no violent wrench. Maybe there’d been no wrench at all, ever. He hadn’t been the only one who’d gone, maybe. Both of them had agreed to leave the past behind. If they hadn’t gotten back together for those few months, following Mattia’s hospitalization that winter, she might not have mislaid the memory of her love. But she wasn’t even sure of that. A year ago: How could she remember what she’d been capable of feeling a year ago? A year ago she still felt an attraction. Though she hated him more, she felt a serious sexual attraction toward her future ex-husband. She hated him and she wanted to fuck him. Many nights, during the prisoner exchange, she felt like grabbing him by the tie, pulling him into the house, and taking him to bed. And then throwing him out again. But it was difficult to explain the real difference between sex and love to a man (men were sure they knew it, they thought they knew it). Then, too, what was the difference?

  A moment ago it had seemed quite clear to her. Maybe she was getting sleepy. When her thoughts became confused and contradictory it meant that she was getting sleepy (thoughts that the next day would seem confused and contradictory). But she wasn’t getting sleepy. She was just confused. What she meant was, if they hadn’t gotten back together, she would have always nurtured in some corner of her mind the idea that she still loved him or that she could go back to loving him. Instead they’d gotten back together and she’d suddenly lost the impetus of hostility she had toward him. They had an emergency to deal with, their child needed them. She’d begun to see Luca as an old friend who could help her.

  She could gladly see that new old friend of hers a couple of times a week without missing him. But when he came back home for a time, they’d again made love as husband and wife. Luca no longer seemed horrified by her, as he’d claimed to be a few months before. When he couldn’t touch her. When he said he no longer recognized her. He’d come back home because their child was ill and they’d made love again to conceive him a second time, to have him be reborn with a new, normal appetite. After a while, they’d no longer felt like it. The expression “once the novelty wears off…” came to mind. More appropriate in their case was “once the novelty wears off again…” And instead of feeling angry or bitter over the burst of sarcasm, she laughed alone during her sleepless nights, her face pressed against the pillow.

  Luca was trying to take it slow, he was afraid of wounding the child. But she was afraid that if they took their time, he’d never leave again. She felt panicky at the thought that he might want to stay. She spoke to him and suggested they take it step by step, according to a plan. Conspire to avert the children’s suspicions, get them used to it little by little, immunize them. She was so worried he might not want to leave again that she’d have been willing to let him have all the furniture—like the sacrifice a lizard makes, leaving its tail behind for its pursuer—all the books, the CDs and DVDs. Luca began to sleep out “for work” a couple of nights a week. By January, the nights away became four, there was a new apartment and the children went there every so often. Everything was going well. Without having to explain (they weren’t good at explaining, and in any case there
was no need for explanations), it was all working out.

  She’d thought the children would no longer react. But one day, out of the blue, Michela told her that she should get a new bed now. Now that their father had really gone, she should get a single bed. If she was no longer married she couldn’t sleep in a double bed. “Who says I won’t get married again?” She didn’t say that. You couldn’t joke like that, or at least she couldn’t. She would have to learn. If she’d had the presence of mind to say, “Maybe I’ll get married again, I might need room for another man,” with a playful smile on her lips, her daughter might have been less obsessed. Or maybe she’d have become even more insufferable. Or maybe the problem wasn’t Michela, and the desire to get a single bed was written on her face; maybe her daughter had simply read it aloud.

  Where could she have gotten such an idea—that a mother doesn’t have sex? At a certain point, she’d lost the urge. She’d stopped feeling like it during all the fighting three years ago. It had returned during the separation, but maybe it was just anger in another form. It had gone away again. “It comes and goes,” that, too, was pretty funny, though not as funny as “once the novelty wears off again…” “It comes and goes,” patients said that often. The pain comes and goes, not even pain is consistent. Sleep comes and goes. She remembered a woman, sixty years old, who came to the ER accompanied by her husband at three in the morning, dressed in her Sunday best. Written on the triage chart was the notation: Can’t sleep. She’d gotten scared because she couldn’t sleep. It had never happened before.

  * * *

  Between traffic lights, she often thought about the shy, reserved internist. Or she recalled the sleepless nights and the chain of thoughts she had spun out during the night, lying motionless on her stomach in the dark. Later she would relate some of these thoughts or anecdotes to the internist, who would inquire discreetly, subtle and cautious, probing only where he perceived no resistance.

  For example: while eating a slice of watermelon, the boy had started laughing over something silly his sister had done, and a small piece got sucked up his nose from his throat. After a while it came out through a nostril and the girl screamed: “Mattia’s nose is bleeding watermelon!” The watermelon nose was funny because the boy suffered from frequent epistaxis. Citing harmless disorders was comforting to her as well as to the shy internist listening to her.

  If Viberti hadn’t encouraged her to tell the story, and hadn’t recalled and mentioned it occasionally as a small sign of their closeness, the episode would have faded and then vanished; instead it fed off repetition and over time grew more resilient. The internist was reserved, but curious. He had a nice way of inquiring, without being intrusive, and he didn’t get much, because she didn’t tell him anything important. But he was omnivorous, interested in any topic, any small incident, maybe just to hear her talk. Or maybe just to see her. There, that’s where her morning’s rumination had been heading as she drove to the hospital. The shy internist was in love with her.

  The idea bloomed in the car like an overpowering perfume (the aftershave or cologne patients doused themselves with before coming to the ER). Too big a car, like the bed she’d left an hour and a half ago without getting back to sleep, a double bed of a car. All the cars moving in a row from one traffic light to another were extensions of beds. People at the wheel or sitting on a bus or waiting to cross the street, their eyes sleepy or worried or absorbed, but she especially noticed the eyes that were irritable, grumpy, like those of children dragged out of bed.

  If she had the morning shift she left before the children, who were then taken to school by the housekeeper or their grandmother. It was better for her to go and pick them up, later on; picking them up was the hardest part. The main hitch after school was Michela with her numerous social engagements: there was always a friend to invite or another friend’s invitation already accepted, arrangements made with complete disregard for the needs of others.

  But before picking the kids up at school, at lunch she would see the shy internist. Who was in love with her. That’s what she called him to herself, the shy internist, while in public she called him Viberti. At the hospital everyone spoke in familiar terms, but doctors were addressed by their last names, nurses by their first. For patients first and last names were reversed: Santi Luciano, Rocca Vincenza. Hierarchies. Every now and then, in her own mind, she called him “my sweetheart.” She wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was in love with her. He was shy so he hid it. There was an eighty percent chance he was, or was ready to fall in love at the first sign of encouragement from her. Encouragement that she intentionally didn’t offer, nor did he ask for any. He was content to see her at lunch, and that was hard to understand. A man of forty.

  In the early days, when Mattia was hospitalized, the internist couldn’t hide his joy at seeing her. Joy, excitement, whatever it was, he was awkward and content. He was extremely happy to see her and didn’t hide it; either he couldn’t hide it or he didn’t want to. About a month, more or less, after their first meeting, something happened, he’d become more cautious. Someone had told him that Luca had come back home. That same someone might have told him that they’d separated again, this time for good. But he hadn’t pressured her recently, on the contrary. Should he have? What did she expect from him?

  If she expected him to court her more insistently, she should maybe think again, she was likely to be disappointed. Let’s suppose that’s what she expected. And let’s suppose he was merely a decent man, concerned about the child and consequently about the mother, a childless man who had never been interested in children, but who now kept asking about Mattia as if deep down he’d adopted him. Or maybe he was so partial to the table behind the column that he didn’t want to give it up at any cost and that’s why he continued to show up for lunch with her. Just maybe.

  There was an eighty percent chance he was in love with her, but a twenty percent chance that he was fond of the child or the table in the café, whereas she needed to feel desired. In that case it was possible that she needed to be courted and needed to lay herself open to the mute adoration of someone, anyone, like a statue of the Madonna. And it was possible that the realization that Luca no longer desired her (she realized it, somewhat surprised, each time he came to pick up or drop off the children) wasn’t at all as liberating as she told herself it was.

  The trees along the avenues were sprouting tender little green leaves that didn’t yet hide the skeleton of the branches, young trees all skin and bones. She liked the shy internist. Yes, he was a nice man. Nose and mouth were nothing special. But the eyes fooled her. They seemed sad, the sad eyes of a dejected dog. Then all of a sudden they stared at her and they were arresting, full of passion. Serious, committed passion; not a game. A sad dog who could look at you intensely. Making promises that maybe he couldn’t keep. Completely different from Luca, or completely different from how Luca was with her. Luca was convinced he had a situation under control, even when he didn’t. The internist was so insecure that she often felt like hugging him or patting him encouragingly on the shoulder. So let’s suppose she needed to be loved by a man who was insecure. For how long would the insecure man continue to love her in silence, content with her Virgin Mary–like apparitions in the dim café?

  She found a parking space. She headed for the ER. An insecure man, in love with her, wouldn’t impose conditions on his love. Was that what she was thinking? For example: if she were to tell him the entire story, just as it had happened, he wouldn’t think badly of her. Was that what she wanted? Fortunately as soon as she entered the hospital she wouldn’t be able to keep thinking; six hours of respite lay before her like a vacation.

  * * *

  The beach seemed bigger, but it was the same as always: white and gray pebbles and darker gravel along the shoreline, a handful of black, shiny rocks on one side and in the center the rusty iron frame of a small pier whose blue wooden planks were still missing. The summer crowd hadn’t arrived yet, and there were no rows of u
mbrellas and lounge chairs to regulate the distribution of families and groups of friends; Mattia had noticed it immediately. It was a long holiday weekend: April 25, Liberation Day, gorgeous weather, the water extremely cold though some were already trying to swim. After months spent cooped up in stuffy rooms with artificial lighting, the brightness and fresh air were overwhelming, all that sky seemed to crush you.

  Sitting a few yards from shore, Cecilia and her mother were exchanging remarks in a slow-motion dialogue, while the children had run off down the beach to play. After a moment Mattia had come back excited and out of breath and said, “There are no umbrellas, there are no chairs.” They started laughing. “No, there aren’t.” An excellent opportunity to steer the conversation onto less problematic terrain, to talk about the child without talking about his problems. They hadn’t been to the shore at this time of year in three years and he couldn’t remember the beach being deserted. “How sweet, he thought it stayed the same all year.” “He’s intelligent, that boy, he notices things, and he knows his multiplication tables so well, Michela couldn’t recite them that well.” It didn’t take a great deal of intelligence to notice that there were no umbrellas, but the conversation seemed to have set out on the right track.

  However, regardless of the starting point, the stations along the way always led in the same direction: Mattia’s intelligence, Michela’s likability, Michela’s temperament, Michela’s similarity to Aunt Silvia, Silvia’s being alone, Silvia’s work problems, Silvia’s problems in general, Silvia will never marry. A coworker of Silvia’s had called the house a couple of times; Silvia got angry because he was a pain in the neck. Then, one day when they were on the bus with the children, her mother had noticed a young man looking at Silvia. That’s just what we need, she thought, someone “normal.”